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They were on Drigh Road. A thin light pierced the haze and the sky turned smoky purple. To the south, Daanish could see service lanes ripped out. He’d heard about this. It was part of the Prime Minister’s development scheme: yellow taxis, a new highway, and a computerized telephone system with seven digits instead of six. But the new lines hadn’t been implemented. The roads lay clawed and abandoned like old meat. Once the city awoke, pedestrians would scoop the dirt in their shoes and kick it into the sooty air, to resettle on the next passer-by.
When he’d lived here, he’d rarely been one of those pedestrians. Karachiites walked out of necessity, not for pleasure. Till now, he’d simply accepted this. Beauty and hygiene were to be locked indoors, adding to their value. No one bothered with public space. As if to illustrate, the little boy, tired of the ching-um wrapper, bounced over the bags on Daanish, unrolled the window and tossed the paper out. He then proceeded to empty his pockets on to the street – more wrappers, a Chili Chips packet, and fistfuls of pencil shavings.
No one noticed. The family was filling in the absentees about local events. Since the start of the year, more than three thousand kidnappings were reported and now at least as many Rangers prowled the city. ‘They stop anyone,’ said the mother to whom the boy, now bored with littering, had returned. ‘Shireen told me they were blocked by these horrible Ranger men, but her driver very cleverly kept driving. Anything could have happened.’ She shook her head.
‘Never stop for them,’ agreed her husband.
‘There’s been a curfew in Nazimabad,’ she added.
Another man piped, ‘Dacoits are now attacking everyone. Not just the rich. Just this month they raided a fishermen’s village. I can’t imagine what they took, there are hardly even any fish left!’
‘Oof,’ said a young woman, ‘the price of fish! Don’t even talk about it.’ She promptly gave Khurram’s mother minute details of the quality, size and price of the seafood in the market. The other woman interrupted with her own wisdom.
Amongst the men, another discussion was rapidly rising in crescendo. Khurram was declaring, ‘This street is the longest in Karachi and that is a fact.’ Daanish wasn’t sure how they went from Rangers to road lengths, but he was once more struck by Khurram’s newfound confidence. Even his speech was clearer.
Suddenly, just about every street in Karachi became the longest. ‘No,’ said one man. ‘It is M.A. Jinnah Road.’
Another shook his head, ‘Abdullah Haroon Road – the longest in all of Pakistan.’
‘Nishtar Road,’ said the first, suddenly changing his mind.
‘How long?’ challenged Khurram. ‘Give me facts.’
‘Oh what does it matter how long? As long as Karachi!’
The discussion would take place altogether differently in the States, thought Daanish. There, first a printed page had to be found. This established objectivity. Then an opponent located another printed page defending his position. The result was that debates took place only in writing, while in person, people seldom argued. As the written debate was limited by the availability of material, more original points of view were less likely to be favored. He learned this the hard way, in Wayne’s class.
Here people frequently argued with each other; usually everyone spoke at the same time, and hardly anyone could sustain interest in the debate for very long. The men had ceased disputing the status of the road’s length. Conversation progressed to its original name – was it Shara-e-Faisal or Nursery Road? Khurram insisted it had always been Airport Road while another swore on Highway Road. Then it changed to the distance from one point to another, the time it took to reach one point from another, the likelihood of traffic between the points, the time of day traffic was heaviest, the importance of the time of day in gauging the traffic, the overall increase in traffic, the necessity of cars, the necessity of two cars, and the overall decrease in time, especially time to spend with your friends and family doing just this: chit-chatting. They laughed heartily, agreeing on basically one thing, that the purpose of the match was not to win or lose but to exchange the maximum number of words, for words carried sentiments like messenger doves.
Daanish’s mind wandered no less than the talk around him, only his had a center: his father.
When the doctor had driven him down this stretch three years ago, he’d spoken of himself as a youth newly returned from England, newly titled a doctor. He’d pointed to the dense smog choking the city and frowned. ‘It was a different country then. Barely twenty years old – roughly your age. Cleaner, and full of promise. Then we got ourselves into a war and were cut in half. What have we done?’
Daanish had felt bleak currents swirling around them, and wished the doctor would offer a more savory parting speech. Suddenly, he’d stretched his arm and patted Daanish’s knee. ‘But it’s reassuring to know that you will be a finer mold of me. You will go away and learn how to come back better than I did.’
Daanish shuddered. It was not how he wanted to remember him. He preferred the way his father had been at the cove. Daanish held the picture an instant, and then willed himself there.
The cove was a deliciously isolated respite several kilometers outside the city. Though silt and human waste had destroyed most reefs off Karachi’s shore, just around the bend of the inlet was a small forest of coral where the doctor took Daanish snorkeling.
The first shell Daanish ever came to know was a purple sea snail. It was a one-inch drifter, floating on the surface of the sea, traveling more extensively than most anything alive – or dead. The doctor rolled in the waves on his back, his stomach dipping in and out of the water like a whale’s hump, his hairy navel a small blue pool. Daanish slunk in after him, peering at the shell bobbing like a cork in the curves of a soft tide. His father explained that if disturbed, the mollusk oozed a purple color that the ancient Egyptians had used as a dye. Daanish plucked it out. While his fingers curled around the fragile violet husk, the animal ducked inside. The eight-year-old Daanish tried to understand where it had been, and how much time had lapsed between the Pharaohs, and him.
Later, they scrambled over the boulders that hugged the cove at each end, and walked the length of the beach, his father poking and prodding the shells swept at his feet. He found an empty sea snail and handed it to Daanish. It would come to rest around his neck.
* * *
He touched it now, back in Khurram’s car.
His house would be swarming with family. They’d have flown in from London, Islamabad and Lahore. He could picture his aunts wiping tears with dupattas, picking rosary beads, reciting from the Quran in a weeping chorus. The doctor had cared nothing for such rituals, yet Daanish knew Anu would want them. He could see her teary, kohl-smeared cheeks. He could feel her pulling him, through Drigh Road, past Gol Masjid, down Sunset Boulevard. She was calling for him to make up for her loss.
He looked up at the haze, yearning for yet more interludes.
5 Recess APRIL 1990 (#ulink_baf8a3b0-ad3f-573b-967b-7b97cc0d8b29)
It was spring break. Most of the students had gone home for Easter. The campus, devoid of human life, was ceremonious: the lawns burgeoned with bluets, buttercups and black-eyed susans; the trees with chickadees, titmice, and the plaintive phoebe. Daanish spent his time walking and listening, absorbing the grounds in a way he’d never done before.
He wandered off into a far corner, down a long, narrow path flanked by two straight rows of enormous oak and cedar trees. Behind one rank of trees rose a short wall stretching all the way from the start of the path to the far end. It was the only boundary wall of the campus. Daanish inhaled deeply, delighted to be walking on land that needed only one demarcation. There wasn’t a single house, school, university, park or office in Karachi that was free of four encircling walls, though the US Consulate there had the tallest four walls of all.
He soon approached a rectangular, sunken garden, nestled thickly in the trees. Egg-smooth pebbles littered the circumference of the hollow. Wild thyme sprang from between the pebbles. The patch had been planted with tricolor pansies, bluebells, and cowslips.
Daanish stepped down and stretched beside the flowers. He saw faces in the gnarly old trees. Some uprooted and changed places with one another. Bluebells rang. Cowslips sneezed and a shower of gold dusted his cheek. Up in the sky, white clouds drifted. No haze, no smog. No potholes, beggars, burning litter, kidnappings or dismissed governments. Such beauty in a country that consumed thirty per cent of the world’s energy, emitted a quarter of its carbon dioxide, had the highest military expenditure in the world, and committed fifty years of nuclear accidents, due to which the oceans teemed with plutonium, uranium, and God alone knew what other poisons. It had even toyed with conducting nuclear tests on the moon.
The plump sparkling clouds whispered: We’re dumping it on them, on them.
It was bloody seductive.
Blossoms fell in his hair. He yawned and felt like Alice, tumbling from one chasm into another. Would he too wake up in the safety of his own? His eyelids began to flicker. An oval nuthatch scrambled down and around the length of a bole. He spun with it. The nuthatch became a smooth, round medallion of pure gold. It bobbed on the end of a chain. On the other end of the chain was a key. The key was in a car’s ignition. The doctor drove the car. The medallion swayed like the hands of a clock gone haywire, backwards and forwards, turning minutes into seconds. Inscribed on its one side was the word Shifa. Healing. Underneath, the doctor’s name: Shafqat. Affection. His own father had presented it to him when he returned from England. On the medallion’s other side was the Pakistani flag. Daanish belonged to that flag. He’d come back to it, the doctor declared, better than he had himself. The key-chain bobbed when he said it.
And it danced down the tree, tapping uproariously as it went. The grass was fluorescent and a touch moist. He ran his fingers through it and the pores of his skin opened as he welcomed each sensation. A barn owl swooped across his vision. The moon began to rise. He slept soundly till dawn.
6 Arrival MAY 1992 (#ulink_9277b95e-1850-57d1-be49-9b4f21b514c1)
Her fair skin set off a head of dark, crinkly hair. She held him close, thanking Allah for bringing him home safely. Had the scene occurred under a street light in his college town, passers-by would be faintly embarrassed, if not repulsed. He thought if she said, ‘Thank you Jesus for returning him to me,’ instead of ‘Thank you Allah …’ people would smile or snicker but not think her a fanatic.
He shut his eyes. Never before had he stood in this house plagued by how others might see him. He tried to clear his head, to instead enjoy Anu’s welcoming arms, flabbier now than when he last embraced them, three years ago.
Khurram and his family waved goodbye. The handsome driver’s eyes pierced his own, turning a hint green. ‘You are my friend now,’ Khurram called out. ‘Anything more I can do for you, I am just down the street.’
‘Such a nice boy,’ said Anu as the car drove away.
Lurking behind her, Daanish now saw, was the shadow of his father’s eight sisters. It grew closer, a single mass with sixteen tentacles, pawing and probing like Siamese-octopi. He was being welcomed just like Khurram had been at the airport, but he did not desire it.
One arm caught his throat. ‘You poor poor child! How your father loved you!’
Another tugged his hair, fighting with the first, ‘How exhausted you must be! Come into the kitchen with me …’
A third whipped his cheek and cried, ‘You look sicker than our own! Were you in Amreeka or Afreeka?’
A fourth spun him from the waist, ‘You’re just like he was at your age!’
A fifth yanked his shirt-tail, ‘Who did you miss the most?’
A sixth, ‘Me!’
Seven, ‘His father, ehmak.’
And eight, ‘Look how his jealous mother keeps him all to herself!’
It was true. While they jerked and pinched her only child and hurled insults her way, Anu still held him, and now they were all entangled, resulting in a chorus of loud protests from small bodies in the arms of each aunt, small bodies with wills and suckers of their own. He fell headfirst into their lair.
‘Ay haay,’ shoved Anu. ‘Let the boy sit down at least.’
She gripped what little she could find of Daanish’s arm, disentangled it from the others, and with determined possessiveness, led him into the kitchen. The others followed like a school of squid. ‘Sit down, bete.’
Scowling at his aunts in black and the babies in their arms, Daanish pulled a chair up next to Anu. She emptied several plastic food containers into metal pots then lit the burners of the stove. His aunts continued making observations, their children still shrieked, but at least no one touched him.
‘I’m really not hungry Anu, just tired,’ he protested weakly. ‘You haven’t even told me how you are.’ She never shared. Just fussed.
‘What is there to tell? Allah has returned my son to me safely, even if He chose to take my husband.’
Her back was to him but he knew she was crying. Softly – tears never interfered with her work – but steadily.
How differently his father would have received him. In place of his mother’s flurry, a thick veil of smoke would infuse the air as he sucked one Dunhill after another. He’d ask what it was like there. Daanish would only select details that would tickle him: the ghostly reflection of an opossum on clear summer nights; pink-haired waitresses with pierced noses (the doctor would guffaw at this perversion of his most favored female accessory, the nose-pin); having a wisdom tooth extracted to lite music: ‘Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you’; children delightfully camouflaged for Halloween. Anu never absorbed curiosities.
She was saying, ‘I wanted so much to come to the airport but who would drive? Your one chacha has the flu and I didn’t want to trouble the other again. He went twice to the airport already but the flight kept getting delayed. We didn’t know – none of the airline people answered the phone. You must be so exhausted.’ She stopped abruptly. Tears stained her face. ‘How do you like the new table? I got it soon after you left. Your father never even noticed. You can have one just like it when you settle down.’
He frowned. Settle down?
‘Your father took too long to shed his restlessness. That’s why you had him for barely twenty-two years. If you do it earlier your family can see more of you. To settle down is to do the world a favor.’
‘Oh Anu.’
The doctor would call this her logic. He’d say it the way he said her blood. It was the subject of most of their fights, he having migrated from Hyderabad, she from Amritsar. She traced her ancestry hundreds of years back to the Caucasus. Hence her pristine white skin, which, to her dismay, Daanish hadn’t inherited (though she consoled herself that darkness hardly mattered as much in a boy). The doctor said it was pathetic how people grasped at anything to prove they carried foreign blood. And since the foreigners – from the Central Asians to the Macedonians, Arabs and Turks – were conquerors, it was the half-teaspoon of conqueror’s blood that made people like Anu gloat over their pedigree. ‘Everyone here has a master-subjugator complex. No one takes pride in being a son or daughter of this soil,’ he snapped at her once, scooping up a mound of earth from the yard and throwing it back impatiently.
One week later, he was gone again, traveling across the seas, bringing back shells for Daanish.
Anu arranged several steaming dishes before him. Their rich cardamom and ghee scent on this early morning, after Daanish had traveled some seven thousand miles and been sleepless for nearly as many hours, gave him a headache of astounding symmetry. Commencing at the forehead, it cleaved his skull evenly in two, like a coconut shell. It was as if the two halves were trying to find the one-in-a-million combination that could fit them together again. He gazed in agony, first at the dishes, then his mother, then at a baby cousin who’d escaped from his mother, and raced toward him on all fours.
‘I’m tired,’ Daanish muttered again.
‘Boti!’ the child squealed. The mother, delighted by her young one’s forwardness, hurried to the table. Resting her wide hips on a cushioned chair that went pish! she proceeded to feed her child one of the dishes Daanish’s mother had set before him.
‘You’re tired because you’re hungry,’ Anu stressed, scowling at her sister-in-law.
Daanish’s other aunts drifted toward the food. Some of them sat, others stood, all picked at the various curries, kebabs, and tikkas for Daanish. They fed their children generously, but never offered a word of praise. In the doctor’s presence, Daanish’s aunts had never so blatantly used Anu. The doctor had died without ever knowing his sisters. He’d died without knowing Daanish. He’d died. Slowly, and with a soft, defeated eye, Daanish began to eat. Anu dried her eyes, smiling gratefully.
When a faint yellow light washed the kitchen, he rose at last. The sun was rising. He gave his mother a tight hug. ‘I’m falling over with fatigue. Everything was delicious.’
She kissed and blessed him copiously. ‘Sleep well, jaan. There is all day tomorrow to answer me.’
7 The Order of Things (#ulink_cad5018f-6321-5416-a92f-97f8abc98b1a)
Mounting the staircase Daanish scratched his head, wondering what the question was. He threw back the door to his room.
The interior was unrecognizable. Once a warm, moody beige, the walls were now a clinical white. So were the built-in bookshelves that replaced the rickety ones on which his father had placed books for him to read.
The doctor had never presented a gift in wrapping paper with a card. He left it where he believed it belonged. This often meant the discovery wasn’t made for days, even weeks. It was in response to this ‘game’ that Daanish developed a keen memory that gradually evolved into an urgent need for systematic tidiness that Becky termed ‘anal retentive’. By memorizing the exact position of every object in the house, including every book, Daanish could identify a new one. If he could see it, even if, as a child, he was too short to reach it, his father let him have it.
Anu knew nothing of this. When the doctor presented her with gifts that popped up in plant pots, spice jars, lipstick tubes (a meter of resham so fine it fit in the finger-sized cylinder perfectly, so when Anu twirled it, out sprang the cloth, softly on her cheek, exactly as the doctor had envisioned), parandas and petticoats, Anu first gasped, then placed the surprise in a more suitable spot. She never strove to discover the impulse behind what she called her husband’s unsettled ways. But Daanish went along with his every fancy to the point where the father’s imagination became the son’s order. Anu, by changing the color of the walls and replacing the bookshelf, closet, floor lamp, even the bed, had changed for ever the order of things. Without knowing it, she’d eliminated the doctor’s presence from Daanish’s room. The one at college was more his own.
He dropped onto the new bed on which the lovely guipure bedcover Anu had made him years before was now a starched white sheet. When had she made the changes? Not after the death, that was barely four days ago. It would have been a breach of decorum. The family expected her to mourn, not pack or decorate. Then when? Why didn’t his father stop her if she’d done it during his lifetime?
His temples throbbed. The headache had lost its symmetry. He probed around his neck for knots.
Perhaps his father had never entered Daanish’s room while he was away. Perhaps it made him sad to be in it without him.
The new bed was no longer under the window, where he’d spent so many nights gazing up at the stars. It lay beside the new closet, and the landscape outside was mostly invisible. He saw only a patch of sky and an antenna from the roof of a house piercing it. The house was one of the four to have gone up in his absence. Barely ten inches from his window was the skeleton of yet another one.
He lay down, shoes still dangling on his feet. This mattress was soft; the old one had been firm. Every time he switched position, the springs bounced. Finally, he lay on his back, arms stretched to still the movement.
He could hear his aunts puttering downstairs, covering the floors with sheets, piling siparahs on side-tables. Soon pages would rustle and the recitation would commence. He didn’t want to be a part of it; it wasn’t a part of his father. He had to find a way of braving the ensuing weeks.
It was seven o’clock in the morning. Were his father here the alarm clock would sound the BBC chime. A crow perched on the windowsill. It was large and gray-hooded. Our crows are bigger than American crows, he thought, eyelids drooping. They’re the only things we have that are bigger.
ANU (#ulink_07f9d7e3-a4fd-5796-ae0c-d8773ee7858e)
1 Guipure Dreams (#ulink_95b5440b-5867-503d-b130-669660e8768d)
Four days earlier, she’d sat on his bed, fingers tracing the weave of the guipure bedcover sewn at the cove.
Once Daanish’s father had shown him life beneath the sea, it was hard for the child to surface again. Now, it was essential that all the images of his submarine life be removed from his room. Then he might return.
She folded the bedcover into a small square, then spread a new cloth from the market in its place. Then she began emptying his cupboards, removing all his shells and shell boxes. Along the way, she paused to marvel at the careful system with which he organized the pieces. Labels drawn in purple ink recorded where each had been found and when. Sometimes he’d even noted particulars about the shell’s life or collector’s value. The best ones were in the left drawer because, he’d explained, left-handed shells were a rarity. He had only four in his entire collection of nearly three hundred.
She picked up a box the doctor had brought back from a trip to the Philippines. It was the only gift he’d ever placed directly in his son’s hands. He’d been too excited to wait for Daanish to find it. The child had stared into his father’s eyes, exactly like his own, and both pairs of hands had trembled. The box was of finely chiseled, green soapstone but the child had only partially registered its beauty. He’d pulled back the gold seahorse clasp and beamed, stupefied and delirious, at the chambered nautilus inside. That was what the doctor had called it. He’d said it was left-handed and that he’d never even heard of anyone finding a leftie nautilus. But there it was, perfectly intact. The doctor had dabbed it with mineral oil to preserve the pearly coat.
Anu examined the spiraling beauty. It shimmered on the cream-colored cushion in the box, alive even in death. Underneath was the note, written in the smart, controlled handwriting of Daanish the thirteen-year-old: December ‘83, on Aba’s return from the Pacific. Called chambered nautilus because it has many rooms inside. Aba says its brain is very developed, it has three hearts, and its blood is blue. He knows because he’s a doctor. It’s 180 million years old, as old as a dinosaur. What a find!
Also on the cushion was a close relative of the nautilus, an argonaut. Anu clearly remembered the day Daanish had found it at the cove.
She tucked the slip of paper back into the box and put it on top of the pile in her arms. From downstairs, the doctor called. He was dying, and there were things he wanted to get off his chest first. She’d heard enough already. Once, perhaps, she would have heard it all. But gone were the days when she would have worn his confessions like a string around her neck. She put the heap of boxes down on the floor. Then she lay on the new bed and spread the guipure lace around her, remembering the cove.
It was shaped like the round neck of a kameez, some forty feet across. The right shoulder was a cluster of enormous rocks, the first of which Daanish called the shoulder-boulder. When he and his father swam, Anu hoisted herself upon it. Around her spilled yarns of the guipure lace she turned into tablecloths, curtains, and more.
She began the bedcover on a chilly early morning in November as Daanish waded into the sea, shivering. The water was cold and composed. She’d tested it while they cleaned their snorkels. An aquamarine shawl enveloped her shoulders. She’d worn her hair long in those days, and left it loose, though it would take hours to disentangle later. The doctor liked it that way. He’d drape it over her shoulder, then gaze at her profile from the water. He preferred her left side, the one that wore the ruby nose-pin he’d given, not given but hidden, at the bottom of a perfume bottle. When it was noticed, she’d not known what to do: empty the bottle and risk splashing drops of the expensive scent, or wait till it had finished? She ended up pouring Chanel into a jar, retrieving the ruby, then pouring it back, spilling his money all over her dressing table and sneezing uncontrollably.
The shoulder-boulder was naturally pitted to seat her. The doctor hollered for her to come in with him, but she flatly refused to wear a bathing suit. He taunted her modesty because he knew she’d never give it up. If she were the changing type, he would not have married her.
The bedcover in her lap was taking a surprising turn. Patterns unplanned emerged and she obliged by seeing them through. When Daanish kicked around the boulder, heading for the deeper sea, he waved. She waved back. What would he see? For a moment, it pained that she’d never know. But this was nothing new. Her husband often left for voyages to the bigger ocean, where she’d seen islands peppering the globe in his study, and young girls dressed in flowers peppering his photos. He was always irritable upon his return. Once she asked Daanish to ask him why. The son reported cheerfully, ‘He says I’ll understand when I grow up, something about falling into the trap of comparison.’ But she always felt his frustration had something to do with the photos.
One day, he’d send her son to one of those dots on the globe. She prayed for him to return untransformed. Like her, he should not be the changing type.
The sun caught in the heavy lace like anchovy. This year the monsoons had poured into autumn. A river, normally dry by now, still ran along the east end of the beach. Plovers, herons, and even a pair of mighty spoonbills bathed in the waters. The birds she could see. The fish beneath the surface she could not. A mischievous desire suddenly overtook her: before the doctor returned, she wanted the spoonbills to fly away. She knew he’d never seen them before. She could impress him for having noticed and identified them. But she alone would have been the witness. Anu covered her mouth, slyly giggling.
After half an hour, she folded up the lace, tucked it under an arm, and hopped down onto the powdery sand. There was no one about. For the time being, this cupular cove and everything it held – the river, cave, rocks, powdery sand, and pristine isolation – were all hers.
She padded toward the left shoulder of the cove, where a line of jagged rocks gradually grew taller, and sheerer. At the base of the incline the sea and wind had etched a cave that could be entered at low tide. The doctor liked to have his tea there. Turning up her shalwar till it pressed her calves – she’d never have rolled that high for him – Anu minced across the slippery stone toward the cave’s mouth. The sea cooled her ankles. If she tripped and fell into the gravelly seabed, though it would hurt, later that night she’d notice her soles had been scrubbed pink. Now, seaweed caught in the hem of her shalwar. Lemon-colored fish scrambled between her legs, like she was their marker. What did her son and husband see? It must be something like this. Then why didn’t they just stay here?
She ducked into the cave, twelve feet deep, its height very slightly less than hers. She could feel the cold stone press down on her head like the foot of a giant. The light inside was eel-gray. When the sea lapped the cave’s sides the giant above her bellowed.
