Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘What are you talking about? He’s darker than you are.’ Zia was trying hard not to act too excited about seeing Karim again, but the casual air with which he held a cigarette between his fingers was more than offset by the frequency with which he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, pausing only to try and raise his entire body weight with his elbows, which were planted on the barrier.

‘Not skin complexion, idiot. His mode of being. What’s he arguing with the customs guy about?’

‘They’re probably giving him a hard time about his Angrez passport. Or is it Amreekan? He could at least look up and wave. Damn, he’s tall. “Mode of being”?’

‘I still don’t know why he asked to stay with you, not me.’ I tilted my head to one side, as though a change in angle would make him look more familiar.

‘Propriety.’

‘Rubbish. If he came to stay he’d be my parents’ guest; staying with us because he’s Ali and Maheen’s son, not because he’s my one-time best friend.’ A man smelling as I imagined the inside of a local bus would smell tried to elbow me aside so that he could secure a spot right against the barrier, and I wondered how to push him away without actually making any physical contact with him.

‘Here he comes. Stop being moody.’

A swarm of cabbies surrounded Karim as he walked past the barrier without seeing us, and as Zia and I battled our way through the jostling figures we heard Karim say, in Urdu without a trace of hesitancy or rustiness, ‘I have friends coming to meet me,’ and the cabbies saying, ‘Where? Where are they? At this hour, they must be asleep. No one’s coming.’ And one enterprising fellow pulled out a phone card and gestured to the public telephone. ‘Call your friends. If there’s no answer, they’re asleep and you come with me.’ Karim turned the visiting card over in his hands. Strong hands, the kind that make you think instantly of massages. ‘Maybe if they don’t answer it means they’re on their way to the airport.’ But he didn’t sound convinced. Zia and I were standing within touching distance of him now, arms crossed, laughing, but he still didn’t look up and see us.

One of the cab drivers clapped the palm of his hand on the top of Karim’s head and turned it towards us. ‘There are your friends,’ he said.

Zia was closer to him, so it was Zia whom he threw his arms around, and I thought, he still hugs men like a real Pakistani, none of this let’s-pretend-there’s-nothing-intimate-about-our-physical-contact that so many American boys, and also so many Karachi boys who’d been watching too much America and too little Pakistan, were guilty of when they slapped and punched each other in greeting.

When he let go of Zia there was a moment when we just looked at each other, neither quite sure what to do, and I couldn’t say if that was because of the way our letter-writing ended or the way our phone conversation ended or the way some of the men around us seemed to be sizing us up, trying to determine the nature of our relationship, forcing us to wonder the same thing also. And in both our minds the soundtrack of our last phone call was playing. I half-smiled — there I went, thinking I could read his mind again. He laughed, that sudden self-conscious laugh of his, and put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs resting on bare skin, either side of my neck.

‘Idiot,’ I said, and put my arms around his waist, everything forgotten except how easily we always forgave each other. He disengaged almost immediately, and turned to catch Zia by the elbow.

‘Zee, is that a shaving cut on your chin?’

Zia punched him lightly in the ribs, and Karim grabbed Zia in a headlock and spun him around, both of them laughing. For a moment they weren’t men just past the brink of adulthood any more, but the same two boys who had stood in front of a mirror and made their first attempts at shaving some seven or eight years ago, both of them arriving in school the next day with nicks and cuts all over their faces, even in places where bristles hadn’t started to grow. We would all have laughed at them a lot more if they hadn’t combined their talents and presented such a perfect balance of swagger and self-deprecation.

Karim finally let go of Zia, and looked around him in some surprise. ‘I can’t believe this airport! It’s so spacious and so clean.’

‘So all foreign visitors can have a good first impression of the city. It’s all downhill from here.’ Zia waved the porters away and said he’d bring the car round. Seconds later, it was Karim and me and a suitcase standing by the side of the road, waiting, the cab drivers and porters and onlookers no longer interested in our presence. Cars shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage. Karim’s glasses shimmered, too; perhaps he was the mirage. If I were ever delusional or hallucinating it would make sense for me to conjure up Karim, and not just any Karim but a Karim who looked like this. I looked sideways at him, but didn’t say anything; I wanted to see if we could still be comfortable in silence. He didn’t say anything either; he was too busy looking around, learning the landscape, the squat shrubs and billboards and low-rise buildings just past the manicured airport grounds, and recalling that, yes, this is what Karachi feels like at five-thirty on a winter’s morning; time to wake up to cram in that last round of studying for today’s exam, which we should have finished preparing for last night. These last three years, Karachi nothing more than holiday for me, I’d slept through this early daylight time, awakening only when the sun had been out long enough to glaze over the chill in the air, so now even I couldn’t help a prickle of nostalgia for those school mornings of sweaters and chapped lips and staticky hair. Karim shivered, and I wrapped one end of my shawl around him, without actually making any contact with his skin — that was not through accident and certainly not through disdain. Coyness — or was it self-consciousness? — entered my life as we stood there, and confounded me entirely.

‘It’s not cold,’ he said.

‘You’ve got goosebumps.’

‘It’s not cold.’

Zia pulled up and I told Karim to sit in the front seat. I sat behind the driver’s seat and watched him watch Karachi as Zia drove us out of the airport ground and on to the road, which was free of congestion at this hour, giving us an unobstructed view of the billboards: MOD GIRL! CUTE! — an advertisement for talcum powder; HAIR STOP FACE — an ad for facial-hair remover; WESTMINSTER ABBEY — an upstart rival to the well-established BIG BEN underwear company, attempting to attract customers with its painting of a man in leopard-print Y-fronts swinging his hips and raising his arms in triumph.

Karim pointed at the hip-swinging man. ‘Zia, he looks like you! So that’s what’s become of the heirloom leopard skin that used to hang in your TV room. Are there matching socks?’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ Zia said, but he was smiling along with me to see Karim being so Karim.

We were in view of the Star Gate, which heralded the turn-off to the old airport, the one from which Karim had departed with his parents more than seven years ago, the nuclear family still intact back then, though showing signs of exploding.

‘All right, where are we headed?’ Zia asked. ‘Karim?’

‘Come to my place for breakfast,’ I suggested. ‘My parents can’t wait to see you.’

‘How about visiting the bride-to-be?’ Karim said quickly, so quickly he must not have heard me.

‘She’s in Dubai for the weekend, visiting some relatives. And besides, if she were here it wouldn’t look right if we had her woken up,’ Zia said.

‘Arré.’ Karim laughed. ‘What rot are you on about?’