Free Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie

asked.’ I had my suspicions though. In avoiding the monsoons Dadi was avoiding memories of her youth in Dard-e-Dil. Dadi’s sister, Meher, had once told me that Dadi’s favourite festival of the year when they were children was the festival that marked the first of the rains. In the Dard-e-Dil palace grounds lengths of silken cord were looped around the boughs of trees and held coloured planks of wood a few feet off the ground. The young girls of the family would rush out, bangles clinking together, and would sing the monsoon songs as they swung higher and higher in the air. Beneath numerous tents great feasts were laid out, with special emphasis placed on mangoes. At the height of the mood of dizziness and gaiety the Nawab would produce a rain-shaped diamond from his pocket and bestow it on the girl who swung the highest without faltering in her singing. Dadi left Karachi before the monsoons so that she wouldn’t remember all those girls she sang with and all the lustre of her early life.
    â€˜But I thought the monsoons were unpredictable,’ Khaleel said. ‘Don’t they sometimes start early, sometimes start not at all?’
    â€˜Aren’t you the expert on global weather conditions? Karachi monsoons, French summers …’
    â€˜I’m French.’
    â€˜Shut up.’
    â€˜No, really. My parents are professors. Physics. Both of them. And bitten by the travel bug. So they get teaching jobs all over the place. And when we were in France I got citizenship. They didn’t want me to be a US citizen because it was the seventies, Vietnam and all that, and they had visions of me growing up and being drafted to fight in some war they considered morally repugnant. Which pretty much covers all wars.’
    â€˜But the French require you to do military service.’
    â€˜Well, maybe I’m lying. Maybe I’m not French. Or maybe I have done military service.’
    â€˜What’s your point?’
    â€˜Don’t pigeon-hole me, or my family, in Liaquatabad.’
    I looked down into my coffee. ‘I try very hard not to pigeon-hole Liaquatabad.’
    â€˜So what’s the problem? Why didn’t you jump back on the Tube before the doors closed?’
    â€˜It was my stop.’
    Khaleel poured his tea into a saucer, blew on it and tipped it into his mouth. My eyes swivelled round to check that no one I knew was watching. I knew right then everything my family would need to know about Khaleel’s parents. They were hardworking, decent people. Not professors, though. Somehow they’d made it to America, land of opportunity, with barely more than the clothes on their backs, and worked absurd hours for even more absurd wages, swearing all the while that for their son it would be different. And it was. He was smart enough and lucky enough for scholarships, and he’d assimilated; maybe he’d even been offered (and accepted) the chance to live as anexchange student in England or France while still in school. At college, perhaps he’d studied abroad for a year, and now he was thinking of going back, back to Karachi, to show his parents’ families that yes, the Butts had succeeded in the US, and you wouldn’t even know how humble his parents’ origins were, except in moments when he revealed little habits he’d picked up at home, like slurping tea out of a saucer.
    â€˜If I tell you I just drank in that manner to see your reaction you’ll never know if it’s true, or if I’m saying it precisely because I did see your reaction.’ He wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘So for that reason, and also because I did see your reaction, let’s shake hands and say goodbye.’
    â€˜No.’ It was time to unlearn the art of shrugging. But, even as I thought that, I knew that this time the option to step away didn’t exist. Run away, yes; but for reasons so complicated I couldn’t cope with thinking about them,