As I considered the serious side of Papa’s attack, I drifted around Yasir’s house wondering what to do with myself. I’d already learned how difficult it was to find solitude in this country. The price of an extended and strong family was that everyone scrutinised and overlooked one another continuously; every word or act was discussed, usually with disapproval.
One day I discovered that my uncle also had a library. Or at least there was a room called “the library,” which contained a wall of books, and a long table and several chairs. The room was musty but clean. No one ever used it, like front parlours in the suburbs.
I took in the books, which were hardbacks. Poetry, literature, a lot of left-wing politics, many published by Victor Gollancz. They’d been bought in London by one of my uncles and shipped to Pakistan. The uncle, who lived in Yasir’s house but now “roamed around all day,” had developed schizophrenia. In his early twenties he’d been a brilliant student, but his mind had deteriorated.
I sat at the library table and opened the first book, the contents crumbling and falling on the floor, as though I had opened a packet of flour upside down. I tried other volumes. In the end my reading schedule was determined by the digestion of the local worms. As it happened there was, by chance, one book less fancied by the worms than others. It was the Hogarth edition of Civilisation and Its Discontents, which I had never read before. It occurred to me, as I went at it, that it was more relevant to the society in which I was presently situated than to Britain. Whatever: I was gripped from the first sentence, which referred to “what is truly valuable in life…”
What was truly valuable in life? Who wouldn’t have wanted to know that? I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. Of course, I was maddened by the fact that whole sentences had been devoured by the local wildlife. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to return to London was that I wanted to read it properly. In the end, the only way to satisfy my habit-if I didn’t want to ask my father for books, which I didn’t-was to read the same pages over and over.
Often, my only companion was my schizophrenic uncle, who would sit at the end of the table, babbling, often entertainingly, with a Joycean flow. The meaning, of course, was opaque to me, but I loved him and wanted to know him. There was no way in. I was as “in” as I was going to get.
While I settled into a daily routine of carefully turning the medieval parchment pages of old books, I noticed a movement at the door. I said nothing but could see Najma, at twenty-one the youngest female cousin, watching me. She waited for me to finish, smiling and then hiding her face whenever I looked at her. I had played with her in London as a kid. We had met at least once a year, and I felt we had a connection.
“Take me to a hotel, please,” she said. “This evening.”
I was mad with excitement. The bum also rises.
This advent of heterosexuality surprised me a little. I had already been made aware of the broad sensuality of Muslim societies. The women, for instance, who slept in the same room, were forever caressing and working one another’s hair and bodies; and the boys always holding hands, dancing and giggling together in someone’s bedroom, playing homoerotically. They talked of how lecherous the older men were, particularly teachers of the Koran, and how, where possible, you had to mind your arse in their presence. Of course, many of my favourite writers had gone to Muslim countries to get laid. I recalled Flaubert’s letters from Egypt: “Those shaved cunts make a strange effect-the flesh is hard as bronze and my girl had a splendid arse.” “At Esna in one day I fired five times and sucked three.” As for the boys, “We have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation.”
I had been introduced to young men of my age, and went out with them a few times, standing around brightly decorated hamburger and kebab stalls, talking about girls. But compared to these boys, after what happened with Ajita, I had little hope. They seemed too young, I was alienated and had no idea where I belonged, if anywhere now. I would have to make a place. Or find someone to talk to.
It took Najma three hours to get ready. I’d never waited so long for a girl before and hope to never again. I was reminded, unfortunately, once more of Ajita, who was inevitably late for classes, giving the excellent excuse that she didn’t want the lecturer to see her with bad hair.
Najma turned up aflame with colour, in a glittering salwar kameez with gold embroidery. On her wrists she had silver bangles; on her hands there was some sort of brown writing; her hair resembled a swinging black carpet, and she wore more make-up than I’d seen on anyone aside from a junkie transvestite friend of Miriam’s. Najma didn’t need the slap; she was young, and her skin was like the surface of a good cup of coffee.
I assumed we were going to the hotel to fuck. I didn’t realise that the Karachi hotels were the smartest places in town, where all the aspiring courting couples went. The radical Muslims were always threatening to bomb these hotels-and did occasionally-but as there were no bars and few restaurants in the city, there was nowhere else to go, apart from private houses.
Sitting there in my ragged black suit-I could scratch my crack through the gash in the behind-drinking nothing stronger than a salted lassi, all I did was worry about the size of the bill and feel as out of place as I did on the street. But in the car on the way home, Najma asked if I’d let her suck me off. It sounded like a good idea, particularly as I doubted whether I’d be able to find my way through the complicated layers of clothes she seemed to be wearing. She pulled over somewhere. As I ran my fingers through Najma’s black hair, I thought it could have been Ajita who was satisfying me. At the end she said, “I love you, my husband.”
Husband? I put this down to the poetic exaggerations of passion. Najma and I had a lot of time together, and after our first lovemaking she made it clear she was in love with me. I liked that about her. I fall in love too easily myself. You see a face and the fantasies start, like tapping on the magic lantern.
She liked to deride the West for its “corruption” and “excess.” It was a dirty place, and she couldn’t wait to move there, to escape the cul-de-sac which was Pakistan, the increasing violence, the power of the mullahs and the bent politicians. I would be her ticket.
I’d read, and she’d lie with her head in my lap, talking. Other women who came to the house were training as doctors and airline pilots, but the Chekhovian women in my family only wanted to get away, to America or Britain-Inglestan, it was called-except that they couldn’t do it without a sufficiently ambitious husband. The ones left behind, or waiting to leave, watched videos of Bollywood movies, visited friends and aunties, gossiped, went out for kebabs, but otherwise were forced into indolence, though their imaginations remained lush and hot.
I didn’t want the sucking to stop. I liked it a lot, along with the spanking and other stuff I hadn’t yet got round to. Najma liked-she was very fond of-the economics, too. Not a Merc, darling, I’d say, when she seemed to think that that was what we’d move around London in. I’d prefer a Jag. I’ve had Jags, even a Roller, a Bentley for a week, but I sent it back. I’ve had a lot of trouble with Mercs, they’re always breaking down, the big ends go, Jesus.
Then I’d tell her New York wasn’t enough for her. We would have to go out to L.A., to Hollywood, where the swimming pools were top-class and maybe she could become an actress, she had the looks.
“Next week?” she said.
“Maybe,” I said, hastening to add that, though I might seem a bit short of money at the moment, I’d had it before and soon would again, once I started back at work. It wouldn’t take someone as smart as me long to make real money.