Home Fire(54)

Joined quickly by a police escort, TV vans following, never mind, nothing to hide, better this way.

“Why are you helping me, Abdul?”

“Something about me you don’t know.”

“I’ve known you’re gay since before you did, probably.”

“Not that but thank you for never mentioning. I told that Farooq’s cousin who Parvaiz was, the rumors about your father, I mean. I think that’s why Farooq came for him.”

“It’s not your fault he went.”

“Why did he go?”

“I don’t know exactly. I stopped asking it. He wanted to return home, that’s what mattered.”

“If he comes back, Farooq, I’ll kill him.”

“No, don’t kill him. Take his skin off with the world’s smallest scalpel, remove his eyes with an ice cream scoop, drip slow-working acid on his tongue.”

“You’ve thought about this, I guess.”

“It’s one of the few things I can concentrate on.”

“I don’t think I could do any of that.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“One other thing you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“Really fancied your brother.” Said in a Dame Edna voice.

“Thank you, Abdul. I’d forgotten what it felt like to smile.”

At the airport she expected the interrogation room again, but the man at the security checkpoint looked over her shoulder at the police, then down at her new passport and the boarding card to Karachi, and nodded her through.

“Why are you going?” one of the journalists called out from across the barrier, just before she walked into the departure lounge.

“For justice,” she said.





xviii.


Karachi: colorful buses, colorless buildings, graffitied walls, billboards advertising cell phones and soft drinks and ice cream, birds circling in the white-hot sky. Parvaiz would have wanted the windows down to listen to every new sound, but she sat back in the car in silence disrupted only by the rattling vents of the air conditioner, a silence not of her own devising but of her cousin’s, the guitarist, who refused to explain why she had been escorted off the plane by airport officials who drove her to the cargo terminal where he was waiting to pick her up in a beige car with a sticker on its windscreen announcing its membership to a golf club; it looked more suited to a businessman than a musician.

“Take off the hijab and put these on,” was the only thing he’d said, passing her a pair of oversize glasses. She refused, but eventually the sun’s glare made her change her mind about the glasses.

The silence continued until he turned into the driveway of a tall white hotel, cleared an ineffectual security check, and pulled over, waving away the valet who came around to take his keys.

“You can get out here,” he said.

“For what?”

“Entrance to the hotel is through there. I’ve checked you in for three days. Under the name Mrs. Gul Khan. His body arrives tomorrow, he’ll be buried by the evening. We’ve arranged a funeral plot, I’ll send a car to take you there the next morning. Nine a.m. You can pray over the grave, and leave. Okay? Do not call me. Do not call my mother. You understand?”

“You’re the one who needs to understand. He isn’t going to be buried. I’ve come to take him home.”

The cousin held his hands up. “I don’t want to know. Crazy girl. I don’t want to know anything. My sister lives in America, she’s about to have a child there—did you or your bhenchod brother stop to think about those of us with passports that look like toilet paper to the rest of the world who spend our whole lives being so careful we don’t give anyone a reason to reject our visa applications? Don’t stand next to this guy, don’t follow that guy on Twitter, don’t download that Noam Chomsky book. And then first your brother uses us as a cover to join some psycho killers, and then your government thinks this country can be a dumping ground for its unwanted corpses and your family just expects us to jump up and organize a funeral for this week’s face of terrorism. And now you’ve come along, Miss Hojabi Knickers, and I have to pull strings I don’t want to pull to get you out of the airport without the whole world’s press seeing you, and it turns out you’re here to try some stunt I don’t even know what but my family will have nothing to do with it, nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t want you or your family to have anything to do with it. Just tell me what time tomorrow he’s arriving, and who to speak to about where to bring him.”

“What do you mean, where to bring him? You planning on checking a corpse into your hotel room?”

“You really want to know?”

“No. Get out.”

“Who do I speak to about where to bring him?”

He reached into his wallet, pulled out a business card, and threw it at her.

“Thank you. By the way, how far are we from the British Deputy High Commission?”

“Look at a map,” he said, leaning across to open her door.





xix.


The British Deputy High Commission compound was surrounded by barbed wire, vans bristling with guns, and roadblocks to prevent any stranger’s approach. But just a few minutes’ walk away there was a park lined with banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.