‘She could hear everything, yes, but you also knew that if she walked a step further, Shafiq would have seen her. You had to get him out of there, right then. That was your first concern.’ I banged his chest with my fist. ‘You thought he had a knife. Bunty, your old friend, Bunty, had beaten you up, and he hadn’t lost a brother.’
‘I could have pushed him out and slammed the door and locked it.’
‘You don’t push men with knives, Aba. You talk them down. You placate them.’
‘I could have said, actually we’ve just broken our engagement. Let’s go to your place and I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘He would have guessed you were lying. You had to say something shocking enough that he wouldn’t see it as a lie…’
‘I couldn’t leave Maheen. Just after the war, how could I bring myself to leave her with everything going on. But if she left me, if I said something completely unforgivable…”
‘You wanted to save her.’
‘I wanted to save myself.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’ We both said that, at exactly the same instant, and both fell silent.
‘That look in her eyes, Raheen,’ he said eventually. ‘When I turned to look at her, just after I said what I said. I would have given up anything — my city, my friends, my life — to erase that look from her eyes. It’s when I knew I still loved her, beyond everything else. But when I opened my mouth to explain, I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I had said it. Right then two entirely divergent explanations asserted themselves with equal force in my brain. Both, Raheen, seemed possible. Perhaps that was crime enough: that both seemed possible.’ He sounded unutterably weary. ‘Which isn’t to say it doesn’t matter. The truth matters, of course. Was I the protector or the coward? I don’t know.’ He pulled himself up straight. ‘I’ll never know.’
Without waiting for a response, he walked past me, back to the house. As I watched him go, I knew I wasn’t watching either the father I adored or the father who had betrayed me with his own weakness, but a middle-aged man who had revealed to me the terror and the pity that I might still just be able to avoid.
. .
There are two ways to escape suffering [the inferno where we live every day]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
— Italo Calvino
Karim,
There’s a street in Karachi that follows the moon.
Near an Imam Baragh, there’s a line of houses, with hack and front doors and no boundary walls. When the lunar calendar enters the month of Muhurram, Shia women make their way to the Imam Baragh daily. There is a back door to the Imam Baragh for them, for the ones in purdah, and to reach that back door without being gazed upon by strangers in the open streets they walk through the neighbourhood houses. Back and front doors are flung open, and the women walk through from the hallway of one house to the hallway of another until that alley within houses takes them all the way to the door of the Imam Baragh. It is an alley without name, it is an alley that ceases to exist when the moon disappears, but it is an alley all the same and one that says more about Karachi than anything you’llfind on a street map.
Your mother called the other day to say she’s given you a copy of my father’s letter. In it he speaks of Karachi’s war stories that are personal in a way which excludes everything outside the story. I
understand now, at last, what this has to do with street names. I’ve always thought it wonderful that everyone I know in Karachi gives directions in terms of landmarks and stories — go to the submarine roundabout; turn into the lane where the car thief accosted Zia; drive until you come to Soma’s father’s office. Such familiarity, such belonging, wrapped up in every set of directions. Don’t deny there’s something remarkable about that; we belong to a city invested in storytelling. It is in our blood. But you can only be familiar with those you know well, you can only know the stories of those to whom you’ve bothered to listen. What happens to all those streets that hold no stories for us? Do we simply stay away from them? I’ve lived my life in such limited circles and it’s your voice I hear now, telling me the limited can be so limiting.
But what has this to do with us? You think my limited life excluded you before, will exclude you again. Karim, I can’t deny I’ve been selfish. Your mood has always been so infectious, no antibodies in my blood to keep me immune from the way you feel. So I’ve always wanted to make you laugh and see you laughing instead of having to weep your tears. I thought you knew that. How could you ever think it was lack of caring that made me turn away from the sight of you in pain?
Am I trying to say my selfishness is a mark of love? How can selfishness and love coexist? Ask the city we live in.
Karachi at its worst is a Karachi unconcerned with people who exist outside the storyteller’s circle, a Karachi oblivious to people and places who aren’t familiar enough for nicknames. What I’ve sometimes mistaken for intimacy is really just exclusion. But Karachi is always dual. Houses are alleys; car thieves are the people to help you when your car won’t start; pollution simultaneously chokes you and makes you gasp at the beauty of unnatural sunsets; a violent, fractured place dismissive of everyone outside its boundaries is vibrant, embracing, accepting of outsiders; and, yes, selfishness is the consequence of love.
No simple answers in Karachi. Just when we decide that intimacy is exclusionary, a man at the airport turns round and gives us his car-keys, a motia seller calls us ‘sister’ and adorns our wrists with flowers, families fling open their doors and avert their eyes and help us make our way to places of worship; at its best, Karim, Karachi is intimate with strangers.
If I am truly to call myself a product of this city, how can I not find it in me to learn that much easier lesson: how to be intimate with my intimates.
This is not an epiphany, it’s just the start of an attempt to be brave enough to think about certain things that terrify me. There’s a letter we’ve both read which urges me to face the terror. What my father said and what he wrote were part of both our pasts, and to pretend the matter can be easily discussed and resolved is to deny how deep in our marrow consequences are lodged. We have to every day live with the truth and every day find a way towards unblinking, unsentimental compassion that renders forgiveness irrelevant. And compassion has to wheel all about us, in concomitantly widening and narrowing circles. To look at waves and understand that when they break they start to re-form, that seems crucial, though perhaps I’m getting my metaphors all tangled up.
I love this place, Karim, for all its madness and complications. It’s not that I didn’t love it before, but I loved it with a child’s kind of love, the kind that either ends or strengthens as understanding grows.
I can see you, out there, reading between the lines.