Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

The wait for the luggage was mercifully short. As a porter wheeled my suitcase out of the terminal I heard a voice announce over a loudspeaker, ‘No cigarette smoking or paan chewing in the terminal.’ The end of the remark reminded me of Che’s reddened teeth and I realized I was glad Celeste hadn’t been able to afford to take me up on my offer to spend part of her summer in Karachi.

My cousin Sameer was waiting for me when I exited the terminal, and he hugged me with an exuberance that prompted a cat-call from some unknown person.

‘Good God, girl!’ Sameer grinned. ‘You’re a sore for sight eyes.’

‘You’re a bit of a sore yourself,’ I laughed. ‘But, oh God, Sammy, the heat!’

‘The problem’s the humidity.’ He gestured in the direction of his car. ‘Your parents were planning to come and pick you up but I had to drop a business associate at the airport in any case, so I said I’d just hang around and wait for you.’

‘Business associate.’ I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘And how’s the corporate world treating you?’

He made a face. ‘It would help if this country had an economy to speak of. My advice is, keep studying as long as possible.’ He put an arm around my shoulder. ‘But, honestly, other than my overwhelming desire to greet my favourite cousin, I’m here because the BS called. Beloved Sister. She told me what happened and that maybe you’re a little shaken up. So I’m here with my shoulder.’

I shrugged. ‘He bought me a cup of coffee. Not much more to it.’

‘He who?’

‘He who? Well, what did Samia say?’

‘Baji. The family tree. What the stars say about you and Mariam.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘That.’ He didn’t say anything else as we got into his olive-green Civic (brand new — obviously the economy wasn’t treating him too shabbily), paid the porter (ignoring his plea for US dollars) and drove away from the comparative order of the airport into the crush of brightly coloured buses and honking horns and zigzagging scooters. Open-backed trucks carrying huge, mushroom-shaped bales of hay lumbered past, and Sameer veered off to the far lane and slowed down until they passed. A man rolled down the tinted windows of his car and raised an eyebrow seductively at me from behind eighties-style dark glasses. My view of him was cut off by a van that zipped past, letters of the alphabet stuck on its back window, spelling out I AM TOM SAWYER.

I laughed so hard at that I almost wept. ‘The absurdities Karachi proffers up to keep our sense of humour intact.’

‘Of course it’s not as absurd as believing old family myths.’

‘Sam Mere!’ I boxed his shoulder. ‘If it were one set of twins, or two, it could be coincidence. But so many, over the years, and each time …’ We overtook Tom Sawyer and I saw he was a woman. ‘Of course I know it should be absurd. And you have to really stretch definitions to believe that Mariam and I … but still. Something feels unresolved.’

He was gracious enough not to laugh at my expectation of resolution. ‘Is that why you’re finally here before the middle of June?’

‘Has she said anything about that?’

‘Your dadi? Not exactly. But she called me a couple of hours ago and gave me a lecture on driving carefully and not exceeding the speed limits.’

‘There are speed limits?’

‘In the abstract. Are you nervous about seeing her again?’

Nervous? That wasn’t inaccurate, but the word seemed wrong somehow. Who was it who first decided that something as complicated as an emotion could be summed up in a word with consonants neatly spaced between vowels? Of course, there had been a time with Dadi when my feelings were as uncomplicated as a monosyllable, vowels politely alternating with consonants. A monosyllable such as ‘love’. And then, after that, there had been a time when I tried to convince myself that my feelings for Dadi were as uncomplicated as that other monosyllable, love’s opposite. But I could never quite bring myself to believe that.

‘She’s not at my house, is she?’ I asked Sameer.

‘What, now? No. Don’t suppose so. Think she’s had her share of family-related tensions for the day.’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘Mummy just broke the news to her. My grandmother’s coming to town.’

‘Meher Dadi? God help us all.’

Don’t misunderstand that remark. Dadi’s sister, Meher, is the grandmother I’d always wanted. Born two years after Dadi, she early on perfected the role of rebellious younger sister. At thirteen she announced that one day she would elope, and five years later she did just that. Mind you, the man she eloped with was from a very good family and, on his own merit, was a particular favourite of my great-grandfather’s, so both families were delighted with the match. (Once, watching a stage production of The Tempest, Dadi laughed at Prospero’s plans to unite Ferdinand and Miranda and said, ‘My father was Prospero to Meher’s Miranda.’) Meher’s husband died long before she was ready to settle into respectable widowhood, so she took to spending her evenings playing bridge with my father and his friends and demanding to know when one of them was going to marry her daughter. One of them finally did — my father’s old friend, Zaheer. Immediately after the wedding Meher sold her house and declared she was going to Greece, and maybe she would take flying lessons while she was there. She said to her daughter, Zainab, ‘Zaheer’s rich, and I don’t foresee divorce for the two of you, so you won’t mind if I squander all my money, will you?’ Then she took off in the direction of the Mediterranean and proceeded to multiply her wealth with a few wise investments in the European stock markets. Every so often she’d return to Karachi for a visit and — this is why I said, God help us — she and Dadi would get into the most bitter rows about the most trivial things. I was almost fifteen before I realized that ‘Apollo’, who missed her while she was away, and because of whom she couldn’t stay in Karachi long, was not a dog. And yes, she had learnt to fly. She had the aviator goggles to prove it.

In London, Samia had said that once you scratched the surface those two sisters, Meher and Abida, were really quite similar. I pointed out that Meher might scratch the surface, but Abida would consider it a most common activity.

‘So what did you think of Baji?’ Sameer waved away the young boy who had darted into the middle of the road to wipe the Civic’s windscreen at the red light. The boy ignored Sameer and wiped vigorously with a dirty cloth, leaving streaks of grease on the windscreen. Sameer rolled down his window and yelled at the boy, who darted around to my side and wiped with more vigour. I picked up the two-rupee note lying, half torn, by my foot and handed it to him just as the lights changed.

‘I was too terrified to think. But Rehana Apa’s lovely.’ Something that should have occurred to me long ago finally did. ‘Sameer, how many of the Indian relatives do you know?’

Sameer shook his head and turned on his wiper spray. ‘Me personally? None. Samia and Rehana Apa found each other in London a couple of weeks after my last visit there, so I haven’t met her or Baji or Stinko and Skunky, or whatever the kids’ names are. And you remember that old Indian relative you saw at our house when we were kids? The one you thought was talking about someone called Prue Frock? Well, she wrote my grandmother a letter of condolence when my grandfather died, which Mummy answered, along with some polite if-you’re-ever-in-Karachi kind of note. No one really expected Prue Frock to take the offer up, and there was — I can’t believe we haven’t talked about this before — there was a huge tamasha when she wrote back weeks later to say she’d be in Karachi for a few hours. A major deal was made of keeping the whole thing secret from your dadi. But we haven’t heard from her since then. I think she might have died.’ His hands left the steering wheel in a gesture of incomprehension. ‘Our more distant cousins — you know, the Starched Aunts and that whole side — probably keep up some of their old ties. I think some of them may have done some border hopping from time to time. And now that everyone’s moving around so much … You know little Usman’s got a conditional offer for Oxford? Akbar and Sulaiman’s old college, no less. So yes, I suppose there are increasing opportunities for meeting on neutral soil. But I think, the more closely one’s connected to your dadi, the less likely one is to hear about all the family reunions going on. I love her, you know, but she’s always been a little nutty about the Indian relatives.’