Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Let’s say – just for the sake of argument, let’s say – that someone kidnapped the Poet, convinced the doctor to misidentify a corpse as his, and thereby spread the conviction through the nation – all the way to the very seat of power – that the Poet had died. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, for government agencies to move in immediately to destroy his poems, knowing that his death would only augment their power? Yes, of course. His death would make his poems so much more powerful than his life ever could. How could a government be stupid enough to kill him while everyone knew he was working on a collection of political poems? How could a government be stupid enough to do that when, for all they knew, there were copies of his poems in someone’s house, in someone’s memory, making their way to someone’s mailbox? It made no sense.

It made far more sense for the government to react to news of his death by burning his poems and hoping there were no copies. Simple as that.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no disproving this thesis. I have explained away all your objections.

Explained away everything, except the most important thing. Motive. Why kidnap the Poet and imprison him for all these years?

Could it simply be ‘any unpleasant motive’? Simply that someone despised him and wanted him to suffer?

That wasn’t good enough.

Perhaps there was a reason that had not yet been revealed to us, or to him, just as the reason for the kidnapping of that young girl was not revealed until all those years later when the man she had come to think of as her father gave her in marriage to her real father and turned her brother to patricide and fratricide.

I moved away from the cold steel of the cabinets. What dark purpose, Omi, lies behind your capture, biding its time like Hera waiting for Hercules to become a father before she infects him with madness and drives him to kill his wife and children – a sweeter revenge than any she could have had before he knew what it was to love as only a parent can love?

As I stood in that room surrounded by murder stories, with the life of the city rumbling away beneath me on the bridge, it was obvious that in the absence of ultimate proof any story was possible, any belief was possible. The questions it came down to were these: did I believe that voice in the pages? Did I trust my ability to know Omi’s voice? Did I trust the core of that man – that bawdy, tender, humorous, no-nonsense man with the razor-sharp mind – to remain unchanged even through all these years, all those trials?

Yes.

Simply, yes.

‘Omi,’ I said, and the word hung in the air, white-gold and sturdy.

He was still alive. Oh dear God, he was still alive.

I found I was kneeling on the ground, though I didn’t know how I got there. Light streamed in through the window, almost liquid, almost tactile. The fist of muscle within my chest unfurled. With a great surge something molten shot through my veins – the sensation so unfamiliar, so overwhelming, that it took me a moment to recognize it as joy.

XIII

In the hours, and days, that followed, life progressed on an ordinary path. Sehri, work, siesta, iftar, television, dinner, night-cricket. That was the outline of my days. But within that outline I was at once weightless and held fast, as though embraced by an Omi-shaped dream somewhere far above the gravitational pull of the earth.

While waiting to bat, and between innings, during the games of night-cricket I’d lean back on my elbows in the grass and look up at the sky. Only in its distant mystery could I find the language for my emotions. A knot of gas, made increasingly dense – perhaps by the force of a wave passing through it – will start to contract in on itself, heating up its core until it sets off nuclear fusion and a star is born.

Does that knot of gas recognize in itself an incipient star? Does it yearn for the wave to pass through it? Of course not. But even if it could, even if it had that faculty of imagination, perhaps it would choose not to use it. Perhaps it would only be at that moment (if millions of years can be a moment) when the knot of gas coalesced into luminescence that it would realize how diffused it had been, and for how long.

I couldn’t speak of what was happening to me as I moved through the day with the outward semblance of a woman following routine. But whatever I did, this knowledge, this wave, was constantly making its way through me: he is alive, Omi is alive.

One evening, in my flat, I realized I had been looking out at the sea for hours without a single thought. That unthinking was the opposite of the deliberate, dark blankness I was driven to when the debris of facts could no longer fill my thoughts. It was the unthinking that came from being full with a certain knowledge, heavy with it. He was alive. That was not a thought, not something that came from the mind. It was knowledge in the form of sensation.

They noticed it, everyone around me – at work, during the cricket games, in the flat next door. They noticed it but couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, or what it was, and didn’t believe that I was being anything other than deliberately evasive when I just shook my head and smiled when questioned. How could I say, I cannot speak of it? This demands music, not language.

And it was music with which I filled my days. At the office, in the car, at home, I engulfed myself with the opera he had tried to teach me to love – here, here, he’d say, listen, and he’d make me sit through as much as I could bear of Carmen, The Ring Cycle, Otello, Madama Butterfly, or whatever else it was that he was listening to at the end of a session of writing. But what do the words mean, I would demand, and he’d shake his head. Never learn Italian, he warned me. Why do you think I prefer opera to qawaali? They both have the same degree of passion, but with qawaali I understand the words and that ruins it. As long as you don’t understand the words of opera you can believe they match the sublime quality of the music, you can believe words are as capable as music of echoing and creating feeling, and you need only search hard enough, long enough, for the right combinations to create that perfection. Before the babble of Babel, Aasmaani, people spoke music.

For four days or five, I remained in the state of quiet joy, unbothered equally by the deprivations of fasting, the phone which kept ringing at odd hours with no originating number showing up on caller ID, the questions and strange looks that came my way. But then one night, as I lay on my stomach in the grass, watching the spinning of a cricket ball illuminated by the headlights of the cars parked side by side in the driveway alongside the makeshift pitch, Rabia lay down beside me and said, ‘Does this have anything to do with your mother?’

The ball spun away from the bat’s trajectory and dislodged a bail from the stumps. The innings ended.

I opened my mouth to say, ‘No,’ but the word didn’t quite come out. Sensation distilled into thought, and the thought was: if there is such a thing as a core of being which remains unchanged, her core is her love for Omi. If she knows he’s alive, if she knows his words are making their way to Karachi, then she’ll return.

I put my head down, feeling blades of grass prickling my face. Rabia put her hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re so different these days, Aasmaani. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. You’re more locked up in yourself than ever. But in a peaceful way, it seems.’

An understanding that I had been too blind to see in all these years forced me to look up at her. ‘And you think, it can only be my mother who can bring me peace. My mother who left fourteen years ago, who used to leave so often before that, only my mother has that power in my life. You’re the one who’s always been my rock, you and Beema together the anchors who keep me moored to sanity. And you think you’re so much less in my life than her, don’t you?’

Rabia looked away, her fingers scratching at my shoulder in tiny circles. ‘It’s not a question of competition.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ I turned over on to my back, and she pirouetted her body round to rest her head against my stomach.

My Scrabble girls, our father used to call us when we were young and there was no pillow in the world which Rabia would rather rest against than some part of me – shoulder, stomach, thigh – her body always perpendicular to mine so there was only that single point of contact between us.

Shakeel walked up to us, laughed, and lay down, his head on Rabia’s leg. ‘Double word score,’ he announced.

‘No abbreviations allowed, skinny man!’ I said.

Someone had switched off the car headlights while everyone took a break between innings, and the stars were bright above us. I lay in silence for a while, looking up, listening to Rabia enumerate for Shakeel the different stars which made up the Orion constellation – Betelguese and Bellatrix at the Hunter’s shoulders, Rigel and Saiph twinkling at his knees – and remembered when I had taught her to look up to the sky and greet the distant points of light by name.

Rabia the Patient, daughter of Beema the Sane.

I had never really thought to question why she maintained that scrapbook about my mother, long after I had discarded it; never stopped to consider that in those two years when my mother lived with me in the upstairs portion of my father’s house, Rabia always kept a distance, not knowing how to react to that unfamiliar creature lurking beneath the shell of the woman she had once known; never wondered how much resentment Rabia felt towards Mama for being the strongest pull in my life. But now it was so clear.

I sat up, causing a reverse domino effect to take hold of my sister and brother-in-law.

‘You have that look of purpose in your eyes,’ Rabia said. ‘What’s that all about?’

‘It just occurred to me to wonder something. When did you become such a fan of my mother, Rabia, and why? I know your feelings for her weren’t uncomplicated when we were growing up.’

Rabia drew her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She didn’t seem particularly surprised by the question. ‘I admire what she did as an activist. I admire it particularly because I read all those condolence letters addressed to you in the months after she disappeared, which you used to throw into the bin after reading the first three words. So I know what a difference she made to people’s lives, and how important she was to the women’s movement in the eighties. But beyond that,’ she glanced over at Shakeel, who nodded encouragingly, ‘beyond that, Aasmaani, everything I think or feel about your mother is really just about you. I cut out those articles and put them in the scrapbook because your memory is so incredibly one-sided, so totally blinkered, that you need the black-and-white reminders of what you used to admire and idolize her for, just in case the day comes along when you’re able to let go long enough to remember her as she really was, with all her flaws and in all her glory.’

There it was again. Let go.

I tapped my bare toes against her ankle. ‘I don’t think that’s what it’s about at all, Rabia. Reminding me of her activism won’t make any difference to the way I think about her – it’s not her activism I’ve ever resented. Admittedly, it turned out to be a waste of energy, but I don’t resent her for not knowing that at the time.’

‘It wasn’t a waste,’ Rabia said quietly. ‘Read those articles. It wasn’t a waste at all. What do you gain by believing it was a waste? Why are you so insistent about that point?’

‘Don’t turn this back on me, Rabo. We’re talking about why you keep the scrapbook. And here’s what I think. I think you cut those articles out to remind yourself that she was this creature of ideals and courage and everything else you admire so much. Because you need that reminder, don’t you, to keep all your resentment at bay? All those years of resentment which only grows with every second she continues to be the siren pulling me away from you and the world of normality and good sense you live in. You can’t let that resentment out, can’t admit to it. You can’t, because you’re the rock, you’re the anchor. Those are the roles I pushed you into when you were so young you should have been trying on different personalities every week just to find the one which suited you best. And even now, you believe that role so completely that you can’t admit to your resentment, and you have to cloak it in concern for me. Rabia, you don’t have to do that any more.’

When I was done, Shakeel said, ‘Oh, boy,’ stood up and walked away, stopping long enough only to look back at Rabia and say, ‘She’s stronger than you think, you know.’

‘What does that mean?’ I demanded from my sister.

‘It means,’ she clutched her knees closer, ‘it means, I’m not you, Aasmaani. People’s minds, their psyches, don’t all work in the same ways.’ She made an exclamation of irritation. ‘Do you want me to spell this out? Who is there in your life whom you once resented, then felt you weren’t allowed to resent because it would be so selfish and so wrong, and whose memory you now revere above everyone else who has ever lived on this planet?’

I pushed myself off the ground and she sprang up next to me and caught me by the shoulder. ‘Dammit, will you stop running away every time I try to talk to you about this!’

There was a crackle of lightning inside my head. ‘You’re talking rubbish. Yes, there were moments of irritation. I’ve had them with everyone. But you think I resented him? Rabia, the one thing I wanted most of all was to be his daughter. Not Dad’s daughter. Not your half-sister. Not Beema’s stepdaughter. I would have given all that up to be his child, I would have given all that up in a heartbeat.’

For an instant I thought she was going to hit me, and then her face took on a concentration of utter pity. ‘Of course that’s what you wanted. Because if you had been his child, he wouldn’t have made your mother choose between the two of you every time he went away and asked her to follow.’

‘That’s not how I saw it.’

‘That’s exactly how you saw it.’

There we stood, my sister and I, looking at each other from opposite shores of perspective. I was no longer in my skin, but hovering above, watching both of us with a curious detachment. We could spend all night out there, I knew, plunging our hands into the ice-cold river and pulling out squirming facts, entirely distinct from one another, which would wriggle out of our grasp almost as soon as we hoisted them above the fast-moving surface.

Then a chill hooked through me, and I almost cried out. It had gone. That peace, that joy, it had gone. With a great surge, questions finned in, jostling against each other, filling up all the crevices of my mind. How will you find the Poet? How will your mother know you’ve found him? What if no more letters come? Suppose Ed is angry enough to keep the letters from coming to you? How do you know you can trust Shehnaz Saeed? What if he comes back and she comes back, too, and they leave again and don’t tell you where?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Please, not again.

‘Aasmaani?’ Rabia stepped closer to me.

I shook my head and held up a hand for her to stay away. Slow, heart, slow. Calm yourself. You’ll find him. Look how far you’ve come already. He’s alive. Say it. He is alive.

Omi.

It had the feel of a mantra.

Om Omi Om Omi.

How many of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

I opened my eyes and exhaled slowly.

‘I’m sorry.’ I took her hand in mine. ‘I didn’t mean what I said. I wouldn’t give up being your sister for anything. And I know it seems like I take you all for granted. You and Beema and Dad. But it’s just… it’s just that sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life missing Mama.’

Rabia wrapped her arms around me and pulled me to her. ‘I know. Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life watching you miss her. You’re wrong about me resenting her for being the stronger pull in your life. I’ve never resented her for that. But I’ve hated her for causing you so much pain. I’ve hated her for making you cry. Just as she hated herself for it.’

I pulled away. ‘You think she did?’

‘I know she did. I saw it.’

‘Saw what?’

The cricket game was starting up again and we were perfectly positioned to be hit by a well-timed cover drive, so we stepped into the driveway and pulled ourselves on to the bonnet of a car, leaning back against the windshield.

‘It was during those last two years. When she was living upstairs. She’d promised you she’d go to Sports Day to watch you in the long jump, but then she couldn’t get out of bed that day. And you cried. You thought I didn’t know. You always thought I didn’t know.’ For a moment a look flitted over her face that was nothing but the triumphant look of a twelve-year-old who has just discovered her big sister’s secret. ‘Anyway, the next day, you’d gone out with some schoolfriends and Dad was at work and Beema was giving maths tuition. So I marched up to your mother’s room and I said, “We need to talk.”’

‘Aged twelve, you marched up to my mother’s room and said, “We need to talk?”’

‘Yes. I said, “Listen, lady.” I think I’d just been watching some gangster movie. I said, “Listen, lady. It’s OK with me that you’re living in my room now, and I’ve had to move downstairs. But don’t forget this is my room you’re in, and if you’re going to go on living here you owe me something. Let’s call it rent.”’

‘You prepared this speech beforehand, didn’t you?’

‘Wrote it down, memorized it, practised it in front of the mirror. Your mother, bless her – she was having a better day that afternoon – just nodded really seriously and said, ‘That seems fair.’ So I said, “I don’t want money. It’s not like that. I want you to stop making my sister sad, that’s the rent you owe me.”’

‘Oh, Rabia.’

‘She started crying, Aasmaani. Really crying. I’ve never heard such crying, not even when Beema told her the Poet was dead. She just cried and cried like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to do any more, and I got so frightened I ran out of there. I’ve asked myself since, what was I so scared of? Because honestly, nothing has been more terrifying to me since. And I think it was this. That I saw, this is what can happen to a life, this can happen to anyone. That was the last day I ever hated your mother.’ She wiped my eyes with the heel of her palm.

‘You and Beema,’ I said, blowing my nose. ‘Saints-in-waiting, occasionally disguised as gangsters.’ And in their saintliness so ready to choose pity over censure.

‘She should at least have moved out of our house,’ I said, balling up the tissue paper in my hand. ‘If nothing else she could have done that. Why should you and Dad and Beema have had to suffer through all her suffering?’

‘She tried to leave. Beema wouldn’t hear of it. And she was in no state to look after herself, Aasmaani, you know that.’

I could have gone with her. I could have looked after her. I never offered. I never wanted, at that point, to have to be alone in a house with her, watching her strip away herself.

‘How did Dad put up with it? I really don’t know.’

‘With gritted teeth.’ Rabia shrugged. ‘I don’t think he was ever too happy about how close Beema and your mother were. It would have suited him better, I’m sure, if they got on civilly enough not to make life uncomfortable for you, and no more.’ One of the cricketers yelled out that her feet were blocking the headlights, so she pulled herself into a cross-legged position. ‘Remember Beema saying to your mother – this was before the Poet died, when they were back from exile and you were so happy you could hardly walk without dancing – Beema said, “Put us together, Samina, and the two of us form the one Superwoman that every individual woman needs to be if she’s to go through this absurd world with even the barest sense of responsibility. We take on governments, buy the groceries, wrest religion out of the hands of patriarchs, raise our daughters into women, and accompany our men to places they’ll never survive alone because they’re still little boys in the bodies of competent adults.” That was it, I think. The heart of their friendship. They saw themselves as complementary, and not only in your life. Your mother would never have left you all those times, Aasmaani, if it wasn’t Beema she was leaving you with.’

‘She would never have left me unless she could bear to leave me.’ I slid off the bonnet. ‘She did me a favour, I know. I’m much better off having been raised by Beema, and in your company. But that was the result of, not the reason for, her decisions.’

From the fielders there came a roar of delight as the batsman struck a slower delivery back into the hands of the bowler.

‘My turn,’ I called out, making my way to the pitch.

I could tell, by the way my sister hovered near me when the game was over, that she wanted to continue our conversation. But I was sick of my own self-obsessed whining, and partly resentful for the dissipation of that utter peace I had known for the last few days, so after the game I loitered in the garden, talking politics with the neighbours.

During Ramzan, the country had finally got a government. Not a very convincing one, but the main reaction among the people I encountered at STD and in the communal garden was relief that the religious alliance had refused to join a coalition government. ‘Bugger, but they talk democracy better than anyone else,’ Rabia had groaned a few days earlier, watching the fiery leader of the beards lay into military intervention in matters of government as the inaugural session of the National Assembly was broadcast live on one channel after another.

I had looked at the scenes from Parliament, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to be sitting there, part of the action.

Earlier in the year, soon after the President announced the new constitutional amendments prior to holding elections to end the three-year suspension of Parliament, I ran into a one-time friend of my mother, a man who’d been a brave and admired participant in the pro-democracy activities of the 1980s, only to turn into a corrupt, vindictive politician when democracy actually returned to the country and he found himself in a position of power. I hadn’t seen him in years, but when we found ourselves at adjoining tables on the rooftop of my favourite restaurant his eyes registered delight.

‘Aasmaani! How marvellous!’ He pulled up a chair next to me, ignoring my three colleagues from the oil company who were sitting at the table with me. ‘Heard about the new amendments? The reserved seats?’

I dipped a piece of na’an into raita and shrugged. ‘My sister’s been babbling on about it. Sixty reserved seats for women in the new parliament.’

‘Right.’ He drew his chair closer. ‘So how about it? You want to be one of my party’s nominees?’

My colleagues exploded into laughter. We had been discussing the amendments earlier and I had said the great benefit of having a quota of women in parliament was that it would add colour and a sense of fashion to the proceedings.

I spooned chicken ginger on to my plate. He picked up a seekh kabab and waved it in my face. ‘Come on. You had a razor-sharp political mind when you were fourteen. Remember that time your mother and I got arrested…’

‘You mean back in the days when you had integrity?’ He bit into the seekh kabab and looked amused. ‘We’ve all got to work with the system. Now, look. Say yes. Come on. This is your chance to do some good for the nation.’

I took the seekh kabab out of his hand and threw it to the cat which had been prowling nearby. ‘The nation can sod off as far as I’m concerned.’

He clapped his hands. ‘Even better. You’re perfectly suited.’

I tried not to get irritated by the sight of my colleagues falling about with laughter at the thought of my entrance on to the political landscape. ‘Right. So the way this works is your party gets to decide which women are suitable candidates. And then, with the fourteenth amendment firmly in place, once we join your party we’re not allowed to vote against party lines, so if you decide to pass a law saying “Women are morons” we’re legally obligated to vote with you? No thanks.’

‘Well, that’s a rather limited view of things.’ He picked up another seekh kabab. ‘A minimum of sixty women in the house is bound to affect business in some way or the other, don’t you think? This is the chance for you to prove right your mother’s theories about how women are the real dynamic and revolutionary force in this nation.’

‘My mother’s theories, like the nation, can sod off. And so can you.’

And that was that.

But now, standing in the garden at midnight, listening to everyone around me arguing different gloomy scenarios for the future of the nation, I couldn’t help wondering what my mother would think if she turned on a TV one day and saw me sitting in the National Assembly.

What if he comes back and she comes back too, and they leave again and don’t tell you where?

Who, or what, would I need to be to make her stay this time?

a) member of parliament

b) apolitical quiz show researcher

c) capitalist corporate girl

d) translator of obscure Urdu diaries by day, party animal by night

Answer: this is a trick question. All depends on who she is now.

I walked up to my flat, with an old, too-familiar heaviness tugging at my limbs. It was there the following morning, too, as I reached the studio and made my way to my office, to another day in which Shehnaz Saeed didn’t send me more encrypted pages, another day in which Ed didn’t call, another day in which I was no closer to knowing anything about where the Poet was and how to get to him.

Someone called my name as I climbed the stairs. I looked down to see an elderly journalist who had recently been hired to fill the spot offered to me as host of the political chat show. He was climbing up the stairs from the basement, wiping pancake make-up off his face.

‘Word’s got out about what you’ve been doing,’ he said, as we met on the ground floor.

‘The quiz show?’ I said.

He took my elbow and steered me away from Kiran Hilal’s team who had just walked out of the ground-floor conference room. The first three episodes of Boond had been filmed over the last week, and the STD office was still full of talk about the brilliance of Shehnaz Saeed and the idiocy of the Mistress’s Daughter who had declared she couldn’t film any romantic sequences before sunset because you’re supposed to suppress ‘those feelings’ while fasting.

The journalist pulled me into the empty kitchen and turned to face me. ‘There was a reporter at the Archivist’s flat when you went there. The Archivist is a big gossip. He told the reporter who you were and which file you were looking at. Then Nasreen Riaz told her cousin, who works on our sports page, that you called her, too, asking about her brother’s death. Now everyone at the newspaper office is speculating what you might be after.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Listen, you’re still young and you might be fooled by the illusion of democracy. But believe me, power is still in the hands of the same old people. Nothing’s changed.’

And with that, I was back to the habits of my childhood, looking around to see who was there, and then beckoning the journalist through the door into the back garden, out of range of any listening devices.

‘What do you know that I shouldn’t know?’ I asked him. Even though we’d barely ever spoken before, I trusted him. Omi used to call him ‘the press corps’ voice of conscience’.

He smiled a little at my cloak-and-dagger antics. ‘My guess is the only bugs in the kitchen are of the Osama Bin Roach family.’ He grew serious again. ‘But if you’re asking me if I know who killed the Poet, I know only as much as everyone does. It’s an open secret who those men were, the ones who ransacked his house and burnt his poems. Or, if not who they were, then certainly who they worked for. It was a government agency, Aasmaani, and the people who were involved are quite likely still in positions to know when people start snooping around where they shouldn’t be.’

‘So you’re not one of those people who believed there was more to the story of his death than simply that the government had him killed?’

He looked at me with interest for the first time. ‘If it wasn’t the government, then who?’

I had to admit I had no idea, and then he looked offended, as though I were casting aspersions on his skills as an investigative reporter.

‘There was no reason to point a finger in any direction other than the one in which we couldn’t ever publicly point it.’

‘But why? Why should they kill him, after all those years when they didn’t? Why not just arrest him again?’

‘Are you really such a child? Don’t you know enough by now to know they don’t need a reason for killing? You think of it as a big decision, whether or not to take a life. They don’t. It’s like picking teeth to them. Why shouldn’t they do it? Who’s going to stop them?’ He pointed a finger sternly at me. ‘If you’re planning to find out who exactly gave the order and who exactly carried it out, if what you’re looking for is a name, don’t. I know how these people operate, and believe me, you don’t want to find yourself in their radar.’

‘You’re the last person I’d expect to hear advising someone to lie low. Can I ask, would you be saying that if I wasn’t a woman?’

‘But you are a woman.’

‘So’s my mother,’ I shot back.

‘I rest my case.’

I opened my mouth to argue, but he straightened his pointing finger into a vertical position to demand an end to the conversation. ‘Keep out of trouble. The Poet and your mother were friends of mine. I owe it to them to tell you what a mistake you’d be making to continue with this madness.’

I remembered all the phone calls from unidentified numbers over the last weeks, the caller hanging up as soon as I answered. When had they started? The day I visited the Archivist, wasn’t it? That very evening, in fact.

What surprised me then was not the feeling of panic that made me want to step on to a plane and leave the country as soon as possible, but the exhilaration that accompanied the panic. It was genetic, that exhilaration, and suicidal, too. But for a moment I let it wash over me. By God, I would give them reason to train their radars on me!