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KIM ECHLIN lives in Toronto. She is the author of Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer, and The Disappeared, which was published in seventeen languages, nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction.

Praise for Under the Visible Life

“I lost count of how many times I was caught off-guard by the poignancy of this novel. Every page pits hope against despair. Every page screams, fight for your dreams, you are lost without them. This story of motherhood and friendship, anchored by two extraordinary heroines, will stay with me for a long time” Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed

“Echlin has created two women who practically explode off the page with their desire, talent and brilliance. They are both incredibly flawed, making all the wrong choices, falling for difficult men, and raising kids on messy kitchens floors—and yet, like most women, they find a way to make life work through the chaos. The result is a book that has the rhythm, cadence and sexuality of a piano tune played in a little theatre on the wrong side of a big town” Heather O’Neill, author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Lullabies for Little Criminals

“This novel is a love song to music itself, the true and requited love of these gifted musicians’ lives” Globe and Mail “The novel carries readers through an impressive cavalcade of personal and societal changes. Echlin is that rare writer who can evoke the joy of playing and listening to music without resorting to overly abstract language or fuzzy metaphors” Toronto Star

“[H]er talent is on full display in this lyrical, exciting story of two women and their lifelong relationships with music and with each other … moving from start to finish” Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In Under the Visible Life, Echlin … delivers a clinic on how to conjure emotions readers didn’t even know they had … This book is nothing short of a masterpiece” Quill and Quire, starred review

“Under the Visible Life looks at the lives of two women … united by their love of jazz and the freedom felt when fingers fly across the keyboards. What a masterpiece this is” Canada Bookbeat

“This is a book about a passion for music … The power of stories—[Echlin] has captured that beautifully with Under the Visible Life” Jazz FM Interview

Praise for The Disappeared

“Powerful and moving” The Times

“Electrifying … The voice is singular and arresting … This is a very sensual book, written in an aroused but taut and plain prose … Echlin’s heroine is a risk-taker; so, on the literary level, is Echlin … Through [her] technical and stylistic virtuosity, allied with elliptical narrative brilliance, Echlin raises Anne’s climactic ritual action to a level of tragic sublimity” Guardian

“Daring … Finely chiseled prose … Undeniably beautiful” Telegraph

“An elegiac, beautifully told memory-tale of obsessive love” Jury, Scotiabank Giller Prize 2009

“Echlin’s masterful novel of meetings, partings and cross-cultural love … A complex expression of annihilating loss and eternal love that is best experienced, in a sense, like the final act of a tragic play: as something inevitable and beyond the calculations of reason” Globe and Mail

“The Disappeared is an expert novel, which manages to penetrate to the aching core of the Cambodian tragedy” National Post

“Despite everything written about Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia, it is still possible to be deeply shocked by the stories of two million who died in the killing fields, were tortured or simply disappeared … Echlin has written a love story that exposes in terrible detail the consequences for generations of Cambodians living through ‘Year Zero’” Independent

ALSO BY KIM ECHLIN

The Disappeared
Dagmar’s Daughter
Elephant Winter
Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer

Elizabeth Smart:
A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity

under the visible life

KIM ECHLIN

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

First published in 2015 by Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Canada Books Inc.,
a Penguin Random House Company

A CIP record for this book can
be obtained from the British Library

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

eISBN 978 1 78283 219 5

For those who cannot name themselves

I start in the middle of a sentence
and move in both directions
at once.

—JOHN COLTRANE

No Memory Is One’s Own Alone

MAHSA

What she is I am. My mother ran away with my father from Lashkar Gah when she was eighteen and gave birth to me in Karachi, the pearl of the Arabian Sea. She liked to make us laugh with her Pashto-Urdu-American jokes and her proverbs and idioms in English. Her name was Breshna Najibullah. She had bright grey eyes that were interested in everything, especially in me and my father. She wore her long hair loose and she had a half-moon scar on her chin from a fall as a child. It looked like a little second smile. She moved with great energy, and gracefully.

My father was an American water engineer who came to Afghanistan to work on the dam projects and he liked home movies and playing piano. His name was John Weaver. He bought our piano from Hayden’s and he used to say with a shrug, I only play party music but your mother likes it. He filled up our living room with “Blueberry Hill” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” When I was three, I have been told, I began to copy him, picking out tunes. He showed me how to find the chords on the bottom and after that it was easy. I made up my own songs and I liked to do this and spent a lot of time at it. I do not remember ever not being able to play.

From the beginning my parents were teetering on their own brink. I did not have them for long. They were murdered when I was thirteen.

Their favourite place to go dancing was the Beach Luxury Hotel and my father’s eyes were always on my mother. He was handsome in an American way, with his shaved-smooth face and his hair short and parted to one side. There was a little stoop in his shoulders that was from tallness not humility, and he was enthusiastic to see or try anything new. He liked to wear a narrow tie, unusual in the heat of Karachi. I sometimes tied one of his ties around my own neck so that I could pretend to be him.

The timbre of his voice was gentle as if he were leaving lots of room for me to think, which he was. He spoke slowly but not stiffly and he pronounced his consonants clearly which he said was useful to people who did not know English. He said, When I try to understand other languages it helps if people speak slowly.

My mother laughed and said, John, you only know how to speak American. It won’t matter how slowly a person speaks.

He said, That’s nonsense, I speak English and I know how to say thank you in Urdu and Pashto and Goan, listen, shukriya-verra-much-indeed venerable wife-ji.

There’s no such thing as Goan, she said.

Then he sang the Falcons song “You’re So Fine” and took her in his arms to dance. He stopped singing and put his face in her hair and he kissed her neck and they stopped dancing for a moment and he said, That’s Goan.

They did not mind me seeing how much they loved each other and they liked to tell over and over the story of how they met in western Afghanistan on the Helmand River that rises from the Hindu Kush. My mother’s eyes were soft and bright like winter mountain stars when she said, He asked me to dance in Pashto. He said if I was married his grave would be his wedding bed. Your father was full of hullabaloo.

I repeated, Hullabaloo, because I liked the rolling sound of it.

She looked at him to see if he was delighting in us.

She may mean baloney, said my American father to the ceiling fan as if there was no one else in the room.

It did not matter if we said hullabaloo or baloney, it was love that he was full of. He said, I could no more not love your mother than stop locusts.

I called my mother Mor, which is Pashto, and I called my father Abbu, which is Urdu, and when I wanted to tease them I called them Ma and Pa which I learned in an American book. Abbu laughed when he heard that and said it made me sound like a hillbilly, but Mor and I did not know what that was.

My name is Mahsa which means like the moon, and my family name was Weaver-Najibullah which Abbu said was a mouthful but Mor said, She will need both our names one day. The girls at my school had all kinds of names, Moslem and Christian and Hindu, but mine was the longest. My father mostly called me Porcupine because when I was a baby my mother sang, Do you know what the porcupine sang to her baby? O my child of velvet.

Abbu used to tell me, You have my big hands and your mother’s beautiful eyes and you will someday be as graceful as she is and touch a man’s heart and I hope he will be a good man.

Like you, I thought.

He said, Where your Mor comes from, women are protected from lions and the likes of me. But I saw something in her eyes so I took a leap, and I sent her love notes and I asked, Are you promised to anyone? Are you married?

The bird sees the grain not the snare. My parents were in love and they did not wait.

In Lashkar Gah my father wrote a report that the underground water from the karezes was too salty for vineyards and orchards, that the soil was good only for pea shrubs and poppies. No one wanted to hear this. Abbu had already been accused of being a communist in America. Now he was criticizing the American projects and he was speaking to a Pashto girl and the Pashto men were outraged. John Weaver, the honest water engineer, was offending everyone.

He said, Porcupine, sometimes the truth gets you into trouble.

He hid Mor in the back of an American supplies truck as far as the border and paid a guide to help them cross into Pakistan on foot. Mor was pregnant. They slipped into Karachi, the Bride of Cities. In those days it was a green place where men washed the streets at night and people took trams from the Empress Market to Keamari. Mor was eighteen and Abbu was five years older and they liked to talk with the musicians in the clubs where Abbu played for fun. He took home movies of Mor sitting with them, holding me in an Afghan-style baby sling. She is smiling and young and prettier than European girls. Abbu used to joke, I was always afraid your Mor would run away with a real musician.

In Karachi they had gone to the only person they knew, Mor’s grey-eyed uncle, Barak Dilawar. He was the first man in our family to learn to read and to leave Afghanistan. In Karachi he met a Pathan wrestler who told him that he could get a job at the Beach Luxury Hotel which employed Bengali cooks and Sindhis and Punjabis, local Urdu speakers and Baloch people. The man told him, Mr. Avari is looking for all good workers. Come.

Uncle was impressed by the graceful and spacious buildings and the long dormitories on each side for the hotel workers, where troops had lived during the war. He had never imagined living in such opulence. With his reading and his wrestling strength he was hired and he rose quickly to become the night manager at the front desk of the Beach Luxury Hotel.

According to our tradition, Uncle had to offer them nanawatai, or sanctuary, until they got on their feet. Abbu and Mor stayed with him only until I was born and then we got our own home in a part of Karachi called Saddar Town near St. Joseph’s Convent School, which I attended. I learned to read left to right and right to left, in English and Arabic, and I could decipher Nastaliq. I took in languages easily like Mor did and Abbu said, You have ambidextrous eyes that go back and forth like a carpet weaver’s shuttle. Abbu taught at the university and Mor with her polyglot tongue got office work at the Pakistan International Airlines and wore a uniform designed by Pierre Cardin.

Abbu was proud of her and said, That’s jim-dandy. PIA is the first airline to fly the Super Constellation and to show in-flight movies. Then he winked in his American way and said, Maybe your Mor could get us some tickets. Would it not be good to watch movies in the sky?

But I liked going to movies with them on the ground, at the Paradise and the Nishat. After we saw To Kill a Mockingbird, Abbu said to Mor, See, America ain’t so great, and we corrected his grammar though he did it on purpose.

Mor liked Barsaat Ki Raat with qawwali music about the policeman’s daughter falling in love with a poet who sings, In all my life I’ll never forget that rainy night, for I met a lovely girl that rainy night.

I saw Casablanca so many times with Abbu that we memorized the words. Abbu played the piano and pretended to be Sam, and I always said to him, Here’s lookin’ at ya, kid.

I began to have my own tastes too. I liked dancing the twist with my friends and I liked Chubby Checker, and I especially liked Sam Cooke singing “Twistin’ the Night Away.” When I practised in my room Abbu came in and smiled in a way Mor called fond and said, You’re turning American.

Mor and I spoke Pashto. I remember sitting in a big chair looking at our chinar tree, listening to her tell the love stories of Layla and Majnun, of Antara and Abla. When I was afraid of anything Mor said, No matter what anyone says, you think, Though I am but a straw, I am as good as you. And she reminded me over and over, Never forget that your grandmother knew only Pashto, and only to speak it. Can you imagine what it is to not read?

I did not care. I did not care in four languages. Mor said the same thing every day.

Thirteen years after Mor and Abbu arrived in Karachi, I was in bed, listening to Mor weeping and pleading with Abbu. She said, We have lived here long enough. My father is dead and there is no one to stop my brothers. Let us go now to America.

Stop them from what? I wondered.

Abbu said, We never bothered them.

She said, John, the sun cannot be hidden behind two fingers.

But we are far away.

Far away from what? I wondered. I heard him move close to her. I imagined his arms around her.

She said, You do not know my brothers.

Then someone closed a door and I could not hear so I fell asleep.

We are going to go on a trip to America, said Mor to me in the morning. Will it not be good to see where your father comes from? Perhaps we will finally find out what is a hillbilly.

I did not want to leave my school and my friends and my only home but I also imagined flying in an airplane and seeing for the first time American teenagers dancing the twist. And maybe getting some red lipstick.

Two weeks later Mor’s half-brothers appeared in Karachi. One went to the university, shot Abbu, and left him on the steps to bleed to death. The other went to the PIA offices. There were two shots. One in Mor’s chest. One in her head. My uncles were not arrested, only questioned and released to disappear back to Afghanistan. This is the unsayableness of my life.

We have a proverb: Me against my brothers; me and my brothers against my cousins; me and my brothers and my cousins against the world.

Family can kill family to make things right.

Why was I not killed? The murder of my parents began my unrootedness. I had no home to return to. I could not fathom how my own family could kill my beloved Abbu and Mor.

The day before he was shot, Abbu had taken me to Clifton Road to a little shop where anyone could make a record for ten rupees. I played a tune I made up and then I played “Autumn Leaves” for the other side and they pressed it into a little 45 record which had in the centre a yellow disc called a spider that popped in and out. The woman printing the label asked what was the title of my tune. I had not thought of a name so I said, That is called “Abbu’s Song,” and his face flushed and he put his long arm around my shoulders and said, Thank you, Porcupine. That is the best gift I ever received. In this way I learned how important my music could be. I do not know what happened to that record. It is lost to me, just as the Karachi I grew up in disappeared.

KATHERINE

They took me away from Ma. I was three months old and she was in the Belmont reformatory because she got put away for living with my Chinese father, Henry Lau, in a garage on Barton Street in Hamilton, Ontario. The year was 1940. They said she was incorrigible. A woman could get arrested for not using the Ladies and Escorts door at a tavern, much less sleeping with a Chinese migrant worker. Ching chong Chinaman sittin’ on a fence, tryin’ ta make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

Ma said, Henry had already left for work the morning they came for me. I heard a knock and men shouting, We know you’re in there, and when I opened the door I saw two policemen standing behind my father. He was drunk and his jaw was clenching the way it did before he took a swipe at me. I wondered why he’d bother coming all the way from Toronto. He left my mother and me when I was thirteen years old and he had been living with another woman.

He was acting all affronted and saying, Yellow kisses. Who do you think you are?

The police drove me back to Toronto. I sat in the backseat and there was a mesh metal screen between us. I felt like I was already in prison and I knew I was in real trouble. They took me to a basement cell in the courthouse. A girl social worker came and interviewed me and asked me why I would run off with a Chinese and how far did I go in school and how old was I, and was I pregnant.

I was eighteen and I had only been with Henry, but I was worried about getting him in trouble for me being a minor so I pretended not to know who the father was.

Ma lit a cigarette and said, The social worker asked for the fellows’ names so I had to say I never knew their names and then the social worker looked disgusted and asked, How many? Three sounded more believable than two so I said, Only three.

I was terrified in the cell and I kept thinking my mother would come and get me out to spite my father but she did not come. She was always busy running the rooming house and she was afraid of my father and I suppose she did not like me living with Henry either. When I was a kid and we saw Chinese men carrying laundry past our house on Parliament Street, she used to tease me that they would steal me and put me in one of their bags. It was illegal for them to employ a white woman, and they weren’t allowed to bring their wives here. It was a miserable life and I felt sorry for them. When I left for Hamilton with Henry, Ma said, You’ve always had a brass neck.

In the morning they took me upstairs into a courtroom that was the fanciest place I had ever been. Behind the judge’s head was a carved wooden picture of two women holding hands. The judge looked down on me from his big wooden chair and I recognized the younger police officer who arrested me and he seemed embarrassed to see me again. I mouthed Hello to him but he pretended not to notice. He told the judge I was wearing pyjamas at the time of the arrest.

Everyone wears pyjamas. Why would he have to say that?

The judge asked if I was pregnant and how far gone, and I said we were saving up for the marriage licence which was true. Then the judge said, Jenny Goodnow, your father is acting in your best interests.

Ma bounced her foot when she told this part of the story, and fiddled with the enamel flip-top lid on her little Ronson pocket lighter making the flame shoot up and down. She said, That was supposed to be my best interests? To be put away by a judge and my own father because I was pregnant? Because my boyfriend was Chinese? That is supposed to be fair? I came out of the court and the matron said, She got eighteen months. Get her ready for Black Maria.

It sounded like spiders. It sounded like something Catholic.

What’s Black Maria?

The court van, she said. They should let you girls get on with things. Why you go with foreigners is a mystery to me.

Ma’s best friend at Belmont was a girl called Violet. She was sixteen, and she already had a baby and she was pregnant again. Violet used to get the other girls to give her and Ma their supper milk because she said pregnant girls needed it. After she had her baby Violet was transferred to the Hospital for the Insane in Cobourg. The judge said immorality was a symptom of insanity even though her doctor said Violet was not insane. They took both her children away for good and gave her shock treatments. Ma said, They might as well have killed her.

I was born in the Toronto General Hospital. They kept me away from Ma but she was screaming she wouldn’t give me up. Finally a nice nurse, not a mean one, brought me to her and showed her how to put my lips to her nipple. Ma said the best part was she finally got to look at me and she could see Henry’s almond-shaped black-brown eyes.

Your eyes always remind me of secrets, she said. Then she added, Good ones.

After three months at Belmont, they took me away from her again and put me in a children’s home for nine months and when I turned a year old they put me with a foster mother because I was not trying to walk or talk. What’s the point of talking if no one is listening? The Children’s Aid worker was still trying to get Ma to give me up. She said, Most girls who aren’t married give up their babies. Yours’ll be better off.

Ma said, I’m not giving her up. I’m going to marry the father and move back to Hamilton.

He doesn’t seem to be very interested.

How could he be? He doesn’t know yet.

So the first thing she did when she got out of Belmont was take the bus to Hamilton and find Henry Lau who did not know where she had been for eighteen months. They got married on January 26, 1942, at the city hall in Hamilton. There is a single black-and-white photograph taken on their wedding day that she kept in a children’s workbook where she practised writing Chinese characters. Henry Lau is wearing a fedora tilted low over one eye. I used to stare at it trying to get an idea of who my father was. Ma always found him handsome but I thought, Why are his eyes averted? Ma said, The photographer was in a rush.

Ma is wearing a dress nipped in at the waist, the same dress she wore the night she met him. Even after a baby she was skinny. The dress looks white in the photo but she told me it was light blue. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in my shoe.

Your father liked that rhyme, she said. She showed me how to write some characters— for Jia-na-da, and for love. She knew the numbers up to twenty. She used to say, Can you imagine? You need three thousand characters to read a newspaper. The wedding photo was taken somewhere near Barton Street. There are steel mills behind, probably the old Dominion Foundries. Wispy snow blows around their ankles on the sidewalk like pretty little snake-ghosts. Ma’s face is not open like I imagined the face of a happy bride should be. She is turned from the camera, toward him, and her lips are not loose and smiling but tight.

Why aren’t you holding hands?

Wasn’t he good looking? she asked. He lined the walls of our place with brown parcel paper to make it cozier. It was like living inside a present. He was the first person I ever saw cook garlic. He used to tape newspaper on the walls around the stove to catch any splatter, and he always kept his shirt tucked in, even at home. The night before I got arrested I lit candles at dinner and he said it made him think of temples and spirits. I was going to tell him about being pregnant that night but I held back because I thought I’d buy something for a baby and leave it around and see if he guessed. I wanted to have some fun with it.

She handed the photo to me and said, Us holding hands was not acceptable in those days. A lot of things were not acceptable then. I used to walk so my shoulder touched his through our coats.

Ma got a job in the coffee shop at the Royal Connaught Hotel on the corner of King and John in Hamilton. She rented our basement apartment in a little clapboard house in a respectable neighbourhood on Mountain Brow from old Mrs. Rose and her grown-up daughter Lily whose young husband was killed in the war. Their shoes click-clicked above us every night and Ma used to make fun of them but we always had Sunday lunch together upstairs in their dining room. Lily called us the four dames and she taught me to play hearts. Ma was afraid Mrs. Rose would not rent to Henry, so she said he wasn’t around right now. During the war people did not ask too many questions. Better to marry and divorce. She had to beg a credit union to give her a bank account where she could cash her paycheques. Most banks wanted a husband or a father to sign for a girl’s account.

Ma said, I was frantic when I first got out. I had no money and I needed to find work and a place to live and a way to take care of a baby. They did everything they could to make me give you up but I fought tooth and nail for you.

She was long limbed and she painted her fingernails and toenails and lips all the same shade of red. She was so thin her own mother used to say, You look like a washboard. She smoked more than she ate and her cigarette butts were always smeared with red lipstick. I’m built lanky too. In anything scoop-necked you can see the bones on my chest and around my shoulders. I gave up trying to look sexy because you need flesh for that. My skin’s not as white as hers. Ma always said burnished and she meant it kindly. On her day off she put cotton balls between her toes and she twisted her hair into big spiky rollers. She smelled of stale smoke and Nivea cream. She tied a scarf printed with little Scottie dogs over her hair when she was setting it, and she balanced her burning cigarette on an ashtray shaped like a music note and she waved her fingers in the air to dry her polish quicker while her toes set. I got my height from her. Her hair was chestnut and she said it thinned out when she got pregnant but I think it probably thinned out when she was in the reformatory because they kept the girls hungry. The visiting doctors did experimental treatments on them for venereal disease and if any girl complained about waiting in line half-naked, or squirmed during the internal cauterizing, the matrons made her sit in a closet. Ma got locked in a closet for a full day because they forgot she was in there. I think that would thin out your hair. My hair is poker straight and black. When I was sixteen I permed it out big and wild and I’ve always kept it that way. Some people think it makes me look half black or something. I have large hands and large feet that go with my tallness and Ma said those hands must come from her mother’s side of the family who, way back, were big-boned Irish potato farmers.

Before I was two, my father left a folded piece of paper with neat printing for Ma at the hotel:

Dear Jenny,

Life here too hard, I must go back. I never forget you.

Your husband, Henry

The people who condemned Ma lived scot-free—her father, the social worker, the police officer, the judge. But Ma got herself a respectable job in a good hotel, her own apartment and a bank account. We had one of the first televisions on the street. She always talked about being independent, as if it were some kind of specialized state not available to most women. Our neighbour Nan took care of me when I was a baby and Ma worked double shifts on weekends to pay her. Nan used to say, What’s one more? I don’t have any other way to get my own money, and she helped us a lot. I think she secretly envied Ma working. Her job was taking care of me and three sons, Mac, Eddie and Little Johnny, and her husband who was Big Johnny and worked shifts in the mills rolling steel. They had tin foil on the bedroom window so Johnny could sleep in the daytime and us kids had to keep quiet. Nan was the family Ma and I did not have. Little Johnny was a few years older than I was but I always seemed to be organizing him and Ma laughed and said, Just like a girl, trying to run things.

Nan said, You’re lucky you got a girl.

One time they were drinking instant coffee at Nan’s Arborite table when I heard Ma say, Getting married didn’t work for me. The deck’s stacked against a married woman.

It’s not that bad, Jenny.

I was hanging back by the counter and they hadn’t shooed me away so I asked, Hey, Nan, how’d you meet Big Johnny?

They both looked around because they hadn’t noticed me I guess. Nan laughed and said, I grew up beside Johnny.

Nan, will you do my Tarot?

Not for you yet, she said. You’re too young. I’ll do your ma’s if she wants.

I liked watching it and I hoped the High Priestess would come up because I liked the blue gown and the crescent moon at her feet.

As she was laying out the cards I said, I hope you get the Priestess.

Nan said in her low, mysterious voice that she always used for Tarot, You can’t control fate.

Ma said, Get money for me. I want to start my own shop.

I wanted admission to their grown-up women life. I played with the boys but they did not talk much. I hung around and listened because I never knew things about Ma like she wanted money and a shop. I thought she liked our life. Why didn’t she tell me what she wanted?

Ma’s solution about a lot of things was to lock up her heart and keep her real self hidden. How many women have done that to protect their children? To make their own lives possible?

Nan started turning over the cards and I said, Find out when my father’s coming back.

I saw the look between them and I felt the moment ruined and I did not know why because we had been having fun. Ma said in her firm voice, He’s working in China, Katie. Don’t you worry, he’ll be back.

After that Nan rushed and turned a few cards and saw lots of money in Ma’s future and then she said, Do me a favour, Katie, and go see what Little Johnny’s doing.

There is a tone in women’s voices that stops their children pursuing. I was secure with Ma and Nan and I accepted their silences and diversions as the way things had to be. I liked living on Mountain Brow and I was good at school and I liked going to the big library with the wide stone steps downtown and meeting Ma at the Connaught and taking the bus home with her. When she tucked me in at night she said, Sometimes in the winter and sometimes in the fall, I sleep between the sheets with nothing on at all. I liked our cozy apartment and our Sunday lunches and card games with the dames upstairs and playing on the street with the boys all through the long springs and summers and autumns of my growing-up years, free to do what I wanted, free to stay outside until the street lights came on.

MAHSA

Sister Devan called me out of class. Aunt threw a burqa over me before they rushed me into a car. Outside the sun was hot and bright and two little girls with yellow and blue ribbons in their hair walked hand in hand. Aunt’s words were crashing through me: Your parents are dead.

They hid me for seven days in someone else’s apartment in an alcove where a maid usually slept until they knew that my Afghan uncles were gone. Aunt came each evening to visit. There was darkness and not sleeping. There was a jagged crack in the plaster near the window ledge. The glass pane was covered with a heavy blind. There was one coil in the narrow, mildew-smelling mattress that was different from the others and poked into my side until I organized my body around it. The sheets were coarse, not soft as on my bed at home. Aunt did not smell warm like Mor, and her feelings were thin as if they had been squeezed through cheesecloth.

Where are their bodies?

She said, They are gone.

Where?

Gora Qabaristan.

I want to see.

Mahsa, the graves are not marked.

But isn’t that the Christian cemetery?

Mahsa, we had to get them buried.

No prayers. No goodbye. Nothing. How could Mor be buried there? Where would I live now? Who would love me?

Uncle came to my little room on the seventh night and Aunt stood behind him in the doorway. He said to me, You will live with us now.

They had emptied my home and sold Abbu’s piano. The end of my old life. The beginning of a new life, unyielding and severe. The sisters offered me a scholarship and Aunt persuaded Uncle to keep me in school, to learn some skills that might make me useful later. Aunt told me that I was lucky. Being lucky with Abbu was finding a coin on the street and making a wish. Being lucky is not your parents murdered when you are thirteen.

Grief is long. Vivid. Full of true and false memories, shreds like bits of lime inside a grater. Before my parents died, I roamed all over Saddar with my friends on our bikes and we played tennis and went to the Manhattan Soda Fountain for coloured iced milkshakes called Green Goddess and Hangman’s Blood. At night with Abbu, I walked in Old Clifton and we heard the wandering Sindhi minstrels playing the ektara and sometimes we walked from Kharadar, the Salt Gate, all the way to Mithadar, the Sweet Gate, where seawater mixed with fresh. Abbu liked to joke, Let’s go to the Sweet Gate today, Porcupine, and I will buy you sweets.

Mor said, But that’s not what Mithadar means, John.

Never mind, he said, putting his arms around her to say goodbye. Us Americans have got a nose for finding good things. I found you halfway around the world, didn’t I? Isn’t that right, Porcupine?

Abbu taught me a rocky-bluesy version of “Kansas City” which he always said was his song but when he sang it he changed the words to “Karachi baby” to make us laugh. To my mind, this was how life was supposed to be, growing up between two people who loved each other. The last Christmas my parents were alive they took me to the famous ball at the Beach Luxury, fairy lights strung through the verandas and patios. Talismen with Norman D’Souza was playing in the 007 Cabaret and that night Abbu sat in with them. He said Norman’s voice was liquid soul. A Dutch band called Johnny Lion and the Jumping Jewels played down by the water. People danced and walked by the sea and the tide rose to flood the dark mangrove swamps. Everyone was dressed up, and Hindus and Moslems and Christians stayed awake all night listening to the music and eating fresh seafood and macaroon cake with almond icing.

An only child watches adults with great attention trying to get clues about what life will be like, and whether it will be less solitary, because there is no other child to share what life is right now. This absorbed watching disappears, but in the moment of growing it feels of great importance. That night Abbu traced his finger along Mor’s blouse below her neck and said, Your collarbone is the place on earth I love most. He pulled me in and asked, Do you not think the collarbone is the loveliest shape? I asked Mor, Am I Moslem or Christian? I thought I was Moslem because Mor was and I always got a new gharara for Eid and at school the sisters sent me to study Islamiat to know the Holy Quran in Arabic. But our family spent more time with Parsis and Goans because Abbu loved their music and he was called an Englisher.

Mor said, Our family is both.

Abbu said, All religions say you must do unto others as you would have them do to you. This is what Mor and I think, Porcupine. Come play a duet with me, it’s Christmas!

So we went to the piano and Abbu and I played “Deck the Halls.” I did not know what bausovolly was but I thought it must be Christian.