Uncle Asif poked me in the ribs. ‘What do you think of all this, Raheen?’
‘I think her hair looks great.’
‘No, silly. What do you think about things in Karachi?’
I stirred my tea. No way was I going to get them started again. ‘I think there’s nothing I can do about the situation, Uncle Asif, so why waste brain cells thinking about it?’
‘Raheen!’ My father was staring at me, a look of shock on his face. My mother shook her head and leaned forward to say something, but before she could, Uncle Asif spoke.
‘Oh, come on, Zaf. She’s only twenty-one. Think back to your twenties. How concerned were you with—’ He stopped, turned red, and looked down. My father bit his lip and looked at me. What?
The phone rang again, and we all turned to look at it gratefully, except for Ami, who was looking between Aba and me and shaking her head. But the call was for her — a mutual friend of hers and Aunty Laila’s was phoning to say someone from the newspaper office had been calling around, trying to get hold of my mother.
‘Odd,’ Ami said. ‘It’s only midweek.’ Ami worked on the paper’s weekend magazine, and we were accustomed to her colleagues trying to track her down when last-minute crises occurred. The most notable of these calls happened a couple of years ago when the magazine was running a piece on some musical evening Aunty Runty was organizing as part of a cultural festival, and an assistant at the office received a message from Runty at the nth hour, saying it was imperative that the article mention she would not tolerate ‘monkey business with toothpicks at the musical evening, so ne’er-do-wellers beware’. The assistant, terrified by this ominous statement, tracked down my mother, who advised him to ignore the call and proceeded to scatter toothpicks into Runty’s letter box on her way to dinner that evening. Runty didn’t speak to her for weeks after that, and still hadn’t explained the connection between monkey business and toothpicks.
Ami dialled her office number and said, ‘What’s the toothpick?… Sonia Lohawalla? Yes, that’s right, she’s Raheen’s best friend…in the main paper?…Can’t you tell me what it is, I’m not home…oh, wait, there’s a fax machine here too.’
When did the front door open without my hearing it? When exactly did the footsteps progress down the hall, and stop, as he realised my parents were inside and paused to decide: what next?
I didn’t hear him, none of us did, because all our attention was focused on the drama within the room as Aunty Laila tore the paper out of the fax machine and handed it to my mother, unable to resist glancing at it first. She made a sound of disgust. ‘Tacky, so tacky. She’s best out of it if this is the kind of people they are.’
It was a paid announcement that was to appear in the next morning’s paper. Ami read it out loud. The Rana family wishes to announce that the engagement between Adel Rana and Sonia, daughter of Ehsan Lohawalla, will not take place. The Ranas hereby apologise to all those whose good counsel they did not heed earlier in this matter, and request that the Lohawalla family, and those associated with them, make no attempt to contact Adel Rana or anyone connected to him.
Ami shook her head. ‘Oh, that poor girl. That poor, poor girl.’
Aunty Laila nodded agreement. ‘No good family will want their son to marry her now — not after both the drug charges and this slap in the face.’
With an explosion of invective, Aba crumpled up the fax and flung it against the wall. The strength of his reaction shocked me out of my own fist-clenched fury. He was fond of Sonia, certainly, but this was entirely out of character. He saw me staring at him, and his eyes panicked. ‘How dare he,’ he said, as though he need to explain himself. ‘How dare he think he was even good enough for that darling girl? If I ever see him I’ll — Karim?’
Everyone’s head turned towards the doorway, at which my father was staring in a mixture of disbelief and joy. I heard Ami get to her feet with a whispered, ‘Oh, there he is. At last!’ but as soon as I saw Karim’s face I knew something horrible was going to happen, because nothing was moving in the unblinking, unsmiling mask that had settled on his face like a second skin.
‘If you ever see him you’ll what, Zafar?’ He didn’t just cut the appellation ‘Uncle’ from his form of address; he cut every tie to his past relationship with my father.
I caught Uncle Asif by the sleeve and whispered, ‘Please do something. Get him out of here.’
‘Karim.’ My father held open his arms, though it should have been so obvious that Karim was not in an embracing mood.
‘Is that what you’ll do when you see Adel Rana, Zaf?’
I saw Ami flinch at the way he spat out that last syllable. But was that anxiety or a glimmer of excitement in Aunty Laila’s eyes?
‘Is it, Zaf? Will you, Zaf, when you see him, Zaf, hold your arms open, Zaf, and say, “Welcome, brother, welcome to the club”? The break-a-heart-too-good-for-you-you-cowardly-bastard club.’
‘Karim.’ Ami started walking towards him, he held his hand up.
‘I don’t want anything to do with you either, I’m sorry, Aunty Yasmin. Please stay away.’
Something in my life was about to be destroyed. I could feel it. ‘Karimazov, go away.’
He turned to me. ‘Are you going to stand by him, and call that loyalty?’
‘Karim, can we go somewhere and talk?’ My father took a step towards Karim, his arms still spread wide, though now it was in the manner of a man holding his arms away from his body to prove he’s not about to reach for concealed weapons.
‘We’ll talk here!’ Karim roared. He caught my father by the shoulder and pushed him down in a chair.
In sheer terror, I caught him by his ear lobe and yanked at it. He spun around, cursing. I watched my hand form into a fist and fly at his jaw. He sidestepped, and my fist smashed into a glass ornament on the shelf behind him. Explosion of glass. I turn my face away. Karim turns his face away. Scrunch shut my eyes. Impact against my cheekbone. Not glass. The tinkle of shards falling to the ground. I open my eyes and there is Karim’s hand moving away from my face. Karim’s hand, which slapped me.
Face stinging, hand miraculously unharmed, I stepped away from him. ‘You bastard,’ I said.
‘He didn’t slap you.’ It was Aba. He took his shoes off his feet and handed them to me, as I stood barefoot amid the broken glass. ‘He didn’t slap you. He was shielding your eyes from glass splinters. He just moved a little too fast. Panic. But it was instinctive. He shielded your eyes before his own.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, glanced at Ami, and then looked back at Karim. ‘She doesn’t know, Karim. Raheen doesn’t know.’
Steel hooks latched on to the weightlessness of the air when he said that. A stillness infected everyone, even me, though I didn’t understand the remark. Looking around, I saw I was the only one who didn’t understand it. Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila were standing together, holding hands like little children. Ami just looked at my father and in the sadness of her expression I heard her voice echoing from years away. Zafar, sometimes I think I love you more than I should. And Karim had recoiled, his eyes moving all around the room, settling momentarily on every face except mine, his voice, staccato, saying ‘but if’ and ‘that time’ and ‘how’ and ‘so why did’ and, finally, as he turned to look at me, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’
‘I did this, not you,’ Aba said. ‘Raheen, look at me. It’s time you heard the truth.’
I closed my eyes and, half-turning, leaned against the wall. The white paint was cool against my cheek and tongue. All my life I’d visited this house and never thought to taste the walls. What an odd and misleading thing familiarity is; so ready to disguise itself as intimacy.