This is how I evoked my childhood for him. Over dinners in the “curry houses” of Manchester, I rambled to Wali about the Walton house, leaping from one anecdote to another, spilling more kachumber salad onto my plate, then resuming in an order that made sense to me, though I could see that this confused Wali. I could see, too, my hand flying as I talked, the spoon in the air dripping chutney, my other hand grabbing the spotless corner of a napkin. You’re butterfingered, aren’t you, Wali would often say. He was forty-five and wore frameless glasses. At times he looked practically avuncular making amused pronouncements in his bewildering Manc dialect—though born in Pakistan, he’d grown up in Manchester. His broken Urdu was even more incomprehensible than his English.
In response, I assumed an insistent overfamiliarity. I blathered breathlessly. I willed charisma into my clumsiness. By mapping the sprawl of my stories onto my body, I wondered if I could create a private language, a system of notations by which we could read each other wordlessly. Alas, neither of us had dated before, and sometimes we sounded like two Frankenstein monsters aping human love after studying old movies. You’re so passionate, Wali said every other hour—at the very least, he was charmed by my animated gestures. When I brightened my eyes he leaned forward to listen, to nod at the correct moment. I could engross him with yet another rant against the atrocities of chicken tikka masala. From there, we journeyed to the roadside eateries of Lahore, to the canteen of my old school. His face furrowed with a strained attention. Then I smiled and touched his forearm. The attention broke; he smiled back.
A waiter appeared with our bill and told us they were closing for the night.
I didn’t know where to look as Wali paid for our dinner, so I stared at my lap. I opened my wallet, then closed it. I checked my phone. In Lahore, my mother would already be asleep. In Manchester it was only nine, though the sky had been dark for several hours already. When I looked up, I locked eyes with Wali. He looked unbelievably old again, smiling benignly at me as if he’d caught me in my act. I got to my feet and gathered the possessions that I had cavalierly strewn across the table.
Standing up, Wali said, So what became of the house?
What happens to houses? You leave them, you sell them, or you die in them. In 2002, when I was ten, we sold the house in Walton, pooled enough savings to buy a bigger house in an empty gated colony on the then-outskirts of Lahore. All the toilets in the new house had Western commodes accompanied with Muslim showers. We planted two bottle palms outside the boundary wall. I changed schools. My small uncle left Lahore without notice—smuggled himself into Turkey, then Greece, Spain, and finally Ireland, where he got married, got papers, got bald and exhausted. By then I had lost my love for him. They’d huddle around the telephone when he called from Cork and when it was my turn, I would stammer and had no words to speak into the receiver.
These have become the divisions of my life. The new house, the Walton house, and the Garden Town house where I was born and where my father continued to live with his parents after the divorce, as he’d done since his childhood. My mother found out that he’d remarried not six months after their divorce and had another child. Thankfully, Ammi had done such a marvelous job filling me with venom against my father that I didn’t miss living with him. Sometimes when I thought about my father, I wondered how strange it must be for a person to have spent their entire existence in one house. Or, like my small uncle, to have moved so many times that a house, a country, was no longer a useful measure, so that farther and larger boundaries were needed to contain a life.
At the new school, “boundary” was a word we used for cricket. If the ball touched the boundary, you hit a four. If it flew over the boundary, it was a sixer. I had played cricket in the street outside the old house, but only when I played in a real ground did it dawn on me that I was atrocious at the sport. I was atrocious at all of them. Early on at the new school, I decided to preserve my dignity by pretending not to care for sports at all. I maintained that my priority was my education, using words our teachers spoke to enforce the binary between school and play. This was easy to manage, because within the confines of the classroom, I was nearly unmatched. Without trying that hard, I almost always stood first in my section.