Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Do what I do,’ I instructed him.

I turned on to my back and hooked my legs over the side of the pool to moor me in place, squinting against the glare of the sun. My back, bobbing up and down on the water, formed a ninety-degree angle with my upper legs. After checking Karim was following me, I filled my lungs with air, held my nose and sank beneath the water’s surface, watching my breath bubble as its slow release pulled me down, the ninety-degree angle becoming increasingly obtuse. I continued exhaling until my back was flush against the wall of the pool. One hundred and eighty degrees. I was suspended upside down in water, like a sea-bat.

Karim was just inches away from me and he turned his head, his expression one of confusion. I gestured, Don’t look at me. Look around. He did, and I watched him long enough to see his upside-down smile before looking around myself. It was like entering another world. Everything blue. The blue of the tiles turned the water into the colour of some Mediterranean dream. Bands of sunlight slid along the tiles. The surface of the water was whipped into activity by gusts of wind, and we saw the undulations on the underside of the water’s surface. Troughs transformed into peaks. The swimmer was walking from one side of the pool to the other at the shallow end, and all we knew of him was his body, chest down, and the water cutting off the rest of him. We couldn’t hear the ping-pong game any more. The shadow of a leaf moved along the bottom of the pool.

I could feel a pressure build up inside my lungs but I wasn’t ready, not yet, to leave. I opened my mouth very slightly and exhaled just enough to buy me a little more time. Karim’s hand reached through the water to try to catch the bubble of air as it escaped to the surface, but his limbs were in slow motion. His hand, attempting to grasp my breath, brushed against my thigh, and stayed there. Water bubbles attached themselves to every hair along Karim’s arm. There was no world but this.

At last I could take it no more and I burst up to the surface, gasping for breath. But Karim stayed where he was. I took off my goggles, pulled myself out of the pool, lay by the edge in the sunshine, and ducked my face into the water. Without my goggles I couldn’t see him clearly, but I knew he could see my face breaking through the calm surface of the water, and I knew he’d know I took my goggles off for vanity’s sake. With a rush of bubbles he burst out of the water, his arms reaching for me and pulling me in. I pinched his nose shut and we ducked beneath the water’s surface, exhaling again, our arms around each other as we twirled lower, no one in the pool now but us, so no one to see how my hands moved across his back and down, and his hands slid beneath my swimsuit, and legs tangled and muscles constricted and mouths forgot to exhale, and so we rose up and broke through the surface again to find a young girl at the side of the pool staring open-mouthed at us with a ping-pong ball in her hand.

But a little while later, when we lay side by side on the blue sunbeds, enough distance between us for propriety but no more, not one millimetre more, I watched his eyes flutter as he dreamt and I knew we were no closer to making peace with our pasts than we had been on the phone when he said he could not forget the palimpsest.

An insect walked across Karim’s chest toward his stomach. I brushed it off, my fingers straying to trace the lower end of his rib cage. I loved Karim, and I knew he loved me; there was no part of me that disputed that. But it was the kind of love that existed because it had always existed, because it didn’t know how not to exist. It all sounded so romantic, but the truth was it frightened me; love wasn’t going to be enough to keep us together for anything longer than an idyllic afternoon so long as he still had reason to look at me the way he’d looked at me more than once already since he got to Karachi. Disgust was not too strong a word for that look.

But why, goddammit? Why did he weave around the subject, jabbing accusations at me, then twirling away, and turning to glare when I looked baffled? I couldn’t help but strike back, but I hit only his shadow, the blow passing through darkness and crumpling my fist against a wall.

Karim opened his eyes, and stood up with a sudden movement, quite ignoring my hand on his ribs. ‘We really should go back to Sonia’s. Wasn’t very nice of us to leave her.’

I nodded, slipped my clothes on over my swimsuit and followed him out.

There were so many movies in which couples in love found that because of fate, circumstance, prior commitments or differing dreams they simply could not be together and, knowing that, they’d always have one last dance, one last kiss, one last here’s-looking-at-you kid. Glancing back at the pool on my way out, I could not escape from the feeling that we’d just had that.

‘Now, darlings, let me get this straight.’ Aunty Laila rested a hand on my arm, fingers spread wide in order not to smudge her freshly applied nail polish. ‘No, first help yourself to tea and then evaluate my recap.’

Aunty Laila and Uncle Asif had just got back to Karachi, after ten days on Uncle Asif’s farm — which was about as long as Aunty Laila could spend there at a single stretch once the romance of being newlyweds living in isolation had departed — and Aunty Laila had phoned my house en route from the airport to say I must tell my parents to leave their respective places of work early, pick me up, and arrive promptly at her house. She wanted us waiting in her drawing room, ready to greet her with garlands of gossip when her car pulled in.

‘All right, so—’ Aunty Laila, tired of my vacillations over whether to take a sandwich or a slice of cake, put both on my plate, along with some pakoras, and pushed me back against the sofa cushions. Uncle Asif, more raccoon-eyed and pillow-bellied than ever, entered the room, his freshly washed hair plastered down in a manner that made his bald spot look like a crop circle. Aunty Laila motioned him to sit down silently and then pressed her fingertips against her temples and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Asif, I have the down-low on GoldTaps. Are you listening?’

Uncle Asif took advantage of his wife’s closed eyes to whisk a piece of cake off the trolley, ‘Yes, yes, go ahead. But don’t break your concentration or you’ll lose your thread.’

‘OK. Sweetie,’ she addressed my mother, eyes still closed, ‘remove the trolley from his reach. I only married him for the agility of his limbs, and the mixture of age and weight is fast destroying the foundation of our union. Asif, stop chewing and listen.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Yesterday afternoon un-uniformed men claiming to be police showed some form of ID to GoldTaps’ guards, who are illiterate Pathans and didn’t know if they were being shown police IDs or library cards, so let the men in, and the men broke GoldTaps’ finger and took him off somewhere. Begum and Baba GoldTaps called all the police stations, but…nothing, nada, zip. Hour or two later, call from GoldTaps saying he’s at Boat Basin. Junior goes to get him, finds him eating kabab rolls, fit as a fiddler, though whether the same was true some hours later we don’t know, because the last time I had kabab rolls at Boat Basin very unglamorous things happened to my insides. But, returning to plot, they return home, five minutes later the phone rings and it’s some toothpick flunkey to say policemen are searching GoldTaps’ office. Door bell rings and it’s the police, with uniforms, and they arrest GoldTaps. Lawyer is called — JP, you know, Tahira’s ex’s brother, the one about whom there were all those rumours involving parrots and masks — and legal things go on. Now GoldTaps is home again, awaiting trial date; his name on the Exit Control List at airports and all border points — even the ones way up north where no one would travel at this time of year — and rumour has it there’s evidence, in documents seized from his office, to link him to the finest poppy-growers of the region.’