The rains came at last, ferocious. Tree branches ripped from trunks, streets became lakes, electricity meters sparked and smoked. The downpour left the city in darkness. No one knew if the power outage was a preventive shutdown or a collapse since the electricity company wasn’t answering its complaints line.

School would certainly be closed the next day; the flooded streets would be impassable. Given the predictability of the August monsoons, it was ridiculous that the holidays didn’t start and end later each summer, but the school’s response to this suggestion — made by more than one parent — was that it was the roads that needed to be fixed, not the school year. “The beauty of Pakistan is that there’s always someone else to blame for a problem,” Zahra’s father had said.

The best place to be in Karachi that night was precisely where Zahra was: on the balcony of one of the Seaview flats overlooking Clifton Beach, with a mosquito coil at her feet and a candle on the table at her elbow, its flame flickering in the warm breeze coming off the water.

The slapping sound emerging from the darkness was the rain-swollen waves crashing into the sea wall. A burst of music and headlights was a car cruising down the street and parking right in front of one of the painted signboards staked into the ground that announced Section 144 was in place, prohibiting activity that was a threat to safety and public order.

Two girls grow up in the Karachi of the 1980s, with a military dictator in charge of a country that is socially changing. They are best friends but from very different family backgrounds. Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel tracks their friendship over more than three decades, from Karachi to London. Can their friendship endure the different trajectories of their lives? Eos presents an extract from the novel Best of Friends…

In her History class, Zahra had learnt about the use of Section 144 during the Raj to prevent gatherings of anti-colonial demonstrators; now she felt embarrassed on behalf of her nation that it was used to keep people from swimming in the monsoonal sea with its murderous undertow.

How tedious it was to live now, in this place, with its repellant dictator and its censored television and the everyday violence that had shrunk all their lives into private spaces. When they moved here, her parents had been clear that she wasn’t ever to go across to the beach without an adult, but Maryam had come over a few days later and convinced her they should sneak off when her parents weren’t at home.

Together they’d walked across the silver-grey sand to one of the vendors with a wooden cart, on which he was roasting corn on glowing coals. Maryam sauntered, whistling a tune Zahra didn’t recognise, but Zahra only felt vulnerable, her mind going to the stories of kidnappings that circulated in the schoolyard.

One of the girls in Class 8 had missed three days of school the previous year and, though she’d returned claiming she’d had a stomach bug, the whisper went around that she’d been kidnapped and ransomed but her parents didn’t want anyone to know, because people would wonder what had been done to the girl in those three days among criminal men. Zahra had insisted they take the corn home and eat it in her room rather than staying out any longer. And at the end of it all, the chilli-lemon-flavoured kernels were hard with over-roasting.

She slapped at a mosquito that had made its way on to her arm despite the coil, and wiped the smear on to the pages of her History book. Closed the book, slipped headphones on, and pressed Play on her Walkman. Bruce Springsteen sounded mournful about how tough he was on the mixed tape Maryam had recorded off Capital Radio in London.

The song ended and the DJ’s voice — filled with the fresh possibilities of somewhere-not-here — said, “And that’s what he—” before Maryam cut off the recording and restarted somewhere during the opening bars of Tracy Chapman singing a song made for Karachi nights, in which being driven around in a fast car with your friends, listening to a mixed tape, was as good as life got — particularly if someone’s older brother was doing the driving.

Bunching up her hair, she pulled it away from her neck to allow the breeze on to her skin. Even when it wasn’t hot, there was still this incessant stickiness. She looked up at the sky, dense with stars now that the rain-clouds had emptied and blown away, and allowed herself to slip further into a satisfying dissatisfaction which she knew she would look back on in a few years, when living in New York or London, with an amused fondness for her younger self who only half-believed in the future that awaited her. The details of that future were hazy but glittering.

The sliding door opened and her father walked out, holding his nightly glass of whisky. Zahra slipped off her headphones and looped them over his head, creating a trough in his wiry grey hair, held the rewind button for what she estimated the correct length of time, and pressed Play. Enough of the music seeped out for her to know she’d judged well. “This Tracy has a voice, not like all those others who have a look,” he’d said the first time he heard ‘Fast Car’.

“It’s nice, isn’t it? Living here?” He gestured in a way that took in the sea breeze, the star-filled sky, the location.

Zahra wished she wasn’t too tall to rest her head against his shoulder. Instead, she made do with linking her arm with his and leaning into his comforting stockiness. Some years ago, annoyed at having to drive out from KDA to Clifton in the middle of watching a cricket match to drop her at Maryam’s house, he’d asked why for once Maryam couldn’t come to see Zahra.

“Why would anyone come here when they live there?” Zahra had said, meaning both the upstairs portion of the gloomy house that she and her parents occupied and the neighbourhood, far away from Defence and Clifton, where all her friends lived. He’d received this with a silence that had stretched out through the rest of the day.

Last year, when his salary as cricket correspondent for the country’s leading Urdu-language paper was vastly augmented by his role as anchor for a cricket talk show, he brought Zahra and her mother to a three-storey block of flats by the sea, led them up two flights of stairs, opened the front door with a key he produced with a flourish and said to his daughter, “Good enough for Maryam?”

His lips moved, not along with the music, and she knew he was replaying lines he’d used in the soon-to-be-aired episode of his show, Three Slips and an Ali. The show’s huge success had been a surprise to everyone, turning Habib Ali into a celebrity.

“Yes,” she said, returning her thoughts to the sky, the breeze, the sea-across-the-street. “It’s very nice.”

The carpets were still thin underfoot, the furniture scratched, and a CD player was a distant fantasy. But up on this balcony you could stand with your father and watch his spine lengthen as he contemplated all he had achieved for himself and his family, and in a moment such as tonight that was even more rewarding than when you stood here with your best friend, watching her breathe in the sea air and knew that, for once, you had something that she wished were hers.

The world blazed around them. Zahra shielded her eyes against the brightness of the light bulb on the balcony, which surged to a terrifying brilliance that would overload the power supply and burn out all electronics if it continued. The light dimmed to its usual wattage, and Zahra’s father tapped his watch face and said, “Just in time.”

Zahra blew out the candle and followed her father indoors to watch Three Slips and an Ali. Her mother was already sitting in the living room, reading Bapsi Sidhwa’s new novel, Ice Candy Man, and as her husband and daughter entered, she flipped back a few pages to read out a paragraph that had particularly pleased her.

Zahra’s father made noises of appreciation, and he and Zahra staged a mini-argument about who would read the book next. “You take so long to read anything,” Zahra said; “I didn’t know you were interested in books without gold-embossed letters on the cover,” he said, his only words of criticism about the blockbuster novels she’d recently started to devour.

Then Three Slips and an Ali started, and everyone quietened. It was still strange to see her father on the screen — everything about him so familiar but made strange by the knowledge that all across the country people were watching him. Today’s episode was primarily about the West Indies’ recent Test victory over England, which he discussed with the satisfied air of a man who thought of colonial rule as a memory rather than history, though he’d only been five years old when it ended.

While his TV self was expansive and confident, his at-home self kept glancing over to his wife, checking her expression for an approval that was never withheld but still mattered more to him than even cricket itself. A trio of guests always accompanied him on-screen — purely to justify the pun in the show’s title, Zahra’s mother said — but the final segment, called Howzzat, was Habib Ali alone, reminding his audience, with the aid of TV footage or radio commentary, of a significant moment in Pakistan’s cricketing history.

He often reached back into past decades but, today, the West Indies victory had spurred him to relive a Test match from just a few months ago, Pakistan vs the West Indies in Bridgetown and surely, surely, if the home umpires hadn’t made a series of unfair decisions, Pakistan would have won the match and with it the series.

Habib Ali was in his element as he built up context and significance, and though Zahra — and everyone watching — knew exactly how the match had unfolded, her father still knew how to make the audience lean towards their TV screens in anticipation as he led them through the final overs of play. By the time he’d finished, Zahra knew more unshakeably than ever that Pakistan had outplayed the most worthy of all rivals but couldn’t outplay the umpires and so their loss was injustice rather than defeat.

How tedious it was to live now, in this place, with its repellant dictator and its censored television and the everyday violence that had shrunk all their lives into private spaces. When they moved here, her parents had been clear that she wasn’t ever to go across to the beach without an adult, but Maryam had come over a few days later and convinced her they should sneak off when her parents weren’t at home. Together they’d walked across the silver-grey sand to one of the vendors with a wooden cart, on which he was roasting corn on glowing coals. Maryam sauntered, whistling a tune Zahra didn’t recognise, but Zahra only felt vulnerable, her mind going to the stories of kidnappings that circulated in the schoolyard.

“Why does that feel even worse?” she said to her father.

“When you live in an unjust world, you want sports to be a refuge, not a reminder.”

His eyes had that sheen that the combination of cricket and whisky could bring on. Talking and writing about the game wasn’t merely his profession, but also his calling. In a nation of oppression and losses, cricket was a blazing light, an arena where you could feel proud of your country and united with your compatriots. Cricket told you that talent and grit and character would win out, that giants could be felled, that today’s defeat could always be followed by tomorrow’s victory.

Yes, there were errors and injustices, cruelty even. But beyond that was the game itself, radiant and untainted. She was old enough now to know that, when her father communicated this to his viewers, he was trying to communicate something larger about life itself and how to live it, always with integrity, always with hope.

Although there was no one in the world she loved more, sometimes she caught herself thinking he was a foolish man, ill-prepared for the world in which he found himself living.

Most Saturday mornings, Maryam could be found on the cricket pitch laid behind the office block of Khan Leather, bowling her off-spin or opening the batting. The other players rotated as they came off shifts in the warehouse or artisans’ block though, sometimes, if a player was having a particularly good game, she’d send a message up to her grandfather to ask if Haris or Lamboo or Kashif could stay out on the field a little longer.

From a very early age, she’d enjoyed picking up a cricket bat and joining the workers on the pitch — at the start, the bowlers gently lobbed balls in her direction, the fielders dropped all catches that came off her bat with exaggerated cries of disappointment. But once her abilities became clear, her grandfather had sent her off to be coached by a former international player, and now there was no question of anyone treating her like the sahib’s granddaughter rather than the best all-rounder on the pitch.

Elsewhere on the factory grounds, she was Maryam Bibi, but here she was ‘Skipper’. Her grandfather had never said that the cricket pitch was where she would undercut the disadvantage of her femaleness and teach the men to see her as a leader, but she knew that was why he’d been so insistent on the coaching.

This Saturday, eager to get back to the game after her summer in London, she’d asked Abu Bakr to drive her to the factory in Federal ‘B’ Area earlier than usual. When they’d left behind those parts of the city where they were likely to be seen by people who knew them, Abu Bakr pulled over to the side of the road and moved into the passenger seat.

Maryam took the wheel and drove confidently through the melee of brightly decorated buses and yellow minibuses, vans and motorbikes, and the occasional pedestrian dashing between traffic. The blocks of flats and offices on either side of the road were all greyed with exhaust fumes. At one point, a motorcyclist drove close alongside her car window for a little too long, and Abu Bakr rolled down his window and raised his kameez to show the man the pistol holstered in his waistband. The motorbike veered away and Maryam continued on, only allowing Abu Bakr to return to the wheel when they were a few minutes away from Khan Leather.

The guard at the gate saluted with a particularly snappy wrist that acknowledged how many weeks she’d been away in London and how welcome her return was. Abu Bakr parked in front of the office block and she stepped out, aware of the ground that her foot alighted on, aware that this vast factory ground was her inheritance, her fiefdom.

Her skin turned clammy as she walked towards the tree-shaded gardens laid out behind the office building where she would wait for the cricketers to gather. The leaves were usually thick with dust, but the rains earlier in the week had turned everything bright and new.

She stood under a tree, eating a yellow-green guava from its branches, watching sunlight filter through the leaves, listening to the tempo of the cutting and stitching machines. The fresh-from-the-tannery scent of leather sheets was a mere suggestion, perhaps the work of memory, since there were never deliveries this early. Lamboo and Haris walked on to the pitch, tossing a red ball between them. Everything in the world was exactly as it should be, the anonymous endless days of London distant.

But in the pre-match practice things started to go awry. Maryam ran in to bowl her first delivery, and with every pumping action of her legs her breasts moved up and down. Jiggling, that was the only word. She slowed her pace and that threw off her bowling action, so she had to turn around and start again. The cricketers showed no sign of noticing, but what else could they do?

Again, she ran in, but it was all wrong. Her fourteen-year-old body had changed over the summer, and it no longer moved as she wanted — fast, unobtrusive. She threw the ball to Lamboo and said she’d bat.

Here, things were better. The sound of the ball smacking off the middle of her bat was one of life’s deep pleasures. Warm-up ended and the match started, with Maryam and Kashif opening the batting. She was able to hunch a little when running between the wickets, which made those flapping breasts less ridiculous. But just a few overs in, she looked down at her shirt. Sweat had adhered the fabric to her skin.

“It’s too hot,” she said, tucking her bat under her arm. “That’s enough for today.”

Usually the players would have teased her with the informality that only existed on the field — “too used to life in air conditioning, Skipper” — but today they said nothing. Kashif looked relieved. She pulled the shirt away from her skin and held it there as she walked to the office block.

Up the stairs she went to her grandfather’s office and opened the door. Her grandfather was sitting behind his desk in his great winged chair, handing something to the man who was facing him. Both men looked towards the opened door — she caught a glimpse of the stranger’s broken-nosed face as he turned — and her grandfather yelled “Get out!” in a tone he never used with her.

She closed the door hurriedly and went next door to her father’s office, which was always unoccupied on a Saturday. Ignoring the leather sofas and armchair that made up a seating arrangement at one end, she walked across to the desk and sat behind it. The desk had been her great-grandfather’s; the pen-holder and document tray and tissue-box holder were all Khan Leather products. She rested her head on the table, cradled by her arms, unable to put a name to this feeling of awfulness.

Eventually, her grandfather came to find her.

“Why aren’t you on the pitch?” he said.

She shrugged, made a face of indifference.

“No, you don’t behave in that insolent way around me,” he said, coming round to her chair and tapping on the back to indicate she should let him have this prime spot and find herself some other pew. She stood up, not looking at him.

“You know you should knock before entering,” he said. “But I’m sorry I spoke to you so sharply.”

“Don’t you think you should introduce me to him? He’ll have to deal with me eventually.”

Her grandfather leaned back, tapping his fingers on the edge of the desk. “Do you know who he is?”

“You pay him protection money every month. But really the person you’re buying protection from is the people he works for.” She knew this from Abu Bakr. The rest of it was just forming in her mind. “And you also pay him something extra, on the side. He’s the phone call, isn’t he?”

When people in her parents’ circle wanted something done, they called her grandfather. They might want to bring suitcases filled with alcohol into the country past customs, they might want a business class seat on an overbooked PIA flight, they might want a No Objection Certificate to allow their foreign guests into restricted areas. Whatever they wanted, her grandfather would say “Let me make a phone call” and then he’d arrange it.

“‘The phone call’ isn’t just one person,” her grandfather said. “Always diversify your assets. But yes, Billoo’s one of the people who is willing to be useful for a price.”

“How will he feel about dealing with a girl one day?” she said.

“How does the girl feel about it?”

She walked to the mini-fridge in the corner of the office and took out a packet of fruit juice. Punctured the packet with the end of the straw and pretended to take a moment to think about it, even though she knew clearly her opinions. “I don’t mind paying him to be helpful to us, and our friends,” she said. “But I hate you paying him because otherwise his real boss will send some thugs to burn down the office.”

“Of course you hate that. But always respect where power lies — and then work out how you can use it to your advantage.” He held out his hand and she passed him the fruit juice. “Your father doesn’t see any of this. Little princeling wants a crown on his head and his hands lily-white. He can’t have both. Why do you have to be so young?”

“I’m fourteen,” she said.

“I’m seventy-one.” He sipped noisily through the straw. “If you want me to introduce you to people who’ll one day have to take you seriously, don’t walk into my office looking like you’ve been in one of those Indian movies where rain drenches the woman in a white sari.”

Maryam crossed her arms in front of her chest, felt again that strange new awfulness.

This extract from Best of Friends is republished with permission from the author. The novel is published by Bloomsbury

Kamila Shamsie is a multiple award-winning author and has seven previous novels and a book of non-fiction to her credit. Her previous novel, Home Fire, won the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.

She tweets @kamilashamsie

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 23rd, 2022