16

‘Not the port. The fish harbour!’

       The rickshaw driver – Sher Mohammed – swerved at the sound of Harry’s barked instructions from the back seat.

       ‘Sorry, sorry. Forgot. Too early. My brain is still asleep.’

       Not the most reassuring statement to hear from the man in the driver’s seat, but then again Harry had already decided that Sher Mohammed navigated the streets with a mixture of intuition and Providence. In the crush of midday he at least acknowledged certain traffic rules, but in the early morning he drove through the almost deserted streets with the air of a man who does not conceive the possibility of other vehicles impeding his progress, treating ‘right of way’ as an unassailable personal liberty which he carried with him through every intersection and traffic light.

       Harry pulled his shawl tight around himself as the rickshaw hurtled onwards, wind whistling through it. So Karachi actually could get cold, he thought, watching his breath steam in the dawn air.

       When they arrived at the entrance to the fish harbour, Sajjad and Raza were already there in Sajjad’s car, Raza slumped against his father’s shoulder, asleep.

       ‘Wake up, my prince.’ Sajjad rubbed his knuckles on the top of Raza’s head, and his son’s eyes flickered open, closed, and he mumbled ‘Fish’ before falling asleep again. Carefully – as once Harry had seen him handle an egg that had fallen out of a nest miraculously intact – Sajjad eased his son off his shoulder and positioned him as comfortably as possible against the passenger-side door. ‘We’ll wake him for breakfast,’ he said, stepping out of the car, looking out of place in a thick woollen sweater and open-toed shoes. ‘This gives us a chance to talk, Henry Baba.’ He looked down at Harry’s shoes, shook his head, climbed back into the car and emerged holding up the rubber-soled shoes he’d taken off Raza’s feet. ‘Wear these,’ he said.

       Harry’s toes curled over the edge of Raza’s shoes, reminding him incongruously of Billy, his cat – from his early days in America – who used to perch on the very edge of the stoop waiting for him to return from school. He wriggled his toes, and the cat batted the air with its paw.

       ‘Believe me, you’ll be glad you’re wearing them,’ Sajjad said, taking Harry’s arm and leading him towards the harbour.

       Perhaps it was the memory of the cat, which regarded all forms of insect life as prey, that did it – when Harry walked through the rusty gates and the harbour came into view all he could think was that the swarm of wooden sailing boats with their riggings painting chaos against the sky looked like grasshoppers lying on their backs, waving their insect limbs in the breeze. There were hundreds of them – in peeling paint of blues and whites and greens – lined all the way along the dock and stacked against each other four, five, six ships deep.

       ‘Breathe through your mouth until we get to the market,’ Sajjad recommended, walking swiftly towards the boats.

       ‘Why?’ Harry said, and then he caught a whiff of a smell so overpowering it made him imagine a fish-monster the size of a house, sliced open to rot for years in the baking sun.

       ‘Come, come.’ Sajjad caught his arm and pulled him along, in through another gate. ‘Now you can use your nose again.’

       They had entered a bazaar of seafood, all wares too fresh for any unpleasant odour. All along the cement ground, beds of ice with fish laid out on them. Men with wheelbarrows were tipping ice-chips on to the ground to replace what was melting, while other men pushed past holding baskets of fish listing with the weight of their contents. And water everywhere you stepped – not the overflow of the sea as Harry had first thought, but liquefied ice. It was barely dawn, but the activity was already frenzied. Harry caught hold of Sajjad’s elbow, as the latter moved forward along the aisle between the two rows of fish. Snapper and salmon and cauldrons of flounder. Sharks. Eels. Huge great whiskered things with dinosaur-era jaws.

       Sajjad stopped to haggle with a fish-seller who jokingly tried to steer him away from the tuna and towards a fish the size of a man.

       ‘What am I going to do with that? Sleep with it?’ Sajjad laughed.

       A man approached Harry, holding a little shark in his hand, his fingers waggling the fin.

       ‘For sex,’ he said, in English.

       ‘Not necessary,’ Harry replied in Urdu, and everyone around him laughed approvingly.

       ‘Where are you from?’ the man with the shark asked.

       ‘America. You? Karachi?’

       ‘No, Mianwali.’ The man gestured around him. ‘People here are from every nation within Pakistan. Baloch, Pathan, Sindhi. Hindu, Sikh even. Everyone. Even an American can come and sell fish here if he wants.’

       ‘Thanks.’ Harry grinned. He loved the way every Pakistani became a tour guide at the sight of a foreigner. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

       Sajjad, overhearing the conversation, caught hold of a fisherboy and directed Harry’s attention to him, taking control of the tour.

       ‘But these are the original inhabitants of Karachi. The Makranis. They’re descended from African slaves. See?’ He pointed to the boy’s hair and features in a way that made the American deeply uncomfortable but clearly didn’t bother the boy in the least. ‘This coastline was along the slave route – not your slave route, of course. The Eastern one.’

       ‘I wouldn’t call it my slave route.’

       ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Sajjad said dismissively, letting go of the boy with a pat on the head. ‘What I’m saying is, this is a city of comings and goings – even before Partition. These days it’s the Afghans. Why sit in refugee camps when you can come to Karachi?’ He bent over a beautifully arranged circular pile of pink-hued fish and prodded one’s flesh. ‘What are you laughing at, Henry Burton?’

       ‘You, Sajjad. You used to talk about Delhi as if it were the only city worth belonging to – and now listen to you, speaking with such pride about a place you would have mocked once for its lack of history and aesthetics and poetic heritage.’

       Sajjad stopped smiling, picked up a pebble of ice and wiped his finger on it.

       ‘Dilli is Dilli,’ he said. He stepped slightly to one side, in between a display of barracuda and a crate filled with crabs, so that he was slightly apart from the press of buyers and sellers. ‘My first love. I would never have left it willingly. But those bastards didn’t let me go home.’

       ‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said miserably, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he felt so culpable. ‘What happened to all your brothers? Did they stay there?’

       ‘My oldest brother, Altamash, was killed in the Partition riots,’ Sajjad said, nodding as he spoke as though confirming to himself, all these years later, that such a thing really was true. ‘I was in Istanbul; no one told me. They were waiting for me to come home. And my brother Iqbal left for Lahore. He said he couldn’t stay in the city that had murdered Altamash. He left behind his wife and his children – they tried to follow him but they were on one of those trains. The ones that arrived with the dead as their cargo.’

       ‘Christ, Sajjad. I had no idea. There was one more brother, wasn’t there?’

       ‘Yes, Sikandar. He stayed. But because two of us were in Pakistan, our house was declared evacuee property. Maybe Sikandar could have fought to retain a portion of it, but he was never a man for practicalities. So he moved out – with his family and Altamash’s family, and they live in such sad conditions I can’t bear to visit them. So I almost never go.’ He said this so cheerfully it was almost heartless, but Harry knew enough migrants to recognise a survival strategy when he heard it. ‘You know, for a long time I blamed your father.’

       ‘For what?’

       ‘Everything.’ Sajjad smiled.

       ‘Yeah. I do that myself. Something about him makes it so easy. You don’t blame him any more?’

       ‘Now I say this is my life, I must live it.’

       ‘Muslim fatalism?’

       ‘No, no. Pakistani resignation. It’s a completely different thing.’ He made a gesture of enquiry at the man whose catch he’d been inspecting and the bargaining started again. Harry caught the eye of a fisherman smoking a cigarette, and the fisherman inclined his head in Harry’s direction in a knowing fashion. Harry wasn’t sure if something beyond a greeting was being signalled. How many of the men in this harbour, he wondered, were involved in smuggling arms bought by the CIA and transported by the ISI from the Karachi docks to the training camps along the border?

       There was a certain freedom about being in Karachi, and knowing no local assets other than Sher Mohammed. A certain freedom, also, in being known to no one – though, of course, every Pakistani assumed that all Americans in their country were CIA operatives. Harry looked at Sajjad, who now had two blue polythene bags dangling off his wrists, fish squashed inside the packaging, one glassy eye pressed against the thin blue material, reminding Harry of an early-winter frost and a garden pond with fish frozen beneath a skin of ice. He wondered if the reason none of the Ashrafs had asked him any details about his position as consular officer at the Embassy was that they suspected it was a CIA cover. Absurdly, it bothered him to think he might be suspected of lying by the family with whom he had spent part of each of the last three weekends. He was already beginning to regret the spring thaw in Afghanistan when things would pick up pace in America’s proxy war and there would be few opportunities for casual leave.

       ‘Now for the crab,’ Sajjad said, handing one of his bags to Harry. ‘So that there’ll be something at dinner that I can eat. Have you ever eaten raw fish, Henry Baba?’

       ‘Sushi? I love sushi.’

       ‘Really? Thirty-five years of marriage and she still hasn’t convinced me to put it in my mouth. All her other Japanese food I’ve learnt to appreciate. I say to her, whatever you cook, I’ll eat. But it must be cooked.’

       Harry stepped round a boy who had dropped a fish on the floor and was trying to pick it up only to have it slither out of his grasp at every attempt.

       ‘The two of you – you know, when I was growing up, falling in love for the first time, listening to the kind of music guaranteed to make you feel sadder than any of the circumstances of your life merit, I used to think of the two of you as the greatest of all romantic couples.’

       ‘Oh, no no. We were just young and foolish. What did we know about each other? Almost nothing. It was luck, pure luck, that we discovered after marriage that our natures were so sympathetic to each other. And also’ – he stopped, twirled the polythene bag so it braided itself all the way up to his wrist – ‘we both had too much loss in our lives, too early. It made us understand those parts of the other which were composed of absence.’ He wrinkled his nose – it was a tic he’d picked up from his wife. ‘If she heard that she’d say it’s the melodramatic Dilli poet inside me. Look, oysters. I think we’ll take some. You can’t go wrong with an oyster. Open it up and you’ll either find a pearl or an aphrodisiac. You’re smiling, Henry Baba. I didn’t think you’d know the Urdu term for “aphrodisiac”. Quick, tell me why you know it. There must be a story behind this.’

       How was it possible, Harry thought, to have such a man as this as your father and grow up as uncertain of your place in the world as Raza appeared to be. If you were Sajjad Ashraf’s son, how could you fail to regard the world as your oyster, regardless of whether you saw yourself as gemstone or mollusc?

       At that moment, though, Raza didn’t see himself as either gemstone or mollusc but merely a boy whose shoes had been stolen from his feet as he slept. He didn’t see Harry’s shoes with socks stuffed into them in the driver-seat area as he rubbed his eyes to ensure he was properly awake before rolling up his shalwar to shin-height and stepping tentatively out of the car, cursing in German as his feet touched the cold, filthy road. No sign of any thief, just a truck parked a few feet away. Near fifteen feet above the ground a Pathan man was perched like a gargoyle on the frame of the truck’s container portion, watching the early-morning ocean traffic.

       ‘Anything exciting going on out there?’ Raza called up in Pashto – it was the only one of his languages that Hiroko hadn’t taught him; he’d learnt it instead during all the years he’d gone to and from school in a van driven by a sweet-natured Pathan who had insisted Raza sit up front with him ever since the boy, at the age of six, first expressed an interest in learning the driver’s first language. For nearly a decade of Raza’s life the van driver remained the finest of all his teachers.

       The man shaded his eyes with his hands, almost saluting.

       ‘Are you Afghan?’

       Raza touched his cheekbones reflexively. Until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he’d never heard that question; but in the last four years, as increasing numbers of refugees made their way into Pakistan, it had become something less than unusual for Raza to be identified as an Afghan from one of the Mongol tribes.

       ‘Yes,’ he said, and felt the rightness of the lie press against his spine, straightening his back.

       The man swung down from the container to look more closely at Raza.

       ‘Who are your people?’

       ‘Hazara,’ Raza said confidently. He knew that was what Harry Burton had assumed him to be.

       ‘Come, meet someone,’ the man said, hopping down on to the ground and placing his arm around Raza’s shoulder. ‘Abdullah! Wake up!’

       The carved wooden driver’s-side door was kicked open by a pale foot, and a few seconds later a boy – no more than fourteen – jumped out of the cab. His wide, upturned mouth and the childish chubbiness of his cheeks did nothing to undercut the adult gaze he directed at Raza through his hazel eyes.

       ‘You have a brother here from Afghanistan,’ the man said. ‘A Hazara.’

       The boy ignored Raza and twisted his features at the older man.

       ‘What does Pakistan do to people’s brains? Is it something in the air? Am I going to get stupider if I spend more time here? Since when are Hazaras and Pashtuns brothers?’

       Pashtun, not Pathan, Raza noted.

       The older man smiled as if recognising the insult as a form of love, and it was Raza who answered, just to assure himself that he wasn’t intimidated by a boy six inches shorter than him.

       ‘Since the Soviets marched into our house and we both had to escape through the window, that’s since when Hazaras and Pashtuns are brothers.’

       The boy frowned.

       ‘How long have you been away from Afghanistan? You speak Pashto like this Pakistani here.’ He indicated the older man, who looked offended this time. ‘Is Dari your language?’

       ‘Raza!’ It was his father, walking towards the car, waving bags of fish at him while Harry pointed at Raza’s feet and made a gesture of distress before pointing to his own feet.

       ‘I have to go,’ Raza said.

       ‘Is that man American?’ Abdullah asked.

       Raza smiled.

       ‘I have to go,’ he said again.

       The boy nodded, his eyes still on Harry.

       ‘Where do you live? I haven’t seen you in Sohrab Goth.’

       Raza had been about to walk away, but at mention of Sohrab Goth he paused, weighing up the possibility that his lies would expose him to humiliation against the usefulness of knowing someone in Sohrab Goth, where, one of the neighbourhood boys swore, it was possible to buy cassette-players and televisions and telephones with loudspeakers at a fraction of the lowest price anywhere else in the city. This boy, it was obvious, could bargain down an Afghan trader to a price Raza couldn’t demand without his voice conveying his own suspicion that he was insulting the seller.

       ‘I might be there soon,’ he said. ‘How can I find you?’ He didn’t even bother making up an answer to Abdullah’s query about where he lived. He had realised already that the boy didn’t ask questions for the purpose of being answered, but merely to maintain an interrogatory style that asserted control.

       ‘There’s a truck yard next to Bara Market. Just tell anyone there you want Abdullah – the one who drives the truck with the dead Soviet.’

       Raza took a step back, alarmed, and then saw the boy pointing to the side of his truck, its wood panelling decorated with brightly painted birds and mountains and flowers and – Raza looked in the direction of the pointing finger – a miniature portrait of a man in Soviet Army uniform lying on the ground with blood gushing from his body as though it were a multispouted fountain.

       The boy laughed.

       ‘Everyone knows me, and my truck.’ The older man made a noise deep in his throat and the boy said, ‘It’s actually this Afridi’s truck. But I’m the one who asked for the Soviet to be put there.’

       Raza nodded.

       ‘Next time I’m there, I’ll ask for you,’ he said.

       ‘If I’m around,’ the boy said. ‘You never know. One day Karachi, one day Sargodha, one day Peshawar. I’ve seen everything in this country.’ He glanced over towards Harry, who had taken off his shoes and was walking, barefoot, towards Raza, holding them in front of him like an offering. ‘But I never thought I’d see that.’

       Harry reached Raza, apologising profusely even as he went down on one knee and placed the shoes on the ground for Raza to step into. In normal circumstances, Raza would have objected, insisted Harry wear the shoes, brightened with embarrassment to be treated with such deference by anyone older than himself. But as he saw the look of awe in Abdullah’s eyes – a look not dissimilar to the ones his classmates used to direct at him when he scored full marks in the most difficult of exams – he just winked at the younger boy and slipped his feet into the rubber shoes, his hand touching the air above the American’s head as though in benediction.