A crow hopped onto the handlebar of a motorcycle that had been parked on the pavement to circumvent the no-parking rules and cocked its head at Zahra. She’d told Maryam she’d been afraid when the pavement men at Cafe VIP looked into the car, and Maryam had said that had been the safest moment of the ride, she must stop being frightened of everyday life. She knew Maryam was right; she wanted to be more like her best friend and not to have to live with fear as a constant companion.

  It’s not just fear, it’s girlfear, Maryam had said with Maryam-like certainty. Boys don’t have it the same way.

  “They should play Saeed Anwar,” Maryam was saying now, breaking into the men’s conversation about the disastrous start to the cricket series, which was unlikely to take a turn for the better given the way Desmond Haynes was batting, merciless against a bowling attack that included Imran, Wasim, and Qadir.

  The men turned to look at her. She blew on the surface of the hot tea, her breath wrinkling the skin of cream. “Your father says he’s one of the best young players he’s seen in a long time, doesn’t he, Za?” To the men she added, “Her father is Habib Ali.”

  The medical students were amazed. They wanted to know what her father said about Saeed Anwar, a Karachi boy, one of their own. One of the students had seen Saeed Anwar play at NED University. He recounted the highlights of the innings, breaking off to applaud Haynes’s century. A few balls later, Imran finally took Haynes’s wicket and there was more applause—both for the batsman and the bowler who’d finally got him. Viv Richards came on to bat, facing Imran, and one of the men murmured both their names the way people in another age might have said “Hercules Achilles” or perhaps “Nargis Raj Kapoor.” Her father had once said that what set these two cricketers—and, he grudgingly added, Botham—apart from all others was the glow of victory that enveloped them even in the midst of carnage. Maryam has that, Zahra thought, watching her friend wipe her fingers very thoroughly on a square of newsprint, as though she weren’t accustomed to the finest linen at home. Any space Maryam entered, she owned.

  The men had discovered that Maryam played cricket. They started to talk about the match between an all-women’s team and a men’s side due to take place in Karachi later in the month that had been called off after the religious parties staged protests.

  “They can’t stop a woman from running the country, so they interfere in cricket matches instead,” said one of the students, his lips shiny with paratha grease.

  “He’s only saying this to impress you both,” said another student, who wore his hair long like a fast bowler. “He won’t let any of us even look at his sisters.” He caught his friend in a headlock, and the other men shouted out to watch it, watch it, don’t knock over the tea.

  “Do his sisters look like him?” Zahra said. There was a moment in which she was horrified at herself for assuming they would accord her the right of banter and insult, and then the shiny-lipped student held up his hands to say, I’m defenseless, don’t attack me, and the other men roared with laughter.

  “A-one!” the fast-bowler said, holding his hand, palm up, toward Zahra. She slapped down on it.

  In that moment she stopped standing outside the circle of men conscious that she shouldn’t be here, and slipped into the scene. She had walked into the city’s arms, and it had embraced her—such a straightforward interaction, why had she never understood it before? She planted her elbows on the plywood tabletop. If a car were to drive up with two girls in it, they’d look at her and Maryam and know that women could claim this space, this outdoor life, this city.

  The innings ended a short while later and the students left, thanking the girls for sharing a table and talking to them.

  Maryam called for some more tea and another paratha. “I love this street, don’t you?” she said to Zahra.

  Zahra didn’t know what there was to love. It was mostly electronics stores. The older yellow stone buildings had upper floors that had once been the homes of affluent merchants, but now they were falling into ruin, which was the kind of thing that only the rich could find charming.

  “In England, everything fits in a little box with its own precise purpose. The cafe is for eating and drinking, the pavement is for walking, the street is for driving.” Maryam’s hands described little strips of activity, each distinct from the other. “And then there’s this . . .” The sweep of her hand took in Cafe VIP with its seating spilling onto the pavement, the motorcycle parked beside the plywood tables, the tree branches beneath which a cobbler had set up shop, the vendor with his cart of sugarcane parked on the street, and down an alley the boys playing street cricket. “You know, if you go into a supermarket in London and they ask you for one pound and you only have ninety-nine pence, they won’t sell you what you came for. Sorry, love, they’ll say. Overfamiliar enough to call you love but not to forgive you one pence. Who would want to live there?”

  Zahra was sure the supermarket comment couldn’t be true, and surely they played cricket on the streets in London?

  “How come Abu Bakr is back?” she said, dipping her finger onto the surface of her second cup of tea and pulling it out with the skin of cream clinging to it. She wiped it off with the square of newsprint, thought about going back to the Mercedes for the box of tissues that was always there. “And still letting you drive?” It still rankled that Maryam hadn’t told her about the driving until Abu Bakr had been fired for it.

  “Oh, everyone’s being very, very nice to me,” Maryam said, tearing off a strip of paratha. “What do I want for dinner, do I want to go to the beach, here are some lemon tarts from the club bakery. The only good thing to come out of it is Abu Bakr’s return.”

  “Why are they being nice to you?”

  “Do you ever feel that something isn’t really properly true until we tell each other about it?” Maryam said.

  “Yes. All the time.”

  “That’s why I don’t want to tell you. But I can’t not. My parents are sending me to boarding school. In England.”

  “No,” Zahra said automatically. “They can’t. Your grandfather won’t let them.”

  Maryam dug a nail into the back of her hand. “He’s changed. The way he thinks about me, it’s changed.” She rubbed the deep crescent mark on her skin, vicious. “I’m just a girl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Jimmy. He made my grandfather see me differently. Well, I see him differently too. I thought he believed in fairness and justice, and he doesn’t, he won’t help me get these things.”

  She’d never seen Maryam like this, so wounded. “He won’t help you how?”

  Maryam was quiet for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice was uncertain. “If I tell you, maybe you’ll look at me the way my parents and grandfather did. Like I’m a child who’s asking for grown-up things when I’m too young to have them.”

  “I would never.”

  “I asked my grandfather to send someone he knows to find Jimmy. To scare him. So he’d know how that felt. And he refused.”

  The shock of that left Zahra unable to respond. She knew what it meant in Karachi when the powerful sent someone to “scare” their enemies. It was part of the character of the city, this other world of personal justice—messages delivered via fists and bullets and power drills. Now the way her parents talked about the Patriarch made sense, always a subtext there that she’d never before understood.

  I want you to die. Zahra remembered Maryam’s voice saying those words to Jimmy. She had known right away that Maryam had said it on her behalf, because Jimmy had terrified Zahra. And it was at least in part for Zahra’s sake that she’d asked her grandfather to send a man to “scare” Jimmy. All at once she was afraid of Maryam. But then, looking at her friend—so cast down, so defeated—she wondered if that was the wrong response and she should be ashamed that she would never be able to match the infinite reach, the unquestioning love, of Maryam’s friendship.

  “You can’t go.” That was what mattered, that was the only thing that mattered right now.

  Maryam moved her chair closer to Zahra’s, and they sat shoulder to shoulder, looking out onto Bunder Road, all at once immense in its beauty.

  “When?”

  “Soon. It’ll be new subjects, new textbooks. I’m going to spend the whole term trying to catch up. And without your brain to help me.”

  “You’ll make new friends quickly.”

  “What’s the point of new friends? I want old friends.” Their heads angled, rested against each other, a deep sorrow passing between the two of them.

  “When will I see you again? Not until the summer holidays?”

  Maryam sat up straight, rubbed her eyes angrily. “My parents want the whole family to move. They’re sending me ahead, but they’re all coming by summer.”

  “What about Khan Leather?”

  Maryam ripped at what remained of the paratha. “My father doesn’t want to run it. My grandfather no longer thinks I can run it. So when he dies, it’ll be sold. Unless I can change my grandfather’s mind, but how can I do that from England?” She tossed the remains of the paratha onto the pavement and a cat streaked out from under the table, the crow on the handlebar dived down. The cat won. “They’re taking everything away from me.”

  Maryam in England. Never coming back. What would Zahra do without this friend by her side?

  “I still don’t understand. Why are your parents sending you away?”

  “They think I’m too wild, too reckless. They think it’s only a matter of time before that’ll land me in trouble I won’t be able to recover from. So I’m off to the English countryside, where the worst thing that will happen is I’ll get drunk and wander into a field full of cows. Which is a situation I’m far less capable of handling than getting into a car with a Jimmy.”

  “I’ll tell them you didn’t want to get into the car. I should have told them already.”

  “No one will believe you. It’s not your fault. Jimmy did this. Not even Hammad, not really. It was Jimmy. That may be the worst thing of all. He’s out there in his FX, thinking he’s such a big man for scaring a pair of girls. I hate him, Zahra, I hate him more than I’ll ever hate anyone, ever.” She exhaled, a long, heavy breath. “Right now, that is the only thing I know for certain about the rest of my life.”

  There had been three moments—three of them!—when Maryam had tried to go back to the party and Zahra had prevented it. It’s not your fault. The acknowledgment and the forgiveness all in one. Zahra looked at the unfamiliar expression on this most familiar of faces as Maryam watched the street, the everyday, taken-for-granted ordinariness of it. Abu Bakr buffing the Mercedes with a square of cloth, the sugarcane seller feeding the long sticks into a press and extracting green juice, the shutters still down almost everywhere because ten a.m. was too early in the day for the life of a nocturnal city to begin. Surrounded by a world she’d known forever, Maryam was lost. Zahra felt her friend’s pain move into her own heart, sharp and surprising. So this is love, she thought.

  She tilted her head back, watching razor-taloned kites glide against the pale winter sky. She had been waiting so long for disaster to come swooping down upon her, and all the while the disaster had been curled up, waiting, inside her tiny, covetous, coward heart.

  LONDON

  2019

  Spring

  The Guardian

  MARCH 23, 2019

  Zahra Ali: “I know firsthand how authoritarian regimes operate. That’s why this government has me so worried.”

  The head of the Center for Civil Liberties on battling for the UK’s freedoms, her celebrity friends, and her love for London.

  It’s hard not to think of a panther when Zahra Ali enters the Center for Civil Liberties meeting room dressed in black from blazer to knee-high boots, dark hair sleek, long limbs moving purposefully. Fortunately, I’m not her prey; she sated herself the night before on the Minister of State for Security during a Newsnight segment that cried out meme me before it was done. She says she’s unaware of the attention she received on social media, which she never looks at—“Too much noise” she says, in a characteristically understated way of talking about the death threats and trolling that inevitably, and depressingly, attach themselves to a migrant Muslim woman who has become the voice of Britain’s conscience since she took on the position of Director at Britain’s oldest civil liberties organization a decade ago.

  “I never thought I’d be doing this so long but, honestly, I can’t think of any better place to work. So as long as they’ll have me, here I am,” she says, sipping a cup of tea that she takes—“Pakistani style”—extra strong, with lots of milk and a spoon of sugar. Ali left a successful career as a barrister specializing in human rights and immigration to join CCL in 2009. “There was a change in my personal life that made me think of what other kind of changes I could make, in that clichéd way.” The personal change was the end to a six-year marriage. “My husband was offered a job in New York, which he didn’t feel he could turn down. When I decided to stay in London, the marriage ended.” If this seems a curiously dispassionate way of talking about matters of the heart, it may be symptomatic of how carefully she guards her private life.

  But when I put this to her, she demurs. “I’m guarding my ex’s private life, not mine. One person shouldn’t get to comment on a marriage of two people.” A little later she adds, “The funny part, of course, is so many women my age rely on their friends far more than their partners for everything from emotional support to belly laughs. But when we talk about people’s private lives that isn’t ever what we mean.”

  Ah, the friends! Among the criticism sent Ali’s way is the charge that she spends too much time with celebrities. “More likely to be seen in the pages of Tatler than in the courts of justice,” as The Sun recently put it. While the comment reveals a lack of understanding about Ali’s role at CCL—as Director she oversees a legal team but doesn’t take on cases herself—there is no denying the starry company she keeps. She’s appeared onstage with Annie Lennox, had a cameo role playing herself in a Riz Ahmed movie, and watches cricket with Malala at Lord’s. “If people who’ve worked hard to get to the top of their profession want to use their high profile to increase awareness of the work CCL does, I’m not about to say no to that—and sometimes you build individual relationships from people’s support for your organization.” She laughs as her own words echo back to her and drops the prepackaged line of defense. “Oh come on, who’s going to say no to getting up on a stage with Annie Lennox?” Her public persona is formidable to the point of being forbidding, but she’s likable in person: wryly funny, happy to send herself up.

  Ali has lived in the UK all her adult life, since she was awarded a scholarship to Cambridge, but she grew up in Karachi during a particularly bleak time in that country’s history. She was three when General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq seized power in a military coup, and though her home life was happy she was always aware of the mood of paranoia and fear that the dictatorship engendered. She worried about making known her family’s anti-Zia views in the classroom, and knew never to say anything compromising on the telephone because the intelligence services could be listening in. When she was fourteen her father, a popular cricket writer and broadcaster, received a message from the military instructing him to work some words of praise about General Zia into his cricket show. Her father chose not to. Ali remembers being angry with him. “I thought he was endangering himself, and not thinking about his family. And that very day—the day he recorded his show and I was throwing an adolescent tantrum about it—General Zia was killed.” A few months later the young, Western-educated Benazir Bhutto was voted into power. “I learned then you should never believe a fight is lost, no matter how many years go by without a glimmer of hope.”

  It’s easy to see why Ali’s childhood has made her a champion of human rights and civil liberties; less clear why she recently declared the United Kingdom was on the road to dictatorship. It’s impossible to imagine Jonathan Agnew being asked by shadowy figures to praise the PM during Test Match Special and even more impossible to imagine his family being terrified by his refusal to do so.

  Challenged, she shifts into a slightly chilly tone. “I never said anything about a road to dictatorship. That’s the tabloid-headline version of a very long answer to a question I was asked at the Cambridge Union. I made the point that I know firsthand how authoritarian regimes operate. I recognize their tactics for suppressing dissent and holding on to power. That’s why this government has me so worried. Not because I think the UK is in danger of becoming a dictatorship but because the British are too complacent that their democracy is so robust it can’t be weakened—things that would set off alarm bells in countries with histories of authoritarian rule are allowed to slide by with little noise here.” She talks at length about the government’s escalating rhetoric regarding the “excessive” powers of the courts, the proposed bill that will limit the right of protest, the planned introduction of ID cards, and the instructions to the Home Office for officials to make wider use of their discretionary powers of rejection “if something doesn’t feel right” about an application for citizenship or settlement. All this with the government just a few weeks in power.

  She makes a compelling case for concern, but I still wonder if her view of things might be colored by her very clear loathing of the new government, which brings a bite to her voice that I’ve never heard in the decade she’s been holding the powerful to account.