Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Three

‘So, please now, while I have your attention undivided and can threaten to withhold lunch until you answer, explain to me why, I mean why, are you planning to return to the Blighted Estates of America to get a Master’s in Education?’ Samia rolled up her sleeves as she spoke.

‘What, are you planning to punch me?’

‘No,’ she said, taking my mug. ‘I’m immersing dishes in soap suds. Come to the kitchen and answer my savaal.’

‘Decisions,’ I said, hoisting myself on to the kitchen counter. ‘Where, what, why. Can’t handle them. So I’m prolonging the indecision with higher education.’

Samia pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, which made me think irrationally that she really had grown up entirely. I wondered if the same could be said of me, even though I was quite liable to scald my hands while attempting to wash the dishes and I didn’t care what the washing liquid did to my nail polish. Samia pointed a yellow finger at me. ‘My quesh is, Education, colon, why?’

‘Oh, the postcolonial why!’ I shrugged. ‘A friend of mine had application forms to various Schools of Ed.’

Samia threw a dish towel at me. ‘What happened to studying history?’

‘You’re the historian in the family.’

‘Aloo, when I was eighteen you knew as much about history as I did. And you were fourteen.’ Samia could deliver the simplest comments in tones of high outrage.

‘I knew more. But my first week at college I got a letter from Dadi.’

I would like to be proud of you again one day. But you can only make me proud if you first understand what pride means. Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is Fakhr and Nazish – both names that you can find more than once on our family tree. You must go back to those names, those people, in order to understand who I am and who you are. This is why it is good you are in America, where there are so many books. Study history, my darling Aliya, but not the history of the Mughals or the British in India, although our stories intersect theirs in so many ways. Study the Dard-e-Dil family. I know you don’t trust the history that comes from my mouth, so go to that continent which denies its own history, and when you find yourself mocking its arrogance and lies, go to the libraries and search among the cobwebbed books for the story of your own past. And when you do that, and you see in print the old tales that thrilled you to sleep at night, I defy you to feel no stirrings of Fakhr and Nazish.

‘Aliya? You got a letter saying what?’

‘Saying she wanted me to study history. So I didn’t.’

I opened the fridge and crouched down beside it. My cousin Samia had become a sandwich eater. Bread, mayonnaise, mustard, salami, sliced roast beef, lettuce, tomatoes, gherkins, tuna salad. Good God, how dreary.

Behind the loaf of bread was a sauce boat, not dissimilar in size and shape to Aladdin’s lamp. I lifted it out of the fridge with both hands and held it to my face. Tamarind!

‘What’s in there?’ Samia held out her hand for the sauce boat. ‘Imli?’

‘Friday nights.’

Fridays used to be Masood’s day off. He’d cycle out at sunrise and be gone all day, leaving Ami, Aba, Mariam Apa and me to lay tables, wash dishes, heat up frozen food. More often than not, at lunchtime, Mariam Apa would end up eating last night’s leftovers and Aba would drive me to the bazaar where we’d buy aloo puri with carrot pickles, and halva on the side to sweeten our mouths. Masood would return well after sunset, clothes wet, hair smelling of salt, sand glistening silver against his skin. He’d hold up two clenched fists like a boxer ready to jab, and when I tapped one he would twist his wrist, unfurl his fingers, and reveal a tamarind-based sweet wrapped in clear plastic. For a while, not so long ago, I had lost these memories of Masood; I’d like to say it was the better angels of my nature which restored the memories to me, but really it was embarrassment at the way my reaction towards him mirrored that of so many of my family members. Embarrassment, and also the visceral tug of food smells. When the taste of chillies sometimes brought tears to my eyes it was not because my palate was overwhelmed by the heat.

I held the sauce boat up to my nose again. Tamarind. It was only at college, when the racks of spices and international foods at Stop ‘n’ Shop forced me to confront the inadequacy of my culinary English, that I ran for my Urdu-English dictionary and discovered that imli was tamarind. It was several days later that I thought, Sounds a little like Taimur Hind.

Taimur Hind. To explain what that name means to me I must return to the triplets, those not-quite-twins. Their father, my great-grandfather, was so terrified to hear the circumstances of their births that he put yaks and their milk out of his mind and concentrated on averting disaster. He was well intentioned, of course, but in my family that’s just a euphemism for stupid. He said, ‘We’ll call them Sulaiman, Taimur and Akbar.’ He thought bearing the names of great kings would enable his sons to face up to any crisis, but he never paused to think what would have happened if their namesakes – Sulaiman the Magnificent, Akbar the Great, and Taimur, sometimes called Taimur Lang or Tamburlaine, but so unimpeded by his lameness that no one ever pictures him crippled – had been born brothers. Romulus and Remus, Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh, Richard the Lionheart and King John would seem, by comparison, merely to bicker affectionately. (Though in the case of John and Richard it seems that their legendary disharmony may have been exaggerated by the Robin Hood tales, and incidentally I’ve never had much sympathy for the Crusaders.)

Of the triplets, Taimur was the one born on the cusp. His brothers adored him and were always arguing over which one of them shared the same birthday as Taimur. Are you born at the moment your head emerges into the light, as my grandfather, Akbar, claimed, or at the moment when every last inch of you is caressed by air, as Sulaiman insisted.

Taimur, when asked his date of birth, said, ‘I was born between my brothers.’ And when he grew older he added, ‘There is nothing more arbitrary than the chime separating one day from the next.’

Things I know about Taimur: he was the most beautiful of the brothers, while Akbar was the most dashing and Sulaiman the most charming; when he was four he bit the nose off Dadi’s stuffed reindeer and Dadi, in retaliation, bit his index finger; he was the sweetest timer of the cricket ball that you could hope to see, but at boarding school in England his run average remained lower than Akbar’s because he so often forgot to ground his bat after completing a run; he loved the poems of Emily Dickinson; before he left for boarding school he had an English governess who called him Percy (Sulaiman was Alfred and Akbar was Gordie); he played the sitar; also, the harpsichord; it was he who persuaded his brothers to join him in leaping off a second-floor balcony in the Dard-e-Dil palace when home for the holidays at the age of sixteen, their broken legs and the intercession of the Nawab on their behalf finally convincing their father to allow them to finish their secondary education in Dard-e-Dil with their cousins, under the guidance of the private tutors at the palace; he despised politicians before it was fashionable to do so, but his most prized possession was a cane belonging to Liaquat, which he either stole or received as a gift from Liaquat after mockpretending to steal it (the stories here vary, but I prefer the latter version); he could devour pounds of fried okra at a single sitting, though his appetite was otherwise unremarkable; in 1938, shortly before the brothers were due to leave for Oxford, he disappeared.

He disappeared and remained that way. For two weeks his family was made efficient by terror, until the arrival of an envelope with an indistinct postal stamp and Taimur’s looping Ds made the postmaster spill his morning cup of tea and sent him pedalling frantically to my family’s home.

Dadi was with her cousins, Akbar and Sulaiman, when the letter arrived and, though she swears she read it only once, she can still recite the letter from memory, her fingers tracing Ds in the air as she speaks:

My brothers, we were born the year after the Jalianwalla massacre. Think of this when you are strolling down paths in Oxford, studying how to be Englishmen and do well in the world. I lack your gift for erasing, nay! evading history. The writing of this letter is the last thing I do before entering into the employ of an English army officer, as a valet. I have accepted my historical role, and when you return from Oxford and take your positions in the ICS or in English-run companies the only real difference between us will be that I am required to wear a grander uniform. You will not hear from me again for I am repudiating English and, alas! those years of English schooling have robbed me of the ability to write Urdu. From the time of our births we have been curses waiting to happen, but now the suspense is over. This is our curse: Akbar, Sulaiman, we are kites that have had their strings snipped. We went to school in a place without sun, and believed this meant we had no need of our shadows. I am not an Englishman, nor are you. Nor can we ever be, regardless of our foxtrots, our straight bats, our Jolly Goods and I Says.

No more the Anglicized Percy, I.

I am now Taimur Hind.

Dadi always ends her recitations with a final flourish of D. And always, always she says, ‘We thought it was a joke. How could it not be a joke? He wrote, Nay! He never said, Nay! except when he was mimicking our uncle, Ashraf.’

‘What would you have done,’ I once had the courage to ask Dadi, ‘if you had been at an Englishman’s house and saw a valet with your tooth mark on his index finger?’

If she had cried then, as I thought she was going to, our relationship might have survived what was yet to come. But, instead, she threw back her head and said, ‘Family retainers were one thing, but what reason had I to look at other people’s servants?’

Unconsciously I had dipped my fingers in the tamarind. ‘You know the real reason they thought Taimur’s letter was a joke?’ I said to Samia, putting the sauce boat down. ‘They couldn’t believe that a Dard-e-Dil could possibly become a servant.’

Samia shook her head at me. ‘Who says your version of events is less clouded than anyone else’s? When I’m reading old historical accounts I like to find out as much as I can about each contributor.’

‘Oh, no. You’ve become one of those deadly types like Sara Smith in my Intro Shakespeare class, who said it would be like, really, like, helpful, if we knew more about Shakespeare’s relationship with his daughters, because then we’d, like, understand King Lear, like, better.’

‘Shut up, shorty.’

‘Take off those block-heels and try saying that.’

That kept her quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘They’re here.’

‘You do enigma so well.’

‘Our Indian relatives. Some of them are here. I’ve accepted an invitation to their place for elevenses today. What do you say? Will you come?’

Chapter Four

I had met one of the Indian relatives, years before, in Karachi. On that day, I remember, I was wearing the T-shirt with a bullet hole in it. As far as I was concerned, the fact that I wasn’t actually wearing the shirt at the time the bullet hole made its appearance had done nothing to detract from the glamour of the ravaged cloth. Our dhobi had been carting my family’s freshly laundered clothes towards our house when someone shot at his donkey-cart. No one was ever able to determine whether the motives were sectarian (our dhobi was a Shi’a) or more literally asinine (the donkey was a champion racer whose three successive victories had reputedly angered a Mr Billo, who was missing a finger and was, therefore, dangerous). The donkey lost the tip of an ear, my shirt lost the embossed letter B and henceforth warned DON’T UG ME! but the donkey only became more aerodynamic and I briefly acquired the nickname Ug, which I secretly loved.

Samia’s brother, Sameer, once said, ‘There is no digression, only added detail.’

So, as I was saying, I was seven or eight and a school friend was dropping me home from someone’s birthday party, except I was in no mood to go home so I directed her driver to Sameer and Samia’s house instead.

No one saw me enter my cousins’ drawing room, where a large crowd of my relatives was gathered around. All attention was focussed, instead, on a silver-haired woman in a sari who lit a cigarette and said, ‘Cigarettes are to me what coffee spoons were to Prufrock.’ I pictured this Prue Frock: a tall, thin redhead in a dress. I thought she must have been an Englishwoman from the Raj days of this stranger’s youth, and I imagined her lifting the stem of a spoon to her mouth and exhaling silver smoke. I remember wanting to impress the stranger – except I didn’t think of her as a stranger. There was something familiar … Is this memory or hindsight? But I did want to impress her, I know, so I fingered the bullet hole, hoping to draw her attention to it, to me. Instead, Sameer’s mother – my aunt, Zainab – appeared in the doorway behind me and sent me home with her driver.

‘One of Zaheer’s relatives was over for tea,’ Zainab Phupi explained to my mother later. ‘And as luck would have it a whole pultan of my relatives landed up as well, so I was going crazy and one more child in the house to keep an eye on was not what I needed.’

To try and distract attention from my disgrace I asked my father, ‘Who is Prue and what does she have to do with cigarettes and coffee spoons?’

He could offer no explanation, but the next day when he repeated this remark to Dadi I thought she was going to die. She put a hand over her heart and with the other hand caught me by the shoulder, her fingers digging into my flesh.

‘Zaheer Phupa’s relative,’ I said, and repeated the silver-haired woman’s remark. ‘Dadi, what’s wrong?’

Dadi pushed me aside and reached for the phone, her ring-laden fingers trembling as they dialed the six digits of her niece’s number. ‘Zainab, where is she?’ Dadi demanded into the receiver. ‘I know she’s there. I’m coming over.’

I was close enough to the phone to hear Zainab Phupi say, ‘She was only here for the day. She’s on her way to England.’

Dadi’s eyes closed and her head swayed from side to side. I don’t remember any sound escaping her, but it must have because Zainab Phupi said, ‘We were all so sure you didn’t want to see her. You’ve always said—’

‘Always! What do you know about always? We were girls together.’ That word – ‘girls’; she said it as a deposed monarch might say ‘king’. ‘More than thirty-five years I haven’t seen her and you just assumed you understood my always. Blood is thicker than time, blood is thicker.’ And she sat on the cold marble floor and wept.

It must be an instance of imagination plugging up a hole in my memory, but I could almost swear I remember Mariam Apa wrapping her arms around Dadi and rocking her into silence.

Samia nudged me and I raised my head away from its resting position against the smudged window of the Tube. ‘Jet lag. Our stop already?’

The train was hurtling on, so Samia didn’t even bother to answer. ‘Racy desi viciously and vigorously checking you out. Sitting next to purple-haired woman.’

I casually flicked my hair aside, shifting the angle of my head as I did so. ‘Where?’ I said.

‘He’s on the move,’ Samia whispered.

I looked up at the man walking towards me and felt a terrible urge to stand up as well, meet him halfway between purple-haired woman and Samia and wrap my arms around him.

‘Hi, Aliya,’ he said, sitting down opposite me. ‘Remember me?’ He crossed one foot over his knee and rested his hand on his sneaker. His hand span extended comfortably from the toe of his shoe to his ankle bone.

‘The aeroplane,’ I said, as casually as possible. ‘Aisle seat. And you handed me my suitcase.’

He extended his hand. ‘Cal,’ he said.

‘You don’t look like a Caleb,’ Samia said, taking his hand before I could. ‘I’m the older cousin.’

‘Hi, the older cousin. Actually, I’m a Khaleel. But when you live in the Western world, and your last name is Butt and you’re born in a town spelt A-T-H-O-L, pronounced “Athole”, things are bad enough already. You don’t want to add to the humiliation by admitting to a name that sounds to certain ears like you’re expectorating. That “kh” you know.’

‘Could be worse,’ Samia grinned. ‘You could be a Fakhr.’

‘That’s my older brother.’

‘Liar,’ I said.

He turned to look at me again. ‘Maybe. But a good storyteller never tells.’

‘All the way from Boston to London I could see your fingers tapping on your sneakers,’ I said. ‘That’s some hand span.’ On occasion, evil demons take hold of my voice box and force out remarks like that one. I reached across and held my hand against Khaleel’s, palm to palm. His fingers bent forward at the topmost joint, pushing down against the tips of my nails, and his thumb rested lightly against the mole on my index finger. I thought of mosques and churches and prayer mats. Hands clasped together; one hand resting atop the other; fingers interlocked to mime a steeple. What sacred power is invested in hands?

This is not to say I was having pious thoughts.

I pulled my hand away.

‘So it’s safe to say your family didn’t arrive in Amreeks via the Mayflower.’ Samia has the Pakistani knack of finding out all she deems it necessary to know about someone’s background within the first five minutes of conversation.

‘PIA, actually. No, my parents are like Aliya. And like you, I guess. Karachiites. I’ve never been there, but there’s a chance I might, really soon.’

‘Are you related to Bunty and Yousuf Butt?’ Samia’s foot was pressing against mine as she spoke, signalling He’s Gorgeous But Okay You Saw Him First.

‘Bunty Butt! I don’t think so. No bells ringing. But I wish I were. Aunty Bunty Butt.’

The train squealed to a stop at Green Park. ‘Isn’t this our stop?’ I said.

Samia shook her head. ‘So where’ll you stay? If you come to Karoo?’

‘With relatives. Place called Liaquatabad. What’s that like?’

Samia jumped up, pulling me along with her. ‘Aliya! It’s our stop. Hold the doors please. Cal, nice meeting …’ And we were out, watching the train pull away.

‘I cannot believe you …’ I closed my eyes and the world rocked around me.

‘Sorry, Aloo. Arré, hold on.’

I pushed past Samia and ran, and kept on running until I was above ground, cars whizzing everywhere, and across the street the PIA office with a cardboard cut-out flight attendant smiling at me from the window. I was horribly jet-lagged, and as London jostled around me I thought, I want to be five again and willing to lie down in the middle of a busy London street to declare I’m tired; willing to weep that I want to go home to Mariam Apa; willing to talk to anyone who seems nice, regardless of where they come from and where their families live.

‘Listen to me.’ Samia put her arm around my neck in a gesture that was both affectionate and immobilizing. ‘Have you ever, in all your days, in all your meanderings when Sameer first learnt to drive and you chuker maroed the city for the best bun kebabs, have you ever been to Liaquatabad? If I asked you how to get there would you have the faintest?’

‘Go away.’

‘Not an option. Oh, ehmuk, he’s an American. Green card and all that. If he really is planning a trip to Karachi his whole extended family is probably lining up its daughters as prospective brides.’

‘Uff! The stereotypes …’

‘What’s stereotyped about thinking people want to get their children to safety? You know what most of Karachi calls our part of town? Disneyland.’

‘Your point?’

‘The poor live in Liaquatabad. The poor, the lower classes, the not-us. How else do you want me to put this? There’s no one we know who would have exchanged Karachi phone numbers with him, Aloo. No one. And, do I have to say this, you especially …’ She turned away in irritation, or perhaps it was frustration.

‘Finish that sentence.’

‘Try this sentence instead: after everything that happened four years ago no one, not even you, will ever trust any feelings you have for him. You can hit me, Thaassh! Dhuzh! Dharam! if it’ll make you feel better.’

I might well have taken her up on that, had a man, stooped and rheumy-eyed, not twitched my sleeve and said, ‘If I had amnesia and I saw you I’d pray you played a part in my life.’

‘Perhaps you do,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I do.’

Tears came to his eyes. ‘Our lives await memories. That’s all.’ He kissed my hand and walked away.

Samia knew well enough not to say anything. She started walking down the street, a few paces ahead of me, but aware enough of my footfall to look back when I stopped to scrape a bit of banana off the sole of my shoe. I refused to catch her eye. How could she just pull me off the train like that? How could she? Could she? Could she do such a thing if I were not willing? Could she have done it if in that split second between Khaleel saying ‘Liaquatabad’ and Samia’s hand reaching out to grab mine I hadn’t already thought of escaping? If I had amnesia, would I have stayed on that train? Imagine that. To be freed of remembered biases. To have nothing to consider but the moment itself; nothing but the moment and the touch of his fingers.

Our lives don’t await memories, I decided; they are crippled by memories. Oh, I knew exactly which memories crippled me, crippled me into running away from him. (Mixing metaphors was the least of my problems.) But I’ve accepted what happened four years ago! I wanted to shout out. I’ve deconstructed it, analysed it, and I have refused to take on the attitude of my relatives with their centuries of inbred snobbery. Why can’t my heart be as evolved as my mind? Why did ‘Liaquatabad’ hit me so bruisingly in the solar plexus?

Perhaps there’s no escape from wounding memories. Time was, I thought time was all it took to move on. But how could I be a part of my family and believe that? We are all the walking wounded. Take this relative we were about to meet: Baji. Fifty years on from Partition, and according to Samia she still couldn’t talk about those who left for Pakistan without rancour. That whole generation of my relatives mystified me. How had they sustained, for so long, the bitterness brought on by the events of 1947? I could believe it of one person, or two, but good God! our family was huge and yet there was never any word of reconciliation across the borders of India and Pakistan. They grew up together: Dadi and Baji and the triplets and scores of other cousins. They were to each other what Samia and Sameer were to me, and I to them. They were to each other what Mariam Apa … Oh, Lord. How do you stop missing the people you loved before you could say ‘love’? If I had the option of inheriting that ability, would I take it?

Change the subject, I told myself. Think of reasons to stop being angry at Samia.

‘So, listen,’ Samia said when I caught up with her minutes later, having finally convinced myself that exiting the Tube when we did was regrettable in the abstract but, practically speaking, had forestalled later embarrassment. ‘Just don’t say anything that could start a conversation about Partition. And do not even begin to start to think about somehow indirectly referring to your grandparents. She blames them more than anyone else for the split in the family. Your Dadi, especially; she’s liable to start ranting at the mention of her name. I haven’t dared to ask why.’

‘You might want to tell me how exactly we’re related to this Baji person.’

‘Our grandmothers are her second cousins.’

‘Well, bless my beehives. That’s the least complicated explanation I’ve ever heard.’

‘I haven’t finished, of course. Your grandfather – Akbar—’

‘I know who my grandfather was, thank you.’

‘Shut up. And this isn’t America, you need to look right, not left, to check for oncoming traffic. Akbar and Baji – her name is Farahnaz but everyone calls her Baji – were first cousins. Akbar’s father—’

‘The yak man.’

‘Yes, the yak man had a half-brother named Abdul, and this is Abdul’s daughter.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Her mother had tantalizing elbows.’

‘Oh.’

The presence of ‘people without family’ on my family tree was always explained away in the following manner: she was walking this way, he was walking that way, she had tantalizing elbows, nine months later this one was born. I had heard a great deal about those women who had elbowed their way, so to speak, on to the family tree, but this would be my first time meeting the progeny of such a woman.

(By the way, Taj’s mother did not have tantalizing elbows – perhaps that’s why, unlike all those other women of low birth, she did not marry the father of her child and take her place in the zenana where the women schemed, plotted, forged alliances, jostled for favour, laughed, befriended each other, complained about men, teased the eunuchs, and conducted grand affairs with each other. This last detail was not part of the oral history of our family but Samia had once declared that it was absurd to assume otherwise and Dadi’s response – disapproval but not denial – convinced Sameer and me that Samia must be on to something.)

Samia stopped outside a block of flats and pressed the buzzer to Flat 8. Before there was any response from the occupants of the flat, the doorman let us in and waved us towards the lift.

‘This thing is as big as my dorm room,’ I said, and stepped into the lift. It was only when I heard my own voice that I realized I was nervous. I lay down on the plush carpet and closed my eyes as the lift hummed its ascent.

‘Up.’

The lift door opened and I took Samia’s hand and levered myself off the ground. She brushed a few strands of dog hair off my shirt, straightened my collar, pinched colour into my cheeks and pushed my hair off my face. ‘She should approve,’ my cousin said and pushed open the unlocked door to Flat 8.

She didn’t.