Sharah-e-Faisal

a story and its natural conclusion

The curve, left, onto Sharah-e-Faisal from the road going back into the city from the airport, at a few paces from a clearing, at a place where the sky opens and Karachi emerges, lanky and bent, as if a boy with curly hair and a necklace that hugs the inclines up, and then the declines into the pools of his collarbones, as if that boy had leaned against a wall—this, this is what Karachi felt like, a boy made memorable for his own actions, his own sly way of seducing you, of letting your eyes settle for his supple skin, his hair framing his eyes as if hiding a memory; this, this is the memory.

This is our way of telling stories where I call home, to follow a fact to its natural conclusion, to remember that turn left, and then that u-turn and my knees and my shoulders oriented to the wind, a little silver pocket of Tulsi inviting my fingers, donating the rest of itself to the vortex of matter that forms along the boulevard, resting, because the motorbike rested, at the little roundabout after Hotel Mehran, turning left again past walls I, sixteen years later, learnt hid Sind Club, and then Frere Hall to my left, and then forward till Teen Talwar, then Do Talwar, and past under the banyans on that road, perhaps the last, my views constricting until the shade clears and the afternoon announces itself, spread sultry-like over the sea.

A story must make sense but a story is always itself a sense of memory. I forget what it smelled like, but I remember the sounds of traffic and the occasional gunfire and I remember the jingle of a Walls cart weaving its way in and past our neighbourhood. Outraged at my own inability to catch him on time, of knowing the kids downstairs could, and did, I arranged for the first solution I can remember. Very sweetly, I asked the nice ice cream man to ring our doorbell when in the area, and he would and he did. There is generosity in this story I forget to sense, and the fear—of the gunfire, of my father, of the way the water crept in every summer, how it made us wait, and then punished us for our desire—all of this so alien, now, to my life.

But I was made in this. The water flooding is the water remembering where it used to be, writes Toni Morrison. I look at a clear sky, still, and I am struck with wonder: the blues, the clouds, morphing as they move. Adam ate the apple and was cast down past that sky; I wanted, at some point, to be born, and now I gaze at where I’ll Return. There is a clearing here, and another ahead. The sun filtering through leaves and intricately interlocking canopies, between slits of air the Earth breathes through, giving us shade. The city like a boy with curly hair and a necklace that licks his collarbones first up, and then into its hollow—your own, most hidden desire, to be the boy and to be the necklace—yes, the city like a boy, the city like a memory.