Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi Page B

which was more than enough for him. The first time he ejaculated immediately, and the second he suffered cramp and howled awfully, followed by a coughing fit which he thought was a heart attack. Farhana suspected the catastrophe might have been caused by her removing his tie. She had never seen him during the day without a tie, and she only saw him at night, wrapped in a dressing gown, if they both had insomnia. She had bought him a cashmere polo-neck one Christmas, but Michel felt his being was an obscenity without a tie, and he never wore casual clothes.
    Farhana thought she was done with her homeland; she had been ripped from the past, and the future was comfortable but null. Then, one afternoon, Yasin’s wife Nasira, who had escaped him at last to London, insisted on coming to Paris to talk. Now working for a travel agent in Cricklewood, North London, Nasira came from a famous family, and had been a Cleopatra, one of the most striking women of Karachi, who wore the most glamorous saris and shimmering shalwar kameez, with solid gold bangles. Many men had been wild about her, which was, Yasin insisted, part of the problem. Now, in jeans and sweater, she was – apart from the Rolex – as diminished and plain as Farhana realised that she herself was. But these two women, both escapees, liked one another, and had much in common.
    Farhana put her fingers under Nasira’s chin and raised her face. ‘Why have you come to see me here?’
    ‘I must warn you,’ Nasira said. Farhana’s wild-tempered son, never the most stable of people, was developing into a madman. Out on his country estate in Sind, where he was a feudal landlord, Yasin was, apparently, playing polo aggressively, drinking whisky, copulating brutally, and shooting his many guns at anything alive. And because of the kidnappings, he was trying to import a brand-new armoured BMW with blacked-out windows into the country. His wife believed that, although this tank was extremely heavy and therefore somewhat slow, the ‘localMr Toad’, as she called her husband, would smoke a joint, turn up his favourite Punjabi bhangra music, and soon embrace a tree with the vehicle. Although she despised him, she didn’t think another violent death in the family would be good for Farhana.
    ‘What can I do about it?’ Farhana asked. ‘Are you saying I must go there? I’m too weak now: I can’t face it.’
    ‘You can only feel you have done your duty,’ her daughter-in-law replied. ‘And then live your life – which is what I am doing at last.’
    Haltingly, Farhana asked Michel if he would be interested in accompanying her, but he wondered whether it would be dusty, or inconvenient for his stomach. That was the least of it. Still, she made sure to take her first husband’s gold watch, cufflinks and fountain pens, which she would deliver to Yasin at last.
    On her first afternoon in Paris after the trip, her husband asked her to walk with him. That day there was a wind, and he had his waistcoat on. As always, his hands were behind his back. Leaning forward, he barely lifted his feet from the ground, for fear of falling. ‘An old man can come to believe that he could easily be knocked down,’ he said. ‘If he takes a step—’
    Farhana interrupted to say, ‘When you return to a country after a terrible shock, and more than a decade away, you will know that the roads will have got wider and the skyscrapers higher. There will be more apartmentblocks, more people on the street, new immigrants and tourists coming to see the sights. Michel, I must be ageing because I remember when Karachi was a pleasant post-colonial city.’
    ‘Tell me!’
    ‘The men wore suits and the women dresses. People still read Somerset Maugham, drank gin-and-tonics, and listened to “In the Mood”, as if the British had just popped north for the summer. There were flowers in the centre of the road. You could get The Times at your club. This time I saw rubble everywhere, a gun every ten yards,