The following is an excerpt from chapter one of the novel Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro. Soomro will be reading fiction at the February Watershed Reading on February 17, 2024.
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 after himself 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-take off.
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 cannon-ball, 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 up-country 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 - brightly coloured 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 the 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 they were 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 mid-air, 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 out of 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 which 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 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.
