‘At Storrow Drive get into the extreme right lane…’ It sounded simple enough, but no one had prepared me for the rush-hour traffic of Storrow Drive, the horror of being stuck in the extreme left lane with at least three lanes to traverse and not much time to do it. I emptied my mind of all the rule-bound small-town driving I’d been practising in the last few months, further emptied my mind of the thought that I was driving Zia’s beloved black Integra, and reminded myself that I was a Karachiite. Setting my jaw, I slammed on the horn, spun the wheel to the right and, with an utter disdain for the curses that were hurled in my direction, managed to make it over to the requisite lane well before the turn for Aunty Maheen’s flat.
When the concierge asked who I had come to see I realized I didn’t know Aunty Maheen’s last name any more, so I just said, ‘Maheen,’ and the concierge said, ‘Would that be Mrs Ahmed?’ which seemed a fair bet, so I nodded and was directed to the eleventh floor.
I thought I’d cured myself of the habit of fidgeting with my hair when nervous, but as I stood waiting for someone to answer her door bell I kept pulling the ends of my hair, conscious that it was much shorter than the last time she’d seen me. I hoped she was alone. When I had finally summoned up the courage to call her and say I needed to see her, I had been unable to think of a way to tell her I didn’t want to see the Interloper. Not yet. It had been a strange phone conversation, both of us too aware that I’d been in the US almost four years without calling, and that made unsayable all the truths going through my mind: I’ve missed you; it’s so good to hear your voice; I can’t wait to see you.
The door opened. There she stood. There stood a woman who was closer to being family than anyone in my extended family was, and there was that smile of hers which reminded me that of all her child’s friends, and of all her friend’s children, I had always been her favourite.
‘Hello, loveliness,’ I said, and put my arms around her.
She laughed as she hugged me, all my failures of communication forgiven, and I saw immediately that for all her years away from home she was still a ‘Karachi aunty’ in the best possible sense of the term.
‘Inside, inside, move inside,’ she said when we finally drew apart, taking my coat and hanging it on the clothes rack, off which it promptly slipped. Aunty Maheen moved as though about to pick it up, and then waved her hand dismissively in the coat’s direction. ‘Floor’s clean,’ she said. ‘Now take this’—she handed me a cup of tea—‘and go and sit down, while I finish things in the kitchen.’
I watched her walk towards the kitchen and couldn’t stop smiling. She was a plump woman now, but there seemed something so contented about that. And her walk, her mannerisms, were still so familiar that I wanted to run into the kitchen after her and throw my arms around her again.
I walked across the wooden floor into the living-room area, where the furthest wall had large windows looking down on to the Charles River and on to Boston’s skyline. On the console table against the wall were framed photographs. A couple were of Aunty Maheen and her husband, smiling; several showed Karim in various stages of growing up, including a recent one of him and the Interloper doubled over with laughter, pointing at a burning frying pan; the largest of the photographs showed Aunty Maheen in Karachi with eight or ten of her friends — my parents stood to either side of Aunty Maheen and my father had his arm around her shoulder.
How could she ever think back to what he said to Shafiq and not tear up this photograph?
Aunty Maheen walked out of the kitchen with a plate of pakoras, and sat down right next to me, balancing the plate on her knee. ‘So have you heard from my son?’
Every day. Every hour. A million conversations, none of them real.
‘Raheen?’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘Have you heard from him since you left Karachi, because, sweetie, I haven’t; not that it surprises me.’
‘He didn’t come to see you a couple of weeks ago?’
She shook her head and handed me a small plate of pakoras. ‘He’d been planning to, but I don’t know what happened. He’ll show up eventually. He always does. Oh, look at you.’ She held me at arm’s length and beamed. ‘Much too much to talk about, so let’s start with how is everyone. What are all those scab-kneed boys and girls who my son grew up with doing with their lives?’
‘Nothing special. Finishing university, deciding what next. Waiting for proposals to arrive from boys of good breeding who don’t care that your father is a suspected drugs smuggler.’
Aunty Maheen patted my hand. ‘That was awful. Poor Sonia. Laila told me all about the newspaper announcement. Can you believe anyone would do something so low?’
Such questions are usually rhetorical, but Aunty Maheen looked at me as though expecting an answer. I shrugged. ‘Yes, I believe it. It’s awful, but I believe it. Just as I believe Zia’s father could arrange the police harassment. And I believe all of us just assumed he was guilty. And still do, even though all charges are dropped. I don’t like any of it, but I believe all of it.’
Aunty Maheen nodded. ‘I would never have said that at your age. That’s what it did, you see. Bangladesh. It made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.’
I nodded and nibbled on my pakora. I hadn’t even spoken to Aba since Karachi, though I sometimes called Ami at the office. She kept telling me to come home.
‘Does it get talked about?’ Auntie Maheen said, ‘The Civil War?’
I shook my head. ‘Only in story fragments.’
Speaking of staying up till dawn, remember during the war when we said we’d keep drinking until sunrise, but that was the night they bombed the oil refineries and the smoke covered the sun, so we just carried on drinking until well after noon.
Don’t you remember the scandal, when she was engaged to him but he was a POW in Bangladesh so she married the other one instead?
Never throw anything away. In ‘yi, when the bomb fell in the empty plot next door to us, the heat from the blast was so incredible the blades of the ceiling fan in our bedroom curled up like a tulip, and don’t you think that would have been worth quite a lot as war memorabilia if I hadn’t chucked it out?
‘Those are the kinds of thing we hear about ’71,’ I told Aunty Maheen, and thought to myself, also, the story of you and my father.
Aunty Maheen said, ‘Also, the story of me and your father.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Also that.’
‘I spoke to him a few minutes ago.’
A pakora fell out of my hand and on to the floor, leaving a smear of chutney on the hardwood.
‘What are you so surprised about? It’s not uncommon for me to talk to them on the phone. You know your mother called me just after both you and Karim left Karachi, to tell me what happened at Asif and Laila’s?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, of course she did. And then I called Ali. To find out who had told Karim about the way the engagement broke off. Of course, I knew it wasn’t Ali…or, at least, not the Ali I had known, although it’s been a while and people change. I have. Who would have thought my Ali would turn into a middle-aged Lothario?’ She looked past me, frowning, not necessarily displeased so much as surprised, perhaps even trying to chart the course her life might have taken if both she and Uncle Ali had given each other the room to turn away from the caricature of opposites that their marriage settled into. ‘First proper conversation I’ve had with him in years. Not just some formal talk to discuss Karim’s flight details or school reports. We were never very good at talk, Ali and I. But I think we’ve improved with age.’