‘Idiot,’ I said, and put my arms around his waist, everything forgotten except how easily we always forgave each other. He disengaged almost immediately, and turned to catch Zia by the elbow.
‘Zee, is that a shaving cut on your chin?’
Zia punched him lightly in the ribs, and Karim grabbed Zia in a headlock and spun him around, both of them laughing. For a moment they weren’t men just past the brink of adulthood any more, but the same two boys who had stood in front of a mirror and made their first attempts at shaving some seven or eight years ago, both of them arriving in school the next day with nicks and cuts all over their faces, even in places where bristles hadn’t started to grow. We would all have laughed at them a lot more if they hadn’t combined their talents and presented such a perfect balance of swagger and self-deprecation.
Karim finally let go of Zia, and looked around him in some surprise. ‘I can’t believe this airport! It’s so spacious and so clean.’
‘So all foreign visitors can have a good first impression of the city. It’s all downhill from here.’ Zia waved the porters away and said he’d bring the car round. Seconds later, it was Karim and me and a suitcase standing by the side of the road, waiting, the cab drivers and porters and onlookers no longer interested in our presence. Cars shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage. Karim’s glasses shimmered, too; perhaps he was the mirage. If I were ever delusional or hallucinating it would make sense for me to conjure up Karim, and not just any Karim but a Karim who looked like this. I looked sideways at him, but didn’t say anything; I wanted to see if we could still be comfortable in silence. He didn’t say anything either; he was too busy looking around, learning the landscape, the squat shrubs and billboards and low-rise buildings just past the manicured airport grounds, and recalling that, yes, this is what Karachi feels like at five-thirty on a winter’s morning; time to wake up to cram in that last round of studying for today’s exam, which we should have finished preparing for last night. These last three years, Karachi nothing more than holiday for me, I’d slept through this early daylight time, awakening only when the sun had been out long enough to glaze over the chill in the air, so now even I couldn’t help a prickle of nostalgia for those school mornings of sweaters and chapped lips and staticky hair. Karim shivered, and I wrapped one end of my shawl around him, without actually making any contact with his skin — that was not through accident and certainly not through disdain. Coyness — or was it self-consciousness? — entered my life as we stood there, and confounded me entirely.
‘It’s not cold,’ he said.
‘You’ve got goosebumps.’
‘It’s not cold.’
Zia pulled up and I told Karim to sit in the front seat. I sat behind the driver’s seat and watched him watch Karachi as Zia drove us out of the airport ground and on to the road, which was free of congestion at this hour, giving us an unobstructed view of the billboards: MOD GIRL! CUTE! — an advertisement for talcum powder; HAIR STOP FACE — an ad for facial-hair remover; WESTMINSTER ABBEY — an upstart rival to the well-established BIG BEN underwear company, attempting to attract customers with its painting of a man in leopard-print Y-fronts swinging his hips and raising his arms in triumph.
Karim pointed at the hip-swinging man. ‘Zia, he looks like you! So that’s what’s become of the heirloom leopard skin that used to hang in your TV room. Are there matching socks?’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ Zia said, but he was smiling along with me to see Karim being so Karim.
We were in view of the Star Gate, which heralded the turn-off to the old airport, the one from which Karim had departed with his parents more than seven years ago, the nuclear family still intact back then, though showing signs of exploding.
‘All right, where are we headed?’ Zia asked. ‘Karim?’
‘Come to my place for breakfast,’ I suggested. ‘My parents can’t wait to see you.’
‘How about visiting the bride-to-be?’ Karim said quickly, so quickly he must not have heard me.
‘She’s in Dubai for the weekend, visiting some relatives. And besides, if she were here it wouldn’t look right if we had her woken up,’ Zia said.
‘Arré.’ Karim laughed. ‘What rot are you on about?’
‘Implies familiarity,’ Zia muttered. ‘Too much of it.’
I repeated the invitation to have breakfast with my parents. Karim looked out of the window. Was he too overwhelmed by the remembered sights and sounds to be able to concentrate on anything anyone was saying? What had he meant by that remark about my father when we’d spoken on the phone? Which of us was going to be the first to bring up all the things we’d said?
‘Ask me directions from here to somewhere I used to know, Zia.’
‘OK. Kindergarten.’
‘That’s easy. Straight down Shahrah-e-Faisal and right on to Abdullah Haroon Road, and the school’s on your right just before Aiwan-e-Saddar Road.’
I couldn’t refrain from adding, ‘Or, in Karachispeak, go straight straight straight straight straight and then turn right just after the Metropole, and when you see a church, stop.’
‘Straight straight straight straight straight, huh?’ Hard to tell if Karim was amused or annoyed, his expression cut off from me as he stuck his head out of the window, taking in the street’s mishmash of tall concrete office buildings, large houses, and the signs, at the entrance to plots of land enclosed by boundary walls, spelling out ‘Hina Marriage Garden’, ‘Diamond Marriage Garden’, ‘Sindbad Marriage Garden’. Zia caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged.
Karim retracted his head. ‘So many new buildings, and the driving is crazier than I remember, even with early-morning traffic. Wait, isn’t that the turn-off for Tariq Road and Mohommad Ali Society? Can we go to Kaybee’s?’
‘You want ice cream at this hour?’
He pulled his ear and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘No, I suppose not. This is all so strange for me…’ He stuck his head out of the window again.
A bus sped past, just inches away, and Zia reached over and pulled Karim back into the car. ‘Look out of the windscreen, OK? You’re no fun when you’re decapitated. So talk to us, yaar, tell us things. What have you been doing since you graduated last year? And why do you have a girlfriend named Spa?’
I tried not to look too interested. Sonia had mentioned the girlfriend after she’d met Karim in London the previous year, though she had no details on how serious things were between them.
‘Don’t really know what I’m doing with life outside uni. So, I’ve put aside the year to travel before worrying about it. And her name’s actually Grace, which is what I call her, but she got her nickname because her parents fell in love while watching “Spartacus”.’
‘That’s about as romantic as it gets.’ I laughed. He couldn’t possibly be serious about someone who allowed herself to be called Spa.
‘And besides, she’s my ex-girlfriend.’
Ha!
Zia blew his horn at a legless beggar crossing the street in a wheeled contraption, just inches off the ground, and swerved away from him. Karim didn’t react, though I had expected him to have a moment of tourist horror.
‘Was it the 1960 version, or the 1967 reissue?’ I asked. ‘Because, you know, the 1967 version cut out that great moment of whatshername looking at Spartacus writhing on a cross and saying, “Oh, please die, my darling.” If that’s not dialogue to fall in love to, what is? I bet it was the 1960 version.’