“
It was uljhan, he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and disquiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word.
”
‘Had fun?’ the driver asked, taking Raza’s hand and helping him down to the ground. ‘Cabbage soup for dinner!’ After the guards in the pick-up, Ahmed the Driver was a joy to sit with. His family were nomads, he explained, as he drove Raza south toward the coast. But drought and war had brought an end to the lifestyle his family had known for centuries, and now they had grudgingly settled near the border and become drivers if they were lucky, stone-pickers if they weren’t. ‘The land mines are the worst,’ he said, while Raza was still trying to work out what ‘stone-pickers’ might mean. ‘Once we used to travel in large groups for protection. Then we started to move in groups or three or four so if anyone steps on a powerful mine it can only have so much impact and others following behind will see the bodies – or the birds swarming around – and know to avoid that place.’ He smiled jauntily as he said this, and Raza didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but was glad just for the camaraderie. He wanted to ask Ahmed the Driver, where – or what - is home for your people? But though he knew how to ask where someone was from, or where they lived, the word for ‘home’ in Pashto eluded him. As he tried to think of ways to explain it, the meaning receded. He was so caught up in talking to Ahmed that it took him a while to understood why Iran felt so strange, despite its topographic similarity to Afghanistan. ‘No war,’ he said near sunset to Ahmed, when he finally understood. Ahmed nodded, for once forbearing from jokes. He didn’t need to ask what this statement was doing in the middle of a conversation about poisonous snakes in Dasht-e-Margo - the Desert of Death which Raza had travelled across in the pick-up truck
28
karachi We must learn to quarter fear, dice it, serve it on plates in manageable portions. Instead, it is etched like a hologram against the sky, starting out of the sockets of buses burnt on the road, where they root like indestructible fungi. The rat-a-tat of gunfire shatters the silence into pieces of a stone requiem. Come now, instead of allegorising fear, dare we spell it out? Dare we name the man who left his house
without knowing its name. They stopped for the night in a hotel where Raza amazed Ahmed with his command of Farsi, and set off again the next morning. They’d hardly gone any distance when a car drew up alongside them filled with women wearing head-scarves and dark glasses, calling to Raza’s mind all those Hollywood actresses of the 50’s who Harry had loved. For a few seconds the car and pick-up travelled alongside, Ahmed shouting out questions to the women, which Raza translated with a disarming smile: Which of you will marry me, which will marry my friend? Why are you travelling by road, don’t angels fly?, the women shouting back in response, ‘We don’t want husbands who smell of cabbages. Women are