Part 11 (1/2)

'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 my slave route.' 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 Part.i.tion. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 Part.i.tion 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 Lah.o.r.e. 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 a.s.sets other than Sher Mohammed. A certain freedom, also, in being known to no one though, of course, every Pakistani a.s.sumed 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 gla.s.sy 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 Emba.s.sy 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?'

'Sus.h.i.+? I love sus.h.i.+.'

'Really? Thirty-five years of marriage and she still hasn't convinced me to put it in my mouth. All her other j.a.panese 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+n-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 hands with his eyes, 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sure 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?'