I did not dare look at Zia. I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him, but I knew the only thing I could do to demonstrate my friendship was to cover up his silence, which was so complete I wasn’t sure he was even breathing.
‘You’re getting engaged? Sneaky thing! You never told me there was anyone…’ I reached out to embrace her, but pulled back before we made contact. ‘Is it arranged?’
‘I really, really like him, Raheen. He’s twenty-six, his name’s Adel, good family, works with his father in the textile industry, really smart, good sense of humour, two sisters who adore him, we talk for ages on the phone every day, that was him just now calling from the office, and I’m happier than you’ve ever seen, admit it.’
‘Who could deny it? You’re radiant.’ Zia sounded like a child of seven, utterly lost, but trying to repeat a formula that his mother had taught him to get out of trouble.
Sonia looked sideways and down, and I wondered if she finally saw that I hadn’t been inventing things all those times in the last three years that I told her Zia would still walk on hot coals and eat them afterwards if she asked him to.
‘Is Adel the reason Zia is being treated like a potential rapist in your house?’
‘Raheen!’ Zia rose to his feet in an instant. ‘If she’s observing customs of proper behaviour…’
‘Proper behaviour? You can’t see her hair, can’t see her arms, can’t make more than minimal physical contact, can’t enter her bedroom. What does that say about you? As though you won’t be able to restrain yourself if…’ I faltered before the look on his face.
‘Oh, sit down, both of you. You’re such a drama queen, Raheen. And “customs of proper behaviour”…which rubbishwallah sold you that line, Zia? I know you don’t see the point in any of it. Now sit down and tell me if you want Dost Mohommad to bring tea or coffee.’
I sat down and put my arms around her. ‘When do I meet him?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks. In about an hour he’s leaving for London on work. And to buy me an engagement ring.’
‘Well, when I do meet him if he isn’t completely gaga about you I’ll have to punch him.’
‘Not his nose,’ Sonia said. ‘He has a lovely straight nose. Don’t ruin it.’
‘I’ll make sure to aim my punch well below the nose.’
‘Not too much below.’ She giggled. I started laughing too, and she turned red and pulled her dupatta down so it covered her face. ‘Tobah! You are such a bad influence. Zia, promise to keep an eye on her during the mangni; I’m fully nervous she’ll do something to embarrass me.’
‘When have I ever been able to keep her in check?’ Zia was smiling now, fooling Sonia into believing he was all right.
‘True. Only one person ever could. Good thing he’s also going to be here, flying in the day after tomorrow and staying until after the mangni. No way I’d let him miss my engagement.’
‘Seriously?’ Zia said, leaning forward but keeping his knees just a few millimetres apart from Sonia’s. ‘Karim’s coming?’
Sonia nodded and both of them looked at me, Sonia slightly nervous, as though unsure if she’d said something that would delight or appal me, and Zia merely appraising. He’d been the one who had, quite by chance, knocked on my dorm-room door just minutes after I finished that phone call with Karim, and he’d made it clear he thought I was being melodramatic, crying over something that had ended long before the phone had started to ring.
I leaned back against the cushions and watched the thin branches of the bougainvillaea whip against the window. If I closed my eyes I’d still see the red flowers, bright against my cornea, surrounded by black. If I closed my eyes I’d see Karim gather up pruned branches that his gardener had been about to throw into the incinerator; I’d see myself, aged thirteen, lying on the grass, resting my head on a pillow of bougainvillaea flowers, watching Karim fashion a hopscotch grid out of denuded branches. Through all that seeing, I’d hear myself laugh for no reason, no reason at all, and I’d wonder where that particular laugh had gone and I’d wonder if he’d bring it back with him when he walked through the doors of the airport.
. .
Whoever he was, he wasn’t my Karimazov, my Cream, my hopscotch partner, my shadow-self, my alter ego.
Showing his passport to the airport officials, just feet away from the wide-open terminal door, he was a tall, very tall, stranger with close-cropped hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, and stylish round glasses, dressed in jeans and sneakers. If it wasn’t for those absurd ears waggling out of the sides of his head, I might have mistaken him for a foreigner. ‘Just as I feared,’ I muttered to Zia, as we leaned against the barriers that stood between the terminal door and the crowds waiting to receive foreigners and foreign-returned. ‘He’s become a gora.’
‘What are you talking about? He’s darker than you are.’ Zia was trying hard not to act too excited about seeing Karim again, but the casual air with which he held a cigarette between his fingers was more than offset by the frequency with which he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, pausing only to try and raise his entire body weight with his elbows, which were planted on the barrier.
‘Not skin complexion, idiot. His mode of being. What’s he arguing with the customs guy about?’
‘They’re probably giving him a hard time about his Angrez passport. Or is it Amreekan? He could at least look up and wave. Damn, he’s tall. “Mode of being”?’
‘I still don’t know why he asked to stay with you, not me.’ I tilted my head to one side, as though a change in angle would make him look more familiar.
‘Propriety.’
‘Rubbish. If he came to stay he’d be my parents’ guest; staying with us because he’s Ali and Maheen’s son, not because he’s my one-time best friend.’ A man smelling as I imagined the inside of a local bus would smell tried to elbow me aside so that he could secure a spot right against the barrier, and I wondered how to push him away without actually making any physical contact with him.
‘Here he comes. Stop being moody.’
A swarm of cabbies surrounded Karim as he walked past the barrier without seeing us, and as Zia and I battled our way through the jostling figures we heard Karim say, in Urdu without a trace of hesitancy or rustiness, ‘I have friends coming to meet me,’ and the cabbies saying, ‘Where? Where are they? At this hour, they must be asleep. No one’s coming.’ And one enterprising fellow pulled out a phone card and gestured to the public telephone. ‘Call your friends. If there’s no answer, they’re asleep and you come with me.’ Karim turned the visiting card over in his hands. Strong hands, the kind that make you think instantly of massages. ‘Maybe if they don’t answer it means they’re on their way to the airport.’ But he didn’t sound convinced. Zia and I were standing within touching distance of him now, arms crossed, laughing, but he still didn’t look up and see us.
One of the cab drivers clapped the palm of his hand on the top of Karim’s head and turned it towards us. ‘There are your friends,’ he said.
Zia was closer to him, so it was Zia whom he threw his arms around, and I thought, he still hugs men like a real Pakistani, none of this let’s-pretend-there’s-nothing-intimate-about-our-physical-contact that so many American boys, and also so many Karachi boys who’d been watching too much America and too little Pakistan, were guilty of when they slapped and punched each other in greeting.
When he let go of Zia there was a moment when we just looked at each other, neither quite sure what to do, and I couldn’t say if that was because of the way our letter-writing ended or the way our phone conversation ended or the way some of the men around us seemed to be sizing us up, trying to determine the nature of our relationship, forcing us to wonder the same thing also. And in both our minds the soundtrack of our last phone call was playing. I half-smiled — there I went, thinking I could read his mind again. He laughed, that sudden self-conscious laugh of his, and put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs resting on bare skin, either side of my neck.