He blew a kiss at me, and left.
I drew my legs up to my body and rested my chin on my knees. Jake was right. Until then I had always thought my college friends saw me as the entertainer. And as the one who couldn’t keep her opinions to herself. It was true, I supposed, that I didn’t bear grudges or hold people accountable for every slip-up, though that had more to do with my father than with me. Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day? Shouldn’t we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today? It came naturally to Aba — the ability to be grateful for his life, the ability to look at the Runtys of this world with understanding — but for me it sometimes felt as though I was forcing my nature into a mould I wanted to fit into rather than one that suited the contours of my personality.
I thought of everything Jake had just said, and looked at my watch. In Karachi, it was early in the morning, far too early to call my father without making him panic. But I needed to talk to someone — not just anyone, but someone who had always known me. I could call Zia, half an hour’s drive away in the same time zone, but I rarely spoke to Zia about Jake since that time Zia had landed up on Jake’s doorstep at midnight and announced that, although he had come to like Jake a great deal in the weeks since they’d first met, no white boy could lay hands on a Muslim girl and expect to live. Jake had leapt out of the second-floor window and broken his ankle. (‘How was I supposed to know you’d be seeing someone moronic enough to take me seriously?’ Zia had protested to me the next day. ‘There are white Muslims in the world, for God’s sake. Hasn’t he heard of Cat Stevens?’) No, I couldn’t call Zia and so much as mention Jake’s name without running the risk of him singing ‘Moonshadow’, which in Zia’s rendition became ‘Crescent Moonshadow’.
But Jake wasn’t really the issue here. I looked at my watch again and added ten to establish Karachi time once more. In a couple of hours Sonia would wake up to say her morning prayers. I could call her then, and ask, ‘Do you think I don’t need you?’ And however she answered, however tactfully, however generously, something in her response would remind me that we both knew I felt guilty about Sonia; if anyone asked who my closest friend in the world was I’d say her name without hesitation, but it was the lack of hesitation that comes from years of practice rather than conviction. In my heart, I still carried around the notion of a friendship that no reality could live up to.
I picked up my phone book. The last three years, every time I had been in Karachi packing to return to America, Ami would come into my room with a letter or package for Aunty Maheen, and every time she would say how much Maheen would appreciate it if I delivered it by hand next time I visited friends in Boston, or even if I just called from college to say ‘hello’, and every time I would say, ‘Yes, sure, you gave me the number. Meant to last semester, but things get so hectic,’ and every time Ami looked at me with something so close to disappointment in her eyes that I had to pretend something was lost and busy myself in a flurry of searching for it.
Ami didn’t know that in my first week as a foreigner, I had called that number, feeling excitement, even a touch of nervousness. It had been so long since I’d spoken to her. But it wasn’t Aunty Maheen who answered. It was a man, and as he repeated, ‘Hello?… Hello?’ down the phone, I heard Aunty Maheen’s voice in the background say, ‘Who is it, darling?’ and I thought of Uncle Ali in London, moving from one short-term affair to another, returning periodically to Karachi to tell my parents he didn’t know why he left, he couldn’t imagine returning, he was so afraid of old age. His life such sadness. I hung up, and cried all afternoon. I had never told anyone else about the call. Even now, I couldn’t quite understand it. All these years later, why did it continue to affect me so much more than I could bear?
I opened the phone book to ‘M’.
In my first days of college, I had gritted my teeth through freshman orientation with its attempts to create artificial bonds between everyone in the hall by getting us to share our most private pains, our most personal stories. I lied my way through it, of course, inventing broken hearts, ruined friendships, family disease, all in an attempt to keep up with the tragedies of the eighteen-year-old lives around me. But in my head I kept a chart of the real answers that came to mind to the questions: What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to deal with? What’s your happiest memory? What’syour biggest regret? Has there been one experience that changed your life? If you could pick up the phone and call one person now, who would it be? The questions went on and on, and every one of my answers had to do with Karim leaving and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen divorcing.
Of the two events, the divorce had been the worse. The finality of it. I knew about divorced couples; I knew the way their friends divided into his friends and her friends. How to divide my parents between Ali and Maheen? It couldn’t be done. That’s when I really realized that Karim wouldn’t be coming back. Before, some part of me had hoped that Uncle Ali would see the error of his ways. (‘England, man. Mike Gatting, Graham Gooch, John Embury. Versus Pakistan. Wasim, Javed, Qadir. Imran, for God’s sake, Imran! Of course they’ll come back.’ Zia logic, and I had more than half believed it.) But now they wouldn’t come back, because that would mean the two of them living in the same city as my parents but the four of them never being a foursome again. How was that possible? It wasn’t. It simply was not possible. More than Aunty Maheen’s remarriage, or the worsening political situation in Pakistan, it was my belief in the impossibility of that quartet rearranging itself in any way that made my thoughts exile Ali and Maheen — and, by extension, Karim — from Karachi for ever. How I had resented Aunty Maheen then. Resented her so much that I had actually found myself agreeing with Aunty Runty, who came over to our house as soon as she heard news of the divorce and said, ‘Who would have thought it? Maheen, an adulteress! Has she no consideration for her son?’ My father had told Runty to get out of his house, and it was many months before either of my parents spoke to her again. Yes, I had almost hated Aunty Maheen then.
Then.
I put the phone book down. They were clawing at me now, those absurd memories and questions that should be long dead by now. I slipped off my bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a jacket, grabbed my Walkman and headed out. The sky moved from sunset to twilight to something darker, something not quite night, as I walked from one end of campus to the other and then back, concentrating on the music, changing the radio frequency any time songs from the mid-eighties starting playing. But when I was just steps away from the dorm, I turned the Walkman off, veered away from the lamplit paths, and cut across rain-drenched fields, watching my feet step into the shoeprints of someone with wide toes, trusting to his purpose as he strode away from the dorms and towards the Observatory, then wavering in my faith as the moon disappeared behind a cloud, and turning to walk back towards the campus lights, forging my own path now, the hem of my jeans dark with wet.