Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

And then the exhilaration was gone. Who was ‘them’? Who was behind Omi’s captivity? Was it an individual or a group, and what were his or their allegiances and contacts and motives? Whom could I trust?

I looked at the journalist. Was he acting on behalf of my mother and Omi, or someone else entirely in telling me to stop my search for answers?

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It was just a moment of silliness. There won’t be any more.’

No, no more pathetic attempts at playing detective. It would get me nowhere. The only person who could give me the answers I needed was Omi. If only he would write again. When would he write again?

It was much later that night, as I was drifting to sleep, that I thought, what if he has written again already? My eyes opened to the faint green glow of an octopus reaching its tentacles towards me. What if Ed told his mother I could read the pages? If she knew I’d been lying to her, why should she continue to send the pages to me? She owed me nothing, after all. She was, Beema had said, a woman who regarded trust as a sacred thing, and I had done nothing from the beginning but deceive her.

I thought, I’ll call her first thing in the morning. And then I thought, Ed. I thought of his hand reaching out to mine on the other side of sunlight and how I turned away from him, choosing to see everything between us as evidence of his manipulation. When the truth of it was, all he’d done was show he was just as confused as I was by the coded pages. Over three weeks gone now since that last meeting between us, and I hadn’t called to apologize, or to say what was simply true – that I missed him.

So, the following morning, as soon as I got to work, I called him. He must have seen the STD switchboard number on his mobile, because he picked up with the words, ‘For the last time, no. We are not shooting her in soft focus.’

‘Does the camera not love the Mistress as much as the CEO does?’ I said. I had to speak loudly to cut through the static. ‘Is that the nightmare in which you are living?’

‘Aasmaani?’ He said it hesitantly first and then with a great exuberance, ‘Aasmaani!’

‘Ed? Ed!’ I replied, echoing his tone. ‘You know you’re going to have to get a new nickname. That one doesn’t lend itself to passionate declamation.’

‘Baby,’ he said, his voice deepening into a Hollywood drawl. ‘You can call me anything, just so long as you call me.’

‘How’s this, then? I’ll call you Bogie and you can Bacall me.’

‘Are we having a conversation or writing a song?’

‘Actually, this is me apologizing.’

‘Then this is me accepting your apology with a song in my heart. Should I sing it for you?’

‘Sing it when you come home. When are you coming home?’

‘Not soon enough. God, Aasmaani, I’ve missed you more than seems possible.’

‘I’m going to linger on the compliment and ignore the backhand there.’

‘This is going to sound odd, and maybe it has something to do with the phone reception, which is fairly suspect in these hills – most days I have to climb the tallest tree and lean at a precise angle to get a signal – but you sound lighter. Like someone’s just pulled the sadness right out of you. Is it just the reception?’

I shook my head, though I knew he couldn’t see it. ‘It’s him, Ed, it’s really him.’

‘Who?’

‘Omi. He’s alive.’ It was the first time I had said it to anyone else and that joy welled up inside me again and made my voice crack.

‘Omi?’

‘The Poet, Ed. Don’t be thick. The Poet is alive. I know it.’

‘How…?’

‘Ed, don’t ask. Just take my word. He’s alive. It’s not a hoax. Now listen, we have to make sure your mother keeps sending me those pages. Have you told her I can read them? Should we tell her? Ed?’

There was silence.

I moved the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen, expecting to see we’d been disconnected.

‘Ed?’ I pressed the phone against my ear again.

‘So that’s why you called.’ His voice was utterly without expression. ‘Because of the letters.’

‘It’s part of the reason,’ I admitted. ‘But – you’re the other part.’

‘Really? Can you break that down into numbers?’ Fissures were appearing in his even tone, anger leaking out. ‘What percentage of your reason for calling is about the letters, what percentage about me?’

‘Ed. This is absurd.’

There was another pause. ‘She doesn’t know,’ he said at last. ‘My mother. She doesn’t know. And though there’s no reason for me to dispense good advice to you right now, I’d advise you not to tell her. It’ll all become “They’re my letters, this is about me.”’

‘She doesn’t seem…’ I stopped. ‘Sorry. I appreciate the advice. Really, Ed.’

‘If more letters appear I’ll make sure you get them,’ he said, his tone relenting. ‘Now I really have to go.’

‘Ed. Wait. Fifty.’

‘What?’

‘Fifty per cent because of you.’

‘That’s a lie, Aasmaani.’

‘I want it to be the truth.’ But this time he really had hung up.

What was there about this man that touched me so unexpectedly?

A girl I knew at university once spoke of ‘secret societies of pain’. Her fiancé had died at the age of twenty-two, and she said sometimes a look in a stranger’s eyes, a particular quality of desolation, would tell her the stranger had suffered a similar grief.

I tried calling Ed back to tell him about that girl but he didn’t answer, so I sent him a text message saying, ‘Ed. Call me.’

He wrote back, ‘Signal buggered. No tall trees.’

It was impossible to discern the tone of that message – curt or humorous? – but I took it as a good sign when, three days later, Shehnaz Saeed’s driver rang my door-bell. He handed me a note from Shehnaz inviting me over on Eid night to watch Boond with her and Ed. I read the note, standing in the doorway, while the driver waited for a response, and when I looked up to him to say, ‘Tell her yes,’ he was holding out an envelope, addressed to Shehnaz in childish handwriting.

. .

We confuse conflict and suffering with tragedy. Hamlet is not the most tragic of Shakespeare’s figures, nor is Lear. Hamlet is the most conflicted, Lear is the one whose suffering is most brilliantly rendered. But the most tragic figure is Macbeth, who has no illusions. Unlike Brutus, he does not attempt to justify murdering his friend and benefactor; unlike Othello, he is not drawn into murder by the perfidiousness of an Iago. Macbeth’s tragedy is absolute self-knowledge allied to an unflinching awareness of the dire consequences of his action and a profound understanding of the immorality of his deeds.

I know whose voice that is: Darius Mehta, Impassioned Professor of English, Adjectivus Emeritus.

Myself, I have always gravitated to the tragedy of lovers. Laila Mujnu, of course. But also Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and his Lady (their passion for each other the real story of the play), Sassi Punoo, Samson and Delilah (of whom I owe my knowledge to Cecil B. de Mille rather than the Bible), Saleem and Anarkali, Oedipus and Jocasta (why pretend his tragedy is greater than hers; she who discovers she has married her patricidal son? She hangs herself – not because of incest committed in ignorance, but because of her continued desire for her son against all laws of morality and custom). But the saddest of love stories is Arthurian – not the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, or even of Tristan and Iseult. Merlin and Nimue, that is the saddest of sad stories.

Not in all versions, of course. In some she is the cruel enchantress who seduces him, learns everything he knows and then imprisons him, leaving him to die a lingering death. But the story of Nimue and Merlin which I choose to believe is this: for love of the goddess whom she serves she must learn Merlin’s lore, and so she seeks him out to seduce him. But Merlin will not fall for just any pretty face, particularly not when he knows he is destined to be betrayed in love. He is a man on his guard for falsehood in a beautiful guise. The only way for Nimue to convince Merlin is to fall truly in love with him. And so she falls, and he falls after her, and even at the moment of their falling she knows she doesn’t love him quite enough to turn away from her goddess, and he knows that he truly loves, for the first time in his life, and if it is his destiny to be betrayed by the woman he loves then Nimue will be the one to betray him.

Why is this so great a tragedy? Because, like Macbeth, they always know the truth. Not for a heartbeat does she believe the goddess will release her from her obligation; not for an indrawn breath does he believe he can cheat destiny. I think this makes them gentle with each other; I think it makes them nostalgic for each moment before it’s even past. I think it strengthens love to be thus caught in the fierce embrace of inevitability.

How did I get to that sentimental moment?

Oh, yes. Darius Mehta. He who, in the twilight of his life, was fired from his teaching job for discussing Richard II as a political rather than a literary text. You admired him for his courage in taking that stand. And I thought, what could he tell his students about politics that they didn’t already know? What a waste – all those young minds that will now be deprived of the chance to hear Darius Mehta speak of Shakespeare and what it means to be human. What made him think he should be anything other than that of which he was so gloriously capable? Who made him believe that what he was wasn’t good enough?

If someone came in here and started to talk to me of politics when I was reading Richard II I would shoo them away.

Stop it. Stop disapproving.

Woman who abandons her child for her lover and flaunts the affair in public while the child is growing up should know better than to disapprove of others.

Woman whose life achieved so little should know better than to demand political commitment in others.

How did this become about you? I promised myself I wouldn’t let that happen again.

I’m beginning to resent pen and paper.

It was far better when I had only my books and my daily routine. My life was strictly regimented. But since I’ve started writing, you’ve come along, barging in at all moments, disrupting the tides that govern my day. Everything is infected by you, and I can’t distinguish now between fiction, memory and my own imagination. Even now, as I write, I have to ask myself: is this gift or punishment? What game is being played with my life? All I know is, I want the Minions to remove from here all temptations to fill these blank pages. Only then can I begin again to forget all that I’ve lost. Only then can I attempt to forget all that someone else must have gained. Then, I don’t need to ask myself questions such as: whose bed do you slip into at night? On whose body do you make your voracious demands?

Sometimes I am happier believing you dead.

Remember the beach that night. How we left the party and found our way to that musty cave and I wanted to leave because of the smell of stale urine, but you pulled me close and soon the cave was filled with another, muskier scent. Then that noise, someone was outside, someone watching, and you didn’t care, you only grew more aroused. I could have accused you so many times of perversion, but I always loved you too much to throw that word at you. You had no such inhibitions when it came to my feelings.

How often thoughts of you can lead to anger. And then that goes, as fast as it came, and all I want, my love, is to hold you in my arms, away from all the world.

Come, find me, and let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world.

XIV

If the door opened and the Poet walked through, I would kill him.

Let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world.

I scrunched the papers tightly into a ball, and hurled them across the room. ‘You’re not taking her away again!’ I shouted. The ball of paper hit the window and ricocheted back to land at my feet.

Woman who abandons her child for her lover and flaunts the affair in public.

Bastard.

I could have accused you so many times of perversion.

Bastard. Bastard. You fat, old, ugly, scar-faced bastard.

For this man, Mama, you left Dad. For this man, you left me, again and again.

I knew those caves at the beach. The scent of them on days when it had been too long since the last time the tide came through and washed them clean of memory. I wanted to be washed clean of memory. I wanted to be embalmed. All fluids, all juices removed. If I angled my face down towards my armpit I’d catch the mingling of my body’s odour and deodorant. Angle it further down. Concupiscence.

Things I didn’t want to imagine, I was imagining. The beach at night, a cave, her eyes watching someone watching her as she pulled the Poet closer, deeper. I bit down on my knuckle, hard.

Away from all the world.

Rabia had been right. There was nothing unfamiliar in this explosion of anger, this desire to have him here so I could bang his head against a wall. I had grown up with this anger, it was almost like a long-lost friend.

‘Bastard. You goddamn bastard.’

Woman who abandons her child.

How dare you? After all she gave up for you. After all you demanded she give up.

Woman whose life achieved so little.

Because of you, bastard, because of you.

In 1980, when the Poet went to Colombia she stayed in Karachi because of all those political commitments in her life. And what did he do? He sent her a postcard.

S – I’ve been trying to work on a ghazal but all I can think is this: you are qafia and radif to me – the fixed rhyme and refrain of all the couplets that make up my life. That line would be adolescent drivel if it wasn’t entirely true. Love, Yours. P. S. Call me! Write! Come here (I promised I wouldn’t make that demand, but this isn’t a demand, it’s an entreaty. The Sufis were right – Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved.)

When that postcard arrived, I had hidden it away from her. For two days I kept it hidden until I couldn’t bear the expectation in her eyes every time the phone rang or she saw the postman toss something over her gate. And so I handed her the postcard. She read it, and then she reached out and gathered me in her arms.

‘What do I do?’ she had wept into my hair.

I said, ‘Go to him.’

What had I hoped? That by saying it I would make her stay? Didn’t I know any better by then? But even though I wanted her to stay, I also wanted her to be with him. Theirs was the great love story I worshipped, even as it relegated me to a walk-on role. I was so proud – what a strange word, but that’s what it was – of the way she was loved by him, and the way she loved him in return.

Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved.

How did I see that as love, when it was so obviously just posturing? The Poet calling to his Muse, throwing himself into the drama of separation.

If someone came in here and started to talk to me of politics when I was reading Richard II I would shoo them away.

And they call you the great revolutionary poet. They put your name in a Master File ranked far above hers. What did you ever do in all those years she was out on the streets, risking her life, crying herself hoarse in rallies? Where were you, great poet? Hiding away in your study, writing and listening to opera, telling us all that you wouldn’t publish anything until the collection was complete, tantalizing us all with little glimpses as you read out your politically impassioned verse. What were you going to do? Leave the country again and have it published from afar, while you were safely tucked away somewhere with my mother, having made sure your words were so inflammatory that there was no hope for a reprieve, no chance you and she would ever return from that exile?

Or were you never going to publish them at all? Three years you worked on that collection. How much longer would it have continued? We couldn’t call you a coward as long as you were writing, couldn’t say you had lost your nerve.

Did you stage your own death, Omi? Did you stage your death and arrange for your poems to be burnt so that my mother’s reaction could give you a whole new world of inspiration to draw on for your next collection? Did you stage your death so that those poems would pass into legend as only lost works can? Never learn Italian, never publish your writing. That way it’s possible to believe the words have transformed into music. Yes, those poems became myth, and you became legend. And what about my mother? What did she become? What did you make her, first by your refusal to marry her and then with your alleged and too convincing death? You always were, always have been, the Poet. Through everything. Through the scandal of your affair with my mother, through all the affront people took to the vulgarity of your early poems, through everything else, you always were, always will be, the Poet. But my mother who gave so much of her life to fighting forces she knew she had little hope of defeating, she is first and foremost the Jezebel, the fallen woman who abandoned her husband and child. And if anyone tries to say, but what about her activism? there are all too many people ready to point out that her commitments to the cause must have been pretty feeble if she could run off for three years just because you snapped your fingers in Colombia.

Let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world.

You bastard, you bastard, I wish you were dead, I wish they had tortured you until you burst their ear-drums with your screaming.

I leaned forward and then jerked back, banging my head against the wall with all the violence I could muster. Before the pain could fully make itself known, a painting above me jiggled off its hook and fell towards me. I had a momentary vision of red and black swirls coming at me, and I put up my arms with a shout and batted it away.

The painting fell to one side, face down, and then I was just a woman with an aching head, looking down at a cracked frame.

I stood up, holding my head, and went to the kitchen. I grabbed a fistful of ice out of the freezer, wrapped the ice in a dupatta, and held it to my head.

A burst of gunfire punctured the silence which surrounded me. The dupatta fell from my hand. But then I realized what the gunfire must be about and I leaned out of the window to look for the shaving of moon which the Ruhat-e-Hilal committee must have seen in order to declare tomorrow Eid. I couldn’t see it – but rounds of ammunition were now being pumped into the sky from all directions and there was no mistaking the celebration in the air.

When I heard you were dead, Omi, there was a moment in which I thought, at least now he’ll never take her away from me again.

The thought made me stop as I was bending down to retrieve the fallen dupatta. My fingers dangled just inches from the cloth which was already seeping liquid on to the tiled floor. Leucippus, in the fourth century BC, wondered how water, having transformed into ice, could then melt into water again. He concluded that there was an essence which remained immutable through the transformation which allowed the water to move from one state to another and then back again. Leucippus coined the term ‘atoms’. What would Leucippus say about the atoms of our character, the atoms of love?

I lay down on the floor, my head resting against the dupatta-wrapped ice, and held my hand in front of my eyes. There was the scar, cutting across my lifeline – a reminder of the penance I had exacted on myself with a kitchen knife for allowing any part of Omi’s death to cause me even that briefest moment of relief. I had made sure to cut deep enough to scar, so that I would never forget my own small-heartedness.

I had been too hard on myself. Omi was capable of being far more small-hearted, it was clear.

There was a dusting of flour on the ground. I reached out and traced ‘MAMA’. A name appearing in a cloud, a word emanating a ghostly-white mist.

Your voracious demands. I could have accused you so many times of perversion.

Somehow, that was the hardest thing to accept. That he would throw such an accusation at her. That he would join the ranks of those unable to accept her frank sexuality.

When I was an adolescent, Mama had sat me down to tell me about the facts of life.

‘Oh, please. I’ve known for years,’ I said, aghast at the prospect of having to hear my mother even say the word ‘sex’.

‘I’m sure you know the technical side of things. The “Insert flap A into slot B” side of things,’ she said, and I almost ran out of the room. ‘But don’t tell me you don’t have questions.’

‘Well.’ I fiddled with something or the other, didn’t meet her eyes. ‘Does it hurt?’

When I looked up I could see her mind reaching back into memory. ‘Mama!’ I said. ‘Please!’

‘What?’

‘You can’t stand in front of me and start thinking about… that.’

She laughed her wonderful, unabashed laugh. ‘Sweetheart, I can’t stop being a woman just because I’m your mother. Stop looking so outraged. It’s not as though I’m showing you pictures of myself in the act.’

‘There are pictures?’

‘Of course there aren’t pictures.’ She bit off the end of the sentence and frowned. ‘Unless your father still has them.’

‘Mama!’

‘I’m joking, silly.’ She placed her palm on the top of my head.

‘You’re really not a normal mother.’

‘I know.’ She sat down on her bed and pulled me down next to her. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Some days.’

‘Aasmaani, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t. Mama, don’t.’

She leaned back, resting her weight on the heels of her hands, and smiled brightly at me. ‘Let me tell you a secret. To answer your earlier question. The first time it happened, it didn’t hurt. But it was definitely strange. And I thought, “You must be doing this wrong. Surely all that fuss can’t be about this.’” Then she rocked back with laughter again, and despite the blood rushing to my face I couldn’t help but see the joke.

When we stopped laughing and I looked up, there was Omi standing in the doorway, smiling. That look in his eyes as he walked over to her and kissed her hand – I had taken that look for nothing but love. And now, what was I to believe now?

The phone had been ringing for a long while now. My anonymous caller again. No one else had such persistence. I knew if I picked it up there would be no answer, and no originating number on my caller ID screen. I stood up to answer it anyway. I would say down the line, ‘Bring him back to me.’ I would say, ‘Keep him locked away for ever.’

But when I picked it up it went dead almost immediately.

I lay down on the sofa. Omi and Mama – what was their great love? Did it end up a catalogue of accusations? Is that what all that early passion shifted into without my even noticing it? It didn’t seem possible. But then, it didn’t seem possible that he would accuse her of perversions. What all had I failed to see about them? How much can a fifteen-year-old really know of the relationship between a man and a woman?

Yeh aag bhee bujh jaye gee.

This fire, too, will burn out.

I pulled myself upright. I wouldn’t start thinking of his poetry.

The phone rang again, my mobile this time, and my gratitude at being interrupted gave way to a feeling of disquiet when I saw the name on the display was MIRZA.

I let it ring two, three, four times. After the fifth ring it would go to voicemail. The fifth ring. I answered.

‘Who is this?’ said Mirza.

‘You’re the one calling me.’

‘I just got home from holiday to a great many tedious messages.’ His voice, as ever, was so languid it was camp. ‘Only one of any interest. Someone swearing, with feeling, into my answering machine and hanging up. I put together the time of the call with the information on caller ID and it appears that obscenity came from this number. So, I just wanted to know. Should I take it personally?

‘Mirza, you take everything personally. Even eclipses.’

There was a pause. ‘Samina?’ he said, the word barely above a whisper.

In my stomach, something somersaulted. ‘Right DNA, wrong generation.’

Another pause, and then a soft laugh. ‘Well, well, well, little Aasmaani.’

There was a crackle down the line. Was it tapped? Mirza had gone for the funeral. What did he know, what did he suspect? What could he tell me about how it really was with my mother and Omi all those years I was too busy weaving a fairytale of love to bother with anything so mundane as reality? ‘Can we meet, Mirza? I’d like to catch up.’

‘Catch up? Aasmaani, even at fourteen, you were way ahead of me.’ He laughed again. ‘But of course we can meet. No time like the present.’

We agreed on a café, which I knew would be free of the scores of Chaand Raat celebrants, and less than ten minutes later – having successfully avoided the traffic jams around areas where families had driven out to see Karachi lit up in lights like a bejewelled bride trying to draw attention away from the ungainliness of her natural façade – I reversed into an empty spot in a plot of land next to the café. As I pulled up the hand-brake I saw a man getting out of his car – a red, gleaming vehicle with aspirations to spottiness. Mirza the Snake.

I turned off my lights and ignition and watched him. The last time I had seen him he had been a man who wore creased kurta-shalwars and an air of glamorous dissipation. Long before heroin chic, Mirza had a startling beauty that was all about emaciation. Whether he picked up a book of poems or reached out to touch the Poet’s shoulder, he treated his body as something that might just fall apart, and yet it was abundantly clear – even to me when I should have been too young to understand these things – that he subjected his flesh to all manner of torments, and that it wasn’t glass but wire of which his bones were fashioned.

I never really had a personal relationship with him, the way I did with many of Omi and my mother’s friends who teased me and spoilt me and asked me for my opinions on adult matters like politics and religion and books. But he was around so often that I knew quite intimately his face, his particular gestures, the cadences of his voice. And I knew he looked at me in a way that made me ashamed to like it. Many people thought he was just another one of the Acolytes – that group of men who I always believed were the main reason my mother and Omi lived in separate homes. She had no time for them – the vaunting egos, the self-absorption, the lachrymose intoxication. ‘I loved him least after two a.m.,’ she once said of Omi, who was always early to bed except when the Acolytes came over and kept him up until dawn with whisky, poetry and hashish. But though Mirza the Snake was always part of those late-night gatherings he wasn’t really an Acolyte. He didn’t ultimately defer to Omi the way the others did, nor preface every criticism with lavish praise. In many ways, Omi regarded him as an equal because he knew more about mystic poetry from a myriad traditions around the world than anyone else. An atheist obsessed with God, that’s how my mother described him. Burdened with that love which was always just beyond reach because he didn’t believe in the Beloved.

After we all thought Omi was dead, Mirza the Snake became the most persistent of his circle who tried to share my mother’s grief with her. I remember him best from this period. One night, he walked up the driveway while my mother and I were sitting in Dad’s garden. She had been avoiding him – and everyone – for weeks.

He ambled up to her and said, ‘Push everyone else away, Samina – they’re fools for thinking they understand what you’ve lost – but this is me, Mirza. You’re the only person whose company I can bear right now and I suspect that’s not a one-way street.’ He held out his hand. ‘Let’s be each other’s companions in grief.’

I was terrified when he said that. Terrified she’d agree. This must have been soon enough after the news of the Poet’s death for me to believe I would have her to myself when the edge of grieving wore off. Before I knew that his death was the one thing with which I would never be able to compete.

But she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Let’s not pretend to be friends, Mirza. He loved me, and that’s one thing you can’t forgive me.’

He reached out his long fingers, took the cigarette from her hand and held it to his lips. ‘You burnt the only copies of his last poems,’ he said, and turned and walked out, listing slightly with the breeze.

Sixteen years later, the walk had changed. It was the walk now of a portly man able to bear all manner of buffeting. The kurta-shalwar was made of richer fabric now, the kind that didn’t wrinkle. And his features appeared to have had blotting paper held over them for a decade or more.

The Fata Morgana in the backseat of my car was gesturing for me to drive away. Mirza’s real talent, my mother used to say, was for finding a wound and driving a nail through it.

I gestured impatiently at the backseat, got out of the car and walked up to the café. Pushing open the wooden doors, I looked around the cosy space with its five tables of varying sizes, of which only the long table had customers seated at it. There was no sign of Mirza, but one of the waiters, seeing my eyes scan the room, pointed up the stairs. I climbed the steps set alongside a long window which had a tree outside festooned in twinkling fairy lights and it was with a mixture of satisfaction and panic that I saw Mirza was the only person in the small upstairs section, his girth almost spilling off the cushion of the wrought-iron chair.