Read Online Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie - Free Book Online Page B

even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?
    Khaleel dropped his arm. ‘Look, I’m sorry. This is stupid. It’s just that I was thinking of you and then you were there.’
    â€˜And then I wasn’t.’
    â€˜Just after I mentioned where my family lives.’
    â€˜What? No, no. Samia just realized it was our stop, that’s all. She’s a little scatty sometimes.’ If I had said a UFO had landed behind the Ritz and its occupants had activated Samia’s homing beacon, I might have pulled it off. I can tell stories, but I can’t lie particularly well. Samia, scatty!
    â€˜Did you say “catty”?’ He grinned and leant back against a car, with arms folded. The I’m-cool-enough-to-handle-anything pose. ‘So what’s so terrible about Liaquatabad that you had to run away at the first mention?’
    â€˜Karachi’s huge. Really. What was sea and swamp and wasteland not so long ago is now tarmac and concrete and, well, another kind of wasteland.’
    â€˜Tell me about April’s cruelty,’ he said. ‘Or answer my question.’
    It didn’t surprise me that he knew his Eliot. On the plane he’d had a copy of John Ashbery’s
Selected Poems.
‘I’ve never been to Liaquatabad. But it’s on that side of Karachi.’
    â€˜Which side?’
    â€˜That.’
    â€˜Are you planning to elaborate?’
    â€˜I’m feeling minimalist.’ He raised his eyebrows at me, and I thought he was going to walk off. So I said, ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know about the great class divide of Pakistan.’
    â€˜Oh. It’s like that, is it?’ He scuffed the toe of one shoeagainst the heel of the other. ‘So I’m the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.’ Before I could quite decide how to respond to that he said, ‘I had a hard enough time growing up in the States knowing the other kids were laughing behind my back at my parents’ accents, their clothes, their whole foreign baggage. The way I dealt with that was by telling those kids to either lay off or stop pretending they were my friends. Most chose the first option. But what I’m saying is, I decided pretty early on that I’d rather risk unpopularity at school than feel embarrassed at home. So don’t expect me to start getting defensive about my family now just because …’ He put his hand to his scalp. ‘Aaah, hell. Can we go somewhere? And talk?’
    Of course we could. But not upstairs; he didn’t even suggest that, but followed me around the corner towards a café. When we came to a crossing his hand lightly touched my elbow, convincing me not to make a dash for it between one speeding bus and the next. At the café we sat down at an outdoor table. I ordered coffee; he asked for tea.
    â€˜Tell me about Karachi.’
    I dipped a lump of sugar into my coffee and watched it change colour. He hadn’t said, ‘What’s Karachi like?’ as so many people did, as though they thought I could answer that question with a single, simple analogy. My stock answer was, ‘Like a chicken.’
    But to Khaleel I talked of June, July and August, the three months that were all I had known of Karachi during my college years. The spring semester always ended by the middle of May, but I’d spend a month or so with college friends, or cousins in New York, having instructed my travel agent to book my flight home for 16 June or as soonthereafter as possible, by which point Dadi was sure to have departed for Paris, where she spent three months every year with her younger son, Ali, always making a point of being there for his birthday on 16 June.
    â€˜But summer in Paris is horrible,’ Khaleel said. ‘Hot, and still. All the Parisians leave for the countryside.’
    â€˜Dadi hates the monsoons. If they come early, she leaves early.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I’ve never