Bloomsbury Circus

‘Why does that feel even worse?’ she said to her father.

‘When you live in an unjust world you want sports to be a refuge, not a reminder.’

They were being flippant for Zahra’s sake but she could see the fear in them. As long as she could remember, there had been this feeling of threat stalking her, everywhere. Say the wrong thing, turn down the wrong street, allow yourself the mildest transgression, and some creature awful and unknown would swoop down on you, talons tearing into your flesh. And now it was here, in their midst, and it had entered in the guise of an old friend just to drive home the point that nothing, no one, nowhere was safe. She held on to her father, feeling the softness of his flesh, the breakability of his bones.

‘It’ll be OK,’ he told her, more foolish now than he’d ever been.

which meant Maryam didn’t know and couldn’t make everything better simply by knowing.

The elections would be timed to ensure the pregnant Benazir Bhutto was giving birth, unable to campaign – no, Benazir outwitted them all by wearing voluminous clothing that made it impossible to know if she was in her second or third trimester and then had her baby in September, well in time to take active part in the November elections.

everywhere else was to be pitied for not being Pakistan in the winter of 1988.

Military officers saluting Benazir. You could cry remembering it, and perhaps no matter how long you lived on this earth you would always cry remembering it. They’d hanged her father, put her in prison, cast her into exile. And now they saluted her, this woman of only thirty-five, because millions upon millions of people went to the ballot box and said they must. Zahra brushed her hand across her eyes. What did all this matter – the school cliques, Maryam’s awfulness, Hammad’s inattentiveness, the scuffed toes of her shoes. Why should any of this matter when the world was transformed?

Cafe VIP, just feet away from her. One nudged another, jerked his head in her direction. Jimmy raised his eyebrows at her, daring her to open the door and get out. There were men, only men, at the cafe tables and in the cars and motorcycles around them. Her father’s newspaper office was nearby, she’d often visited him there, but that was during daylight hours – Karachi’s nights were not for girls or women.

The fear she’d felt last night had been activated by a knowledge inside her body, a knowledge that was about her body.