Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

I leaned back in my chair. If my life were a top-rated television show, how would it go from here? I’d send a message to the Poet through a crossword puzzle. He’d realize his scribblings were getting through to me. He’d send messages back. Details of the flora, the fauna, the weather around him. He’d write about a brief but intense shower of rain. I’d find a weather-man. My next-door neighbour would happen to be a weather-man. I’d ask him, where did it rain yesterday, with a ferocity and brevity reminiscent of most passion. He’d say, there was one cloud only, right above this spot here on the map, that’s where it rained yesterday. And I’d tell no one, I’d enlist no aid, but I’d make my way to that spot, I’d face down the Minions, I’d rescue the Poet. And somewhere, far away, my mother would open a paper, hear of his return from the dead, and that would dissipate the amnesia she’d been suffering from these past fourteen years and she’d catch the next plane home.

Wasn’t that the only season finale that would leave me satisfied?

I turned my attention back to the computer and continued to scroll down my inbox. Near the bottom was a message from my father.

The subject heading: Remember her?

I clicked on the message. It was just a few sentences and a weblink.

I just found this. My first time hearing this side of her. My God! Love, Dad.

I clicked on the weblink and my computer’s audio player popped up.

A voice trying too hard to sound purposeful and trustworthy said: Samina Akram, 2 January 1986, Karachi. In conversation with Maulana Moin Haq.

The voice cut off and the audioplayer started rebuffering the sound file.

I had been there. I had been in that audience in an auditorium in Karachi, 2 January 1986, watching my mother and the maulana square up to each other – an extraordinary match-up that only took place, Omi said, because both my mother and the maulana were convinced of their ability to decimate the other in discussion. I had been sitting between Omi and Beema in the first row of the audience, and while the moderator (the term caused Omi much amusement) was introducing my mother, Omi and I were making faces at her up on the stage, trying to make her laugh, while Beema shrugged apologetically in her direction. At one point, Omi had bunched his features into a exaggerated grimace and it was the maulana, not my mother, who caught his eye. The look on the man’s bearded face almost made me fall off my chair with suppressed laughter.

I rubbed my hands over my eyes and my mother’s voice filled the office: ‘Maulana Sahib, is it asking too much of you to look at me while I speak?’

A man’s gentle voice came back: ‘Mohtarma, if you don’t respect yourself and the laws of the Qur’ān enough to keep your head covered in public, I at least respect you enough to keep my eyes averted.’

‘The laws of the Qur’ān?’ (‘Now she’s got him!’ Beema had whispered.) ‘Maulana Sahib, it embarrasses me profoundly to have to remind a scholar such as you of what is written in the Qur’ān – and I don’t mean in your translation of it, which I have read with astonishment and wonder.’ (Laughter from the audience.) ‘Within the Qur’ān itself, as you well know, there are two verses which refer to the apparel of women. Verse thirty-one of Surah An-Nur and verse fifty-nine of Surah Al-Ahzab. In one, the word “khomoorehenna” is used and in the other the word “jalabib”. Your translation, I’m afraid, seems utterly unaware that khomoorehenna comes from the word “khumar”, which simply means “a covering” rather than “a veil”. It doesn’t specify what is covered or how. And “jalabib” means a shirt or cloak. If the Almighty had wished to use the word “hijab” to more precisely indicate a head-covering I’m sure He would have done so. I know you would not want to suggest any deficiencies in His vocabulary or precision.’ (Muffled laughter from the audience, as well as some shouts of objection.) ‘It seems fairly evident from a close examination of the text that women are being enjoined, Maulana Sahib, to cover our chests in public, which I am really more than happy to do when in your company.’ (Loud laughter, in which Omi’s raucous guffaw was unmistakable.)

‘Mohtarma, I am impressed that a woman such as yourself should have taken the time to read our Holy Book. But as Shakespeare said,’ and here he switched to English, ‘“the devil can cite the scriptures to his own purposes”. I could mention verses from our own tradition which have similar warnings but I suspect Shakespeare of the West might carry more weight with you. The strictest definitions of “khumar” are irrelevant – what is relevant is its commonly accepted usage. I implore you not to spread your poison through the ranks of our young Pakistani women. It is precisely because of the divisiveness caused in religion by acts of re-interpretation that the gates of Ijtihad were closed in the thirteenth century—’

‘Maulana Sahib, there’s a difference between re-interpretation and reading.’ (And now there were hoots of delight, in largely female tones.) ‘The strictest definition of a word is never irrelevant to the intended meaning…’

‘The unity of the ummah is of paramount importance. Anyone who works against it works against Islam.’

‘And you know all about the unity of the ummah, don’t you?’ Her voice moved down a register and hearing it I knew – as I had known nearly seventeen years ago – that no jokes would follow. ‘Last night I was talking to a friend, Maulana, who has seen those planes fly to our border with Afghanistan, with volunteers – young men, little more than boys – ready to join the Afghans and Pakistanis already in the training camps preparing to battle the Soviets. Planes with volunteers from all across the Muslim world. Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt—’

‘Mohtarma, a second ago we were sitting here in Karachi talking about women’s religious obligations and suddenly you’re taking us all on a world tour.’ (He got his laughs, too.) ‘Please don’t stray from the subject.’

‘The subject is your obligations to the ummah. You take a territorial issue in Afghanistan and you make it into a matter of religious duty – you and your unlikely bedfellows in the West – and you spout phrases like “the unity of the ummah” as you hand those boys – those young, idealistic, confused, angry, devout, ready-to-be-brainwashed boys – the most sophisticated weapons and the best combat training in the world and tell them to get the infidel Soviets off Muslim soil. Soil has no religion, Maulana. If you had left those boys without that call to unity, they would be separate, untrained, spread all across the world. Some would have picked up guns, yes, and some would have lectured their sisters on how to dress. But some would have turned to local politics, or maybe even to writing bad, impassioned poetry. Or maybe, Maulana, maybe even very good, impassioned poetry.’

‘You are, of course, the expert on impassioned poetry.’ (There was no laughter now. Even through the computer’s speakers I could hear tension crackle through the room.)

‘What happens after Afghanistan, have you considered that? Where do they go next, those global guerrillas with their allegiance to a common cause and their belief in violence as the most effective way to take on the enemy? Do you and your American friends ever sit down to talk about that?’

The sound file ended.

Mama, could you have known that as your voice took on a power that left us all speechless, and brought tears to Omi’s eyes – as it brings tears now to mine and not just for reasons of hindsight – you were singing your swansong?

It was only five days later that she was told Omi had died, and that version of her – that Activist and Icon and woman of grazia—we never saw again.

I left the office and drove down to the sea, my windows open to the cool winter breeze. I drove past the lingering Eid revellers, past the theylawallas selling juice and chaat and roasted corn, past the camels with mirror-worked cloth spread over their humps who bowed each time they sat or stood. Finally, in a spot of relative isolation in front of the sea-wall, I parked the car and breathed in the scent of brine.

Omi and I used to come walking here some evenings. He told me, on one of those walks, about the first time he came to Karachi. After his mother’s death, when the rich landlord who was his father continued refusing to acknowledge Omi as his illegitimate son, the schoolmaster in the village took him under his wing and sent him to the city to live with his brother and enrol in the school at which the brother taught. Still mourning for his mother, Omi was desperately miserable the first days in the home of the schoolmaster’s brother, despite all the kindness everyone in the household lavished on him. The schoolmaster’s nephew, three years older than Omi, was the only one who didn’t fuss over him and try a little too hard to make him feel welcome. Instead, he left him alone for two days and on the third day told Omi to climb on to the back of his father’s Vespa, and drove recklessly through Karachi’s dusty streets all the way to Clifton beach – clear blue waters and fine sand, before the waste of cargo ships slicked down its wild beauty.

That was as far as Omi took the story, but it was enough. He stopped walking, looked out towards the water, scanning the horizon from right to left, and I knew that in some way he pitied me for having grown up so near the sea that I couldn’t help but take it for granted.

Is this really the most we can ask from them, the ones who have raised us? That they leave us with memories we can cherish?

My mother won that round with the maulana, no one could deny it. But to what end? She was the safety-valve who allowed us all to release some of our frustrations as we cheered her on and said that she, too, was a voice of the nation, a voice that would make itself heard. But what came of it except a lesson to all the daughters in the audience, learnt slowly over the years, that voices such as hers could be ignored or stifled or extinguished completely? My mother’s life as an activist, brave as it had been, was a lesson in futility – and in the end, she knew it.

So I had been telling myself for a long time now. But now I had her voice echoing in my ear, the laughter of the women in the audience echoing with it. And then all the sound of the world fell away and I was left in that silence – that almost holy silence – which had grown up around her, sentence by sentence, as she so artfully moved the debate to the exact space in which she had all along intended it to exist – that accountable space. How could I call that nothing? And the thrum of my own blood as I heard her speak, how could I repudiate that?

Why is it so necessary for you to believe the version of her which you cling on to so desperately, Rabia had asked me.

Because. I looked out at the water. Sunlight cut a path through the sea.

Because. Just because.

XXI

It had been forty-six hours and seventeen minutes since the second episode of Boond ended with a shot of the crossword grid, perfectly in focus. Forty-six hours and seventeen minutes, and no word from Omi. Forty-six hours and eighteen minutes now, and I was lost in a vision of dark blues and reds and jagged lines.

‘What are you thinking?’

I turned my attention away from the ceiling of the Sadequain gallery and towards my brother-in-law, who was gesturing around the large room as though he were a game-show host and this was the grand prize. Less than fifteen minutes ago he had received a phone call offering him a solo exhibition at the gallery, and he’d run into my flat and insisted that I had to accompany him to the gallery so that I could watch him leap with joy around it and then describe it all to Rabia when she got back from her weekend trip to Islamabad.

‘Don’t you mind having that as competition?’ I said, pointing my thumb at the gloriously worked ceiling.

‘Silly girl. Sadequain’s not competition. He’s the giant whose shoulders are imprinted with my feet. He’s the guy who made me stand open-mouthed in front of a painting at the age of twelve and think, my God, this is possible. You can be just human, and do this.’

‘He died a poor, depressed alcoholic, didn’t he?’

Shakeel rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Yeah. But that doesn’t erase a single line he drew.’

As we were walking down the stairs – after Shakeel had, quite literally, leapt with joy around the gallery – my phone rang.

‘Where are you?’ Ed said. ‘I’m standing outside your flat ringing your door-bell. I’m paying you a surprise visit.’

‘Well, we’re a bad O’Hara story, then. I’m around the corner from your place contemplating dropping in on you.’

‘I’m turning around. I’m walking towards the stairs. I’m almost tripping over a cat. I’ll see you at mine in a few minutes.’

Shakeel was smirking at me when I hung up. ‘We’re a bad O’Hara story,’ he said in a high-pitched voice, batting his eyelids. I slapped the back of his head and he put an arm around me. ‘When do we meet this guy? I want to see the man whose name need only be mentioned to send my sister-in-law into a paroxysm of blushes. Let me demonstrate: Ed. There you go. Beetroot Inqalab!’

‘Oh, shut up and drop me at his house. And no, you can’t come in and wait for him.’

It took only a few seconds to get to Ed’s, and it wasn’t until the chowkidar opened the gate for me and Shakeel drove away that I realized Shehnaz Saeed might be home, and if so, there could be no avoiding her any longer.

She had called me the day after.we’d watched that first episode of Boond, and I had seen her number flash up on my caller ID screen and let my answering machine pick it up. Her message had been brief. Just, ‘Please call me.’ I hadn’t – and when I mentioned it to Ed he said, ‘It’s between you and her. If you don’t want to talk to her, don’t.’ I didn’t know if she’d tried calling in the last few days. I had pulled my phone out of its socket several nights ago when the crank calling had become intolerable.

If I was lucky, I thought, pushing open the front door, I would make it up the stairs to Ed’s section of the house without bumping into her.

But the sort of luck I needed wasn’t possible in a house with a yapping chihuahua. I was only a few feet down the entrance hall when the creature heard me and launched into what sounded like a demented version of ‘O Sole Mio’.

‘Who’s there?’ I heard Shehnaz Saeed call out, and then I had no option but to walk into that elegant room from which I had so dramatically departed nine days ago.

‘Ed’s not home,’ were her first words.

‘I know. He’s on his way.’ I was sufficiently ill at ease that I was grateful to have the canine falsetto twirling at my feet, giving me an excuse to bend down and fuss over her. I thought that would pass the conversational ball into Shehnaz Saeed’s court but she didn’t say anything, and when I couldn’t bear having my hand licked any more I stood up and said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. Things have been very busy. My father was in town, and work’s a little crazy.’

‘Aasmaani, you don’t have to lie. I understand that you’re angry. Ed’s told me you have no desire to hear my excuses. And I’m sorry for that, I really am.’

‘I never said that to Ed.’ The chihuahua’s front paws were scrabbling at my shins. ‘Director, basket!’ I ordered and the animal darted out of the door.

‘Your mother never liked chihuahuas either,’ Shehnaz said.

And once again, in her presence, it was impossible to feel anything but utterly at ease. I walked over to the sofa and sat down across from her. ‘So why did you do it? Imitate my mother?’

‘Why do you imitate your mother?’

‘When?’

‘All the time. You have all these gestures. Like now. The way you’re sitting. The way your arm is crooked on the back of the sofa and your head is resting on your hand. That. Right there.’

I moved my arm down to my side. ‘I’m not…’

‘No, of course not. You’re not imitating her. You’re just sitting. That’s how you sit. You may have learnt it from her. You may have copied her at one point in time, but now that’s just the way you sit.’

‘I don’t understand your point.’

‘Look, my character in Boond, she smokes. It’s a big plot point. She smokes a very particular imported brand of cigarette from Guatemala or Ecuador or some other place that exports bananas. She has always smoked that brand, ever since she was a college student. In episode three, someone she’s trying to hide from will know that she’s been in his office because he’ll find a stub of her cigarette in his waste-paper basket. So, she’s a smoker, always has been. When we were filming that flashback pregnancy scene, the director said, OK, no smoking in this scene because she’s pregnant. She said, Shehnaz, do that air cigarette thing you did in Nashaa to show us she’s trying to quit. Did you ever see Nashaa, Aasmaani?’

‘Yes.’ It was the last telefilm she acted in before she retired.

‘Yes. Here.’ She uncurled herself from the sofa and put a tape in the VCR. ‘I was thinking of sending this to you with my driver but I didn’t know if it would make things worse.’ She pressed ‘PLAY’, and there, on-screen, was a young Shehnaz Saeed smoking air cigarettes as my mother used to.

‘I got it from her, from Samina. When I did Nashaa, early on when I was still finding my way into the character’s skin, I was having dinner with Samina and she’d run out of cigarettes so she started air smoking. And I said, can I borrow that mannerism? Take it, she said, and continued to demonstrate it for me so that I’d get it right. But once I got it right it became mine. That’s how I smoke cigarettes that aren’t really there. I don’t think of it in terms of your mother any more than you think of her when you rest your arm on the back of a sofa. I learned gestures and expression from her, Aasmaani, turns of phrase and a way of squaring my shoulders when I don’t want to show that I’m intimidated. All these things and more, I learned from your mother. But in time you internalize all that you learn, and it becomes yours. I wasn’t imitating your mother in Boond.’ She gestured to the screen once more. ‘I was imitating myself imitating her all those years ago. I’m sorry that I didn’t stop to think that it would upset you. Believe me, that possibility didn’t even cross my mind.’

‘I see.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘You said, I have all these gestures which are hers.’

‘Gestures, cadences, entire sentences of speech.’

‘Like what? Tell me.’

‘It’ll only make you self-conscious. You are your own woman, Aasmaani. But it does make my breath stop sometimes, the way Samina peeps out from behind your eyes.’

There was something in her voice as she said my mother’s name for which I couldn’t quite find a word.

‘You should come for dinner next week,’ she said, her tone changing into briskness. ‘My husband will be back from Rome for a few days. I think you’d like him. Although, no, actually, let me retract that invitation until I check with Ed. The two of them alternate between being civil and pretending the other one doesn’t exist.’

I’d almost forgotten there was a husband. ‘Why does he spend so much time in Rome?’

‘His boyfriend lives there.’ ‘Oh.’

She cracked a peanut shell open with her teeth and looked remarkably pleased with herself. ‘That was almost exactly your mother’s reaction all those years ago. Don’t start giving me those pitying looks, darling. He’s a lovely man and he’s given me both unstinting friendship and stability.’ She gestured around the opulent room. ‘In exchange I’ve given him the freedom to be with the love of his life, his university sweetheart, who, being Jewish and male – a terrible combination, in these parts – was entirely unacceptable to his family, who threatened to disinherit him. Also, his mother kept having a stroke each time he said he would rather live without money than live a lie, and he’s a real mother’s boy. So, he married me. Made Mummy happy – and convinced her that homosexuality is cured with just a little bit of parental firmness and a friendly doctor who’s happy to misdiagnose heartburn. And after that, he could spend as much time as he wanted in Rome on “business trips” with David. Close your mouth, Aasmaani, you look undignified.’

‘But…’ I looked at her curled on the couch, unsure if she was playing another game with me as she had that first time we met. ‘But you’re Shehnaz Saeed. You could have found plenty of men who would have given you financial stability and also…’

‘Sex?’

‘In a nutshell.’

‘Yes, well, there’s the rub.’ She squared her shoulders.

And just like that, it was clear. The Others, Ed had called her various lovers, and it hadn’t occurred to me to think about the absence of gender in that term.

‘You and Mama. You were in love with her.’

She looked steadily at me. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ I leaned back in my sofa and tried to form a reaction to that. ‘When did that happen?’

‘Why?’ she demanded, with sudden force. ‘Does the timing of it alter the unnaturalness of the emotion?’

‘Unnaturalness? Is that what you think I think? Shehnaz – Aunty – my mother didn’t raise any bigoted children.’

At that she ducked her head and smiled, and I smiled back, my mother’s disdain for the sheer stupidity of narrow-mindedness filling the room around us.

When Shehnaz Saeed looked up again, there was almost palpable relief on her face. ‘It probably started the first time we met. At least that seems inevitable now. But I became aware of it a few months after the Poet died.’

‘And how did she…? Did she reciprocate?’

Shehnaz Saeed laughed. ‘It’s sweet of you to pretend to believe that’s a possibility.’

‘Well…” I spread my hands. ‘You’re a total babe. And I can’t pretend to know the range of my mother’s… interests.’

‘You really are so much like her. Her way of letting me down gently was to say, “My hormones are too inscribed with the habit of Him to consider anyone else. Of any gender.”’

‘And that didn’t stop you loving her?’

‘Oh no.’

For a little while we both sat where we were, looking straight ahead. Then I went over and sat down beside her. ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

I leaned back and breathed in deeply. ‘For loving her unreservedly after Omi died. I’ve thought she didn’t have that from anyone.’

‘Oh, darling. She had it from you.’

‘We both know that isn’t true.’

Shehnaz Saeed sighed. ‘She understood. She said adolescence is horrible enough without having to deal with a mother unable to cope with the world and a father-figure brutally killed.’

‘She talked to you about me?’

‘Of course she did.’ She rested her palm on the top of my head. That was one of my mother’s gestures of affection, but somehow I knew this time that Shehnaz wasn’t imitating, merely replicating a gesture she’d learnt from my mother and made her own through using it unselfconsciously. ‘She talked to everyone about you. You were the world to her.’

‘The Poet was the world to her.’ Despite everything, that particular scar still bit down into my bones.

Her hand slipped off my head. ‘They were mythic,’ she said. ‘The Poet and the Activist. They walked into a room and crowds parted for them. The sea itself would have parted for them if they’d so demanded. That’s how we felt, all of us who were their audience.’ She looked down at her finger nails, and pushed a cuticle back to reveal a tiny sliver of a half-moon between her nail polish and skin.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her. Tell me about you and her.’

‘You sure this doesn’t make you uncomfortable?’

‘Why should it?’ And then I knew: Ed. The Others, he had spat out. ‘It’s your son, isn’t it? He’s the one who called it unnaturalness?’

‘Don’t think badly of him for it. If there’d been other men in my life he wouldn’t have been any happier. Oh, and I dealt so badly with it. It wasn’t until several years after my divorce that I was able to face the truth about myself, and then I was ashamed, Aasmaani, of who I was. Ed was such a sensitive child. I think he picked up that feeling of shame from me. And of course I wasn’t going to tell him outright. So I lied and sneaked around. Made him spend the night at the homes of cousins he didn’t like. I don’t even know when or how he found out – but one day in his adolescence he hurled it at me. You’re not a real woman, he said.’

I could see him saying it. And I could see him hating himself for saying it afterwards.

‘He was angriest about your mother. He thought we were having an affair and I never denied it.’

‘Why let him think something that would make him so angry if it wasn’t true?’

‘Because it wasn’t any of his business. That’s what Samina taught me – that it wasn’t anyone’s business and no one had a right to question me about it and demand answers. She was, you know, the person who finally made me dispense with all feelings of shame. My husband was largely responsible, too, but it was Samina who took that final filament of shame off my skin and just blew it away.’

‘How?’

‘I delivered some tortured monologue to her one evening. About desire and identity and what we admit to ourselves and what we admit to others and how do we know when reining in desire is repression and when it’s just good manners? I went on and on about this. And when I finally stopped to draw breath, Samina shrugged and said, “I’ve never liked mangoes. People say it means I’m not a true Pakistani, but I’ve never liked mangoes. Nothing to be done about it, and frankly I don’t see why I should bother to try. The way I see it I’m just expanding people’s notions of what it means to be Pakistani.” And that was the entire conversation for her, right there.’

Mama. Always a woman who could cut to the quick of things.

‘I do wonder sometimes,’ Shehnaz Saeed went on. ‘Did I love her enough to love her unselfishly, really unselfishly? If she’d pulled out of her depression and found herself in a frame of mind to consider being with someone else, and that someone else wasn’t me, would I have been able to accept it?’

‘We’re back to the depression storyline, are we? The one which meets with such high viewer approval it’s going to keep running for ever.’

‘You don’t accept that she suffered depression?’ She was looking at me as though I’d just told her the world was flat.

I shrugged. ‘She stepped out of her character.’

‘She did what?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. Forget it.’

‘Stepped out of her character?’ I didn’t know if she was ignoring me or if I hadn’t actually spoken aloud. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it, I suppose. Though it’s more a question of your character stepping out of you, isn’t it? Or of the different parts not holding together, or one part overwhelming the rest. There’s still so little we understand about it, isn’t there, for all the strides science has made in the last decade and a half?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Shehnaz Saeed walked over to her bookshelf and pulled out an armload of books. ‘Here. Take these home. Read them.’ She opened her arms and the books fell on to the sofa with a thomp! which released a spray of dust from the sofa cushions. I looked at the titles. Living With Depression. Brain Chemistry. What Can We Do? Virginia Woolf: Diaries and Letters.

I looked up at her, my eyebrow arching. ‘Virginia Woolf? Oh, come on.’

She sat down again. ‘Sometimes, near the end, I didn’t see her for days or weeks because she couldn’t even come to the phone or get out of bed. I used to go to your house in the morning, while you were at school, and just sit by her bedside talking to her, or not talking, just sitting there. Some days she’d come over and all she’d do was weep. Your stepmother and I, we convinced Samina she should get professional help. But we were both so clueless. We just saw a sign outside a clinic saying “PSYCHOTHERAPIST” and we took her there. Without a single reference. The man was a complete nightmare. He told her that what she was experiencing was delayed guilt about having an extra-marital relationship for all those years. She said – it was one of her stronger days – she said, “Doctor, then I’m afraid things are going to get much worse for me. Because I think I might do it again, and this time it might even be with a woman.”’

‘There you go. She was making fun of him. And of the whole process. Because she knew it wasn’t depression. She knew she didn’t need to seek out professional help.’

‘It was one of her periods of reprieve. That’s what she called them. She always knew they wouldn’t last very long.’

I hated those periods most of all. Those moments, those days, sometimes weeks, when she reverted to her old self and became the Samina of grazia again. I didn’t understand then what she was doing, what was happening to her, what she was making happen. And so those days were just reminders of what I’d lose when she retreated into her self-imposed darkness again.

Incandescent. Aflame. Those were the words we all used about her. She was supposed to be the Olympic torch, the fire that never burnt out. I would have thrown myself into that fire to keep it alight, but that power was never mine. So all I could do in those last two years was watch with dread each time she emerged into brilliance.

‘That was the cruellest thing she did. Remind us what she used to be like, what she could be like.’

Shehnaz Saeed closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘It was like watching beautiful, fragile butterfly wings exploding out of a chrysalis. It could never be anything but short-lived.’

Stay believing that, I thought. Keep loving her without anger. I won’t be the one to tell you the truth.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything.’

‘Why did you stop acting? It wasn’t because you were planning to have more children, was it?’

‘I don’t know how that story got started. I never publicly gave any reason. Well, I suppose that is how the story got started. People need reasons, don’t they? If you don’t give them one, they’ll pick one for you. I just stopped. That’s it.’

‘So it’s just coincidence that it happened just a few months after the Poet died? No correlation there?’

She stood up and walked towards the windows. It was dark now. She drew the heavy silk curtains. ‘I was offered a part which would have required being away from Karachi for several weeks. I didn’t want to leave her. And I was recently married – he’d put this house in my name – so my bank account didn’t require me to work any more. Things snowballed in my mind after that.’