Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Wow,' Aisha said, 'she's beautiful.'

There was no doubt she was. She was curled up on a red divan, wearing a red satiny mini-dress that left her long, golden legs quite bare, and her chest pressing against a low-cut neckline. Sharmeen said, 'Um.' She had a complicated reaction to Zoya Mirza. She liked Zoya's height and some of the roles she was so good in, like the crusading lawyer she had played in her second film, Aaj ka Kanoon , but she thought that a Muslimah showing her body like this was not a good thing. It made her uncomfortable. There had been a time when she would have thought it was a very bad thing, she would have agreed wholeheartedly with Abba and Ammi that this was unquestionably an evil. But she had spent a lot of time with Aisha, and Aisha thought Zoya Mirza was cool. So Sharmeen said, 'She's all right,' and left it at that, and tried to turn the page.

But Aisha put her hand down, over Zoya Mirza's very flat stomach. 'Why?' she said. 'She's as good-looking as Chandrachur Singh. Much more. You can't say she's not.'

Sharmeen didn't want to talk about this, because she knew where the discussion would go. Aisha's parents prided themselves on being modern. Her mother worked as a real-estate agent, and her father ran a software company. Aisha's eldest brother had married a white American girl, who hadn't converted even after the marriage. And Aisha's sister and she both went about with their heads uncovered. Aisha was very proud of her long brownish hair, and Sharmeen knew that she pitied her, Sharmeen, for having to wear such conservative clothing outside the house. She refused to accept Sharmeen's assertion that she felt safer with her hair covered, and closer to Allah. Aisha said that was all social conditioning, and Allah had never said anything about covering yourself head to toe. So arguing with her was useless, but an argument was going to happen anyway. Sharmeen could see that. So she sighed, and said, 'She just always looks so cheap to me.'

Aisha rolled over, clapped her palms over her eyes and burst out, 'Cheap? Cheap ? Sharmeen Khan, after all this time in America, you're still such a fundoo.'

'I am not a fundoo.'

'Yes, you are a fundoo.'

This time around, they had reached their customary impasse with unusual swiftness. Before leaving Pakistan, in Rawalpindi and Karachi, Sharmeen had never been called a fundoo, not by a friend or an enemy. She had always gone to army schools, where many of her classmates had dressed like her and the older girls had worn hijaab and mostly everyone had agreed about what was proper and what was not. But that had been an eternity ago, when she was eight and nine. Now she was almost fourteen and on the other side of the world and Aisha was her best friend and everything was different. Now she had to defend herself, and deny that she was a fundamentalist. 'Being modest,' Sharmeen said, 'doesn't mean that you are a fundoo.'

Aisha came back instantly with, 'And being proud of your body doesn't mean you're cheap.'

Sharmeen felt her own body contract into itself. She hated this eternal argument which set off this constriction centred at her belly. 'Fine,' she said, and tried to turn the page.

'Fine what?'

'Fine, she's not cheap. Oof. Can we move past Zoya Mirza now?'

Aisha turned the page, to another two pictures of Zoya Mirza. It was her Stardust , and she'd brought it in her black bag, so she had proprietary rights. She was allowed to read Stardust at home, in front of her parents, who no doubt thought of Sharmeen's parents as fundoos. Sharmeen waited patiently for Aisha to finish reading the article about Zoya Mirza, and thought about her father and mother and their religiosity. Abba was the more observant, the more rigorous. His forehead was marked with a namaaz ka gatta, the testimony of his five kneelings and five prayers daily, and every time Sharmeen had flown in an aeroplane with him, she had been comforted by his readings from a small, exquisite Koran during take-offs and landings. He had told Sharmeen about how his faith had sustained him, how it had made it possible for him to rise despite all the difficulties. He had battled poverty and dispossession, family troubles and discrimination, and had studied hard and prayed and come up through the ranks of the army. Now he was attached to the embassy in Washington in a very important position, and Sharmeen admired and loved him very much. Despite anything Aisha or her emigrant parents might think of him. Sharmeen didn't care.

'Okay,' Aisha said. She'd finished the article, and was ready to go on to the next. But she couldn't let Zoya Mirza go without a last admiring, 'I tell you, she's so smart.'

Sharmeen held her tongue, and they settled into a long perusal of an article about Anil Kapoor's career, and then an analysis of older heroes. Sharmeen watched films only at Aisha's, on DVD, and so her knowledge of heroes and heroines and their histories wasn't as wide and deep as Aisha's, but she had an astute sense of what was going to be a hit and what wasn't, and she could remember entire songs after hearing them only once. Of the black-and-white heroes, from long before either she or Aisha had been born, Sharmeen liked Dev Anand. After that she had a partiality to Amitabh Bachchan. Aisha was quite agreeable about these two preferences, it was only over Chandrachur Singh that they parted company. Sharmeen had often wondered why it was that modern times divided them more than olden times. Now they agreed about Feroz Khan – both thumbs down – but disagreed about Fardeen, whose first film hadn't been released yet but whose photographs were suddenly everywhere, who Aisha thought was cool but Sharmeen pronounced a dork. 'Dork' was one of Sharmeen's new words.

'Sharmeen,' came the call. 'Beta?'

They had plenty of warning. When Ammi opened the door, the Stardust was safely deep under the bed, and Sharmeen and Aisha were seated in the middle of the bed, facing each other. Looking, Sharmeen hoped, like two obedient girls having a respectable discussion about something suitable.

'Salaam alaikum, Khaala-jaan,' Aisha said. She was adept at these sudden transformations. She suddenly had her hair tucked behind her ears, her arms wrapped around her knees, and she looked as sweetly innocent as one of those forties heroines simpering at an approving elder.

And Ammi did approve. 'Waleikum as salaam, Aisha,' she said, dabbing at her mouth with the end of her chunni. 'Are you well?'

'Yes, Khaala-jaan, very well.' Aisha did a little side-to-side nod of the head that she brought on when she was being good for aunties and uncles. 'You look very pink. The cold weather brings out your cheeks.'

The flattery wasn't strictly necessary. Ammi had been at first surprised and then charmed by Aisha's good Urdu and modest manners. She didn't approve of Aisha's family, but was quite comfortable with letting the sweet girl into her own house and being her daughter's sweet friend. Aisha was quite safe, but she never missed a chance to lay on the butter. Ammi smiled, and succumbed once again to Aisha's acting. 'It is just the heat in the kitchen,' she said. 'Sharmeen, go and watch Daddi for a while. I can't keep running up there.'

'Now, Ammi?'

'No, next year.'

'Ammi, we were just talking about exams.'

'So go and talk up there. That poor old woman is not going to stop you.'

Sharmeen couldn't tell Ammi that she hated the musty smell of that room, that it scared her to be in the presence of that supine, wizened body that had once been her Daddi. She made a face, and then winced as Aisha pinched her toe.

'We'll just go, Khalla,' Aisha said. 'Two minutes.'

Ammi left, but not without a warning glare at Sharmeen. Aisha gathered up her things, and herded Sharmeen through the kitchen and up the stairs to the back room. Even the heavy smell of Ammi's cooking couldn't hide the grim reek of old age, that shut-off closeness which smelt of camphor and bitter medicine and however slightly – this is what made Sharmeen gag – of urine. Though the room was warm, from the heating ducts and the kitchen just down the stairs, Daddi lay under a thick covering of quilt and blankets. Sharmeen sat on the chair next to the door, and tried to breathe very lightly. Aisha marched up to the bed, and plonked herself down on the couch next to it. Even though Daddi was by now little more than a lump under the blankets, Aisha professed an interest in her. She said Daddi changed every time she visited the house, got smaller and more creased and pickled. Sharmeen thought this was true, that what was left in this room was not the tall, loud, sarcastic woman with huge dark eyes that she remembered vaguely from early childhood, but she preferred not to look. She would prefer to leave this smelly body alone, at the back of the house.