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  Then in 1975, to everybody’s surprise, Johnnie married. Gossip buzzed in the Sind Club bar; after all, there was little else to gossip about. ‘Young enough to be his daughter.’ A nudge and a wink. ‘He’s landed on his feet,’ said Mr Bashir from Cameron Chemicals. ‘Has he?’ asked Kenneth Trimmer from Grindlays Bank. What did she see in him, and he in her? She was a small, gaudy Pakistani girl, seemingly sprung from nowhere. But then Karachi was used to arrivals and departures; the airport road was the busiest in the city.

  Another nudge and wink. Above, the ceiling fans creaked. Along the walls, bearers stood like waxworks. Beyond, the tree frogs whirred; beyond them, beyond the beach route and the apartment blocks, the hot wind blew in from the sea.

  She had sprung from nowhere. At least, she was new to him. Music thudded from his lounge, where his guests gyrated under the swaying aircraft. There she was in his kitchen, buttering a slice of bread.

  ‘You look starving,’ he said.

  She gazed up at him. She had large black eyes and shiny lipstick. ‘Someone said there was smoked salmon.’

  ‘All gone.’ A plate lay there, scattered with lime wedges. ‘I brought it back from London.’

  ‘You’re the pilot then?’

  He nodded. He wanted to feed her up. He opened the fridge but by this stage in the evening everything had been eaten.

  ‘Jam?’ he asked. She nodded. She was wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt with spangles on it. Despite the make-up, and the indolent way she pushed her hair behind her ear, she looked so young. She ate greedily.

  Her name was Aisha and she had come with Farooq and his crowd – young bloods who drove their Daddies’ cars and went to the Excelsior Hot Spot. They knew the location of parties by a kind of radar.

  And Aisha disappeared with them, with honking horns from down below and a slewing of tyres. Johnnie was left amongst the ashtrays, and when he moved to the window there was nothing but a huge moon silvering the sea. A string of street lights led to Karachi. He thought of flying, of cities laid out below like winking puzzles that sometimes made sense; he thought of his own back which was starting to ache whenever he leant over. He picked up a glass and straightened with a grunt.

  The next flight to London he bought back a packet of smoked salmon and put it in his fridge. And a few days later he found her.

  It was in downtown Karachi. Through a haze of exhaust smoke he spotted her outside the Reptile Emporium. Air crews bought shoes and handbags there; she was looking at the window display. He wanted to buy up the shop; he wanted to please her.

  Nearby, a pavement kiosk sold cigarettes. But also, for those who knew, copies of Vogue and Penthouse could be produced from under the counter. He asked to see the selection. Inspired, he knew just what she wanted: a glossy copy of the Harrods Christmas catalogue.

  They sat in an open-air café behind the Metropole Hotel. Against the white glare of the sky a sign stuttered for 7-Up. She drank through a straw and pointed to photos of ostrich-trimmed nightgowns. ‘Ooh,’ she gasped.

  The next page was a festive table, laden with food; it glowed in the candlelight. ‘Look,’ she pointed. There were two brushed children and their parents gathered around a pile of presents, which were wrapped in ribbon. Behind them an olde-worlde window was speckled with snow.

  ‘I want to go to England,’ she sighed.

  He smiled. ‘It doesn’t really look like that.’

  Two street urchins came into the café and held out their hands. ‘Baksheesh!’ they demanded. She shooshed them away. Johnnie, however, gave them Rs 5 each – far too much. They sniggered and ran off. Today he felt foolish; he felt young.

  Two months later they were married. He had never been so happy. Aisha sat on his knee and he told her about Singapore and Sydney. Her eyes widened; she stroked his cheek.

  She liked jokes, too. One evening she put on a small black moustache.

  Startled, he asked: ‘What’s this – Hitler?’

  She knew nothing of the Second World War. She replied: ‘Look, I’m Charlie Chaplin?’ She loved the movies and could see the same ones again and again.

  In their high apartment they gazed out at the sea; they ate smoked salmon and Bentinck’s Bittermints. Some other windows were lit now, and sweetmeat sellers had set up their stalls on the sand. With his wife on his knee, his flat became his home. He was no longer seen at the Sind Club; she thought it fuddy-duddy, with its shrouded billiards tables and relics of the Raj. She preferred the beach. Young men from the city drove out nowadays, their car boots clanking with crates of Bubble-Up and their radios blaring. The place was being developed into a seaside resort of a minor nature. Fairy lights had been strung around a chicken-tikka café. Bold couples parked their cars and necked.

  His own bearer had left, disapproving of this plump young woman who had bewitched his master. Neither Johnnie nor Aisha could cook, so the two of them went down to the beach café and sat on mismatched plastic chairs. They drank sweet tea while car radios played film music and the sea sighed, vastly. Young men ogled her; she shouted back at them – Urdu oaths which even Johnnie, an old trooper, couldn’t understand.

  Once he asked her about Farooq, who had brought her to the party, but she just shrugged. Farooq’s family was in favour with the Bhutto government and involved in developing the beach; they had landed the contract to build a casino. One evening he and his friends arrived and dragged Aisha, squealing, to the water’s edge. They sauntered back, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. Later she showed Johnnie the mark on her wrist where Farooq had gripped her. He was angry, but she shrugged. ‘Stupid Rooqi,’ she said, with one of her baffling smiles. He felt pain, first for her and then for himself.

  ‘In England she’d be called a scrubber,’ said Shirley Trimmer, ‘but I like her.’

  They were driving home from a Sind Club dinner-dance. ‘Not top drawer,’ said her husband Kenneth. ‘But then, if one thinks of it, neither is he.’

  It had been a stifling evening – an elderly band playing Frank I field tunes; polite wives in saris. She glanced at Kenneth. He was putting on weight. He had never been as pompous as this in England, but then in England he had never been a sahib.

  She sighed and looked out of the window. Something was caught in the glare of the headlights. It was a camel, bedecked with beads. It turned its head slowly, like a puppet. She felt a rush of pleasure – the first, and last, of the evening.

  Like her husband, Aisha was a lost soul, an orphan. Sometimes she talked about the past, but it was always the far past, when she was a child. Her father had been the assistant clerk of an irrigation scheme up in the north, in the Punjab. She talked about the ditches filled with brown water, the banks moulded like putty. She didn’t use those words, but Johnnie pictured it.

  He stroked her hair as she sat, curled in the armchair, and told him how she had adored her father and how she had followed him along the canals. He didn’t know she was following him; he would have been angry. One day she lost him; she remembered looking down and seeing the water moving with snakes. Long, shiny snakes, they had coiled and knotted themselves in the water which was as warm as soup.

  Johnnie tilted her face towards him; her jaws worked as she chewed on her gum. He was filled with such tenderness that his limbs felt boneless.

  ‘My serpent of old Nile,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘William Shakespeare,’ he replied.

  She smiled and turned the page of Movie Secrets.

  ‘My snake girl,’ he said.

  She shivered. ‘Ugh! I hate snakes.’

  Kenneth and Shirley Trimmer came out of the Reptile Emporium. It was May, and the suffocating weather just beginning.

  She was carrying her new snakeskin shoes. ‘You shouldn’t have bargained!’ she hissed.

  ‘They respect you for it,’ he replied. ‘You should understand by now.’

  ‘Don’t be condescending.’

  ‘My dear, they’re all on the fiddle.’

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nbsp; Only recently had he started calling her dear. She looked at him coolly. The subcontinent was turning him into the housemaster of a minor prep school. She should have suspected it.

  Ahead she spotted Johnnie and his wife; Aisha wore luminous pink shalwar-kamize pyjamas and red high heels. She clung to his arm as they hailed a taxi.

  ‘Don’t they look happy,’ Shirley said.

  ‘Who?’ He was not an observant man. She pointed them out. He said: ‘Obvious, isn’t it. She’s looking for a father and he’s looking for a daughter. Won’t last.’

  There were damp semi-circles under his arms. She turned away and thought: But will we?

  When Johnnie flew, he flew for his wife. Planes simply became vehicles to shorten the distance until he held her again. In foreign hotels his heart ached. He only found peace browsing in the gift arcades.

  Sometimes he managed to get through on the phone – the lines to Pakistan were erratic – but often there was no reply. On his return he never asked her about this; he was too old to want to know the answer.

  He returned, laden with gifts. Once, when he came home from a long haul and the phone had never answered, she gave him a present.

  He unwrapped the box. It was a Mark V Spitfire, ready-assembled. In fact he had one already, suspended near the kitchen door, but though she had tried to learn the difference between his planes she had never succeeded.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked. ‘There is a toy-wallah in Bohri Bazaar. I told him to make it for you.’

  Deeply moved, he hugged her. How could he explain that the fun was in doing-it-yourself? For her, the fun was not-doing-it-yourself.

  She didn’t understand him. But what did that matter when in some obscure way, he could never find the words for it, they were two of a kind? He loved her all the more.

  One day Shirley bumped into Aisha in Bohri Bazaar, the main bazaar of the city. Along the alleys, saris hung like flags; village women shuffled past, shrouded in bourquas like grubby sheets; a legless beggar sat on his trolley and the air smelt of incense.

  ‘I’m going to London soon,’ said Aisha. ‘I’m going to Oxford Street.’

  Shirley grimaced. ‘It’s awful. Tacky and crowded.’

  Aisha gestured around. ‘But this is dirty and crowded.’

  ‘No,’ smiled Shirley. ‘This is romantic.’

  Aisha wrinkled her nose. ‘You English people, you must be mad.’

  He wanted to show her the world; on the other hand he wanted to keep her safe. For the first time in his career he thought of hijackers and metal fatigue. He blamed this for his reluctance.

  But how her eyes would widen at the England she desired so fiercely: acres of separates at Marks & Spencers; fairy lights not over a tikka café but looped high around Harrods; clean, moneyed streets.

  He himself had lived abroad for so many years that by now this was his England too. He too saw it from an air-conditioned transit bus; he had become an outsider. London was where you bought gift-wrapped jars of marmalade and where people still sometimes said I’m sorry. If you move from one scentless hotel room to another, cities blur. They become a fast flip of picture postcards and a memento, at the bottom of your suitcase, you forgot you bought.

  He fixed them a holiday in London, for two weeks in October. He booked her a direct flight; he himself would be arriving from New York. They planned to meet in the hotel. ‘It’s our honeymoon,’ he told her, though they had been married a year. He booked a room overlooking Hyde Park, so that when she opened the window, for the first time in her life she would smell autumn. He pictured the two of them, laden with carrier-bags, walking beside the lake and kicking the leaves. He hadn’t kicked leaves since he was a boy, and seldom then. He had been raised in an orphanage. He hadn’t kept this a secret; it was just that nobody asked. It was his wife who fifty years later was giving him back his childhood. For this he would give her the world, which he had crossed so many times alone. If not the world, at least he would give her London.

  He was leaving two days earlier than Aisha. He hugged her. Ridiculously, his stomach churned. He had never before suffered from flight-nerves.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ he murmured. He pressed her glossy head to his chest. She gripped him. ‘Fly to me safely.’

  ‘You always say it’s the safest way to travel.’

  ‘But you’re different,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re precious.’

  When he left, a gust of wind blew through the apartment. Doors slammed; the planes rocked.

  All that evening a gale blew in from the sea. Sand dimmed the sunset; drifts half-buried the café chairs. Down in the city, dust swirled.

  Shirley, emerging from a business function at the Metropole Hotel, saw Aisha climbing out of a Mercedes. Giggling, she was smoothing down her loose lurex slacks which billowed in the wind. Another girl followed her, and three Pakistani men. Cigarettes glowing, the men propelled the girls downstairs into the Excelsior Hot Spot.

  Shirley climbed into her own car and sat next to her husband. She thought: Aisha is an innocent. Not as nice as Johnnie, but an innocent too.

  Now why did she think that? The words jostled in her head; a puzzle she hadn’t the will to work out. Let them get on with it, she thought recklessly. Tonight she was tipsy. She had drunk a great deal of Rs 300-a-bottle imported gin.

  Perhaps, when he returned, Johnnie would hold one of his shindigs. Ah, she remembered, but by then she and Kenneth would be back in London; his contract finished at the end of the month.

  At that moment, as they drove through the dusty street, palm trees swaying in the headlights, Kenneth clearing his throat beside her – at that moment, with the crystal clarity that alcohol can bring, she knew that once she returned to England she would leave him.

  In the subcontinent, the most beautiful times are dawn and dusk. Johnnie had often remarked upon this. The sky was pearly-pink as Aisha sat in the car with Farooq. The storm had passed; the sea glinted, swelling like oil. It was the early morning. Across the world, across time zones, her husband slept. Or maybe he was eating lunch. Who knew? Painfully, she wished she did.

  Farooq kissed her forehead. ‘You’ll adore Yasmin,’ he said. ‘She’s a terrific girl.’ He withdrew his hand from inside her blouse and reached into the back seat. ‘Remember, Thursday morning. Where?’

  ‘The Kardomah Café,’ she repeated.

  ‘And where is that?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘In Oxford Street.’

  ‘Where in Oxford Street?’

  She paused, and said dreamily: ‘Opposite Marks & Spencers.’

  He passed her the parcel. It was a box, wrapped in ribbon. ‘No peeking,’ he said. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead.

  ‘It’s her birthday present?’ she asked again.

  He nodded. ‘Snakeskin shoes from the Reptile Emporium.’

  ‘Snakeskin.’ She shivered.

  ‘My sister adores it, and it’s frightfully expensive in London.’

  She closed her eyes again. ‘I’m going to Harrods and Marks & Spencers and Selfridges –’

  ‘Yasmin’ll take you. She knows simply everybody and everywhere. Shops, nightclubs, you name it.’

  ‘Johnnie and I don’t know anybody.’

  ‘Trust her. Have a sooper-dooper time.’ He took her arm and folded it around the parcel. ‘And don’t forget this, will you?’ He kissed her lightly. ‘Sweetie.’

  She flew overnight. Below lay the glittering grids of cities; around and above, black space. Whimpering, she pressed the airline pillow to her cheek; she felt rigid with fear. She had never flown. Surely the plane would fall? Surely Johnnie would not be there?

  The cabin bucked. Everyone else slept blamelessly. ‘Just a little turbulence,’ the stewardess told her, as Aisha gripped her hand.

  She clenched her eyes shut. She tried to rub out the thought of Farooq’s hand between her thighs. She knew she was wicked, and that she would be punished.

/>   They didn’t believe her. Who would believe an overdressed Pakistani girl, no better than a tart, who reeked of cheap perfume and scratched the customs officer with her crimson fingernails? She yelled that the box wasn’t hers, it was given to her by a friend. Who? Called Farooq. Farooq who? She didn’t know. She had never known his surname but he was a good friend, his father knew the President. What sort of friend is that, they asked, that you don’t know his surname? Where did he live? She didn’t know.

  The packet was laid out on the table: small, white and smug. There were now four officers in the room. She struggled; the policewoman held her down.

  She screeched: ‘He said they were shoes!’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘Snakeskin shoes!’

  By now she was hysterical. She twisted in the policewoman’s arms; she spat like a cat. She was pregnant, she yelled, she was ill, she wanted her father, he was a very important person, he was a personal friend of President Bhutto. She started swearing in Urdu. They frowned, looking at the flimsy walls; people would think they were beating her up.

  The mascara ran down her cheeks, her voice rose higher. She wanted her husband, he was very important too, he knew everybody, all the places to go. Her mother was sick, her mother was dying, she had to get out. Where did her mother live? they asked.

  She tried to struggle free. ‘At Harrods!’ she shouted.

  An hour later Johnnie arrived, breathlessly. They were trying to take a statement from her; she had jammed shut the lavatory door and was yelling for her husband. He heard her shrill voice; his heart shifted.

  It only took him a moment to realize what had happened. It all made the most painful sense, but he didn’t want to think about it. He only knew that she meant everything to him and that the world was senseless without her. He stood, swaying with fatigue, staring at the creamy walls.

  For cocaine smuggling she would get at least a year in prison, his darling wife. Or maybe they would deport her and she could never visit Britain again, all her life.

  He heard her voice approaching as she was dragged out of the toilets. She sounded coarse as a fishwife; he had learnt some of the oaths by now, but he would always love her.