‘Strabo and Eratosthenes,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was going to talk to you about on the phone the other day.’
‘Yes?’ He looked at me cautiously, as though he thought I was drawing him closer just so that I could hit him over the head with a mallet.
I had first encountered mention of the two of them while researching a paper on Homer at college, and that’s really when I decided it was time to get in touch with Karim again, although I had to wait until I wrote that Calvino paper before I was able to decide how to make the first move. Eratosthenes, the grandfather of cartography, was the first man to make a distinction between scientific and literary mapping. Prior to Eratosthenes, no one ever said that cartography should concern itself with science and facts rather than stories; the distinction didn’t really exist. The Odyssey was considered as valuable a tool of mapping as were the charts and eyewitness accounts of sailors and travellers. But Eratosthenes’ decision removed Homer, and all other poets, from the corpus of cartography.
In the furore over this move, which lasted through generations, Eratosthenes’ greatest critic was the cartographer Strabo, who said that Homer depicted geographical truths in the language of poetry, so it was absurd to deny him a role in the realm of cartography. I loved the idea of those early cartographers who thought Odysseus’ voyage was as valid a source for map-making as the charts of travellers who had actually set sail themselves.
Back then, of course, maps weren’t used for travel. They were mainly used for illustrating stories. There stands Mount Olympus. That’s where Theseus fought the Minotaur. That kind of stuff. So maps weren’t about going from point A to point B; they were about helping someone hear the heartbeat of a place. I explained this, and then I reached for Karim’s hand and held it at the very tips of his fingers. He didn’t draw away. ‘Seems to me like we’re Strabo and Eratosthenes, Karimazov. I want you to pay attention to the stories that define Karachi, and you want to know what the name of the road connecting Gizri to Zamzama is, and how many people have died there in the last year.’
But even as I said all that, I wondered why any of it should have been anything more than a minor irritation in our friendship. And then I was back, again, to the question I had asked so many times it even invaded my dreams: what did I do to make him cut up my letters?
His hand closed on my wrist so tightly I almost cried out. ‘You want to hear the heartbeat of a place? Do you know how hard your heart beats when you’re lost? Do you know what it is to wander out of the comfort of your own streets and your own stories?’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Which stories do you want me to pay attention to? Or, more to the point, which stories have you deliberately turned away from, Ra, and why?’
I pulled my wrist out of his grip and then turned away from Zia’s uncertain, sympathetic, exasperated eyes, which were meant as much for Karim as for me. I cranked up the volume of the music as high as it would go, so that none of us could hear our own thoughts.
All around us, Karachi kept moving.
. .
1971
‘Of course there won’t be war,’ said Asif, running his fingers through his luxurious mass of hair. ‘Everyone’s playing brinkmanship, that’s all. Here’s what’ll happen: Mujib will back down on his Six Points, give up the whole idea of a decentralized federal system of government in exchange for some political and economic concessions towards East Pakistan. Once he does that, Yahya will invite him to form the government, and at that point Bhutto will also take his place as leader of the opposition. It’s the only sane, rational, not to mention cheerful, choice. Mujib’s no zealous revolutionary, and, besides, whatever the Bengali masses might want, they’re just rabble, and our army will decimate them if they try to make some kind of one-legged stand. No one wants to be slaughtered.’ He snapped his fingers at the Ampi’s waiter and asked for more ice.
‘No one wants to be enslaved either,’ Maheen said, waving down at Laila and her new husband, who had entered and taken a table on the ground floor. ‘Yasmin, don’t you love what she’s wearing?’
‘My God, she is so gorgeous. What does she see in him?’ Asif shook his head. ‘And come on, Maheen, isn’t enslaved a little too dramatic a word?’
‘Nothing dramatic about it,’ Ali said. ‘Just look at the statistics.’
‘Oh, you and your statistics,’ Asif said with a laugh.
‘Well, but just think about it. East Pakistan is the majority wing of the country in terms of population, and yet…’ He started to count off his fingers, ‘It gets less than 30 per cent of foreign aid allocation, less than 20 per cent of civil service jobs, less than 10 per cent of military positions, fewer schools, fewer universities, it makes up near 70 per cent of the country’s export earnings but receives the benefits of less than 30 per cent of our import expenditure.’
‘All these stupid bloody politicians on their own power trips,’ Zafar said, picking up the menu and looking at the dessert section. ‘Why don’t Mujib and Bhutto just have a duel to the death, pistols at dawn, and leave the rest of us out of it?’
‘It’s not that simple, Zafar,’ Ali said, folding his napkin neatly into a little square.
‘Well it’s not the little numbers game you make it out to be either, Ali.’
Maheen put a hand on her fiancé’s arm. ‘Jaanoo, Ali’s right. Look, Asif, I wish — really, really, I wish and pray — that everything could be easily resolved, but you’re deluding yourself if you think the Bengali people’s demands are going to go away, because I don’t know if they’ll even accept a federation at this point when the word Independence has gone around and it’s such a more soul-stirring word than federation.’
‘Ah, but you don’t know what I know,’ Asif said.
‘And what’s that?’
‘That just today Yahya told newsmen that his talks with Mujib were satisfactory, and that Mujib will be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan. They’ve reached a compromise, Maheen; I’m sorry, but your soul will have to do with being a little less stirred.’
‘God’s sake, Asif, she’s lived all her life in Karachi,’ Yasmin said. ‘She’s not…’
‘Not what?’ Maheen turned to her friend. ‘One of them?’
There was a yelp from below. The waiter had spilt a drink on Laila. Her husband stood up and cracked a slap across the waiter’s cheek. ‘Halfwit Bingo! Go back to your jungle.’
Zafar stood up. Ali and Asif pulled him down.
Laila grabbed her husband’s arm and whispered something. He looked up at Maheen, and turned red. ‘It’s a new sari,’ he called out in Maheen’s direction, pointing at Laila’s stained clothes. ‘I got angry, can you blame me? No hard feelings, OK, Maheen?’
Maheen shrugged noncommittally, which seemed to satisfy him. He sat down and resumed eating. Laila continued looking up, but Maheen refused to meet her eye.
‘It’s going to get worse,’ Yasmin said.
‘How much worse can it get?’ Zafar sighed. He slipped his hand into Maheen’s palm beneath the table, but her fingers didn’t curl around his in response. She was looking at the Bengali waiter. He walked past and caught her eye, and for a moment the barriers of class and gender became porous and something passed between them that Zafar couldn’t quite identify. Maheen’s hand slipped out of Zafar’s. He turned his face away from her, and saw Yasmin and Ali looking at Maheen, their faces moulded into identical expressions of concern. It was so brief he was almost unsure it happened, but for an instant he felt a most alien and inexplicable sensation of jealousy.