Home Fire(41)

“You’re sure I can come back if I don’t like it?”

“Of course you can. I’m back here, aren’t I?”

“You’ve never said why.”

“Had to deal with family stuff. Then you happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“Should have left weeks ago. But thought if I waited, maybe you’d come too.”

“You stayed for me?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll really help me find people there who knew my father?”

“I really will.”

“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“I’m your brother.”

“Yes. I know. Thank you.”

He called his cousin, the guitarist in Karachi—the one he’d hated because on the only occasion they’d met the other boy had said, “I’m a Pakistani and you’re a Paki”—and said he was going to take up the offer, proffered by the guitarist’s mother, to spend some months in Karachi working on a popular music show to build up his professional credentials. He sorted out his paperwork, one half of his brain believing he really would end up in Karachi, and booked a flight with a connection in Istanbul that would arrive in the old Ottoman capital soon after Farooq’s flight. When Aneeka talked about meeting him in Karachi over Easter he enjoyed making travel plans with her, their heads bent together over maps of Pakistan. Badshahi Mosque and Kim’s Gun, the ruins of Taxila, the Peshawar Museum, with the world’s largest Gandhara collection, and in Karachi the studio of the music show they’d been listening to since its inception a few years ago, where Parvaiz would soon be working.

“If I like it there, maybe I’ll stay awhile and you can visit too,” he said to Isma the December night before he was due to leave, the statement brought on by the smell of the masala omelet she was cooking for his final dinner at home.

The first weekend after their mother died, Parvaiz had stopped eating. He was unable to explain to himself why he was rejecting every item of food Aunty Naseem and her daughters and Aneeka offered him, and even Aneeka was at a loss to understand it. It was Isma, who disliked cooking above all other domestic chores, who had come into his room with a masala omelet such as their mother used to make for breakfast every Saturday. She had cut it into pieces and fed it to him, forkful by forkful.

Now she looked up in surprise and smiled in a way usually reserved for Aneeka. “I’d like that,” she said.

Her smile sent him out the door into the cold December night, head tipped back to count the stars and keep the tears from falling. It was there that Aneeka found him a short while later.

“You’re going to have to get rid of that growth on your face,” she said, maybe or maybe not noticing the hand he quickly rubbed across his eyes at her approach. “The Heathrow officials might mistake what is fashionista for fundo and decide not to let you board the plane to Pakistan. Particularly if you’re flying through Istanbul. Jihadi alert!”

He laughed too loudly, and his twin touched his arm. “You sure you want to go? You know I’m only allowing you to do it because you obviously have to get away from her. Will you never tell me who she is? I promise I won’t beat her up too badly.”

“I’m going in order to improve my career prospects for that Asian marriage site. Though the bio should still start Handsome Londoner who loves his sister.”

She stepped forward until there was almost no space between them, butted her head against his shoulder. “Both you and Isma leaving. What will I do all alone?”

He held her earlobe between thumb and finger. He knew she had wanted to say this since he first announced he was going. There was no living person for whom he’d leave her just weeks before she had to say good-bye to the older sister who had raised her—raised them both—as much as their mother ever had. But the dead made their own demands, impossible to refuse.

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While the plane was taxiing he ignored the instructions to turn off his phone and listened, instead, to the audio track “Twin Heard from the Garden Shed.”

These were the things her voice said:

It’s getting late; even the birds have gone home.

Oh god, I’m interrupting you again.

Couldn’t you have found a less solitary obsession?

Where are you these days?

Regardless, dinner’s ready. Might as well come in.

The wheels left tarmac. He uploaded the track to her account on the Cloud and deleted her from his phone.





6




PARVAIZ PAID THE MAN in the electronics store with the Turkish liras he was carrying in his knapsack, and then asked, as if it were an afterthought, if he sold phones with SIM cards that allowed international calls.

“The new arrivals will have to call home, and there’s always one who weeps into the phone and covers it with snot. So they’re not getting my phone again,” he said.

“I don’t need to know your business,” said the shopkeeper, moving over to the glass-topped display case housing cell phones. “Here.” He pulled out a bricklike handset that belonged to a time when calls and texts were all anyone expected from a phone, and that continued to exist, Parvaiz was sure, only because people in high-crime areas liked to carry around a decoy phone to hand over to muggers. “No charge,” the man said expansively, as he slipped the SIM card into its compartment.