Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘And then?’

‘And then I closed the filing cabinet, and told my father to find a new hiding place for his key.’

‘Was there a “Khan, Yasmin” in there as well?’

Zia looked down into his drink and nodded. ‘I looked at that. Couldn’t help myself. It was just one line.’

‘Something like “She married Zafar after what he said to her best friend”?’

‘Yeah. Something like that.’

‘So you’ve known. All these years.’ I tried to fathom that. ‘Didn’t it change the way you felt about them?’

Zia unwrapped a packet of Marlboro Reds and turned one cigarette upside down, for luck. ‘I didn’t really think about it in terms of them.’ He lit up and took a drag. ‘They’re supposed to be my father’s friends. And he had files on them.’ Zia shook his head. ‘I didn’t know much about ’71—that year’s main significance for me is that it’s when my brother died — but I knew a thing or two about friendship. Why are you looking at me like that?’

I caught his wrist and traced the veins on it with my thumbnail. ‘You’ve still got the sexiest wrists in the world.’

Zia took another drag, but didn’t move his arm away. ‘And if you weren’t in love with Karim, and I wasn’t besotted by Sonia, who knows?’

I let go of his wrist. ‘Repeating patterns. We could end up together, and Sonia and Karim could end up together, and one pairing would work, and one wouldn’t.’

Zia lifted a fifty-paisa coin from the ashtray and blew off the clinging ash. ‘Heads, we divorce. Tails, we play marriage counsellors to Karim and Sonia.’ He placed the coin on his thumb and flipped it.

My parents hadn’t played marriage counsellors to Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen, but I always half-believed that the divorce wouldn’t have happened had Karim’s parents stayed in Karachi, in the company of my parents. My mother had tried to convince Uncle Ali to change his mind about immigrating, right until the last minute, but he wouldn’t listen to her. It was the only thing I ever saw her ask of him that he refused her. At the time, I had thought it was the worsening political situation that had driven him away, and it was only much later that I wondered if he wanted to put as much distance between Aunty Maheen and the Interloper as possible; but all he did was bring the situation to a head, and force Aunty Maheen to make that final, irrevocable choice.

It was the only really selfish day that I could point to in my parents’ lives: the day Aunty Maheen called to say she was divorcing Uncle Ali and moving to Boston with the man my parents had already known about, though Aunty Maheen had never admitted anything about him to either of them.

I remember how quickly Ami’s face lost its sparkle after she answered the phone and heard Aunty Maheen’s voice. I remember her saying, ‘No, Maheen. Say you’re not serious,’ her hand reaching out for my father’s hand as she spoke. When she hung up, they held each other in a way I wasn’t accustomed to seeing, and he had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry. They left me alone that evening, and went out to dinner together. It’s the only time I remember them going out to a restaurant and leaving me behind, and how angry I was with them for doing that. The tragedy wasn’t theirs, it was mine. Karim would be dividing his time between his parents. School term in London and holidays in Boston. So when would he ever come home? When would I see him? How was I supposed to go from day to day without the thought at the back of my mind that soon Karim would return and I had to store up every memory worth storing just so that I could repeat it to him? How to see the world without seeing it as a world I would replay for Karim soon, very soon, just a few more weeks now? How could I bear to think of what he was having to bear?

The coin bounced off the edge of the bar, and fell somewhere on Zia’s side. He shrugged. ‘Guess we’ll never know.’

I told him everything then. Starting with the conversation in Mehmoodabad and carrying on to the moment we left the beach. Zia listened without saying anything beyond the occasional ‘uh-huh’ or ‘and then?’ When I had finished he said something entirely unexpected. He said, ‘At least it’s all out in the open now.’

‘Oh, please, Zia, don’t talk rubbish. I don’t want to have to fight with you as well.’

Zia crunched a piece of ice between his teeth and pressed play on his CD remote control. Billie Holiday’s voice filled the room. I laughed. He could have such incongruous tastes.

‘I tried telling you once that you should talk to your father about why the engagement broke off.’

‘You did?’

‘Uh-huh. When we became friends again at college. Sonia and I sat down and talked about why Karim went so weird on you with that letter, and we sort of guessed that maybe he knew. Yeah, Sonia knows about it. Everyone knows about it. Both of us tried telling you to talk to your father. You really don’t remember this, do you? Every time we tried to bring the conversation round to the topic you just deflected it or ducked it, and it looked to both of us like you guessed it was something painful and you were trying really hard not to have to face it. So the question is: now you know that you have to face it, what are you going to do? Avert your eyes? Coyness doesn’t suit you, you know.’

‘I’m not averting anything. I’m disgusted with my father for what he said. And I’m disgusted with Karim for saying I’m a reflection of my father.’

‘You’ve always wanted to be a reflection of your father.’

‘Of the man I thought he was, Zia. Not the man he is.’

‘Rot,’ Zia said succinctly.

‘You think I could say something like that? Like what he said?’

‘I think you want life to be easy. I think that’s what worries Karim. Because it means imposing blindness on yourself.’

‘Why should I care what Karim worries about?’

‘Because there’s something about the two of you that’s almost magic.’

I looked at him to see if he was joking. ‘Magic’ was not the kind of word Zia was prone to using.

‘Seriously, yaar. Still is. When you were laughing together in Mehmoodabad, about that painting of me, I felt so…I felt jealous, Raheen. Not jealous jealous; not really jealous,’ he hastened to add, suddenly the cool guy again, refusing to admit any imperfections in his life. ‘It was just that I see you two and I know I’ll never have that.’

‘Zia.’ I put an arm on his shoulder.

‘No, I won’t. You said something to me a couple of years ago when I broke up with someone or other. You said, “There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free of because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.” That was a good line.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But forget about me. My life’s too messed up even to begin to sort out. But you can sort out this thing that you and Karim have together. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in his head, but I know you. I know you’ve never fought for anything. Always easier to pretend it doesn’t matter enough to get bruised over. But, listen, if you have to bleed for Karim, bleed. Promise me you will.’

I loved him more in that moment than ever before. I stood up on the rung of the bar stool and reached over to hug him. ‘Don’t undersell yourself, sweetheart. You’re worth bleeding over too.’

‘But not by you.’

I kissed his cheek. ‘I have news for you.’

I told him about the newspaper announcement. I think I expected him to show some satisfaction about the news that Sonia was no longer engaged, but I was shamed entirely to see that he swore and clenched his fist and said, ‘When you tell her, you’ve got to force her to talk about it, Raheen. It’s doing her no good, holding everything in. She’ll fall ill. Can’t you see she’s already looking so run-down, she has to talk about it.’ He ground out his cigarette, his scowl deepening. ‘One touch of my father’s speed dial, and when that Adel creature gets back to Karachi I could have him met at the airport and thrashed within an inch, or maybe even a millimeter, or maybe even less…’