Kamila Shamsie can still remember with absolute clarity a moment that happened to her many years ago when she was a teenage girl in Karachi. “I was in a car with a bunch of friends and a man was driving. We were having fun and then, in an instant, something shifted and it became dangerous and threatening. Fortunately, the moment passed quickly but I’ve never forgotten it.” The moment, barely 30 seconds long, contained a shift in the atmosphere rather than an actual threat, but it was full of meaning nonetheless. “As you become older what becomes clearer is how early on, if you are female, that feeling of sexual risk enters your life,” says Shamsie. “You are suddenly made aware that the world is dangerous for girls.”
That car ride features in slightly different form in Shamsie’s new novel, Best of Friends, both an adolescent coming-of-age novel and paean to female friendship. The first half is set in Karachi in 1988 and draws intimately on an emotional level on Shamsie’s remembered adolescence. Close as thieves since the age of four, Zahra and Maryam share a binding love for George Michael and Jackie Collins despite their different backgrounds – Zahra’s parents are arty and middle class; Maryam’s boast establishment connections and are far wealthier. But then comes the thing that changes everything. Zahra steps into a car containing a male school friend and an unknown man and, after a moment’s hesitation, Maryam follows her. Suddenly they are aware they are trapped in a situation they will be unable to control. Nothing too appalling happens, but afterwards Maryam is sent to boarding school in England, while Zahra will be marked by the abrupt power shift that occurs inside the car long into adulthood, unable to fully forget the inchoate feelings of shame that the moment provoked, despite not being at all responsible. “It’s a feeling many women can carry with them for the rest of their lives,” says Shamsie. “Every time I’ve mentioned that experience of mine to female friends, regardless of where they grew up, they say, ‘Oh yes, we know that car ride.’”
