He banged the CD power button with the flat of his hand, switching off Billie’s ‘Strange Fruit’.
‘And anyway, Zee, if the issue is the money, Adel Rana will be feeling sick enough tomorrow when he finds out that the charges have been dropped and Daddy Lohawalla’s millions are intact.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. Dost Mohommad told Karim and me. All charges dropped.’ I paused to consider the strangeness of it. ‘If it had happened just a few hours earlier, Sonia would probably still be engaged.’
‘Oh God.’ Zia sat down.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You’d better leave, Raheen.’
‘What?’
‘Raheen, go. You don’t want to be in this house for what’s about to happen.’
‘Where do you want me to go?’
‘Anywhere.’ He looked up at me, arms wrapped around his stomach as if he was in severe pain. ‘Go home, Raheen. Go home.’
. .
To go home really wasn’t an option I felt in any state to exercise, so I drove back to Sonia’s house and sat outside in my car until one of the guards came out and told me I could wait inside. I had been sitting in the drawing room for only a few minutes when the front door opened and Karim walked in. We sat at opposite ends of the sofa in silence, leafing through coffee-table books. Easy for Zia to talk about magic, but once a spell is broken, pumpkins and rats appear.
At last Sonia and her family arrived home.
‘Have you heard?’ Sonia said, rushing forward to put her arms around me.
Karim stood up and shook Sonia’s father’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Uncle, but at least it’s over.’
‘Yes, thank God. Over.’ Sonia’s father thumped Karim on the shoulder. ‘But everyone’s going to say I just paid off the police. Never mind. Memories are short in this part of town. Throw a few parties and everyone forgets your crimes. At least, everyone who’s invited does.’ He grinned at me.
‘You aren’t guilty of any crimes, Aboo,’ Sonia said softly. ‘Ama, you look exhausted. Go to sleep.’ I hadn’t even noticed her mother enter the room. No one ever did.
‘Everyone’s guilty of crimes,’ Sonia’s father said. ‘Just not always the ones you’re accused of.’
‘And what are your crimes?’ I asked.
I saw Karim glare at me, but I thought, let all truths ring out tonight. Enough secrecy and innuendo.
Sonia’s father gestured around him. ‘Look at this place. Look at where I live. Look at all I had to leave behind to be here. That’s my crime. I left so much behind.’
‘You did it for us,’ Sonia said, in the manner of a second-rate actress who has played a climactic scene so often she can’t remember how to inject that quality of revelation into her voice. ‘For Sohail and me.’
Her father kissed her forehead. ‘Yes. I thought you’d be better off in this world. There was a time when I had certainty.’ He put an arm around Karim’s shoulder; he’d always been fond of Karim. ‘Now that I don’t have this on my mind, I’ll sort out something for your car-thief friend.’
When had he told Sonia’s father about the car thief? Had he been to visit Sonia at some point without telling me? How could anyone look at Sonia and not want to drown forever in her serene beauty? How could anyone look at Sonia and not see how easy it was to love her? I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. Karim looked surprised at that. Did he think I wasn’t capable of a single genuine emotion? Did he expect me to say, ‘Pity you won’t be marrying Adel Rana. He would have purified your nouveau riche blood line.’
God, Aba, how could you have?
Dost Mohommad entered the room, with a tray bearing cups of green tea with mint and cardamom. Karim, Sonia and I each took a cup, and went outside. We sat in the garden, forgoing cane chairs for the sprawl of grass, and Sonia raised her cup. ‘To the grey areas of our lives,’ she said. ‘To the slippery slopes, and the absence of signposts.’
What had she begun to suspect about her father?
Karim clinked cups with her and waved away swooping, bewinged insects. ‘Raheen has something to tell you.’
I told her about the newspaper announcement.
She listened, without interrupting, as I spoke, and then laid a hand on my arm. ‘Thank you. I’d rather hear it from you than anyone in the whole wide…’ She closed her eyes, and looked away.
I held my cup against her cold cheek, and understood Zia’s inclination to beat Adel Rana senseless. She didn’t look at me, fidgeting instead with a long fleshy leaf that sprouted from a calla lilly bulb. She wrapped the leaf around her fisted hand and the leaf snapped, just centimetres above the bulb.
I took the leaf out of her hand and knotted it around her neck. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, and wondered: how had we come to this, all four of us? How had the laughter gone out of our lives?
Karim stood up and walked around the garden, running his palms over the outline of flowers and shrubs. I closed my eyes for a long moment. When I looked again, he was out of the radius of the veranda light, transformed into shadow. When a moth veered past his shoulder I was almost surprised it didn’t flit right through his dark form.
Sonia raised her head from my shoulder, and looked from me to Karim.
‘I’m going in to tell my parents what’s happened. Karim, you and Raheen wait for me.’
She went back inside, and Karim continued staring intently at a cluster of flowers, with more fascination than was necessary for what was just a pink clump of petals trying hard to assert resemblance to a rose. I lay back and tried to find something to focus all my attention on, but my mind simply would not clear of everything whirling around in it. It seemed so easy to curl up in a ball on the grass and never think of anyone or anything again.
At length, Sonia came back outside. ‘Zia just rang. Sounded strange. He said he had to see me. Do you know what this is about?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, he’s driving aimlessly. Refused to come here. And I don’t want to go anywhere we’re likely to run into people we know. So I said the two of you would drive me to Kharadar to meet him. That’s OK, isn’t it?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Your father won’t let you leave the house at this hour. Why Kharadar? I’ve only ever driven through there on the way to the beach.’
‘My father’s feeling too bad about my broken engagement to say no to anything I ask. And you’ve answered “why Kharadar?” Because no one we know goes there.’
And so, for the second time in the day, I drove over Mai Kolachi, the road that cut through mangrove swamps. A few minutes later we were on I.I. Chundrigar Road, just past the Jubilee Insurance House, which, in the dark with some of its illuminated letters fused, spelt out the suggestive command: jubile in ra house.
‘Oh, I always Jubile in Raheen’s house. Don’t you?’ Sonia said, turning to smile at me. I rolled my eyes and then smiled back. It was the only thing she’d said since we’d left her house. It was the only thing anyone had said. Zia’s car streaked past us on I.I., and then reversed back when he realized it was my car he’d overtaken. Karim opened the door without a word and stepped into Zia’s car.
‘What’s happened with the two of you?’ Sonia said, but she didn’t need my pain to add to hers, so I told her ‘nothing serious’.
‘You’ll tell me when you’re ready,’ Sonia said, and touched my cheek, almost crumbling my resolve.
Before long we were in narrow gullies. Zia pulled alongside and asked Sonia if she could find her way around here.