Broken Verses (14 page)

Let go. As though I were holding on to something outside myself; as though conclusions were ropes that could hang you. And whatever I tried to say, however much I tried to explain that my mother really was capable of vanishing, that she'd been practising it for two years before she actually left, that she had been practising shedding the skin that was her character and assuming another identity, right there, under our noses without any of us understanding what was happening—however much I tried to explain all this, and tried to explain, also, that there had been simply no reason for her to stay within her old identity, they would tell me I had created a story to avoid facing the painful truth. That they, too, were creating a story would not occur to them—if enough people believe a thing, belief becomes indistinguishable from truth, and they cannot see how anyone with the same facts as they possess could ever reach a different conclusion except through stubbornness, denial or a wilful misreading of the situation.

I opened the desk drawer which contained the cover letter and encrypted page, and then closed it again. I would give myself another two hours before looking at it. Self-imposed restrictions are absurd but not without effect; if you can't rid yourself of obsessions you can at least wean yourself off the number of hours you waste on them to the exclusion of everything else.

I forced my hands off the drawer-handle and on to my keyboard. But there really wasn't any work demanding my immediate attention. It was a particularly slow day at STD—the only event of note had been the firing of a pregnant TV presenter, whose energetic and efficient hosting of a current affairs programme had been brought to an end at the insistence of the show's primary advertisers who claimed that their product could not be associated with a pregnant woman without ‘adverse effects'. The primary advertiser was a bank—and already the STD kitchenette was rife with ribaldry about ‘direct deposits' and ‘early withdrawals'.

Somehow my hand was on the drawer-handle again. I moved it over to the telephone and phoned Shehnaz Saeed to thank her for lunch.

‘Don't be silly,' she said. ‘My pleasure entirely. I don't know why we haven't been in touch all these years. You know, I was just going to call you myself to ask if you'd made any sense of that page of garbled letters.'

‘No, sorry. Haven't had time to really look at it. But as a matter of interest, do you remember the postmark on the envelope?'

‘I did check,' she said. ‘But some of the letters were smudged so I only know it started with “M” and ended with “AN”. Either Multan or Mardan, I suppose. The stamp was local.'

That really didn't help, but it wasn't as though I could think of any postmark that would have furnished a helpful clue about the origin of the letter.

I was going to end the call, but she said, ‘Aasmaani, can I ask you a personal question?' Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow. But I merely made a noise of acquiescence, and Shehnaz Saeed asked, ‘Is there some kind of problem with you and Ed?'

I had heard his distinctive gait—one stride followed by three short steps—outside my office several times today. Each time he passed I thought of opening my door and calling out to him, but I remained unsettled about how my feelings towards him could swing so quickly and so arbitrarily from irritation to camaraderie to desire to disdain, and not knowing what I wanted from him made it impossible to know what to say to him.

‘Why do you ask?'

‘I mentioned your name during dinner last night and he reacted strangely. Surly, in a way that was almost adolescent. And I'm not sure if it's because of your name or because I'm mentioning it, if you see what I mean.'

‘Not really.'

‘No. No, I suppose you don't. It's just that—I'm going to be very frank now—I think he likes you. A lot. And he's not going to want me befriending you, because then, you see, you'll be my person and not his. That's how he'll think of it. It's not easy, I suppose, having a mother like me.'

For a woman who had managed to maintain an air of secrecy around her private life for so long, she was surprisingly voluble.

‘You're wondering why I'm telling you this?' she said, and I couldn't help laughing in embarrassment at being caught out. ‘It's just that, my dear, when we were growing up no one taught us how to be mothers and something else at the same time. Motherhood was an all-or-nothing business. You can tell me, if anyone can, how should I be his mother and be famous? He's thirty-five years old, Aasmaani, and I still don't know what he wants me to be. When I acted, he hated that it took me away from him. When I stopped acting, he hated that I'd given up that part of myself. He kept hounding me to act again, and now that I've said yes, he's even more moody than before.'

If she wasn't going to be subtle, neither was I. ‘You're trying to talk to me about my relationship with my mother, aren't you?'

‘No, darling, I'm being much more self-involved than that.'

She was probably lying, but I liked her all the same. ‘I'm really not the person to talk to about Ed. I can't even begin to fathom him. I'll try not to be unpleasant to him, that's as much as I can promise. But I'm trying for your sake, not his.'

She sighed then. ‘If he hears that he'll say, you see, Ma, you've gone and done it again. And I suppose I have.' Her voice dropped. ‘Oh, I hear him. He's here for lunch. I'll speak to you later.' And she hung up.

What an odd household.

The thought had barely crossed my mind when I smiled at the irony. Who was I to talk of odd households, when between the ages of fifteen and seventeen I had lived under the same roof as a divorced couple, his second wife and their daughter? And before that I'd spent all those years shuttling between the picture-perfect normality of life with Dad, Beema and Rabia and the utter unconventionally of my mother's house with its connecting door to her lover's garden. How unremarkable those arrangements had seemed to me.

I put down the receiver and sent around an e-mail to a choice group of colleagues, enquiring, ‘Time for a breakout, Chinese style?' and within minutes I'd assembled a group of three women and two men who were more than happy to join me at the nearest Chinese restaurant for lunch. (That was one of my carefully nurtured talents—the ability to enter a new workplace and almost instantly find people who would provide companionship to speed up the day without demanding anything so emotionally exhausting as friendship.)

Over chow mein, lemon chicken, egg-fried rice and beef chilli dry I brought the conversation around to Ed and everyone rolled their eyes or held up their chopsticks in gestures of confusion.

‘If he was a woman, the letters PMS would be attached to his name like it was a university degree,' the news anchor asserted, picking off the little pieces of carrot from the egg-fried rice on her plate, and leaving everything else untouched.

‘Oh, he's sweet enough. Leave him alone,' said one of the women on the
Boond
team. ‘You can't blame a guy for getting frustrated if he's been working abroad and then has to come back and deal with goats in the budget.'

‘Sorry?' I said between mouthfuls.

‘Don't you know this?' The news anchor leaned in. ‘Whenever there's some major production in the works the budget includes the cost of several goats—the bigger the production, the more goats. That way, when something goes wrong, a goat gets sacrificed without disrupting the balance sheet. Two goats if the problem is major.'

‘
Boond
is a seven-goat production,' the
Boond
woman said, not without pride. ‘But what with Bougainvillea dropping out, and then waiting to see if Shehnaz Saeed would agree to do it, we're already four goats down and filming has hardly even begun.'

The conversation moved on from there and I could find no seamless way of bringing Ed back into it. That felt like failure. Later, in my office again, I found myself tracing widening circles on my desk and thinking of them as Eddies. Then, my mobile phone beeped to tell me it had been twenty-four hours since I left Shehnaz Saeed's house.

It was with a sense of occasion bordering on the ritualistic that I pulled open my desk drawer and lifted out the covering letter. I set it down in front of me, an empty coffee jar filled with pens holding down one corner and the edge of my mouse pad holding down the corner diagonally across from it. It struck me instantly that the handwriting was too deliberately childish, the misspellings too obvious.
I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want
. Though. Perhaps. Might. Those were words you'd associate with someone who was more than just marginally literate. And a sentence structure that employed a sub-clause offset by commas—that required a certain level of sophistication.

I felt a moment of satisfaction mixed with contempt. Whoever had written this could have tried just a little harder to make the fiction convincing. And yet ... I adjusted the neck of the desk lamp so the light shone on to the letter, and tried unsuccessfully to find a watermark or some other distinguishing feature. And yet, if the intention of the writer of this letter were merely to disguise his (or her) identity, then the plan had been successful. I continued to look at the letter for a few more minutes, but no amount of staring could force it to yield up any clues, so I turned my attention to the encrypted page.

The Minions came again today. That sounds like a beginning
.

I held my hands in front of me, as though in prayer, as understanding dawned. Of course. It was written by someone who was trying to write something—the Poet trying to write a story for Rafael Gonzales, perhaps—except his mind was having trouble forming plot and sentences. So he wrote one line, and then he wrote, triumphantly, that it sounded like the start of something.

What more can I say?

But having got his opening line, he didn't know how to continue. Of course, of course.

Can it be you, out there, reading these words?

That could only have been addressed to my mother. Why? Just to be playful, perhaps. Just to say, I know you can't resist picking up things I've been working on, and reading them. Except, she never did as far as I knew—she always respected the privacy of his work, never read anything until he asked her to.

Something else was troubling me. I looked at the paper again. Why do it? Simply that. Why write in code for any reason except to write letters to my mother that he wanted no one else to read? Yes, I used to write in the code all the time—I wrote stories, wrote letters to my mother, wrote in the steam of the bathroom mirror. But that was only because it gave me the thrill that children get from partaking in adult behaviour that is forbidden to them. It was the most illicit of pleasures to write in code, and then tear it up or rub it out instantly before anyone—anyone—could see. I was a child then, and the flexibility of my child's mind was able to grasp and learn the code with an ease that defied grown-ups. But for my mother and the Poet writing in code was hard, laborious work; it carried with it the scent of jail cells and dread. My mother told me so after the Poet had died—and I had surprised her then by saying, yes, I know it. I still know the code.

It was supposed to be their secret, just the two of them. But I was eight years old when they devised the code—curious and small; an excellent combination when your mother locks up her study which has grilles outside its window to prevent
any grown person
slipping through.

In a drawer, in her study, I found a paper on which she had written:

My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark
.

And below that, two columns. One which listed all the letters of that odd sentence, and another beside it listing letters of the alphabet:

 

M=A
Y=B
E=C
X=D
C=E
A=F
L=G
L= (Repeated)
S=H
and so on.

 

It wasn't hard to figure out after that.

I copied the sentence and the two columns of letters into the mini-notepad with the spy-sized mini-pen which I carried around in the back-pocket of my jeans, and that afternoon I asked, ‘What's fugue, Mama?'

‘What? Why are you asking me that, Aasmaani?'

‘I saw the word somewhere. In a book at the school library,' I lied.

‘Oh. Well, to start with it's not fug-you. That could sound rude.' She pulled me down into her lap and put her arms around me, her chin resting on the top of my head. ‘The more conventional meaning has to do with music. A sort of call and response. Two or more musicians responding to one another's music. The second meaning is much more interesting. It means deliberate amnesia. You know what amnesia is, sweetheart?'

‘Mama! Of course. But that's so silly. Why would you deliberately forget something?'

The following day, I handed my mother a card which said:

 

AFAF, N GKZC BKP.

 

When I first handed it to her, she thought it was nonsense words. I dug my hands in my pocket and rocked on the balls of my feet as the Poet did when he was offended by someone's misreading of his work. ‘It says “Mama, I love you”.' That's when she shook me, made me promise to forget about it, made me swear never to mention it to anyone. Then she tore out the pages of my notebook which contained evidence of the code—and though I wept to save the jellyfish which I had laboured over drawing on the reverse side of the page which contained the jazz fugues sentence, she shook her head firmly, told me there were consequences for taking people's secrets, and burnt the pages.