Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Yeah,’ Bunty turned to the men. ‘Who wants to play with the Bingo lover?’

As the first fist made contact with his body, Zafar closed his eyes and thought, I wasn’t cut out for this role. I’ve stepped into someone else’s story. Get me out. I want to get out.

Around him the men echoed his thoughts. ‘Get out,’ they snarled, their fists sticky with his blood. ‘Get out.’

When I returned home, my parents were drinking tea and watching BBC World in the TV room, wearing their dressing gowns and unusually sunny morning faces.

‘Where is he?’ Ami said. ‘Where’s Karim?’

I tossed the newspaper in my father’s direction. ‘Asleep in Zia’s car. I asked him over for breakfast when we picked him up, but I don’t think he heard me.’

My mother handed me a cup of tea. ‘Why didn’t you ask again?’

‘I did.’ I sat down next to Aba, and leaned against his shoulder. ‘Can’t handle this early-morning stuff. I’m so glad I’m not a rooster.’

‘Well…?’ Ami asked. ‘How was it? How was he? Was it wonderful?’

‘I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of it.’ I picked up the bottle of jam from the breakfast tray and started reading the contents. ‘We were just kids when we last met. Would you get excited meeting someone you hadn’t seen since thirteen?’

‘If that someone was Karim to my Raheen, yes, I would,’ Ami said.

Aba rolled his eyes. ‘Such a sentimentalist.’

Ami walked over to Aba and rapped the back of his hand with a teaspoon. ‘You were the one getting all misty-eyed ten minutes ago remembering the two of them turning towards each other in their sleep the first time we put them in a crib together. And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you use the term “fated friendship”?’

‘She’s making all this up,’ Aba said to me. ‘She’s a sentimentalist and a liar. And the day she loses her looks, I’m running off with a Scandinavian shot-putter.’

I had already sprawled out on the sofa Ami vacated, and now she sat down on the two-seater next to Aba and rolled the pink rubber-band off the morning paper in such a way that it flew off the end of the bound paper and leapt through the air, contorting and braiding itself before landing on the bridge of Aba’s nose. I watched my parents glance at the headlines and the back page, the rubber band falling off Aba’s nose when he bent his head to read, and then move straight to the page with the crossword, which they always solved together in the mornings before going to work.

‘Do you think there’s such a thing as fated relationships?’ I said.

Aba was concentrating on folding the crossword page into a neat rectangle, isolating the crossword and its clues, but Ami looked up and shook her head. ‘Of course not. That implies the relationship will survive no matter what carelessness you’re guilty of.’

‘So who was guilty of carelessness? Uncle Ali or Aunty Maheen?’

Aba stopped folding the paper. ‘Sometimes things just don’t work out, Raheen. Ali and Maheen just couldn’t…’ He frowned. ‘They weren’t ever… Ali was always too cold for someone like Maheen.’

‘Ali wasn’t cold,’ Ami said, very quietly, taking the paper from Aba.

‘Yasmin, I’m not saying he’s some heartless bum. I love Ali. But, you know, I’ve known the man all my life, and I’ve never really seen him show any kind of strong emotion, except anger on occasion.’

‘You were never engaged to him either,’ Ami said, still quiet, still looking down at the crossword.

Aba folded his arms and leaned back against the sofa cushions, clearly amused. ‘As I recall, you told me the most romantic thing he ever said to you was “you can listen to that Barbra Streisand record if you really want to”.’

‘And when I did, he knew all the words.’ Ami laughed. ‘Eight-letter word for a kind of flower, beginning with “G”. I’m not saying he was romantic; you’re hardly romantic yourself. Obviously that doesn’t bother me too much. But there are depths to his feelings that I don’t think any of us really ever gave due credence to… All right, stop laughing at me, Zafar. You are so irritating sometimes. Guzmania?’

‘Geranium, my love.’

‘I’m going to sleep,’ I said. I rolled over and closed my eyes, but the room had become strangely silent. I waited for the silence to pass and when it didn’t I opened my eyes and saw my parents looking at me.

‘We want to hear about Karim,’ Aba said.

‘There’s nothing to tell. He looks better, but I preferred him before. I haven’t seen him since we were thirteen; it’s no big deal, you know. Can I please go to sleep?’ I walked out and went into my bedroom, closing the door firmly behind me. They had asked so many times over the years, Why did you and Karim stop writing to each other? When you go to America won’t you even try to get in touch? and the more often I answered, People grow apart, that’s all, the less convinced they looked. Both Karim’s parents and mine always seemed to get such joy out of our friendship and, thinking about it, I had an inkling that the joy contained a strange sort of pride, as though our friendship proved their choices justified.

The door opened and my father walked in. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ I sat on my bed and kicked out of view the album of pictures of Karim and me in Rahim Yar Khan which was lying by my bed. ‘And if you keep asking, I’ll get moody, and you’ll get annoyed that I’m being moody, and that’ll make me more moody and you more annoyed, so why go down that path?’

My father crossed his arms on his chest and looked down at me. ‘I used to think we could talk about everything.’

‘There’s nothing I keep hidden from you that I would tell anyone else. Except maybe certain intimate details about boys and-’

Aba put one hand up and whistled sharply, placing tips of thumb and forefinger in his mouth, in imitation of a traffic cop. ‘Red light. Red light. Don’t need any of that.’

I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. He sat down and put his arm around me. ‘My worry, kiddo, is about the things you don’t tell anyone. Things mutate, thoughts and emotions, they mutate inside you in ways you aren’t even aware of.’

My father, the court jester, in a serious moment.

‘For instance?’ I said.

He bit his lip and looked at me. ‘For instance…’ His voice trailed off. His foot kicked against the album lying just under the bed, and he pulled it out and looked at the cover. ‘For instance, you and Karim. Have you ever spoken to anyone about why the two of you stopped writing to each other?’

How could I have shown him that final communication from Karim — he would have read my unkindest sentences and, however much I insisted that Karim had taken things out of context and the whole picture was very different from these scraps Karim had chosen to focus on, it would not have prevented him looking at me with disillusionment. I hadn’t actually been able to show it to anyone, not even Sonia and Zia, though both of them knew the general gist of why Karim and I had stopped writing to each other. ‘Aba, please. I really am tired.’

For a moment I thought he was going to say something else, but he only kissed my forehead and left. I felt strangely disappointed.

I lay down, convinced I would free-associate manically in that state between sleep and wakefulness when memories and dreams slipslide into each other, but instead I slept, almost instantly, and dreamt of wearing Nike shoes without soles in a rain-drenched park in Karachi that had ceased to be a park before I was born.

When I woke up the phone was ringing. It was afternoon, my parents were at work, and Zia was calling to say that he and Karim had both just woken up and were going over to visit the twins after they’d eaten something, so they’d come and pick me up in about an hour.