“This man,” her mother said, shaking her head but smiling.

  Her father walked in and spread his arms wide. “My loves,” he said, all the weight of the last few days lifted off him.

  “What did you say?” Zahra said standing up.

  “Nothing,” he said, swiping his hand diagonally through the air as though it were a rapier. “Not one mention of the President, as has been the case every week, as will be the case every week. Let them come and arrest me for saying nothing. Let them reveal their trembling desperation.”

  “All right, all right, hero,” her mother said. “No one’s going to arrest anyone. Stop frightening your daughter.”

  “What’s wrong with both of you?” Zahra shouted, and ran into her room.

  Her father came in after her. He wasn’t being foolish, he tried to explain. He had talked to many people, taken sound advice. Governments didn’t want to look weak, and what is it but weakness to arrest a man or push him off the airwaves because he didn’t say thank you? They would ignore him, that was all that would happen.

  “You’re guessing,” she said. “You’re hoping. And for what? There’s nothing to gain, not one single thing.”

  “It was the only thing I could do,” he said. “One day I hope you’ll understand.”

  He left the room and Zahra locked her bedroom door, rotating the lock this way and that twice to make sure he heard it. Turned Bruce Springsteen on as loud as her boom box could manage before its speakers started whistling. She started to dance, fast, wild, trying to shake off everything but the music. She was still dancing when the phone rang. It was the Brigadier, she knew it. Now consequences had arrived. The Pet Shop Boys sang “It’s a Sin.”

  Her mother shouted for her father. Zahra ran out of her room in time to hear, “He’s dead! He’s dead!,” her mother’s voice giddy. “Someone finally killed him.”

  “What?” her father said, and her mother said, “His plane exploded.” Her father: “A rumor?” Her mother: “No, it’s confirmed.”

  They hadn’t said his name, but there was only one person they could be talking about, holding on to each other’s hands. Zahra said, “He can’t be dead.” Her parents turned to her, each of them letting go of a hand and extending their arms toward her so she could walk into their embrace.

  “My god,” her father said. “Today of all days. Thank you, Allah, I’m a believer again.”

  “But what will happen now?” She didn’t know why they didn’t seem scared. Without the dictator who had ruled almost all her life, who could know what would happen?

  “Now you’ll see,” her father said. “Now you’ll see what this country can be.”

  Her mother said the unimaginable words: “Elections. Benazir.”

  Her father began to cry in a way that told her that all the tears he wept when Pakistan beat England were just practice for this moment, this turning of history toward the light. Zahra held her parents close, not wanting to be the one to tell them that they were wrong. None of this would happen, how could it? There would be another dictator, and he might be worse.

  Her father switched on the television. The screen was taken up by a message saying normal transmission would resume shortly. Zahra and her parents stood and looked at it, and then her father opened a cabinet drawer, brought out a camera, and took a picture.

  “Will they broadcast Three Slips and an Ali?” Zahra said.

  “I doubt it, jaani. We may be looking at this screen for a while.”

  “Thank god,” she said.

  Her father smiled at her. “I think you may be fixating on the wrong details here.”

  The phone rang again, and it was Maryam.

  “Did you hear?”

  “Yes, just now.”

  Speaking about it to Maryam made it feel true. And their unspoken agreement to discuss it on the phone without naming it let her know that Maryam, like her, understood that the rules of the world hadn’t changed, and probably wouldn’t.

  “Sad for his family,” Maryam said.

  “Hmmm, yes.” Her tone trying to suggest she had been thinking this too.

  “I hope things don’t get too unstable.”

  “Is that what your parents are saying?”

  “My father and grandfather. My mother—she’s thinking about her old school friend. But no one really believes that’s going to happen.”

  Maryam’s mother had known Benazir Bhutto at school, but Zahra had never heard the term friend applied to her before.

  “My father’s upset that he may have to cancel his fortieth party.”

  “That’s too bad. But at least they won’t have to have the drug overlord in their house.”

  Zahra’s father slid open the glass door that led to the balcony and the sound that came rushing in was a wedding song playing loudly through a car speaker—no, two car speakers, three, their synchronization just slightly off. Her father clapped his hands and snapped his fingers, her mother responded in kind, and then they were dancing, laughing together.

  “What’s that noise?” Maryam said.

  “That isn’t noise. It’s music.”

  There was no way of counting the hundreds of thousands of mourners on the streets of Islamabad the day the President was buried. Men, all men, dressed in white, surged toward the white marble edifice of the Shah Faisal Mosque. Heat shimmered across the television screen, making everything feel illusory. And perhaps it was. What reality corresponded to all these mourners, or to the newscaster whose soaring eulogy went on and on until he broke into tears, convinced by his own sorrow even if no one else was? In Karachi, the troops were on high alert, but that was just a piece of propaganda or perhaps a show of respect by the armed forces for their commander in chief, pretending there was some possibility that the city would be convulsed by a grief that would turn to violence.

  “Say what you will about the man, and I’ve said enough over the years, but you have to give him his due,” Maryam’s grandfather said, shelling a peanut with one hand while holding the telephone receiver to his ear with the other. He’d commanded her and her parents to come and watch the funeral with him, but as the coverage entered its second hour with the body nowhere near the burial site, he had turned his attention to telephone calls with friends, while Maryam’s father made his way through the evening paper crosswords. Her mother had long since departed the room and was probably speaking to one of her friends on the second phone line.

  All the leaders of what was called the Free World had come in person or sent their emissaries to the funeral of the dictator who had played a key role in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. “He put this country on the geopolitical map,” her grandfather was saying now, as the newscaster identified George Schulz of America and Geoffrey Howe of Britain among the dignitaries at the funeral. “All this democracy people are getting so excited about. Power respects power, whether it comes from ballot boxes or bullets.”

  Maryam stood up and walked out of the study, bored by it all. Her grandfather’s house in Bath Island was a 1930s two-story structure of stone walls and high ceilings and black-and-white handmade floor tiles; when her grandmother was alive it had been famed for the frequency and glamour of its parties. “Invited or uninvited, you were always welcome,” one of her grandmother’s friends had once said. Now the parties had been reduced to two a year—her grandmother’s birthday, though she’d been dead nearly a decade, and New Year’s Eve. Her grandmother’s birthday was when her grandfather invited people he liked; the New Year’s Eve party was far larger and included guests who were “useful to know.” When you see the chance to increase your proximity to power, take it, he’d told Maryam, and waved his hand dismissively when she asked if it wasn’t better to be the power than the proximity.

  In the garden she whistled for her grandfather’s German shepherd, Dash, who came charging at her, nearly knocking her over in his joy. They wrestled together for a while, played fetch for a bit, and then Dash followed her indoors to the bedroom that her father had grown up in, larger by far than the bedrooms of his two older sisters. She sank into a bean bag, Dash’s head resting on her feet, and started to read through the stack of Archie comics that she kept there for these dull stretches of time. She heard someone calling for Abu Bakr, wondered what that was about, but only vaguely.

  Eventually her grandfather’s bearer, Shah Nawaz, came to tell her she was being called for. She said a regretful goodbye to Dash—who’d been banned from the study since the exuberant wagging of his tail had knocked over two bowls in her grandfather’s Gardner collection—and returned to the adults.

  “Shut the door, we don’t need the servants hearing this,” her grandfather said when she entered the room. Someone—he didn’t say who—had seen her driving the Mercedes on Shahrah-e-Faisal.

  “Lots of kids my age drive,” she said. “Saba’s brother has been dropping us home from parties and school events since he was fourteen and no one’s ever minded.” She gestured to her parents. “They know he has.”

  “Yes, we know he has,” her mother said. “And his parents know he has. You’ve been sneaking around and making Abu Bakr cover for you.”

  “It’s not his fault,” she said.

  “No, it’s your fault,” her grandfather said. “But Abu Bakr is the one who’s lost his job over it.”

  “You can’t fire him.”

  “You think anyone wanted to?” her father said, angry as he rarely was. “But what choice have you left us? Should all the servants think it’s forgivable to aid our children in breaking our rules?”

  “And the law,” her mother said, with so little conviction no one had to respond to it.

  “Shahrah-e-Faisal,” her grandfather said. “That was stupid. How did you think you wouldn’t be seen by someone who knows us? It’s the only Mercedes of this model in all of Karachi.”

  “I usually only drive nearer the office,” she said, stung by the charge of stupidity. “Dada, please don’t fire Abu Bakr.”

  “You’re spoiled,” he said, his nostrils wrinkling as if she were a putrefying fruit set in front of him. “I want you to be fearless, not like every other soft, silly girl. But instead you’re turning out spoiled and reckless.”

  Her mother’s indrawn breath was a surprise, but it turned out it wasn’t in response to the charges being leveled against Maryam. On the screen, something draped in green was being lowered into the ground. Her grandfather turned up the volume.

  “My god,” her mother said. “My god. He’s really dead.”

  Maryam’s disgrace was pushed into a tiny corner of the world. A man who had bent the country to his will was being buried, and even her grandfather leaned forward in his chair as if he wanted to be closer to an event that seemed as unreal as anything they’d ever seen on television, including Vulcans and Klingons.

  Maryam ran outside, calling for Abu Bakr, but he wasn’t there among the drivers and cook and bearer sitting around a radio, listening to the sound of shovels.

  “He’s gone,” Shah Nawaz said, looking up.

  “General Zia’s gone,” the cook said, and everyone laughed and returned their attention to the radio.

  Dash rubbed himself against her legs, sensing her disquiet, and she squatted down on the ground and rested her head against his warm animal neck. She recognized, but couldn’t change, the awfulness of being less upset about Abu Bakr’s fate than she was by the tone of disgust in her grandfather’s voice when he told her she had ceased to be exceptional.

  Every video shop in Clifton and Defence offered the same mix of Indian movies, Hollywood movies, and American TV shows, and yet shifting your loyalty from one to the other was a serious matter, not lightly undertaken. Maryam had been going to Star Video for years, but last week when she’d asked for Bull Durham, the man who had handed her every movie she’d asked for without comment for years said it wasn’t appropriate, there were too many “dirty” parts; even though she’d ignored the advice, that was the end of that relationship. Zahra said she should go to Crystal Palace, Saba said Everest was the best option, Babar said you couldn’t beat Video Tech.

  Now she stood in Ocean Video on Boat Basin, looking up and down the tall shelves of videos as if she might be interested in any of them, even though she knew every video store kept its newest releases under the counter for prized customers, and she had no intention of settling for anything less than Gorillas in the Mist, which had just arrived in Karachi in a master print after several weeks of no option but a juddering version of it with people talking in the background. She heard the door open and someone came in singing Nazia and Zoheb’s “Telephone Pyar.” He walked over to the wall of videos and stood close enough that they could talk in whispers, but not so close that anyone walking in would think they were together.

  “Our first date,” Hammad said.

  She glanced at him. She’d never seen him out of school uniform before. Blue jeans and a white tennis shirt with a gold chain like Andre Agassi’s. She knew the only game he’d been playing was video games at Sagar, where he spent every evening with his friends from outside school before returning home and phoning her. The calls were boring; his part of the conversation largely consisted of, “And? Tell me something else,” but he was good-looking and older and even though he only sounded ridiculous when he dropped his voice to a whisper and said things like, “I want to touch your breasts,” she was curious to know if she’d like it when it actually happened or if she’d like any of the other things he said he wanted. Though how she’d ever be able to find out, she didn’t know. The guards outside her gate meant she couldn’t sneak out of the house unseen and get into his car at a pre-appointed time, and Zahra would turn prissy and disapproving if she suggested using her flat as a pickup point. So instead she had to make do with following his instructions about which video store the new driver should bring her to and at what time, so he could stroll across from Sagar and meet her.

  He placed a cassette from Offbeat on the shelf with American soap operas—Dynasty, Dallas, Falcon Crest. “I had that made for you,” he said. She picked up the mixtape, looked at the typewritten list of songs visible through the cassette cover. “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” was the first song on side A.

  “Thanks. Can you tell him I want Gorillas in the Mist in master print?” She indicated the man behind the counter, whom she could feel watching her.

  “Boss!” Hammad said, stepping away from the shelf and walking to the counter. She liked him more now that he was speaking with authority, telling the videowallah to show her all his newest movies but only in master print, and then she was annoyed by the way he was standing—legs apart, hands on his hips, chest out—a posture allowed to him because he was a boy but which she couldn’t replicate anywhere, not even on the cricket pitch.

  The videowallah reached beneath the counter for a pile of videocassettes and told her the limit was usually one video per day from the coveted stash, but she could have two. She took Gorillas in the Mist and Mystic Pizza. Hammad asked if there was anything new in WWF for him. He’d told her one evening on the phone that this was code for porn movies.

  “I have to go,” she said. “My driver will come looking for me if I stay longer.”

  And that ended her first date.

  Winter

  At first, hope approached falteringly: now tangible, now a mirage. There would be genuine party-based democratic elections; there would not, yes there would. The elections would be timed to ensure the pregnant Benazir Bhutto was giving birth, unable to campaign—no, Benazir outwitted them all by wearing voluminous clothing that made it impossible to know if she was in her second or third trimester and then had her baby in September, well in time to take active part in the November elections. There would be orchestrated violence that would require the military to step in for the public good, no, instead there was a giant party that transformed Karachi into a city of galloping hope and frenzied nightlife.

  The frenzy started every evening along the beachfront outside Zahra’s flat and continued into the early hours of the morning. Its soundtrack was composed of election songs and car horns and voices learning their own power for the first time, calling out, “Jeeay Bhutto,” “Jeeay Altaf”—it didn’t much seem to matter, in that moment, which party you supported. Zahra and Maryam had been caught up in two public rallies while in Zahra’s car with her father—one for Benazir’s PPP, one for Altaf Hussain’s MQM—and both times they were swept along in the music and jubilation of it all, taking hold of party flags that shining young men on motorbikes handed to them through the rolled-down car windows, singing the party’s election song, calling out the slogans as though they had never believed anything more profoundly or unshakably. And Zahra’s father, who would in any other circumstances have issued a look of warning to young men on motorcycles approaching the adolescent girls, added his own cry, “Pakistan Zindabad,” which was taken up by the shining boys and raced through the rallies.

  At parties, Madonna’s primacy in drawing people to the dance floor was replaced by Shabana Noshi, the singer from a part of Karachi that neither Zahra nor Maryam nor any of their friends had ever ventured into, who sang Benazir’s catchy, joyous campaign song “Dila Teer Bija.” A young Englishman at one such party was heard saying, “Can’t imagine teenagers in London going crazy to a ‘Long Live Maggie Thatcher’ song,” and this confirmed what all of them already knew: everywhere else was to be pitied for not being Pakistan in the winter of 1988.

  The November night when everyone waited for the election results that would tell them if they’d merely been living in a dream state, Maryam was staying over at Zahra’s. In Maryam’s house, tucked away in a quiet street, you couldn’t hear the heartbeat of the city as you could in Zahra’s flat by the sea. And also, once her mother’s attempt at rekindling a school-day friendship that never was with Benazir had proved fruitless, the enthusiasm for democracy had waned in Maryam’s household for everyone but Maryam herself, who saw in Benazir an idol she hadn’t known she’d been waiting for. Even her younger sisters, eight and ten years old, were given to saying things like, “How can that girl hope to rule?” which they’d heard from their father. Maryam understood that the word girl had nothing to do with Benazir’s age, which, at thirty-five, was only five years short of her father’s.