‘Who’s Mr Forehand?’
‘Oh, just this guy.’ Strangely embarrassed.
‘Jake?’
‘How did you…?’
‘My cousin, Omar, ran into Sonia in Karachi. She told him Jake’s a tennis player. Is it love?’
‘No, it’s over. Has been for a while, though he keeps suffering memory lapses about that little detail.’
‘Full story, please,’ he said, in the tone of one who is entitled to know everything.
‘He discovered his Hispanic roots. Decided to change the pronunciation of his name. I didn’t take all this seriously enough.’
There was a pause, then laughter so dizzyingly contagious I knew it would have instantly healed my slightly aching heart if I’d heard it when the symptoms of break-up still persisted. ‘Hake?’ Karim spluttered. ‘You were involved with a man who called himself Hake?’
‘It’s worse than that,’ I said, laughing back. ‘He’s Hake Hunior.’
I could almost see Karim doubling over in the airport, oblivious to the stares of the jet-lagged and travel-weary. ‘You’re making up the Junior bit. Admit it!’
‘But it rounds off the sentence so nicely.’
‘God, it’s good to laugh,’ he said. ‘Especially after I’ve been sitting here getting newsprint on my nose, reading about what’s going on in Karachi.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The violence flaring up. One hundred and thirty people killed in the first seventeen days of December. Have you see the new issue of Newsline? It says more people have been killed in Karachi this month than in Bosnia. Bosnia!’
‘Oh, right.’ I kept my voice as neutral as possible, but I was thinking: Bloody, bloody hell. Just when I thought all that rubbish between us had departed with the end of self-righteous adolescence.
‘I can hear you rolling your eyeballs.’
‘Yeah, well. You know.’ I looked out of the window again.
‘No, I don’t, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?’
‘Whatever, Karim.’ I felt drained; I couldn’t imagine ever having enough energy to fully engage in this conversation. I couldn’t imagine having enough patience.
‘That essay you wrote…I thought it meant you were thinking about Karachi.’
I knew he couldn’t see my eyebrows, but that didn’t stop me raising them.
But he was going on: ‘I mean, I’ve been trying for the last few years to come to grips with Karachi’s nature, to face all these things that are so hard to face, and I’m just more glad than I can say that you’ve also started. Reading that essay, it was like you’d reached into my mind and pulled out all these thoughts from there. That cartographer in Zytrow, he was amazing. That you could write that was amazing. I mean, that you see he’s willing to be unselfish — yes, because of the work he’s doing people will stop talking about his great leap, and of course he’s known that from the beginning, but he’s willing to forgo that kind of self-glory in order to bring some order to the place.’ I’d never heard anyone speak so fast or confuse me so much with what they were saying. ‘And those two people in Raya, they have a kind of perfection, but it’s in such a limited way because it’s such a limited city, a city with only two inhabitants, and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhubat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And the two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside and… Raheen, I see where you’re going with it. I know what you’re trying to say. Or beginning to. And I know it’s not easy, but I’m here, Ra, I’m here.’
If he had been standing in front of me I would have hit him. ‘You’ve been trying to come to grips with Karachi’s nature and you’re glad I’ve also started? I go home, Karim. Every bloody year. Twice a year. The day classes end. I get on that plane and I go back to Karachi. I’m going there in two weeks. And you, you’d rather go to Lapland!’ I slammed my open palm against the side of my desk. ‘Listen, do me a favour and burn that essay. Because it’s obvious you haven’t understood a word I’ve tried to say, and, frankly, right now I have no interest in pointing out all the places where you went wrong.’
There was silence from the other end. I could make out the noises of the airport, but from Karim I couldn’t hear even a whisper of breath. It occurred to me that he’d simply walked away from the phone.
‘When you go home do you ever catch a flight out of Boston?’ he said at last.
I cranked open the window again and picked up a fistful of white from the ledge. When I opened my fist, my fingerprints were whorls of evidence in the tightly packed snow. I still remembered her number. I had only called it once, but I still remembered her number. ‘Zia saw your mother over fall break. Went there for dinner while he was in Boston. I told him to give her my love.’
‘What is Zia to my mother?’ His voice tired now. ‘You were the closest thing she had to a daughter. Over three years you’ve been on the East Coast, and not once have you bothered to call her. You really are your father’s daughter.’
The mirror on the opposite wall showed my head jerking back in surprise, putting distance between myself and the words that came out of the handset. The only image that came to mind: my father putting an arm around Karim’s shoulder at the airport, the last time our two families were together, and Karim turning one hundred and eighty degrees, wrapping his arms around Aba’s waist and weeping. And I wondered again, as I’d so often wondered, of all those scraps of my letters that he’d chopped and pasted, why he had chosen the one in which I talked about parents and accepting their imperfections.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘They’re calling my flight.’
‘Karim…’ The thought that this was it, the attempt at reconciliation ended, was physically painful.
‘What?’
‘Why did you call?’
There was silence at the other end again, but I could hear him breathing. Say it. Say, ‘Because I missed you.’
‘Because I wanted to see…if we could speak without noticing the palimpsest.’
‘What?’ He was receding, I could hear him drifting away, or was that me? Why had we ever thought it would be enough for us to speak to each other in fragments? What had we missed by finishing each other’s sentences, assuming we’d always know the direction in which a thought was going? How many words had remained unspoken, misunderstood, between us at a time when we could so easily have set things right?
‘Too many layers of words, Raheen, beneath and behind our sentences to each other.’
‘Karim, don’t, please, don’t disappear.’ Salty tracks curving beneath my eye and splashing on to the receiver.
‘In that part of my mind that only remembers life before fourteen, Raheen, I’ll love you for ever.’
He hung up so gently, I didn’t even hear the click.
. .
The boundary walls around Sonia’s house were several feet higher than they had been in August when I was last in Karachi, and when Zia rang the bell no one opened the gate. Instead, a man I didn’t recognize slid open a little flap in the gate and looked through. All I could see was one of his eyes and part of his nose. The eye darted from Zia to me, then back to Zia, where it stayed, narrowing slightly.