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.
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
