‘Karachi is an anagram of “hack air”.’ He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and slashed at the wind. Women in bright clothes with makeshift cloth bags full of cotton slung over their shoulders walked past and pointed towards us, giggling. I felt oddly foreign.
‘Karimazov?’
‘Just mindless violence,’ he said, snapping the blade closed. ‘Doesn’t it bother you that we’re here because our parents don’t feel we’re safe at home?’
I shrugged. Our first time away from our parents, and he had to go and do the whole concerned-citizen-of-a-city-in-turmoil bit on me. Imagine if in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the four children sat around saying, ‘We’re here because there are air-raids in London. How terrible!’ They’d never even make it up the stairs, let alone into the wardrobe, with that kind of attitude. I thought of mentioning this to Karim, but we’d decided that it was time to grow out of the Narnia books the previous year, and he might have laughed at my childishness had I invoked them. So instead I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with spending a few days in this place.’
He looked at me as though I were very stupid. ‘He thinks changing locations can alter things,’ he said.
‘He who? Your father? Well, so what? It can, can’t it? Sometimes. Depending on the things.’ I began to feel I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘But when we go back nothing will have changed.’ He tossed the claw away from him with a jerk, as though just realizing it was part of a dead animal. ‘What does he think he’s protecting me from?’
‘Bullets and bombs. Come on, Cream, it’s not so bad here.’
He turned away from me and rubbed his hands across his eyes. Probably tired from the journey, I told myself. But he’d fallen asleep before me on the train and woken up only when I woke him up. I knew I should ask him what really was the matter, not just today, but nearly every day for the last few weeks, or was it months? We were all beginning to surprise ourselves with our reactions to the world in those days, anger flaring up for no reason and solitude becoming a sought-after state in which we’d find ourselves thinking about things that formerly would have made us clump together in groups to giggle. So it would have been easy to dismiss Karim’s moments of rage towards his father as nothing more than a manifestation of adolescence, and it seemed almost everyone did dismiss it as exactly that — Sonia and Zia did, and so did my parents, and even Uncle Ali was wont to respond to Karim’s scowls with some exasperated comment about ‘boys at that age’, while Aunty Maheen sighed. But there was a gravity to Karim’s anger, a sense of cause and effect, some terrible notion of consequence. Did no one but me see that? While the rest of us were still just changing, Karim was maturing.
‘When we drove into the farm I thought I was seeing snow for the first time,’ I said, leaning forward and speaking softly into his ear as he looked out at a distant point in the cottonfields. ‘But really it’s tired clouds, coming to rest on the ground.’
He turned away from whatever he was staring at to smile at me, and encircled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. He was much smaller than I was in those days, but my wrist fitted perfectly into the ‘O’ created by his clasp. Then he cut across to the cottonfield, his feet squelching in the mud. He pulled a cotton boll out of its pod and walked back to where I was standing. ‘Here. I found you an angel in disguise.’ Sitting on the top of the cotton was a ladybird. Karim touched the cotton to my hand and the ladybird crawled off on to my palm. I wanted to hug Karim then, but was surprised to find myself imagining my breasts pressing against his chest, and so instead I just looked down at the ladybird and wondered out loud, if I touch its back will my finger come away red? The back became wings and the ladybird swooped off my hand.
There was more swooping a few hours later when Aunty Laila found Karim and me sitting at one end of the long dining table pulling faces at our reflections in the polished wood surface. ‘Darlings!’ she cried, descending upon us with arms outstretched, and coming to rest in a crouch between our intricately carved chairs. Her arms locked themselves around our necks and she pulled us close in a sudden gesture so that our faces almost bounced off her cheekbones. She pursed her Lancome-enhanced lips into kisses that were presumably intended to ricochet off the opposite wall and on to our cheeks. Ami once said that no one, least of all Aunty Laila, knew where the boundaries existed between Aunty Laila’s parody of Karachi high society and her genuine embodiment of the characteristics of a Karachi Knee.
Have I not mentioned the Knees yet? The Ghutnas, rather, in local lingo. This narrative demands tangents, but, for the moment, remain befuddled. Aunty Laila is on centre stage, and deserves her spotlight.
‘Send word back to Karachi that I am bilkul a farmer’s wife,’ she said, twirling into her chair. ‘Who needs parties? I’m happy to pick cotton and feed goats.’
‘You’re out every day with your scythe, cutting down the sugar cane,’ Karim said, his mood sufficiently improved to allow him to smile at Uncle Asif who had just entered the room.
‘Standing knee-deep in keechar to birth a buffalo,’ Aunty Laila whooped.
‘Every morning, you’re up with the cock,’ I said.
And regretted it immediately.
Karim covered his face with a napkin. Aunty Laila — beautiful, elegant, coiffed and manicured Aunty Laila — snorted with laughter. I glanced over at Uncle Asif, but he had the decency to pretend to be too engrossed in piling his plate high with food to realize what was going on. Or so I thought.
‘A history lesson,’ he said, a few seconds later, cutting through Aunty Laila’s chatter and turning his plate towards Karim and me. ‘In 1947, East and West Pakistan were created, providing a pair of testicles for the phallus of India.’ He had moulded his rice into the subcontinent.
‘Honestly, Asif,’ Aunty Laila said. ‘No genitalia in the dining room.’
I blushed. Karim crossed his legs.
‘We’re thirteen,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should wait another five years or so before having this kind of conversation in front of us.’
Aunty Laila laughed. ‘Your mothers and I became friends at the age of ten when I told them about the facts of life.’
Karim retreated behind his napkin again.
‘You needn’t act so coy.’ Aunty Laila pulled the napkin away from his face and slapped his shoulder with it. ‘Your mother told me about the magazines under your bed.’
‘They weren’t mine! Zia brought them over. I can’t believe she told…I can’t believe you’re bringing this up.’
‘So to speak,’ Aunty Laila said.
‘Look.’ Uncle Asif poured daal on to his plate. The liquid suffused and flowed off the rice. ‘The Indus flooding the land and spilling into the Arabian Sea. See, here, the Oyster Rocks and there Manora lighthouse disguised as a carrot. Look at those tributaries engorged. Jhelum, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and whatever that fifth one is. Guddu Barrage overflowing. See, now, I’m crumbling the Himalayas beneath my fork. Nanga Parbat goes down shrouded in lentils.’
I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, is this how people are forced to entertain themselves in Ruralistan? But Karim, when I looked at him for the raised eyebrow that would confirm our synchrony of thought, was staring down at his plate, shifting his rice around with his fork as though he, too, were trying to construct a rice-mould but the picture in his mind kept changing shape, stymieing all efforts to reconstruct it in rice.