She didn’t come alone; she was carrying a baby with her, who she said was my sister. The baby cooed at me and cuddled up to my mother, tugging on her dupatta for a game of peekaboo. I was filled with rage and refused to speak. She came again the next year, this time without the baby, Sabah. But the same rage filled the room and she cried when she left. I refused to see her after that, refused to speak to her when she phoned from America.
In my grandparents’ home, I had the world at my feet—quite literally. Every day, a different hawker was invited into the gates of our compound. Jaffer and I would inspect the wares they laid out for us, taste of their goods, or avail ourselves of their services, with no worries about who would pay—this was a house where the adults set no limits on the children, and all accounts, the hawkers knew well, were settled with no questions asked. There was the kilona-walla on Monday, the toy man who sold old-fashioned string tops; squirt guns; paddle balls; ugly little baby dolls with blond, plastic, painted-on hair; cap-guns; balloons; and little pieces of junk that would pass no safety regulations that any sane person would have ever subjected them to. We bought slingshots from him, which we practiced at every chance we got, aiming for a line of old cans that Jaffer ordered the servants—a full retinue of them, assigned to follow us around and see to our needs and wants—to set up in the driveway, hoping to perfect our skill enough to shoot at something live one day.
Jaffer even managed to do it once, killing a bird—a sparrow, I think it was, a small, undistinguished specimen—which the driver, Sharif Muhammad, lectured Jaffer against killing, telling him that hunting was only allowed in Islam if you ate what you killed, because life was sacred and even the lives of the lowliest of God’s creatures could not be taken lightly. So, I remember with disgust, Jaffer asked the cook to marinate and grill the dead little bird and managed to swallow a couple of bites before throwing up all over the new shoes his mother had sent for from London.
The horse handler passed through our neighborhood on Tuesday afternoons, giving us slow, plodding horses to ride slowly, ploddingly around the neighborhood, while the servants followed us on foot to make sure that no one stole us away to sell to a beggar-master who would maim us in order to increase the return on his investment—this was more Jaffer’s worry than mine. Jaffer had never been anywhere on foot, nor commuted by rickshaw, like I had with my mother. Without the glass windows of chauffeur-driven cars to keep him safely separate, he was afraid of the evidence of poverty that was everywhere in Karachi’s streets.
On Wednesdays, we’d wait for another hawker, who would sell us buddhi ka baal, old-lady hair—a wonderfully disgusting name for cotton candy. On Thursdays, it was the kulfi man, who sold a heavenly sort of ice cream on a stick, set and frozen in aluminum molds, sold from a pushcart loaded with wooden barrels that smoked when he opened them. The monkey-man came on Saturdays—twirling a handheld drum and jerking on the poor monkey’s leash to make him dance, bow, scrape, and gesture to accompany the silly story his master narrated. Whatever pity rose up in my heart for the monkey, I smothered, trying hard not to remember the favorite old story and the voice—my mother’s—that had told it.
Those vendors and what they had to offer were merely the daily, routine indulgences that now defined life. My grandparents also took me to Europe every summer. We shopped at Hamleys, in London, for remote-control cars and train sets and racetracks, watched movies in Leicester Square, and fed pigeons in Trafalgar. In Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I looked down at the world and wondered at how small it was.
One year, Jaffer and his family went to America, a place I longed to see and yet hated the thought of at the same time—its
In my grandparents’ home, I had the world at my feet—quite literally. Every day, a different hawker was invited into the gates of our compound. Jaffer and I would inspect the wares they laid out for us, taste of their goods, or avail ourselves of their services, with no worries about who would pay—this was a house where the adults set no limits on the children, and all accounts, the hawkers knew well, were settled with no questions asked. There was the kilona-walla on Monday, the toy man who sold old-fashioned string tops; squirt guns; paddle balls; ugly little baby dolls with blond, plastic, painted-on hair; cap-guns; balloons; and little pieces of junk that would pass no safety regulations that any sane person would have ever subjected them to. We bought slingshots from him, which we practiced at every chance we got, aiming for a line of old cans that Jaffer ordered the servants—a full retinue of them, assigned to follow us around and see to our needs and wants—to set up in the driveway, hoping to perfect our skill enough to shoot at something live one day.
Jaffer even managed to do it once, killing a bird—a sparrow, I think it was, a small, undistinguished specimen—which the driver, Sharif Muhammad, lectured Jaffer against killing, telling him that hunting was only allowed in Islam if you ate what you killed, because life was sacred and even the lives of the lowliest of God’s creatures could not be taken lightly. So, I remember with disgust, Jaffer asked the cook to marinate and grill the dead little bird and managed to swallow a couple of bites before throwing up all over the new shoes his mother had sent for from London.
The horse handler passed through our neighborhood on Tuesday afternoons, giving us slow, plodding horses to ride slowly, ploddingly around the neighborhood, while the servants followed us on foot to make sure that no one stole us away to sell to a beggar-master who would maim us in order to increase the return on his investment—this was more Jaffer’s worry than mine. Jaffer had never been anywhere on foot, nor commuted by rickshaw, like I had with my mother. Without the glass windows of chauffeur-driven cars to keep him safely separate, he was afraid of the evidence of poverty that was everywhere in Karachi’s streets.
On Wednesdays, we’d wait for another hawker, who would sell us buddhi ka baal, old-lady hair—a wonderfully disgusting name for cotton candy. On Thursdays, it was the kulfi man, who sold a heavenly sort of ice cream on a stick, set and frozen in aluminum molds, sold from a pushcart loaded with wooden barrels that smoked when he opened them. The monkey-man came on Saturdays—twirling a handheld drum and jerking on the poor monkey’s leash to make him dance, bow, scrape, and gesture to accompany the silly story his master narrated. Whatever pity rose up in my heart for the monkey, I smothered, trying hard not to remember the favorite old story and the voice—my mother’s—that had told it.
Those vendors and what they had to offer were merely the daily, routine indulgences that now defined life. My grandparents also took me to Europe every summer. We shopped at Hamleys, in London, for remote-control cars and train sets and racetracks, watched movies in Leicester Square, and fed pigeons in Trafalgar. In Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, I looked down at the world and wondered at how small it was.
One year, Jaffer and his family went to America, a place I longed to see and yet hated the thought of at the same time—its
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