Trespassing

They were on Drigh Road. A thin light pierced the haze and the sky turned smoky purple. To the south, Daanish could see service lanes ripped out. He’d heard about this. It was part of the Prime Minister’s development scheme: yellow taxis, a new highway, and a computerized telephone system with seven digits instead of six. But the new lines hadn’t been implemented. The roads lay clawed and abandoned like old meat. Once the city awoke, pedestrians would scoop the dirt in their shoes and kick it into the sooty air, to resettle on the next passer-by.

When he’d lived here, he’d rarely been one of those pedestrians. Karachiites walked out of necessity, not for pleasure. Till now, he’d simply accepted this. Beauty and hygiene were to be locked indoors, adding to their value. No one bothered with public space. As if to illustrate, the little boy, tired of the ching-um wrapper, bounced over the bags on Daanish, unrolled the window and tossed the paper out. He then proceeded to empty his pockets on to the street – more wrappers, a Chili Chips packet, and fistfuls of pencil shavings.

No one noticed. The family was filling in the absentees about local events. Since the start of the year, more than three thousand kidnappings were reported and now at least as many Rangers prowled the city. ‘They stop anyone,’ said the mother to whom the boy, now bored with littering, had returned. ‘Shireen told me they were blocked by these horrible Ranger men, but her driver very cleverly kept driving. Anything could have happened.’ She shook her head.

‘Never stop for them,’ agreed her husband.

‘There’s been a curfew in Nazimabad,’ she added.

Another man piped, ‘Dacoits are now attacking everyone. Not just the rich. Just this month they raided a fishermen’s village. I can’t imagine what they took, there are hardly even any fish left!’

‘Oof,’ said a young woman, ‘the price of fish! Don’t even talk about it.’ She promptly gave Khurram’s mother minute details of the quality, size and price of the seafood in the market. The other woman interrupted with her own wisdom.

Amongst the men, another discussion was rapidly rising in crescendo. Khurram was declaring, ‘This street is the longest in Karachi and that is a fact.’ Daanish wasn’t sure how they went from Rangers to road lengths, but he was once more struck by Khurram’s newfound confidence. Even his speech was clearer.

Suddenly, just about every street in Karachi became the longest. ‘No,’ said one man. ‘It is M.A. Jinnah Road.’

Another shook his head, ‘Abdullah Haroon Road – the longest in all of Pakistan.’

‘Nishtar Road,’ said the first, suddenly changing his mind.

‘How long?’ challenged Khurram. ‘Give me facts.’

‘Oh what does it matter how long? As long as Karachi!’

The discussion would take place altogether differently in the States, thought Daanish. There, first a printed page had to be found. This established objectivity. Then an opponent located another printed page defending his position. The result was that debates took place only in writing, while in person, people seldom argued. As the written debate was limited by the availability of material, more original points of view were less likely to be favored. He learned this the hard way, in Wayne’s class.

Here people frequently argued with each other; usually everyone spoke at the same time, and hardly anyone could sustain interest in the debate for very long. The men had ceased disputing the status of the road’s length. Conversation progressed to its original name – was it Shara-e-Faisal or Nursery Road? Khurram insisted it had always been Airport Road while another swore on Highway Road. Then it changed to the distance from one point to another, the time it took to reach one point from another, the likelihood of traffic between the points, the time of day traffic was heaviest, the importance of the time of day in gauging the traffic, the overall increase in traffic, the necessity of cars, the necessity of two cars, and the overall decrease in time, especially time to spend with your friends and family doing just this: chit-chatting. They laughed heartily, agreeing on basically one thing, that the purpose of the match was not to win or lose but to exchange the maximum number of words, for words carried sentiments like messenger doves.

Daanish’s mind wandered no less than the talk around him, only his had a center: his father.

When the doctor had driven him down this stretch three years ago, he’d spoken of himself as a youth newly returned from England, newly titled a doctor. He’d pointed to the dense smog choking the city and frowned. ‘It was a different country then. Barely twenty years old – roughly your age. Cleaner, and full of promise. Then we got ourselves into a war and were cut in half. What have we done?’

Daanish had felt bleak currents swirling around them, and wished the doctor would offer a more savory parting speech. Suddenly, he’d stretched his arm and patted Daanish’s knee. ‘But it’s reassuring to know that you will be a finer mold of me. You will go away and learn how to come back better than I did.’

Daanish shuddered. It was not how he wanted to remember him. He preferred the way his father had been at the cove. Daanish held the picture an instant, and then willed himself there.

The cove was a deliciously isolated respite several kilometers outside the city. Though silt and human waste had destroyed most reefs off Karachi’s shore, just around the bend of the inlet was a small forest of coral where the doctor took Daanish snorkeling.

The first shell Daanish ever came to know was a purple sea snail. It was a one-inch drifter, floating on the surface of the sea, traveling more extensively than most anything alive – or dead. The doctor rolled in the waves on his back, his stomach dipping in and out of the water like a whale’s hump, his hairy navel a small blue pool. Daanish slunk in after him, peering at the shell bobbing like a cork in the curves of a soft tide. His father explained that if disturbed, the mollusk oozed a purple color that the ancient Egyptians had used as a dye. Daanish plucked it out. While his fingers curled around the fragile violet husk, the animal ducked inside. The eight-year-old Daanish tried to understand where it had been, and how much time had lapsed between the Pharaohs, and him.

Later, they scrambled over the boulders that hugged the cove at each end, and walked the length of the beach, his father poking and prodding the shells swept at his feet. He found an empty sea snail and handed it to Daanish. It would come to rest around his neck.

* * *

He touched it now, back in Khurram’s car.

His house would be swarming with family. They’d have flown in from London, Islamabad and Lahore. He could picture his aunts wiping tears with dupattas, picking rosary beads, reciting from the Quran in a weeping chorus. The doctor had cared nothing for such rituals, yet Daanish knew Anu would want them. He could see her teary, kohl-smeared cheeks. He could feel her pulling him, through Drigh Road, past Gol Masjid, down Sunset Boulevard. She was calling for him to make up for her loss.

He looked up at the haze, yearning for yet more interludes.

5 Recess APRIL 1990 (#ulink_baf8a3b0-ad3f-573b-967b-7b97cc0d8b29)

It was spring break. Most of the students had gone home for Easter. The campus, devoid of human life, was ceremonious: the lawns burgeoned with bluets, buttercups and black-eyed susans; the trees with chickadees, titmice, and the plaintive phoebe. Daanish spent his time walking and listening, absorbing the grounds in a way he’d never done before.

He wandered off into a far corner, down a long, narrow path flanked by two straight rows of enormous oak and cedar trees. Behind one rank of trees rose a short wall stretching all the way from the start of the path to the far end. It was the only boundary wall of the campus. Daanish inhaled deeply, delighted to be walking on land that needed only one demarcation. There wasn’t a single house, school, university, park or office in Karachi that was free of four encircling walls, though the US Consulate there had the tallest four walls of all.

He soon approached a rectangular, sunken garden, nestled thickly in the trees. Egg-smooth pebbles littered the circumference of the hollow. Wild thyme sprang from between the pebbles. The patch had been planted with tricolor pansies, bluebells, and cowslips.

Daanish stepped down and stretched beside the flowers. He saw faces in the gnarly old trees. Some uprooted and changed places with one another. Bluebells rang. Cowslips sneezed and a shower of gold dusted his cheek. Up in the sky, white clouds drifted. No haze, no smog. No potholes, beggars, burning litter, kidnappings or dismissed governments. Such beauty in a country that consumed thirty per cent of the world’s energy, emitted a quarter of its carbon dioxide, had the highest military expenditure in the world, and committed fifty years of nuclear accidents, due to which the oceans teemed with plutonium, uranium, and God alone knew what other poisons. It had even toyed with conducting nuclear tests on the moon.

The plump sparkling clouds whispered: We’re dumping it on them, on them.

It was bloody seductive.

Blossoms fell in his hair. He yawned and felt like Alice, tumbling from one chasm into another. Would he too wake up in the safety of his own? His eyelids began to flicker. An oval nuthatch scrambled down and around the length of a bole. He spun with it. The nuthatch became a smooth, round medallion of pure gold. It bobbed on the end of a chain. On the other end of the chain was a key. The key was in a car’s ignition. The doctor drove the car. The medallion swayed like the hands of a clock gone haywire, backwards and forwards, turning minutes into seconds. Inscribed on its one side was the word Shifa. Healing. Underneath, the doctor’s name: Shafqat. Affection. His own father had presented it to him when he returned from England. On the medallion’s other side was the Pakistani flag. Daanish belonged to that flag. He’d come back to it, the doctor declared, better than he had himself. The key-chain bobbed when he said it.

And it danced down the tree, tapping uproariously as it went. The grass was fluorescent and a touch moist. He ran his fingers through it and the pores of his skin opened as he welcomed each sensation. A barn owl swooped across his vision. The moon began to rise. He slept soundly till dawn.

6 Arrival MAY 1992 (#ulink_9277b95e-1850-57d1-be49-9b4f21b514c1)

Her fair skin set off a head of dark, crinkly hair. She held him close, thanking Allah for bringing him home safely. Had the scene occurred under a street light in his college town, passers-by would be faintly embarrassed, if not repulsed. He thought if she said, ‘Thank you Jesus for returning him to me,’ instead of ‘Thank you Allah …’ people would smile or snicker but not think her a fanatic.

He shut his eyes. Never before had he stood in this house plagued by how others might see him. He tried to clear his head, to instead enjoy Anu’s welcoming arms, flabbier now than when he last embraced them, three years ago.

Khurram and his family waved goodbye. The handsome driver’s eyes pierced his own, turning a hint green. ‘You are my friend now,’ Khurram called out. ‘Anything more I can do for you, I am just down the street.’

‘Such a nice boy,’ said Anu as the car drove away.

Lurking behind her, Daanish now saw, was the shadow of his father’s eight sisters. It grew closer, a single mass with sixteen tentacles, pawing and probing like Siamese-octopi. He was being welcomed just like Khurram had been at the airport, but he did not desire it.

One arm caught his throat. ‘You poor poor child! How your father loved you!’

Another tugged his hair, fighting with the first, ‘How exhausted you must be! Come into the kitchen with me …’

A third whipped his cheek and cried, ‘You look sicker than our own! Were you in Amreeka or Afreeka?’

A fourth spun him from the waist, ‘You’re just like he was at your age!’

A fifth yanked his shirt-tail, ‘Who did you miss the most?’

A sixth, ‘Me!’

Seven, ‘His father, ehmak.’

And eight, ‘Look how his jealous mother keeps him all to herself!’

It was true. While they jerked and pinched her only child and hurled insults her way, Anu still held him, and now they were all entangled, resulting in a chorus of loud protests from small bodies in the arms of each aunt, small bodies with wills and suckers of their own. He fell headfirst into their lair.