Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Your father?’ Karim said. ‘Sohail, that’s just absurd.’ And then he looked at Zia’s face, and then he looked at mine.

‘We should leave if we’re going to be at the airport in time,’ Zia said.

None of us said anything in the car until we got to Zamzama, and then Karim said, ‘What route are you taking?’

‘Via the Club,’ Zia said. ‘My father’s there. I have to ask him something.’

Zia’s father, Uncle Anwar, was better-connected than anyone I knew. He kept politicians at arm’s length, because they were too apt to fall from power, but the numbers stored in his phone’s memory for single-touch dialling all belonged to bureaucrats, army generals, officials in the intelligence services and high-ranking police officers. No one knew quite how he acquired these people, or to what use he put them beyond the usual uses to which every successful businessman put people of influence, but his speed-dial meant he was right up there with Uncle Wahab on the list of those who the socialites called when their lives fell apart. For all that, he couldn’t get his own son to string together two sentences in his company without turning hostile or contemptuous. Zia’s jaw was clenched as he drove, and I had a feeling this signalled he was about to ask his father for a favour. He loved to boast that he’d never asked his father for anything, a claim I viewed with scepticism because I knew it only meant he asked his mother instead and she acted as intermediary, passing demands in one direction and college tuition money, new car, state-of-the-art computer in the other. I had once berated Zia for his attitude towards his father and he said, in one of those rare and excoriating moments of revelation about his family life, ‘Do you have any idea what it feels like to know that every day of your life your father looks at you and thinks, “This one also could die at any second”?’

Zia drove through the Club gates and screeched to a halt on seeing his father walk under the covered archway that connected the ‘No Ladies Beyond This Point’ portion of the stone colonial building to the dining area.

‘Raheen, deal with the car,’ Zia said, getting out and striding after his father, who was now walking on to the veranda overlooking the Club gardens.

I drove on and parked by the tennis court.

‘So you believe he’s a drug smuggler,’ Karim said.

I caught his eye in the rear-view mirror and raised my eyebrow in a manner meant to indicate I wasn’t about to discount any possibility. ‘No one makes that kind of money from manufacturing toothpicks.’

‘It’s not just toothpicks. He’s got a number of business interests.’

‘Yeah, because everyone used to say — to his face—“No one makes that kind of money from toothpicks.”’

Karim shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Why? Because he always liked you? Come on, Karim. Remember Anis, that guy in kindergarten with us, whose father used to dress up as a magician at his birthday parties? Well, the father’s a murderer. Had his brother-in-law bumped off over some inheritance chuker. But, oh, didn’t we all wish we had fathers who would put on black capes and pull giraffe-shaped pencil sharpeners out of our ears?’

‘Are you really as casual about this as you sound?’ He was watching me intently.

I shrugged. ‘Obviously I don’t want Sonia’s father to go to jail.’

‘I don’t understand how you can act so detached, as though it doesn’t matter a bit what he’s done, whose lives he’s ruined — and don’t you dare tell me I sound like a foreigner.’

‘I was going to say you sound like your father.’ Actually, I was going to say he sounded like a foreigner, but I hated being predictable.

I expected him to flare up in anger at the comparison to Uncle Ali, but instead he said, ‘Yeah, well, you sound like your father a lot of the time. Think I’d rather have my set of genes, thanks.’

I turned around in surprise, but he was staring out of the window, making it clear he didn’t want to continue the conversation.

Come back, Karim.

Zia opened the car door and I shifted over to the passenger seat. ‘He’s going to make inquiries,’ he said. ‘Hold on, Sonia’s plane should have landed already; I’m going to drive like a maniac.’

A man of his word, my friend Zia. But when we got to the airport we didn’t see Sonia, even though the arrival board informed us her plane had landed ahead of schedule. I called her house on Zia’s mobile phone only to have Sohail tell me he hadn’t heard from her and maybe she was still waiting by the conveyer belt for her luggage.

It was almost an hour before she finally emerged — an hour during which Zia carried on an almost relentlesss monologue to try to hide the silence between Karim and me. His voice was beginning to get hoarse by the time Sonia walked out of the terminal, her face bespeaking an anguish that went beyond bumpy landings and cold, greasy in-flight omelettes. But when she saw Karim she smiled and put her arms around him, unconcerned by her dupatta slipping off her head. I saw his arms tighten around her and thought, Not Karim, too. Not this again, and Zia winced and turned his face away.

‘Why are you all here?’ Sonia said, putting an arm around me, her other arm still around Karim, and nodding, merely nodding, at Zia, who waved away the porters and started to wheel her luggage trolley towards the car.

‘All four of us together,’ Karim said without missing a beat. We had decided not to say anything about her father until she got home; maybe, just maybe, everything would already have been cleared up by then. ‘Couldn’t wait any longer for it to happen. Here we are at last like four peas in a pod.’

‘Keys in a cod,’ I said.

‘Bees in a bod,’ said Zia.

‘Seize in a sod,’ said Sonia, with a smile. ‘What? Why are you laughing? Tobah! Such filthy minds.’

We were still laughing when we reached the car even though it hadn’t been that funny. Laughing because regardless of circumstances we were together at last, eight years down the line, all together, and despite everything that had changed and was changing we still found one another’s laughter contagious.

‘You remember that joke of Zia’s?’ Sonia said, as the boys finished loading her luggage into the boot. ‘The one about the guards and the rubber gloves?’

‘And you said, “Like the ones you wash dishes with.’” I started laughing again, but Karim put out an arm to stop me.

Sonia was trying to smile, but her face had turned lifeless, and her hands as she pulled her dupatta over her head were trembling. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice without expression. ‘Since about half an hour ago, I get the joke.’

A crow swooped by low, I remember, and I noticed two holes in its beak and wondered if they were nostrils. It swooped past Zia and I saw his face, the tears springing to his eyes, and wondered what my face looked like, because it felt like granite. The crow flew away, something red and glinting in its beak, and I remembered an airport official who had patted me down perfunctorily in the curtained-off area for women travellers the last time I had boarded a flight out of Karachi. Her red nail polish had been chipped at the nail-tips.

I watched myself put my arms around Sonia’s neck. Karim had her hand in his, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Her dupatta slipped off her head again and Zia cupped his palm against her head and stroked her hair. When I raised my head and saw him crying, I cried also.

It was only when Karim got a box of tissues out of the car and handed it to Zia, then me, that I realized Sonia was dry-eyed.

‘How will I tell my fiancé?’ she said to Karim above the sound of Zia and me blowing our noses. ‘How will I tell Adel?’