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 bougainvillaea-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 grey and white uniforms were already resettling into their formations from the previous term. The cool kids. The thuggish boys. The couples. The judgemental girls. The invisible boys. Zahra had invented these categories after watching a string of teen-centred 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 subplot 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 ageing 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…
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