‘No, I’m serious. Move to New York with me.’
‘What do you mean “with me”?’
‘You know. I mean, no strings or anything. Well, not too many of them. But what the hell, you know. Why not? One day at a time.’
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. ‘Why ruin a beautiful friendship, Zee?’
‘Come on, Rasputin. Come on. Save me from myself.’
‘Zia, I can’t.’
‘It’s Karim, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
I waited for him to remind me that in four months Karim had made no attempt to get in touch with me, and to remind me further that Sonia had still not received any halfway decent proposals and didn’t I see how selfish I was being? But instead he said, ‘Abracadabra, baby. Guess there’s a part of me that still believes in magic.’
‘Thanks, sweetheart.’ I hung up, and opened the door, hoping to find some clue to the identity of the person who had knocked.
‘Ra!’
At first I thought I must have imagined it. The voice came from behind me, it came from inside my room.
‘Open the window, I’m about to fall.’
I swivelled around. One foot on my window ledge, one foot on a tree, head tilted back to prevent the glasses balanced on the edge of his nose from falling off, he was Charlie Chaplin rather than the Romeo I’d imagined when I’d imagined him appearing outside my window.
‘Karim, what are you doing?’ I levered open the window, and fumbled with the clips that kept the screen in place.
‘Attempting the splits, fifteen feet above ground. Could you remove that screen?’
‘No, it’s stuck. You’ll have to go down and use the front door.’
‘I don’t think you appreciate my problem.’ A gust of wind blew and Karim yelped, removed his foot from the ledge and wrapped himself around the tree limb. ‘I can’t get down.’
I put a heavy hiking boot on to my right foot, stood on my bed and kicked the screen. My foot went through the wire mesh.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘I thought I’d kick the whole screen off.’
‘Yeah, and then you’d have fallen out yourself.’
I looked at Karim, clutching on to the tree, head still tilted back, and then looked at myself, one foot in a large boot sticking out of the screen. ‘One day we’ll tell our children about this moment,’ I said.
‘Is that “our” as in your children and my children, or “our” as in our children?’
The wire mesh had left cuts all around my ankle, but I really didn’t care. ‘Is that a proposal or a proposition?’
‘I’ll take what I can get.’
Karim looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at the branches beneath him, leapt clear of the limbs and leaves, his arms spread wide, embracing the wind. He jumped up, not down. Lifted himself up, Daedalus for a moment, long enough for me to extend my arm through the jagged screen and feel the air that brushed his fingertips brush my fingertips also; then he was rolling on the grass, the gradient of that patch of lawn carrying him away from the concrete dorm and towards the gravel path.
By the time I made it outside, he was standing up, apparently unharmed. I took his face in my hands. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’
‘Could you bear not to go back to Karachi?’
‘What?’
‘Let’s walk.’
Walk? Who wanted to walk?
We walked. There should have been many questions in my mind, but I was suddenly so happy that all I could think of was something I’d wanted to ask him since he’d yawned and stretched and his shirt had lifted to reveal his stomach in Mehmoodabad.
‘Does that chicken-pox scar on your stomach mark an erogenous zone? Tamara says her boyfriend’s chicken-pox scar does.’
‘Every part of me is an erogenous zone when you’re around,’ he said, as though remarking on the time of day. ‘Now, behave yourself.’ I was raising his T-shirt, and he caught my hand and smacked it lightly. ‘I’m here on serious matters.’ I felt myself grow tense, and he said, ‘Because I’ve seriously discovered that I seriously don’t want to believe that everything between us is over.’
Was this because things were too convoluted to reason out, so he just clutched on to that instinctive need we’d always had for each other? I was afraid to ask.
‘Karim…’ I said, and then didn’t have the words to continue.
He kissed me.
When we finally pulled apart I allowed myself a moment to believe everything had been resolved, but he had his serious face firmly in place as he took my hands in his, and sat me down on a bench at the edge of the glen. ‘I can’t go back to Karachi. It’s starting again. The same kind of stuff that went on in ’71.’ He ran the tip of a leaf down my face. ‘The desperation, the craziness. The stench from the newspapers. This is how it begins.’
I pulled away. ‘Karim, you’re being silly.’
‘Why do you even want to go back, Ra?’
Did I want to go back? Back to a city without glens, without places to sit in public with my arms round his neck, without the luxury of wandering among indistinguishable trees unmindful of the repercussions of getting lost. Back to a city that was feasting on its own blood, the violence so crazy now that all the earlier violence felt like mere pinpricks. Back to a city that bred monsters. Back to a city where I’d have to face my father. Why should I want to go back to any of that?
And yet. When I read the Dawn on-line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing. ‘Because, Karim, you’ve shown me that it’s not so simple to leave a city behind.’
‘You have to see why I can’t go back.’
I nodded. I saw that, for all his obsessing about the city, or perhaps because of his obsessing, Karachi was an abstraction to him, in the way the past is an abstraction, and he lacked the heart to make it a reality. And I saw that everything he had heard about 1971 gave him reason to fear that national politics would again force people he loved to reveal their narrow-mindedness and cowardice and rage, and those people might include Zafar’s daughter, so like her father in so many ways.
‘You were the one who said I needed to stop living in tiny circles.’
‘I’ve found that doesn’t matter to me as much as I thought. Or maybe it’s just that you mean more to me than I knew.’
I stood up, twigs and dry leaves crunching beneath my feet. If Zia had walked through the opening in the trees, I think I might have said yes to New York City and made it all simple.
‘What about Soma?’
He took a deep breath. ‘She’s the loveliest girl in the world. And to marry her because I think no one else will come along for her is such a supreme act of condescension. She said that to me on the phone just the other day.’ He smiled. ‘Except she called it an act of condemnescension.’
‘Just a minute. Aren’t I the loveliest girl in the world?’
‘No, no. You’re not. You’re not, but that doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Just say you won’t go back to Karachi. We’ll escape to the middle of nowhere, and eat roots and berries, and never read a newspaper.’
‘When did love become so dependent on geography?’
‘When personality started to change with location. In Karachi I have to see your reactions to certain things. Amid the roots and berries there’s no cause for those reactions.’
‘I’m sorry if my imperfection makes life inconvenient.’ I jammed my hands in my pocket and stepped further away from him. ‘We can’t all be godlike.’