Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Five

‘You!’

It wasn’t a pronoun, it was an accusation. I blinked in the darkness of the hallway which opened out into a drawing room cluttered with furniture, pictures, books and no human being that I could see. ‘You!’ the voice said again, and now I saw the tiny woman on the sofa, surrounded by piles of fabric. Was it fabric or more tiny people? Samia manoeuvred her way gracefully through a maze of tables to bow down in an aadab before the woman and kiss her wrinkled cheek.

‘Baji, don’t do the imperious bit. You’ll frighten her. Stinky! Smelly!’

A door opened and two children ran in, whisked away the piles of fabric, turned on the lights and disappeared back into the room from which they came. Even with the lights on I knocked my legs against two table corners before reaching a suitable aadaab position. Baji didn’t respond to my aadaab with the traditional ‘jeeti raho’ so I didn’t kiss her. Whatever her feelings towards my grandparents there was no need for her to forego wishing me continued life. Manners above all. Qaida. Saleeqa. Hadn’t anyone ever taught her that? It’s those tantalizing elbow genes, I caught myself thinking, and refused to follow Samia’s lead and sit down until I was expressly invited to do so.

‘Be more considerate of your feet,’ Baji said. Had I managed to sleep just a little on the flight from Boston I might have held out for something more gracious, but the situation being what it was I sank into an armchair.

‘So,’ Baji said. ‘How is your dadi?’

I looked at Samia, who whisked a penknife out of Baji’s reach. Very reassuring.

‘Oh, Dadi,’ I said, waving my hands vaguely. ‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t. I haven’t seen her since Partition.’

‘Oh, that’s right. Partition.’ I wondered if ripping off my clothes and doing the bhangra would help steer this conversation towards less disastrous paths. ‘Not a lot of interesting words that rhyme with Partition. I wanted to write a ghazal, in English, for a class. With Partition as the rhyme. Partition. Ma’s mission. Pa’s wishin’. Turns into a country and western song. Allowing for half-rhymes isn’t too rewarding either. Partition. Fruition. Revision. Condition.’

‘Division,’ Baji said.

‘Mauritian,’ said Samia, and saved the day.

Baji leant back against the cushions and smiled at me, not altogether pleasantly. ‘For Samia’s sake, I won’t say anything else on the subject. Except that if you ever write a poem about Partition, it must be a lament.’

‘A ghazal,’ I said, determined not to back down before her. ‘It was to be a ghazal. And one of the reasons I love ghazals is that the mood can change entirely from one couplet to the next. Isn’t that how it always is? One person’s lament can be someone else’s elegy.’ Masood once told me that his grandmother walked over a hundred miles to reach Pakistan in August 1947, and when she arrived in her new homeland she fell to her knees and kissed the ground so repeatedly that the dust of Pakistan was permanently lodged in her throat and for the rest of her life she could not breathe deeply without coughing. When, years later, a doctor said he could cure her of the cough she threatened to break his legs. Who was Baji to imply that Masood’s grandmother’s story was not worth celebrating?

‘My brother died in a communal riot just after Partition. Your grandparents, and all those other Dard-e-Dils who leapt on to the Pakistan bandwagon, had left by then, were in Karachi; so my brother died in their place.’

‘In their place?’

‘He died for what they believed in.’

She was making it up. I knew that with utter certainty. None of the Dard-e-Dils died in the Partition riots; they either left for Pakistan in first-class style, with armed convoys or in the safety of aeroplanes, or they stayed within the four walls of the palace in Muslim-majority Dard-e-Dil until the worst of the troubles died down.

‘He was my half-brother,’ Baji said, very softly. ‘We had different fathers. I hardly ever spoke to him. He was not royal, you see. He was not too grand to be killed in something as common as a riot.’

Why weren’t any of the windows open? I could barely breathe.

The doorbell rang and even Baji looked relieved by the interruption. Stinky (or was it Smelly) charged out of his room and into the drawing room, leapt over one table, rolled under another, somersaulted over a third, unlocked the front door and leapt, rolled, flipped back into his room before the bellringer had quite finished entering the flat.

‘Rehana Apa!’ Samia kissed the newcomer – a younger version of Baji, but with hair halfway down her back. Her elbows were quite ordinary.

‘My granddaughter,’ Baji said to me. And then to Rehana, ‘This is Aliya.’ Rehana Apa smiled at me, a lovely smile, and embraced me.

‘These cousinly demonstrations can wait until later,’ Baji said. ‘Rehana, why don’t you bring it out?’

It? I thought. Tea?

‘Can I help?’ I said.

‘Not if the past is anything to go by,’ was Baji’s response.

Samia seemed as mystified by this as I was. We sat back in our chairs as Rehana Apa exited the room, and Samia started to talk to Baji about the difficulty of getting saris dry-cleaned in London. I tried to understand why I felt such hostility towards this woman whom I’d never before met. Because she hadn’t greeted me with open arms? I was usually adept at receiving coldness with indifference. Why should she bother me so much, when I knew nothing about her except for that matter of the elbows (and it couldn’t be that because I had no such animosity towards her granddaughter, who had provoked in me only feelings of warmth in the few seconds she’d been in the room)? So what else was there? She’s liable to start ranting at the mere mention of my grandmother’s name. Surely, surely, if anything, that should create a feeling of affinity between us. I’d done my fair share of ranting about Dadi in the last few years. Even as I thought that, I remembered Samia saying Baji blamed Dadi for the family split after Partition, and my face flushed with rage. How dare she? ‘We were girls together,’ Dadi had cried when she missed the chance to meet the mysterious Prufrock relative from India. She had cried. Slipped down on to the marble floor … My Dadi sat on that cold, hard floor and though I was only a child I knew the tears she was weeping were old, old tears.

I felt tears forming in my own eyes, so to distract myself I looked around at the framed photographs cluttering the walls and tables. A few of them were in colour, but by and large they were black and white and, here and there, sepia. Baji was still talking to Samia, but as my eyes wandered in her direction she extended a hand and pointed at a picture on the wall. I got up and walked over to it.

The setting was the grounds of the Dard-e-Dil palace. I recognized it instantly from the photographs and paintings that adorned the walls of Dadi’s house in Karachi, recognized it well enough to know that to have snapped that particular vista the photographer must have been backed up against the marble statue of Nur-ul-Jahan, founder of the house of Dard-e-Dil. Behind the figures who posed in the foreground was the arched entryway to the verandah that led to the part of the palace where Dadi’s immediate family lived. Her father, though related to the Nawab only through marriage, had the prized ability to make the Nawab laugh and, as such, was indispensable at court. Officially, he was a minister, but it seems to me he came closer to fulfilling the role of court jester. My other great-grandfather, the courtier-cum-yak-enthusiast, was somewhat more independent (or less favoured) and lived away from the palace. But not so very independent, or so very out of favour; if the photographer had angled his camera up, say, thirty degrees he would have captured that spot on the palace roof where you could stand and look through a gap in the trees to see the house where the yak-man and his wife raised the triplets, just outside the palace walls. (‘House’ is the word Dadi uses to describe the triplets’ home, but within the boundary walls there were stables, a mosque, and fruit orchards, to name just a few accessories to the ‘house’.)

All this I registered when I looked at the picture, but only to the extent that you might register the details of a frame when looking at the ‘Mona Lisa’. My real interest was in the three boys and the girl who were the reason for the photograph. My first thought when I saw the brothers was how strange it was that I had never before seen a picture of all three of them together. Their arms around each other’s shoulders, they stood so close they could have been Siamese triplets in sherwanis, their necks rising dark from the high white collars, their hair identically parted and slicked down. Abida – she was too young in the photograph for me to think of her as Dadi – stood in front of her three cousins, swaying back just enough to make it impossible to discern from the lens angle whether or not she was leaning against the middle brother’s chest. But whose smile was that on Abida’s face? Not Dadi’s, certainly not. The peculiar expression, ‘her face spilling over with laughter’, made sense for the first time as I looked at that teenaged girl, her back arching towards the impossibly beautiful boy in the centre of the photograph.

‘You see, I have a photograph of her, and of your grandfather, on my wall,’ Baji said. ‘Despite what I said earlier. Don’t think my feelings are one-dimensional. Don’t think you can dismiss me as an embittered old woman.’

‘Baji,’ Samia said. ‘Please.’

‘That’s all I’m going to say about it. Now come and sit down, Aliya.’ Baji waved me over to the floor cushion beside her. I hadn’t seen Rehana re-enter the room, but there she was, helping Samia pull a coffee table a little closer to Baji, a long roll of paper under her arm.

‘I want to register my disapproval of this,’ Rehana said.

‘Yes, yes, you’ve done that. Now lay it out.’

‘You know about Babuji, of course,’ Baji said, motioning to Rehana to hand me a cup of tea from a trolley which had appeared without calling any attention to itself. I nodded my thanks to Rehana, and nodded a yes to Baji. Babuji was the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil family tree, as his father had been before him and his grandfather before that. It was said (which means none of my relatives in Pakistan wanted to admit to being the original teller of this tale because it implied contact with the Indian relatives) that Partition and the subsequent Age of Frequent Flyers had in no way impaired Babuji’s family’s meticulous record-keeping, and all Dard-e-Dil births and deaths made their way to the family tree, regardless of bristling borders.

‘This is a copy – a pruned copy – of the family tree, as recorded by Babuji,’ Rehana said, placing the paper on the table and unrolling it. This was a pruned copy? The coffee table must have been about four feet by four feet, and still the edges of the paper curled off three sides of the table and rolled down to the floor. There seemed to be some vastly elaborate colour scheme at work, involving purples, greens, yellows, reds, blues and a whole range of colours and shades besides. It seemed that those who were directly descended from the first Nawab via the patrilineal line had their name inked in purple, but what the other colours were supposed to signify I didn’t know. They probably indicated how far you had strayed from being the offspring of a direct male descendant. Yes, true enough. My grandparents’ generation was hanging over the edge of the table, but I could just make out Dadi’s name in blue. Her mother was red, and you had to go back a generation further to locate Dadi’s purple grandmother. How Dadi must hate that! But it must be some comfort that Akbar’s bloodline allowed Dadi the privilege of purple children. Samia and my generation was hidden from view, but I didn’t need to see our names to know Samia’s direct line hadn’t been purple since her great-great-grandmother. I was purple, but it appeared my children would be red unless I married a fellow purple. I wondered, If I were to marry a non-purple Dard-e-Dil, would my children still be red? Or was there a maroon or something for such cases? Why should it matter, either way?

‘Are these what I think they are?’ Samia pointed to a pair of black stars marking two names halfway down the tree. Now that she had pointed it out I could see pairs of starred names scattered across the paper, their familiarity rendering Samia’s question rhetorical. The not-quite-twins. As a child, I had inked those names on to my skin after a hot bath, my pores thirsting for that spiral of legend wrapped around my limbs.

‘This is the saddest of all the twin stories.’ Rehana’s thumbnail underlined the starred words ‘Inamuddin’ and ‘Masooma’.

Baji sighed and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘What we are, we are.’

Baji was clearly like Dadi in one thing at least: she could state the obvious and make it sound like revelation.

‘Although maybe I only think that because I’m an architect,’ Rehana added.

Inamuddin and Masooma were twins born on either side of midnight, almost three hundred years before Akbar and his brothers performed that feat with an added twist. The twins’ uncle, Nawab Hamiduzzaman, aware of the curse of not-quite-twins, ordered the royal physician to poison the babies and ascribe the deaths to natural causes. Someone should have told Hamiduzzaman the story of Oedipus. Or of Lady Macbeth, perhaps. Because after the deed was done, old Ham could not sleep. He could not sleep and he could not pray and he could not peel the taste of poison from his lips. Until at last a man with the dust of distance on his feet and the gleam of prophecy in his eyes won entry into the Nawab’s presence and, bending closer than close, whispered a means to redemption. And it was this: raze to the ground the mausoleum you have just started building for the bones of your ancestors and your descendants and those who come in-between. Make that land a holy shrine for pilgrims from every everywhere.

You may wonder, Then what? And you may wonder, How did that lead to a fall in the family’s fortune? I’ll say this: Think of the Mughals. Think of an image that captures and preserves the glory of the Mughals, and if you have any sense of anything you’ll say the Taj Mahal. Well, the fact is, Shah Jahan bought – in secret and in gold – the plans to that Dard-e-Dil mausoleum from the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil archives, and the only thing he changed when he had the plans copied for the benefit of the contractor was the name. But we know, though you’ll laugh, that Taj Mahal is, was, should have been, Dil Mahal. Other not-quite-twins denied the family wealth, power, freedom, unity; Masooma and Inamuddin’s curse was that they deprived us of posterity. And, oh God, we deserved it.

(When? you might demand. When did this happen? And now I’m forced to concede that it happened during the glory days of the Mughals, when Dard-e-Dil was not a kingdom at all but merely part of the Mughal Empire and Nawab Hamiduzzaman was not a Nawab, not really, no; that title was only conferred upon him posthumously by the Nawabs that followed after Dard-e-Dil became independent of the Mughals. So really old Ham was merely a scion of a once important family which had the good sense to ingratiate itself with the Mughals early on and received, in return, the position of subehdar- chief administrator – of the province comprising those lands which earlier may have been, and later certainly became, the kingdom of Dard-e-Dil. The position was not hereditary and the Dard-e-Dils were sometimes sent to cool their heels in outposts of the Empire but somehow, in contravention of the standard Mughal policy of keeping administrators on the move, the Dard-e-Dils always returned to those lands. Because they were sycophants, competent as administrators, but otherwise so grovelling and seemingly ineffectual that the Mughals saw them as no real threat? Perhaps. But also perhaps because the Mughals trusted them, admired them, acknowledged them as cousins of the Timurid line, and felt that a few years away from Dard-e-Dil was all it took to remind those cousins that they were entirely dependent on the bounty of the Mughal for their own prestige and power. By and large the plan worked through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By and large. But Hamiduzzaman was less than happy to play the role of needy relation. It was, I believe, the desperation to be ruler not vassal, coupled with an awareness of his own impotence against the Emperor, that made him so susceptible to an act as mad as infanticide. He saw that the reign of the Great Mughal, Akbar, was past and, sensing the faintly glimmering possibility of breaking free from Mughal rule, he was willing to sacrifice anything that might stand in the way of an auspicious future for Dard-e-Dils, even if that thing was a pair of mewling babies.)

‘Taj,’ Baji said, interrupting my thoughts. I assumed she must have been thinking, like me, of Shah Jahan’s architectural wonder. But no.

‘Taj, the midwife,’ she said, one manicured nail circling the name of the Nawab who killed a tiger with his bare hands. ‘With her head full of family lore and no reason to love those oh-so-legitimate babies she brought into the world. How do we know she didn’t invent, make up … Oh, let’s say it straight. How do we know Akbar, Taimur and Sulaiman didn’t enter the world on the same day, all just before or just after midnight?’

‘Because their mother—’

‘Samia, please. I’ve given birth in the days before these super painkillers and epidurexes – Rehana, you wouldn’t laugh if you’d been through it yourself – and I would have believed anything, yes anything, anyone said to me afterwards about when the clock chimed and when it didn’t.’ She smiled, as though thinking of something that pleased her inordinately. ‘Maybe Taj saw triplets and wondered if they qualified as not-quite-twins. And then maybe she saw the clock and thought, Why not. Let me make them believe it’s so. Let this be my revenge for their treatment of my mother and me.’

I was thinking, believe me, of my earlier conversation with Samia about Taj. I was thinking that, and thinking also that of course I wasn’t the first woman in the family to be bothered by Taj’s role in our narrative. So I said, ‘Well, I can understand why you feel a sense of affinity with Taj.’

Was it the air, the company, the tilt of my head? I don’t know. I just know that as soon as the words were out something transformed them. At the periphery of my vision, Samia was shaking her head at me and Rehana had turned her face away, but Baji only laughed, throwing her head back and showing all her cavities. ‘Oh, I see Abida in you. I see her so clearly. You with the untainted blood. Here …’

She swooped forward and picked the trailing end of the family tree off the floor, unrolling it on to my lap. ‘Here’s a pair of not-quites you don’t know about.’

Beside Mariam Apa’s name, a star.

A diagonal dotted line connected it to another starred name.

Mine.

Chapter Six

I’d had the opening line of Mariam’s story ready for a long time: In all the years my cousin, Mariam, lived with us she only spoke to order meals. The next line varied, according to my mood. Usually it was: Strictly speaking, she was more aunt than cousin, though I always called her Apa. But when I was feeling more fanciful I sometimes replaced that with: She taught me the textures of silence, the timbres of it, and sometimes even the taste.

My first thought when Baji showed me those stars was, the opening line will have to change. The story must begin with the curse of not-quites.

I should have thought, How is this possible? Given chronology, given science, given my life. How? But Rehana Apa was up and moving towards me, distracting me with her purposefulness as she pulled me up and said, ‘Baji, remember Hamlet? I’m taking Aliya out for something to eat. Samia, stay and look after my grandmother. She’s about to go into regret.’ She turned to me. ‘Where to?’

I thought, Hamlet? I said, ‘Any doughnut shop.’

‘To Piccadilly Circus then,’ Rehana Apa said. She allowed me silence as we walked. I suppose she thought I was thinking of that star beside my name. But actually I was thinking of America. My college days, so recently finished, were days of empty spaces in my head. Spaces without chatter, spaces without textured silences. I was so utterly foreign there, so disconnected from everything that went on that I could afford to be passionate about the tiniest injustice in the domestic news.

‘I don’t really want a doughnut,’ I said. I put on my best academic voice. ‘The word “doughnut” is a sign, the visual image of the doughnut is the signifier and a nostalgia for another life is the signified.’ I gestured vaguely with my hand. ‘Can we just go and sit under a tree instead?’

Rehana Apa said she knew a wonderful tree, and indeed she did. A shady beech in Green Park. Or perhaps it was an elm. Or an oak. I know nothing about trees, but I’ve read enough novels set in England to be pretty sure no other trees of importance exist there.

‘What about Hamlet should Baji remember?’ I sat down, unmindful of the damp.

Rehana Apa touched her palm to the tips of the grass, found the grass wet, dried her palm with a tissue and sat down anyway. ‘When Polonius says he’ll treat the players as they deserve, and Hamlet says, “Use them after your own honour and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty.” ‘

‘Such an aristo remark,’ I said. ‘Combat abuse with nobility; it’ll make the other guy look so small.’

Rehana Apa shook her head at me. ‘I love Hamlet in that moment. It makes me weep for everything he’s forced to become.’

I leant against the tree trunk and tried not to stare at her. My cousin. She must have been a dozen or so years older than me, and suddenly that didn’t seem very much. And here we were, talking about Hamlet. With everything else there was to talk about, we were talking about Hamlet.

‘Those kids at Baji’s. Are they yours?’

‘Stinky and Smelly?’ Rehana Apa laughed. ‘Yes. When the older one was born Baji said he had eyes like the old Nawab, Binky. So I said to my newborn child, “Should we call you Binky?” and he put his hand to his nose and scrunched up his face. My husband said, “He’s saying not Binky but Stinky.” And it stuck as such names do. The second born didn’t have a chance.’

‘Their real names?’

‘Omar and Aliya.’

‘Really? Aliya?’

Rehana Apa nodded. ‘Samia told me there’s a Stinker in the Pakistani side of the family.’

‘Yes. And his brother is Pongo. Weird, isn’t it? How our names overlap despite, you know, the complete lack of communication between the two sides of the family. How did Samia get in touch with you?’

‘We met at an art exhibition. Treasures of the Indian princes. We both kept circling back to a cabinet which displayed the sword our illustrious ancestor, Nur-ul-Jahan, used in the Battle of Surkh Khait. Once we started talking it took about seven seconds to work out the connection. Do you think your – our – relatives in Pakistan will criticize her for fraternizing with the enemy?’

‘No. Well, maybe one or two will. But I suppose the overwhelming emotion will be curiosity about how you’ve all fared. And the Indian relatives?’ It occurred to me suddenly that we didn’t support the same cricket team, this cousin and I. We’d never share that joy or camaraderie or heartrending despair that Samia, Sameer and I – and various other cousins – had so often experienced as we sat together in Sameer and Samia’s TV room, digging our nails into each other with anticipation during the final overs of a one-day game.

‘Probably react the same. Except, as you say, for one or two.’ Rehana Apa pulled a twig out of my hair. ‘Besides, almost everyone who stayed in Dard-e-Dil is now locked in some kind of property dispute with other relatives, so we’re expending our quotas of familial animosity within the national borders. And, for the record, I think Pakistan was a huge mistake.’

‘For the record, I don’t see it that way. Glad we’ve got that part of the conversation over with.’

She laughed and slapped my hand lightly. For a while we were silent and I found myself thinking again of him. Khaleel. I tried to picture him in Liaquatabad, but I had no idea what Liaquatabad looked like, so I just imagined tiny storefronts and burst sewerage pipes and cramped flats with laundry hanging over the balconies, spattered with crow droppings. I didn’t know if I was imagining a place I’d seen, or one I’d had nightmares about when I had nightmares about Mariam Apa. I looked at Rehana Apa’s elbows and I knew I had lied to myself when I said that crippling memories were what made me recoil at the prospect of Liaquatabad. I was born into a world that recoiled at such prospects. If Rehana Apa were to tell me that she was in touch with Baji’s mother’s family, I’d be shocked. I’d wonder what she could possibly have to say to them, and how she could bear to be reminded that she was one of them just as much as she was one of the Dard-e-Dils. But for all I know, I reminded myself, they could have risen in the world in the last few generations. They could be as polished and urbane as Rehana and I. They could be as polished and urbane as Khaleel.

Rehana Apa must have seen my brows furrowing deeper and deeper because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘If I understand correctly, Mariam’s older than you, older than me. What I mean is, you do realize that this twin stuff is absurd, don’t you? Babuji won’t say why he added it to the tree, but you know, just because we claim he’s always right, it doesn’t mean he is.’

So I told her the story of Mariam Apa’s arrival, and of mine.

It started with a letter to my father; another one, like Taimur’s, with an indistinguishable postmark. It was addressed to Sahibzada Nasser Ali Khan, and my mother was still new enough to our family to laugh at the pomp of that address. The letter (my mother still has it) said:

Huzoor! Aadaab!

I hope you are well and I hope you hope the same of me. I am writing because there is a young lady, Mariam, who soon before was motherless but since last month is an orphan. Her father (late) was Sahibzada Taimur Ali Khan whose name you must know and maybe even his face if you have old pictures. But even if not his face is your father’s face and so you will recognize her also because she has the familiarity. She is coming to look you up and I like her so much that I want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never!

In true Hollywood fashion the gate-bell rang as soon as my parents finished reading out the letter and, in a further cinematic twist, my mother was so surprised by the sound she spilt her tea over the paper and it washed away the signature, which my parents had read when reading the letter, but could not afterwards remember because the letter’s sentence structure convinced them that the writer was no one they knew.

So the bell rang and my father, certain that the laws of Hollywood had no part in his life, frowned at the spilt tea and told my mother it was probably just the night-watchman come to collect his monthly gratuity (which was and still is a tiny amount, but how much can you pay a man for riding through the neighbourhood on a bicycle while blowing a high-pitched whistle which sounds as if it’s the shriek of something supernatural).

At this point in my tale, Rehana Apa stopped me to enquire what I thought of Pakistani movies. I had to concede I’d never seen one of Lollywood’s productions, though Samia’s brother, Sameer, once went to see a local flick with his driver and cook and came home howling with laughter. ‘So the hero’s at this party, looking suave in his safari suit, and a waitress – not a waiter, a waitress! I ask you, From where? – asks him what he’ll have to drink. And I’m thinking, Is he going to do a shocker and ask for alcohol? But no, he asks for Coke with ice. Except he says it in English in some pseudo-smooth accent, so how it really comes out is “Cock on rock.” ‘

Rehana Apa laughed. ‘You must tell Baji that. She’ll look offended, but she’ll love it. But now get back to the story. You said the bell rang.’

Yes, the bell rang. A few seconds later the ayah, recently hired in preparation for my arrival into the world, knocked on my parents’ door and told them that a begum had arrived and was seated in the drawing room. She hadn’t said anything but she’d brought two suitcases.

‘Well,’ Ami said. ‘Well. It must be her.’

‘What do we do?’ Aba held the letter up to the light as if looking for a secret message written in lemon juice. ‘I mean, what kind of a person do we think she is?’

Ami laughed. ‘If the servants in all their snobbery think she deserves to be seated in the drawing room, she obviously isn’t a valet’s granddaughter. Most of your relatives only make it to the TV room, and they all think they’re princes and princesses.’ My mother can be dismissive of lineage in such a manner because, although she never mentions it, everyone knows she can trace her family tree back even further than the Dard-e-Dils. She’s from a family of Syeds, yes, descended from the Prophet Mohammed, and there were at least four great poets in her family – one of whom was exiled from Dard-e-Dil by one of the Nawabs who fancied himself a poet. My mother’s ancestor read the Nawab’s poetry and said, ‘This poem proves Allah’s justice. How can religion reconcile the privileges you were born into with the hardship I have had to face from birth? This is how: you have power and emeralds; I have talent. And history has shown that fine couplets live longer than fine banquets. God is great.’ My father’s family claims that the Nawab showed his greatness by banishing, rather than executing, the offending poet. But they never say so within my mother’s earshot.