Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

That’s what I had thought at the time, but in the years since I had come to realize that holding on to anger towards Karim was not an option I was physiologically capable of exercising. Not when my ears became more alert when his name was mentioned, not when my mouth broke into a smile when I thought I saw him walking down the street towards me.

But how could I expect things to revert to 1987, or even 1990?

I pushed aside the letter collage, stood up and reached for my gloves. I’d make snow angels and snowballs and snowmen, and that would be a far better way of spending the evening than — The phone rang.

I stood and watched it.

The answering machine clicked on and my prerecorded voice started its Marlene Dietrich impersonation: Thank you. You have called. Leave a message. Darling.

‘You are not seriously screening this call, Ra!’

Ra. No one had called me that in seven years. When I thought of her, of Ra, she was a fourteen-year-old who knew nothing about the empty spaces that can press against a person in the most crowded of rooms. I tossed the gloves on to the bed and picked up the phone. ‘Congratulations,’ I said, still in Dietrich mode. ‘You have passed the screen test.’

‘So who’s Erin?’ he said.

‘Erin who?’ I drew curvy lines in the dust on my bookcase. Grey dot on the tip of my fingers. I sucked it off, tasting dust in my mouth. What was he thinking right now?

‘When I called before. Sounded like you said Erin Toss The Knees. Like there was a bunch of Ghutnas standing around and muscle-bound Erin was going to throw them out.’

I walked over to my bed and lay down. So, gaps of years could close so fast we’d wonder if they had really existed.

‘O hell,’ I said.

‘Hello yourself.’

Over four years since we’d written; longer since we’d had any kind of phone conversation. But some part of me had carried on talking to him, keeping up a dialogue about Ghutnas and anagrams, and perhaps I did that so we would never have to talk as strangers.

‘God, Karimazov, it’s good to hear your voice. Why the hell did it take you so long to call?’

‘Didn’t take me long at all. Calling-card number plus international code plus country code plus area code plus phone number all within four seconds. I am the king of speedy dialling.’

‘You are the king of morons!’ I was shouting now, for no reason, standing up on my bed, also for no reason except that I seemed to require elevation, my feet as many inches off the ground as possible. I jumped up and touched the ceiling and came down with cobwebs sticking to my fingers.

‘I’m a marooned moron. Calling from Rome. I should be on a flight to London but the pilot can’t find the keys to the plane. So I’ve been sitting here for the last hour, singing to myself to keep entertained.’

I lay back on my bed, barely noticing the barrage of snowballs that thumped against my window, preceded by a carrot. ‘So you’re saying the only reason you’re calling me after all these years is boredom?’ I said, knowing the answer was no.

‘Your essay finally caught up with me in Rome. Just got here, hours before I left for the airport. It’s been all around the world trying to find me. Australia, Morocco, Lapland.’

‘You went to Lapland?’ I threw my hands up in mock incomprehension at my reflection in the mirror. I looked a lot better than I had when we’d last met — my hair shorter and combed back, not flopping over my face trying to cover the shape and size of my eyes; a little more flesh on my bones so elbows and knees weren’t jutting out awkwardly; greater definition to my calf muscles after all those weeks of playing tennis with Jake. I rolled my eyes at myself. Such self-absorption.

‘No, but it rounds off the sentence so nicely,’ Karim said. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Lapland. ‘What was that thing you said?’

‘Eratosthenes.’

A boot clunked against my window. I cranked the window open and stuck my head out. ‘Stop ignoring us,’ Tamara yelled up through a megaphone, waving one shoeless foot in the air. ‘We want Chuck’s nose back.’ I leaned out, lifted the carrot — and the boot — off the ledge outside and threw them down.

‘Now go away,’ I yelled.

‘Is that Mr Forehand bothering you again?’ Tamara called up.

I closed the window and lay down again.

‘I had possession of a snowman’s nose,’ I explained to Karim.

‘Who’s Mr Forehand?’

‘Oh, just this guy.’ Strangely embarrassed.

‘Jake?’

‘How did you…?’

‘My cousin, Omar, ran into Sonia in Karachi. She told him Jake’s a tennis player. Is it love?’

‘No, it’s over. Has been for a while, though he keeps suffering memory lapses about that little detail.’

‘Full story, please,’ he said, in the tone of one who is entitled to know everything.

‘He discovered his Hispanic roots. Decided to change the pronunciation of his name. I didn’t take all this seriously enough.’

There was a pause, then laughter so dizzyingly contagious I knew it would have instantly healed my slightly aching heart if I’d heard it when the symptoms of break-up still persisted. ‘Hake?’ Karim spluttered. ‘You were involved with a man who called himself Hake?’

‘It’s worse than that,’ I said, laughing back. ‘He’s Hake Hunior.’

I could almost see Karim doubling over in the airport, oblivious to the stares of the jet-lagged and travel-weary. ‘You’re making up the Junior bit. Admit it!’

‘But it rounds off the sentence so nicely.’

‘God, it’s good to laugh,’ he said. ‘Especially after I’ve been sitting here getting newsprint on my nose, reading about what’s going on in Karachi.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The violence flaring up. One hundred and thirty people killed in the first seventeen days of December. Have you see the new issue of Newsline ? It says more people have been killed in Karachi this month than in Bosnia. Bosnia!’

‘Oh, right.’ I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but I was thinking: Bloody, bloody hell. Just when I thought all that rubbish between us had departed with the end of self-righteous adolescence.

‘I can hear you rolling your eyeballs.’

‘Yeah, well. You know.’ I looked out of the window again.

‘No, I don’t, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?’

‘Whatever, Karim.’ I felt drained; I couldn’t imagine ever having enough energy to fully engage in this conversation. I couldn’t imagine having enough patience.

‘That essay you wrote…I thought it meant you were thinking about Karachi.’

I knew he couldn’t see my eyebrows, but that didn’t stop me raising them.

But he was going on: ‘I mean, I’ve been trying for the last few years to come to grips with Karachi’s nature, to face all these things that are so hard to face, and I’m just more glad than I can say that you’ve also started. Reading that essay, it was like you’d reached into my mind and pulled out all these thoughts from there. That cartographer in Zytrow, he was amazing. That you could write that was amazing. I mean, that you see he’s willing to be unselfish — yes, because of the work he’s doing people will stop talking about his great leap, and of course he’s known that from the beginning, but he’s willing to forgo that kind of self-glory in order to bring some order to the place.’ I’d never heard anyone speak so fast or confuse me so much with what they were saying. ‘And those two people in Raya, they have a kind of perfection, but it’s in such a limited way because it’s such a limited city, a city with only two inhabitants, and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhubat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And the two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside and… Raheen, I see where you’re going with it. I know what you’re trying to say. Or beginning to. And I know it’s not easy, but I’m here, Ra, I’m here.’