Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Eleven

She’d always been strange about Mariam Apa.

At the time of my birth and Mariam’s arrival Dadi had been staying with my uncle in Paris. She had started that holiday tradition the summer after my grandfather, Akbar, had died much too young. His hair had begun to silver and his eyes no longer had their hawk-like vision, but Dadi’s sister, Meher, doesn’t mention that when she recounts her last glimpse of him, the evening before his stroke. Just arrived in Karachi from Greece, she had driven over to my grandparents’ house and pulled into their driveway in the failing light. Among a group of cricketers in the garden she saw a man silhouetted against the sun, bat in hand. The delivery was short of a length. The batsman danced out of his crease, went down on one knee, and swept the ball to the boundary with the grace of … ‘With the grace of the triplets in their youth,’ Meher Dadi said, the first time she mentioned it to me. ‘Taimur, Akbar, Sulaiman. He could have been any one of them, young and gorgeous with the world at his … at their feet. It was the first time in a long while that I’d thought of what he’d had to learn to live without. Aliya, I backed out and drove away. I didn’t want to wait for the light to change, didn’t want him to step forward and become the gruff man I’d known for so long that I’d forgotten that other Akbar.’ She closed her eyes and I knew she was imagining that other Akbar, and in her imaginings he stood with his brothers.

Dadi was inconsolable after his death, though it always seemed to me that whenever any of my older relatives mentioned this fact it was with an element of surprise. So when my uncle, Ali, suggested she come to visit him in Paris the whole family agreed she needed a break. Before the summer was over, Ali Chacha and his wife had convinced her that the trip should become an annual ritual. The only time she even considered changing her mind about that was when Ami was pregnant. Dadi offered to stay, but Ami told her, ‘No. Just come back sooner rather than later.’ She did, and on her return Aba greeted her at our front door with, ‘Guess what, Mama! I’ve kept a secret from you. There isn’t just one new addition to our family, there are two.’

‘Twins?’ Dadi gasped.

‘No, no,’ Aba said. ‘Taimur’s daughter, Mariam, has come to stay.’

Ami was standing behind Dadi, arms braced, and caught her as she swooned. ‘Honestly, Nasser,’ Ami said.

I’m on my father’s side. Dadi’s reaction seems a bit extreme. But I suppose, even given how long it had been since she’d seen him, it wasn’t extreme that she cried and cried when Aba told her Taimur was dead. She wanted to know how and when and where had he been and what had he been doing, but when Mariam Apa walked into the room with me in her arms, and Dadi asked all these questions, Mariam just offered me to Dadi to hold. Dadi kept repeating the questions, ignoring me entirely, so Ami took me from Mariam Apa, who still did not answer or even attempt to. Dadi said, ‘Who was your mother?’ Then Mariam Apa’s expression changed to something like pity. She put her hand on Dadi’s arm. Dadi shrugged her off. ‘Some upstart, no doubt, who raised her daughter without manners.’

I’ll admit that, when I was old enough to understand the story, it annoyed me that Dadi was too concerned about Taimur, whom she hadn’t seen in decades, to coo and fuss over her first grandchild. But, looking around the room that used to belong to Mariam, I tried to imagine decades passing by with no sign of Mariam Apa, until one day a young girl purporting to be her daughter appeared. And if this girl refused to tell me anything of Mariam’s life? I’d shake that girl, yell at her, curse and cajole. No baby would detract me from my purpose.

‘So that’s why,’ I said out loud. That’s why Dadi was always so cold towards Mariam.

Cold didn’t entirely cover it, of course. That’s what made me even angrier at Dadi than I might have been had their relationship consisted of nothing but animosity. But there was more to it than that. I know. I was there when they laughed together at the sight of me parading around in Dadi’s old wigs; I was there when Dadi described to Mariam Apa meals at the Dard-e-Dil palace; I was there when Mariam Apa told Masood to make the lightest soup in the world for Dadi when she was too sick to keep anything down, and I was there when Mariam Apa fed Dadi that soup herself.

But none of this seemed to matter when Dadi learnt that Mariam had run away with Masood. Just seconds after Aba had told us what had transpired on the farm, while I was still too stunned to feel anything, Dadi walked into the house. Aba told her, simply, in one sentence, ‘Mariam has eloped with Masood.’ Despite my shock I remembered the story of Dadi’s reaction to Mariam’s arrival, and I moved to catch her if she should fall. She did not fall. She stood up straight and said with icy regality, ‘That whore!’

Then she staggered and almost fell.

Because I slapped her.

She left early for Paris that year. Packed her bags and was gone within forty-eight hours of that echoing slap which I can still hear, along with my words: ‘I hate you. I hate this whole bloody clan.’ I would not apologize, would not say goodbye, though everyone in the family – even Sameer – said I must. I had not seen her since.

Oh, they had tried, of course; everyone in the family, I mean. Letters, phone calls, lectures, I got them all from three generations of relatives in the year just after the slap. Sameer and I’d had our only serious fight, ever, over the matter of my refusal to apologize.

‘What’s the point of an apology if there’s no forgiveness?’ I said to him, the first time he called me at college to say Dadi had just got back from Paris, and it really would be a good idea for me to call her.

‘I think she will forgive, Aliya.’

‘Who’s talking about her?’

That’s when he called me obstinate, stubborn, and even stupid. He’d called me these things before, and I’d returned the compliments, so I wasn’t too ruffled by any of it. And then he said, ‘Look at it from her point of view.’

‘Sameer,’ I said. ‘Even you?’

Within minutes we were yelling. I was the first to slam down the phone, and then he called back so that he could do the same. If it hadn’t been for Samia making a three-way call and telling us both off so thoroughly that we had no recourse but to band together and gang up against her, who knows how long our stand-off would have continued.

Sameer never mentioned the matter to me again, except through oblique hints which I ignored, and after my first summer home no one else brought the matter up either. I think my parents must have told everyone that Dadi and I would just have to work it out on our own. They only said that, of course, because they’d spent that whole summer doing everything they could to make me pick up the phone and call her but I’d been intractable. It was the worst summer of my life; worse even than the summer before, when we were all in too much pain about Mariam Apa’s departure to talk about it, or about my fight with Dadi, in anything except quick exchanges which rapidly became silence.

But now, unmistakably, those were Dadi’s footsteps progressing down the hall. I could drum out the beat of those steps, with their pauses in between one footfall and the next, which had always suggested to me that someone had told her, when she was just past crawling, never to drag her feet while walking. She lifted each foot up, entirely off the ground, and then placed it down, firmly, without any slipping or sliding. I caught myself praying that she hadn’t aged.

Wasim opened the door. ‘Bari Begum Sahib,’ he announced, and fled.

I stayed seated on the divan and stared down at her feet and the hem of her sari. I wanted to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her calves as I had done more than once in my childhood when she was leaving for the airport. If we’d been in any other room in the house, I probably would have. But instead I waited for her move and, after a long pause, her move was laughter.

‘And you’re still so young,’ she said.

I flushed and looked up. She wasn’t more wrinkled or stooped or sagging, and I could have kicked myself for having come back now, before June, because I was afraid she would die and I’d be left with nothing but guilt and anger to remember her by. To hell with guilt.

‘Better young than old,’ I said.

‘Oh, Aliya.’ She sat down and shook her head at me. ‘I wasn’t insulting you.’

‘No?’

‘No. The last time we saw each other —’ her hand went to her cheek in a gesture that was supposed to look unconscious – ‘just after that, when I was on the plane to Paris, I realized how young eighteen is. So young. How can you hold people responsible for things they did at eighteen? How can you go on clinging to something from that stage in your life?’

‘You want me to forget Mariam Apa existed?’

‘Aliya, I’m not talking about you. Now stand up and greet me properly.’

I stood up, performed an aadaab and bent lower to kiss her cheek. Her arms wrapped around me for a moment, then disengaged before I could respond.

‘Aba and Ami aren’t home yet.’

‘Yes, I know. Your father isn’t always clever.’ She reached into her handbag and pulled out a mobile phone. ‘He said he was calling from the house, but the display showed his office number.’

‘You have a mobile phone?’

‘I’m an uppie. A yuppie no longer young. Sameer suggested prefixing “geriatric” but I will not be a guppie.’

I wouldn’t allow myself to laugh, so instead I said archly, ‘Nothing less than smoked salmon for Dadi.’

‘I was thinking along the lines of a swordfísh.’

Had she always possessed this virtue of self-parody? Yes. That’s partly why I’d loved her so much. Why had all those relatives wasted so much time in talking about rapprochement? If they’d only thought, instead, of a way of bringing us together, physically together, so that I could see her ear lobes. Yes, I said ear lobes. As a child I was always fascinated by their softness; I would grip a lobe between thumb and finger and fall asleep, and nothing on earth would persuade Dadi to move while I still had her in my grip. When I’d wake up and say, ‘Dadi, you could have pushed me away,’ she’d reply, ‘My darling, one day you’ll push yourself away. I’m making the most of this while I can.’ I swore that would never happen.

I looked at her ears and felt an overwhelming anger towards myself. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you.’

‘No shit, Sherlock, as your Americans would say.’

‘Dadi!’

She leant back and looked at me, amused. ‘English is capable of such vulgarity. But sometimes that’s good. When you live in euphemism you can’t speak to people who are accustomed to direct speech.’

‘Is this a euphemistic jab at me? What haven’t I understood?’

‘Love, Aliya. You never understood love.’

What I had never understood, I now saw quite clearly, was her. I had left at an age when understanding had only just become possible, and I’d spent the intervening years reducing her to a tilted head and a cheek that provoked slapping. How had I let myself do that? How could one remark undo eighteen years of love? Because hating Dadi was easier than facing the truth. I thought that, but then I didn’t know what it meant. What truth?

‘Sameer says you met Baji?’

I hadn’t been at all sure how to bring this up. But she seemed only curious; perhaps even relieved. ‘Yes.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘The first not-quites. Kulsoom and Shahrukh. A story I’d never heard before.’

‘If you’d been around at all over the last few years I’m sure I would have told it to you by now.’ Her tone was entirely matter of fact. My anger caught me off guard. This time the anger was all outward. I really did hate her for the pretence that nothing had ever been wrong; the pretence that my absence meant nothing more than a few missed opportunities to tell family stories. I had felt, just seconds earlier, the urge to cry for having stayed away from her for so long, and she couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge that there were moments when she had missed me.

‘Touché,’ I said, matching her tone of indifference. ‘I don’t believe you, but touché.’

Dadi raised her eyebrow just enough to let me know that I had come perilously close to accusing her of lying. ‘Did Baji mention me?’ And now I saw that she was, unmistakably, hungry for news of her family. My God, I thought, it’s only pride that’s kept her from writing a letter, making a phone call, doing something, anything, to get in touch with the family on ‘the other side’. Pride, and the fear of being rebuffed. Were those absurd reasons partly to blame for my decision not to call Dadi or write her a letter these past years? What else? What were my other reasons?

‘She asked how you were,’ I said. ‘Then she said she saw you in me.’

‘What did you do to deserve that?’ Dadi smiled sadly, and I thought back to that laughing girl framed in Baji’s apartment. No trace remained. ‘I always liked her, though I don’t think she knew that. I told you that once. Remember?’

I couldn’t say I did. Dadi persisted, ‘When you were studying twentieth-century thought at school. Condensed in one chapter of seven pages. The green history book. Remember?’

Yes, I remembered. Remembered that I had fallen asleep with the history book on my lap, and when I awoke Dadi was sitting beside me. She started talking about a cousin of hers whose mother had tantalizing elbows. She asked me two questions: ‘How does royalty treat a washerwoman? How does a daughter treat a mother?’ Before I could answer Dadi said, ‘What do you do when the two questions are really just one question?’ That was Baji’s story – convinced her father’s relatives considered her their inferior; equally convinced that her mother’s relatives should treat her as their superior. Dadi pointed at the bearded man on the open page of my text book. ‘Although she couldn’t demonstrate any sympathy for the lower classes herself, it was Baji who made a Marxist of me.’

A decade later, recalling that remark, I found it even more absurd than I had at the age of twelve. ‘Baji made a Marxist of you?’ I said to Dadi.

‘You’re thinking, If she’s a Marxist, I’m an eland,’ Dadi said. ‘But I was. So was Taimur. We were both so young.’

Elands. Yaks. We couldn’t be common and deal in dogs and goats. ‘And Akbar?’ I asked. ‘Did the two of you fall in love over shared political views?’

‘Akbar? He said the difference between a royal who inherits power and a plebian who achieves it —’ she used the word ‘plebian’ without a grain of self-consciousness – ‘is that the royal is tutored in the arts, in social graces, in subtlety. So his misuse of privilege is blanketed in ghazals and aadabs. The plebian, unused to power, hungry for it, desperate to grab it while it lasts, does not bother with niceties. And niceties, Akbar said, cannot be undervalued.’

‘You disagreed with this?’

Dadi shrugged. ‘Yes, but politely.’

‘With subtlety and art.’

‘Precisely.’

I didn’t know what to do with the silence that followed, so I picked up the morning newspaper and looked at the front page. ‘Who’s flaying who?’ Dadi asked.

There is no institution in the world which uses the word ‘flay’ as wantonly as the Karachi morning papers. Government flays opposition. Opposition flays PM. Politician flays bureaucracy. Journalists flay censorship. Batsmen flay bowlers. Hygienist flays fleas. Foreign Minister flays Foreign Hand. The other wantonly used word is ‘miscreant’. Whenever anything untoward happens – be it the spread of vulgar graffiti or the detonation of a bomb – miscreants are blamed. No one seems to realize that the seriousness of the crime is undermined by the use of the word ‘miscreant’, which conjures up an image of little gnomes scampering around with flaming torches in their hands. When the papers are feeling particularly reckless they’ll print a headline which announces that someone has flayed a miscreant.

‘I’ll say this for Akbar Dada’s theory.’ I tossed the paper aside. ‘If a politician flayed someone in verse, he’d get my vote.’

‘My darling, relative to the times, you’re a bigger snob than I was at your age.’

‘It’s intellectual snobbery.’

Dadi laughed. ‘Around here who but the privileged have the luxury to commit poems to memory?’

‘Your butcher, for one.’ Dadi’s butcher had his shop miles away from where she lived, but she wouldn’t hear of patronizing anyone else in the meat trade, because no other butcher could quote poetry so beautifully while slicing through hunks of flesh. ‘I wouldn’t vote for your butcher if he took to politics. I can’t dissociate him from the image of a cleaver.’

‘Advancement without bloodshed.’ Dadi polished her solitaire ring with the puloo of her sari. ‘Unheard of at one time.’

‘Well, yes.’ I sat up. ‘At some point, when whatshis-name, the founder of Dard-e-Dil, swept down into India with his forces … Dadi, we were the nouveau riche.’

‘The word then was “marauders”. Actually, whatshis-name was a Timurid from Samarkand, so you’re wrong about him.’ Her tone suggested reproach, but this time I didn’t mind. She was reproaching me for having forgotten, if only for a minute, the stories of our family that she had so often told me, and in that reproach was an acknowledgement of all the hours we’d spent together. Dadi held her ring up to the sunlight and checked for smudges, then slipped it back on and tried to smooth out the wrinkles on her fingers. She grimaced, then smiled in resignation. ‘But go back far enough and, of course, we were all swinging from trees.’

‘So, we’ve had our turn. Power, wealth, the whole tamasha. Too bad we were born during the downward swing.’

‘That is our chief blessing. Now we can fade with dignity.’

‘A moment ago we were monkeys. Now we’re cloth. Milao-ing your metaphors, Dods.’

It was the old nickname that did it. She put her hand on mine, and absently scratched away the curve of nail polish that my swab with the polish-remover had missed. ‘Akbar knew my Marxist ideals – unformed and uninformed as they were – were based on a world that did not exist. In this world, the one we must live in, Baji will never fully belong to either side of her family. And if Mariam has a daughter, as beautiful and intelligent as Baji was when I knew her, you’ll never be able to forget that her father was a servant.’

I’d been wondering how I’d feel when she first mentioned Mariam Apa’s name. Sorrow, and an overwhelming physical exhaustion. And somewhere deep down, somewhere horrible, the nausea of knowing I agreed with her. It came to me then – that truth about why I’d tried so hard to hate her: when I told the story of Mariam’s departure … No, when I told my story of Mariam’s departure, I could allow myself to figure as the heroine. Here was the story as I’d told it to myself over and over and over: Mariam eloped with Masood and I was shocked to hear about it, but then Dadi walked in and called her a whore so I slapped Dadi because whoever Mariam might have married she was still Mariam and I would defend her against all those who couldn’t see beyond their own class prejudices.

Bravo, Aliya.

But I had felt something other than shock. When Aba told me she’d eloped I felt humiliation. Also, anger. Worse, I felt disgust. She’s having sex with a servant. Those words exactly flashed through my mind. Not Masood; just, a servant. How could I possibly have acknowledged that reaction as my own? So much easier to remember, instead, that I championed Mariam, seconds later. So much easier to say that in slapping Dadi I proved I did not think like her.

I felt a terrible emotion, too complicated for a monosyllable, well up inside me. I cried out, ‘But Dadi, at the end of the day can’t we at least hope to be better than ourselves!’

‘What we are, we are.’

Chapter Twelve

I had planned to tell Dadi and my parents about Baji’s copy of the family tree over lunch, but just as we sat down at the table Sameer sauntered in.

‘Aadaab. Hello. Hi,’ he said, pushing me over so that he could sit on the edge of my chair. He raised an eyebrow, silently enquiring about my meeting with Dadi, and I rolled my eyes slightly and smiled. He seemed to understand what I was trying to say. I hadn’t forgiven and forgotten what she’d said four years ago; but I had remembered why, prior to her terrible words about Mariam Apa, I had adored her so completely. Of course, I now adored myself a lot less completely than I had a few hours earlier … but no, that wasn’t quite true either. At least now I could put my finger on why it was I had so often felt the urge to smash my fist through my reflection in the mirror in the weeks after Mariam left. But how much had I changed in the last four years? That really was the question. I had learnt to reclaim my old affection for Masood, and it had been a long time since I felt anger at Mariam Apa. But there was still that matter of Liaquatabad.

Sameer touched my ankle with his foot, to let me know how glad he was that things were approaching normality between me and Dadi, and he and my parents exchanged looks of relief. He raised my glass as in a toast, then thought better of it and turned to Dadi. ‘Abida Nani, Mummy was about to call but I volunteered to deliver the news, person-to-person. Some relative just had an ultrasound.’

‘Mini,’ said Dadi. ‘Booby’s daughter. Everything’s okay, I hope.’

Sameer spooned haleem on to my plate and sprinkled green chillis and ginger over it. ‘Twenty fingers and twenty toes.’

Aba rolled his eyes. ‘More twins.’

There had been much holding of breath a couple of summers ago when some random cousin whose existence I was only dimly aware of had an ultrasound which detected twins. I was back at college by the time the twins were born and Aba left a two-word message on my answering machine to announce the event: ‘They’re quite.’

Sameer tore a naan in two, and gave me one half. ‘The Starched Aunts are clearly thrilled because it gives them something to speculate about. Particularly since the father’s name is Farid. Short for Fariduddin, which is supposedly significant.’

Dadi jangled the little bell which was always placed within her reach when she ate with us. When Wasim appeared she said, ‘Quickly give my driver something to eat. Tell him we have to go to Booby Sahib’s house as soon as I’ve finished lunch. And didn’t you see Sameer Mian walk in? Set a place for him straightaway.’ Before he was out of earshot she said, still in Urdu, ‘I remember the days when servants were fired if their hands shook while they were serving food.’

Marx would have liked that. I decided to relay the thought to her telepathically and it must have worked because she paid me no attention.

‘There was a famous Fariduddin in your family, wasn’t there?’ Ami said. ‘Wasn’t he the twitchy one?’

‘No, the twitchy one was the necrophiliac,’ Sameer said.

Aba clicked his tongue. ‘The stammerer was the necrophiliac, and for the record he wasn’t a necrophiliac as such – he just had some difficulty accepting his wife’s death.’

‘I thought the stammerer and the twitchy one were the same person,’ said Ami.

‘I didn’t know there was a stammerer.’

‘Sameer, everyone knows there was a stammerer.’

‘Are the stammerer and the stutterer the same person?’

Dadi jingled the bell so softly I wouldn’t have heard it if I hadn’t seen it. When I was very young she had taken me to a kathak performance. It was my first experience of classical dance and I was transfixed by the sound of the ankle bells – the ghungroo – which accompanied the tabla and sitar as the dancer whirled and glided across the stage. Dadi, however, declared the performance amateur. A real kathak dancer, she said, such as the ones she remembered at the Dard-e-Dil court, did not rely on a ‘crowd-pleasing chhing-chhing’ of hundreds of bells. A real kathak dancer demonstrated mastery by isolating one bell from all those hundreds, through sheer muscle control, and ringing it with the clarity and purity that was lost in multitude. It was that way with family histories, too, she said. One could not simply say that our family was involved in battles and treaties, patronized poetry and dance, was sometimes generous and sometimes cruel. To say someone committed patricide and someone infanticide, that heads were severed and hearts broken, that there was great glory and also falls from grace, with no symmetry to the reversals unless chance has its own peculiar symmetry, to say all this is not enough. You have to isolate each life, have to say that here lies the first discordant note and look how it is echoed in this life and see the discordance transformed into a necessary part of the whole as it, through contrast, heightens the harmony of this chord.

‘Fariduddin was the ugly Nawab,’ I said, and everyone aahed.

So ugly that all the paintings of him show a tall, strikingly handsome man with lashes so long and luxurious you ache to run your fingers through them. Of course, the painters were all his subjects, so what do you expect? (Besides, one of the Starched Aunts noted, none of the paintings show the back of his head, and that omission must mean something.) Regardless of details, the bottom line is he was ugly, and he knew it. He knew also that his wife’s brother, Askari, was not ugly and he knew his wife knew it, too. But he didn’t realize the extent to which she knew it until she gave birth to twins. One, the spitting image of Fariduddin. One, the spitting image of Askari.

Perhaps Fariduddin had read too many Greek myths and too few biology texts. It was the middle of the eighteenth century – literature was more important than science in the education of a prince. Yes, yes, I’m referring to Leda and her twin eggs again. One egg encased the mortal children of her husband, Tyndareus; the other egg incubated the immortal children of Zeus. No one tells us what Tyndareus thought when he saw his children hatch and saw, also, that other egg from which the children of Zeus – Helen and Pollux – emerged. Let’s face it, Tyndareus could do nothing about the fact that his children, Clytemnestra and Castor, were twinned with twins who were no relation to Tyndareus. There is nothing to do against a god but rage, and quietly. But Fariduddin, having read his mythology, saw his wife’s children and knew that those twins were not-quite-twins in the way that Castor and Pollux were not-quite-twins. Except, it was no god who held Fariduddin’s wife in his beak and his wings. It was Askari who thought he could take that which was most forbidden to him and escape without detection. But Askari’s beauty – his eyes, his smile, his rose-shaped mouth – was his doom. Fariduddin saw his wife’s children, saw one who was ugly and would never be anything else, and saw another who was beautiful in the way that only one other man in the kingdom was.

Fariduddin said to his wife, ‘I will kill Askari first. Then his son. Then you.’ You’d do well to suspect the veracity of this part of the story. We’ve watched enough movies, all of us, to know that when you say a thing like that all three of your intended victims will survive, and you’ll be the one with the bullet through your heart. You see, I’m not even pretending there’s suspense attached to this bit. Did I mention that by now the Dard-e-Dils were well and truly independent of the Mughals and had their first real chance of becoming great princes, free from all overlords, enlightened rulers of a stable kingdom? Did I mention that the year was 1773? Guess which trading company in India was dealing in more than spices by now.

Yes, when Askari heard Fariduddin’s cry of rage he galloped away to a neighbouring state, where the East India Company had something between a toe– and a foot-hold. What exactly Askari said to the Englishman, Fraser, I don’t know, but he might as well have held out a silver platter with the soil of Dard-e-Dil sprinkled on it, and a gout of blood added for good measure. The rest is painfully predictable. The troops loyal to Askari, with the aid of the English, overran Dard-e-Dil. Fariduddin was killed. Askari became regent to the infant Nawab (the ugly one, who grew up to be beautiful despite all predictions). Did Askari think the English would tip their hats, collect their gold, and go? Did he think? Clearly not, because in addition to the fifty lakh rupees he paid out, he also made a treaty of mutual assistance with the English.

Were they involved, the Empire builders, in stirring up trouble for Askari? Every time the state lurched towards peace another nobleman would carve out an alliance to unseat Askari, and every time that happened Askari turned to Fraser and his men. By the time the Nawab attained his majority and Askari died in a drunken brawl at the banquet to celebrate the Nawab’s birthday, Dard-e-Dil was just another de facto vassal, and Fraser, that man of common birth, was a lord. The rest of the story? This is how the history books sum it up: ‘Near the turn of the century the state’s fiscal debt to the English was so vast the Company annexed half the lands of Dard-e-Dil in commutation of arrears.’ Half the lands. Those three syllables cannot begin to convey the orchards and rivers and mosques and temples and shrines and people, yes, there must have been people on those lands, too. I only just thought of that.

(Has anyone asked what became of Fariduddin’s wife? Fariduddin killed her. Though some say Askari killed her when she shielded her husband from Askari’s drawn sword. This, at least, is incontrovertible: she died. So much for movie rules.)

I looked up from my haleem. Touched my foot to Sameer’s for support. ‘Don’t worry about Mini Apa’s twins.’ Sameer, now with his own place setting, moved his chair a little closer to mine. ‘There’s never been more than one pair of not-quites co-existing at one time. And if that pattern holds, her twins will be fine. After all, I’m still alive and, though god help us we have no way of being sure of this, so is Mariam Apa.’

Ami tapped my cheek with a piece of naan. ‘Aliya, I love you truly-truly, so don’t take this badly, but I have no idea what you just said and why and don’t dip your sleeve in the haleem.’