To one side of the field was a patch of snow, the only remains of last week’s early snowfall, protected against sun and rain by the overhang of a building’s roof. I bent to pick up a fallen branch, and trailed its forked end behind me as I walked through the patch, the branch rising and falling as I took each step, leaving marks so faint it looked as though I had been walking alongside a sparrow. Or beside an angel that hovered above the ground, only the tips of its folded wings brushing against the snow.
Can angels lie spine to spine?
I closed my eyes, saw the snow before me transform into fields of white. Tired clouds coming to rest on the ground. My wrist remembered the pressure of a thumb and forefinger encircling it. A boy with ears too large and legs accustomed to leaping touched a cotton boll to my palm and tiny insect feet crawled across my skin.
It was an unexceptional moment, but, lord, how he smiled when he watched me watch a ladybird take flight.
28 October 1994
Dear Uncle Ali,
It was lovely to see you in Karachi over the summer, although I have yet to recover from seeing you give the Ghutnas instructions in how to dance the ‘Electric Slide’. This is what comes of dating Americans who run summer camps! I know, I know. It was a blind date, and you haven’t seen her a second time, but I insist she’s responsible.
It’s good to be back at college again. Weather’s bearable at the moment and there are still some gorgeous autumn (or, should I say, fall) leaves clinging to trees, but I’d appreciate the beauty of it a little more if it didn’t serve to remind that another East Coast winter is about to begin. We’ve already had one round of snowfall. And yesterday there was a thunderstorm that was nothing short of a monsoon. Can’t believe this is my last year up in the snowbelt of America. Although any regret at graduating is more than tempered by the joy of knowing no-more-dining-hall-food. Last night there was something call Noodle Sneeze on the menu. The pizza delivery man is my best friend, even though rumour has it he was once in jail for attempted murder. I’m a Karachiite. I can handle these things.
Just wrote a paper based on Calvino late last night (well, maybe early this morning would be more to the point) for my ‘other (not Other) realisms’ class. Please don’t ask me to explain the course title — I just liked the reading list. Anyway, the point is, I’m enclosing the paper — could you forward it to Karim, whichever part of the world he’s in on his Grand Tour (how nineteenth-century can you get! Or were you just pulling my leg about that?) And yes, you do still have to stick to your promise not to ask any questions about your son and me.
Tons of love,
Raheen
. .
When I answered the phone he said, ‘And?’ as he always had, as he always did, as though our time apart had merely been a Karachi sunset: swift and startling.
I leaned back against the wall of my dorm room, and opened my desk drawer to look at the photograph of the four of us — Sonia, Zia, Karim and me — which lay, unframed, on top of a clutter of staples, paperclips, sticky tape, pens and drawing pins. My father had taken this picture the day before Karim left for London, and it had stayed hidden yet within reach through all my years at college in upstate New York.
‘Eratosthenes,’ I said. That was the name with which I’d left off the last conversation I’d had in my head with him.
‘What? Can’t hear…sorry, it’s Karim. I’m sorry, of course you don’t recognize my voice, it’s…’
‘Broken,’ I said. Why did he sound so formal? ‘But instantly recognizable all the same.’
‘And yours too.’
‘My voice has not broken, thank you.’ I’d intended flippancy, but I think I sounded annoyed.
‘It’s gone husky.’
‘Not really. I’ve got a bit of a sore throat.’
‘Sick as a dog?’ he said.
‘No, just a minor annoyance.’
‘No, it was a joke. Your voice is husky. Huskie, like the dog. So you’re sick as a—’
‘Oh. Yeah. Got it.’ I attempted a laugh but it came out wrong. The first rule of humour that Karim and I had always subscribed to: if the other person doesn’t get the joke, just move on. I looked out of the window at my hallmates slinging snowballs at one another, the freshly fallen snow tinged blue in the moonlight. One of them, Tamara perhaps, looked up and saw me, threw a snowball at my window in an invitation to join the fun, and for a moment I wanted to end the phone call and run downstairs.
‘I said Eratosthenes. Just now.’
‘Can’t hear properly. I’m at the airport and there are all these announcements and…oh hell, scary demon-baby has just started bawling. I’ll find a quieter phone and call you back. Don’t go away.’
I replaced the receiver on the phone base, and looked out of the window again. Two of my friends were lying next to each other in the snow, their arms fanning out away from their bodies, pushing aside the powdery snow. Watching them, I found I was raising my own arms, feeling remembered water currents tugging against my fingertips as I floated in Karachi’s sea. I lowered my arms. What was I doing here? The two figures outside stood up and stepped out of their outlines, leaving behind a pair of snow angels, the wing of one overlapping with the wing of the other. Siamese twin angels.
I ran my fingers through my hair. Why had I sent him that essay? Of course he had called after receiving it. I sat down, cross-legged, beside my desk, and from the bottom drawer I pulled out four pieces of writing paper, neatly taped together, which constituted Karim’s last communication with me, back in 1990. On one side was a map of Karachi. A useless, partial map of Karachi, which I had brought with me to America to see if it would bring me any kind of comfort, any kind of pain, on the days when I was most homesick. The answer to that question I quickly found was no, and no again. I laid the paper on the ground, map side up, smoothing it flat with the palm of my hand, reminding myself I needed to hoover — sorry, vacuum — my room. Streets leading to other streets, streets named, areas defined, places of interest clearly marked out. This map was Karachi’s opposite. It could only exist through its disdain for the reality of the city: the jumble, the illogic, the self-definition, the quicksilver of the place. As usual, the map did nothing but irritate me. I turned the taped sheet over, and flicked away the crumbs of chocolate-chip cookies that had been squashed between paper and carpet. I really needed to hoover.
Myriad pieces of paper taped together. What had hurt me most was that they were originals. If he’d wanted to make a point surely he could just have made photocopies of my letters and taken his scissors to them. But to cut up the originals…to have such certainty that nothing on those pages would ever make him want to take another look, make another assessment…to have such certainty, and not to hide it. He was never so cruel when I knew him.
He was certainly never so cruel that he unveiled my own cruelty to me, offered it up free of contrasts to make it appear all the harsher. I had written him letters full of laughter, letters in which I expressed how much I missed him. These fragments, which he pasted together, were only extracts, contextless; they did not — oh God, surely they did not — reflect anything but a partial truth of who I was, of who I had become in those defining years when he was in so many ways absent to me.