14

Hiroko exited the sanctuary of the bookshop with its thick walls and slowly whirring fans into the chaos and furnace-like heat of Saddar. This used to be her favourite part of Karachi in the early days, when almost every one of the yellow-brick colonial buildings housed a café or bookstore, before it became a thoroughfare for buses with their noxious exhaust fumes and the impassioned university students disappeared into a new campus built far away, while the migrants who had crowded in refugee camps within walking distance of here went wheeling into distant satellite towns. Now every time she came here another several bookstores or cafés had disappeared, often replaced by the electronic shops through which her son loved to wander.

       The one she most missed was Jimmy’s Coffee Shop with the art deco stairs leading up to the ‘family section’ with lurid green walls where, for years, she used to meet a group of Japanese women on the first Saturday of each month at 5 p.m. Those monthly meetings had started in early ’48 when she and Sajjad were still living in the refugee camps, not so far from here, and he had come running to find her one evening and said he’d met a Japanese woman, her husband worked at the Embassy, she was sitting in one of the cafés waiting for Sajjad to bring Hiroko to meet her. Through her, Hiroko met the other Japanese wives in Karachi, and entered their weekly gatherings at Jimmy’s – it had meant a lot, more than she would have guessed, to have the promise of an evening every week to sit and laugh in Japanese. She never told any of them about the birds on her back, though. Considering it now, she decided the day she knew her life had tilted into feeling ‘at home’ in Karachi was when she found she was able to tell her neighbourhood friends that she had lived through the bombing of Nagasaki, while still insisting to the Japanese women that, although she grew up there, she was in Tokyo when the bomb fell.

       The ripple ice cream at that café – she closed her eyes to remember it – was particularly wonderful. But really, the heart went out of those meetings when the capital shifted to Islamabad in 1960, taking the Japanese Embassy with it. The café stopped reserving the entire family section for them, though the meetings continued – Hiroko’s participation becoming more sporadic after Raza was born – until the demolition of the café a few years ago brought an end to the weekly gatherings altogether. She found herself mourning the loss, even though in the last years prior to Jimmy’s closing she had attended the meetings mainly from a sense of obligation – she had become the fount of wisdom about all things Karachi-related for the group.

       She wondered sometimes near the end if she seemed as foreign to the newer members of the group as they did to her – so Japanese! she sometimes caught herself thinking. The only person she could really talk to about this was the one Pakistani member of the group – Rehana, who had spent twenty years in Tokyo before her Japanese husband had come to Karachi to set up an automobile plant. Rehana had grown up in the hills of Abbottabad, and said Karachi might be part of the same country as her childhood home but it was still as foreign to her as Tokyo, ‘but I’m at home in the idea of foreignness.’ When Hiroko heard her say that she knew she’d found a friend. But now Rehana was back in Abbottabad – she had moved there two years ago when her husband died – and months could go by without Hiroko going to the Japan Cultural Centre and meeting other past members of the group, though there were several for whom she retained an affection.

       As she retained an affection for Saddar, despite the electronics shops and the loss of Jimmy’s, she thought, looking around. There was one world at street-level – frenzied, jostling, entirely in the now: pavement vendors, large glass display windows, neon signs, gaping manholes, rapid-fire bargaining, brakes and horns and throaty engine sounds, the rush, the thrum of urban life – and then, overhead, if you stood still, shoulders squared against the passers-by, and looked at the arched windows, the cupolas, the intricate carvings, there was another world of buildings constructed in the belief that life moved at a different pace, more elegant, more pompous.

       She was entirely happy for the pomposity to be displaced, but there was something else seeping into the atmosphere, worse than electronic shops, which made her uneasy. A few minutes earlier she’d picked up a copy of War and Peace to replace her battered copy, shaking her head in fond exasperation at the memory of her son telling her time and again that eventually he’d learn Russian and then he’d read it, when a man standing beside her – the air of ordinariness about him – said, ‘You mustn’t read their books. They are the enemies of Islam.’

       After the man left, the bookseller apologised.

       ‘Strange times we’re in,’ he said. ‘The other day a group of young men with fresh beards came in and started to pull all the books off their shelves, looking at the covers for which were unIslamic.’

       ‘What makes a cover unIslamic?’ Hiroko asked.

       ‘Portraiture,’ the man replied. ‘Particularly of women. Fortunately, there was a policeman walking past who saw what they were doing and came and stopped them. But I don’t know what’s happening in this country.’

       ‘It won’t last,’ Hiroko assured him. When any of her friends in the staff room complained of this new wave of aggressive religion which was beginning to surface in some of their students she always told them that compared to the boys she’d first taught who dreamt of kamikaze flights these Karachi boys with their strange fervour for a world of rigidity were just posturing youths. And in any case, nothing could supplant cricket as their true system of worship.

       Ignoring the crippled beggar who had dashed crazily across the street in his wheeled crate to get to the foreigner in whom he saw the possibility of compassion long since erased from locals, she looked around for her son. He was late, which was unlike him, but everything in Raza had been a little bit strange these last weeks since he finished his exams. She couldn’t explain to Sajjad exactly what disturbed her, beyond saying there was a falseness about their boy as he threw himself into enjoying the time before college, talking loudly and excitedly about the law, boasting that when the exam results came out his name would be at the top of the list – he who’d always been so circumspect about his successes. She found herself thinking that she shouldn’t have agreed when the teachers suggested he skip a class – intellectually he was ready for it, but there was so much growing up to be done in the year between sixteen and seventeen and she wondered if he was yet ready for the next stage of life.

       ‘Ma!’ Raza pulled up in Sajjad’s car, extending his torso through the window to take the heavy bag of books out of her hands, impervious to the car horns behind him.

       ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I forgot my other shopping inside. Go round the block and come back.’ Without waiting for a response she darted back into the shop.

       Raza continued sitting where he was, taking a strangely masochistic pleasure in the humid stillness which made sweat stains bloom on his shirt. As the beeping of horns grew more insistent he gestured to the cars behind to go round, even though there was no room for them to manoeuvre. The crippled beggar raised a hand in supplication towards the open car window but Raza’s indifferent ‘Forgive me’ – the words a matter of custom, rather than meaning – convinced him that nothing would be gained by staying here. As the man wheeled away, Raza’s hand rested briefly on the afternoon newspaper on the dashboard, its reflection in the windscreen revealing columns of names – the exam results. Grimacing, he picked up the newspaper and slid it beneath the mat on which his feet were resting. Almost immediately, he changed his mind and returned it to the dashboard.

       At least it had finally happened. No more lying, no more pretence. By the time he arrived home he knew all the boys in the neighbourhood would have seen the newspaper. Who would be the first of them, he wondered, to stop scanning the lists of candidates who had ‘passed’ and realise that it wasn’t just an error that prevented him from finding Raza’s name where it should be?

       And when they asked him what had happened, urged him to appeal to the Board because obviously it was a mistake, it couldn’t be anything else, right, Junior, right, even total idiots got the 33 per cent required to pass – what would he say then? How could he explain to anyone – when he didn’t understand himself – what had happened the final day of the exams when he sat down to the Islamic-studies paper?

       The initial moment of panic when he looked at the questions was nothing new. For years he’d been familiar with this sickening sense of free fall as his eyes jumped from one question to the next, unable to finish reading one before darting forward, individual words and phrases from different questions clumping together in his mind to create an unintelligible mass. But then he’d steady himself, force his mind into quietness and read more slowly – and meaning would attach to the words, answers flying from his pen to the paper as quickly as he could write. There had been times, through these Inter exams, when the moment of panic had lasted longer than normal, and it took three or four attempts of reading through the questions before everything fell into place. But that afternoon, that final exam of his school-going days, nothing fell into place. The jumble of words only grew more jumbled, bright spots of light appeared before his eyes as he tried to read, and nonsensical answers to questions he didn’t even understand kept coming to mind in Japanese. He knew he had to calm down, that panic only bred panic, but then he remembered that this was a compulsory paper, failing it would mean failing everything, and how would he ever look his father in the eyes again? As soon as he thought of Sajjad Ashraf – pictured his trusting, expectant face – everything emptied from his mind. And then, the examiner was collecting the papers. Just like that. And his was blank. He picked up his pen, wrote firmly on the page, ‘There are no intermediaries in Islam. Allah knows what is in my heart,’ and handed in the paper.

       When he emerged from the examination hall, there was a group of his friends clapping him on the shoulder. ‘All done, hero! We really can’t call you Junior any more, college boy.’ One of them – Ali – slung an arm around Raza’s shoulder and called out to a group of girls walking past, ‘Who wants to go for a scooter drive with my friend, the college boy? Top marks this one will get.’ He dropped the keys to his Vespa into Raza’s hand, and pushed him towards the group of girls, two of whom were smiling directly at Raza, no coyness, no pretence, in the way that college girls smiled at college boys. Right then Raza knew he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. For a few more weeks he could still be Raza the Brilliant, Raza the Aspiring, Raza the Son Who Would Fulfil His Father’s Dreams.

       When his mother sat down in the passenger seat he handed her the newspaper and pulled away from the pavement, his voice strangely calm as he said, ‘I didn’t pass. I left the final paper blank.’

       A small noise of shock and disappointment escaped her mouth before she stopped herself and said, ‘What happened?’

       ‘I don’t know.’ He wished she would shout at him so he could be petulant or resentful in return. ‘I couldn’t understand the words on the exam paper. And then time was up.’

       She had been a teacher long enough to know things like this sometimes happened to the best of students.

       ‘This was your Islamic-studies paper?’ When he nodded, she allowed herself a long, luxurious expression of disgust, though it wasn’t directed at him. Devotion as public event, as national requirement. It made her think of Japan and the Emperor, during the war. ‘And why do you need that to study the law? Ridiculous!’ She stroked the back of his head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier, Raza-chan?’

       The childhood endearment brought tears to his eyes.

       ‘I don’t want to be the new neighbourhood Donkey.’ Abbas, who used to live down the road from him, had acquired that nickname when he was eight and had to repeat a class year after failing his exams. For three years he barely scraped through, coming at the bottom of the class, and then he failed again. After that, no one called him anything but Donkey. Failure was the ultimate embarrassment in the neighbourhood, a disgrace to the whole family, and the children picked up on this early, distancing themselves quickly from it through insults and jeers.

       ‘Raza! No one will think of you that way. It was only one paper. You’ll retake it in a few months. Everything will be fine.’

       ‘But how will I tell Aba?’

       ‘I’ll tell him,’ she said firmly. ‘And if he says one word in anger to you I will make him regret it.’ At his smile of relief, she said, ‘In return you have to do one thing for me. Tell me what you really want from your life. I know it isn’t the law.’

       Raza shrugged and gestured to the electronic shops. ‘I want to have everything that’s in there,’ he said grandly.

       ‘I’m not asking what you want to possess. I’m asking what you want to do.’

       They were stopped at a traffic light, behind a rickshaw that had a pair of sultry eyes painted on it, beneath which was emblazoned, in Urdu, LOOK – BUT WITH LOVE. Raza’s mind found itself instantly translating the words into Japanese, German, English, Pashto – a reflexive response to any piece of writing he glimpsed as he drove through the city’s streets.

       ‘I want words in every language,’ he said. His hands briefly left the driving wheel in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘I think I would be happy living in a cold, bare room if I could just spend my days burrowing into new languages.’

       Hiroko rested her hand on Raza’s, not knowing what to say to that unexpected moment of raw honesty. To her, acquiring language was a talent, to her son it was passion. But it was a passion that could have no fulfilment, not here. Somewhere in the world perhaps there were institutions where you could dive from vocabulary to vocabulary and make that your life. But not here. ‘Polyglot’ was not any kind of practical career choice. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of sorrow for her boy, for that look in his eyes which told her he knew and had always known that he would have to take that most exceptional part of himself and put it to one side. She knew what Sajjad would say if she tried to discuss it with him: ‘If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he’s always known to be a dream, then he’s among the fortunate ones.’ He’d be right, of course, but that didn’t stop this pulling at her heart. There was something she had learnt to recognise after Nagasaki, after Partition: those who could step out from loss, and those who would remain mired in it. Raza was the miring sort, despite the inheritance he should have had from both his parents, two of the world’s great forward-movers.

       When they arrived home she went inside first, leaving Raza outside, leaning against the car, until she talked things over with Sajjad.

       First, he was disbelieving, convinced she was playing a ridiculous joke on him. Then he raised his voice, bellowed that the boy didn’t study enough. But when she told him which exam he’d failed, and what had happened, Sajjad just shook his head in disbelief and sat down, his anger unable to sustain itself, as always.

       ‘He’ll take the exam again in the autumn,’ Hiroko said, sitting next to him and clasping his hand. ‘The results will be in before college starts, and they’ll hold a place for him pending that one result. It’s happened with our students before.’

       For a few moments Sajjad was silent, but finally he nodded and brought her hand to his lips.

       ‘All right, I won’t be angry with him. It might not hurt him to miss a rung on a ladder. Next time, he’ll leap right over it.’

       He went outside to find his son, to tell him – Hiroko instructed him to use these words – ‘These things happen’. On his way out he cursed under his breath the government which kept trying to force religion into everything public. His mother, with her most intimate relationship with Allah, would have personally knocked on the door of Army House and told the President he should have more shame than to ask all citizens to conduct their love affairs with the Almighty out in the open.

       What Sajjad saw as he stepped outside was this: Bilal and Ali, his son’s closest friends, driving down the street on a Vespa, Bilal waving the exam results in the air like a victory flag, while Raza hunched down behind Sajjad’s car, hiding out of their sight.