‘Hand,’ Uncle Ali said.
‘Oh, be quiet.’
‘I think he was trying to reassure you, Maheen,’ Aba said.
‘Ali, she has a point,’ Ami said, at the same time.
‘I don’t need reassuring. Why can’t he understand that? Why do the two of you always have to explain my husband and me to each other?’
Karim was in another world, watching the clouds wisp past. Was he more of a dreamer than I was because his parents fought all the time? For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for escape when I was right here beside him? I twitched his sleeve, and he turned instantly to me, something close to relief on his face when I motioned him to follow me.
We crawled away from our parents and I squeezed myself into the narrow space between the boundary wall and the spreading hibiscus plant. Karim had to suck in his stomach to follow. The sun had trouble reaching this patch in which we crouched, knees drawn up to chin, and the mud was still damp from the mali’s round with the garden hose earlier in the evening. I wondered if Karim was also recalling that long-ago monsoon day when we had hidden in the bushes of my grandmother’s house; I had pointed out that my mother said that if you stand around in wet clothes you’ll catch a chill, so in the interests of good health we had thrown all our clothing in a pile and: ‘That’s so funny-looking, Karim. Can I hold it? Can you make it move?’ ‘No, but I can wiggle my ears.’
Karim cleared his throat, and I shifted slightly away from him, watching his bare toes curl around a twig in the mud.
‘We’re really sick, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Wanting riots to continue just so school can remain closed.’
I scratched my knee and tried to look repentant, but really I was thinking that the riots had to stop, they absolutely had to, else we’d be sent away over the holidays. None of what was going on in Karachi made much sense to me — not since last year when that girl was killed by a speeding bus and you’d think that was a domestic tragedy, her poor family, and also, I wondered, what must go on in the head of the driver, who certainly didn’t intend to kill a girl but now had to live with the consequences of his recklessness, but instead of being a family tragedy it all ignited a terrible ethnic fight. The girl Muhajir, the bus driver Pathan, and somehow, somehow, that became the issue, though my mother said ‘a catalyst, no more’ and Uncle Ali said, ‘all being orchestrated to create divisions and factions’, and my father responded, ‘Don’t the fools know these things can’t be contained’, while Aunty Maheen kept talking about ‘the perils of amnesia’. Lots of people looked at her strangely when she said that. But Karim and I were thirteen; there was nothing we could do about the nation’s problems, so why not stick to issues that perhaps we did have some control over?
I poked Karim in the stomach. ‘We need a p.o.a.’ I said. ‘To stop them from sending us off to milk feudal cows.’
Karim adopted the voice of our maths teacher. ‘The probability of success regarding a plan of action employed by two thirteen-year-olds against their parents is what? (a) one in one thousand; (b) two in three thousand; (c) too small to bother calculating.’
‘Oh, come on, Karimazov. Forget maths and come up with a plan.’ From between the hibiscus branches I saw Uncle AH flick an insect out of his wife’s hair. Aunty Maheen looked startled, and then smiled, and they regarded each other curiously, as though they hadn’t seen one another in a very long time. For no reason at all, I felt suddenly gleeful, and I punched Karim’s shoulder. ‘Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.’
‘Miandad wasn’t thirteen, and Chetan Sharma wasn’t his mother.’
‘Final ball of the innings, Karim! Four runs needed to win! And Miandad at bat. Six runs the moment that ball left the willow. Come on, Karim. Think.’
‘Why don’t you think?’
‘I’m the brawn.’
Which was true. At the time, I was about four inches taller than Karim and, just weeks earlier, in front of our whole class, I had lifted him off his feet and deposited him in the waste-paper basket during one of his bouts of recalcitrance. Of course, he had rescued himself from embarrassment by refusing to step out until Mr Ansari, our science teacher, walked in, whereupon Karim said, ‘You were right, sir, last week when you said I am rubbish. Please pray for me so that I might be spared the destiny of pencil shavings.’ Poor Mr Ansari stood speechless while the class dissolved into laughter around him.
But even as I was laughing I knew Karim was not playing for attention, but for justice. Mr Ansari really had called Karim ‘rubbish’ the week before, after finding Karim in the library looking at ‘a dirty picture’. That is to say, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
So when the school principal walked past our class en route to teaching mathematics to Class 9-K, and saw Mr Ansari standing red-faced and ineffectual amid thirty-one laughing students, I knew it wasn’t coincidence, but timing. Only afterwards did it occur to me that Karim couldn’t have timed the whole thing, because he didn’t know I was going to deposit him in the waste-paper basket. Or did he?
Three days later Karim apologized to Mr Ansari. He told me his sense of justice had evolved beyond revenge.
At thirteen we were all given to saying things that sounded as if we were trying too hard to grow up.
But that October day in the garden, when Karim said, ‘Nope, sorry, no p.o.a. comes to mind’, we were forced to face our status as children and accede to the tyranny of adults. Our only hope was that Ami’s sense of propriety — which we regarded as rubbish — would win the day.
‘You’re going,’ Aba said, nearly an hour later.
Karim and I looked round at the four grown-ups, trying to find some sign of relenting, but they had that look of solidarity which can only belong to four people who have switched partners without missing a step or treading on a toe.
‘Do we have to call Aunty Laila’s new husband “Uncle” even though he is a decadent feudal?’ I asked.
My parents blanched.
My sense of justice was not as evolved as Karim’s.
Less than two months later Karim and I boarded a train bound for farmland, with the decadent feudal’s brother along as an ‘in-charge’, though I swear I heard my mother refer to him as a chaperon. Of course, when I confronted her about this she said, ‘Don’t be a silly-billy, I didn’t say chaperon. I sneezed.’ And for weeks afterwards she made her sneezes sound like ‘a-chaperoo’, to the point when it became normal and she couldn’t sneeze in any other way even if she tried.
The journey to Rahim Yar Khan was an overnight one, and we were booked into two adjoining compartments, though each compartment slept four. Decadent Feudal’s brother pretended to insist that Karim sleep within the same four walls as him, but when Karim slipped next door — ostensibly to borrow a book to read — Uncle Chaperoo (as we had already named him) pretended not to notice the length of his absence until the next morning.
What is it about a train charging down the tracks? Buses, planes, cars, boats — I was blasé about all of them before I even knew what blasé meant. But that evening when the train pulled out of the station, I leaned out of the window like someone in a film and waved madly to anyone who cared to look. And I sang! I wanted a song appropriate to the moment but only ‘Feed the World ‘ came to mind, so I sang that and didn’t care that the coolies laughed at me and a beggar flung a handful of peanuts in my direction.