Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

I put the phone down, and heard a tapping on the door. It was Naila, the maalishwali, doing a round of Defence to see which of her regular clients were home and wanted a massage to make up for the one they’d missed over the weekend, when Naila was unable to make it out of her part of town because of trouble in the city.

‘Heaven,’ I said, pulling off my clothes while Naila laid a white sheet on the carpet for me.

‘Always asleep when I come. You miss the best part of the day,’ she said, and then the scent of coconut oil filled the room as she unscrewed the cap of a plastic bottle and poured its contents into one hand. Massages on Saturday mornings in Karachi were one of life’s great pleasures, and Naila was our yardstick for measuring the severity of violence in the city on Saturdays. The previous weekend, when she hadn’t turned up by twelve, my mother had called around and told her friends, ‘Don’t leave the house today. Things are very bad.’ Things in Karachi had gone from being very bad to very bad indeed of late, but in the last few days we’d entered a lull and though my parents and their friends sighed that it was just temporary, I was grateful that Karim had arrived after the start of the lull so I wouldn’t have to hear his breast-beating about the grief he felt for his city every time he saw a newspaper headline.

Naila put the bottle of oil down by my head, and I caught a glimpse of her scarred elbow, reminder of the one time she had misjudged the situation and arrived at our house with her elbow bleeding. The bullet had only grazed her, she said, and if she didn’t do her weekend rounds how would she pay her children’s school fees, which were due at the end of next week?

When my mother mentioned to her friends that she was thinking of raising Naila’s pay per session, many were horrified. ‘But, sweetie, then she’ll expect all of us to do the same,’ Aunty Runty said. ‘And if the servants hear of it, they’ll all want salary increases. Please, darling, don’t rock the apple-cart. Give an inch, they’ll take a foot, and they’ll take your best shoes along with it. If Naila’s so concerned about her children’s education, give her some books. You have so many at home and, really, though I scolded the person who said this to me at your dinner the other night, the bookshelves are beginning to look’—she dropped her voice dramatically—‘cluttered. Speaking of cluttered, guess who Chun-mun is sleeping with now.’

Naila massaged the oil into my shoulders, her thumbs rotating as they worked out the knots that I had felt forming the moment Sonia told me that Karim was arriving in Karachi. If he could see me now, would he feel anything of what I had felt when he stretched and his t-shirt lifted to reveal taut stomach? Or would he see my relationship — or lack thereof — with Naila as just another reason to criticize the way I lived my life? The Karim of eight years ago, I knew what he would do if he walked in on my massage. He’d retreat hastily and, when he saw me next, hide his embarrassment behind a joke, ‘Please Ra, what kind of bodice ripping cliché have you become — lying on the ground, nearly-naked and glistening with oil.’ But this new Karim, this beautiful, angry Karim, I didn’t even know if he’d greet me with warmth or anger next time we met.

But when he and Zia walked into the TV room, just minutes after I’d finished showering and changing after my maalish, his opening gambit was nothing more than a casual, ‘Hey, you’ve changed the carpet.’ He was wrapped in a grey shawl. Large enough for two, I found myself thinking.

‘My parents would really like to see you,’ I said.

He sat down without responding, and picked up the framed photograph of our two sets of parents, and a group of their friends, including Runty and Asif and Laila, taken at Uncle Asif’s farm in Rahim Yar Khan, before Karim and I were born.

‘Ridiculous clothes,’ Karim said, and put the photograph down.

The phone rang, and on the line was Sonia’s brother sounding not-macho for the first time since his voice broke. He asked if it would be possible for me to meet Sonia at the airport and bring her home; her plane was due in thirty minutes.

‘Of course I can. No biggie,’ I said. ‘But Sohail, what’s wrong?’

‘Some guys took my father away.’

‘What guys? Took your father where?’

Zia and Karim stood up and Zia pointed to the extension in the hallway. I nodded and he and Karim were out of the room and had picked up the extension before Sohail stopped his ragged breathing and spoke again.

‘Just…some guys. With guns. They said they’re from the police. They said…drugs.’

‘They wanted drugs?’

‘Why did you say that?’

‘Sohail, you just said…’

‘You think my father is some kind of drug dealer.’

Zia had pulled the telephone cord as far as it would go, all the way to the doorway of the TV room, and I saw him lean his head against the door frame and close his eyes.

Karim, standing beside him, pulled the phone slightly closer to his own mouth and said, ‘Sohail, it’s Karim. Zia and I are on the extension. Just tell us what happened.’

‘I don’t know what happened. These guys came in, said they were from the police. Grabbed my father, said he had to come with them. He was so scared; I’ve never seen my father look like that. He grabbed the sofa and they prised his fingers off, one by one, and when it came to the last finger I heard…I heard a snap. Really clean. Like a wishbone breaking in two. I would have done something but I was holding my mother because she was going crazy, screaming, crying, would have attacked them, and they had guns, man, they had guns.’

‘What about your guards?’ I was trying to sound in control, digging my nails into my palms to fight the desire to lock all doors and think of places to hide. I looked at Karim, and he saw my panic, and just raised his palm slightly. It’s OK, it’s OK. My fingers unfurled. It was like that time when I saw his head appear over the gate, against the starry sky, before he was beautiful.

‘What about my guards? Useless bastards,’ Sohail said. ‘I just fired them all. They said they couldn’t take on the police, and I asked how they knew those men were the police. No uniforms, unmarked car. One of the guards said he was shown some identification. He’s an illiterate Pathan: what kind of identification can he decipher? We’ve been calling around to different police thaanas and no one knows where he is. Listen, do any of you have contacts in the police?’

‘Only Uncle Wahab,’ I said. ‘And he’s on holiday in Florida. But he should be back in the next few days.’

‘Few days? Oh, great! By the time he comes back wearing a cute little pair of Mickey Mouse ears who knows what could have happened… Raheen, what do you think they’re doing to him? They wouldn’t kill him, would they?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘If they wanted him dead they’d have killed him right there.’

‘No, they wouldn’t,’ Sohail said. ‘Not with our armed guards outside.’

‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.’

Zia threw a pillow at me. Karim walked over and took the phone from my hand.

‘Pull yourself together, Sohail. For your mother’s sake, you have to stop talking this kind of rubbish.’

‘Exactly,’ Zia said. ‘And for Sonia.’

Great macho moment. And why was I being treated like an outcast? As if anyone had ever taught us the etiquette for dealing with such situations. Oh God, Sonia.

Karim put an arm around me and pulled me close and for a moment I forgot all about Sonia. Then I realized he did it so that I could hear Sohail’s voice coming through the receiver. ‘They said — it was almost the only thing they said — that they were taking him away for…’ his voice was breaking up and at first I thought there was something wrong with the phone line ‘…for questioning about drug smuggling.’