Best of Friends

First day back at school. The sky heavy with monsoon clouds, the schoolyard clustered with students within striding distance of shelter: the kikar trees planted along the boundary wall or the neem tree partway up the path from gate to school building; the many bougainvillea-framed doorways carved into the building's yellow stone facade; the area of the playing field beneath the jutting balconies on the first and second floors. Only a few boys, with daring to prove, roamed the most exposed parts of the yard, shirtsleeves rolled up, hands in pockets. Zahra, standing beside the archway that housed the brass bell, was using her height to look over the heads of all the girls and most of the boys, searching.

The school day hadn't officially started yet, but students in gray-and-white uniforms were already resettling into their formations from the previous term. The cool kids. The thuggish boys. The couples. The judgmental girls. The invisible boys. Zahra had invented these categories after watching a string of teen-centered Hollywood movies on pirated videos, but it did little to make up for the inadequacy of Karachi school life. Without detention, how could there be The Breakfast Club? Without a school prom, how could there be Pretty in Pink? Without the freedom required to make truancy possible, how could there be Ferris Bueller's Day Off ? But the one area where the failure was that of the movies, not of Karachi, was when it came to friendship-it was almost always a sub-plot to romance, never the heart of a story. Except The Outsiders, but that was boys, which meant it was really about how girls caused trouble and led to fights and burning buildings and death.

From where she stood, Zahra had a clear view of the school gate. For most of the day, buses and rickshaws and vans and other aging vehicles clogged up the streets of Saddar, perhaps heading to Empress Market or the electronics stores that populated the area, but twice a weekday, sleek air-conditioned cars joined in the melee to ferry students to and from the most prestigious of Karachi's schools.

There she was. The Mercedes, sleekest of sleeks, drove right up to the gate and Maryam stepped out and walked into the school grounds. A different Maryam, a different walk. The plumpness that had been on her face seemed to have descended elsewhere over the course of the summer, though it was hard to know exactly what was going on beneath the sack-like gray kameez she was wearing. Maryam stopped to say something to one of the older boys, and as they were talking she tugged at her kameez with what was clearly meant to be an absentminded air. The fabric pulled taut over new breasts, a new waist. The older boy kept on speaking to her as though nothing had happened, but when she walked past him, heading to Zahra, he turned to observe her all the way down the length of the path.

Other things had changed too. The wavy shoulder-length hair was artfully tousled rather than wild, the messy eyebrows reshaped into two curved lines. But the smile was the same old Maryam smile that greeted Zahra every time Maryam returned from her family's summer trips to London. And her outstretched hand held a cassette that was always her belated birthday present to her best friend-a mixtape that she had recorded off the radio, with the best of the London charts.

"Do you see what's happened to me?" she said.

"Is it your mother or your tailor who's having difficulty accepting it?" Zahra said, gesturing to the kameez.

"Hard to say. Master Sahib stitches what he thinks my mother wants. Mother says he's easily offended; we can't go back and say it's all wrong or he'll stop doing our clothes and he's the only one to get my sari blouses right."

"Adulthood is so complicated."

They smiled at each other, confident of the futures ahead of them in which they'd never face such petty dilemmas. They had barely moved on to swapping notes about the summer apart when Saba approached, with that smile of hers as if she were holding some forbidden delight in her mouth that she was willing neither to swallow nor to reveal. They knew all of each other's smiles, the three girls; at fourteen, they were ten years into what might loosely be called friendship, though Zahra had once looked up from a dictionary to inform Maryam that what the two of them had with each other was friendship, and what they had with the other six girls and twenty-two boys in class was merely "propinquity"-a relationship based on physical proximity. "If you moved to Alaska tomorrow, we'd still be best friends for the rest of our lives," she had told Maryam, who was the only person in the world toward whom Zahra displayed extravagant feelings.

Now there was Saba, standing in front of them, allowing them to cajole her into giving up the secret that she had just heard from her aunt-Mrs. Hilal, the biology teacher-to the rest of them. The school's bomb alarm was going to be complemented with a riot alarm. There would be drills throughout the term to ensure the students didn't confuse the first with the second. You wouldn't want seven hundred students evacuating the building when they were supposed to be inside with doors and windows firmly shut. The school had never known either bombs or riots, but Saba conveyed the news of the anticipated disaster, and the possible mix-up over alarms, with relish.

"My parents are going to get even more hysterical if they hear that," Maryam said, dragging out the word even. "The day we got back from London they hired armed guards for our house because all these expats over there kept telling them how dangerous Karachi is. Give me dangerous and keep your boiled cabbage, Londoners. Now no one can come indoors without having to go through some ridiculous procedure of guards calling up the house to make sure they're acceptable, and if someone's on the phone and they can't get through, then one of the guards has to run inside-not that they ever run, it's the slowest crawl. You don't worry, Zahra. I gave them a picture of you and said if anyone tries to stop you from entering I'll have them fired."

"Lucky," Zahra said, and Maryam grinned. She liked nothing better than to be compared to Lucky Santangelo, heroine of the Jackie Collins novels, composed in equal parts of courage, ruthlessness, and loyalty. Saba made a little face and Zahra recognized this expression too: it was the one that said Saba didn't see why Maryam continued to be best friends with Zahra and share private jokes with her when Saba, like Maryam, belonged to that subgroup of students whose parents were part of the "social set" and who went abroad for their summer holidays and swam at the same private members' club.

"Maybe it's a good idea for the school to have some kind of plan in case the worst happens," Zahra said, glancing toward the high boundary walls, shards of glass embedded at the top to prevent anyone from climbing over. Last summer, car bombs had killed more than seventy people in Saddar-not far from this school, one of the explosions shattering all the windows of the shop where Zahra and her mother had been buying new school uniforms the previous week. For days after, she'd imagined pieces of glass piercing her throat and eyes. Maryam had been in London at the time and when she'd returned she'd said, "That was awful; thank god it was during the school holidays," as if to suggest that no one they knew could have been anywhere around Saddar at such a time of year.

The school bell rang, sending them to the playing field, where ragged columns of students had started to form. The soil was damp from yesterday's rain, and there was one large puddle in the middle of the field, into which some of the rowdier Class 9 boys were stomping to try to splash any girls walking past.

Maryam wasn't the only one in their class to have changed over the summer. There were boys who were taller, other girls who were curvier; this boy had finally shaved off the nest of caterpillars above his lip, that girl had replaced glasses with contact lenses. The only change in Zahra was an added inch of height; beyond that, she was still skinny, with poker-straight hair that her mother cut to just above her shoulders. But something felt different in everyone in their class year, however much their outward appearances might have remained unchanged. There was more step in their step than before. They were conscious they were in Class 10 now, old enough for the younger students to look up to them, and also at that stage where familiarity could start to replace deference in their relationship with the A-level students.

School assembly had been canceled to get everyone indoors as fast as possible as the clouds turned even darker, so they made their way straight up to their new classroom, with its thick walls of seaweed-green and its wooden desks freshly painted a revolting pink brown. Maryam and Zahra found two seats together, separated from other desks in the row by an aisle, and Zahra told Maryam about the highlight of her summer, which had been a sighting of all the members of Vital Signs walking out of a house in Phase 5, near that intersection where the man with bougainvillea behind his ears used to direct traffic. Her father was driving and refused to slow down, let alone stop so she could look at them a little longer. Just because some boys record a pop song doesn't mean you have the right to start treating them like zoo animals, he'd said.

"But still. You saw them. That's so cool. It might even be cooler than seeing a pop star in London," Maryam said, having seen Paul Young strolling through Hyde Park one summer. This was clearly a serious topic that they would return to later, when they had the time to pick through it forensically-did an internationally famous pop star in the city where you spent your holiday outweigh homegrown national sensations hanging out not far from your own neighborhood?

"I learned a new Italian word this summer," Maryam said, resting her elbow on the top of Zahra's chair and learning toward her. "Zia. It means aunt. Also slang for"-she lowered her voice, as she should have done before making light of the name of the dictator-"homosexual. Can you imagine, every time the Italian ambassador meets General Zia he must be thinking-"

"Maryam!"

Zahra glanced around to see if anyone showed signs of having heard. She didn't think that any of their classmates were from families that supported the president, but it was an unspoken matter, and assumptions were dangerous.

"Don't be paranoid," Maryam said. She lowered her face toward the hole cut into the desk that served as a pen holder, as if speaking into a mic. "GHQ, do you want to know what we all think of Wordsworth's 'Daffodils'? Off with their sprightly heads!"

The boy sitting behind them-Babar-strode to the front of the class. Picking up a piece of chalk, he scrawled on the blackboard, DON'T WORRY IT'S ONLY EVERYTHIN

A teacher's voice sliced off the G he was about to write. "Mr. Razzaq, it's best you sit at your desk and don't parade trousers from a bygone era, don't you think?"

Babar was still for a moment, then reached up and ran his fingers through his thick hair, squared his shoulders, and turned with a cocky smile. If he'd had a leather jacket, he would have flipped up the collar. He sauntered back to his chair, sat down.

"My older brother's school uniform goes to our cook's children," Saba said loudly.

Zahra pivoted to face Saba, who had found a seat across the aisle from Babar. "Saba, he's not going to like you if you insult him any more than he did when you wrote him love poems."

An Ohhhhhhh!, building in volume, went around the class until the teacher cut it short by starting to take attendance. Saba wept into her exercise book. Zahra reached into her school bag for a tissue, leaned back in her chair, rapped on Babar's knee, and passed him the tissue under the desk.

"Is there supposed to be something written on this?" he whispered a few moments later.

Zahra turned around. He'd unfolded the tissue and was holding it like a letter, thumb and forefinger gripping either side. "She shouldn't have said that, but you can be the nice guy," she said.

"Miss, do you want me to take my trousers off?" Babar called out, which made all the students laugh, including Saba, and rendered the tissue unnecessary.

***

DON'T WORRY IT'S ONLY EVERYTHIN

Zahra approached the words on the board when everyone had left the classroom. There was a dot of chalk where Babar had intended to start the G before the teacher had interrupted. Until now they had all been students together, taking the same classes, learning or failing to learn the same things, easily able to recover from a bad set of exams brought on by a bout of illness or a cricket series that ate into revision time. But today was the start of the O-level course, and how well or badly you fared in the exams that waited two years down the line would determine the life-altering matter of which American or British university would want you another two years after that. In Zahra's case, it wouldn't be enough to be wanted; she'd have to be wanted enough to qualify for a scholarship in Britain or financial aid in America. She was equally drawn to both countries-the grandeur of Oxbridge, the glamour of Ivy League-but knew she'd prefer the word scholarship attached to her than financial aid.

"How important are the O-level marks, really?" Babar had asked a young teacher-freshly graduated from Columbia in New York-at the end of the previous year, and the teacher had replied, Don't worry, it's only everything.

Zahra found a piece of chalk and wrote in the G, trying to make it slope forward just as Babar's letters did so it wouldn't look out of place. At a laugh behind her, she turned. Maryam, leaning against the doorframe.

"Always tidying up for everyone," Maryam said.

"Thought you'd gone to the computer lab already." Zahra tossed the chalk onto the teacher's desk and deliberately allowed it to roll off the edge.

"We go together as far as we can," said Maryam, linking her arm through Zahra's as they left the classroom.

Maryam was going to computer science; Zahra to chemistry. With the start of the O-level course they'd all had to choose which subjects to take, and so the separation of paths had begun. Zahra would have preferred computer science to chemistry, but the former was a newly introduced subject and there was some taint of a fad to it; universities might not take it as seriously as the more established subjects, one of her teachers had warned. Maryam didn't stop to consider what universities took seriously or even how well she did in her O-level exams because she knew her parents' money would pave the way into some university or other and she didn't care too much which one it was. It was this casual attitude to academics that separated Maryam from most of her classmates, more than the money and social status that eclipsed almost all of them, even in this school known for its connection to the elite. Everyone else-whether Babar or Saba or Zahra-could recite like cricket stats which students in past years had been to Harvard, to Princeton, to Yale, and what their O-level results and SAT scores had been. But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she'd left it. But that was a separation of paths beyond any Zahra was willing to contemplate right now as they walked, arms still linked, down the stairs and along the corridor, greeting other students they hadn't seen all summer.