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unharmed.
    Karim touched my knee and then was gone, clambering back to the other side of the tree. I stretched out and lay down. Would it be so terrible to live here? In Karachi we never had this freedom, this space to wander in. Too dangerous to walk around, and too humid to want to walk most of the time. Besides, walk to where? Life compressed into houses and cars and private clubs and school and gardens too small to properly hide in. Zia was in Karachi, I had to remind myself. That was hardly inconsequential. I could hear Karim moving from branch to branch. We had never once talked about my feelings for Zia, and I had only realized that Karim knew how I felt when he backed up my insistence, in front of our whole gang, that there was no picture of Zia in my bedside-table drawer, despite Sonia’s claims to the contrary. He backed me up on that, even though I had started keeping the drawer under lock and key and would not tell him why. He backed me up even though Sonia was the new girl in school and she was beautiful. That had been in August, at the beginning of the term, and now Sonia and I were fast friends (‘I’m not fast; I’m fully modest,’ Sonia had said, the day I let her look in my bedside drawer again. ‘But you’re a real Carl Lewis. Except, where Zia is concerned you’re Legcramps-e-Azam’). But Karim still hadn’t said another word to me about the picture. Or was it I who hadn’t said another word to him? My eyebrows drew closer to each other. How would I feel if he had pictures of a girl in his drawer and never talked to me about it? Not good. In fact, I’d probably walk up to him and kick him hard for such an attempt at secrecy. But Karim didn’t kick. Perhaps it was because he knew that he had only to wait and I would tell him everything.
    â€˜Hey, come and look at this,’ he called out.
    Without hesitation or even the slightest lurch of fear, I walked round to the branch just below the one on which Karim was standing, and stood up on my toes, resting my chin just inches from his feet. On the tree trunk someone had written ‘Z+M’, the letters biting deep into the bark.
    Zia, I stupidly thought. Who’s this ‘M’?
    Karim sat down, straddling the branch, and ran his thumb through the thick grooves of the letter ‘M’. ‘Mama told me Asif was a regular member of their gang back then. They all spent one New Year here. Must have been 1970, though she didn’t tell me that part of it.’
    Oh.
    I looped my arm around the branch above me, and looked at my father’s flamboyant ‘Z’. He must have sat on the branch that Karim was now astride, leaning towards the tree trunk, hammer and chisel in hand. How long had it taken to gouge so deep a mark of devotion to Karim’s mother? I pulled myself up so that I was sitting just behind Karim, and reached out to cover the ‘Z’ with my palm, pressing harder until I could feel the letter leave its mark on my skin. Karim did the same with the ‘M’, our hands separated by a+.
    Oh.
    I couldn’t even begin to imagine them together—my father and Aunty Maheen. The only pairing that made less sense was my mother and Uncle Ali. Although perhaps it was just that I couldn’t imagine my parents and Karim’s parents as anything other than my parents and Karim’s parents.
    I pulled my hand away, and then pulled Karim’s hand away. We had first heard about the fiancé swap when we were ten and our mothers told us they hadn’t mentioned it before because it might have seemed too weird. They knew, they said, how sensitive kids can be about their parents. On the contrary Karim and I saw the news as thrilling proof that our friendship was destined, and spent many hours, over the years, drawing up lists of the foibles and the talents the other possessed, under the heading ‘Those Genes Could Have Been Mine’—though for a long