Broken Verses (10 page)

‘And what about fathers?' I had challenged him once. ‘Why are they allowed to be irresponsible?'

‘It's not that we're allowed. It's just that we're less significant, and so less capable of doing damage,' he had replied, turning away before the sentence was finished.

When he'd exhausted the subject of light fixtures I said I had to go, and hung up. But more than before, I felt the need to call someone and talk, just talk. I scrolled down the names in my mobile phone, considered calling my brother-in-law, but knew he would be entirely uncommunicative during the middle of his work day. I put down the phone, ran my fingers over the steering wheel and, for a moment, had a memory—no, not a memory, a reliving—of sitting behind the wheel and learning to drive at the age of fourteen. I needed to speak to a friend, simple as that—and not just one of my ex-colleagues from teaching or human resources or the cricket magazine, who served so well as dinner or beach companions. A friend who had known me long enough to know me, that was what I needed. A childhood friend. Someone who had changed gears while I held the wheel and pressed the clutch because doing all three things at the same time had seemed a task too complicated even to attempt.

I shifted gears from neutral to first. A few months after my mother's disappearance, soon after I had stopped my blinding search for clues and conspiracies and waited, instead, simply for her to call or return, my closest schoolfriends had come over to my house, sat me down and said it was time to accept facts. They weren't going to collude in my delusions any more, they said, it was too painful for them and too harmful for me. Better to face that she's not coming back, and look, here are our shoulders. Cry on them.

It was their mothers' voices speaking through them, I knew. All those mothers in whose houses I had done so much of my growing up; those mothers who, even more than their children, had wrapped such a tight, protective circle around me when my mother disappeared that I had hardly been able to breathe in their presences. I stood up in front of all my friends and, one by one, reeled off a litany of complaints about those mothers. The mother who tried too hard. The mother who stifled her children. The mother who was holier-than-thou. The mother with her absurdly bleached hair. And finally I turned to the closest of my friends, the one whose mother had been most like an aunt to me and, unable to come up with any complaint about or accusation against that sweetest of women, I said, ‘And your mother with her arranged marriage. She'd hardly even met your father before the wedding. That means she did it with a stranger. Like a prostitute.'

I knew exactly what I was doing. Mothers were sacred in all our lives, and even while our faith in their worthiness as objects of veneration might falter, it was not something we would ever dream of saying in public. To complain about your own mother was taboo; to insult someone else's mother was unthinkable. And so, my friends turned and left my room. The following day, in school, my closest friend walked past me in the schoolyard, alone, three times, giving me all the opportunity I needed to call out an apology. But I didn't, and we hadn't spoken since.

In the weeks after my betrayal of my friends, I kept waiting for the moment when one of them, or more, would reveal to the world the reasons for their refusal to associate with me, and then, I knew, I would be shunned by everyone in the tiny circles in which I conducted most of my life. But that moment never came, and I knew their silence was a final mark of friendship which all of them handed to me, across that line which now separated us, before retreating from my life.

I looked up to see the traffic light changing from green to red again and I slammed on the accelerator, almost colliding with a bus which had replica nuclear missiles attached to its roof at jaunty angles.

There was one moment when I could have changed course and found my way back to those friends—and their mothers. It was the end of my first year at university in London—my mother had been gone two years by then, and my newly found method of coping with her absence was excess, which meant drugs, drink, men, or any combination of the above. That lasted most of the university year until Beema and fifteen-year-old Rabia arrived in London at the beginning of Rabia's summer holidays and refused to say anything disapproving at all for two weeks; the weight of their forbearance finally became too much for me and I broke down in tears and promised a reformation of character. The first step was finding a way to pass my exams—which I did, after weeks of dedicated studying which surprised me with the exhilaration it brought to my life. One of my most vivid memories of that year is of walking through Bloomsbury in the rain, after my last exam, repeating one phrase over and over: for peace comes dropping slow. The rain seemed to change its tempo as I whispered those words, each drop hesitating in its arrow-straight descent from sky to my outstretched palm. I, too, am of the sky, I said aloud. My mother named me.

I looked across the street then, and saw my former best friend sitting at one end of a long table in a pub, with a group of students celebrating the end of the exams. I had been avoiding her through the year, but right then if she had turned around and there had been anything at all except indifference in her eyes I would have broken down in tears, and told her of every fear that had made me so cruel. But she didn't turn, and the rain became a torrent, so I returned to halls and ate baked beans out of a can. It was all so obviously pathetic that I told myself I'd laugh about it one day.

‘Still waiting for the day,' I said, driving past a police checkpoint that was absurdly blocking an entire lane of a busy road, without bothering to see if a policeman was flagging me down.

Who would I be now if she had stayed? How did I become this person, this quiz show researcher without real friends? I was the girl who could be anything—that's what my teachers used to say, and I believed them. I just never realized that ‘anything' could include this.

What have I done to my life, Mama, in your name?

There was a slight tremor running along the back of my hand. It would be so easy to drift into the utter self-absorption of misery.

Absorption. Something or the other absorbs neutrons and then fission occurs, after which...

Aasmaani! There was my mother's voice. Are you thinking of nuclear weapons as the more cheerful alternative to thinking about me?

No one could ever make me laugh in more unexpected moments. Things I—and everyone else I knew—might find funny, she'd often deem outrageous, such as when Ronald Reagan insisted on referring to Pakistan's military-picked Prime Minister, Junejo, as Huneho during the latter's state visit to the US. ‘Cowboys running the world, and treating us like vassals whose names aren't even worthy of learning to pronounce', she fumed, and refused to see the joke. But on another occasion, a typo in a warrant for her arrest reduced her to tears of laughter. ‘Aasmaani, look,' she said, as I clung on to her arm, terrified by the policeman at her doorstep. She handed me the warrant. ‘I stand accused of having “beached the law”.' I laughed all the way to the police van with her, entirely caught up in picturing the law as a giant whale and my mother as Jonah, the magnetism of her personality throwing off the compass that allowed the whale to navigate away from shore.

I was still thinking about that when I parked the car in my designated spot outside the STD office and got out, ducking my head in greeting at a group of co-workers who were standing around their cars. The ducked head, if executed properly, serves as polite salutation carrying with it the barest suggestion that you're really just nodding to yourself over some remembered incident and are not making overtures of friendship. It keeps both offence and familiarity at bay.

As the police van had driven away with my mother inside, and it occurred to me to be frightened, the Poet appeared from next door; when I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Run, look up “breach” in the dictionary.'

So I did, and beneath ‘to fail to obey or preserve something, for example, the law or a trust' I found ‘to leap above the surface of the water (refers to whales)'. That was all the proof I needed that there was order in the world, and that—this followed naturally—my mother would come back soon. She did, that evening. All they wanted was to keep her locked up during a protest rally.

You had your moments, Mama, I'll give you that. In those—what was it?—ten years out of the first seventeen of my life when you weren't absent in one way or the other, you had your moments.

I pushed open the front door to the studio and walked in. On the ground floor, life was as chaotic as usual, with people calling out to one another through open office doors, and a steady stream of employees walking from kitchenette to photocopier to downstairs studio to upstairs offices. I stopped next to a group of men and women of mixed ages standing under the television mounted above our heads, watching STD's repeat broadcast of its mid-morning music video programme.

‘But why is she sitting under an umbrella at the beach like it's the French Riviera instead of Karachi?' one said. ‘Put her on an old shawl surrounded by kinoo peels, that's more like it.'

‘You just go watch your MTV if all you can do with the local stuff is complain.'

‘Oh, baba, I'm saying the local stuff should try less harder to be like MTV.'

‘O-ay, listen. You really planning to boycott American goods when they attack Iraq?'

‘Hanh, well, we have to feel like we're doing something, right?'

‘OK, but does that mean boycotting movies and music as well? I mean, what if they attack before the new
Lord of the Rings?
'

‘No, no, no problem. We get that on pirated videos and DVDs. So when you buy those you're just helping local industry. Same with music. And computer software.'

‘Great, great.'

‘Yeah, great, but there's one problem remaining. Petrol pumps. Between work, home, supermarket, sabziwallah, and my parents' house, there's only Shell and Caltex pumps. What do I do about that?'

A moment of silence. ‘Well ... you have to be realistic, after all. You need the car. The car needs petrol. What to do?'

‘I'll tell you what to do. You want to piss off the Americans, there's only one thing to do. Vote in the fundos. I swear next election, I'm doing that. Last time I was tempted, next time I will, for sure.'

‘You just shut up and go sit in your corner. You vote in the fundos, they'll do nothing about the petrol pumps, and just ban all your precious music videos and put us women in burkhas.'

‘And anyway, the Americans like it these days if you piss them off. You piss them off, they bomb you.'

‘Seriously! But listen, yaar, you think the mullahs are going to join this government?'

‘God forbid. If they do, who knows what killjoy laws they'll try and pass. Remember in the eighties how boring life got with all that pretend-Islamization?'

Boring? What I wouldn't have given for some boredom in the 1980s. It was all prison and protest and exile and upheaval around me. Strange, how I was almost nostalgic for that. The battle-lines were so clearly drawn then with the military and the religious groups firmly allied, neatly bundling together all that the progressive democratic forces fought against. Now it was all in disarray, the religious right talking democracy better than anyone else and insisting, unwaveringly (admirably, I would say, if I didn't recall their political track record), on the removal of the military from power while all the other political parties tiptoed around the matter or see-sawed back and forth; and, on the other side of the equation, the President-General who had been the first head of state in my lifetime to talk unequivocally against extremism was tripping over his own feet in an attempt to create a democratic façade for a government in which the military remained the final authority and the only veto power. All those sacrifices, all those battles—and this is what we had come to. It wasn't a tragic waste—those lives, that passion; it wasn't tragic, just farcical.

I made my way up the stairs—leaving the groups below to argue about whether Pakistan's nuclear capability made America more or less likely to attack—and almost collided with Ed, on his way down.

We both moved away from each other, further than was necessary—him up two steps, and me down two steps—so the distance between us didn't imply the civility of two people making room for the other to pass but instead implied a mutual feeling of contamination.

The only way past this moment was brazenness, so I took two steps in one stride—at the exact moment that he came to the same decision—and then we really did collide, his foot stepping on mine, my forehead bumping against his nose.

We both cried out, extricated ourselves from the tangle of our bodies, and sat down, side by side, to nurse our injuries. And then, looking sideways at each other—him with a hand over his nose, me with my palm pressing down on my foot—we laughed.

Ed leaned sideways on his elbow and looked at me appraisingly. ‘You're impossible to figure out, aren't you?' That struck me as particularly funny, coming from him. ‘I just spoke to my mother. She said the gift she sent you was that strange nonsensical bit of writing she'd received some weeks ago. Why did you tell me she sent you calligraphy? I thought you meant she'd lifted her Sadequain painting off the wall and had it delivered to you.'

When he put it that way, I couldn't imagine why I'd said such a thing. I fanned my fingers in front of me, hoping that would convey some sort of adequately inadequate response. ‘You did seem rather upset about it.' I was embarrassed to remember that it had crossed my mind at some point during the morning that his response had been an admission of complicity—in what, I hadn't worked out. That search for conspiracies hadn't entirely died.

‘I have to admit I was a little concerned,' he said. ‘I mean, you're quite lovely despite all your considerable strangeness, but Sadequain is Sadequain. I've loved that bit of calligraphy hanging in my mother's bedroom since I was a child.'