Aba reversed out of the gate, and I got into the car. He drove towards Clifton, past the shrine of the Sufi, Shah Abdullah Ghazi, with its surrounding world of pavement fortune-tellers and heroin addicts and shops selling flower garlands, then up the incline from where we could see Mohatta Palace, that decaying pink building which, with its domes and its history and its amalgamation of British, Middle Eastern, Hindu and Mughal styles, had always been my favourite of Karachi’s structures. Aba steered his car away from the palace and parked in the large circle overlooking Funland and a green field and, further out, the sea. I followed him down the graffiti-covered steps leading from the circle to the field, and we stopped just before the steps gave way to a stone walkway with carved archways cut into its underside, which ended in a covered stone structure, open on all four sides.
‘The Lady Lloyd Pier,’ he said, gesturing at the structure. ‘That’s where I proposed to your mother. It stood in the waves once.’
We walked along the stone approach to the pier, a sea of grass and polythene bags around us. The Ferris wheel and Pirate Ship and other Funland rides were motionless to our left, the white minaret of a mosque cleft the air between the pier and the sea wall in front of us, and the rock shaped like man metamorphosing out of stone rose from the water on the other side of the sea wall. The transparent polythene bags looked like balloons where inflated, sleeping giant jellyfish where not. It hits you in unexpected moments, this city’s romance; everywhere, air pockets of loveliness just when your lungs can’t take any more congestion or pollution or stifling newspaper headlines. A pier in the middle of a field that was clearly used on occasion as a rubbish dump should have been absurd, or sad, but instead was suggestive of both constancy and change.
I’ll take constancy. Keep the change.
The rumble of buses behind us sounded as the ocean might sound to someone who had only heard it in imagination. The early morning sea not yet woken up to full colour.
I turned to Aba. ‘Karim wants to marry Sonia.’
Aba tilted his head to one side. ‘Marry! I still think of you as kids. Karim and Sonia? I didn’t realize there was…well, to be honest I thought you and he…’
I looked away, rubbing my thumb in the pockmarked stone between my father and me. ‘I thought so, too.’
‘Oh God. Is it because of me…?’
I nodded. I wanted to hit him and hug him all at once. He didn’t say anything, and I imagined him thinking back to that day, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when he proposed to my mother. All I knew about the proposal was that when he popped the question she replied, ‘Zaf, yesterday when I told you to give me a ring, I meant a phone call.’ I had always thought of their courtship as being rife with humour.
‘If I had told you earlier what I said to Shafiq, how would that have changed things with you and Karim?’
I raised my hands and dropped them, unable to answer. It would have changed everything. It would have changed nothing.
‘People have always said how much I’m like you.’ I stood up and put my arms around the stone pillar. ‘I thought I knew what that meant. I thought I was your distilled self. Raheen’s like a younger, female version of Zafar, but slightly less charming, slightly less intelligent, slightly less prone to singing tunelessly.’ We both smiled at that. The same smile, mouth going up at one corner, head tilting forward slightly, something slightly sardonic about our eyebrows. ‘Slightly less capable of putting aside all biases and prejudices for the sake of justice.’
‘Is that how you see me?’ He couldn’t keep the pleasure from his voice. ‘Champion of justice?’
‘It was.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know now. Something’s changed, something’s changed horribly, and I don’t even know what it is. But I know this. We are alike. We are alike in this: we don’t deserve the people who love us.’
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ He stood up and started to come towards me.
‘I’ll hit you. If you try and touch me, I’ll hit you. I swear I will.’
Neither he nor I were prepared for the ferocity of my reaction. We both looked away from each other, tears running down our cheeks.
‘What do you want me to say?’ His voice was unrecognizable. ‘If I knew what to say I’d have said it long ago. There was a moment when I thought that by the time you were old enough to know, I’d be old enough to know what to tell you. But what can I say?’
‘Tell me why. Why did you say that to Shafiq?’
He looked at the sea, at the field, at the ships on the horizon.
‘I swear to you, I don’t know.’ He clenched his hands. ‘I don’t think I even knew at the moment I said it. Raheen, how could I have said it? After everything we’d just lived through, after everything that she’d had to bear.’ He leaned his face against a pillar and, as I watched his shoulders shake, a thought sprang to mind so hideous that I cried out loud.
He looked up at me.
‘You’ve brought me up to forgive you, haven’t you?’ I backed away from him. ‘Everything you’ve ever taught me about how to live my life. “Condemnation is an act of smugness… How can you blame a person unless you’ve slipped into their soul, seen the serpents and abysses that lie there?…Shouldn’t we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today?” Everything I thought was so damn noble of you, it was just a self-serving attempt to turn me into someone who would forgive you when this moment came.’
‘Raheen, that’s not true.’
‘And when it came to ethnic politics, weren’t you the great man? Never attacking anyone else, but also standing firm on your position, saying it wasn’t ethnicity that mattered per se but questions of injustice. Zafar the Just. And what was that all about? So you could say to me, look at my track record, Raheen; see how I’ve evolved?’
‘You’re getting it all wrong. I wanted you to grow up to be someone who would never do what I did. I wanted you to be better than I am.’ He reached for me, and I pushed him away, slamming him against a corner of the brick column. He choked in pain.
‘If that’s what you wanted you wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to love you. You’ve destroyed our relationship; maybe I could forgive you that. But you’ve destroyed whatever hope Karim and I had together, and that, Aba, I will hold against you well past the day you die.’
I wrenched the keys from his hand and ran, faster than I had run with Sonia to get away from Karim. But Aba was following. Calling my name and running, his feet echoing in time with mine. Did I even have to run like he did? Men walking down the stairs saw us and called out to me as I drew near them, ‘Is he bothering you? Should we stop him?’
‘No,’ I said, hearing his steps falter as age caught up with him. ‘Get him a taxi.’
. .
‘Oh, here you are. I’ve just been looking for you.’ Zia strode into his den later that morning, holding aloft a large quiche. ‘You been here long?’