Kartography by Kamila Shamsie Read Free Book Online Page A

wedding, I mean.’ I held up the photograph, then put it down again. I felt I should say something other than what I had planned to say. He was looking at me as though there was something he wanted me to say. ‘The photograph...’ I put it down in front of him. ‘I just wondered, you know, why it’s the only one of the four of them together at the wedding.’
    He didn’t even look at it. He picked up the atlas, cutting off our view of each other, and then swivelled round in the leather chair so that I couldn’t see him at all. ‘Bet you don’t know how many countries border the Soviet Union.’
    â€˜Bet you think everyone’s going to be impressed that you do know,’ I said and walked out. Knowledge had never been something we used against each other. The previous year when Ami’s cousin visited from France and taught me foreign words, five new ones every day, I always called Karim at the end of the day to share the words with him. You could put Karim’s brain in my skull, I believed at the time, and I wouldn’t even notice the swap. Why ruin that over the number of countries bordering the Soviet Union? I suspected the real reason for his new interest in maps was the need to feel superior to me. But I couldn’t say that. Couldn’t say, ‘You just like knowing things that I don’t know,’ because then he’d look even more superior and say, ‘Who said everything I do has to be about you?’ And, I had to admit it, he’d have a point.
    I didn’t mention the photograph again that day or the next day, or the day after, but I kept it in my room and whenever I found I’d lost Karim to those infernal maps I’d climb up the nomad girl’s tree, lean against my father’s carving and examine the photograph, searching for clues to the past. That was how Uncle Ali found me, when he came to Rahim Yar Khan to take us home at the end of the winter holidays.
    â€˜What are you doing up there?’ he shouted up to me. I stuffed the photograph into the pocket of my jacket, and climbed down.
    â€˜Nothing.’ I took him by the hand to lead him away from the tree, but after a few paces he stopped and looked back, up to the branch where I had been sitting, his eyes sliding over to the tree trunk. Surely from this angle and this distance he couldn’t see what was written there? He sighed, and then looked at me curiously.
    â€˜What? Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said.
    â€˜Do you mind getting sand in your shoes?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    We stood and looked at each other for a few seconds, his eyes grave. Uncle Ali always took me seriously, and I loved him for that.
    â€˜I was looking at old pictures,’ I said. ‘Karim has your smile. But you don’t have it any more.’
    He looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed without much humour. ‘You’re growing into a perceptive young woman, aren’t you?’ He put an arm round me. ‘Karim has it mainly when you’re around. It’s a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there’s a sun for it to reflect off.’
    â€˜I’m no sun. The sun is stationary, and I can’t stay still for even five minutes. Karim can be the sun. I’ll do the orbiting.’ I pirouetted around Uncle Ali. He took my hand in his and twirled me as though we were dancing.
    â€˜You’re a cool guy, Uncle Ali.’
    â€˜Thank you, sweetheart. If only my son were as easy to convince as you are.’
    When I repeated that comment to Karim, as we were preparing to go to the train station later that day, he snorted in disdain. Of late, that had become his standard reaction to anything to do with his father, regardless of the context.
    â€˜Yeah, he’s so cool he’s frozen,’ Karim said. He lifted his suitcase off his bed and carried it to the landing outside, where my suitcase was already waiting for one of Uncle