In the City by the Sea Read online

  In the pause that followed, filled only by the sound of Gul Mumani striking a match against flint with such vigour the match head snapped off, Hasan could not look up. He gripped the pine-cone, but though his palm was marked with dozens of crescents he felt nothing.

  ‘For a moment I went mad,’ Gul Mumani continued. ‘Actually, truly mad. It was as though everything in my brain got pushed back, what’s the word? compressed against my skull, and in the centre of my brain there was just blinding light. Maybe a doctor would argue – neurons, cerebellum, medulla oblongata whatever – but I know. Blinding light. The only way to shut it out, fill it up, was cry, kick, scream. I did. I even kicked Salman.

  ‘I think I would have gone on and on until I dropped from exhaustion if it hadn’t been for one of the army chaps who called me by my name. I was so startled I looked up, saw his face for the first time, and it was Javed. Mona’s brother, you know? Who I had a crush on in college. He took me to one side and said, ‘We have orders for his arrest. No more. He’s going to be tried for treason. A former ACE party worker just made a deathbed confession of a planned coup attempt, and he named your husband as the chief plotter.’ Then they led Salman to the jeep, and drove out. They told me I would have to stay at home for an hour – long enough to get Salman safely inside jail – Safely! – and then the guards outside would leave and I would be free to do whatever.

  ‘You know, all the books, stories, movies, they all get it wrong. When you say goodbye to your husband in a moment like that you don’t do any of this clasping to your bosom and vowing eternal love-shove, you don’t smile bravely and say everything will be all right, you don’t break into tears and cling on to him until the guards tear you apart. You just stand and look at him. And when the car drives out your hand raises itself to wave goodbye as though he were just leaving for the supermarket. But then you turn to go inside, see the doorframe which he used to lean against while watching you come and go, and you close your eyes, wrap your arms around the place where his torso used to be and rest your head against his imagined shoulder.’

  Gul Mumani curled herself up on the sofa. ‘He didn’t even have any lunch. I hope they feed him properly.’

  ‘You know he has a tiny appetite,’ Ami said. This seemed to bring Gul Mumani some relief, because she nodded and fell asleep.

  Hasan waited for Aba to crack a joke or Ami to run spiderfingers up his arm until he laughed himself on to the floor, but Aba’s hands were blinkers on the side of his face and Ami’s arms were holding her body together.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ Hasan said. And then, in a rhetorical move Aba often used to reduce all crises to mundanity, Hasan added, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  There followed a quiet that reminded Hasan of some movie which used slow-motion and silence to depict a sword slicing through air and flesh and life. The dying man’s knees buckled; he crashed to the ground, arms widespread, and before his face came into view there was just enough time to know with a movie-goer’s savvy that he was the hero, and then enough time to hope that he was not.

  ‘Quite right,’ Aba said, getting to his feet and brushing imaginary crumbs off his shirt. ‘At worst he’ll develop a taste for prison food and never want to eat Gul’s cooking again.’

  At the mention of her name, Gul Mumani sat upright and said, ‘Ignition!’ Hasan envisioned flames.

  The door opened and the Widow entered, dangling Gul Mumani’s car keys from her fingers. ‘I heard,’ she said to Aba. ‘The Bodyguard told Zehra. They know everything that goes on in the City.’ She squeezed Ami’s hand; Hasan had never seen her exhibit such intimacy with anyone other than Zehra before. ‘Huss, can you come over for dinner? Zehra’s a little moody today; she might cheer up if you’re around.’

  Zehra seemed fine when Hasan saw her a few minutes later. She and Uncle Latif were sitting close to the stereo in their lounge, attempting to decipher lyrics that doubled as dance instructions. The sofas and floor-cushions had been pushed against the wall and the bukhara rug was rolled up to one side. Ladies at their toilets in Mughal miniatures cast sidelong looks at princes hunting on the adjacent wall. Zehra seemed to have decided that the key to being a good dancer was shaking one shoulder in time to the music.

  ‘Oh, Hussy, join in,’ Uncle Latif said. ‘First get one leg a shakin’. No, no Hasan, that’s just shaking. We want a-shakin’. A-shakin’. Oh, yaar, pathetic. Pa-thetic. Let’s face it, daughter and shorter, my generation is the generation, you lot are de generation. Better. Better. Okay, now we butt butts . . .’

  Hasan’s stomach muscles were still aching an hour later when he straddled the railing of Zehra’s balcony and craned his neck for shooting stars. A massive power-failure through the City – yet another presage of sweltering summer – meant even the most bashful stars had unveiled themselves in the dark. Hasan coaxed the corner of his eye away from the candlelit silhouettes of Ami and Aba which paced across the TV room window, and tried to count the stars which fit between his circled thumb and forefinger when he squinted.

  ‘So is this like a tradition passed on from uncle to nephew in your family?’ Zehra said, leaning on the railing. ‘Going to prison, I mean.’

  Hasan laughed. Sometimes he thought his earliest memory was of Salman Mamoo sitting cross-legged on a floor-cushion and, ignoring Ami’s sigh, beginning:

  ‘This is exactly how it happened: Zafar Haq, known to his friends as Zephyr because he was a cool breeze across the arid landscape of politics, awoke one morning in his rain-dripping prison cell and saw the breeze calligraphing “Azadi” in the dust of the prison floor. That single word of freedom told Zafar Haq that eight months of imprisonment were over, and he set about moistening his hands with rain and then pressing his kameez between his palms to smooth away the creases.

  ‘The rain stopped when he was working on the cuff of his left sleeve, but before Zafar Haq could even think of a suitable word of abuse the prison warden opened his cell door. The courts had cleared him of all charges of corruption and the members of the National Assembly, both government and opposition, had urged bamboozled begged the Prime Minister to set Zafar Haq free.

  ‘Zafar Haq walked out of the prison and the first person he waved to among the throng gathered to greet him was his nephew, eight-year-old Salman. He did not wave to his niece Saira, and she suffered many long lasting personality disorders as a result.’ Ami rolled her eyes, but did not interrupt.

  ‘In a playing field just near the prison, a group of boys was playing cricket. One of the boys hit a magnificent six, which flew out of the field, over the heads of the throng and landed at the feet of Zafar Haq. Zafar Haq picked up the ball, whispered something to it, and threw it back to the field. Young Salman, sitting on his father’s shoulders, saw that ball spin through the air, over the throng, over long-on, over mid-on, heading straight for silly mid-on, but just as the fielder reached out to catch it, the ball spun out of reach, struck the pitch and broke to dislodge leg-stump. Three months later Zafar Haq was elected Prime Minister.’

  Hasan closed his eyes and saw a cricket ball (spinning, spinning) which knocked the President out cold and gathered speed to shatter the bars of Salman Mamoo’s cell.

  Chapter Ten

  Hasan’s hand slipped off the mattress and travelled much too short a distance before hitting the carpet. The carpet was marble. Hasan jerked upright, and tried to remember how exactly he had come to fall asleep in Zehra’s room. He recalled the balcony and the power-failure; oh, yes, and the electricity returned and Uncle Latif called Hasan and Zehra downstairs to watch a movie . . . and then there was a thumping sound. Uncle Latif’s heart against Hasan’s ear as Uncle Latif carried Hasan upstairs.

  Hasan spun his wrist, glanced down, and leaped off the mattress. ‘Zehra,’ he yelled. ‘It’s nearly seven. Wake up!’

  Zehra raised her head a few inches off her bed. ‘No school . . . strike.’ Her head fell back on the pillow and she seemed to say something else, but it was just a snore.


  Hasan punched the air in triumph. No Geography test! It occurred to him that Salman Mamoo was probably the reason for the strike. He smiled all the way back to his house. To think, the whole City, the whole entire City, had come to a standstill because of Salman Mamoo. And just two years ago most people said he only won the by-election because the electorate saw his face, heard his voice, and thought they were voting for the ghost of his dead uncle, Zafar. Hasan couldn’t wait to see what the papers were saying today.

  Ami and Aba’s faces ruined Hasan’s mood completely. Both of them looked as though they hadn’t slept at all; Hasan felt nothing but anger when he looked at them. He slouched down on a sofa and answered Ami’s questions about last night in monosyllables. The newspaper hadn’t arrived yet. Hasan longed for the ease of Uncle Latif’s house and the pleasure of Imran’s french toast. He was about to excuse himself when he heard chapals slip-slapping against floor and foot floorfoot floorfoot in the hallway.

  ‘Newspaper,’ Arif-Atif-Asif announced in the doorway, holding up a rolled-up bundle of black and white. ‘The newspaperman says he’s sorry it’s late, but he has to cover five delivery routes today because even though the newspapermen have been allowed to work through the strike, many of them live in curfew areas and can’t work in any case. That’s what the newspaperman says, but I think he just overslept this morning.’ He handed Ami the paper and slip-slapped a return to the kitchen.

  Ami rolled the rubber band off the bundle and the paper sprung open, spewing out sports page, comic strips and crossword so that only the main paper stayed in Ami’s hands. She scanned the front page, frowned; turned to the back page, the frown deepened. Her hands and eyes accelerated, zipped through the inside pages and columns, her fingers darkening with newsprint. She dropped the main paper, sped through the sports page, but nothing uncreased her brow. Finally she looked up, and Aba must have heard her words before they travelled from thought to speech because he was already up and moving towards her, towards the papers she threw down, when she said, ‘Not one mention. Not a word. Nothing.’

  Now Hasan knew what anger was, and it was not the thing he had felt when seeing Ami and Aba’s expressions. This was anger: the memory of Salman Mamoo taking seven hours to drive from the airport to his house the day after he resigned from the government and called for a no-confidence motion; seven hours, because the people, so many people it seemed each one of the City’s ten million inhabitants were out in the streets calling out his name, shouting out his last name, ‘Haq! Haq!’, until it was both a call to him and a call for him to become his name, to become Haq, become justice; seven hours, because the people were dancing, God! dancing and cheering and blowing whistles in the street, despite the police who still tended to incline their heads at Salman Mamoo because it was only twenty-four hours since he was a government minister and perhaps soon he would be even more, so for now the police did not disperse the crowd with tear-gas or bring down their batons on spine and neck and anything else that came in the way, and perhaps they abstained also because they were part of the people too though they could not say it and could barely even think it, and Salman Mamoo pulled Hasan up to peer out of the sunroof with him and wave to the crowd, and the next day Hasan was newsprint, front page, waving by Salman Mamoo’s side under banner headlines which proclaimed Salman Mamoo the saviour, the future, the only hope. This was anger: discovering that, less than five months later, Salman Mamoo’s imprisonment didn’t even get a page six side-bar.

  Hasan returned from memory at the sound of Aba using a word he never used.

  ‘What is it, Shehryar?’ Ami asked.

  ‘Did you see the headline?’ Aba said.

  Ami leaned against Aba’s arm and looked down at the paper in his tightly clenched fists. ‘“President signs historic treaty”,’ she read out loud. She shrugged. ‘All the treaties he signs are historic. After all, he commissions the writing of the history books.’ But then she read more and her face took on a kind of bafflement that Hasan was used to seeing on his four-year-old cousin’s face. ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘He’ll bankrupt the nation. And for what?’ Her lips turned grey. ‘Dear God, no,’ she said

  ‘What?’ Hasan said. ‘What?’

  Aba and Ami looked up, as though they had just remembered that he existed. They exchanged glances, and Ami unclasped her hands and spread them wide, before letting them fall to her lap. ‘Unless you have a glass bubble hidden away, we had better tell him,’ she said.

  Aba beckoned Hasan over to come and sit beside him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Eleven is too young for this.’ Hasan squirmed away from Aba, but Ami caught his hand and pulled him down. Leaning into the curve of her body, Hasan felt he could bear anything.

  ‘You know, Huss, whenever we talked about Salman Mamoo and what would happen to him, we were always sure that he would not be . . . that no harsh measures would be taken against him.’ Aba’s fingers were sliding across the newspaper, blurring the print.

  ‘Yes,’ Hasan said. ‘Ami told me. Because the foreign powers wouldn’t let the President harm him.’

  ‘Right. But it seems that the President’s been in touch with . . . well, a whole bunch of foreign powers, and he’s signed trade agreements with each of them. So he’s going to export just about anything he can, just about anything we produce and the rest of the world needs. And usually export is a pretty good thing, because we get something in return.’

  ‘Aba, you don’t have to explain that.’

  ‘Sorry. But, in the case of this particular trade agreement we’re getting a really minimal amount in return for our exports. At least, officially. In monetary terms.’

  ‘So what are we getting unofficially?’

  ‘Well, not us. Just the President. He’s getting carte blanche.’ Aba closed his eyes and leaned back, shaking his head.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Hasan knew how disturbed Aba must be when he didn’t answer and it was up to Ami to say, ‘Permission to do what he likes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Hasan said. ‘So . . .’ he tried not to sound too worried. ‘So what’s the sentence for treason? How many years?’

  Aba looked up, a few inches above Hasan’s head. Hasan felt Ami’s chin move left-right-left against his hair. ‘Well, there are variables,’ Aba said. ‘It is a serious offence, but there are variables.’ He looked back down at the newspaper and began to speak rapidly. ‘You’d think they would at least mention Salman somewhere. Although, I suppose they’re making a mockery of censorship, carrying it to an extreme, preferring omission to saying the kind of nonsense the government feeds them. I can’t blame them for being scared.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re not as scared as you think,’ Ami said, leaning forward and running her finger down a column of newsprint. ‘Read vertically. Read only the first letter of each line in each article’s lead column.’

  Hasan followed the path of her fingertip. ‘P-I-N-E C-O-N-E-S,’ he read out loud. ‘PINE CONES PINE CONES PINE CONES PINE CONES PINE PINE PINE PINE PINE PINE PINE SALMAN.’

  Hasan’s heart surged at the sight of Salman Mamoo’s name in print for the first time in three months. He pictured Salman Mamoo’s supporters stitching together a hundred copies of the front page and floating it magic-carpet-style through Salman Mamoo’s cell window at 6.00 p.m. in place of pine-cones.

  ‘What is this meant to accomplish?’ Aba said. ‘What are they thinking?’

  Hasan leapt out of his chair. It had come upon him again, that old feeling of a spring curling and uncurling in his stomach as it did when he was five and Salman Mamoo pushed the garden swing higher and faster. Hasan ran round the garden, ran past hibiscus, bougainvillaea and kumquat trees, leapt up, swung on the branch of a guava tree, back and forth and back and forth and back and his leg kicked the invisible goblin. Aha! Got you! He threw himself on the ground before the goblin could recover from the blow, rolled over and over until he reached the cricket bat which became an oak staff the moment his hand touched it. He threw
it high, caught it on the descent, shifted it from hand to hand to hand so fast it became a blur of possibility . . . and the goblin, always a coward, ran away. Hasan kissed the bat and saw the Widow, just feet away, watching him.

  ‘I want to know,’ Hasan said, in his most adult voice. ‘What’s the penalty for treason?’

  For the first time ever, Hasan saw the Widow look taken aback. She turned slightly to glance at her bedroom window, and for a moment Hasan thought she would leave. But, instead, her hand went to her throat. It was all the response Hasan needed.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, coming towards him. ‘If only I could show you the way into my world.’

  Then Uncle Latif was there, holding Hasan, down on his knees, and Hasan was surprised to find that he was kneeling too. ‘Let it out, Huss. Let it out,’ Uncle Latif said. But Hasan kept his eyes wide and dry. Salamander, he told himself. Salamander, first meaning. He broke out of Uncle Latif’s grasp and went charging around the garden, feet pounding and hands fisted, giving his heart a good reason to pump so madly.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hasan dragged his throbbing legs into his room. Ami’s voice called to him but he yelled back, ‘Can’t come now. Nature calls!’ and shut the door behind him. He leaned against the door and allowed his body to slide to the ground, his hair squeaking and bristling in its descent along the whitewashed wood. Now what? he wondered, hugging his knees to his chest. He looked around. Something was different. His bed. The blue summer coverlet had made its appearance.

  Hasan crawled across the room, pulled himself on the bed and ran his hands in circles along his coverlet in greeting. Ami must have removed his duvet last night or this morning. The thought was cheering. If Salman Mamoo’s situation really were desperate Ami would not have concerned herself with bedspreads.

  It seemed that for once, though, Ami had entered his room without rearranging his bookshelf. Hasan ran a proprietary eye along the books across the room from him. Both Ami and Zehra had reacted strongly when Hasan arranged his books alphabetically. ‘It looks so ragged,’ Ami had complained. And Zehra had just rolled her eyes and said, ‘First, books are alphabetized by author, not title. Second, it’s not like you’ve got an entire rainforest worth of books. Tall to short, favourite to least favourite. Those are the only acceptable categories. No need to get democratic about books, okay?’ This was the day after the military coup, and seemed unfair. So Hasan did not tell Zehra about the comfort of order, or the reassurance of knowing that every new book would have a place already awaiting it, or the thrill of finding alliterations by stringing together the first words (articles aside) of titles: Hagar Hamlet Haroun Harry Higher Hookey Hockey Horse.