‘That makes you pretty despicable, doesn’t it?’
She drew herself up to her full height. A tall woman, my mother, and capable of great regality. ‘I will not apologize for marrying your father.’ She made a tiny self-deprecating sound. ‘Would it help you if I said I loved him first? And that as long as I thought he and Maheen had a chance I never made one move towards him?’
‘But didn’t you think about what you were doing to her? You were her best friend, Ami, and you married the man who broke her heart.’
‘I loved him more than her. Yes. I don’t deny it. I’m not going to make this easy for you, Raheen. Your father may want to play the martyr and say, “Come, hate me, I deserve it,” but I will show you so many shades of grey about this business it’ll make your head spin.’
I backed away. ‘God, you’d make a good tyrant.’
‘I’m a mother. The boundary between the two is sometimes very blurry.’
I started to smile, but forced myself to stop. ‘How could you want to spend your life with someone who said a thing like that?’
A tiny furrow of concentration appeared on her forehead, as though she were trying to remember something she hadn’t thought about in a very long time. ‘I didn’t believe he meant it.’
‘Oh, so it’s that simple.’
‘There was nothing simple about any of it.’ She gazed out of the window again, then looked at me as though sizing me up. ‘He only had one major fault, your father, when we were all young. One flaw. He lacked strength. But somewhere along the way he found it, and to this day I don’t know if he found it when he was engaged to Maheen or just after. No, Raheen, I don’t know why he said what he said, but I know that after he did it he was able to look the country straight in the eye. Until then he’d been looking from a height, a position of remove, and suddenly he was down there — or thought he was — with the rabid crowd, saying the kinds of things that came out of their mouths, believing that a part of him may have believed what he was saying, though I can tell you he didn’t.’
‘Or at least that’s what you need to believe to justify marrying him.’ I couldn’t stop myself saying it, though I had already lost Aba and Karim and I didn’t know how I could bear another loss. But Ami and I had always spoken straight to each other; maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to save us. I could have shown her Karim’s last letter to me, all those years ago; I almost did, except I didn’t know how to tell her not to tell Aba about it.
‘If you choose to believe that, I can’t dissuade you.’
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She gave me this look as though to say, you decide what questions you need to ask.
‘What do you mean, he looked the country straight in the eye?’
‘I mean, he didn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. He said, this is what we have done, these are the consequences we must live with, and these are all the ways in which we’ve got to learn from this. He developed incredible strength, Raheen; but then you came along and all his residual weakness became concentrated on you. Everything he promised he wouldn’t do — like keep quiet about what he’d done, like turn his back on ’71—he did because he was afraid of the consequences of telling you the truth. It was the one thing I could never argue him out of. Didn’t really try hard enough, I suppose.’
‘He brought me up to be someone who’d forgive him.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you forgive him?’
‘Never.’
She gave me a knowing look. ‘Exactly.’
I dropped my gaze from hers.
‘Tell me what’s been happening with Karim,’ she said. I looked at her and knew that she understood about love and friendships getting so tangled it seemed impossible to find your way clear except through following something in the gut that bypassed the brain entirely. If ’71 had defined Aba, it had in some way defined her, too. She married my father and decided it was not something she would ever apologize for. So she became a women who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it. And while my father was charming me, pulling me close to hear his heartbeat, teaching me how to look at the world, she taught me that you didn’t have always to agree with your parents or want to emulate them in order to know they mean the world to you and you to them.
So I told her about Sonia, about Zia, about Karim, and when I had finished the telling, she said, ‘There are no blueprints for love. But you want to know how things unfolded with the four of us?’
You couldn’t escape from my mother’s voice when she wanted it to hold you in place. It reached out to me — honey over gravel — and pulled me into the past, into 1970, to a Karachi before drugs, before guns, before Civil War, before the economy ran on foreign aid, before religion was wielded as the most powerful of political tools. A Karachi in which people stayed. There they all were, in the Nasreen Room — Zafar, Yasmin, Ali, Maheen and all their closest friends — many of them recently returned from university abroad as though it were the most natural thing in the world to come back, to return home, no reason not to. Zafar pulled Yasmin on to the floor, he asked her a question, she replied with coquetry, he thought it was refusal. Everyone’s futures changed, right there.
She walked around the gallery, her hand alighting on this sculpture’s head, that one’s back, but always moving on, and looking in my direction less and less as the story moved to Rahim Yar Khan and then back to Karachi, to Ampi’s, to the racetrack, to the Club. She reached up and swivelled a track light so that her aspect moved in and out of shadows, her voice getting hoarser and everything in my mind more jumbled.
When she had finished, the story taking me past Karim and my first meeting in the cradle, I was more confused than ever. How do you measure love? How do you separate it from selfishness? Think of all the futures that could have been, all the pasts we’d never understand, everything in the present we keep hidden from one another and ourselves, all the futures that still might be. Is love strongest when it holds on or lets go?
I closed my eyes. I imagined Karim walking into the room. All abstractions fled.
Sonia, I’m sorry.
. .
1971
Ali paused, hand on the door knob, and tried to identify the source of the noise from the other side of the door. Plock! Thock! Crash! Plock! Thock! Plock! Thock! Plock! Thock! Crash! He eased open the door and poked his head in, hesitantly, ready to withdraw it in a hurry.
Zafar stood at one end of his drawing room, whacking a tennis ball with his cricket bat—plock! The ball ricocheted off the opposite wall—Thock! Ali noticed the broken glass around the room, remnants of a rather expensive set of whiskey tumblers, of which only two now remained intact on the drinks cabinet.
Crash!
Or, rather, only one now remained.
Ali closed the door behind him and walked closer to Zafar, who still hadn’t acknowledged his presence. There was a cut on Zafar’s arm, with a shard of glass protruding from it. Ali took hold of Zafar’s arm and pulled out the shard.
‘Maheen’s over at Yasmin’s place,’ he said.
‘Thought she might be. I suppose you’re here to ask why I said what I said.’
‘No.’ Ali took the tumbler from the drinks cabinet and poured himself a drink. Bits of glass swirled around in the amber liquid. ‘Honestly, Zafar, this is so irritating,’ he said, looking in disgust at the contents of the tumbler.