Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

Ten minutes? That was how long it would take to walk from my house to Zia’s and I’d never once done anything but drive over. And those were streets I knew. I looked down the alley. How dangerous a section of town was Mehmoodabad? I couldn’t be sure.

‘Guys,’ Karim said, softly, ‘there’s someone coming.’

Zia and I turned and saw a moustached man walking towards us.

‘Having trouble?’ he said. He was wearing sneakers with his shalwar-kameez. Nike. Undoubtedly fake.

‘No, we’re fine. Just waiting for some friends. Thank you.’ Zia tried to look confident and relaxed as he spoke, and I reached into the car and pulled out Zia’s mobile phone. Quite why I thought that should intimidate the man, I don’t know, but it gave me a feeling of power.

The man laughed. ‘It’s all right. I mean no harm. But I just wanted to ask if you had any anti-theft devices in the car. That might be why you’ve stalled.’

I looked helplessly at the phone. I didn’t even know what the number for the police was.

Zia smacked his hand to his forehead. ‘Yes. Stupid of me. I forgot to press the thief switch.’

‘The what?’ Karim said.

‘Thief switch. It’s a little button. Can be placed anywhere in the car. See? Mine’s next to the ignition.’ Zia guided Karim’s hand in through the open car window and made him feel the button. ‘If you don’t press it within a few seconds of starting the engine it cuts off the petrol supply and the car stalls. So if someone’s trying to steal the car and they don’t press the switch the car just stops, destroying their quick getaway. My father had mine put in only a few days ago; I’m still not used to it.’

Zia turned to the fake-Nike man. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and offered the man a cigarette. The man produced a match and the two of them lit up. I stepped on Zia’s toe, trying to draw his attention to my unhappiness about standing around in the middle of a deserted road with some unknown man, but he just moved his foot away.

‘Are you a mechanic?’ Zia said.

The man shook his head. ‘Car thief.’

‘You going to steal my car?’ Zia tried to sound casual.

The man looked offended. ‘After I’ve taken a cigarette from you?’ He shook his head again. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t take your car and leave you stranded when you’re in the company of a girl. These are unsafe times. And it’s obvious you don’t live around here.’

‘That’s very decent of you.’ Zia regarded me triumphantly, as though he’d won a point.

‘Where do you think we live?’ Karim said.

‘Defence.’

Karim laughed. ‘Right. That obvious, huh?’

The man nodded. ‘Burgers,’ he said. Karim look confused. When he’d left Karachi we were still unaware of this term that most of Karachi used to refer to the English-speaking elite.

‘Have you been doing this long?’ I asked.

He looked straight at me for the first time. ‘I wanted to join the civil service. I’m an educated, literate person, you know. I sat for the exam, and I did all right. I mean, not top marks, but decent, good marks. But I sat the exams from Karachi. It’s not enough to be just good.’ He looked from Zia to Karim to me. ‘You know?’

That was probably just a rhetorical question, but I felt compelled to respond. ‘We’re Karachiwallahs, too,’ I said, the word stumbling on my tongue. It just seemed a bad idea to use the more Anglicized ‘Karachiite’. And then, because I was annoyed with Karim, I added: ‘At least, the two of us are. He—’ jerking my head at Karim, ‘—hasn’t been here in eight years. He lives in England and America. Both.’

The man whistled. ‘What a hero! Do you understand why I’m a car thief instead of a civil servant, hero?’

‘Yes,’ Karim said softly. ‘The quota system.’

The man spat on the side of the road. ‘May those who set it up burn in every kind of fire that hell has to offer.’

I caught Zia’s sleeve, my eyes begging Let’s get out of here.

The man caught my look. ‘Why are you afraid of me? I have sisters. I’m not one of those uncivilized men. But I get frustrated. Don’t you? You live in this city, after all.’

There was nothing I could say to this man without it being condescension or a lie. Privilege erased the day-to-day struggles of ethnic politics, and however Karim might want me to feel about the matter I couldn’t pretend I was sorry that I had been born on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern. So what if I walked around with a heaviness in my heart after reading about the accelerating cycle of violence, unemployment, divisiveness in Karachi? So what if I agreed with this man that the quota system in the province discriminated against Karachiites, particularly Muhajirs who had no family domicile outside the city that they could claim as their own when government jobs and government-run university places were being allocated according to an absurd urban — rural divide? So what if I thought the entire city was being pillaged by the central government, which was happy to take the large percentage of its revenue from Karachi but unwilling to put very much back? I didn’t find myself picking up a gun because of it, or losing people I loved because of it, or feeling my sanity slip away because of it.

‘You’re Muhajir,’ I heard Karim say to the man. For God’s sake, what was he trying to do!

‘Yes, hero. What are you?’

‘Bengali.’

Zia and I both looked at him in surprise. I’d never once heard Karim identify himself that way. Of course, none of us ever used to feel the need to identify ourselves by ethnicity when we were younger but it still took me off-guard that he chose to identify himself with his mother’s ethnicity rather than his father’s. I wondered if Zia even remembered that school-yard fight when he had pushed Karim over and kicked him. I wondered if Karim remembered it.

The man straightened up. ‘We didn’t learn anything, did we? From ’71.’

Again, Karim gave me one of those looks I couldn’t decipher. ‘We learned to forget,’ he said. ‘Do you have a family to support?’

‘Everyone has a family to support. If not your own, then someone else’s. My brother has five children. The choices my brother’s made…soon I’ll have his family to support. And then there’ll be his widow — I’ll have to marry his widow, who else will marry her with five children? — and she sings all day, so badly, like a goat.’ Zia and the man both laughed, but the man’s laugh had an edge of bitterness to it.

‘I can’t do anything about the quota system,’ Karim said, ‘but maybe we could help you find something better suited to your education than car theft.’

The man nodded, all traces of amusement gone. ‘Already I can imagine myself doing things that a few months ago would have been unthinkable. I own a gun, and I’m imagining things. That’s not a good combination.’ He grimaced. ‘You’ll probably leave here and do nothing for me, but if you can do something, do it quickly.’

‘How will I find you?’ Karim said.

‘Come back here in this car. I’ll tell my friends to look out for it, and make themselves known to you.’ He shook Karim’s hand, and walked away.

‘Your father could get him a job, couldn’t he?’ Karim said, turning to Zia.

Zia looked ready to explode. ‘Did you just miss what he said? His friends the car thieves will be looking out for my Integra. And now he knows where the thief switch is. You are behaving like such a fresh-off-the-boat, Karim. Don’t buy his “I’m forced into crime because I have no options” story.’

‘Oh, come on, Zia, it’s not as though his story was far-fetched.’ I pointed towards the thief switch as Zia started the car and he nodded and pressed it.