Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Implies familiarity,’ Zia muttered. ‘Too much of it.’

I repeated the invitation to have breakfast with my parents. Karim looked out of the window. Was he too overwhelmed by the remembered sights and sounds to be able to concentrate on anything anyone was saying? What had he meant by that remark about my father when we’d spoken on the phone? Which of us was going to be the first to bring up all the things we’d said?

‘Ask me directions from here to somewhere I used to know, Zia.’

‘OK. Kindergarten.’

‘That’s easy. Straight down Shahrah-e-Faisal and right on to Abdullah Haroon Road, and the school’s on your right just before Aiwan-e-Saddar Road.’

I couldn’t refrain from adding, ‘Or, in Karachispeak, go straight straight straight straight straight and then turn right just after the Metropole, and when you see a church, stop.’

‘Straight straight straight straight straight, huh?’ Hard to tell if Karim was amused or annoyed, his expression cut off from me as he stuck his head out of the window, taking in the street’s mishmash of tall concrete office buildings, large houses, and the signs, at the entrance to plots of land enclosed by boundary walls, spelling out ‘Hina Marriage Garden’, ‘Diamond Marriage Garden’, ‘Sindbad Marriage Garden’. Zia caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged.

Karim retracted his head. ‘So many new buildings, and the driving is crazier than I remember, even with early-morning traffic. Wait, isn’t that the turn-off for Tariq Road and Mohommad Ali Society? Can we go to Kaybee’s?’

‘You want ice cream at this hour?’

He pulled his ear and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘No, I suppose not. This is all so strange for me…’ He stuck his head out of the window again.

A bus sped past, just inches away, and Zia reached over and pulled Karim back into the car. ‘Look out of the windscreen, OK? You’re no fun when you’re decapitated. So talk to us, yaar, tell us things. What have you been doing since you graduated last year? And why do you have a girlfriend named Spa?’

I tried not to look too interested. Sonia had mentioned the girlfriend after she’d met Karim in London the previous year, though she had no details on how serious things were between them.

‘Don’t really know what I’m doing with life outside uni. So, I’ve put aside the year to travel before worrying about it. And her name’s actually Grace, which is what I call her, but she got her nickname because her parents fell in love while watching “Spartacus”.’

‘That’s about as romantic as it gets.’ I laughed. He couldn’t possibly be serious about someone who allowed herself to be called Spa.

‘And besides, she’s my ex-girlfriend.’

Ha!

Zia blew his horn at a legless beggar crossing the street in a wheeled contraption, just inches off the ground, and swerved away from him. Karim didn’t react, though I had expected him to have a moment of tourist horror.

‘Was it the 1960 version, or the 1967 reissue?’ I asked. ‘Because, you know, the 1967 version cut out that great moment of whatshername looking at Spartacus writhing on a cross and saying, “Oh, please die, my darling.” If that’s not dialogue to fall in love to, what is? I bet it was the 1960 version.’

‘Still the Queen of Trivia,’ Karim said. ‘Hey, QT.’

‘Hey, Bloody Damn Idiot. Can you spot that clever acronym, BD-I? But before we lose track of the conv, tell me, did you and Grace ever watch “Spartacus” together?’

‘Oh, you didn’t,’ Zia said. ‘That would be too weird. Who wants to re-create their parents’ relationship, have to imagine when they were young and hormonal and…’ He looked at Karim, went bright red and started cursing the beggar who was now barely visible in the rear-view mirror. Karim turned to look at me, his expression unfathomable, then looked hurriedly away.

I remembered something I’d been wondering about for a while. ‘So, have you ever visited your mother in Boston in the last few years? While Zia and I were on the east coast? Were you there, too?’

‘Don’t start with the recriminations,’ he said shortly and looked away.

How could I explain to him about Aunty Maheen, when I hadn’t really explained it to myself? He probably suspected that I had flown out of Boston again on my way home and still hadn’t called her, despite his rebuke to me on the phone. It’s not as though I hadn’t thought of it. It’s not as though I hadn’t picked up the telephone and started to dial the number, more than once, more than twice, more than that even. I wanted to lean across and shake Karim. Why did this have to be so difficult? Although Zia barely ever answered his letters, and hadn’t had any kind of verbal communication with him since we all left school, aside from one phone call last week when Karim asked if he could stay at Zia’s, they were chatting away in the front seat as though no time had passed and nothing had changed since 1987, pausing only to look at each other, still sizing up the changes time had wrought in their physical selves, then laughing, half-embarrassed, as boys do when they’ve been caught paying any kind of attention to the way other boys look. And when Sonia had met Karim in London she had come back and reported that he was the same, their friendship was the same, everything same-to-same, except that now he was gorgeous, but that’s just superfacial change, right?

‘I can’t believe I’m back,’ Karim said.

‘The temptation is strong to say, there is no going back.’

‘Resist it,’ he advised.

Resistance was never my strong suit, so I tried to look only at his ears. They really were his least attractive feature, and I had to concentrate hard to avoid shifting my attention to the triangle of moles on the nape of his neck, and the FromHereToEternity length of his legs, and the supple fingers that were drumming snatches of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ on thigh, throat, clavicle, and all this I was manag ing quite well, but what was really getting to me were the veins that stood out on his wrist and forearms, even when his hands were relaxed, and one vein in particular that ran all the way from his wrist to his elbow.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as Zia turned off the airport road earlier than he would if going to my house or his.

‘I’ve made a command decision. We’re off to Mehmoodabad. I have to look at a billboard that has my face painted on it.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘I agreed to pose for this photograph for some ad. As a favour to Cyrus’s cousin — you remember Cyrus from school, Karim? — who’s just started up this ad agency. Anyway, I thought it would be some print ad, but it turns out my long lashes are going to greet you as you ascend Clifton Bridge. According to Cyrus’ cousin the painters have captured my features but missed my essence, so I have to drop in on the painters and radiate essence so that they know where they went wrong. They start work at dawn, poor bastards, so they should be there now.’

‘What are you advertising,’ I asked.

‘I didn’t actually bother to ask.’

‘Mehmoodabad,’ Karim said. ‘That’ll be great.’

‘Why?’ I was instantly irritated. It wasn’t my Karimazov but the foreign cartographer speaking — the one who had sent me maps of Karachi from London, informing me how limited my knowledge of the place was. ‘Why will Mehmoodabad be great when you’ve probably never been there?’

Zia turned up the volume of the music, and Nusrat’s rendition of ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aya’ drowned out anything Karim might have thought to say in retaliation. Mera Piya Ghar Aya … My beloved came home.

We crossed Kala Pul, the Black Bridge that wasn’t black, and turned into the residential streets of Defence Housing Authority (Phase II), just past the roundabout that displayed a model of a fighter-plane with a trail of fire shooting out of its rear (when Runty and Bunty provided a map to their house for one of their Ghutna parties, the roundabout was marked: ‘jet with flaming ass’). I closed my eyes, overcome with sleepiness. When I looked out again the comparative order of Defence had given way to the narrow alleys and tiny store-fronts of Mehmoodabad. I had no idea how we’d got here, and Zia seemed a little surprised himself. I could hear him muttering, ‘Left after the place where the goats were eating the antenna, then right…before or after the hubcap?’