“Don’t you ever want to do anything that you shouldn’t, Za?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Kiss a boy.”

  “Zahra Ali!”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m teasing. Which boy?”

  “Any boy. It’s the kissing I want.” She went very red as she said it. “But you’d have to trust the boy not to talk about it. And it would be stupid to trust anyone that way, except you.”

  Maryam nodded. That last part was certainly true. “Do you think it would be that different, if you closed your eyes . . .”

  “What?”

  “To kiss a girl.” A new kind of possibility, suggested by a movie she’d watched late one night in London.

  “You mean each other?”

  Maryam scrunched up her face at the sheer wrongness of that thought. “Never. Not even for practice. Okay. That’s decided. Straight on to Babar for you and Hammad for me.”

  “I don’t know which half of that sentence is worse. Does he call you?”

  “You think I’ve started lying to you over Hammad? Please.” She stood up on the bed and peeled off her sock. “You’ve sinned against the friendship and now you have to face your punishment.”

  “Oh god, no, not that.”

  “Yes, that. Sniff the sock! Sniff it!” She waved her sock in the direction of her friend’s face, and Zahra rolled off the bed to escape. Seconds later, Maryam was chasing Zahra down the corridor, waving the sock, and around the dining table and into the study, where Maryam’s mother yelled at them for being a pair of hooligans with no regard for the terrible day anyone else was having.

  Zahra said some words of apology and exited the room. Maryam joined her in the bedroom a few minutes later, gleeful at the dilemma her parents had been placed in. They were hosting a large party later in the month and one of their guests, her father’s old university friend, had called to ask if he could bring along his brother, who was going through a hard time and needed cheering up. It was the kind of request no one could ever think to turn down, but this brother had recently been arrested for drug trafficking and everyone knew that his release had been due to a bribable judge. “Why should I be the first step in his rehab program?” her mother said to Maryam, meaning social rehabilitation. She had pretended there was a crisis in the kitchen that meant she had to swiftly hang up on the university friend, but she or her husband would have to call back with an answer before long, and there was no pathway to a no that she could find.

  “So will they cancel the party?” Zahra said.

  “It’s my father’s fortieth birthday,” Maryam said, joining Zahra by the CD collection. “They’re not going to cancel that.”

  “But they’re not going to have a drug smuggler in their house, are they?” Zahra had pulled the Dirty Dancing soundtrack out of the rack and was reading the song list with great concentration, as if she didn’t already know it by heart.

  “He’s fine in a social gathering,” Maryam said, having met the man several times and retaining no clear memory of him beyond a soft-spoken politeness. “The main thing is, his brother’s a friend asking for a favor, so what are you going to do?”

  “I didn’t think of it that way,” Zahra said, finally looking up at Maryam.

  “Very diplomatic response.”

  Zahra placed the CD into the player. There was the clattering sound of a spinning disk that hadn’t been pressed down firmly enough, and Zahra shook her head, always impatient with her own imperfections, before fixing the problem. The opening bars of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” erased any differing opinions they might have about the adult world as they sang, I’ve naaiiver felt this way before.

  “I suppose if your sisters became criminal overlords and you asked if you could bring them along to my fortieth birthday party I’d say yes,” Zahra conceded, halfway through the song.

  “Please. I’d never make you invite those irritating creatures to any party. Forty! What do you think we’ll be doing at forty?”

  This was the kind of conversation they loved to have, and they reduced the volume slightly and returned to their side-by-side spot on Maryam’s bed to consider it.

  “I suppose we’ll be married, with children,” Maryam said. “That’s sort of inevitable, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Zahra said.

  “Well, I’ll have to have children so there’s someone to inherit Khan Leather,” Maryam said. “The difficult part will be finding a husband who doesn’t mind that I’m running my own company and letting him have no say in it at all. But he can’t be weak.”

  “I suppose we’ll want those kind of things one day,” Zahra said, a little gloomily. “But we’ll still be us when we’re together, won’t we?”

  “We’ll always be us,” Maryam said firmly. “Even if you’re living in Alaska. This is friendship, not Propane Kitty.”

  “Propinquity!”

  “My version’s better.”

  “True.”

  There was a slight thumping sound against the window. One of the garden cats had jumped from the chikoo tree onto the windowsill. “Propane Kitty!” they called out together.

  Their laughter built, moving beyond the immediate joke into a deep laugh of joy for friendship, for each other, for the certainty that whatever happened in the world you would always have this one person, this North Star, this rock, this alter ego who knew your every flaw down to your atoms and who still, despite it all, chose to stand with you and by you through everything that the world had yet to throw at you, every heartache, every disappointment, every moment of darkness. Always this friendship, always its light.

  When Zahra’s mother came to pick her up later that afternoon, Maryam’s father was on the phone telling his university friend that of course his brother was welcome at the party, which meant one of the gun-toting guards at the gate had to go round to the kitchen entrance and call for the cook because he wasn’t allowed to enter the house—but the cook was indoors talking to Maryam’s mother about dinner, so the guard walked over to the servants’ quarters and called out until the driver, Abu Bakr, woke up from his afternoon nap and went to tap on one of the windows, which alerted Maryam’s sisters’ ayah, who couldn’t understand what Abu Bakr was saying through the glass because Maryam’s sisters were playing their music too loudly, so she shuffled outside to see what he wanted and then shuffled back in and found Zahra. By this time, Zahra’s mother had been sitting in her car for several minutes in the oppressive August heat.

  “I’m sorry,” Maryam said, coming outside with Zahra to apologize.

  “Does he make you feel any safer?” Zahra’s mother said, indicating the man who had opened the gate for Maryam and stood there watching her, Kalashnikov dangling from his hand.

  “Ma!” Zahra said, hurrying into the car to prevent a prolonging of the conversation.

  “No, he just annoys me,” Maryam replied. She turned to the guard. “This is another person who is always allowed in, understand?”

  Zahra saw the disapproval in her mother’s expression at the tone of Maryam’s voice. The first burning embarrassment of Zahra’s friendship with Maryam had been when her five-year-old self had addressed the driver as “Abu Bakr Bhai” and Maryam, looking horrified, had said, “He’s not related to us!” Zahra soon learned that almost everyone she went to school with referred to the people who drove them around, cooked their meals, and made their beds without attaching either honorifics or familial relations to their names, class positions overriding deference between generations. In Zahra’s house, the couple who came to clean and cook were “Zahoor Bhai” and “Shameema Apa” to her and to her parents.

  A Pajero, large and gleaming, turned the corner and pulled up right behind Zahra’s mother’s car.

  “First I couldn’t enter and now I can’t leave,” Zahra’s mother said.

  The back window of the four-wheel drive slid down and Maryam’s grandfather leaned out. “Is this car coming or going?” he said.

  “Going. It’s Zahra and her mother,” Maryam said.

  The Pajero door opened and a silver-topped walking stick emerged, followed by Maryam’s grandfather. The Patriarch, as he was known in Zahra’s family, was impeccably dressed as ever in a pin-striped Savile Row suit. Zahra didn’t know what a Savile Row suit was, but it had somehow long ago entered her consciousness that this was the only kind of suit the Patriarch ever wore.

  Zahra’s mother sighed at the unnecessary dance of etiquette but turned off the engine and motioned to Zahra to join her in getting out of the car.

  “Isn’t this ridiculous?” the Patriarch said. “I’ve blocked your exit and now I’m delaying you further in order to apologize.”

  “I haven’t seen you in so long,” Zahra’s mother said, which managed to imply this was a source of regret without her actually saying anything insincere. They spoke for a few minutes—the Patriarch showing a deep interest that couldn’t possibly be genuine in Zahra’s mother’s new school—while humidity tightened its wet grip on everyone. But at last Zahra’s mother switched on the car engine, the Pajero backed up, and Zahra waved goodbye to Maryam while the Patriarch shook out the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his whole face.

  “God, he makes my skin crawl,” Zahra’s mother said. It was the kind of thing her parents often said about the Patriarch, though they always refused to explain what they meant by it. “Anyway, how was your afternoon?”

  Zahra made the mistake of telling her about the drug trafficker.

  “These people, they always protect their own,” her mother said.

  Zahra looked away, aware of the talcum-powder rather than perfume scent of her mother. It was the one thing for which she could confidently reach when she needed a reason to justify what she recognized as unwarranted rage toward a woman adored by every other fourteen-year-old who knew her. Talcum powder and the fact that she thought of her new position as an elevation even though the school she now ran, named Andalusia, was referred to in Zahra’s school as And-a-loser for its comparatively low academic standards.

  Adults were unbearable, she thought, looking out of the car window. All of them, all. This was a feeling that came and went often these days, and it was almost always accompanied by the thought that the one person in the world she wanted to spend all her time with was Maryam. But something was different between her and Maryam now, something summed up by her memory of Maryam pulling the fabric of her kameez taut around her body and pretending it wasn’t intentional.

  Zahra did want to kiss a boy, it was true. And it didn’t just stop at kissing. She wanted to understand better the things happening in her body that made her wrap her legs around her pillow in bed and direct water from the shower to her nipples. Wanted someone else to make her feel the way she made herself feel late at night when she slipped her hand between her legs and thought of walking masked through a room of older boys, letting them do things to her, doing things in return, without anyone knowing it was her. But no mask could disguise her; everyone she grew up with recognized her by the length of her shadow, so she wouldn’t do any of this, not for a long time, maybe not until she went to university, away from the prying eyes in this tiny world in which they lived within a city of millions. There was no horror she could imagine greater than people whispering about her, saying she had behaved in ways that no girl from a good family should behave. “Zahra’s very sensible and I trust her,” she’d heard her father recently say to a cousin of his on the phone. She didn’t know exactly what that comment was about, but suspected it had to do with the cousin’s disapproval of a coeducational school with a reputation for “fast” girls. Her father’s response had made her feel proud and also crushed her with the terrible weight of living up to all that trust.

  And then there was Maryam, who didn’t see why her parents’ opinion—or the world’s opinion—had anything to do with what she wanted or what she did about it. Zahra didn’t know if Hammad was what Maryam wanted. Maryam said he wasn’t, but sometimes she lied. Zahra had seen her do it with her parents, with teachers, with other students, but she’d never learned how to recognize it—there was no giveaway blush or averting of the eye or saying too much or change in the tone of her voice. Zahra knew when Maryam lied because, until now, Zahra had always known the truths of Maryam’s life. But she couldn’t be sure of that anymore. A drift had begun, which would only grow as the years went on. Deep down they both knew that no one had the kind of friendship when they were forty that the two of them had at fourteen.

  The rains came at last, ferocious. Tree branches ripped from trunks, streets became lakes, electricity meters sparked and smoked. The downpour left the city in darkness. No one knew if the power outage was a preventive shutdown or a collapse, since the electricity company wasn’t answering its complaints line. School would certainly be closed the next day; the flooded streets would be impassable. Given the predictability of the August monsoons, it was ridiculous that the school holidays didn’t start and end later each summer, but the school’s response to this suggestion—made by more than one parent—was that it was the roads that needed to be fixed, not the school year. “The beauty of Pakistan is that there’s always someone else to blame for a problem,” Zahra’s father had said.

  The best place to be in Karachi that night was precisely where Zahra was: on the balcony of one of the Sea View flats overlooking Clifton Beach, with a mosquito coil at her feet and a candle on the table at her elbow, its flame flickering in the warm breeze coming off the water. The slapping sound emerging from the darkness was the rain-swollen waves crashing into the seawall. A burst of music and headlights was a car cruising down the street and parking right in front of one of the painted signboards staked into the ground that announced Section 144 was in place, prohibiting activity that was a threat to safety and public order. In her history class Zahra had learned about the use of Section 144 during the Raj to prevent gatherings of anti-colonial demonstrators; now she felt embarrassed on behalf of her nation that it was used to keep people from swimming in the monsoonal sea with its murderous undertow.

  How tedious it was to live now, in this place, with its repellent dictator and its censored television and the everyday violence that had shrunk all their lives into private spaces. When they moved here, her parents had been clear that she wasn’t ever to go across to the beach without an adult, but Maryam had come over a few days later and convinced her they should sneak off when her parents weren’t at home. Together they’d walked across the silver-gray sand to one of the vendors with a wooden cart, on which he was roasting corn on glowing coals. Maryam sauntered, whistling a tune Zahra didn’t recognize, but Zahra only felt vulnerable, her mind going to the stories of kidnappings that circulated in the schoolyard. One of the girls in Class 8 had missed three days of school the previous year, and though she’d returned, claiming she’d had a stomach bug, the whisper went around that she’d been kidnapped and ransomed but her parents didn’t want anyone to know because people would wonder what had been done to the girl in those three days among criminal men. Zahra had insisted they take the corn home and eat it in her room rather than staying out any longer. And at the end of it all, the chili-lemon-flavored kernels were hard with over-roasting.

  She slapped at a mosquito that had made its way onto her arm despite the coil, and wiped the smear onto the pages of her history book. Closed the book, slipped headphones on, and pressed play on her Walkman. Bruce Springsteen sounded mournful about how tough he was on the mixtape Maryam had recorded off Capital Radio in London. The song ended and the DJ’s voice—filled with the fresh possibilities of somewhere-not-here—said, “And that’s what he—” before Maryam cut off the recording and restarted somewhere during the opening bars of Tracy Chapman singing a song made for Karachi nights in which being driven around in a fast car with your friends, listening to a mixtape, was as good as life got—particularly if someone’s older brother was doing the driving.

  Bunching up her hair, she pulled it away from her neck to allow the breeze onto her skin. Even when it wasn’t hot there was still this incessant stickiness. She looked up at the sky, dense with stars now that the rain clouds had emptied and blown away, and allowed herself to slip further into a satisfying dissatisfaction that she knew she would look back on in a few years, when living in New York or London, with an amused fondness for her younger self who only half believed in the future that awaited her. The details of that future were hazy but glittering. The sliding door opened and her father walked out, holding his nightly glass of whiskey. Zahra slipped off her headphones and looped them over his head, creating a trough in his wiry gray hair, held the rewind button for what she estimated to be the correct length of time, and pressed play. Enough of the music seeped out for her to know she’d judged well. “This Tracy has a voice, not like all those others who have a look,” he’d said the first time he heard “Fast Car.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it? Living here?” He gestured in a way that took in the sea breeze, the star-filled sky, the location.

  Zahra wished she weren’t too tall to rest her head against his shoulder. Instead, she made do with linking her arm with his and leaning into his comforting stockiness. Some years ago, annoyed at having to drive out from KDA to Clifton in the middle of watching a cricket match to drop her to Maryam’s house, he’d asked why for once Maryam couldn’t come to see Zahra. “Why would anyone come here when they live there?” Zahra had said, meaning both the upstairs portion of the gloomy house that she and her parents occupied and the neighborhood, far away from Defence and Clifton where all her friends lived. He’d received this with a silence that had stretched out through the rest of the day. Last year, when his salary as cricket correspondent for the country’s leading Urdu-language paper was vastly augmented by his role as anchor for a cricket talk show, he brought Zahra and her mother to a three-story block of flats by the sea, led them up two flights of stairs, opened the front door with a key he produced with a flourish, and said to his daughter, “Good enough for Maryam?”