‘I half-thought you wouldn’t either, Puck.’ He smiled at her and she didn’t pretend to be confused. ‘But Maheen was in a gentle mood after she heard about Laila, so I took the opportunity to add to our invitation list.’
‘I just heard about the miscarriage. Awful, it’s so awful. Poor Laila.’
‘She nearly died, you know. Loss of blood. But Dolly was at the hospital, visiting a relative, and she heard there was no blood matching Laila’s type, so she called her husband and God knows what strings Anwar pulled but he managed to get hold of a match.’
‘God bless Anwar. And we’re always so snide about his newly-found connections.’ Strange how already it seems a dream or a part I once played, all those months I was engaged to you with no thought of wanting anything differently for the rest of my life.
‘Hmmm. There was some half-deranged guy at the hospital who almost attacked the doctors. Seemed to think those last available units of blood were earmarked for his brother, who died without them.’
‘Good God.’
‘Yes. Apparently the police were called to get rid of him. He was led off screaming about how one day he’ll be rich and powerful and his house will have running water, twenty-four hours a day, gushing out of gold taps.’ Stay where you are. Don’t move any closer. Don’t let me smell that scent of jasmine and spice on your hands. At this distance, I can make myself believe you’re only an old friend.
‘I am so glad I’m not poor. Particularly not in Pakistan.’
‘I’m so glad I don’t know anyone with gold taps.’
‘Silver tea set? What do you think, Zafar? As a wedding present for Ali and Maheen.’
Zafar, when we send out wedding invitations, can we say: no silver, please. Show some originality.
Or we couldjust elope, Maheen. How about it? Today?
‘Silver’s fine, Yasmin.’
Yasmin raised her eyebrows at him across the Ampi’s table. ‘That was a joke. You know Maheen hates silver.’
‘Oh.’ He swirled ice cream around in its pewter bowl.
She had to say it. For all their sakes. ‘Zafar, it’s still not too late for you and Maheen.’
He found he didn’t even have to pause an instant before taking Yasmin’s hand and saying, ‘Yes, it is.’ Guilt had swallowed up everything else between him and Maheen, and for a while he had thought that regret would swallow him up too. But Yasmin had changed that. He suspected people thought him fickle, and if everyone wasn’t so frantically busy trying to put the war and everything associated with it behind them he doubted his engagement to Yasmin would have met with such approval all around.
And Maheen was with Ali. Fine and upstanding Ali.
He didn’t think very hard about Maheen and Ali together. He couldn’t. Not yet.
His other hand closed around Yasmin’s.
But soon.
‘So soon? I thought you’d refuse to see me for at least another decade.’ Yasmin drew Maheen into an embrace. ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you more than a little.’
‘Silly girl, as if you thought I could stay angry for ever. I’ve been picking up the phone to call you every day since Karim was born and twice a day since Raheen was. Did you really imagine I’d turn you away at my doorstep? Ali, what are you doing?’
‘I’m smelling Yasmin’s hands.’
‘Is it a pleasant smell?’ Yasmin smiled at him.
‘Talcum powder.’ Now I know, we’ll all be all right. We’ll all be friends for ever. The echo stronger now than it was the day we got married, and surely it can only amplify as the years wear on.
‘Now all you have to do is convince that husband of yours that all is forgiven,’ Maheen said. ‘What does he want from me, Yasmin, an official letter of pardon?’ Zafar, when we talked of names for the children we were going to have, neither Karim nor Raheen were on the list. I miss you. I miss the way you made me laugh. Come back, in whatever form it is. I’d rather have you as my friend than watch you sulking in corners ashamed to meet my eye each time we meet.
God, Zaf why didn’t you try even once to say you were sorry?
. .
One more month, and the reprieve would be over. I lay down on the bed and looked out through the huge window at the lushness of early summer. Odd to think these paths that I’d walked, that glen in which I’d spotted deer, that student diner where I’d braved the most arctic of nights for a plate of curly fries, would soon only be memory.
‘Out into the real world,’ my classmates and I would chirp, when thinking of graduation and what lay beyond. To them the real world meant work, bills, the start of a road leading to a mortgage, children, a suburban house and a car in the driveway. But what my real world was, I still hadn’t decided.
‘You should stay,’ Zia had said to me on the phone the night before, calling from New York, where he’d gone to talk to real-estate agents. ‘You’re entitled to a year of practical training with your student visa. You should definitely stay. This isn’t about your father any more, Raheen; the way things are in Karachi, you’d be a fool to go home.’
It would be so easy to stay, and convince myself that it wasn’t about my father any more. I hadn’t seen him since that day on the pier. While I was still talking to Ami in the gallery, Aunty Laila had walked back in, and I told her I wanted Uncle Asif to get me on the next flight back to New York. My old school friend Cyrus was there, and I knew he’d put me up until the start of the semester without asking any questions. ‘I just need to go away and clear my head,’ I told Ami, expecting her to argue me out of it, but she had replied, ‘As long as you promise to clear it rather than empty it.’ I didn’t tell her the main attraction of staying with Cyrus was that he could be counted on to envelop me in a whirlwind of activity that made it possible to live from one hour to the next without any thought of what lay beyond, or behind.
There had been a flight that evening. My only qualm was leaving Sonia, but when I called her she said her father was taking the family on Umra. I doubted any desire for religious pilgrimage lay behind her father’s decision; he probably just wanted her out of Karachi so that she wouldn’t have to face the scandal of the broken engagement.
There was a gentle tapping on my door. I ignored it. Probably Zia, back from New York, stopping off to see me on his way to his college. I wanted to lie here and wallow in nostalgia about my college days, not discuss the future and what I honestly thought lay in it for me if I went home. The tapping turned into a loud knocking.
‘Oh, go away,’ I said.
There was the sound of footsteps retreating from my door. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes he gave up so easily. Truth was, one of the things I already regretted most about graduation was that it meant moving out of a place where Zia was less than twenty minutes away by car; it meant Zia would no longer be within my local calling zone with his peculiar nocturnal hours that allowed me to wake from nightmare at four in the morning and call him without hesitation. I walked towards the door. The phone rang.
‘Hello,’ I said into the receiver.
‘Hey, I’ve got an idea.’
‘Zia? Who just knocked on my door?’
‘Tooth fairy. Listen, I have an idea.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t go.’
I covered my eyes with my hand and fell back on my bed. ‘Zia, not this conversation.’