Other Names for Love: A Novel

I

ONE

FROM HIS CABIN, Fahad could hear his father shouting instructions at someone, his voice so near it was as though he were here beside him, and Fahad flinched away.

The carriage jerked. A whistle sounded twice. Footsteps thudded down the passageway outside. The crowded platform slid past the window. Fahad set his case on the bed. He inspected his bathroom, sliding its door shut so he could turn around. It was narrow as a coffin, with speckled tin walls, a shower hanging sideways on a hook, a rimless toilet. At the bottom of the toilet was an aperture through which the tracks flashed, faster now as the train sped up. The smell of mothballs prickled his eyes with tears, which he jabbed away with his fists.

He wasn’t angry anymore. He really wasn’t.

Through the closed doors, over the chug of the engine, the whistle squealing, he heard his father call his name, the syllables hard as drumbeats. There was a small high window and through it the lowering sun made a hot square of light on his face.

His father’s voice became louder and louder still. Now he must be in the cabin, Fahad thought, must have his hand raised to the latch of the bathroom door. But when Fahad slid the door open, the room was still empty.

It was to punish him, that much was obvious.

The train passed the low sandstone barracks of Karachi’s cantonment, a giant cannon on a plinth angled towards him, a fighter plane painted in camouflage propped up mid-takeoff.

Everything Fahad did, his father twisted his mouth at—that his clothes were too tight, his hair too long, that he sat with his knees too close together or his legs crossed the wrong way, that he spent too much time with his mother and his ayah, that he liked to cook and to set a table, that he was charming company to guests, that he was first in his class this year, that he could recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ from memory, that he acted in plays, that his voice was shrill. His father was a cannonball, an avalanche, something giant crashing through the jungle. This was what Fahad and his mother said of him in private, one of the little jokes they shared.

And now Fahad was to spend the summer with him at the farm upcountry instead of in London. To stay in Karachi, even that would have been tolerable. Even Karachi seemed like civilisation. The carriage wobbled, and he steadied himself against a little desk that folded out from the wall. They had reached parts of the city he didn’t know: tall apartment blocks—one pale green, another purple, a third yellow—gaudy washing slung out over balconies to dry, rusting air-conditioner casements. The train slowed as the track ascended. They were level now with the higher storeys of these buildings. A woman unfurled a bright red sheet like a flag, her arms splayed. She frowned it seemed directly at him and shook her head.

He would sequester himself, keep himself to himself. He wouldn’t allow his father to have any effect on him at all. He found in his suitcase the books he’d brought with him—History 2, Ad Maths: Statistics, Contents, and Meaning, Macbeth, and, at the bottom of the case, wrapped in his pyjamas, a book he’d taken from his mother’s shelf, adjusting the books around it to close the gap it had left: Dark Obsession, subtitled A Passionate Story of Love Overshadowed by Memories of the Past. On the cover, a man with wavy golden hair, his shirt open to his waist, his chest gleaming like a shield, was turned towards a woman, her chin tilted up at him, her eyes closed, her fingers curling at his shoulder. Fahad opened the book and reread the first line—which was delicious—then closed it, buried it at the bottom of his case, and tucked the case beneath his bunk, pushed the edge out of sight with his toe.

His mother would be packing for London today. Her cases would be open across the bed, her shoes in their shoe bags nestled against one another, her freshly laundered outfits laid out over the bedcover in their plastic sheaths. On the plane, they liked to sit in the seats at the very front. ‘So we’re the first to arrive,’ his mother would say with her little laugh sharp as cut glass. Everyone wanted those seats, but his mother spoke just so to the attendants at check-in. It was never as though she were asking for a favour. Rather that they should want to do her a favour without her having to ask. It was in the tilt of her chin, the way she held their gaze and pressed her perfectly painted lips together, the way she narrowed her eyes and nodded them towards the conclusion she wanted, a conclusion that was somehow inevitable.

Even the London apartment they borrowed from his father’s friend—dark as it was, with the musty smell of damp, with shadows creeping up the walls—she’d fling the curtains open, raise her head towards the outside stairwell as though it were glorious sun, she’d plump the tired cushions on the sofa, she’d tidy the crystal ornaments on the side tables, she’d buy tight little bunches of narcissus from the corner shop and arrange bouquets around the house, and it would become somewhere different: their English cottage. And barely a short walk from Harrods.

‘Will it be alright?’ he’d asked about Abad, once the rage had subsided, once his tears had dried against his pillow, once he had abandoned all hope of changing his father’s mind.

‘No,’ she’d said, touching her papery fingers to his face, smiling sweetly. ‘It will be terrible.’ And she’d laughed. ‘Horrible.’ She’d shuddered. And then confessed, ‘I haven’t been, of course. But when we married, Rafik and I, hordes of them came from there, dark and ragged, and danced, spinning like dervishes, late into the night, shrieking and hollering round a fire like savages.’

‘Why did you do it?’ he wanted to ask her, of the wedding. ‘Why?’ he wanted to ask her, and shake her by her thin shoulders.

The train passed within a tangle of motorways, some half-finished, some ending midair, protruding rusting girders from their concrete slabs. Giant trucks queued at a toll station. The train sped beyond them and now, now there was only desert: pale, flat sand dunes to the horizon, an occasional bush of some spidery plant. His heart became loud and knocked urgently against the front of his chest. He imagined Karachi receding into the distance and he had to see it. He ran down the passageway outside his room, to the door through which he’d climbed into the carriage. Its handle was a giant lever, which he gripped, as though he might with all his weight release it. He lowered a window in the door and leaned out as far as he could, the hot air whipping grit at his cheeks and in his ears but all he could see was the rest of the train, the other carriages snaking behind out of a shimmering haze.

He shouted. He cried out as shrilly as he wanted—sounds, not words, that the wind snatched from his mouth, made vanish. But even here, beneath the whup-whup of the wind about his head, he could hear the sound of his father’s voice, hear him calling his name, and when he ducked back into the carriage, he heard it once again, more clearly, from the room at the other end of the passageway.

He returned to his cabin, sat on the bunk with a book open in his lap, flicked page to page, the words swimming in front of him, becoming an indecipherable pattern that he followed with his fingertip, often tracing back to the start of a line again, again, again.

‘It’s a jungle,’ Ayah had said of the farm. ‘In the grass there are snakes as thick as this.’ She had squeezed the fattest part of his arm. ‘And wild cats hungry as lions.’

The sun began to set. The windowpane cooled. The room as it darkened became smaller. The sand turned pink and then mauve and, from hills so distant he hadn’t seen them before, long shadows reached towards the carriage like incisors.

There were footsteps outside. They came nearer and paused. Then, a rap on the door.

It was the uniformed bearer who had loaded their luggage onto the train. A slick of grease down the centre of his nose shone under the bright lights in the passageway. ‘Sir has been asking for you.’ He was barely older than Fahad. There was a tear at the waist of his jacket where the seam had opened up to loose threads. His eyes flickered round the room. ‘This you must close,’ he said. He slipped past Fahad to the window and began to wind down the blinds. ‘There are bandits.’

‘There’s no one,’ Fahad said. ‘Not even an animal.’

‘You can’t see,’ he said. He drew the curtain. ‘They are everywhere.’ He glanced inside the bathroom. ‘It’s alright?’ he said. ‘You’re comfortable? You’re happy?’ He edged out but stopped again in the doorway, reached in, and flicked the desk lamp on. ‘Your father is asking about dinner. He says he doesn’t care, he doesn’t eat, we should ask you.’

Fahad shrugged. He shook his head. ‘Anything,’ he said, knowing it would be terrible, strange lumps of meat swimming in grease.

‘Sir is calling you again.’ The bearer jerked his head. He stood aside, waiting for Fahad. ‘I can hear him.’ He gestured down the passageway.

Fahad turned, busied himself with his book, but when he glanced back, the bearer was still waiting.

‘He’s in the government?’ he said.

Fahad shook his head.

‘This saloon is for ministers,’ the bearer continued. ‘He must know someone. And they don’t give it like that. Many people ask. They say no.’ He gestured again.

‘I’ll come in a bit,’ Fahad said.

‘He told me, You bring him. He’ll be angry if I go without.’ He stared ahead. ‘The cook is with him now. He must be asking what your father wants. There’—he signalled—‘he’s calling again.’

Fahad paused at the window. He pushed the curtain aside and lifted a corner of the blind. It was too dark to see anything beyond the glass—only a reflection with a slice of his face in it and the shifting figure of the bearer behind him.

‘It’s like a TV from outside,’ the bearer said. ‘Sometimes the train stops in the night, and if anyone is there, they see a full picture. Who there is, what they have. Sometimes they pay these drivers to stop. If the salary is only two, three thousand, they offer them ten thousand, twenty. Sometimes they come and you don’t even know. But if they don’t find what they want, they bring guns, they wake everyone, they break everything.’

The boy scratched his nose. There was an angry red welt to one side of it. ‘My father—if he called and I didn’t go,’ the boy continued, ‘he’d give me a slap across the face. But you people are different.’ He rubbed the welt with his knuckle and the patch of redness bloomed across his cheek and over the bridge of his nose.

Fahad thought of his bedroom in Karachi, where he could sit undisturbed for hours, longer even if he kept the lights off so it seemed he was resting.

‘It’s good,’ his mother had said, when he’d come to say goodbye, but as though she were talking to herself. ‘But you’re my bird, my littlest bird.’ She’d sighed then and, with a shake of her head, turned away.

He had a list for her of what he wanted from London: a Russian camera that obscured all but the centre of every image; a countertop ice cream maker; a programme from Streetcar, which they had planned to see together. She folded the note up into a tiny square and tucked it into the inside pocket of her Filofax. ‘No,’ she said, touching her fingers to his cheeks, brushing at their wetness with her thumbs. ‘You’re a man. Almost, almost. And this is why, this is the reason, this is what Rafik says, and what can I say then? You have to be a little—’ She shook her fist.

There were things he wanted to say but couldn’t—a horrible feeling had swelled in his throat and stopped him speaking, so he just lowered his head.

‘Where does all this come from?’ She waved her hand indiscriminately, at the sheesham dresser, at her vases of silk and porcelain flowers, at her crystal jars of stem ginger biscuits and the supari they mixed specially for her at the Club. ‘From there. The jungle. So then? You must go.’

He pressed his lips tightly together.

‘And Rafik? You think he’s this, you think he’s that. What is he? He’s your father.’ He’d felt angriest with her then—for a moment he’d imagined hitting her, imagined the bones of her cheek and jaw knocking like dice against his palm—and remembering it now, the rage bubbled up sour at the back of his tongue. She’d get just what she wanted.

‘You’re coming—’ The bearer nodded and stood aside to make way for him.

‘I DIDN’T HEAR YOU,’ Fahad said, as he reached the room his father was in.

There were banquettes on either side upholstered in glossy pistachio green vinyl. His father sat on one, a table folded out over his legs, papers scattered across it.

‘Here he is.’ His father directed this at a grizzled old man in a shabby tailcoat and matching pants with a tall white hat on his head.

‘It’s very late,’ the man said. ‘How is there time to make dinner?’

‘There isn’t time?’ His father motioned as if he might stand, as if he might toss the table and its contents to the ground.

‘There’s time,’ the man said. ‘Of course there is.’ He clasped his hands in front of him, squinted at his dark feet in his worn sandals.

‘He can make whatever you want,’ his father said. ‘You say anything you like.’

‘Yes, baba.’ The man perked up. ‘I’ve cooked in the homes of—’ He reeled off a list of names. ‘Chinese food, English, Irish stew, chow mein chicken.’

‘He likes these things,’ his father said, and then to Fahad, ‘Tell him now.’

Fahad shrugged. The broad window behind each banquette was uncurtained and the panes reflected the room endlessly like a hall of mirrors.

The man continued naming dishes he could make—potato mash, chicken roast, chicken keev, chicken nuggy, beef roast, beef burger.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Fahad said—though he was so hungry his stomach twisted into knots. ‘I probably won’t eat anything. I’ll probably sleep early.’ He pressed his hot palm to his stomach.

‘He’ll eat,’ the cook said. ‘I’ll make such things he hasn’t had. Even if’—he circled his hand in the air—‘he’s been to all these places.’

Then, he and the bearer slipped away. Fahad turned to the window opposite his father.

‘All this, it’s for you,’ his father said. ‘What do I care for it? I’d be happy coming by road or in a passenger train. But I said, The boy must be comfortable. He must see what it’s like—to go in the saloon and everything.’ His papers rustled. ‘These fancy lights and this cook and bearer and bedrooms. All for you.’

The lamps on the walls were brass and beneath them there were framed prints—the nearest one of a fisherman squatting by a riverbank hauling a net through the water towards him.

Fahad kneeled on the banquette, leaned over the back, and pressed his face to the windowpane. The glass was cool against the tip of his nose, against the ridge of his brow. He cupped his hand over his eyes. ‘It’s desert all the way?’ he asked.

Were those stars in the distance, or was that a town? He imagined him and his father laughing and talking, like his father did with his friends and visitors, gesticulating insistently. He imagined his own voice booming the way his father’s did. He imagined their voices booming together so loudly the walls shook. ‘It was wonderful,’ he imagined telling his mother. ‘I think I’ll go every summer.’ He imagined turning away when she talked about the things she talked about—the flower show, the servants, the Club.

He swivelled round, sat down.

‘You’ve seen the farm,’ his father said. ‘You’ve been to Abad.’

Fahad shook his head. ‘I haven’t.’ It was odd sitting opposite his father like that, his father’s gaze travelling across his face as though he were looking for something, so Fahad looked away, at the pictures on the other wall, this one of a bridge, that one of figures at a bazaar.

‘Of course you have.’ His father motioned with his fingers over his lap like he was snipping. ‘When you had the business done.’

The carriage swayed, swung violently, tossing Fahad onto his side.

He didn’t want to be here or there, Fahad thought suddenly, not with his father or with his mother. If the train stopped in the night, he’d get off wherever it was, wade through the heavy sand in the dark, just to be away.

‘Where are you going?’ his father said, as Fahad stood up. ‘What’s there in your room? Sit down. Stay.’ His father tidied the papers in front of him, glanced again at the page that was uppermost, then continued. ‘Always with your mother. Now, I want to talk to you.’

To Fahad’s relief, the bearer returned before his father could begin. He seemed to have distracted Fahad’s father from his purpose because, as the bearer dismantled the table in front of his father and removed it, his father fell silent, rested his chin on his hand, frowned into the middle distance. Fahad wanted to excuse himself. He thought of things he could say—that he wasn’t feeling well, that his tummy was funny, that he was tired.

‘Sit.’ His father frowned again.

Another table was assembled now so that it reached from one banquette to the other. The bearer unfolded a white cloth over it, with an orange kidney-shaped stain in the centre, and came and went with plates, with cutlery, with glassware, finally with a bud vase with a single blue carnation in it and a sprig of baby’s