Kartography (9 page)

Except Zia, you might expect me to say.

I keep forgetting how crazy I was about him then. I forget that, and I remember other things which surely can't be real memories. For instance, the drive home from the train station. I seem to think I remember Karim looking out of the window as we snaked through the congested parts of Karachi with its colourful buses maniacally racing one another, men selling fruit and vegetables from wooden carts on the side of the road, deformed beggars dextrously making their way through traffic, laundry flapping from washing lines on the latticed balconies of low-rise apartment buildings. But I can't really remember that, can I, because even if Karim had already started imagining what it would be like to be a stranger in Karachi, even if he were jumping ahead of his own life and seeing the city with the eyes of someone who views Karachi as contrast rather than norm, I had no inkling of it at all. And so I would not have paid any attention to buses or beggars or balconies, and I would not have paid any attention to Karim paying attention to them. I would, I'm quite sure, have been thinking of Zia instead.

He was waiting for us at my house, when Uncle Ali's driver dropped me off. Something wobbly happened to my knees when I saw his car parked outside. He was waiting at my house, not Karim's. He was waiting for me.

‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. Zia's whisking the two of you off for breakfast. I told him we'd stop at your house first, Raheen, on our way back from the train station. I'll call your parents at work and tell them we've arrived safely. But promise you won't go too far away. Things have got better, but they're not OK yet.'

Karim and Zia greeted each other with whoops of delight and high-fives while I struggled to pull my suitcase out of the trunk of the car. Uncle Ali rolled down his car window and yelled at the boys and they both came running to give me a hand. Zia smelled of Drakkar Noir. He hoisted my suitcase up on to his head and held it there with one hand while swaying up the driveway as though he were a village woman bearing an earthenware matka full of water. He was so absorbed in being entertaining he had quite forgotten to say hello, let alone that it was good to see me. Uncle Ali gave me a look that seemed almost sympathetic, and then his car drove off.

‘Zia, I'll take that inside. I need to use the Louvre in any case.' Karim took the suitcase and disappeared indoors, and I was left alone with Zia.

‘Hi, Raheen. Suno, if you want to take a shower or something before we go for halva puri, no problem. Karim and I can hang about for a few minutes.'

I looked down at my crumpled shirt and the caked farm mud that clung to the hem of my jeans.

Zia laughed. ‘No, I don't mean you look as though you need to. You look fine. Really good, in fact. Your parents are at work, aren't they?'

‘Yeah,' I said, a voice in my head shouting
ohmygodohmygodohmygod.
‘Why?'

He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket of his denim jacket. ‘Don't want them to see me smoking.'

I watched him unwrap the cellophane sheath, flip the packet open with his thumb and turn one cigarette upside down in the pack, for good luck. He took a box of matches out of his pocket, attempted to strike the flint against his shoe, and then realized he was wearing sneakers. He grinned, embarrassed. ‘Good thing you're the only one around to see that. Which do you think is cooler? A box of matches or a lighter? I mean, obviously if the lighter is a Zippo, that wins. But if your choice is those transparent, brightly coloured lighters or a box of matches with a Ferrari pictured on the box, then which?'

‘Vole,' I said. ‘Damn vole.'

‘Huh?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Karim, our friend's gone mad,' Zia shouted over my shoulder. ‘She's talking about voles.'

‘Get in the car and drive, Zia.' Karim came up to me and brought his fist down on my shoulder. ‘Vole, huh? I thought you'd say “I rush cats”.'

It's a crush? Lord, no, I thought. If it's a crush and nothing more, what must love feel like?

‘So are we picking up Sonia?' I got into the passenger seat and passed a bunch of tapes back to Karim. He rejected tapes labelled ‘Grooooves', ‘Selexions' and ‘Mewzic Micks' in favour of one marked ‘Vybs'.

Zia snorted. ‘Her father's gone mad. Won't let her out of the house because he knows someone who died recently in Korangi or Orangi or some such area, and that's made him completely paranoid about his darling daughter's safety.'

‘It's not that absurd, Zia,' Karim said. ‘I mean, our parents made us leave the city, and they don't even know anyone directly affected by what happened.'

Zia made another dismissive sound and threw his cigarette butt out of the window. I could see it spark as it hit the asphalt. ‘Yeah, they made you leave because otherwise both of you would have kept wanting to go to the beach or the twins' farm or some far-flung place and they just didn't want to deal with the headache of always saying no. Believe me, I've driven my parents crazy the last few weeks with driving off for hours and not telling them where I'm going. But Sonia's father's not even letting her go as far as Boat Basin. And the really funny part of it is, this guy he knew who died, he fell off a bus. What the hell does that have to do with anything?'

‘Fell off a bus?'

‘That's what I'm saying. He was going home from work, and he lived in some area that's under curfew so there's a window of about an hour or so in the evening when the curfew is lifted so that everyone can come home, right?'

‘If you say so.'

‘I say so, Raheen. So, obviously, the buses at that hour are so full they almost topple over and this guy sees his bus and leaps on to it, except there's no place to even hang on to outside, forget managing to get a foot inside, so he ends up hanging on to this guy who's hanging on to the wide-open bus door which is flapping back and forth as the bus hurtles on and at one point the door swings and the guy holding on to the guy holding on to the door knocks his head against someone else and loses his grip and there's another bus speeding past and dhuzhook! next thing you know Sonia's father doesn't want her leaving the house.'

I couldn't help laughing at the incongruity of it all, even though I knew that Sonia's father didn't like any of Sonia's friends except Karim and me, so our absence must have been the real reason he forbade his daughter from hanging out with what he considered a ‘fast, precocious crowd'.

Karim saw it similarly, but articulated it differently. ‘Someone died. Someone he knew. And I bet you never even thought of telling him you were sorry.'

‘Of course not. He'd just think I was trying to get into his good books.'

‘I don't know.' Karim opened and closed a cassette cover repeatedly. ‘Don't you think maybe there's something wrong in us having such fun all the time when people are being killed every day in the poorer parts of town?'

Zia rolled his eyes at Karim. ‘This is Karachi. We have a good time while we can, ‘cause tomorrow we might not be so lucky.'

But he couldn't have said that back in January '87, could he? Did we already know that something had begun that perhaps none of us would live to see the end of? Perhaps. Although the ethnic fighting had broken out for the first time in my life in 1985, I cannot remember Karachi being a safe city even before that. When Alexander's admiral, the Cretan Nearchus, reached Krokola he had to quell a mutiny among Alexander's Krokolan subjects, who had killed the satrap appointed by Alexander to gather supplies for his forces. If Karachi and Krokola are one and the same, recorded instances of violence on its soil go back over twenty-three hundred years. And yet, it is the only place where I have ever felt utterly safe. Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears' invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home'? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?

I am trying to pass, like a needle, through the thread of narrative but my eye is distracted by what lies ahead.

‘Everything looks different,' Karim said, leaning forward between the passenger's seat and the driver's, and looking out through the windscreen. ‘It should seem cold. By Karachi standards it's cold, but compared with RYK it's not. And arid. Everything looks arid, even the trees.'

Everything did look different. I'm sure. Maybe my memory of Karim on the drive home from the train station isn't false after all. Three weeks away from Karachi and I was noticing things that were generally just so much background: the plastic buckets in which flower-sellers stored bouquets of roses encircling the roundabout near the graveyard; the sign on Sunset Boulevard that said ‘Avoid Accidents Here'; the squat-walking street cleaners dodging traffic while sweeping dust and rubbish to the sides of the road; the carpet-sellers who spread their wares on pavements, with the choicest rugs draped above on the boughs of trees; on billboards, the Urdu letters spelling out English words; the illegal tinted glass fitted in cars with government licence plates. And, yes, Karim was right, the trees that looked so arid. I should have told him I agreed, but Zia was smirking at his remark.

‘Go and write a poem, Karim,' I said, pushing him back so that he wouldn't obstruct my view of Zia any longer. ‘Zee, where are we going?'

‘For halva puri. You know, that place we went that time when it rained.'

‘Oh. We promised Uncle Ali we wouldn't go too far.'

‘Yeah, but he didn't define what he meant by too far, did he?' Zia winked. He had amazing eyelashes.

‘Well, fine, but you turned off too early from the road leading to the airport.'

‘No, I didn't. I turned after the petrol pump.'

‘I don't know about the petrol pump, but we should have passed the Chinese restaurant. Remember last time we went past there and Sonia started craving chicken corn soup even though it was six in the morning?'

‘Yes, but last time we got lost.'

‘We got lost after the Chinese restaurant. We worked that out on the way home.'

Zia slowed the car and we looked up and down the road, which looked so wide after the little streets of RYK, and tried to find something familiar in the large, and largely hideous, houses behind their high boundary walls.

‘You're right. OK, we're lost again. Now what, Raheen?'

‘What did we do last time?'

‘Sonia asked for directions.'

‘So ask for directions.'

‘OK. What's the name of the place?'

‘Don't you know?'

‘Shit.'

Zia drove on, frowning, and I watched him chew his lip.

‘Wasn't it something beginning with a “T”?' he ventured after a few seconds.

‘Yes. It was. And with two syllables.'

‘Tata's? Tito's? Toto's?'

‘Toto sounds familiar.'

‘It does. It does sound familiar. Toto's. It's Toto's.'

‘Or maybe we're just thinking of
The Wizard of Oz.
'

‘Shit.'

Karim finally decided to join the conversation. ‘It's Shahrah-e-Faisal.'

‘I'm sure it's not.' Zia shook his head.

‘The road leading to the airport. I just remembered. Its name is Shahrah-e-Faisal. How could we forget that?'

‘I didn't forget,' I said. 7 haven't forgotten.' Hadn't forgotten we always called it ‘the road leading to the airport'. And the year before, stuck in a traffic jam, we had come up with: the road leading to the oar trip; the road lead gin to the rapt roi; O, I dare thee, old gnat, hit parrot; pin the aorta or glide to death.

And how do you glide to death, Karim?

If you don't pin my aorta we might find out.

So what need was there for him to call the road by its official name, when he'd had no part in the naming, when he had no memories stored in the curves of its official consonants? We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget; we should have all that when we've just spent so much time together in a context unfamiliar to all our friends, and to some extent we do, but over and above the jokes and stories and memories, he has maps and I don't. He has maps and I don't understand why.

‘Zia, Karim's decided he's going to be a cartographer.'

‘What's that?'

‘Map-maker,' Karim said. ‘A Karachi map-maker. Have you ever seen a proper map of this city? Not just one of those two-page things that you see in tourist books, but a real, proper map of the whole city?'

‘No.' Zia shrugged. ‘But why would I have looked for one?'

‘Well, one might have come in handy right now,' Karim said. ‘You have no idea where you are, do you?'

Zia swung the car around. ‘There are really only two places you can ever be. Lost or not. When lost you do a youee until you're not. Which is what we're about to do. How about ditching halva puri and going to the airport for coffee instead?'

‘What's a youee?'

‘U-turn, Ra, U-turn. Arré, yaar, two weeks on a farm and you've fallen behind on the local ling.'

That stung, whether he intended it to or not. I felt desperately uncool and out of step.

‘Strap her cargo,' Karim said. ‘Crop rag hearts.'

‘Huh?' Zia frowned.

‘Go rap her carts.' I smiled at Karim.

‘Chop Ra's garter.'

‘What the hell...?' Zia said. ‘What? Is this another one of your...what's that word thing called?'

‘Anagram,' Karim said.

‘Nag a ram,' I shot back. We grinned, enjoying the sound of that.

‘Nag a ram. Nag-nag-nag nag-nagaram. Nag-a-ra-a-am,' Karim sang, drumming his hands on my shoulder.

And, just like that, life was cool again.