Soon Papa’s servant was making us tea and toast. Papa, not only as thin but as fragile as a Giacometti, yet dignified in his white salwar kameez and sandals, informed us we would not be staying with him but with our uncle, his older brother Yasir. To be honest, it was a relief.
“What the fuck is this, a squat?” Miriam said when we were alone.
It turned out that Father, an aristocrat to those he left behind, was living in a crumbling flat, the walls peeling, the wires exposed, the busted furniture seeming to have been distributed at random, as though a place would be found for it later. Dust blew in through the windows, settling amongst the ragged piles of newspaper rustling on the floor and the packets of unused white paper already curling in the heat.
Later that morning, saying he had to write his column, Papa got his servant to drive us to Yasir’s. It was a broad one-storey house that looked like a mansion in movies set in Beverly Hills, an empty swimming pool full of leaves at the front and rats rushing through them.
Miriam was annoyed we weren’t staying with Dad, but I went along with the adventure. For a suburban kid with not very much, I like my luxuries. And luxuries there were at Yasir’s, exactly how I liked them.
It was a house of doe-eyed beauties. There were at least four. “The Raj Quartet,” I called them. I was still mourning Ajita, of course, as well as assuming we could get back together when she eventually returned to London. I had never given up on her. When the time was right, I would tell her what had happened to her father, and she would be shocked, but she’d forgive me, seeing that it had to be done. We would be closer than before; we would marry and have children.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me that this quartet of dark-skinned, long-haired women staring at us from a doorway, Uncle Yasir’s daughters, might help me bear my pain.
I was looking at the girls, confronting the anguish of choice, not unlike a cat being offered a box of captive mice, when there was a commotion. Apparently there was a rabid dog on the roof. We rushed out to see it being chased by servants with long sticks. The servants got a few good cracks in, and the dog lay injured in the road outside, making god-awful noises. When we went out later, it was dead. “You like our country?” said the house guard.
Miriam was told that she not only had to share a room with two of her cousins but with a servant too, a couple of children and our grandmother, who was, apparently, a princess. This old woman spoke little English and washed her hands and clothes continuously; the rest of the time she spent either praying or studying the Koran.
It was a large house, but the women kept to their side of it and they were very close with one another. So Miriam and I were separated, and each day we did different things, as we always had at home. I liked to read the books I’d brought with me, while Miriam would go to the market with the women and then cook with them. In the evenings, Dad and his friends would come over, or I’d go with him to their houses.
When Papa was writing his column, which he began early in the morning, I’d sit in his flat listening to the heroes of ska and blue beat while being shaved by his servant. Papa was working on a piece ostensibly about families called “The Son-in-Law Also Rises.” It was giving him difficulty because, having written it straightforwardly, he then had to obscure it, turning it into a kind of poetic code, so the reader would understand it but not the authorities.
Dad’s weekly column was on diverse subjects, all obliquely political. Why were there not more flowers bordering the main roads in Karachi? Surely the more colour there was-colour representing democracy-the more lively everything would be? His essay on the fact that people wash too often, and would have more personality if they were dirtier-thus expressing themselves more honestly-was about the water shortages. An essay ostensibly about the subtle beauty of darkness and the velvet folds of the night was about the daily electricity breakdowns. He’d hand them to me for my suggestions, and I even wrote a couple of paragraphs, my first published works.
This work having been done, at lunchtime we’d tour the city, visiting Dad’s friends, mostly old men who’d lived through the history of Pakistan, and ending up at my father’s club.
In the evening we’d go to parties where the men wore ties and jackets, and the women jewellery and pretty sandals. There were good manners, heavy drinking, and much competitive talk of favours, status and material possessions: cars, houses, clothes.
Far from being “spiritual,” as Miriam understood it, Karachi was the most materialistic place we had been. Deprivation was the spur. I might have considered my father’s friends to be vulgar and shallow, but it was I who was made to feel shabby, like someone who’d stupidly missed a good opportunity in Britain. I was gently mocked by these provincial bourgeois, with my father watching me carefully to see how I coped. What sort of man, half here and half there, had I turned out to be? I was an oddity again, as I had been at school.
All the same, my father was educating me, telling me about the country, talking all the time about partition, Islam, liberalism, colonialism. I may have been a feisty little British kid with Trot acquaintances and a liking for the Jam, but I began to see how much Dad needed his liberal companions who approved of Reagan and Thatcher. This was anathema to me, but it represented “freedom” in this increasingly Islamised land. Dad’s friends were, like him, already alienated in this relatively new country, and he believed their condition would get worse as the country became more theocratic. As Dad said, “There are few honest men here. In fact, I may be the only one! No wonder there are those who wish to establish a republic of virtue.”
Many of my father’s friends tried to impress on me that I, as a member of the “coming-up” generation, had to do my best to keep freedom alive in Pakistan. “We are dying out here, yaar. Please, you must help us.” The British had gone, there’d been a vacuum, and now the barbarians were taking over. Look what had happened in Iran: the “spiritual” politics of the revolution had ended in a vicious, God-kissed dictatorship with widespread amputations, stonings and executions. If the people there could remove a man as powerful as the shah, what might happen in other Muslim countries?
I learned that Father was an impressive man, articulate, amusing and much admired for his writing. He’d almost gone to jail; only his “connections” had kept him out. He had been defiant but never stupid. I read his pieces, collected at last, in a book published only in Pakistan. In such a corrupt place, he represented some kind of independence, authority and integrity.
If he seemed to have the measure of life, it wasn’t long before I had to put to him the question I was most afraid of: Why hadn’t he stayed with us? What made him come here? Why had we never been a proper family?
He didn’t shirk the question but went at it head-on, as if he’d been expecting it for years and had prepared. Apart from the “difficulties” he had with Mother-the usual stuff between a man and a woman, at which I nodded gravely, as though I understood-there had been an insult, he said. He had liked Mum. He still respected her, he said. It was odd to hear him speaking about her as a girlfriend he’d had years ago but now, clearly, was indifferent to.
I learned, though, that he had had, briefly, at the same time as Mum, another girlfriend, whose parents had invited him to dinner at their house in Surrey. They were eating when the mother said, “Oh, you can eat with a knife and fork? I thought you people normally ate with your fingers.”