Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

Author:Kamila Shamsie [Shamsie, Kamila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Another Sunday, and lunch ended with Maryam’s roast chicken reduced to splinters of bone. “Still astonishing after all these years,” Layla said. It was a long-running joke that the moment Layla realized she’d truly been accepted into the Khan family was when Maryam’s parents were able to gnaw through bone and cartilage in her presence without worrying about showing her their most unrefined side.

Maryam’s mother extended her hand toward Zola’s plate, where wing bones had been reduced to nubs. “This one really is all Khan sometimes,” she said. Zeno never passed on an opportunity to comment on any similarity she could find between Zola and someone perched on Maryam’s family tree, even if the connection was as tenuous as Zola’s interest in gymnastics and some great-uncle who’d entertained several generations with his ability to do cartwheels all the way into his eighties—her comments always delivered in a tone that suggested the connection proved something that needed proving about this granddaughter of hers who was composed of no Khan DNA.

Zahra looked across the table to Maryam, an unspoken Let it go in the slight movement of her head. All these years later, Maryam could still become enraged when one of her parents revealed the little bit of their hearts that still placed Zola in a separate category than their other grandchildren; she saw too clearly in that revelation the continuing wish that their eldest daughter had gone down another route in life, which they were sure she could have if she’d just been a little more concerned with how awkward, sometimes impossible, it would be for them to reveal to their friends that they had a lesbian daughter with a Black partner and a child born from some sperm donor of unknown family background whom they’d found in a binder. Layla almost always thought Maryam was being too hard on her parents, still holding against them their early resistance to the coupling (“What will people say?” her mother had predictably said), but thank god for Zahra, who’d had a lifetime of Zeno to learn all her subtexts.

Perhaps that was the key to the longevity of childhood friendships—all those shared subtexts that no one else could discern. And perhaps shared subtexts felt even more necessary when you both lived far away from the city of your childhood that was itself the subtext to your lives. Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships, Maryam thought, as she signaled Zola to get up and clear the plates; it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. You weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domesticity, or even—as was the case with friendships made in adulthood—much by way of common interests.

Soon Zahra would be the only one left in London who had been an integral part of her childhood. Maryam’s parents were moving back to Karachi after three decades in London, taking all their subtexts with them, a development more unsettling than Maryam would have imagined.

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