Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

‘Abida.’ He hadn’t even seen me.

Dadi, who had slept soundly through her sister’s chatter, woke up with a start.

Her hand went to her mouth to stifle a scream.

‘Akbar?’

The man shook his head.

‘Taimur, Taimur. You’re not dead, you’re not.’

The man shook his head again and walked forward into the moonlight. ‘I was always third on your list, Abbie.’

‘Sulaiman …’

Chapter Twenty-Two

In Book VIII of The Odyssey a bard at the court of King Alcinous entertains the assembly with tales of the crafty Odysseus, hero of the Trojan war, beloved of the grey-eyed goddess, wanderer in search of a way home. Before the bard has finished his tale a stranger weeps and is asked to identify himself. He says, ‘Behold Odysseus!’

Imagine how the bard must have felt to see before him that legendary figure whose name was more familiar on his tongue than the names of his own children. Imagine that, and you might begin to understand how I felt when I saw Sulaiman. I had always assumed that he was, like Taimur and Akbar, a man from another age, mythical, our lives not destined to overlap. His presence, just feet from me, had to be a trick or an apparition. How could he be alive when his brothers had been dead so long?

‘Look at you.’ His voice was strangely familiar; I had heard something like it many times when Aba imitated his own father’s voice with all its velvety softness. He propped his cane against a chair and sat down on Dadi’s bed. ‘Look at you. I thought I never would.’

Dadi’s hands trembled across his face. She touched a white scar at the corner of his mouth. That was where Akbar had punched him so many years ago. She clenched her hands and sat back. ‘Why now?’

‘Because we’re dying. We can’t rely on tomorrows.’

Dadi patted her hair. ‘You could have waited for one more tomorrow. I look quite good for my age, you know, when I have a little time to get dressed and put on some make-up.’

Sulaiman laughed. I liked his laugh; it hinted at a vast capacity for delight. ‘The vanity of Abida. Still unchecked.’

‘The same can’t be said of the Naz of Abida.’

‘No one has ever had more right to Naz than you.’

Dadi patted his hands. ‘Where shall we begin? Not with apologies.’

‘No, never with that. With an answer to your question. Why now? Because I was just in London, where my charming great-niece, Rehana, introduced me to my even more charming great-niece, Samia, and both of them then proceeded to give me an absolute earful for my stubbornness, called up a travel agent, and gave me your address. They had everything organized, from connections at the visa office to a car driven by Meher’s grandson waiting for me at Karachi airport. Poor Mohommed nearly fainted when he saw me.’

Dadi waved her hands. ‘Those details can wait. Tell me about you, Sulaiman. Tell me about, oh, everything. You have children? Grandchildren?’

Sulaiman touched her knee. ‘Abida, did he hate me to the end?’

‘So you know he died.’

‘Yes. I heard about it just weeks after it happened. Someone who knew someone who knew someone in Karachi told me. Tried to find Taimur after that, but nothing. Then I heard that his daughter was here and that Taimur, too, was dead.’

‘Sulaiman, that someone in Karachi was me. I saw to it that you were notified. I was sure you would come. I was sure at the very least you would write.’

‘I was sure you would write. Besides, it was nineteen seventy-one. There was a war on. And after that, as I said, you keep waiting for tomorrow. Did Akbar hate me to the end?’

‘Your name, and Taimur’s, were the last words on his lips.’

I think he knew she was lying. He looked at her as if to say that Akbar’s last words couldn’t possibly have been about anyone other than her.

‘Abida, there’s something I should have told you long ago. Something about Taimur.’

What he told her was this: when Abida and Meher’s parents returned to Dard-e-Dil in 1938, after a year of living in Delhi, Akbar and Taimur and Sulaiman took one look at their childhood playmate, the erstwhile tomboy Abida, and did a triple take. The other girl-cousins had become women at the ages of fifteen or sixteen (in Baji’s case, closer to fourteen), but Abida had bided her time, waiting for a moment when her transformation could be extraordinary. And it was. The wonder of it, Sulaiman said, was not that Taimur and Akbar had fallen in love with her, but that he hadn’t. Perhaps, he said, he had, but he kept it buried because right from the start he saw that if she were to make a choice between the three of them she’d have no difficulty in reducing the list to two.

(‘You always had that edge of insecurity,’ Dadi said, when he mentioned that. ‘You were the one who held yourself away, starting the day we got back from Delhi. I wasn’t even sure you liked me any more.’)

That Taimur was in love with Abida was easy for anyone to see. He turned cartwheels in the garden, sang ghazals of longing, offered to be twelfth man in cricket matches so that he could sit beside her among the spectators. But Akbar’s love was a more brooding thing, though that may simply have been because, except on that day he hit Sulaiman and then hit him again, he could always foresee consequences.

Sulaiman came upon Akbar one day, slumped at the wheel of their father’s Daimler, on the road between Dadi’s house and the palace. Sulaiman dismounted his horse and got into the passenger seat.

‘Rotten luck,’ Akbar said. ‘I suppose I should be happy for him.’ He handed Sulaiman a piece of paper. ‘Found this on the path. Abida’s handwriting.’

She’d written Taimur’s name all across the page, in Urdu.

‘So that’s that,’ Akbar said. ‘Oh, well. Better this way. No long drawn-out rivalry. Not as though this is a surprise. How could anyone choose anyone over that brother of ours?’

‘Sorry,’ was all Sulaiman could think of to say.

Akbar closed his eyes and leant back in the seat. ‘Abida.’

Sulaiman got out, walked around to the driver’s side, pushed his brother over to the passenger seat, and drove him home, the horse cantering after them.

The next day he saw Taimur, sitting on an old garden swing, looking forlorn.

‘What?’ Sulaiman said.

Taimur looked up. ‘I overheard Meher talking to HH.’

‘Oh, yes? Hard to imagine Meher and Binky having anything to say to each other. Were they discussing affairs of state?’

‘Affairs of the heart. She thinks Akbar’s so down today because he’s in love. With Abida. Is he?’

Taimur’s obliviousness to his brother’s feelings shocked Sulaiman. ‘What if he is?’

Taimur kicked the ground. ‘If he is and I haven’t seen it then maybe there are other things I haven’t seen. Maybe she’s in love with him.’

Sulaiman knew right then that the whole matter had to be straightened out as quickly as possible. ‘She’s not. She is in love, but not with Akbar. And Akbar knows it. She’s in love with someone else. Wait here, I’ll bring you written proof. In her own hand.’ And off he went to find the paper which Akbar had crumpled up and tossed in the back of the car the day before.

It was Sulaiman’s need for the dramatic gesture which did it. He couldn’t just say, ‘She loves you, Taimur.’ He had to go and find the paper, had to give Taimur those moments of suspense, had to see Taimur’s face when the suspense was over. But how can we blame Sulaiman for not anticipating what would happen next? Who could have? Taimur saw Sulaiman rush off, saw him run into Abida on his way to the car, saw her put an arm on Sulaiman’s sleeve, and leapt to a conclusion: Abida had written Sulaiman a love letter.

‘That’s why he left,’ Sulaiman told Dadi as the moon angled its rays on to her bed, creating the illusion that she and Sulaiman were still young and raven-haired, the moonlight alone responsible for the silvered quality of their manes. ‘He was gone before I returned. He thought you loved me.’

‘But, the other woman?’ Dadi gasped.

‘What other woman?’

‘The one he took the ring for. The one who was the reason for that letter he wrote when he left. There had to be truth in the letter, there had to.’

‘More truth than we cared to acknowledge. He wrote that because he was angry with Akbar and me. With me because he thought you loved me. With Akbar because Akbar loved you but seemed to have found a way to live without being loved by you, a thing Taimur knew he couldn’t do. So he wrote in anger, but also in truth. There was truth to what he said about Akbar and me. And also – Abida, he was eighteen – he knew that letter was the one way of angering the whole family sufficiently to keep us from searching for him.’

‘But Sulaiman, the ring.’

Sulaiman reached into his pocket. ‘I went to London thinking I’d sell this.’ I knew what was in that little velvet box even before he opened it. Dadi sighed, a woman past surprises now that this had happened. She touched the tip of a finger to the emerald. ‘Explain this to me, Sulaiman.’

Taimur took the ring with him because he was eighteen and broken-hearted, and that combination often leads to a desire for symbolic gestures. He took the ring so that Sulaiman would never place it on Abida’s finger. Sulaiman knew all this because Taimur had told him so.

‘So he really did come back?’ Dadi said. I had pressed myself against the wall by now, each muscle constricted into a mass of tension. Each muscle, especially the heart.

Sulaiman pressed her hand in apology and nodded. It was just after Abida and Akbar were married. Sulaiman was in his mother’s room, watching her sleep, trying not to notice how like a claw her hand had become, and Taimur opened the window and hopped in. Even in the dark Sulaiman knew it was him. He was taller and broader and the English suits he had favoured were replaced by a long achkan over churidar pyjamas, but his smile was still pure Taimur.

‘It’s your idiot brother, Sully,’ he said. He said it in English.

Sulaiman held him and thought, Everything will be all right now.

‘Can’t let a girl get between us, can we?’ Taimur said, when he finally pulled away.

Sulaiman had long ago guessed why Taimur had left; for a moment he hesitated, and then he told Taimur the truth. Taimur tried to shrug, opened his mouth, closed it again. ‘She loved me?’ he said at length. Sulaiman nodded. ‘Does she still?’

‘She married Akbar.’

‘Oh,’ Taimur said. ‘I see.’

He went over to his sleeping mother and held her hand. A long time went by.

Summer had ended and the breeze was cool enough for some members of the family to sleep with their windows closed. Sulaiman was about to shut the window which Taimur had flung open, when he heard the window in the room next door creak open.

‘Look at that moon, Akbar,’ Abida exulted.

Taimur got up and walked over to the window. If he leant out, just a little, she would see him. He didn’t lean out. He pushed the window closed and rested his head against the wall. ‘God help me,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay. I thought I could. But I can’t.’

‘Taimur?’ It was their mother waking up.

He stayed by her side all night, telling her all the memories he had of her from his childhood. She seemed to derive greater comfort from that than from any of the medicines, or prayers, or tales of miracle cures with which she’d been regaled in the preceding months. But he barely looked at his brother, and Sulaiman knew that as Taimur sat there his rage was mounting against his brother for allowing him to misinterpret his words so completely. At one point Sulaiman tried to leave, but Taimur was up and barring his way to the door before he was halfway across the room. ‘If you leave to call Akbar I’ll be gone before you knock on his door.’

But in the early morning, when their mother finally fell asleep, Taimur turned to Sulaiman with an expression of sorrow. ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘And Akbar’s a far finer chap than I. Don’t tell him I was here; it’ll break his heart. And never a word to Abida about any of this.’

‘Where will you go? Where have you been?’

‘Far away. It doesn’t matter. I’m well, that’s all you need to know. Goodbye, Sully.’

Sulaiman would have done anything to make Taimur stay, so he tried the most unforgivable thing he could think of. ‘She might still love you,’ he said.

Taimur smiled. ‘Yes, I think she might. Maybe I’d stay if we weren’t not-quites; maybe if we hadn’t grown up believing ourselves capable of bringing about something terrible. Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Because I, and you, and she, we all love Akbar. Here.’ He pressed a velvet box into Sulaiman’s hands. ‘I have no right to this. One day you might even know what to do with it. I certainly don’t. Tell Mama I love her.’

‘You already did that.’

Smiling, Taimur left.

When Sulaiman finished talking I was close to tears, but Dadi did something entirely unexpected. She laughed.

‘Sulaiman, that’s sheer melodrama. My life! Such passion, such tragic miscommunication, such revelations in the aftermath of the main action. It’s too absurd.’ She took the ring from Sulaiman and weighed it in her hand. ‘It would have broken my finger.’

‘No regrets?’

‘To be loved by two such brothers. That’s a rare gift. You’ve given me back my Naz.’

‘Make that three such brothers,’ Sulaiman said, and kissed her hand. ‘Just to increase the melodrama.’

Dadi laughed again, and then she turned to me. ‘Aliya, did the thought that flashed through my mind flash through yours?’

‘Which thought is that?’ I felt strangely shy in the presence of my great-uncle, who had only just seen me.

‘Mariam’s mother might well have been high-born.’

‘No, Dadi. I didn’t think that at all.’

‘Good. That’s a start.’

Sulaiman stood up. ‘I wonder who she was. The wife. Whoever she was, she was much later. Samia told me Taimur’s daughter – Mariam – is much younger than your children and mine. He must have waited a long time before he was ready to love someone else.’

‘Or maybe he and his wife were so happy together, just the two of them, that it was many years before they felt they could allow anyone else into their lives. Why not that, Sulaiman? Let’s love Taimur enough to believe that. Aliya, look!’

I turned to look out of the window, but the thudding sound against the glass had already told me what she was staring at.

‘Take me to the balcony, Sully.’ He lifted her up in his arms, that man nearing eighty, and I opened the glass door to let them out. The sound of the rain beating down was almost deafening, but though I couldn’t hear I could see her telling him to put her down.

Sulaiman slid the door between us closed so that the rain wouldn’t whip into the room, and then it really was as though they were two characters in a movie and I was watching them with the sound turned off. What an evening, what an evening! Taimur left because he loved Abida, and stayed away because he loved Akbar. He went to Turkey. Yes, he did. He went to Turkey and looked up his uncle’s Turkish friend – the Dard-e-Dil uncle who went to Turkey talked often of his Turkish friends. Through these friends he found employment, occupation. Perhaps he taught Urdu somewhere. Or English. Or Persian. Then he met the mechanic from Dard-e-Dil, and together they talked of their ancestral home. One day the mechanic told him that Meher was in Greece, and Taimur knew at last he had found a way to receive word of all the Dard-e-Dils without any of them receiving word of him. And how did Mariam and Masood’s story fit into this? And how did mine?

I looked out on to the balcony again. She’d waited almost sixty years for this story, Dadi had. How different would her life have been if she had heard it earlier? These stories, this salt … How could we ever exert ourselves to the simplest physical action when all our lives were so dependent on this seemingly passive act of listening?

I stepped out on to the balcony. Dadi raised her hands to the skies, her nightgown clinging to her frame, and inhaled the heady scent of parched mud gulping water. As I watched her I knew that the monsoon rains would wash away streets, blow down electricity wires, create stagnant pools of water prime for mosquito orgies, but for those few minutes there seemed no price too high for the sight of rainwater eddying bougainvillea flowers around Abida’s bare feet.

‘Sulaiman!’ she cried out above the noise. ‘I’m so glad I’ve had my life.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Of course I was happy that Sulaiman was in Karachi. To watch him with Dadi and Meher was like watching a dance in which a group of three would become two against one, and then three again, and then a different two against one, but always back to three again. Sulaiman and Abida teased Meher about being the youngest, the one who always wanted to act older than her age (‘What on earth were you doing talking to Binky about Akbar’s broken heart?’ Dadi said, but she laughed as she said it); Sulaiman and Meher teased Abida about her regal airs (‘Remember when Abida got stuck up that tree with the cradling branches, and instead of admitting she was stuck she said, “I am not in the habit of descending.” How old were you, Abbie? Eight?’); and Meher and Abida teased Sulaiman about the folly of men (‘Well, of course that ended in divorce. You only married her because she did that thing with her lips, Sulaiman. That sensuous, snarling thing. Remember when Ama, with an air of pious innocence, asked her whether her mouth had those muscle spasms often?’).

How could I not be happy?

But every day that he was there I’d hear some mention of Taimur and remember: I had understood Taimur’s story, but I was no closer to understanding Mariam’s. Perhaps all the explanations I had thought of were true. Perhaps none of them were. But if I were to retell her story, with what would I fill the gaps between all I knew and all there was to know?

That may have been what I was thinking about that July evening when I lay in my garden, mosquito coils around me, watching a candle flame bobbing past the windows of the house as Ami searched frantically for something – Ami always seemed to feel the need to search frantically for something when we were swallowed up by the darkness brought on by a power failure.

‘I’ve brought you a surprise,’ Sameer said, turning the corner of the garden and coming into view. ‘I think I should start a limo service between the airport and town.’ So saying, he disappeared into Mariam’s old room through the French doors and promptly tripped over something. I heard the thud as he fell. Ami came running. ‘Oh good, you’ve found the box. But why are you lying down, Sammy?’

In that moment a bunch of thin, green, stringlike things came flying towards me and fell, several feet from where I lay. I rolled over to them.

Stems.

‘Khaleel?’

He stepped forward into the garden. ‘If the mountain won’t go to Liaquatabad,’ he said, and squatted beside me.

I turned on to my side to look at him and he lowered his knees to the ground. ‘Hey,’ he said, and I wanted to cup my hand against his larynx and feel the muscles move beneath my palm as he spoke.

‘Hey yourself.’ There was a tiny cut at the base of his index finger, giving me all the excuse I needed to touch. You know what it felt like, the touch. Don’t you? At the very least you’ve imagined it.

‘I have something for you in Sameer’s car.’ I wanted to tell him it could wait, whatever it was. But he was gone already.

I touched the grass on which he’d been sitting. He was here. He was actually here and there was no doubt in my mind now … no, not my mind … there was no doubt now in any part of me that he could break my heart. What a blessing. All the active-passive listening I’d ever done in my life had brought me to this moment, to this darkness in which I awaited light, knowing it was time for me to don my costume, make my entrance and speak the words. Which words I didn’t yet know, but they were, they would become, part of someone else’s story, one generation, or two, or three down the line.

The lights flared back on and I went inside. Sameer was in my parents’ room, the door ajar.

‘But do we know anything about him? What’s his family?’

Sameer ignored Aba’s second question. ‘We know Samia likes him. And Rehana Apa, whose opinion you’d trust completely if you knew her. He’s been to Baji’s for tea. She invited him to return. What more do you need to know?’

I entered the room. ‘He’s staying with his family in Liaquatabad.’

Aba’s eyes rose sharply at this, and even Ami looked unhappy.

‘And he’s brought over dinner, so you can’t say I have to whisk him away before we’ve eaten,’ Sameer added.

‘Dinner? Why? Does he think we’re not capable of feeding our guests?’

‘Nasser, now stop being annoying. It’s a thoughtful gesture, although, of course, he could just be trying to get into our good books. I didn’t really mean that, Aliya. Where is he?’

‘Gone to get something from the car.’

‘Probably the food,’ Sameer said. ‘I’ll help him. Can I just microwave it and tell Wasim we’re eating right away? I’m starving.’

Sameer was so good with exits.

‘This is the boy from the plane, is it?’ Ami asked.

‘What boy from the plane?’ Aba looked wounded.

‘Girltalk, Nasser. You didn’t mention the Liaquatabad part, Aliya. Why not?’

‘Why do you think?’ I blew out the candle which was flickering, forgotten, in the blaze of the lamplight around the room. We had reached an impasse.

Or perhaps not. ‘You know you’re in Karachi now.’ That was Aba, of course. It had taken him several seconds to think up this line. ‘There are certain rules you have to live by. Just as a mark of respect to others.’

I knew that. I knew that I had never admired people who claimed to be non-conformist but were really just self-absorbed. I knew that it was all I could do at that moment to stay in my parents’ company with Khaleel at a short sprint’s distance.

‘I hope he hasn’t brought burgers for dinner.’ Ami didn’t meet my eye as she said this.

‘Food’s on,’ Sameer said, poking his head in. ‘And this is Khaleel.’ Khaleel shook hands with my father, nodded at Ami, smiled. I could see them thinking it was clear that I’d fallen for his good looks alone.

‘Are you having power failures in Liaquatabad, too?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I came straight from the air—’ He bit off the last syllable and looked at me to see if he’d committed a faux pas.

Why hadn’t Sameer just picked me up and driven us to a restaurant?

‘That smell,’ Ami said.

Now what? Don’t tell me he wasn’t using deodorant.

‘Good God!’ Aba said.

I stepped out into the dining area, and then it hit me, too.

A smell that was not so much a smell as a miracle. Different strands of smells coming together like an orchestral symphony. Aba moved to one side, and my eyes helped my nose to pick up each nuance of detail. There on the table: biryani, timatar cut, bihari kebabs, aloo panjabi, raita. But these names don’t tell you enough. They need a prefix: Masoodian.

I grabbed on to Khaleel’s arm.

‘Quite a journey your cousins sent me on. Said they’d arrange my ticket, and next thing I knew I was travelling via Istanbul. Some guy met me at the airport – said he knew your great-aunt – and handed me this package of food. If Sameer hadn’t come to the airport in Karachi, with a list of his connections poised to leap off his tongue in a swallow dive, those customs guys would have confiscated the package for sure. You could see their mouths watering at the thought of it.’

‘Do you know …’ I could barely form the words. ‘Where it came from?’

‘A restaurant. Your great-aunt’s friend translated the name for me. The Garrulous Gourmet.’

Somehow we made it to the table, and sat down. What can I say about the food? That nothing had ever tasted better. That words reveal their inadequacy every time I try to describe it. That sometimes it seemed we were all eating faster than was possible and other times so slowly it defied all the laws of motion. That the grains of rice in the biryani were swollen but separate; that the saffron had been sprinkled with a hand that knew the thin line between stinting and showing-off; that the chicken was so succulent you had to cry out loud. I could tell you about the aloo panjabi with its potatoes that reminded us why a nation could live on potatoes and die without them; I could mention its spices, so perfectly balanced you could almost see the mustard seed leaning on the fenugreek, the cumin poised on the dried chillies. If that’s not enough let me try to evoke the bihari kebabs, the meat so tender it defied all attempts to make it linger in our mouths, and yet it lingered on our tastebuds before graciously making way for all the other tastes worthy of attention. And, while I can still think of it without falling to my knees in thanks, allow me to mention the timatar cut, which takes the familiar tomato and transports it into a world inhabited by ginger, garlic, chillies, green and red, karri pattas, and the sourness of tamarind. To eat that meal was to eat centuries of artistry, refined in kitchens across the subcontinent. The flavours we tasted were not just the flavours in the food, but also the flavours the food reminded us of and the flavours the food remembered.

But saying all of this is not enough. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam in a kitchen, a vast glorious kitchen, brushing saffron off her husband’s neck and dusting it on to her own lips. I saw Mariam listing names of vegetables – mooli, loki, bhindi, shaljam, gajjar, mattar, phool gobi – as though the list were a ghazal, while Masood kneaded mangos to pulp in a bowl which suddenly had four hands, not two, intertwining and pressing. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam older and happy.

Khaleel said something to make Aba laugh and I saw Ami lean forward to Khaleel and speak, speak without stopping until she had to stop because Aba threatened to eat the last piece of chicken on her plate since she didn’t seem interested in it. Khaleel looked at me and I wanted everyone else to disappear. But in some sense they had disappeared while he was looking at me in that way he had of looking at me.

When the meal was finally over – the plates not licked clean, not entirely, because that would have meant that the cook miscalculated quantities, but nearly so, so very nearly so – Khaleel picked up the last grain of rice on his plate and, with everyone else distracted by satiation, he placed the wonder of it all on my tongue.

‘I’m stopping in Istanbul again on my way back to America,’ he said softly. ‘Right before the semester begins. You’re flying out around that time, too, aren’t you?’

Ami turned to ask him something and I was left thinking of all that his question implied. Was it merely coincidence, the timing of all that had happened? Or would I never have asked the questions I asked if I hadn’t met Khaleel? How can we ever know why one thing happens and not another? Perhaps, I thought, watching the curve of his neck as he laughed, perhaps when we tell our stories our stories tell on us; they reveal what is and what is not explicable in our lives. In all those years Mariam lived with us I never asked that she be explained to me. That she was who she was was enough. The answers I’d been searching for so desperately since then all stemmed back to one question. The question of why she loved Masood. I had reasons now, I had explanations for every thing she’d ever not said, for everything she’d done. Her mother’s social status; a desire to subvert hierarchies; a search for answers about why Taimur left; her final conversation with the man whom she had never considered loving (who might even have been Meher Dadi’s friend from Turkey, or his son). All these were answers and together they might even form a whole. Some of them might even be more than conjecture. But none of this tells me why she loved Masood. Khaleel rested a hand on the back on my chair, his palm pressing against the small of my back in the spaces formed by the latticed design of the wood. No, none of this answered the unanswerable question.

The real question, the one that only I could answer, was this: Was I willing to take that first step? To take Khaleel with me into a room full of relatives and say, ‘Mariam and I are not-quite-twins. This man, I don’t know what will happen between us, but I think he’s worth the risk of heartbreak. He’s worth it not because of Masood, not because of Taimur, not because of Taj or Dadi or anyone, but because. Just because. Why do you call us not-quite-twins as though we are something incomplete? More than twins, say that. Or better still, say fallible, like you; capable of error, like you; given to passion, like you.’ This was a speech that I’d prepared, rehearsed in front of the mirror. Could I ever make it when even the best of the Dard-e-Dils, even my parents, had quailed when he walked in?

My mother said something I didn’t catch and Khaleel replied, ‘When our hearts live, we are more than ourselves.’

I stood up and walked over to the window. My parents took this as some sort of signal. They told Khaleel there was no need to clear the table, Wasim would do that, then said goodbye and retreated to their room. Sameer had disappeared somewhere. Wasim took a stack of plates and vanished into the kitchen. There was such an air of familiarity about the silence in the room. I looked out at Mariam’s hibiscus branch. The glass between it and me was both a window and a mirror. I reached out to run my fingers through the air, parallel to the branch. Khaleel bent down to pick up a plate. My fingers traced the curve of his spine.