Hot Water Man (28 page)

Her voice rose. It was all happening so quickly. She was so passionate. He could not believe that this was them; it seemed unreal, himself slumped in the chair and this young girl, trembling in her cloud of smoke.

‘I thought I could trust you,' she said. ‘I thought you were the one person in this place who wouldn't be corrupted. I didn't realize you would be, but deep down where it didn't show.' She started to sob. A black tear slid down her face. ‘Oh you look so straight, you all-American good guy, but it's all worked out.'

‘Honey don't.' His chest ached. He was sobbing too, in jerks.

‘You even said you loved me. Remember that time in the middle of Chundrigar Road with all those other people around? You seemed so wonderfully unfurtive. Large-spirited. As if you really were swept over.'

‘You think I don't love you?' He buried his face in his hands. He could not bear to look at her like this, her face breaking, with that black stuff sliding down it. Her plainness moved him more passionately than her beauty. It had happened that first time in the beach hut when she had looked so lost, and his breath had stopped.

‘I don't know what to say.'

‘You always were the strong silent type.' She tried to laugh; it came out wheezingly. ‘Oh it's all so humiliating. Why did I have to fall for you? There's everything against you. You're no oil painting. I just thought you were a good man. You didn't use people. I even thought you weren't using me.'

‘You think I was?'

‘Well it's all okay. Bobby told me last night. You've timed it perfectly.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's all coming through.'

‘What's coming through?'

‘Oh Duke, don't look so flabbergasted. It doesn't convince me any more.'

‘Please don't talk like that. Please be anything, but don't be cynical.'

There was a silence. She stood with her back to him, running her fingers to and fro across Minnie's books. She said lightly: ‘He told me last night. He said he'd granted the permission and the documents would be coming through this week. On Monday you can get the earthmovers in. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to harm your precious self-respect. Your innate integrity. I wanted you to think
you'd
done it.' She paused. ‘Most people do it with money. You're too bloody pure to do it with money, you've always been superior about that. Us corrupt Pakistanis. So you do it with me instead. It's all going your way, isn't it.'

He felt choked and sick. ‘Shamime, I didn't realize. Can you believe that?'

She turned round and picked up her handbag. ‘I don't think I believe anything any more. I'm going.'

He got to his feet. ‘You can't just walk out into the street. I'll drive you to the office.'

He found his car keys. They did not speak. She blew her nose, opened her compact, grunted at her smudged make-up and wiped her face with her handkerchief. He, too, blew his nose. They tended to themselves, side by side in the large lounge. She would not let him help her. He wiped his eyes. They were not fierce tears like hers; they were the rheum of grief. Today he had become an old man. Nothing he could say would help her because he no longer knew what he believed.

They drove into town, Shamime sitting beside him. At the traffic lights by the Sind Club, with the car at a standstill, he leant over and put his arm around her. She continued staring ahead.

‘Mustn't let your darling project suffer must we,' she said. ‘Don't worry, I won't let you down.'

‘I wasn't meaning that,' he bellowed in despair. Behind them cars hooted. On the pavement, emerging from the Club, stood several men he knew. If he had cared to think of such things he might have thought it ironic, that the one time he and Shamime looked really compromising was the moment it was no longer true.

‘
Hello,' she said
. ‘I'm awfully sorry to intrude.'

He turned slowly to look at her. He shook his head, smiling, and turned back to gaze at the water. Nobody was around. Down here by the shore, bushes screened them from the bazaar and the road.

She said breathlessly: ‘I saw you once, I think, sitting outside Bohri Bazaar.' Wearing apparently the same clothes he wore now: flimsy, grimy orange kurta and trousers.

He raised his eyebrows.

‘The place with the trinkets,' she said. ‘Down in Elphinstone Street.'

‘Elphinstone Street . . .' He seemed to find that amusing. He had a flat Midlands accent.

She sat for a moment, trying to catch her breath. Running in this heat made her pant. She had spotted him near the tea stall when she was hastening from the sleeping Sultan. She had followed him down to the water's edge.

He did not seem inclined to engage in small talk. Nor did she. They sat in silence. Flies buzzed around them. He scratched his bites; his ankles were even whiter than her own.

‘You know this is a magic place,' he said. ‘You can feel it.'

She nodded.

‘Like, you've got to be open, see. Be still.'

‘I know.'

She sat looking at the muddy water. She was dirtier. This rickety little place was shabby but she was shabbier.

‘You're emptied now, right? Your mind is pure. Just pure and blank.'

She nodded. If she nodded she might feel it. She smoothed down her crumpled yellow skirt. It did look second-hand, now. She had pushed it up and held him pressed against her. So quick, it had been. Then the juddering – his spasm, not hers. And then the breathing, as deep and regular as before. He had sunk back into sleep as blindly as he had emerged. Perhaps he would never recollect his humiliation.

‘You just sit here. You accept. Like it kind of flows through you. People who come here, they don't learn this. They try to fight it.'

‘I've been trying to learn.' She looked at his grey bony face with its soft moustache. You did not see many people like him in Karachi. ‘Have you lost your way to India?' she asked. ‘Karachi's a bit off the route.' What, she wondered, was he finding in his own passage to India?

He wagged his finger at her, slowly up and down. ‘Once you're lost, it's then you begin to find yourself.'

This sounded wise. She felt terribly lost.

‘I don't know how to get back,' she said.

‘Turn right at Tesco's and it's second on the left after the Curry Inn.' He giggled like a schoolgirl, alarmingly high.

‘There isn't a Tesco.'

‘You can get lost when you're right back home.'

‘Are you going back to Karachi? I want to get back quickly.'

Get back before he wakes up. Who was that Sultan Rahim? She made him a saint for her own gratification. She made him mysterious, for her own foreign
frisson.
Who was he? A genial businessman, a generous-hearted host who bought her a drink and lay down for a sleep. A family man no doubt, a diligent Muslim.

And how she had used him. She had confused and inflamed him; oh pray to God he would think it was a dream. She had raped him. As the British had once invaded this country, so she had invaded him. She herself, of all people, was the worst colonialist of all. She had used him for the colour of his skin.

‘There's a bus. There's always a bus. You wait, and there's a bus.'

He spoke like Sultan: you want a shrine? You wait, you'll find a shrine. Wherever you are looking, that will be the holy place.

She rose awkwardly and went down to the water. She squatted in the liquid. It seeped up over her sandals. She splashed the water on her face. It was as warm as soup. Perhaps this was the hot water she had heard about. She would believe it was; it was the faith that counted. Words rolled around her head – racism, sexism, tinny catch-phrases she had mouthed without feeling. She had been so strident and innocent.

Even after the wash she felt sticky. They walked up the slope, through the bushes. Sultan's car had gone, but there were tyremarks in the sand.

Families were standing around waiting for the bus. It was true: when you wanted a bus, so you saw other people waiting for one too. You would not have noticed them otherwise. They were poor people, women carrying tiffin tins wrapped in cloth and children carrying babies. They seemed to have sprung from nowhere; when she had visited the shrine it had been so empty.

She did not look at them. She had misused them all.

For a week
Donald had kept the piece of paper in his wallet.
Saleem Beg, Near Petrol Pump, Commercial West Colony.
He knew the place; it was the other side of the city, a run-down business suburb between the industrial sector and the beach road slums. He had driven through it several times on his way to the Cameron factories beyond.

He had to go in working hours, of course; the tailor would not be there when the shops were closed. Twice this week he had tried to drive there. The first time he had been stopped by a frantic phone call from Mrs Gracie. The permission would be coming through at the end of the week; could he get up a petition at the Sind Club? Highly embarrassed, he had gone there for lunch. They would think he was mad – a crackpot Englishman instead of the sober Sales Manager and fellow sport he had been trying to appear. It was tricky, to campaign against a minister when not only did Cameron's need the man's support but when most of those who propped up the bar were the same minister's friends and relatives. Out of loyalty to Mrs Gracie however he had cleared his throat and approached some of them. It fell flat. None of them had heard of the Donkey Sanctuary. Worse than this, few of them seemed to have even heard of Mrs Gracie. Since her day a new generation, and a new race, had arrived at the Sind Club. Then he had been obliged to break the news to her, blaming himself and his lack of contacts and charisma to divert her attention from the painful fact that she herself, as well as her cause, was in truth extinct.

The next day he had left work early and driven to Commercial West. He had been stopped, however, by a cordon of police. There was another riot in the area. Afterwards he had read about it in the paper – just a small paragraph on the back page. Discontent was growing. What had originally started as a protest against the rising price of
ghee
was being fuelled by the few members of the opposition not in prison. The shaky presidency was shakier than ever; the Prime Minister's bungalow in Clifton was now permanently guarded by a reinforcement of troops. There were rumours of corruption in high places and a ministerial re-shuffle; no doubt the risky members of the government would be replaced by those who toed the party line.

Today he was going there. At five o'clock he was concluding a talk with Shamime about the paints brochure. He rose to leave.

‘One small thing, Shamime. I was supposed to meet Duke Hanson for a drink at the Intercon, and I can't put it off because his line's been engaged. Could you possibly have another bash when I've gone?'

‘Me?' she said sharply.

‘I'm awfully sorry. It's just, with Mary being off sick . . .' Meaning: I hope you don't think I'm treating you like my secretary.

‘No, no, of course, that's fine.' She looked composed again. She was a tricky girl, with her moods. He wanted to say: sorry, my mind's a bit confused today. You see, I'm off to find my uncle. But then again it was not much to ask. After all she was a friend of Duke's. Only yesterday she had lunched with him; he himself had seen her climbing out of Duke's car when he was parking his own.

He put her out of his mind. He was outdoors now in the suffocating heat of the car park, tipping the old man who polished his windscreen. He had always preferred this man to the small canny boys who ran this way and that with their cleaning rags, calling him sahib and giggling, making him feel foolish and younger than they.

The old man bowed without a smile. Donald unlocked the door and waited while the man fumblingly opened it for him. Nowadays he looked at the man differently. Somewhere in this city a member of his own family was surviving on small coins such as these. Each time he realized this his stomach shifted.

He drove through the traffic. Billboards advertised airlines and insurance schemes. Below them people squatted in their pavement camps. A barber cut someone's hair; bundles slept on rope beds. Christine complained of being watched but she could retreat. It was only the humble who, year in and year out, had to suffer in public the indignity of their private lives. He himself had taken snapshots of the more picturesque amongst them.

Lodged in his heart, he had a snapshot of his half-uncle. There was the petrol pump, exhaust fumes and a stall. They usually sat at junctions, for maximum trade. The setting was as primitive as these: just a tailor's space on the pavement, a heap of clothes and customers being measured as people jostled past. His uncle must be the lowliest of the low, a half-caste with no place even in the humblest society, his mother dishonoured and dead. Spawned from two races you belonged to neither. At least he had an occupation, albeit that of street tailor. Like the discarded wrappings that littered the road, the man was the debris from his own father's career.

How could he make amends? He was driving down the highway now, tense and tacky. He still had not decided. It would be cowardly not to identify himself. But even if he made himself understood, which seemed unlikely, the man would probably think that the most tasteless joke was being made at his expense. They had their pride; however poor, one could retain a measure of that. In Donald's wallet lay 2,000 rupees, about £80, the sum of his savings so far. Though little enough for himself – for the first time in his life he could actually afford this – it was large enough to set up the man in a better place. By Mr Beg's own pitiful standards this would be a fortune. Or they could perhaps work out some kind of provident fund, or subsidy. Better late than never.