Invitation

For the end of the year, we bring you a first look at Shehryar Fazli’s gritty debut novel on the real Pakistan. Excerpt taken from Invitation by Shehryar Fazli, (forthcoming from Westland Books)

THE TAXI THAT TOOK ME BACK to my hotel smelled of the pulp of some dead fruit. Malika had fallen asleep while I was still telling her the story of my father, and I had let myself out of the room without waking her. “Bhai jaan,” I said to the driver, a boy. “A question for you.”

“Ji sir, tell-tell,” he smiled, his widely spaced teeth scattered across the rearview mirror.

“I hope you don’t mind…”

“Nahin sir, nothing like that, tell-tell.”

“Where can one find a larki, a foreigner, this time of night? Not local woman. Foreigner. From outside.”

He covered his smile with his hand and ducked his head. “Sir, I don’t know about these things. I just drive my taxi.”

“No problem,” I said. “Sorry. No problem.”

“How much?” I asked him when he dropped me at the hotel.

“Whatever you want, sir,” he said, embarrassed. I gave him the coins I had in my pockets, and climbed the long steps of the Khyber. Another day and another night, filled.

I SAT IN A LEATHER BOOTH in an Elphinston Street bar and ordered a beer. I hadn’t slept much, thinking of the orchard, one sleepless night spent remembering those other sleepless nights, long ago. And in the Khyber Hotel bed I remembered numerous occasions when, after the others were asleep, when inside the abode of adults the card games had stopped and all the lights were off, I tip-toed away into the orchard’s cool black world of insect noises and silhouettes and nighttime deformations of the shapes I took for granted in the sun. Walking barefoot, despite the night, and loving the earth’s touch against my soles, even when muddy. And then I decided on a spot with the mysterious rationale of a four-legged animal and settled there. From the second or third time, I took off my clothes, flung them to the base of a tree and sat down, bare ass against grass and tweeds and pebbles and mud. Sat there for what felt like hours, with my legs raised, crossed at the ankles, heels on the ground, hands enveloping knees. Nervous, of course, scared of the rustling nearby, but immobile, thrilled, not getting up and putting my clothes on and returning to my charpoy. On one occasion—and I don’t remember how many such nights there were—sitting in the same position, in a different spot, without moving I succumbed delightfully to the light spasm in my groin, and felt the warm endless stream pass around and under and on my heels. Watched and heard the stuff collect and course away, and just sat there for a while longer, until I felt I could sleep. On another, or the same, night the ground was wet from early evening rain, and I delighted in the sogginess against my skin. On yet another occasion, feeling particularly daring, I took my pajama off before walking off, leaving it on the charpoy, so that if I got caught, if someone else was also having a sleepless night and happened to be up when I returned, they would see a naked child with no explanation for what he was doing. In the mornings that followed these nocturnal adventures—for that’s what I saw them as, adventures—I was quiet, sated with my secret that nobody else knew. So when I thought back to the orchard, the day belonged to the others; the midnight to me. There was no place in the city that was like it, that midnight in the orchard.

But there was a night—and I’ve still not determined whether this is a false memory, or really happened—there was a night when, sitting there in the black, I realized there was another figure there, nearby, sitting probably like me, but dressed. “Be careful of snakes, bachai,” the voice said. Was it real, and if so who could it have been? It sounded in my head like a pure Urdu, uneducated voice – did we bring servants with us to the orchard? Be careful of snakes, bachai. Could the figure see me, or just a vague silhouette? Could he tell I was naked, could he tell it was young Shahbaz and not one of the other kids? In this memory, or false memory, I pretended I was looking for a lost tennis ball and ran back to the veranda, seized my charpoy, put my pyjamas on, and didn’t dare move. Was that the last time I ventured into the orchard’s depths at night?

I finished my beer slowly, paid for it, and at the counter asked in the lowered tone of brotherhood where I could buy some opium. I didn’t know the Urdu word. The barman frowned.

“Paan?”

“No,” I said. “O-pee-um. What people have, like charas…”

“You want charas?”

“No, like charas. Stronger than charas.”

“Ah, afeem. You’re talking about afeem?”

“Afeem.”

“You do this, you get out of here, walk just four doors to the right.”

“They’ll give it to me?”

“Why won’t they give it? Just ask for afeem, they’ll give it.”

Four doors down there was a small kiosk, a khoka, where an old man with glasses large and thick as goggles, and a mouth of toothless pink gums sat cross-legged on a stool, handling the hard, cracked skin of his heel. His hair was henna-coloured. Nervously, I made my request.

“You want afeem?”

“Yes.”

“Achha?” The old man seemed uncertain and moved reluctantly. He searched a small cabinet, then looked back at me, closed the cabinet door without removing anything from it. “Your name?”

“My name? Shahbaz. Shahbaz Ghazanfar.”

“You have a certi-fi-cate?” He struggled with words.

“No,” I replied. I addressed him deferentially, “Bhai sahib, do it for me, na.”

He nodded and produced a long hardcover notebook. “Write your name and address in this,” he said. He turned its cover, and went through the lists of names with frustrating calculation, licking his aged fingers and turning the pages one at a time. My impatience grew almost unbearable with every page he flipped. “Here,” he said, then fumbled for a pen.

“Thank you,” I said. I looked at some of the other names – the addresses were vague, such as ‘PECHS, Karachi’, or ‘Clifton.’ I wrote, ‘Agra Hotel.’ The old man went back into the cabinet and brought out a small rolled up cellophane packet with a dark, almost black, paste. He named a price, and I didn’t argue even though I was sure it could be brought down. I closed the book of Karachi’s opium buyers and pushed it forward on the counter. He took it and put it away with the same slow precision with which he’d brought it out. “This is in case the police ask,” he explained, apologetically. “Obviously, we don’t want to lose our licence.”

“Obviously,” I replied. But the old man went on explaining, repeating that he wasn’t trying to inconvenience me, that he simply didn’t want to lose his licence. I assured him again, grew more restless, but felt obliged to stay until he was finished. Finally the man said, “Achha ji,” and with that I left him, elated, the episode a success, a sign of independence in this city. I walked back to the Khyber, where Ghulam Hussain was waiting dutifully to take me to Mona Phuppi’s.

The smell of high tide reminded me, most of all, of Mona Phuppi’s home in Bath Island, where the high tide brought the sea right up to the roads and houses and one had to either leave before it hit, or wait until it passed before driving on the roads again. Mona Phuppi, of course, never let us swim on the streets with the other naked ‘street kids,’ though there were times when we’d do so anyway, for as long as we could before getting found out, and then my aunt would reprimand all of us, make sure we bathed and in my cousins’ clothes, send me home with the driver or ask my father to come get me.

It was comforting coming back to the house, a place that carried the scent of the past. Her driveway was crowded with cars, more than one household could need, two of them preserved under white sheets like new furniture. A male servant met me at the front door, and led me to the drawing room. This room had wood panelling that was capped by three neat layers of exposed red brick. Three hexagonal windows, too small to admit much sun, left the task of light to two lamps that extended a carrot coloured shade on the room. I sat down on a two-seater, double layers of wicker on the sides and back, and cylindrical cushions against the armrests. Next to me on a lectern was a portrait of the Founding Father, Jinnah, sitting cross-legged in a greenish suit. On the wall facing me was a framed inventory of the ninety-nine names of God, written in ornate golden Arabic against a black background; the most used, ‘Allah,’ was in the middle, in larger letters than the others. On a table below the ninety-nine names was a framed family photograph: my father on the far right in a dark sherwani, Mona Phuppi in the middle, and their younger brother, Ifti, who lived in Lahore, on the other side. On the adjacent wall, within a small black frame, a Quranic prayer was sewn into beige Egyptian papyrus. Of the Arabic words, I could make out only the ‘Bismillah-e-Rehman-e-Rahim’ at the top. Despite the bits of theology in the room, the carrot glow made it all look damned.

But so trapped I felt at the Khyber Hotel, that I was happy to be here, happy to have a night out. I heard the flapping sounds of a woman’s slippers, and turned around to see Mona Phuppi enter the drawing room. I stood up. “Oh, look who’s here!” she exclaimed, feigning surprise, walking from the drawing room entrance to me with a sweet, frozen smile and squinted lids.

“Mona Phuppi,” I said, standing up and raising my hand to my forehead. “Adaab.”

“Jeetai raho, beta, jeetai raho!”

She held me at a distance for a moment, with both hands at my shoulders, as if examining me after many years, before closing in on me with a hug and a parched kiss on the cheek. Her light brown eyes were similar in colour to my father’s. She sat down and gestured me to do the same. “Oof, I am ex-hausted. I just got back from my florists’ class, this thing I’m a part of, we meet twice a week.” Her speech was slow, every word given undue weight. Her patrician English accent sounded tenuous.

“I see. How nice,” I said. “How long have you been doing this?” I found myself adjusting my tenor when I spoke to her, to make my voice less adult.

“Three months.”

“How nice.”

She asked about my father, sent him love; I did the same for her kids, one in Manchester, one somewhere in America. The servant rolled in a tray of appetizers. I smiled when my aunt’s hands shook as she raised her glass to her lips. Even when she passed a bowl of namak-parras, her actions seemed as taut as a drunkard being tested for sobriety. I’d heard so much about Mona Phuppi’s madness in recent years, brief signs of which I thought I saw the day at the Yacht Club, that I found myself stirred in her presence. Behind every one of her gestures I wanted evidence of a damaged mind.

She walked to the switchboard next to the room’s entrance and rang the bell twice. She walked back to her seat, slowly, making a show of her struggle on her feet. She let out a grandiose sigh, “Oooh, Allah,” as she sat down with one hand at her back, delighting in age and exhaustion.

A servant, this one a young girl, came in to be told to go call sahib and tell him dinner was ready. She cleared the table, put the empty plate and glasses back on the trolley. Once the servant had turned her back to us, pushing the trolley, Mona Phuppi said with a lowered voice, “Listen, you see the kapra of her kameez? The dark blue patches against the light blue background. Nice, nahin? I gave her that kapra. I still have lots of it left. I was planning on making a skirt out of it. But problem is this girl wears that damn kameez every day. You think I should still make it? It doesn’t seem right, na, friends coming over and seeing me wearing the same fabric as the servant? I should have never given it to her.”

“Ji,” I said, noncommittal.

Phuppa Jaan joined us at the dinner table. I kept looking at the clock on the wall, and fingering the opium in my pocket. The land issue didn’t emerge during dinner, except as a passing reference when she mentioned an imminent trip to Islamabad to meet with the lawyers. Mona Phuppi suggested again that I should stay with them. I asked them about Brigadier Alamgir. Haan, haan, of course we know him, they said, why did I ask.

After eating, Mona Phuppi excused herself to catch up on a round of prayer she’d missed. Phuppa Jaan assumed the role left suddenly vacant, asked some of the same questions that Mona Phuppi had asked during dinner. Voice raised, I gave him the same answers, could almost hear them reverberate in that familiar buzzing from his earpiece. He played with his thick, unbrushed beard, and then, with one hand in his mouth and the other covering it from view, he picked bits of food from his teeth, examined them, and then replaced them on his tongue. I distracted myself with the large painting of the Mohata Palace, framed on the wall behind Phuppa Jaan. He took off his glasses, blew hot breath on the lenses, rubbed them against his napkin and put them on again, a jittery man. Peering toward the dining room entrance and then, leaning forward and dropping his voice to a secretive hum, he said, “You know, it’s actually good that… ah, in a way, that you’re not staying here.” I looked at him surprised, unexpectedly offended. “It’s your phuppi,” he continued. “Her illness (he tapped his temple softly) has gotten much worse. You can’t always tell. And of course she’ll insist and insist, but the fact is she wouldn’t be able to handle guests, any guest, right now. These next months we have to be very careful with her.” He didn’t move his lips much when talking. “Very careful.” When Mona Phuppi returned, he went back to being the half-deaf husband.

My aunt, looking a tad weakened from prayer, lit a cigarette and spread herself out, moving the chair back so she could cross her legs, one resting over the other more horizontally than vertically, like a man. “So. Brigadier Alamgir, huh?” I nodded, uncertainly. “Brigadier Alamgir. Ha.” She took a long, smooth drag, and blew out a long, smooth trail, ashed the cigarette. “He was never even close to becoming a brigadier.”

“What?”

“Haan-haan!” she hollered with a laugh. “Call him brigadier in front of someone from the army. They’ll laugh at you. Yes-yes! Flat out, laugh. His family, corrupt to the core. You know his father was in the railways, hain na? So? Where do you think he got the money to set up a fancy hotel? Where does he get the money to pay those dancers and all that? Oh, you think it’s what he’s raking in with his business? I see, I see. Ha! Please, you know as well as I do that that place loses money every bloody month. He has all this money because his father was in the railways. You know what that means, don’t you beta? You don’t? Did my sweet younger brother not teach you anything? The railways!” She repeated this as if simply doing so, with this added weight, was evidence alone, would reveal the fact of it all. R. A. I. L. W. A. Y. S. “Ward-and-Watch. Transporting jute. Coal contracts. That whole industry runs on coal, you know that, na? Whoever you gave the coal contract to was more than grateful. There wasn’t a better shop in town to make a killing. What, you think the house he has, he made with his own money? Has the army suddenly started paying enormous pensions, kya?” Again, that pleasure entered and revived her face, the pleasure of prosecuting the world. “His father, with those enormous nostrils of his—” she turned to her husband. “You remember how big his nostrils were? Alamgir doesn’t have nostrils like that, na? No, didn’t get the nostrils but the corruption, that’s in the blood.” She took another hard drag. “Our father, your dada, was the only one who didn’t make a penny. He said—this is a true story, you know—he’d rather resign…when the people he worked for told him they would have to let him go unless he started accepting bribes. He said he’d rather be let go than take a bribe. It’s true, ask your abba, he must have told you this story. Very upright, in his lovely sherwanis. A very literary mind, too, your dada. Those values…” She scrunched her mouth and shook her head almost in repentance. “He would have rather died a pauper than… But these other people, no integrity.” And then, just as just as quickly as she began, she closed her case, left me to draw my conclusions and then with a smile got up and said she wanted to show me her display of flowers before I left. So in the downstairs bedroom I was shown the arrangements she made at whatever florists’ group she was a part of. Delphinium, gerberas, daisies, gladioli, sharp colours, surrounded by greens. And it occurred to me that this activity, the fruits of which she displayed with such satisfaction, was part of her therapy, that there were indeed efforts underway to make her more sound and manageable. “Very nice,” I said with each bouquet. “Very nice.”

“Did them all myself. Aren’t they pretty? Your bloody Phuppa Jaan is colour-blind so he’s useless, but aren’t they…”

“Yes, very pretty,” I repeated. I wished her the best with them.

SHOULD I STAY?” Ghulam Hussain asked, as I got out of the car at the Agra’s entrance. I’d already had him for a couple of hours, and thought it unfair to keep him here, for I imagined how eagerly he looked forwarded to getting home, settling into whatever routine he settled into every night when he returned. As soon as I saw my affection growing I should have told him to leave and not ever come back.

“I’ve brought you a bouquet,” I told Malika when she opened the door. She stood in the doorway, barefoot, one leg bent, the foot positioned vertically, based on folded toes. She stared at the two acorn-like shoots of opium in my hand, looking puzzled. It was late, her performance, if she performed at all, over.

“Well?” I said.

Finally, she took the opium from me, but as I followed her into the room, she put a strong hand at my chest. “No,” she said. “You, first, you go to three-one-three.”

“Room three-one-three?” She nodded. “Why?”

“You go. Then you come.”

Three-one-three. Standing outside the door was Quinn, the man who’d assaulted me the last time. The sound of a radio came from inside. Quinn knocked when he saw me, and after the loud “Hmm!” from the room, opened the door. Facing us from a beige one-seater was the retired brigadier, or whatever he was, with something white pressed between his lips, not a cigarette. He gestured for me to come in, which I did hesitantly, and then raised his hand to his aide to suggest all was well, his duty done. Quinn shut the door, leaving me alone with his boss. The brigadier beckoned me closer with an impatient gesture, like an immobile family elder on the verge of a tantrum. This room was similar to Malika’s, but the carpet was a rusty brown. The first time I saw him in proper light. It was a thermometer in his mouth, which he presently removed, inspected its reading, rinsed in the glass set on the arm of the couch, wiped dry on his shirt and put in its cover.

“Haan ji, jenaab!” he declaimed. The little hazel circles of his eyes were surrounded by small bursts of red. Only the two lowest buttons of his shirt were fastened, revealing a flare-up of white wiry chest hair. I started to speak, but he lifted his finger, moved his ear close to the radio, from which Omar Kureishi, the cricket commentator my father followed from Paris, analyzed the day’s play. “Hanif’s gone,” the brigadier said, shaking his head and tightening his lips, as if describing a man’s death. “We need some batsmen or we’re fucked. Hopefully this kid, Zaheer Abbas, can do some damage. Believe it or not, he proposed to my wife’s sister.” He lowered the volume, and gestured towards the bed. “Please, have a seat.” Loose sleeves hung off his forearms. He set an ashtray on one arm of the couch, next to the glass of water, took out a cigarette from a thin silver case and lit it.

I remained standing.

“Why don’t you make yourself a drink?” He pointed to the bottle of Royal Salute on the dresser.

“What can I…?”

“You should have told me you were Ghazanfar’s son.”

I sat down.

“Though I should have guessed,” he added. “The eyes and the cheekbones are unmistakably the old man’s.”

“You’re well-informed,” I said. Sweat collected on my forehead, under my arms. I wanted to piss.

“That’s the army’s occupation,” he replied. “Or pre-occupation. Now fix yourself a drink. Since you’re not a teetotaler like your father, thank God—speaking of which, you ever want to buy me a bottle again, Royal Salute, not Chivas, for God’s sake.” He pointed again to the bottle. I walked over to the dresser and poured myself a little, filling the rest of the glass with water. I sat down. The brigadier’s nails, white pointed thorns, extended perilously from his fingers. With the one on a little finger, he scraped the outer flap of his ear and wiped it on the arm of the sofa. “So what brings you back—it’s Shahbaz right?” I nodded. “What brings you back, Shahbaz? The whiff of democracy? You could smell it all the way from, where it is, France?”

“Paris,” I replied.

“Paghee.” He shook his head. “It’s amazing. Ghazanfar going to France to become a sand-nigger for the rest of his life.” He leaned back, turned his face one way, applied pressure on his chin until he heard a small crack of his neck, then repeated this for the other side. He took a swig of his whisky.

“How well do you know him?” My voice had thinned.

“How well do I know him? Ha!” He stood up, went to the dresser, looked at himself in the mirror as he buttoned up his shirt. “I was the only Establishment man who stood up for the devil. They would say his pictures were obscene, that he was uncivilized. I myself used to tell him, you’re too bloody civilized.” His shirt now buttoned, he retrieved his drink. He sat back down, leaned forward and clutched my hand with his cold fingers. “So how did it feel over there? Being a sand-nigger? That’s what you are to them, my boy. A sand-nigger. Pied noir.” He placed his hands on my knees, and in a tone that betokened a convergence of interests, a new partnership between us, asked, “So what would you call them, the imperialists themselves? Huh, what kind of niggers are they? Ice niggers, I suppose? Ice-nigger.” He stared into blank space, his moniker for white man dangling comically before us. A small smile stretched across his face. Then, he tightened his grip on my knees, shook them forcefully, and said, “But we’ll have to discuss all that the next time.”

“Next time?” I asked.

“Yes, Wednesday night. I want you to have drinks with me. Downstairs. Nine o’clock sharp.”

“I was actually wondering, sir, if…”

“Now drink up, young Shahbaz,” he demanded. “I have a meeting in a few minutes, and I think I’m just about drunk enough to bear the company. If we talk any more you’ll kill the buzz.” He chuckled, a wheezing chuckle straight from his lungs. He glanced at me, as if expecting the same from me. I smiled. “Wednesday,” he repeated. He got up again, went back to the dresser, picked up a bottle of cologne, and worked a couple of dabs along his jaw line. I finished my drink in an unpleasant gulp and stood up, the whisky thick and hot in my throat. The brigadier walked me to the door standing close, holding me by the elbow. Lowering his voice, resuming his tone of partnership, he said, “By the way, Malika’s not dancing tonight. I think she’s going to be upstairs in her room.” At the door, he moved his grip down to my forearms, framing me for one last valuation, then pulled me into a family friends’ embrace. His cologne smelled like gin.

NEVER MAKE THE FIRE TOO MUCH,” Malika instructed me. She lit a low flame on her gas burner, placed a mini wok over it. “Give the packet,” she said. I gave it to her, and she emptied the seal-brown liquid into the wok. “Wait for water to go.” The liquid soon gave off tresses of smoke. The host of Hit Parade, Eddie Carrapiett, made small talk with his listeners from the radio before playing Neil Diamond’s ‘Solitary Man.’ Malika got up, flicked her cigarette out the window, and coughed a spiteful cough, full of phlegm. She turned the volume up. The opium thickened into paste.

“So, who else?” I asked.

Moving about the room, she reeled off a series of names and, where required, their professions: business families, political families, painters, an information secretary, and others that she cited too quickly for me to hear.

“That’s an impressive clientele,” I said.

She bent down in front of the plate with the mosquito coil, struck a match and lit the coil.

“Why you’re so interested in who come to the cabaret?” she asked.

“Just seeing what kind of job your brigadier’s done.”

“He had luck.”

“Yes?”

She sat down on a single seater, crossed her legs under her kaftan, the red paint on her toenails starting to shrink and fade. Malika told me the story of Aida, a dancer at the Metropole, by far Karachi’s most popular belly dancer, according to Malika. “You know of Mian Kamal?”

“No,” I said.

“A cousin of Ayub, I think. He fall in love with her. With Aida. One day at last she run away with him. The Metropole go down, like that,” she snapped her fingers, smiled, gloated.

“It went down,” I said.

“Went down.”

“And that’s when they all came here?”

“Everyone was very angry with Metropole.”

“Nothing like that has ever happened here? Dancers running off with a client?”

She shook her head. “The brigadier! Very strict.”

“You’re all afraid of him.”

She shrugged. She stood up and paced in small, slow circles on the carpet, her hands behind her back, playfully lifting her feet high like a soldier.

“What’s his wife like?” I asked.

“They say she was very desirée when she was young woman. For many, many men.”

Malika lay down next to me, sighing as she did, “Ayo.” She looked up at the ceiling. “He doesn’t care about men who are not im-por-tent. Alamgir. Or women who are not beautiful.”

“What if they’re the wives of important men?”

She turned her face to me. “Can you feel it yet?”

“Yes,” I said. I turned on my side, propped my head on my hand, and looked at her from this elevated angle, at her dopey eyes. “So did you ask your brigadier about the act, the Conspiracy Play? I’ve thought of it some more. Four men in a room: a poet, a filmmaker, a major-general, a Party leader. Stuck in a room, in a small hill station kind of place in the middle of a large orchard. Plotting their communist coup. Outside… standing half behind a tree… waits our Lady Macbeth. Begum Shahnawaz, played by the ravishing Malika.”

She put her finger on my lips. “Shhh, no more.” She removed her hand, then turned on her side, facing me. I put my free hand on her thigh. Her lips spread slowly into a lazy smile. I smiled back. I moved my face towards her face, but just before my lips met hers she put a hand on my chest.

“No, darleeng,” she said.

No darling? I wasn’t sure if she was serious, moved closer still; she applied more force to my chest.

“Do I have to pay you?” I asked.

She took my hand off her thigh and applied still more pressure on me to make me to lie back down. “Just enjoy opium,” she said, as the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ faded and Eddie Carrapiett concluded the Hit Parade.

“Let me pay you,” I said. I raised myself again and gazed at her. “Why do you have me over?”

“I enjoy your company,” she replied. “Not fun doing opium all alone.” She closed her eyes to avoid my stare. With one simple gesture, she’d made herself inaccessible to me. A week’s fantasies festered inside me. I was willing to harm her.

Later, when I walked down the same corridors that hours earlier had contained such promise, I realized that I’d been grinding my jaw, now stiff and aching, for a while. Shortly after I woke the next afternoon, Doli came to my room with two girls. They sat on my bed, their smiles hardened through years of duty. He asked me to choose between them. Or, if I was willing to pay for it, to choose both. He pointed to the one on the left, the slimmer and taller of the two, and told me: “This one has no language.”

“No language?”

“No tongue.”

The girl on the right joined in to help clarify, but by then I’d understood that the girl on the left was mute. I remembered my earlier encounter with the whore who’d teased me for my ‘reading-writing’ ways, the woman who would probably have continued insulting me all night if I’d let her.

There was also something else that tempted me about this silent one. The power of speech had made that first woman more than what I’d paid for. When she said she felt the first signs of a cold, when she asked whether I would have guessed she was a whore if I’d seen her in the bazaar, she’d revealed a life independent of the Khyber Hotel, a life of eating habits, illnesses, companions. This girl, however… I took Doli aside and informed him of my decision, paid him the money, and he made a signal at the plumper of the two, a tilt of the head towards the door. She followed Doli out, and once I’d locked the door the other girl took off her clothes. For the next fifteen minutes, the only sounds that came out of her mouth were the female sounds of copulation, sighs of pleasure, or displeasure, I couldn’t tell. Her motions were largely automatic, though she did press her cheek to mine occasionally and, briefly, the tip of her cold tongue touched my neck and shoulder. In the postcoital squalour, I sat up and prepared a mixture of hash and tobacco on a day-old issue of Dawn. I lit the joint. The mute girl was still in the room, watching, naked but with her clothes sprawled on her lap, looking unsure of whether she still had an obligation to fulfill.