I scrambled off the branch. ‘Come on,’ I said to Karim. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ But he stayed where he was, running his fingers over the letters, again and again. ‘Stop it,’ I called out from the base of the tree. ‘Stop doing that.’ But he ignored me, and I could not stay to argue for the queasiness in my stomach.
. .
Uncle Chaperoo was supposed to accompany us back to Karachi when our three weeks in RYK were up, but he decided to elope instead. At least, that’s what he wanted everyone to believe, but Uncle Asif saw things a little differently. I was having tea with Uncle Asif in front of the fireplace when Uncle Chaperoo called with the news, and Uncle Asif put the call on his newly acquired speaker-phone.
‘Bhai, Umber and I have eloped,’ Uncle Chaperoo said.
‘What? You’ve married her! Wonderful. And about time.’
‘We’ve eloped!’
‘Let me speak to her. I want to welcome her to the family.’
‘We love each other. We don’t care what anyone else says.’
‘Excellent. Where’s the honeymoon? When you return we’ll throw a huge reception for the two of you.’
‘We’re prepared to live on love!’
‘I’ll get Laila on the line right away. She’ll be so happy.’
‘We’ve eloped, damn you!’
Uncle Asif hung up, and shook his head. ‘Such assumptions, such assumptions! From my own brother.’ He threw another log on to the fire and watched the sparks fly. ‘At a time like this, Raheen, should I care about anything other than whether he’s happy? Have I not always said that I wish to be the most unfeudal feudal in this country?’
‘You don’t seem very decadent to me,’ I said by way of comfort. ‘Though it’s true you live in luxury and don’t seem to spend a lot of time doing anything that looks even a little bit like work.’ I tilted my head and looked at him sideways. ‘I could see you lying on a couch in a toga, eating peeled grapes. Uncle Ali said that’s the real definition of decadence.’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? It requires a certain genetic disposition to say something like that at the age of thirteen and yet manage to be utterly charming.’
‘I’m not the charming one,’ I said, putting my feet up on the coffee table. ‘That’s Karim. He’s got natural charm. I mean, you see him across a room and you know you’ll like him.’
‘And you?’ Uncle Ali said. ‘What do people think when they see you across a room?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘But usually if I’m in a room I’m with Karim, Sonia, Zia. One or all of them. And then you’d notice Sonia, because she’s gorgeous, and you’d notice Zia because he’s completely cool, and you’d notice Karim because you can’t help but notice Karim. Me, I guess you’d notice that all three of them choose to be my friends. And that must say something.’ It was true; I knew quite well that there was nothing remarkable about me. This is not to say I suffered insecurities because of everything I lacked. There wasn’t a great deal that I did lack. I was intelligent enough, attractive enough, witty enough, cool enough. On sports day I won silver medals and even, occasionally, a gold; in school concerts I got speaking parts rather than being relegated to ‘a rock’ or ‘crowd scene’; when teams were picked for anything, anything at all, I was never, ever, the last to be chosen; I knew all the words to all the songs on Whaml’s ‘Make It Big’ album, and had been the one to inform a group of sixteen-year-olds that the line from ‘Wake Me Up’ was not ‘You make the sun shine brighter than the darkest day’, which made no sense at all, but rather ‘You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day’. I could do a dead-on imitation of Qabacha from ‘Tanhaiyan’; Qadir, not Imran, was my favourite bowler. And perhaps all this might have meant that I was remarkable for being a perfect blend of admirable traits, except for the fact that there were other things blended in, colder things. I didn’t know how to embrace the world, the way Karim did; I didn’t know how to make strangers feel at home, the way Sonia did; and I didn’t know how to embody a loyalty so fierce it meant putting myself at risk for others in any fight, even the fights that seemed absurd, the way Zia did.
‘Hmmm…’ Uncle Asif stared down at his toes and made them wiggle. ‘But I notice you, even when there’s no one else around.’
I smiled at him. ‘That’s because I really like you, and you know it.’
‘Ah, there’s that charm again.’ He picked up a poker and smiled at me. ‘I liked all my parents’ friends when I was your age. Then I grew up and began to understand what kind of people they were and, you know, a lot of them just weren’t very nice. Maybe one day, when you’re old enough to see beneath the smiling veneer, you won’t like me any more.’
Unsure if he was serious or not, I curled on to the sofa and looked at the framed black-and-white photograph on the coffee table of Uncle Asif baring his teeth in half-grimace, half-leer, at a camel which had pushed its snout to within inches of his face. ‘Doubt it,’ I said.
He waved the poker in my direction. ‘An aphorism from the middle-aged to the extremely youthfuclass="underline" you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.’
The tree carving hadn’t been far from my mind since I’d seen it; the memory of it gave rise to an uneasiness in my stomach. ‘Why didn’t my father marry Karim’s mother?’
Uncle Asif turned away and poked the fire with vigour. Sparks flew up and leapt over the grate. ‘That’s not my story to tell.’
‘In other words,’ I said to Karim later that night, as I sat in the bay seat of his bedroom window, ‘there is a story there.’
He nodded and brought two bowls over to the window from his bedside, liquid sloshing against the sides as he walked. Green dye in one and purple in the other. ‘I got them from one of the nomad boys. In exchange for my marbles. Because green and purple seemed like map colours. But now I don’t know what to do with them.’
I looked down at the ceramic bowls uneasily. I had the strong suspicion they were expensive items of art; I had a stronger suspicion the dye might not wash off very easily. ‘Good you got rid of the marbles. They were beginning to give me the creeps.’ They really were. They looked too much like the eyes of the nomads’ mad goat with its twisted horns that resembled dried leaves curling in on themselves.
Karim tore a piece of paper out of a legal pad and sat down across from me. Jackals howled in the distance. I dipped my hand in green dye and pressed it against the paper. Karim dipped his hand in purple dye and pressed it over my palm print. Karim’s hand was smaller but his fingers were broader. Some of the lines of our hands ran together for a while in purple — green, then veered off in different directions. I half-expected the letters ‘Z’ and ‘M’ to appear on the paper.
‘How do you think it happened?’ he asked.
‘I think the mad goat’s father came untethered and chased your mother around the dunes, and your father came by and saved her. And over on the other side of the farm a crazy bull was chasing my father and my mother waved her red sari at it to make it change course and, olé! Love swap!’
Karim laughed shortly. ‘My father’s not the kind of guy to walk out into the dunes. Sand in his shoes. He wouldn’t like that.’ He pushed his hair off his face, leaving a purple smudge, like a bruise, on his forehead.
‘OK, so what’s your version?’ I wiped my hands on his jeans.