The Centre(55)
After our meal, I reached into my bag and pulled out a piece of folded cardboard that I’d used to carefully preserve a single feather. It was jet black with a sharp stroke of white running through one side, as if someone had streaked a paint brush over a crow’s feather.
“For you,” I offered, inexplicably shy.
“Oh.” She untied the string that I’d wrapped around the card and lifted the feather by its stalk. “Magpie!”
“It landed on my balcony the other day, as if asking to be passed on to you.”
“I love it,” she said and kissed me on the cheek. I felt an embarrassing quickening of the heart.
Some hours later, we disembarked at Delhi airport, which was not dissimilar to Karachi’s. More white people and more women dressed in short skirts and sleeveless tops than you’d find in Pakistan, but the overall vibe was so familiar that I felt instantly at home. Same accents and style of conversation, same eagerness in the porters and rush of travelers, and a similar kind of controlled chaos holding it all together. We collected our luggage and made our way to the arrivals hall, where Shiba’s father was waiting for us. Dressed in a navy blue shirt and beige trousers, he was tall and slim, with slicked back hair and a manicured salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee. He beamed when he saw Shiba and wrapped her in a tight embrace. She folded into his arms like a little girl.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said. I felt a pang of jealousy, having grown up in a family in which such terms of endearment didn’t exist.
“Arjun,” he declared, holding out his hand to me as if I were a colleague and not a friend of his daughter’s.
“Hi. Anisa,” I replied, irritated at my shyness as I shook it.
We piled into Arjun’s gleaming car and drove down spacious roads interspersed with roundabouts. The two of them chatted in the front while I stared wide-eyed out the window. Delhi reminded me of Lahore, with its expansiveness, its parks and roundabouts, and its surprising combination of the ancient and novel. Later, I would notice a similarity in the people of these two cities as well, in the way they tried to pin you down in the social hierarchy as soon as they said hello, their treatment of you changing drastically according to where they imagined you fell within that structure. Don’t get me wrong, Karachi could be like that too; nothing surpassed Karachi in its particular brand of snobbery. But still, Karachi was more like I imagined Bombay to be. You could move with at least a bit of anonymity there. Delhi, like Lahore, felt spatially more expansive but socially more claustrophobic. A few days into my trip, I felt—just as I did whenever I visited Lahore—scruffy and unkempt, and had a sudden and urgent need to go shopping for something stylish to wear and to visit the beauty parlor for blow-dry-waxing-threading-mani-pedi-the works, which Shiba was more than happy to come along for.
Shiba’s father, on the drive home from the airport, told us that his colleagues were at a fundraising gala but would meet us for dinner. He had stayed behind to pick us up.
“Couldn’t miss out on receiving you,” he said, ruffling Shiba’s hair. His accent had a British twang that was thicker than his daughter’s, even though she’d spent a lot more time in England than he had.
“You’ll enjoy meeting them,” he said to me of his colleagues. “Wonderful chaps.”
We arrived at their house, the chowkidar opening the giraffe-height black metal gates for us and saluting as we drove past. Shiba’s home was a beautiful and airy two-story colonial-style building in the middle of the city, with marble floors, expansive verandas, and ornate windows. Mughalesque furniture, patterned tiles, and decorative carvings dotted the house, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases with glass doors lined the hallways. Cane chairs and tables occupied the living rooms, along with handloomed carpets, long linen curtains in muted colors, and tall showcases. It was a carefully curated home that looked of another era, opulent in a very different way from my house in Karachi with its sliding doors, large flat-screen TVs, and swimming pool. Shiba’s home announced a kind of dynastic wealth that had, through the decades, absorbed into the very fabric of the sofas, a wealth embedded in the way her father spoke and evidenced by the cultural capital I saw all around me: the black-and-white photographs on the walls, the tabla set in the corner, the dusty bookshelves crammed with the so-called classics. Their flat-screen TVs, I would later find, were discreetly tucked away, covered demurely with old-looking Rajasthani prints (except for the massive flat screen in Shiba’s TV room, which had been set up as a home cinema, with large leather recliners and a fancy surround sound system). I felt in my bones that this was the kind of family that would look down on mine. Probably not the type that would snigger overtly about “new money” or anything like that—they’d consider that kind of behavior crass—but one that would find a way to say it nonetheless, through a kind of benevolent kindness or, even worse, total disregard.
I was surprised, actually, to see that this was where Shiba came from, to see, for instance, the retinue of servants at her disposal. It’s not that our household in Karachi wasn’t also run using the labor of servants, but in Shiba’s home, it was like … I don’t know … a whole protocol thing. Like, the chowkidar at the gate saluting us or the maid, Roshan, grabbing Shiba’s suitcase as soon as we arrived. Even for a cup of tea or a glass of water, someone had to be summoned. In Sussex, Shiba lived a simple and independent life. She worked hard at her job and took good care of her home. She subsisted off khichri and pasta and aloo saag that she made herself with ease and skill. I never saw entitlement or snobbery in her before, and the truth is, I didn’t see it now. But I didn’t see embarrassment either—just a very natural easing into her setting, as if she were perfectly comfortable both ways. I tried to follow suit.