‘Not yet. Yasmin, not yet. We can’t tell Raheen yet.’ His voice was desperate, pleading.
‘Then when?’
‘When she’s old enough to know the impossibility of tracing backwards and saying, here, this is where love ends and this is where it begins. When she’s old enough to understand that sometimes there is no understanding possible.’
‘It’s possible. It’s always possible. It’s just occasionally easier not to interrogate it too closely.’
‘She doesn’t have to know yet, Yasmin.’
‘Zafar, sometimes I think I love you more than is good for either of us.’
‘You mean, you acquiesce.’ There was relief in his voice, and I exhaled deeply as if a hand had unclenched my own windpipe.
‘That’s only part of what I mean. But it’s the only part you’ll remember in the morning. Good-night.’
I made my way back to bed as noiselessly as possible. I had brought this on. Whatever it was that made Aunty Maheen use that terrible voice to Aba, whatever it was that made Uncle Ali and Ami exchange those looks of concern, almost fear, whatever it was that had my father near to tears in his need to protect me, I had brought it on.
I wouldn’t ask any more questions, I swore silently. Not even to myself. Not even if it killed me. No truth was worth such upheaval. My heart was still racing and I found my lips moving in prayer, giving thanks that whatever it was they were talking about, I didn’t know.
My bedroom door opened, and I heard Aba come in. He sat on the edge of my bed, and reached for my hand.
‘Are they going to move to London?’ I asked.
His grip tightened on mine. ‘It isn’t definite by any means,’ he replied, and I knew he said it because he couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.
. .
Aba drove through the puddles left by the evening’s monsoon shower, his headlights picking out steel billboards in a state of obeisance, bent over almost double by the weight of wind and rain, unable to return to an upright stance. Swish-swish of wheels traversing wet patches. Somewhere in front of us, almost out of hearing, a car with a burst silencer. Scent of a rinsed city.
‘Nice of Bunty to lend us the Pajero. Couldn’t manage six of us and luggage otherwise.’
‘Probably wouldn’t have made it this far in your car. That drain overflowing back there…’
‘Yes. That poor Suzuki…’
‘Remember the time your Foxy stalled and we had to wade home?’
‘Your brand-new Italian shoes ruined.’
Something reassuring about Aba and Uncle Ali’s voices from the front seat, engaged in meaningless talk as though there were no need to inject every statement with the weight of the occasion. Something reassuring also about Ami and Aunty Maheen silently holding hands, as though they were girls again; girls who no longer had pop stars and furtive smoking and shared crushes to bind them together, but who found that friendship was binding enough, even though there was little but friendship that now bound them to the school-yard twosome who broke every rule and got away with it.
But there was nothing reassuring about Karim. We were only inches apart, both swaying cross-legged on the suitcases in the back, but he was too busy looking at streets to pay attention to me. Looking at streets, and whispering street names when we drove past road signs, and drawing a map of the route we were taking from his house to the airport, his pen veering off course every time Aba braked or went over a speed bump or drove through a puddle.
At the airport, he handed me the map, our fingers barely touching. Then he swivelled round and threw his arms around my father and burst into tears. There was so much hugging goodbye between our parents, and between his parents and me, and my parents and him, that I pretended, even to myself, that it hadn’t really registered that the brush of fingers had been Karim’s and my goodbye.
On the drive home, I said, ‘Who’ll speak in anagrams with me now?’
‘Poor Karim is the one who’s left everyone. You’ll still have Sonia.’ My mother winked at me. ‘And Zia.’
Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised ‘Guaranteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’d still be those bottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?
After all, it was just the ends of my sentences I was losing.
That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine.
. .
The rain had stopped. Water drops shimmered in the gossamer interstices of a spider’s web outside my window. Not so much captured in the web as resting on it. I could, I thought, lift up that web, very carefully, and place it against my throat, where it would adhere, threads retreating into near invisibility and only rain drops remaining to glisten against my skin like some precious inheritance.
Jake’s hand reached across me to close the window. ‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking you for the last ten seconds to get rid of the draught.’
‘Didn’t hear you.’ I swivelled my legs off the window ledge, making room for him to sit next to me, but he remained standing on my bed, head inches away from touching the ceiling.
‘Of course you didn’t. It’s always Grand Central Station in here.’ He jerked his head at all the people, seven or eight of them, crowded into my tiny dorm room.
When the downpour had started, less than an hour earlier, I had been attempting to read a supermarket romance for my ‘Myths of Courtship’ class, but the sudden ferocity of the rain made me set aside my herbal tea and rush outdoors. It was the closest thing to the monsoons I had encountered in the three years I’d been at university in America, rain ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a Kalashnikov. I half-expected to see little frogs and winged insects appear. People were running for shelter, the ones who knew me shouting as they charged past that I was crazy, ‘Get inside, Raheen.’ I looked down. Crazy I could handle, but crazy in a white shirt was probably not such a good idea. I pulled the clinging material away from my body, hearing with satisfaction the suction release of wet cotton from flesh, and ran up the stairs towards central heating.
‘Study break. Ten minutes. My room. Who’s going to make the hot chocolate?’ I yelled down the hallway on my way into the shower.
Someone shouted, ‘But I’ve just started War and Peace,’ and someone else: ‘We’ve been back from the dining hall less than half an hour.’
‘Raheen says study break, ten minutes,’ another of my hallmates declared. ‘You want to argue with her?’
Less than fifteen minutes later, I had a crowd of people clustered in my room as, freshly showered and dressed in sweats and fleece jumper, I poured out hot chocolate with marshmallow bits from a large saucepan into mugs and plastic glasses bearing the university’s crest. Tamara from next door held up my romance novel with a whoop of delight, and the rest of my friends chanted, ‘Read, Raheen, read,’ over and over until, with mock resignation, I took the book from Tamara, sat on the window ledge by my bed, cleared my throat and started reading out loud choice passages in breathy, emotive style.