Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

Mariam Apa held her hand throughout the birth, while Aba sat in the waiting room practising the self-hypnosis exercises the gynaecologist had taught Ami to help ease the rigours of childbirth. Between contractions Ami revealed that she and Aba had been planning to name their child Mariam, if she was a girl, but there couldn’t be two Mariams in the house. Fortunately they had (given the Dard-e-Dil history) considered the possibility of twins, so there was a second name: Aliya.

‘Don’t tell me that for this reason you think you qualify. As not-quite-twins,’ Rehana Apa snorted.

Mariam and Aliya were supposed to be twins. And Mariam Apa and I entered a world, not the world I’ll admit, but a world — one inhabited by my parents and Dadi and Masood and Samia and Sameer and all the rest of them — on the same day. But that’s not all. Everyone I know grew more garrulous than normal around Mariam Apa, except for me. I’ve heard that twins communicate in the womb before tongue and throat and larynx form, so they know how to speak to each other without speech.

Am I saying Mariam Apa was in Ami’s womb with me?

Not quite.

I fell asleep under the tree and woke up in the spare room of the Palmer House flat, with memories of a dream which involved Rehana Apa pulling out a mobile phone from her bag, Dadi asking me about the quality of Baji’s teaset, me lifting myself off the ground and stumbling into a cab with the help of Samia, and Ami saying, ‘But of course you’re twins; did I forget to tell you?’

The scent of Samia’s perfume and a set of door keys were gone when the eddying noises in my stomach finally convinced me to get out of bed, but in their place was a still-hot haandi of chicken karhai on the stove and a note instructing me to ‘add whole green chillis and pudina — or is it dhaniya? That green thing, you know what I mean — and cook on medium heat for two minutes’. A spoon covered in spices and the juice of cooked chicken lay next to the haandi, but I ignored it and reached for a clean spoon to stir in the chillis and coriander. Masood always used to say that two hands on one spoon spoilt the flavour of a dish. I watched the clock for the two minutes to be up. (’How much time?’ I heard Masood’s voice, incredulous. ‘How can I tell you how much time it’ll take? When the spices and the meat dissolve the boundaries between them and flavours seep, one into the other, then it is time.’ The day he said that I added new words to his English vocabulary so that he could laugh at, ‘For the true chef, thyme is only a herb.’ English is the language of advancement in Karachi, and I taught Masood as much as was necessary to enable him to laugh at my jokes.)

The chicken was good, but it wasn’t spiritual.

Someone was calling my name. I looked out of the window into the parking lot, and it was him. Khaleel. Cal Butt from Athol, Mass. My knees buckled absurdly, and I pretended to be leaning into the sink to cover that moment of unsophistication. Although how sophisticated can you look while leaning over a pile of dirty dishes? I pulled a teacup out of the sink and waved it at him. Thumb hooked into the pocket of his jeans, sneakers replaced by brown leather boots, fingers twirling a pair of shades, he looked like an American cliché. I said to myself, ‘I’d like to be clichéd by him.’

‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘These are for you.’ He held up a bunch of flower stems.

‘Am I being stalked?’

He laughed. ‘I promised myself if you didn’t get it, I’d leave.’ His expression changed to embarrassment. ‘I can still leave. I don’t mean it’s my decision to make.’

‘Hang on.’ I grabbed the spare keys and ran down the stairs until I came to the final bend leading to the lobby with its glass doors, and then I ambled. ‘How?’ I said, when I was through the doors.

‘Your luggage tag. From the airport. I remembered the address on it because I have a friend who used to live in that building.’ He pointed across the street. Adam’s arm reaching towards God. When I first stood in the Sistine Chapel I wondered if Michelangelo was aware of his blasphemy. Who even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?

Khaleel dropped his arm. ‘Look, I’m sorry. This is stupid. It’s just that I was thinking of you and then you were there.’

‘And then I wasn’t.’

‘Just after I mentioned where my family lives.’

‘What? No, no. Samia just realized it was our stop, that’s all. She’s a little scatty sometimes.’ If I had said a UFO had landed behind the Ritz and its occupants had activated Samia’s homing beacon, I might have pulled it off. I can tell stories, but I can’t lie particularly well. Samia, scatty!

‘Did you say “catty”?’ He grinned and leant back against a car, with arms folded. The I’m-cool-enough-to-handle-anything pose. ‘So what’s so terrible about Liaquatabad that you had to run away at the first mention?’

‘Karachi’s huge. Really. What was sea and swamp and wasteland not so long ago is now tarmac and concrete and, well, another kind of wasteland.’

‘Tell me about April’s cruelty,’ he said. ‘Or answer my question.’

It didn’t surprise me that he knew his Eliot. On the plane he’d had a copy of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems. ‘I’ve never been to Liaquatabad. But it’s on that side of Karachi.’

‘Which side?’

‘That.’

‘Are you planning to elaborate?’

‘I’m feeling minimalist.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, and I thought he was going to walk off. So I said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know about the great class divide of Pakistan.’

‘Oh. It’s like that, is it?’ He scuffed the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other. ‘So I’m the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.’ Before I could quite decide how to respond to that he said, ‘I had a hard enough time growing up in the States knowing the other kids were laughing behind my back at my parents’ accents, their clothes, their whole foreign baggage. The way I dealt with that was by telling those kids to either lay off or stop pretending they were my friends. Most chose the first option. But what I’m saying is, I decided pretty early on that I’d rather risk unpopularity at school than feel embarrassed at home. So don’t expect me to start getting defensive about my family now just because …’ He put his hand to his scalp. ‘Aaah, hell. Can we go somewhere? And talk?’

Of course we could. But not upstairs; he didn’t even suggest that, but followed me around the corner towards a café. When we came to a crossing his hand lightly touched my elbow, convincing me not to make a dash for it between one speeding bus and the next. At the café we sat down at an outdoor table. I ordered coffee; he asked for tea.

‘Tell me about Karachi.’

I dipped a lump of sugar into my coffee and watched it change colour. He hadn’t said, ‘What’s Karachi like?’ as so many people did, as though they thought I could answer that question with a single, simple analogy. My stock answer was, ‘Like a chicken.’

But to Khaleel I talked of June, July and August, the three months that were all I had known of Karachi during my college years. The spring semester always ended by the middle of May, but I’d spend a month or so with college friends, or cousins in New York, having instructed my travel agent to book my flight home for 16 June or as soon thereafter as possible, by which point Dadi was sure to have departed for Paris, where she spent three months every year with her younger son, Ali, always making a point of being there for his birthday on 16 June.

‘But summer in Paris is horrible,’ Khaleel said. ‘Hot, and still. All the Parisians leave for the countryside.’