Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Kamila Shamsie
Broken Verses

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Arts Council for a fellowship to the Santa Maddalena Foundation during the writing of this book – and Beatrice Monti della Corte for her extraordinary hospitality at Santa Maddalena.

Broken Verses

For Herman Fong and Elizabeth Porto

The Minions came again today.

That sounds like a beginning.

What else to say?

Can it be you, out there, reading these words?

I

The old dream, once more.

I stand in a beach hut, looking out. The window frame in front of me reduces the world to a square of sun and sea. Into that square a woman falls, her arm drawn up in front of her face. She splashes into the water. I run out. Her body is caught in the surf, a dark tumbling shape. Above, there is nothing but sky. The waves recede, leaving her on the sand. I rush down, see scales where I expect legs. I have seen a mermaid once before, spent hours splashing water on to it to save it from dehydration. I remember the ache of my arm from the effort, but not whether I saved the creature. It is evident nothing will save this one. I turn towards the hut to see why people are shouting, and when I look back she is gone, only her impression remaining. I know what is necessary. I must cut out the sand which is imprinted with her body, lift it up, and bury it. But the sea is coming in again and I know that, faster than I can respond, waves will wash away the contours of her body, the graceful curve of her tail.

When I awoke, this line came to mind: Dreams, sometimes, are rehearsals.

I sat up in bed, scratching the faded scar which criss-crossed my palm, and a shark lunged at my shoulder. I really had to do something about these walls. The bedroom had been a children’s nursery when the previous tenants lived in this flat, and the walls were covered with water-colour paintings of sea-creatures: jellyfish, turtle, barracuda, flying fish, octopus, swordfish, angel-fish, shark, sea-horse, and a mermaid sitting on the back of a manta ray. I couldn’t look in the full-length mirror without some creature extending tentacles, fin, snout or tail towards my reflection. If it were a fixed image it would be easy enough to get accustomed to it, but the mirror was attached to the closet door which opened and closed with any gust of air, and the angles of the room shifted even as I stood still looking into the mirror. Even so, occupying this room was preferable to moving into the master bedroom – directly across from a mosque which, my sister had warned me, broadcast fiery sermons just before the dawn azaan. ‘If you sleep there, you’ll wake up angry every morning,’ Rabia had said.

I stepped, naked, out of bed and belted on my dressing-gown. Then I remembered: I’m living alone. I shrugged off the dressing-gown and for a moment I was giddy with imagining all the flats around me that might be filled with single occupants wandering nudely around their homes. But you can really only imagine people in states of nudity for so long before your internal censors step in and relieve you of the images. For me, it was the image of the madman of 3B doing push-ups on the hideous beige carpet I’d seen through his window which made me cast about for other things to fill my brain.

But what other things?

I stepped into the kitchen, and ducked right out again. There were no blinds over the kitchen window. So much for my one-woman nudist colony.

Minutes later, I was back in my dressing-gown, sipping a cup of tea and wondering whether to go next door and steal Rabia and her husband Shakeel’s copy of the morning paper. I had told them earlier that I didn’t want a subscription – what was there in the news these days that I could possibly benefit from knowing? – but I hadn’t contended with the sheer boredom of waking into an empty flat. If this persisted I’d have to take up yoga, or morning television. Or both. At the same time. I’d have to start watching morning yoga programmes.

Clever Beema, I thought.

My father and stepmother weren’t flying out to Islamabad until that evening, but my stepmother – Beema – had still insisted that I move into this flat a day before they ‘migrated’, rather than spending one final night in the bedroom I’d occupied my entire life. ‘Because the house will be in turmoil with everything being packed up,’ Beema had explained, but I knew now that she hoped this waking up into silence would convince me to have a last-minute change of heart about staying in Karachi instead of going with them.

Looking around into the emptiness, I had to admit her hope was not without foundation.

You’re a grown woman, I told myself. Behave like one!

Assistance came in the form of a ringing telephone. I picked it up with gratitude and an unfamiliar voice on the other end said, ‘Aasmaani Inqalab?’

Aasmaani Inqalab – my first and middle names, self-important trisyllables that long ago pushed my shorter surname off everything except the most official documents. My mother’s choice, the name. My mother had made all the important choices regarding my early life; the only thing she left to Dad and Beema was the actual business of raising me. Aasmaani Inqalab: Celestial Revolution. Such a name never really admits the notion of childhood. But Beema used to whisper in my ear, ‘Azure.’ Aasmaani can also mean azure. An azure revolution. Like Picasso’s Blue Period, she’d say, without the gloom.

Picasso never had a period, my mother replied once, when she was around to hear Beema. Men know nothing of inevitable pain.

I wish I could say she had been attempting humour.

The unfamiliar voice was calling from Save the Date studios – fondly known as STD – to tell me my afternoon interview with the CEO had been moved up to the morning, so could I come to the studio straightaway.

‘With bells on,’ I said.

‘Belzon?’ echoed the voice, with a hint of panic. ‘I think you’re expected alone.’

One of the only fortunate things I inherited from my mother was the ability to be entertained by a mediocre joke for a very long time. I was still chuckling over Belzon when I got into my car to make the short drive over to STD. And when I pulled up outside the startlingly yellow house which had been converted into the STD studio a few months earlier the thought of encountering the voice behind the joke brought on a fresh bout of laughter which I had to try to suppress as I slid out from the passenger-side door of my car to avoid the gaping manhole next to which I had parked, walked up the palm-lined driveway, gave my name to the armed guard sitting on a fold-up chair near the front door and was ushered into reception.

Reception was a desk and unoccupied chair at one end of a long, freshly painted white hallway which led to offices, smaller hallways and – at the far end – an imposing staircase with rosewood banister leading both up and down. Two twentysomethings in jeans and short kurtas were walking down the hall, one saying, ‘What do you mean they don’t want any two-shots?’ and the other one shaking her head, ‘Yaar, celebrities, yaar.’

Standing there – seen but unnoticed – in a shalwar-kameez with a dupata tossed over one shoulder, I felt instantly old. They had that light in their eyes, those girls did, of believing they were a part of something bigger than their own lives. They were going to beam youth culture, progressive thought, multiple perspectives, in-depth reporting to a nation which until so recently had only known news channels which spoke with the voice of the government. 2002 would be remembered as the year of the cable TV explosion in Pakistan, and these girls were right bang in the middle of it, making history happen. For a moment I tried to step into their minds, to remember what it was to be that hopeful.

Poor, enviable fools.

I looked around for something that wasn’t younger and more stylish than me, and found a painting of a line of Arabic on the wall behind me. The repeating line from Surah al-Rahman, beloved of calligraphers for its variedness and its balance.

Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

When my mother – in one of her attempts to give me career advice – told me that I should learn Arabic in order to translate the Qur’ān into both English and Urdu, in versions free from patriarchal interpretations, the Poet said, ‘And translate Surah al-Rahman especially for me.’

‘Because you want to know all about the virginal houris who await the faithful in heaven?’ my mother teased. ‘You want to know what you’ll be missing?’

The Poet shook his head. ‘Not that part. “He created man and taught him articulate speech. The sun and the moon pursue their ordered course. The plants and the trees bow down in adoration.” I want to see how Aasmaani tops that with her translation.’

‘It is beautiful,’ my mother acknowledged. ‘But don’t forget the warnings of the Day of Judgment that follow. It’s not all order and adoration.’

The Poet held his hands in front of him as he always did when quoting words that moved him, as though weighing them in his palms. ‘“When the sky splits asunder, and reddens like a rose or stained leather – which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?”’

The sky as stained leather. It was almost enough to make you desire the end of the world.

A middle-aged woman with a nose which changed character halfway down its length walked out of one of the offices and smiled at me. ‘Are you here for Boond?’

I shook my head, more than a little regretfully.

Boond was a much-hyped, multi-part television drama which had fallen into a deep crisis the previous week when one of the lead actresses was fired, six weeks before the show’s premiere, because her newfound antipathy to bougainvillea made filming outdoor sequences impossible. There was talk that the whole show would need to be cancelled, and speculation about how much of a financial setback STD would suffer, and then, in a stunning coup, one of the STD newsreaders had announced, in the headlines of the 9 o’clock news, that Shehnaz Saeed was going to take on the role of the lead actress.

I was listening to the news when the announcement was made and, I swear, I gasped out loud when I heard it. Shehnaz Saeed! If I’d heard that the ghost of Marlene Dietrich was taking on the role I suppose I would have been a little more surprised, but only because Dietrich didn’t speak Urdu.

Shehnaz Saeed had been the darling of the theatre and the small screen, an actress of amazing range who had retired at the peak of her career fifteen years earlier in order to devote time to ‘preparing for and raising’ the children she was planning to have with the man she had recently married. Her son from her first marriage was raising hell at university by then, telling anyone who would listen that all mothers should stay at home with their children, otherwise the children would grow up like him. I had never met the first-born son, but I disliked him intensely for being the person who convinced Shehnaz Saeed there was a choice to be made between acting and motherhood. I had seen her on-stage for the first time when I was about eleven, in an Urdu translation of Macbeth—it was the Poet’s translation – and I swear there was not a man, woman or child in that audience who would not have plunged a dagger into a king’s heart for her. She never actually had any children with the second husband – the gossipmongers said he always timed his frequent business trips abroad so that he would be away while she was ovulating – but though rumours surfaced intermittently that she was considering an end to retirement, she hadn’t so much as made a cameo appearance since her swansong – a one-woman show in which she played six different roles; it had been a one-night-only performance, sold out before the box office even opened (the leading newspapers ran editorials of protest).

It was to confirm that the newsreader wasn’t on drugs that Beema rang an old schoolfriend of hers, whose brother-in-law was the CEO of STD (that he was a noted philanderer made the title hilarious to both Rabia and me); at the end of the call she didn’t just have confirmation of the news, she’d also set up a job interview for me at STD. I had just quit working at the oil company and was having trouble figuring out, what next? So I thought I might as well go along with Beema’s plans.

The woman with the extraordinary nose turned away from me to flag down a man with gelled-back hair. ‘It’s all a disaster,’ she said. ‘We have to rewrite the entire role.’

‘Everyone is doing too much drama,’ he said. ‘She’s just a has-been actress.’

The woman jerked her head in disgust, and turned to me. ‘You. Tell me something. You planning to watch Boond?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘OK, so here’s the thing. This role – this role Shehnaz Saeed is doing – she plays the ex-wife of a wealthy industrialist. They’ve been divorced for years. Now he’s getting remarried. The drama starts with the proposal scene. His new wife, much younger, is completely and without reason insecure about the ex-wife. OK? So, the thing is this. The ex-wife becomes important eventually but she’s supposed to play a totally minor role in the first episode. How do you feel about Shehnaz Saeed returning to the screen in a minor role? Don’t answer! Your face has answered.’ She turned to the gelled man. ‘Look at that! Look at her expression.’ I ran my palms along my mouth and forehead to see if my facial muscles were doing something of which I was unaware, but they seemed to be utterly in repose. ‘I don’t know if I can do it. Every idea I have for that first moment she steps on to the screen is inadequate. A nation’s expectations are sitting on my bony little shoulders.’

The woman stopped speaking and turned sharply towards me.

‘I just realized who you are,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if…?’ Before I could say anything, she stepped forward and held up her hand to cover the lower half of my face, so all she could see were my eyes – grey with a starburst of green in the centre – and my high forehead and straight, black hair.

‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

What was amazing was the way women in Pakistan took one look at me and assumed they were entitled to instant familiarity – as though I were the one who had sat in jail cells with them or knelt beside them in cramped railway carriages writing slogans on banners.

An office door a few feet away opened and a man in his mid-thirties stepped out. He saw me, and his face became bloodless. I stepped away from the woman, revealing my long nose and sharply angled jaw, and the man blinked, put his hand up to his eyes and rocked back on his heels.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman was saying. ‘That was presumptuous.’

But I wasn’t paying much attention to her any more. I knew the man, just as he knew me. Even if Beema hadn’t said he was working here and was the reason Shehnaz Saeed had agreed to do the show, I think I would have recognized him immediately. Those curved eyes straight out of a Mughal miniature, that sensuous mouth. How strange that they should be so masculine on his face, even while marking him clearly as the son of the most beautiful woman in the country. In sober tie and an obviously expensive shirt he looked nothing like the imagined hooligan in my mind who had forced his mother into retirement fifteen years ago.

He saw that I realized who he was and a look came upon his face which I recognized – a mixture of panic and self-deprecation allied to an acknowledgement of failure.

He stepped forward and held out a hand. ‘Mir Adnan Akbar Khan,’ he said, in mock-grandiose tones. ‘But my friends call me Ed.’

‘Nicknames and friendship rarely go together,’ I said, taking his hand, and trying not to show how startled I was to have found a stranger wearing an expression I thought of as mine alone. He seemed to have no desire to let go of my hand, and as I pulled my fingers out of his grasp I wasn’t sure if that was flattering or sleazy. He was one of those men who straddled the line between dazzlingly sexy and somewhat repulsive. All due to the heavy hoods of those Mughal eyes. ‘My name is Aasmaani Inqalab. My friends call me Arse-Many Inflagrante.’

He laughed – dazzlingly – and beckoned me towards the office out of which he’d just walked. ‘You’re expected.’

Inside the office, a portly man sat behind a large, cluttered desk. He nodded as I walked in, placed both hands on the arms of his chair and pressed down with them, leaning forward at the same time. It was clearly his way of expressing that while he would like to rise and greet me, the effort was overwhelming – so I did what was expected of me, and said, ‘No, please,’ while patting down the air with both my hands to indicate he should stay seated.

‘So,’ he said, after we’d finished the formalities of whether I wanted tea or coffee, and how exactly I knew his sister-in-law, and why it had been necessary to move the interview up by a few hours, ‘so you’re looking for employment.’

‘Yes—’ and then I realized how unprepared I was for this meeting. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t bring a CV or references.’

He waved his hand in dismissal. ‘If you want a job here, that’s all the reference you need. We’re in no position to be fussy. And as for a CV,’ he smiled and picked at his teeth with the corner of an envelope, ‘your background is CV enough.’ He leaned forward again with that anticipation I knew so well, and said, We’re starting up a political talk show. Hard-hitting stuff, one-on-one interviews with our newly elected ministers. You could be ideal to host. If you have even a fraction of your mother’s fire, the camera will just lick you up.’

‘I’m entirely anti-flammable, I’m afraid. And I’d like to stay unlicked while at work if that’s OK.’ The CEO of STD held up his hands as though warding off an accusation. ‘Is there anything off-camera I could do? And nothing about politics, please. It’s not really something I’m interested in.’

He looked offended, as though I had made my way into his office under false pretences. ‘I suppose you’re not interested in poetry either.’ Then he turned red, as strangers often did when they alluded to the Poet’s position in my life.

I shrugged. ‘I occasionally write haiku. Munchkin verse is how I think of the form, ergo I’m working on a Wizard of Oz series.’

So this is who I was planning to be in my media incarnation. A woman who penned constipated verse and who could use the word ‘ergo’ before her morning cup of coffee. This could be the most insufferable version of me yet.

The CEO’s face brightened – not from any poetic feelings, I was sure, but merely because he was grateful to be past the awkward moment. He made a clumsy gesture of appeal, and my mind worked furiously, counting syllables and reaching for the most obvious way out.

‘Follow the yellow/Brick road, follow the yellow/Brick road. Follow it.’

From behind his desk, he looked uncertainly at me, obviously unable to decide whether this was humour or an appalling lack of talent.

Someone behind me cleared his throat. I turned, and it was Mir Adnan Akbar Khan, known to his friends as Ed, standing in the doorway.

‘There is wit in straw/Courage in fear. Love echoes/In vast tin caverns.’

He had his eyes fixed on me as he spoke. I kept my hands hidden beneath the desk as I counted syllables on my fingertips, unaccountably hoping that he’d got it wrong.

The man behind the desk had lost all interest in poetry – and me – by now, and indicated this by hiring me on the spot. ‘Ed will show you your office. Wait in there until someone comes to talk to you about a contract and then you can leave. Or stay. Whichever suits you.’ He raised his bulk out of his chair.

‘But what’s my job description?’ I asked.

‘Bit of this and bit of that. Same as most people here. You do actually want to work, don’t you?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re not one of the eye-liner girls? The ones who come here to find husbands.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Because if you are, I’ve got this nephew…’

Mir Adnan Akbar Khan cleared his throat again. ‘Do you have any particular talents or abilities we should be taking advantage of?’ he asked.

‘Not really. Except, facts. I have many of them in my head. About all sorts of things. I don’t know if that’s at all useful. I take some pride in it not being useful, actually.’

‘That’s perfect,’ the CEO said, smiling a gold-capped smile. ‘We need a research assistant for our new quiz show. You have to come up with questions in different categories, and list four possible answers. Quiz show researcher. That’s your official designation, but you’ll soon find everyone here does a little bit of everything.’ He addressed himself to the man behind me. ‘I’ll be at the golf course, Ed. Deal with anything that needs dealing with. That includes finding someone to read the five o’clock news. Amina has to leave at four – there’s a tea at her place and her mother needs her to hand out pakoras. You, haiku girl, how do you feel about cockroaches?’

‘The sight of their antennae makes me sneeze.’

‘Well, then you can’t be our newsreader,’ he said, and waved me away.

I followed Mir Adnan Akbar Khan out of the office and up the staircase at the end of the hall. The ground floor’s buzz of activity fell away as we stepped on to the landing which led into a lemon-yellow hallway with a window at the far end, framing a bough clustered with pink blossoms set against the pale sky. ‘The creatives are on the ground floor,’ Mir Adnan Akbar Khan said. ‘Along with the CEO, of course, but only because he’s too lazy to walk up stairs. The studio is in the basement. There’s a lone cockroach living there at the moment, resisting all attempts to take him dead or alive – we call him Osama Bin Roach. He makes some of our live shows far more interesting than they would otherwise be. And up on this floor you’ve got producers, researchers, analysts and other people who prefer quiet. My office is down the end. This is yours—’ He pointed to a door halfway down the hallway.

I pushed open the door and entered. A glass-topped desk and computer took up the bulk of space in the tiny room. It was hard to imagine being able to move in there without bumping into something – the desk, a computer peripheral, your own ribs. There was no window, only four blue walls and a duct for central air-conditioning, which didn’t seem to be turned on.

‘A room with a vent. How charming.’

‘If it’s luxury you’re looking for, you’re in the wrong place.’ Mir Adnan Akbar Khan squeezed in past me, and reached under the desk for a pedestal fan, which he deposited on the desk. He reached down again, and pulled out a pile of books. He stacked the books vertically against the wall, and put the fan on top. The blades were rimmed with blackness. He turned to face me, amused. ‘Think you can handle it?’

I walked around the other side of the desk, and sat down in the worn, leather chair, elbows propped on the armrests. My mother would tell me to count myself fortunate. She’d work out how many political prisoners could be squeezed, like pomfiret, into prison cells this size. She’d refuse to say, ‘Like sardines,’ because sardines are a colonial residue.

‘So, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan—’

‘It’s Ed. Short for Eddy. As in, a whirling current. And there’s no need to laugh – it’s a childhood name which just stuck.’

‘Don’t get so defensive, Eddy.’ He looked annoyed and I waved my hand in a gesture of peace. ‘It’s just that I woke up thinking of seas and currents, and now here you are.’

‘Oh.’ He blushed, and that made me suddenly self-conscious. The office was so small that for the two of us to be sharing its space seemed like an intimacy.

He rested his hand on the edge of my desk, and, looking down, smiled. There was a tiny stick-on heart near his thumb, the kind I had covered my pencil-box with when I was a girl.

‘Tell the Tin Man to call off the search,’ he said.

‘Who first did that?’ I asked, levering my nail between glass and sticker to prise it off. ‘Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers – a castrated organ?’

‘The same people who turned angels into harp-playing, effete creatures in nightgowns, floating on clouds. The ones who like to domesticate the dangerous.’

I busied myself removing bits of sticky paper from my nail. It was an answer too near my own way of thinking for me to know how to respond to it. I didn’t know what to say to him – there was a subject between us, a history going back one generation, which I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to allude to or avoid.

‘Look, there are plenty of jobs available here,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to get stuck with this quiz show nonsense. It’s obviously not what you want to be doing.’

I looked up, flicking the last bit of sticky paper into the space between us. ‘What makes you think you know what I want to be doing?’

‘Oh, please!’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The enigmatic-woman act is so overdone.’

Don’t you dare, I found myself thinking, and then almost – almost, mind – before I knew what I was doing, I angled my head just so as to draw out the cords of my neck, clenched my jaw, narrowed my eyes to obscure the grey and make the green flash through.

Ed stepped back, the expression on his face telling me to what extent I had just left my own skin, allowed someone else’s personality to brush its hand across my features and leave its ghostly mark there.

I looked away, aware of feeling smaller, more useless, as soon as I had returned to myself.

‘What’s your story, Aasmaani Inqalab?’ he said in a tone of voice I couldn’t decipher. He moved the fan on to the floor, and sat down on the stacks of books. ‘No, don’t give me that look. I hate that look.’

‘You’ve just met me. You can’t hate my looks already.’

‘Your looks are actually quite stunning.’ I raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not making a move on you. I’m just stating a fact. You like facts. You said so. Although, here’s a question. Why?’

‘What?’

‘Why do you like facts? Or maybe you don’t like them. You just collect them. See, we’ve just met and here’s what I know about you. You say you’re not interested in politics, you claim to write haiku though clearly you don’t, which casts some suspicion on the veracity of your claim about politics, you pride yourself on collecting useless facts, you woke up thinking about currents, your friends call you Arse-Many Inflagrante, and cockroach antennae make you sneeze. You’ll have to agree, this is a strange collection of information to have about someone you’ve only just met. It’s… well, isn’t that interesting?’ He leaned back against the wall. ‘You’ve given me a lot of useless facts about yourself. Huh. Clever. I bet you do that a lot as an alternative to actually revealing information.’

‘There’s something really creepy about you, you do know that, don’t you?’

‘You’re just upset that I’m on to you.’ He stood up. ‘Look upon it as a gift. I’ve seen past the façade instantly. Isn’t that a relief?’

‘There’s a difference between seeing a façade as a façade and seeing past it, Eddy. So enjoy the arches and parapets, take your pictures, buy your postcards. The guard dogs at the gate have been alerted to your presence.’

‘I hear the clatter of a gauntlet,’ he said, stooping down as though to pick something off the floor before walking out.

‘Irritating sod,’ I muttered after him.

It was a long time I continued to sit there, waiting for someone to come and find me. I recited Song of Myself in my head, not knowing why it had occurred to me until I came to the line about ‘eddies of the wind’.

At length, my mind wandering back to my first moments in the STD building, I found pen and paper in the desk drawers and began to write:

To: the woman in the hallway who asked me if I was planning to watch Boond.

My turn to beg forgiveness for presumption. But I’ve been thinking about your concerns re Shehnaz Saeed’s role in your drama. It seems to me your biggest problem is knowing how to both use and downplay her status as A GREAT. That first moment the camera alights on her – how can you make that moment work both at the level of the television drama and at the level of the larger ‘real-life’ drama of Shehnaz Saeed returning to a medium she once owned more fully than any other actress in Pakistan’s history? I have a suggestion:

Let the show start with her return to Karachi, after years away. Let those years be years of mystery, and silence. That allows her to step on to the screen both as a character who has been away from her family for many years and as Shehnaz Saeed returning to all our lives. Those initial moments of recognition that her family has when she comes back, those gasps of shock, those searching inquisitions of every aspect of her appearance to see how she has changed, can both mirror the audience’s responses to her and set up the character’s position as ‘the familiar/unfamiliar-mother/friend/enemy/ex-wife’. You said the show starts with her ex-husband’s proposal to another woman. Think how the drama increases if his proposal coincides with Shehnaz Saeed’s return to town. Yes, this is staple fare of low-brow soap operas – but no less effective for that.

As I wrote, I saw it in my mind. A woman is disembarking a plane in Karachi. On the walk from tarmac to terminal she pauses to light a cigarette and look around her. This terminal was not built when she last left, and for a moment she is terrified by all that must have changed, and all that must have stayed the same, in this city she departed without explanation so long ago, leaving behind her only child.

I put down the pen and bent my head forward to rest in my cupped hands.

Oh, Mama.