Osama was a big patron of my library. He loved Burrough’s The Wild Boys which featured an international guerilla army of boys who have trippy sex in jungles and golf courses and then plan the downfall of authoritarian regimes. He also loved Notes of a Sex Psychologist, the “true records” of an American psychologist from the 70s who cured various sexual troubles. In one chapter, the psychologist teaches a concerned Catholic to consummate his marriage by “locating the right orifice.” Perhaps what enthralled Osama was the psychologist’s scientific tone, the remedies he dryly dispensed for convoluted problems. Both of us wanted to become doctors, after all. I remember us joking about the Catholic couple’s “orifice confusion.” He must have giggled at the boys’ jokes too, just as he claimed to like some of the girls, but I don’t recall him participating much in the bathroom banter—the crassness or wittiness of “juggat bazi” didn’t appeal to him.
In ninth grade, Osama looked the same as when we had first met. Although he still called me on the landline, we had found other friends. Osama’s new buddy was an insectile boy who had moved to our school from Quetta because the “situation had gotten worse” there. He spoke with an accent we considered Pushtun, so we started calling him “Mosquito Khan” even though he was Punjabi, and had fled Quetta with his family precisely because he was Punjabi.
My new friends included a group who went around the city on motorbikes—three, sometimes four boys on each bike—and chased qinqi rickshaws and pickup vans open at the back so we could catcall the college girls sitting inside and hurl at them balled-up chits of paper on which we’d scribbled our cell-phone numbers. Only a few boys actually catcalled, and many of us didn’t own cell phones, but we all went along with the sport. None of us was old enough to have driver’s licenses, and tripling was, of course, illegal, so we were careful to avoid police wardens at traffic lights.
Where were we headed, crammed like clowns on those motorbikes? To paddle fiberglass boats in Racecourse Park. To swim in the canal. To watch porn in internet cafés, two of us sharing a pair of earphones. We lazed in each other’s houses and ate lunches our mothers passed through the door. We held hands in parks, or scraped up money to share meals at local restaurants, smoked cigarettes at khokhas. We prayed together on Fridays. How was all this happening alongside those insular afternoons I spent with my books? In memory, these parallel lives remain immiscible. One is me hungering for the transport found only in the stillness of my own room, where the voices of the dead and the imagined soundlessly enter my mind. The other is a boy holding onto a boy holding onto a boy, fused into a triple-headed creature giving chase between traffic on Canal Road, barreling through underpasses and the shadows of old trees on that beautiful and endless road that slices the length of the city and drags water down its throat.
When Osama and I hung out, now in the company of Mosquito Khan, it was for “group study.” In eleventh grade, our life was over- run with a neurotic obsession with studying. We were expected to sit for our Cambridge O-level exams at the end of the school year and were reminded at every turn to become “serious” now because “these exams will determine the rest of your careers.” That turned out, like so many such utterances, to be a lie, good only for nostalgic lampooning at reunions. But the exams did at least determine how we dispersed to either private schools for A-levels or to public colleges for FSc Programs.
At my house, we ordered in Student Biryani and quizzed each other on Jinnah’s Fourteen Points, listed the differences between waterlogging and salinity. Osama recited the hagiographies of the ten Sahabah guaranteed paradise by the Prophet. We were most competitive over Biology questions, since both of us wanted to enter medical colleges. Now, I wonder: was this all I ever saw him as? A studious, hairless eunuch narrating memorized passages from textbooks? We were friends, after all. I must’ve been aware of the depth of his character, his interests beyond school, or even a more complicated picture of his family. But I find these depths impossible to plumb now. Under the crush of years, Osama has been pressed neatly into my memory like a leaf or a butterfly is flattened in the pages of a book, and over time, become thin as paper itself with two crisp sides.