‘That’s very decent of you.’ Zia regarded me triumphantly, as though he’d won a point.
‘Where do you think we live?’ Karim said.
‘Defence.’
Karim laughed. ‘Right. That obvious, huh?’
The man nodded. ‘Burgers,’ he said. Karim look confused. When he’d left Karachi we were still unaware of this term that most of Karachi used to refer to the English-speaking elite.
‘Have you been doing this long?’ I asked.
He looked straight at me for the first time. ‘I wanted to join the civil service. I’m an educated, literate person, you know. I sat for the exam, and I did all right. I mean, not top marks, but decent, good marks. But I sat the exams from Karachi. It’s not enough to be just good.’ He looked from Zia to Karim to me. ‘You know?’
That was probably just a rhetorical question, but I felt compelled to respond. ‘We’re Karachiwallahs, too,’ I said, the word stumbling on my tongue. It just seemed a bad idea to use the more Anglicized ‘Karachiite’. And then, because I was annoyed with Karim, I added: ‘At least, the two of us are. He—’ jerking my head at Karim, ‘—hasn’t been here in eight years. He lives in England and America. Both.’
The man whistled. ‘What a hero! Do you understand why I’m a car thief instead of a civil servant, hero?’
‘Yes,’ Karim said softly. ‘The quota system.’
The man spat on the side of the road. ‘May those who set it up burn in every kind of fire that hell has to offer.’
I caught Zia’s sleeve, my eyes begging Let’s get out of here.
The man caught my look. ‘Why are you afraid of me? I have sisters. I’m not one of those uncivilized men. But I get frustrated. Don’t you? You live in this city, after all.’
There was nothing I could say to this man without it being condescension or a lie. Privilege erased the day-to-day struggles of ethnic politics, and however Karim might want me to feel about the matter I couldn’t pretend I was sorry that I had been born on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern. So what if I walked around with a heaviness in my heart after reading about the accelerating cycle of violence, unemployment, divisiveness in Karachi? So what if I agreed with this man that the quota system in the province discriminated against Karachiites, particularly Muhajirs who had no family domicile outside the city that they could claim as their own when government jobs and government-run university places were being allocated according to an absurd urban — rural divide? So what if I thought the entire city was being pillaged by the central government, which was happy to take the large percentage of its revenue from Karachi but unwilling to put very much back? I didn’t find myself picking up a gun because of it, or losing people I loved because of it, or feeling my sanity slip away because of it.
‘You’re Muhajir,’ I heard Karim say to the man. For God’s sake, what was he trying to do!
‘Yes, hero. What are you?’
‘Bengali.’
Zia and I both looked at him in surprise. I’d never once heard Karim identify himself that way. Of course, none of us ever used to feel the need to identify ourselves by ethnicity when we were younger but it still took me off-guard that he chose to identify himself with his mother’s ethnicity rather than his father’s. I wondered if Zia even remembered that school-yard fight when he had pushed Karim over and kicked him. I wondered if Karim remembered it.
The man straightened up. ‘We didn’t learn anything, did we? From ’71.’
Again, Karim gave me one of those looks I couldn’t decipher. ‘We learned to forget,’ he said. ‘Do you have a family to support?’
‘Everyone has a family to support. If not your own, then someone else’s. My brother has five children. The choices my brother’s made…soon I’ll have his family to support. And then there’ll be his widow — I’ll have to marry his widow, who else will marry her with five children? — and she sings all day, so badly, like a goat.’ Zia and the man both laughed, but the man’s laugh had an edge of bitterness to it.
‘I can’t do anything about the quota system,’ Karim said, ‘but maybe we could help you find something better suited to your education than car theft.’
The man nodded, all traces of amusement gone. ‘Already I can imagine myself doing things that a few months ago would have been unthinkable. I own a gun, and I’m imagining things. That’s not a good combination.’ He grimaced. ‘You’ll probably leave here and do nothing for me, but if you can do something, do it quickly.’
‘How will I find you?’ Karim said.
‘Come back here in this car. I’ll tell my friends to look out for it, and make themselves known to you.’ He shook Karim’s hand, and walked away.
‘Your father could get him a job, couldn’t he?’ Karim said, turning to Zia.
Zia looked ready to explode. ‘Did you just miss what he said? His friends the car thieves will be looking out for my Integra. And now he knows where the thief switch is. You are behaving like such a fresh-off-the-boat, Karim. Don’t buy his “I’m forced into crime because I have no options” story.’
‘Oh, come on, Zia, it’s not as though his story was far-fetched.’ I pointed towards the thief switch as Zia started the car and he nodded and pressed it.
‘If it’s true, that makes things worse,’ Zia said, screeching off, clearly as keen to get out of Mehmoodabad as I was. ‘He’s probably with the MQM and you just don’t want to get involved with someone who has anything to do with these political groups.’
‘Why is he obviously with the MQM?’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention political affiliations.’
‘It’s the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, isn’t it? And he’s a Muhajir with grievances. Two plus two equals four.’
‘I’m a Muhajir, Zia.’ I poked his shoulder.
‘Oh, don’t give me that. You’re nothing. You’re just a burger. And thank God for that.’
‘You macho Sindhi ass,’ I said with a yawn. It was too early in the morning for a full-length replay of this little exchange — one that Zia and I trotted out every so often almost as a set routine — which deflected the differences in our backgrounds.
‘Only half my ass is Sindhi. The other half is Punjabi.’
Karim didn’t join our laughter. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were wide, terrified. ‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ he said.
Zia reached over and touched my knee then. He saw how hurt I was by the comment, but Karim was oblivious. I thought of another car ride, heading to, rather than from, the airport. Karim had sat opposite me and drawn a map and even the fact that he couldn’t have known it was the last time we were to be together for the next seven years didn’t temper the corrosiveness of that memory. Look up, I had wanted to say then. I’m here. But he hadn’t looked at me then and he wasn’t looking at me now.
‘Well, then, go home,’ I said. ‘If you have a home to go to.’
‘Raheen, cool it,’ Zia said.
‘Let her continue, Zia.’ Karim crossed his arms and looked at me in the manner of an eagle staring down a sparrow.
‘There’s really nothing more to say. Why don’t you turn around and leave, and I’ll draw you a nice map of all the places you might have visited while you were here. I’m sure for you that’ll be better than actually having to deal with the realities of this place and the people in it.’
‘Why the hell do you keep harping on about maps?’ he said.
I didn’t have the first idea how to respond to that one. We continued to glare at each other, while Zia turned the music up again and started singing along boisterously, as though he were listening to hard rock rather than a qawaali. Why did I keep harping on about maps? How had they become the symbol of everything that had gone so wrong, so inexplicably, in my relationship with Karim?