Extract: Kamila Shamzie

Here is an extract from Kamila Shamzie's novel Kartography, one of the latest Indo-Anglian novels on the market. Shamzie was born in Karachi in 1973. She is the author of In the City by the Sea--winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize--and Salt and Saffron. She teaches creative writing at Hamilton College in New York.

It is 1987. Raheen, the narrator, and Karim, her closest friend, both thirteen-year-olds in Rahim Yaar Khan, a town in the Punjab, for the winter holidays, staying on lands belonging to their parents' friends, Laila and Asif. Karim has just announced, much to Raheen's surprise, that when he grows up he wants to be a map-maker.

We were without obsessions at the time, a rare occurrence in our lives. A few months earlier it had been birds. We became buyers of bird books, spouters of bird-facts ('the hummingbird eats 50 or 60 meals a day,' 'the Gila woodpecker lives in the desert and never sees wood, only cactus'), imitators of bird-walks (moving through the world on our toes, heels in the air), though the fascination with feathered creatures was necessarily short-lived since all we could see in our gardens were crows and sparrows, and what's the point of being bird-obsessed if you can't bird-watch. Prior to that, we'd filled our lives with disguises. We'd wander under loose shirts, stick black paper over our teeth, and even collected hair clippings from Auntie Runty's beauty parlour and attempted to glue straight long tresses to the ends of our own hair.

How each of our obsessions started, and how they ended, and who instigated their beginnings and ends we never remembered or cared about. But I cared deeply when Karim started pulling atlases out of Uncle Asif's bookshelf, the day after we arrived in Rahim Yar Khan, and traced distances and routes with his index finger, without any regard or concern for my total uninterest in the relationship of one place to another.

'You can't be a map maker anyway,' I said to him one morning when I found him in Uncle Asif's desk poring over a large map of Pakistan with creases where it had been folded and re-folded into a neat rectangle. 'Because all the maps have been made already, right? What are you going to do? Discover a new continent and map it?' I hoisted myself onto the desk and sat down in the 'disputed territory' of Jammu and Kashmir. 'Better way to occupy yourself is to come outside and lose a game of badminton to me. Or we could walk to the dunes. Or leap around the cotton mountain.'

He took the glass of orange juice I held out to him, and gulped it down. Bits of pulp clung to the inside of the glass and to his upper lip. 'If you had to give someone directions to Zia's beach hut, what would you say?'

I looked out the window. It was a beautiful day, winter sun beckoning us outside. 'I don't know. I'd say, go towards the beach, and when you come to the turtle sign take a right and...'

'No, idiot.' He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. 'How would you give directions to someone who didn't know the way to the beach. Maybe someone who'd left Karachi, years ago, and couldn't remember the way there any more.'

'Oh.' I considered this. 'Well, I'd just say, 'don't worry, we'll meet somewhere and go to the beach together.'

Karim glared at me. 'That's not helpful.'

I glare back at him. 'There's something you need to know.'

'What?'

I lifted him up by the collar and slammed him against the chair back.

'You hated geography!'

'Yeah, so? Every map maker has his quirks.'

I couldn't help laughing. 'Fine. By the way, map makers are called cartographers.'

'Cartographers.' He wrote down the word, forming a circle with the letters, and we both bent our heads over the paper.

'Go rap her carts,' I suggested, re-arranging letters in my head. 'Strap her cargo? Crop rag heart?'

Karim grinned. 'Chop Ra's garter.'