Taken at Karim’s parents’ wedding, it showed my parents flanking the bride and groom, all four of them laughing. There was no such photograph at my parents’ wedding, which had taken place just months earlier, because Aunty Maheen hadn’t been present. She’d been in the newly created nation of Bangladesh, spending her last weeks as a single woman with her family there. At least, that was the version I’d always been told.
As I looked at the photograph, I began to distrust their laughter. Were they laughing together, as a foursome? Or had the photographer said something amusing to make each of them, as individuals, laugh? They were not looking at one another, not at all; Aunty Maheen was not resting a hand on my mother’s wrist to say ‘I get it, I get it. Too funny, darling’, and Aba was not half-turning towards Uncle Ali to see his own laughter mirrored in his best friend’s face, and though Aunty Maheen was leaning towards Uncle Ali in what I had always taken as a sign of intimacy, perhaps she was really just leaning away from my mother.
The next morning, I went looking for Karim to show him the photograph. I found him in Uncle Asif’s study, looking at the atlas again.
‘Karimazov, where’ve you been?’ I shut the door behind me with what I hoped was a conspiratorial air. ‘We have to talk. I’ve been wondering about your parents’ marriage.’
He looked up at me, blew out air from his cheeks, nodded, gulped, nodded again. ‘OK,’ he said, putting the atlas down and clutching the edge of the desk with both hands. ‘OK.’
‘Their wedding, I mean.’ I held up the photograph, then put it down again. I felt I should say something other than what I had planned to say. He was looking at me as though there was something he wanted me to say. ‘The photograph…’ I put it down in front of him. ‘I just wondered, you know, why it’s the only one of the four of them together at the wedding.’
He didn’t even look at it. He picked up the atlas, cutting off our view of each other, and then swivelled round in the leather chair so that I couldn’t see him at all. ‘Bet you don’t know how many countries border the Soviet Union.’
‘Bet you think everyone’s going to be impressed that you do know,’ I said and walked out. Knowledge had never been something we used against each other. The previous year when Ami’s cousin visited from France and taught me foreign words, five new ones every day, I always called Karim at the end of the day to share the words with him. You could put Karim’s brain in my skull, I believed at the time, and I wouldn’t even notice the swap. Why ruin that over the number of countries bordering the Soviet Union? I suspected the real reason for his new interest in maps was the need to feel superior to me. But I couldn’t say that. Couldn’t say, ‘You just like knowing things that I don’t know,’ because then he’d look even more superior and say, ‘Who said everything I do has to be about you?’ And, I had to admit it, he’d have a point.
I didn’t mention the photograph again that day or the next day, or the day after, but I kept it in my room and whenever I found I’d lost Karim to those infernal maps I’d climb up the nomad girl’s tree, lean against my father’s carving and examine the photograph, searching for clues to the past. That was how Uncle Ali found me, when he came to Rahim Yar Khan to take us home at the end of the winter holidays.
‘What are you doing up there?’ he shouted up to me. I stuffed the photograph into the pocket of my jacket, and climbed down.
‘Nothing.’ I took him by the hand to lead him away from the tree, but after a few paces he stopped and looked back, up to the branch where I had been sitting, his eyes sliding over to the tree trunk. Surely from this angle and this distance he couldn’t see what was written there? He sighed, and then looked at me curiously.
‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said.
‘Do you mind getting sand in your shoes?’
‘Yes.’
We stood and looked at each other for a few seconds, his eyes grave. Uncle Ali always took me seriously, and I loved him for that.
‘I was looking at old pictures,’ I said. ‘Karim has your smile. But you don’t have it any more.’
He looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed without much humour. ‘You’re growing into a perceptive young woman, aren’t you?’ He put an arm round me. ‘Karim has it mainly when you’re around. It’s a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there’s a sun for it to reflect off.’
‘I’m no sun. The sun is stationary, and I can’t stay still for even five minutes. Karim can be the sun. I’ll do the orbiting.’ I pirouetted around Uncle Ali. He took my hand in his and twirled me as though we were dancing.
‘You’re a cool guy, Uncle Ali.’
‘Thank you, sweetheart. If only my son were as easy to convince as you are.’
When I repeated that comment to Karim, as we were preparing to go to the train station later that day, he snorted in disdain. Of late, that had become his standard reaction to anything to do with his father, regardless of the context.
‘Yeah, he’s so cool he’s frozen,’ Karim said. He lifted his suitcase off his bed and carried it to the landing outside, where my suitcase was already waiting for one of Uncle Asif’s innumerable servants to carry it to the car.
Uncle Asif, Aunty Laila and Uncle Ali were all in the drawing room on the ground floor, and as we made our way down the stairs we heard their voices through the wide-open door.
‘But really, Ali, you must all come and stay,’ Aunty Laila was saying. ‘The kids are divine, but we’d quite like to have divinity’s parents’ with us, too. Asif, tell him.’
Karim and I stopped, hoping to overhear more about our sterling qualities as house guests.
Uncle Asif grunted. ‘Of course you must all come. And tell Zafar that this time I won’t take him for a walk and get him lost in the kinoo orchards if he starts his ranting about the need for land reforms.’
‘God, I had forgotten about that. Asif, really, how could you have?’
Uncle Asif laughed. ‘Laila, it was sixteen years ago, and before your civilizing influence. Besides, Zaf wasn’t acting the polite guest himself. Still, I understand why he said those things. I mean, Muhajirs will never understand the way we feel about land. They all left their homes at Partition. No understanding of ties to a place.’
I put out my hand and gripped Karim’s shoulder, stopping him as he was starting to walk, whether towards the drawing room or away from it I couldn’t tell. When my father spoke of the need for land re-forms to break the power of the feudals, he lost his customary languid posture and his soft voice took on an edge of urgency. Even at thirteen, I could link his fervour to a myriad reasons. The socialist professor who set his mind ablaze when he was at university; the capitalist profession he had entered when he started his own advertising agency; the novels he read (my mother always cringed when he referred to Hugo as ‘Old Vic’); the stories he’d heard, firsthand, from employees and prospective employees who left their villages to come to the city, and were willing to do anything at all to earn a living in Karachi, anything but go back to ‘that life’; his analysis of economic reports; his mistrust of humanity’s capacity to be uncorrupted by power. Some reasons were contradictory and some were contradicted by other parts of his life, but all of them, all, were part of the mesh that made up his character. Yet Uncle Asif had summarily dismissed all that with one word: muhajir. Immigrant.
I heard a plate — or was it a saucer? — placed firmly on a table, and Uncle Ali said, ‘I share Zafar’s views on land reform. And I’m not a Muhajir.’
‘Yes, but you’ve lived all those years in Karachi,’ Uncle Asif said, never losing his jolly tone. ‘It’s made you so urban. Don’t get uptight, Ali. I love Zafar, you know I do. And when the revolution comes, I’ll take refuge in his house and he’ll welcome me with open arms and guard me with his life. You, on the other hand, I’m not entirely sure about. Oh, for heaven’s sake, yaar, smile.’