Something to Tell You (17 page)

The plane must have touched down around three in the morning.

I had to slap and shake Miriam awake. She’d been living in a squat in Brixton and was eager to get away. The area had recently been torn apart by antipolice riots. Miriam had been up for a week throwing bricks and helping out at the law centre. The contemporary graffiti advised:
HELP THE POLICE—BEAT YOURSELF UP.

Inevitably, Miriam had taken something to calm her nerves on the flight, cough syrup, I think, one of her favourites, which had poleaxed her. I helped her throw her stuff into her various hippy bags and shoved her out into the Third World. Lucky them.

It was still dark but warming up. In the chaos outside the airport, scores of raggedy beggars pressed menacingly at us; the women fell at, and kissed, Miriam’s red Dr. Martens.

Wanting to escape, we got into the first car that offered a ride. I was nervous, not knowing how we’d find our way around this place, but Miriam closed her eyes again, refusing to take responsibility for anything. I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.

We couldn’t have been in Pakistan, the land of our forefathers, for more than an hour when the taxi driver pulled a gun on us. He and his companion, who looked about fourteen, wrapped in a grim blanket against the night cold, had been friendly until then, saying, as we took off from the airport to Papa’s place with Bollywood music rattling the car windows, “Good cassette? Good seat, comfortable, eh? You try some paan? You want cushion?”

“Groovy,” murmured Miriam, shutting her eyes. “I think I’m already on a cushion.”

This was the early 80s; I had graduated, Lennon had been murdered, and the revolution had come at last: Margaret Thatcher was its figurehead. Miriam and I were in an ancient Morris Minor with beads and bells strung across it. She must have thought we were approaching some sort of head idyll and would soon run into Mia Farrow, Donovan and George Harrison meditating in front of a murmuring Indian.

The driver had taken a sharp left off the road, through some trees and across a lot of dirt, where we came to a standstill. He dragged us out of the car and told us to follow him. We did. He was waving a gun at our faces. It was not Dad’s house; it was the end. A sudden, violent death early in the morning for me—on day one in the fatherland. A death not unlike the one I had caused not long ago. That would be justice, wouldn’t it? An honest and almost instant karma? I wondered whether we’d be in the newspapers back home, and if Mum would give them photographs of us.

Not that Miriam and I were alone. I could see people in the vicinity, living in tents and shacks, some of them squatting to watch us, others, skinny children and adults, just standing there. It looked like some kind of permanent pop festival: rotting, ripped canvas and busted corrugated metal, fires, dogs, kids running about, the heat and light beginning to come up. No one was going to help us.

We considered the shooter. Oh, did we take it in! Sister and I were shouting, indeed jumping up and down and wildly yelling like crazies, which made the robber confused. He appeared to get the message that we didn’t have any money. Then Miriam, who was accustomed to intense situations, had the stunning idea of giving him the corned beef.

She said, “It’s not sacred to them, is it?”

“Corned beef? I don’t think so.”

She became very enthusiastic about it; she seemed to believe they should want corned beef, perhaps she thought they’d had a famine recently. They did indeed want corned beef. The robber grabbed the heavy bag and kept it without looking inside. Then the other man drove us back to the road and to Papa’s place. Even robberies by taxi drivers are eccentric in Karachi.

“Papa won’t be getting a brand-new bag then,” I said as we hit the main road. Miriam groaned as we swerved past donkey carts, BMWs, camels, a tank with Chinese markings, and crazy-coloured buses with people hanging from the roofs like beads from a curtain.

Luckily, along with the reggae records Dad had requested, I’d put a couple of cans of corned beef in my own bag. Papa wasn’t disappointed; it had been his request. Although, apparently, he had told Miriam that corned beef was the thing he missed most about Britain, I can’t believe he’d have wanted a suitcase full of it. He was partial to the stuff, though, sitting at his typewriter eating it from the can and helping it down with vodka obtained from a police friend. “It could be worse,” he’d say. “The only other thing to eat is curried goat brain.”

Mother had wanted us to come here. She was sick of worrying about Miriam when she wasn’t at home, and arguing with her when she went there to crash. Mother was also, at times, bitterly angry with Father. She had found us hell to cope with, and she had no support. It would benefit all of us to spend time with him, getting to know how he lived and how he really felt about things. Even Miriam agreed.

Long before we got to Pakistan, like a lot of other “ethnics,” she’d been getting into the roots thing. She was a Pakistani, a minority in Britain, but there was this other place where she had a deep connection, which was spiritual, even Sufi. To prepare for the trip, she’d joined a group of whirling dervishes in Notting Hill. When she demonstrated the “whirling” to me, at Heathrow, it was pretty gentle, a tea-dance version. Still, we’d see just how spiritual the place was. So far we’d had a gun at our heads.

Soon Papa’s servant was making us tea and toast. Papa, not only as thin but as fragile as a Giacometti, yet dignified in his white salwar kameez and sandals, informed us we would not be staying with him but with our uncle, his older brother Yasir. To be honest, it was a relief.

“What the fuck is this, a squat?” Miriam said when we were alone.

It turned out that Father, an aristocrat to those he left behind, was living in a crumbling flat, the walls peeling, the wires exposed, the busted furniture seeming to have been distributed at random, as though a place would be found for it later. Dust blew in through the windows, settling amongst the ragged piles of newspaper rustling on the floor and the packets of unused white paper already curling in the heat.

Later that morning, saying he had to write his column, Papa got his servant to drive us to Yasir’s. It was a broad one-storey house that looked like a mansion in movies set in Beverly Hills, an empty swimming pool full of leaves at the front and rats rushing through them.

Miriam was annoyed we weren’t staying with Dad, but I went along with the adventure. For a suburban kid with not very much, I like my luxuries. And luxuries there were at Yasir’s, exactly how I liked them.

It was a house of doe-eyed beauties. There were at least four. “The Raj Quartet,” I called them. I was still mourning Ajita, of course, as well as assuming we could get back together when she eventually returned to London. I had never given up on her. When the time was right, I would tell her what had happened to her father, and she would be shocked, but she’d forgive me, seeing that it had to be done. We would be closer than before; we would marry and have children.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that this quartet of dark-skinned, long-haired women staring at us from a doorway, Uncle Yasir’s daughters, might help me bear my pain.

I was looking at the girls, confronting the anguish of choice, not unlike a cat being offered a box of captive mice, when there was a commotion. Apparently there was a rabid dog on the roof. We rushed out to see it being chased by servants with long sticks. The servants got a few good cracks in, and the dog lay injured in the road outside, making god-awful noises. When we went out later, it was dead. “You like our country?” said the house guard.

Miriam was told that she not only had to share a room with two of her cousins but with a servant too, a couple of children and our grandmother, who was, apparently, a princess. This old woman spoke little English and washed her hands and clothes continuously; the rest of the time she spent either praying or studying the Koran.

It was a large house, but the women kept to their side of it and they were very close with one another. So Miriam and I were separated, and each day we did different things, as we always had at home. I liked to read the books I’d brought with me, while Miriam would go to the market with the women and then cook with them. In the evenings, Dad and his friends would come over, or I’d go with him to their houses.

When Papa was writing his column, which he began early in the morning, I’d sit in his flat listening to the heroes of ska and blue beat while being shaved by his servant. Papa was working on a piece ostensibly about families called “The Son-in-Law Also Rises.” It was giving him difficulty because, having written it straightforwardly, he then had to obscure it, turning it into a kind of poetic code, so the reader would understand it but not the authorities.

Dad’s weekly column was on diverse subjects, all obliquely political. Why were there not more flowers bordering the main roads in Karachi? Surely the more colour there was—colour representing democracy—the more lively everything would be? His essay on the fact that people wash too often, and would have more personality if they were dirtier—thus expressing themselves more honestly—was about the water shortages. An essay ostensibly about the subtle beauty of darkness and the velvet folds of the night was about the daily electricity breakdowns. He’d hand them to me for my suggestions, and I even wrote a couple of paragraphs, my first published works.

This work having been done, at lunchtime we’d tour the city, visiting Dad’s friends, mostly old men who’d lived through the history of Pakistan, and ending up at my father’s club.

In the evening we’d go to parties where the men wore ties and jackets, and the women jewellery and pretty sandals. There were good manners, heavy drinking, and much competitive talk of favours, status and material possessions: cars, houses, clothes.

Far from being “spiritual,” as Miriam understood it, Karachi was the most materialistic place we had been. Deprivation was the spur. I might have considered my father’s friends to be vulgar and shallow, but it was I who was made to feel shabby, like someone who’d stupidly missed a good opportunity in Britain. I was gently mocked by these provincial bourgeois, with my father watching me carefully to see how I coped. What sort of man, half here and half there, had I turned out to be? I was an oddity again, as I had been at school.

All the same, my father was educating me, telling me about the country, talking all the time about partition, Islam, liberalism, colonialism. I may have been a feisty little British kid with Trot acquaintances and a liking for the Jam, but I began to see how much Dad needed his liberal companions who approved of Reagan and Thatcher. This was anathema to me, but it represented “freedom” in this increasingly Islamised land. Dad’s friends were, like him, already alienated in this relatively new country, and he believed their condition would get worse as the country became more theocratic. As Dad said, “There are few honest men here. In fact, I may be the only one! No wonder there are those who wish to establish a republic of virtue.”

Many of my father’s friends tried to impress on me that I, as a member of the “coming-up” generation, had to do my best to keep freedom alive in Pakistan. “We are dying out here, yaar. Please, you must help us.” The British had gone, there’d been a vacuum, and now the barbarians were taking over. Look what had happened in Iran: the “spiritual” politics of the revolution had ended in a vicious, God-kissed dictatorship with widespread amputations, stonings and executions. If the people there could remove a man as powerful as the shah, what might happen in other Muslim countries?

I learned that Father was an impressive man, articulate, amusing and much admired for his writing. He’d almost gone to jail; only his “connections” had kept him out. He had been defiant but never stupid. I read his pieces, collected at last, in a book published only in Pakistan. In such a corrupt place, he represented some kind of independence, authority and integrity.

If he seemed to have the measure of life, it wasn’t long before I had to put to him the question I was most afraid of: Why hadn’t he stayed with us? What made him come here? Why had we never been a proper family?

He didn’t shirk the question but went at it head-on, as if he’d been expecting it for years and had prepared. Apart from the “difficulties” he had with Mother—the usual stuff between a man and a woman, at which I nodded gravely, as though I understood—there had been an insult, he said. He had liked Mum. He still respected her, he said. It was odd to hear him speaking about her as a girlfriend he’d had years ago but now, clearly, was indifferent to.

I learned, though, that he had had, briefly, at the same time as Mum, another girlfriend, whose parents had invited him to dinner at their house in Surrey. They were eating when the mother said, “Oh, you can eat with a knife and fork? I thought you people normally ate with your fingers.”

This was to a man who’d been brought up in a wealthy, liberal Indian family in colonial Bombay. Among the many children, Father was the prince of the family, inheritor of the family talent. “Isn’t he a magnificent man?” Yasir had said to me. “Your grandfather told me to look after him always.”

Dad had been educated in California, where he’d established himself on the college circuit as a champion debater and skillful seducer of women. He believed he had the talent and class to become a minister in the Indian government, ambassador to Paris or New York, a newspaper editor or a university chancellor. Dad told me he couldn’t face more of this prejudice, as it was called then. He had “got out,” gone home to the country he had never known, to be part of its birth, to experience the adventure of being a “pioneer.”

As we drove around Karachi—him tiny behind the wheel of the car—he began to weep, this clean man in his white salwar kameez and sandals, with an alcohol smell that I got used to and even came to like. He regretted it, he said, the fact that we as a family weren’t together and he couldn’t do his duty as a father. Mother wouldn’t live in Pakistan, and he was unable to live in England.