Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Kamila Shamsie
Salt and Saffron

For Victoria Hobbs and Alexandra Pringle

THE HOUSE OF DARD-E-DIL

(showing those characters who appear in this story)

^*Great-Aunt One-Liner, Booby, Usman related to Aliya through this line

^†Starched Aunts, Mousy Cousin, Bachelor Uncle related to Aliya through this line

~ ~ ~

All right, don’t scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.

Of course, reduce all stories to their basic elements and you’ll see all families are possessed of prejudice – that alternative name for ‘fear’. The only thing that makes us stand apart is our particular choice of … I want to say ‘bugaboo’. I often want to say ‘bugaboo’. It’s a word that demands to be said out loud, particularly among bilingual Pakistanis who recognize its resemblance to ‘baghal boo’ or ‘armpit odour’, but its meaning ‘object of baseless terror’ makes it misleading in this conversation. Nothing baseless in our terror; we have five hundred years of empirical evidence on which to base our fear of not-quite-twins. Ours has always been a scientific family, that way. So I suppose we are unusual. Because, though we are like all families in the almost religious fervour of our prejudices, all the other families we know can point to nothing but stereotype, ignorance and jealousy of their own privilege as a basis for those prejudices and, I’ll admit, our contrasting historicity has always made us feel superior.

One of my earliest memories is of Dadi cackling when she heard the news of Hussain Asif’s marriage to Natasha Shah. ‘Shia Muhajir marries Sunni Sindhi! How will the bigots react? Disown your own kind, or accept the enemy! Ming-ling! Ring-a-ling!’ Of course, no multi-culti appreciation of marrying across both sect and ethnicity lay at the root of my grandmother’s words. She merely wanted all other family biases confounded and challenged so that she could hold up her head and say, ‘We of the royal family of Dard-e-Dil have always held true to our family fears.’ No marriages, conversions or redistributions of wealth can change that. Not-quite-twins are not-quite-twins; no way around that. Oh, they may escape undetected for a time, but ultimately they are incapable of disguise, incapable of escaping the category into which they are born, incapable of causing our family anything but pain. I know. I’ve read the histories.

Confused? Would you rather I changed the topic to yak milk production?

Chapter One

Yak’s milk is green. But, of course, I never got round to telling my fellow passengers that choice tidbit. It takes more than a Nepalese ox to distract attention away from my family. And the occupant of the aisle seat across from me was so grateful for my high-volume chatter – which replaced the usual boredom and non-recycled air of the transatlantic economy-class cabin with murder, war, jealousy, and rapidly reversing fortune – that he pulled my luggage off the conveyor belt at Heathrow while I was still stuck in the immigration line, waiting for a turbaned Sikh who dropped his aitches to finish scrutinizing my Pakistani passport.

‘Here,’ aisle seat said in an American accent, when I finally zigzagged my way to the conveyor belt through luggage trolleys, unknown languages and a hysterical Nordic man who had just been informed that his baggage had been mysteriously rerouted to Nicaragua. ‘I figured this was yours. Any others?’

I wanted to say, Where are you from? You look Pakistani now that you’ve removed your baseball cap, though on the plane I assumed you were a tanned, possibly multi-racial, American. But instead I shook my head, no, and hoisted my grey suitcase with its Gemini zodiac sticker on to a trolley. Aisle seat said I should go ahead, he was still waiting for his second suitcase, no point in me hanging around. He was just being polite, of course – that much was obvious by the pauses between words and the way his eyes darted around the terminal building to register his distaste for the surroundings – but at that moment I really didn’t have the energy that the laws of reciprocal courtesy required so I just nodded and thanked him. We hugged goodbye (his initiative, but I saw no reason to resist) and when I turned to go he said, ‘Hey, Aliya. How much of it is true?’

I smiled. ‘A good storyteller never tells.’

I walked a few steps away and then turned back. My body had just begun to register the feel of his arms around me. What would my grandmother say if she knew I’d been hugging strange men in airports? He was facing away from me, staring at the leather flaps at the end of the conveyor belt through which the luggage emerged, so I could continue to look at him and regret that I’d spent so much time on the plane chattering to anyone who cared to listen (two girls had even sat cross-legged in the aisle, listening to my stories until the flight attendant shooed them away and then hung around herself, a pot of coffee cooling in her hand). If I’d been a little less intent on entertaining everyone maybe I would have leant over the aisle and talked, actually talked, to him. He knew all my family stories – all, except the most important one – and I didn’t even know his name. I moved towards him, then felt absurd and walked away.

I stepped out into London. Filled my lungs with the 6 a.m. air of summer and slowly, in the lingering manner in which you might peel off a bandage in order to prolong the joy of seeing skin where last there was exposed flesh, I exhaled all residues of aeroplanes and airports from my system. I could have spread my arms wide and spun in tiptoed circles with the joy of terra firma and familiar breezes, but it seemed more expedient to flag down the nearest taxi instead.

‘Where are you coming from?’ the cabbie asked, after we had been driving in silence long enough for me to adjust the ‘cultural expectations’ knob in my brain from ‘America: chatty’ to ‘England: not’.

‘America,’ I replied.

‘But you’re not American,’ he said, in a tone which seemed to imply that I might not be aware of this fact.

‘No, I’m Pakistani.’

‘Ball tamperers,’ he muttered. Even if he was merely talking about the not-so-long-ago cricket controversy between our two countries, that wasn’t polite. I responded with silence. Not the kind of silence with which my cousin, Mariam, filled her days, but rather the silence of my grandmother, which was meant to inform those who received it of the lowliness of their stature. Dadi always accompanied those silences with an upward tilt of her head, as though she were posing for the head of a coin. Strange how, in remove, single gestures can be all that remain to us of people who once inhabited the daily tos-and-fros of our lives. In Massachusetts it was the memory of that tilted head which kept me from writing to Dadi. I suppose the tilt encapsulated for me the way Dadi behaved about Mariam Apa.

The cabbie pulled up to my St. John’s Wood destination – after what seemed an unnecessary detour via Lord’s – and I tipped him a more than generous amount. (That was another Dadi trick for making the lowly feel lower, but it didn’t seem to produce the desired effect.) I waited for him to drive away before sitting down on my suitcase in the tiny parking lot of Palmer House. Halfway to home, and not just geographically. There, two floors up, the red brick with its starburst of cracks, where the tenant of Flat 121 had slammed down a hammer and yelled at my cousins and me, ‘If you don’t stop that singing it’ll be your heads next.’ And there, behind the fence, the garbage bin in which I had hidden amongst green cans during a game of hide-and-seek, where curiosity taught me the taste of beer and my father, on finding me, taught me the meaning of ‘backwash’, embellishing details sufficiently to engender in me an unshakable paranoia regarding shared drinks. Oh, and up, between the white lace curtains of Flat 77, my cousin Samia staring down at me.

‘What are you up to, Ailment?’ she shouted. ‘Have you gone mental?’

‘No, just sentimental,’ I said, and rolled my suitcase to the front door.

Upstairs, Samia flung her arms around me and pulled me into the flat. ‘Look at you, you America-return! Graduated and all! Can’t believe it’s been five years since.’ She held me at arm’s length and scrutinized me. For a moment I felt as though I were a child again and she was the oh-so-cool elder cousin whose opinion mattered so much to me that I would go out of my way to annoy her just so that she wouldn’t detect my devotion. ‘You’re looking so … I mean, so! Swear to God. When your mother told me you had cut your hair, I wasn’t sure your face could bear the attention, but it can. It really can.’

‘Thanks, and you look quite ugly,’ I said, irritated at myself for feeling so grateful for that non-compliment. I glanced around at the new decor with its Bukhara rug and paisleyed floor-cushions and Mughal miniatures. Samia, it appeared, had become one of those desis who drink Pepsi in Pakistan and lassi in London.

‘You lie so well, everyone will know we’re related,’ Samia said, handing me a mug of tea. She didn’t add, No one would know it by looking at us, though that was true enough. She had the angular features, prominent clavicle and straight black hair of Dadi and my father, a throwback to the Rajput princess who was so beautiful that one of my ancestors from the Dard-e-Dil royal family abducted her and dragged her to a battlefield, hoping that her face would seduce enemy soldiers into dropping their swords and rushing for paper to compose ghazals of devotion. The plan might have worked had it not been that the princess, outraged that common soldiers were to look upon her, slashed her face with her fingernails before the battle began. My ancestor was so overcome by her proud courage that he married her, and went on to win the battle anyway.

Somehow, that story seemed quite romantic when I was fifteen.

Needless to say, I do not look like the Rajput princess. Which doesn’t bother me much, though I really would have liked a prominent clavicle. Family members use words like ‘agreeable’ and ‘pleasant’ regarding my features, and go on so much about the beauty mark (no one ever says ‘mole’) on my cheek that it’s obvious that’s my only redeeming feature. My ‘bedroom eyes’ also attract much comment, but let’s be frank, they only make me look like Garfield.

I have the unfortunate habit of looking very focussed when I am in fact distracted; a tendency that is a great asset in most classrooms, but has often landed me in trouble elsewhere. I suppose while my mind wandered down ancestral paths my eyes must have been fixed on some aspect of the flat’s new decor, because Samia said, ‘Look, Aloo, I know this has always been your home away from, so it must be just a little bizarre to think I’ve taken it over, but really, truly, I’m only here doing research for a few months.’

‘Oh, please, Samia, you’re such a moron sometimes. It’s family property.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Can we avoid the tangle of family rights and privileges for just a few more seconds?’

Samia grinned. ‘Yes. Good. Top Ten remark. I was just leading up to telling you that you’re stuck in the spare bedroom.’

‘No hass. It’s where I always sleep when I stay here with my parents.’

‘Yes, but there are new tenants next door, and their bedroom shares a wall with yours. They’re newly-weds. The walls might shake a little. Speaking of which …’

‘Yes?’

Samia raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I just thought I’d generously provide you with a lead-in to any goosy jossip in your life,’ she said.

‘I think you’re confusing my life with yours.’

‘No goose?’

‘Well, maybe a gander or two. Nothing worth mentioning.’ What a thing to say about all the boys at college I had liked enough to consider liking even more. They were all brimming with rage against the world’s injustices, those boys. All of them. So how could I tell them the story I would have to tell them if there was to be anything approaching intimacy between us? I learnt many things at college, but the only art I perfected was the art of stepping away with a shrug.

‘Hunh.’ Samia fiddled with the heart-shaped pendant around her neck, but I wasn’t about to sit through an exhaustive – or should I say, exhausting – account of her romantic entanglements, so I just sipped my tea and frowned at the calcium spot on my thumb nail.

‘Oh, well. Good flight?’

I shrugged. ‘I kept the galleries entertained with stories about the family.’

Samia rolled her tongue under her upper lip. With relatives, even those you haven’t seen for many years, as I hadn’t seen Samia since I was seventeen and she twenty-one, you can recognize what their expressions hide because someone you know well – in this case, my father – has exactly the same manner of concealment.

‘No,’ I said, skimming my palm on the underside of the mug before setting it down, and then wiping my palm vigorously on my jeans. ‘Not that story. I take it you’ve heard some melodramatic family version of how I reacted to all that stuff four years ago.’

Samia tugged my earlobe. ‘I wanted to come back home, you know. Mainly because of you. But between summer jobs and research and other stuff …’

‘Like Jack, short for John.’

‘Yeah, that loser.’ We fell silent for a moment and then Samia said, ‘Have you ever asked yourself why you don’t tell that story?’

‘Uf tobah! You’re a historian not a psychologist, Samo.’ I stood up and dragged my suitcase into the spare bedroom, pushing away my cousin’s hand when she tried to help me. It was happening already. Five minutes with a relative and I was becoming a moody cow. Moo-dy cow. Well, that’s all right. Still a shred of humour remaining.

‘So, how long before you head off to the homeland?’ Samia asked, following me into the bathroom.

‘Tomorrow morning. You didn’t read the e-mail I sent, did you?’ I yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it at Samia.

‘Not with any kind of obsessive attention to detail.’

I turned on the shower. The rest of Samia’s reply was punctured by the needles of water that tattooed my body, so her words became indistinct and all that remained was the lilt and tempo of her voice, which could have been the lilt and tempo of any of my female relatives except one. I was not showering, I was carrying out a ritual, a ritual of arrival in London, and part of the ritual was to miss Mariam Apa, which I did, but the other part of the ritual was to imagine what she was doing, right now, and that I couldn’t do. My imagination could accommodate aliens and miracles and the taste of certain men’s sweat, but not that.

I turned off the shower and said, ‘I don’t tell that story, because it still doesn’t have an ending.’

Chapter Two

‘Is yaks’ milk really green?’ I asked Samia, settling down to my second mug of tea.

She shrugged and pulled my wet hair to check that it squeaked. ‘That’s really so not important.’

Which is the closest she’s ever come to conceding ignorance. Fact is, I’m sure no one in the family knows any more than she or I do on the subject. But we all know that my great-grandfather’s declaration, on 28 February 1920, that he had just heard yaks’ milk was green and, therefore, he felt impelled to inform his cousin, the Nawab, he was giving up his courtier’s life in order to become a scientist and study yak milk production, was what jolted my great-grandmother into premature labour.

Taj, the midwife, was summoned. A woman whose veins stood up a centimetre from the backs of her hands, Taj had delivered every member of my family born in Dard-e-Dil since 1872. By the time my great-grandfather was envisioning all the honours he would receive for investigating lactose colouration Taj was so shrunken and wrinkled that rumour had it she was regressing into babyhood and was only awaiting a suitable womb into which she could tunnel and complete the circle of her life.

When she entered my great-grandmother’s bedroom, dressed as always in a gharara and looking like a deep-fried shrimp with wide, embroidered cotton trousers in place of a tail, all the hovering women, relatives and servants alike, scurried out. Only the Begum of Dard-e-Dil attempted to stay with her kinswoman and childhood friend through the birth, but Taj raised an eyebrow at her and, though the Begum may not have scurried, she did leave with a haste that was less than regal. It was all very well to have titles, and sufficient gold to cover all the streets and fields of Dard-e-Dil and still have enough to gild all the mango trees, but that didn’t allow you to stand up to Taj, who had the family’s umbilical cords. I kid you not. She never left a delivery room without one.

(Trace back the origins of the Urdu expression of disdain – ‘Who do you think you are? Was your umbilical cord buried here?’ – and you might just find it was first used to insult a member of the Dard-e-Dil family born between 1872 and 1920.)

Where, if at all, did Taj bury those Dard-e-Dil umbilical cords? No one knows. In 1890, immediately after my great-grandfather’s cousin, the Nawab of Dard-e-Dil (Binky to his intimates), was born, his father, the hairless Nawab, told one of his courtiers to follow Taj when she left the palace and find out what she did with the umbilical cord. (The fear of not-quite-twins had been with the Dard-e-Dil family for over three and a half centuries at this point, and a miasma had arisen out of history to waft over any irregularity related to childbirth.) The courtier was discovered, two days later, in a neighbouring state, stealing pork from the kitchen of the British Residency. He could offer no explanation for this act. After that, no one tried following Taj again. The hairless Nawab earned a reputation for his strong sense of justice by deciding that an umbilical cord, even a royal one, was not worth forfeiting a True Believer’s place in heaven. It was pork, you understand, not theft, that marked the courtier for hell.

But I doubt any of this was on my great-grandmother’s mind as she pushed and pushed and pushed and Taj held up first one and then another and then another baby boy, and said, ‘Did you hear the midnight chimes?’

The quality of my great-grandmother’s shrieks was different enough from her labour cries to bring the women of the family rushing back into the room. Taj handed the triplets to the Begum, who was the first through the door, and then disappeared out of the room, out of the palace, out of my family’s life, three twined and bloodied umbilical cords in her hand.

So, three sons. One born just before midnight, on 28 February. One born just after midnight, on 29 February. One born at midnight, on the cusp of the leap year, his head emerging on 28 February, the rest of his body following the next day. My great-grandmother couldn’t have been more successful in birthing not-quite-twins if she’d planned it. Though I don’t suppose you can plan a thing like that. Of course, everyone still blamed Taj for the whole thing, quite overlooking her previous forty-eight years of midwifery, during which there were no not-quites and only three stillbirths.

‘As a feminist I feel I should object to the Taj story.’ I was lying flat on the floor so that Samia could pound airport tension out of my spine, my voice rising and falling with every thump. ‘I mean look, it’s got two of the archetypal female elements. The crone and the mother. The only thing it needs to fulfil all stereotypes is the virgin.’

‘Well, don’t look at me.’ Samia practised dance steps along my back.

‘I think you’ve just paralysed me.’

‘Such gratitude!’ Samia lay down and rested her head against my back. More than anything else, more than mangoes, gol guppas, nihari and naans, more than cricket mania, more than monsoon rains, more than crabbing beneath a star-clustered sky, what I missed about Karachi was the intimacy of bodies.

‘Besides,’ Samia said, ‘aren’t crones full of … What’s that term? You know, like Ego in Oh Hello?’

‘Iago in Othello. I hope you’re just trying to be funny.’ I traced the lozenge-shaped pattern on the rug with my forefinger and remembered playing a strange form of hopscotch in my grandmother’s bedroom, along with Samia and her brother Sameer, with the geometrical designs on Dadi’s carpet standing in as hopscotch squares.

‘Motiveless malignancy, that’s it. Can’t get into Crone School without it. But Taj had a reason the size of Everest to hate the family.’

‘If you’re willing to consider the possibility that Iago is in love with Othello, then—’

‘Oh, shut up. Who cares?’ Samia rolled over, propped her head on her hand and looked at me. ‘But listen, is it true that you once asked your Dadi if Taj’s name appears on our family tree?’

‘No.’ Until Samia asked that question it hadn’t really occurred to me that, yes, Taj was family too. God, it was even larger than I had thought, this pool of my relatives out in the world, generations of people with Samia’s hair, my father’s eyes, Mariam Apa’s smile, and if I saw one of those cousins on a street would I recognize something in them, would I say, We’ve never met but I know the jut of your clavicle, the curve of it. And what if, what if, in addition to the hair, the smile, the collarbone straining against the skin, what if there were also veins rising a centimetre above the backs of the hands?

‘Really?’ The disappointed voice of someone who’s just had a family myth shattered. ‘You never said anything like that at all?’

‘Nuh-uh. Though there was that time I got frightened by a squirrel and Dadi just looked at me in such disgust and said something like, “And to think you are descended from the Nawab who killed a tiger with his bare hands.” And I—’

‘Did you just say, a squirrel?’

‘It was a big squirrel. And I said to Dadi, “That paragon of bravery you just mentioned – isn’t he the same guy who raped Taj’s mother?”’

‘No, wait!’ Samia held up her hand for silence. ‘Let me guess. She said, of course it wasn’t rape. He was a Nawab.’

‘Worse. She recited “Leda and the Swan”.’

Samia fell forward, laughing. ‘Abida Nani! Always full of surprises.’

If you’re trying to understand how exactly Samia and I are related you might suppose from Samia’s words that my Dadi is her Nani, which means my father and Samia’s mother are siblings and, therefore, Samia and I are first cousins. It’s never that simple. Dadi is my father’s mother; she is not, however, Samia’s mother’s mother as Samia’s use of the term ‘Nani’ implies, but rather Samia’s mother’s mother’s sister, and so Samia and I are second cousins. While I’m climbing up the family tree let me add that my grandparents, Dadi and Dada, or Abida and Akbar if you prefer the familiarity of first names, were also second cousins, and Dada was one of those three sons, the not-quite-twins, who brought such heartache to the family. But that comes later. Of course, it really came earlier.

‘You can laugh,’ I said, looking up at the painting of an emperor and his courtiers on a hunt, which has hung in the flat as long as I can remember. The emperor on a horse, surrounded by armed men on foot. What courtier would ever allow a ruler to get within wrestling distance of a tiger? ‘But it really sums up Dadi’s view of royalty. The Nawab as Zeus; I mean, consider the implications. She thinks he was a god. And he wasn’t even a Nawab when he raped Taj’s mother. He was still just heir apparent. Not that I’m saying the title or lack thereof makes the slightest difference.’

Samia stood up, pulled an anthology of poetry off the shelf, and thumbed through the pages. ‘Suno,’ she said. ‘“How can those terrified vague fingers push/ The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” Give your dadi a qatra more credit. The poem is about the seductiveness of power, right? Was it rape or seduction? The question is there. The fingers are terrified, the thighs loosen. Both things go on. We’re too modern to appreciate the aura of kings-to-be. And of gods disguised as swans. And, hang on just a … Now that I think of it, in what rash of clairvoyance do we presume Taj’s mother was unwilling?’

I turned away. ‘Dadi doesn’t understand complexity.’

‘Your view of her has changed one hundred and twenty-three degrees since we last met.’

‘Everything changed four years ago. Everything.’

Samia put her arms around me and pulled me close, my head resting against her chest. ‘Wasn’t there something about Zeus’s rape, seduction, jo bhi, of Leda that had something to do with twins?’

‘You’re right! Leda had sex with her husband, Tyndareus, on the same day that Zeus did what Zeus did. And nine months later Leda laid twin eggs. From one came Helen and Pollux, children of Zeus, and from the other came Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Tyndareus. Talk about not-quite-twins!’

‘Arré, maybe we’re descended from Leda.’

‘It’s mythology, cuz. And from a cultural tradition not our own.’

‘Actually, Point A, ancient Greek texts were kept alive through Arab translations, which were translated from Arabic back into European languages when Europe was ready to stop being barbaric and have a cultured moment. My grandmother in her little house on the Mediterranean is very adamant about this matter. And, Point B, it doesn’t sound a whole cartload more mythical than some of the stuff that’s gone on in our clan. Speaking of which, did you hear about Sameer’s lizard experience? In the loo. The bloody chhipkali practically attacked him. It was the same colour as the floor and it moved with speed.’

And then she was off, recounting a tale worthy of a place beside all the best lizard stories of our family. The one about Samia and Sameer’s grandmother ripping off her sari at a state dinner because she thought she felt a lizard run down her spine; the one about Dadi’s grandmother, who saw a lizard nestling between the pillows by her foot and reacted by leaping off her palanquin, thus showing her face to men who were neither eunuchs nor close relatives; and the one about the lizard, red and large-throated, which clambered on the grilles outside our cousin Usman’s window, prompting screams that turned into full-blown hysteria seconds later when Usman’s mother uttered the four most terrifying words imaginable: It’s in the house.

At college I was famous for my storytelling abilities, but I never told anyone that my stories were mere repetition, my abilities those of a parrot. Oh, they are a talking people, my relatives, and I have breathed in that chatter, storing it in those parts of my lungs (the alveoli, the bronchi) whose names suggest a mystery beyond breath and blood. And yes, when the need arises I can exhale those words and perpetuate the myth that is nothing more than myth because it forgets Mariam Apa; the myth, that is, of my family’s across-the-board, no-exceptions, one-hundred-percent-all-the-way garrulousness. But when I am my only audience, the wit and the one-liners, the retorts and the rebukes are just so much noise and I crave something silent as a wisp of smoke.

I can think of no one who knows me who would believe any of that. Maybe not even me. Maybe.

‘But Aliya,’ Samia said. ‘A squirrel?’