‘The kids are still outside,’ Ami said, and Karim and I turned and ran into my room.
‘Now we’ll listen to music and say nothing.’ Karim headed straight for my stereo without waiting for a response. He popped in one of my parents’ tapes and pressed play and the room filled with the morose sounds of ‘Seasons in the Sun’. Karim switched off the music and pulled a jigsaw puzzle out of my desk drawer. ‘Let’s assemble.’
He was so much his father’s son, though I’d never seen that before (and maybe I didn’t even see it quite then, but play along, play along). Both of them sought desperately for the imposition of order in their lives, though how anyone as adept at anagrams as Karim could fail to see the arbitrariness of order I’ll never understand. I finally was ready to say, ‘Let’s talk, Karim,’ but he was already placing all the border pieces into one pile and sorting the rest into piles of co-ordinating colour.
‘You’re putting the sky in the sea,’ I said. ‘And I think that branch is really an antler.’
He sat back and tapped his ankle bone, visible between jeans and sneakers. ‘Where does that road go?’ he asked.
I looked at the cover of the jigsaw box. ‘What road? You mean this path?’
‘No, the main road that cuts past the Sheikh’s palace. Near where you were shot at. Khayaban-e-Shaheen. Where does it go? Does it keep going on to the sea?’
‘Who knows?’
We heard his parents’ voices rise up in anger from the study. I tapped Karim’s clenched fist and when he didn’t respond I prised open his fingers. He could become a hermit, I thought. I could see him alone on a mountain, spending hours observing his fingers’ ability to flex and unflex, and tracing the bones that connected thumb to ankle in the jigsaw of his body. I shook my head. Karim on a mountain? He was such a city boy.
He looked up, suddenly concerned. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Me?’
‘You were shot at.’
‘Oh, yes.’ I let go of his hand and sat back. Already that memory was fading, and I had started anticipating the social cachet I could enjoy in the school yard from having a story like tonight’s under my belt. ‘It’s over,’ I said.
He looked at me and shook his head. ‘But the world is slightly different now, isn’t it?’
They cannot protect you from this. And what else?
‘Not as safe.’ Inexplicably, I started crying. I drew my knees up against my chest, and looked down at the carpet. Tears landed on my jeans and sank into the fabric.
Karim rested his elbows on my knees and leaned forward, his forehead touching mine. ‘Transmitting images into your brain,’ he intoned. ‘Images of teachers in red leather thongs.’
‘Gross!’ I pushed him away, laughing. He fell back, resting on his elbows, the toe of his sneaker pressing against the toe of mine.
‘I almost wish you’d been there,’ I said a little later, when silence had replaced the laughter.
‘I wish I’d been there, too,’ he said, turning a jigsaw piece over and over in his hand, looking at the precise irregularity of its edges. ‘Because then I’d be thinking of how the bullets could have hit me, instead of sitting here imagining those bullets hitting you. All those bullets.’ His face took on one of those expressions again: the one with which he receded away from me.
‘You can’t think things like that. I wish you’d never think things like that.’
‘Tell me something funny, Raheen.’
I’d been saving this one up for him, for a moment when he’d really need it: ‘One of the names the British used to refer to Karachi, in the days when it was little more than a fishing village, was Krotchy.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Nuh uh. We could all be Krotchians. Or Krotchyites.’
‘Krotchyites! Sounds like a kinky communist party.’
I hadn’t yet finished rolling my eyes about that when Uncle Ali opened the door. ‘Let’s go, son. Way past your bedtime.’
In the hallway, my parents stood awkwardly with Aunty Maheen, no one speaking. Ami and Uncle Ali exchanged ‘what-just-happened-there?’ and ‘what-brought-that-on?’ looks. Aunty Maheen started walking quickly towards the door, and Aba speeded up too and touched her lightly on the shoulder. At first I thought she was going to ignore him, but then she turned round and shrugged, half-apologetically, half-not. ‘Forget about it,’ we all heard her say. She looked over Aba’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Karim, let’s go.’
Karim held my wrist for a moment, then followed his mother out.
‘Talk to her,’ Ami said to Uncle Ali.
‘Yasmin, I’ve forgotten how.’
Then he left, too.
Later that night, unable to sleep, I went towards my parents’ room, where I heard them through the part-opened door.
‘Why after all these years?’ Aba said.
‘Given what’s going on with her, why wouldn’t she think of how else her life might have worked out? Why wouldn’t she get angry that things didn’t happen differently?’
‘Do you think Ali knows? You know, about—’
‘I think that’s part of the reason he wants them all to move to London.’
Whatever it was they were talking about, I knew they’d stop if I walked into the room. And, ordinarily, I would have turned and walked away, nothing more discomforting than lurking in shadows listening to conversations that weren’t meant for you, but this had something to do with the possibility of Karim leaving Karachi, so I had to stay. I had to know.
‘Has she said anything to you?’ Aba said, after a hesitation that suggested he wasn’t sure he wanted to take the conversation any further.
‘No, of course not. She knows I’ll feel I’m betraying Ali if I do anything except censure the situation.’
‘You would?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
Spell it out, I silently urged them on. S-P-E-L–L.
‘I think I would be compassionate about the situation without feeling I’m betraying Ali. And, let’s face it, if we portion out loyalties mine should belong with Ali and yours with Maheen.’
‘Quite the reverse, if we’re honest about it. Come on, Zafar: if Maheen told you she’d robbed an old woman you’d feel compassionate.’ Her voice became accusing. ‘You don’t feel you’re entitled to be anything but compassionate towards Maheen.’
I couldn’t help lifting up my arms in exasperation. Why make compassion seem like a crime?
‘Why so cold, Yasmin?’
‘Because many years ago we decided to square our shoulders and say, this is what we have done; we will live with it. We will make it something less than a waste and an unmitigated cruelty. And you’ve backed out of that, Zafar. You look over your shoulder and squirm as if to say, what is past is past, all I can do is look abashed and change the subject as fast as possible. When Raheen was born we both promised ourselves that wouldn’t happen.’
‘Raheen has nothing to do with this.’
‘Raheen has everything to do with this. Zafar, you were there when Ali told us Raheen’s been asking questions about the past. You were there, but you were the only one of the four of us who seemed to think it’s some passing curiosity that she’ll soon forget about. You want to know what brought on Maheen’s outburst? She knows that when Raheen asks questions, Karim asks them, too. She knows we’re all going to have to start marshalling facts, making our cases. She knows we’re all going to have to start thinking about it again.’