Dialogue between Raheen and Karim.

Kartography (pg 299)

I allowed myself a moment to believe everything had been resolved, but he had his serious face
firmly in place as he took my hands in his, and sat me down on a bench at the edge of the glen.
‘I can’t go back to Karachi. It’s starting again. The same kind of stuff that went on in ’71.’ He
ran the tip of a leaf down my face. ‘The desperation, the craziness. The stench from the
newspapers. This is how it begins.’
‘Is that a hickey on your neck?
‘No... So you’ll come with me?
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere but Karachi’ I pulled back. ‘Karim, you really are being silly.’
‘Why do you even want to go back, Ra?’
Did I want to go back? Back to a city without glens, without places to sit in public with my arms
round his neck, without the luxury of wandering among indistinguishable trees unmindful of the
repercussions of getting lost. Back to a city that was feasting on its own blood, the violence so
crazy now that all the earlier violence felt like mere pinpricks. Back to a city that bred monsters.
Back to a city where I’d have to face my father. Why should I want to go back to any of that?
And yet. When I read the Dawn online and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of
campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I
looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that there were so
many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce
and unfathomable thing. ‘Because, Karim, you’ve shown me that it’s not so simple to leave a
city behind.’
‘You have to see why I can’t go back.’
I nodded. I saw that, for all his obsessing about the city, or perhaps because of his obsessing,
Karachi was an abstraction to him, in the way the past is an abstraction, and he lacked the heart
to make it a reality. And I saw that everything he had heard about 1971 gave him reason to fear
that national politics would again force people he loved to reveal their narrow-mindedness and
cowardice and rage, and those people might include Zafar’s daughter, so like her father in so
many ways.
‘You were the one who said I needed to stop living in tiny circles.’
‘I’ve found that doesn’t matter to me as much as I thought. Or maybe it’s just that you mean
more to me than I knew.’ I stood up, twigs and dry leaves crunching beneath my feet.
‘What about Sonia?’ He took a deep breath. ‘She’s the loveliest girl in the world. And to marry
her because I think no one else will come along for her is such a supreme act of condescension.
She said that to me on the phone just the other day.’ He smiled.
‘Except she called it an act of condemnescension.’