Broken Verses (16 page)

And bless you, you laugh with me.

‘Both,' you say, and I know you are mine for ever.

 

This is why it's best not to write. Not even English. It jolts the memory. I had to put aside this page for days after writing that previous paragraph. I'll talk now only of my time in here, the years without you.

One day I just decided to stop. Stop trying to find ways to write in secret, stop writing in my head, stop remembering how it felt in those sweet moments when language obliterated me. You were so entwined in every word I wrote that I had to banish you too, though you did nothing to make that easy for me.

Then one day the Minions arrived with a book. A book! Not just any book, my love, but Shakespeare. The Complete Works of. That memory I wrote of earlier, the one from 1971, even that turns pale compared to this one. I kept thinking it meant they were going to kill me. Shakespeare as last meal. I didn't care. I held that book to my heart—black binding, faded gold lettering—and I wept. Huge great sobs from a place so far inside I didn't know it existed.

What I remembered then was Orwell. In
1984
, two years before they brought me here. Winston sometimes dreams of a world beyond the world of grey order, a world of green fields in which a woman takes her clothes off in a careless gesture that defies all authority. Without understanding why, Winston wakes up with the word ‘Shakespeare' on his lips.

I told you once I would rather have written in English, despite its absence of curves. It was my politics that made me choose Urdu, more accessible to the public, less colonized. You rolled your eyes at me, but I was speaking the truth. I would rather have written English, purely because of Shakespeare. My first—and, it appears, most enduring—love. Another lie. The first love was Rashida, the schoolmaster's daughter, who was the only reason I went to his house for extra classes after school. Her hips, even at thirteen! And while I'm confessing lies, let me admit the choice of Urdu had nothing to do with public accessibility and everything to do with the fact that the grandeur of Shakespeare's language has gone out of English—it's a language that learned to use a knife and fork, though once it ripped chickens apart with its bare hands. Urdu still allows for lushness.

My favourite word in the English language: intrinsicate.

Shakespeare uses it to describe the bond between Antony and Cleopatra. The knot intrinsicate. He had the advantage, had Will, of living before dictionaries. He could do what he wanted with words and no one would use the awful phrase ‘experimental', with all its connotations of impending failure. Intrinsicate. Both intricate and intrinsic.

My favourite definition in the English language: frass. It means ‘excrement of boring larvae'. I choose to read ‘boring' as a comment on personality. Is there any greater insult that you can think of? You frass! Not just excrement, not just excrement of larvae, but excrement of boring larvae. I yell it at the Minions sometimes. Frass! Frass! They continue to look impassive.

Did I always ramble this much?

They didn't kill me. (The Minions, I mean—keep up!—when they gave me Shakespeare.) They might even have looked amused. Since then, from time to time, they've added on to my library. I have to commend them on their tastes. Or on their knowledge of my tastes, perhaps. Or no, they are merely the delivery boys. For whom? There is the question to which I have no answer, though I've given it more than a little thought these last sixteen years.

Oh, and there you were, just as I wrote that last line, your eyebrows rising to impossible heights and your voice that extraordinary mix of sarcasm and tenderness: ‘You always have an answer, sweetheart. It's just not always the right one.'

I'm beginning to miss you now, and I can't allow that to happen.

It had to be a hoax. It could only be a hoax.

Yes, a hoax. That's what it was. The Poet was dead.

But even if it was a hoax—no ‘even if', Aasmaani, it is a hoax—who could have written it?

I thought I was the only person left in the world who knew it, but it seems there are two of us now
.

My mother had said that the day I told her I still knew the code. If she was right, the only person who could have forged that communication and pretended it came from the Poet was her. Could my mother have tried to become the Poet just as Laila became Qais? I could feel myself falling into the strangeness of that thought, began picturing my mother running into barbed wire, and then I pulled my mind sharply out. It was an absurd idea, both too far-fetched and too neatly symmetrical—life never imitated art in quite that way—to be anything but false.

But if only three people ever knew the code and I could rule out my mother and myself as writers of that piece, what conclusion was left?

Someone else had to have known the code.

And yet it sounded so much like him.

Too much like him. It sounded too much like him. No, that wasn't true. There was a resignation to that tone which was never part of his voice.

So then it's proof he didn't write it.

But in sixteen years of course he would have changed.

He's dead, Aasmaani.

Yes, of course he's dead, but all I'm saying is...

Is what?

That it sounds so much like the way it would sound if it were true.

All right. List them. List the ways in which it sounds like him, and the ways it doesn't, and in those lists you'll find the flaw, the lie which will blow down that elaborate edifice.

And if I don't find the flaw?

You'll find it.

But if I don't?

Make the lists!

All right. All right.

The ways it doesn't sound like him: Resignation. Giving up poetry and my mother. (But he explains that. And the explanation makes sense. And he doesn't really give her up, does he, because he's writing to her.) Becoming an enthusiastic cook. The story of the courgette. There—that's the lie. That isn't how it happened.

See, I told you.

But...

What?

If it had happened that way, Mama would never have told me. We're talking about the moment she left my father. How could she tell me such a line as ‘Domesticity or a dildo'? No, she would not tell me that. But I could imagine him—the Poet—I could imagine him saying it. There was that bawdy streak in him, and she loved it, though she pretended not to.

Keep going, then. Keep going with the list of all the ways it doesn't sound like the Poet.

That's it. That's the list. He's learnt resignation, he's given up poetry and he's become an enthusiastic cook.

So then, it isn't him.

But I've done all those things in the last sixteen years, though it seemed inconceivable when I was fourteen and he was alive.

The other list, then. All the ways in which it sounds like him.

Everything. The voice.
What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this?
That was a sentence structure he liked to use.
What will you become, you with the eclectic mind?
He wrote that on a card for me, on my thirteenth birthday.
You were silent, then more silent
. That's an echo of something he said when he described to me the first time he saw my mother.
She was beautiful, then more beautiful
.

But he's a poet. Of course he has a distinctive voice. It only means it's more easily imitated.

In Urdu. It's easily imitated in Urdu, not in English. Urdu was his public language. And then, there are all those detáils. The peach allergy. The schoolmaster's daughter and her hips. The grey shawl. Shakespeare. Yes, that particularly. I was there when he told my mother he would rather have written in English. That entire conversation. It was him and me and her. I was studying
Julius Caesar
for an exam. That's what started it. Just weeks before he died. There was no one there but the three of us.

He doesn't mention you. Doesn't that prove something?

No. Nothing.

But one of them could have told someone else about the conversation.

Gue.

Yes. I thought of that. Gue.

He loved finding oddball definitions in dictionaries. One day he called me up from Colombia, sat by the phone for hours waiting for the trunk call to be put through, so he could say, ‘Look up “gue” in the dictionary, Aasmaani.' He and I had the same dictionary; he gave it to me as a present precisely so we could play this game. Gue is ‘a kind of rude violin'. He loved that. He would love Frass. It is exactly the sort of thing he would love.

But it's impossible.

It's extremely improbable.

You can't allow yourself to start believing this.

But no matter how hard I looked for a sign that would prove, incontrovertibly, that is wasn't him, I couldn't find it. Hours went by, in which I first read and reread the pages, then wrote them out in plain English, just to have some different way of approaching them. When that proved fruitless I tried to impose order: start with paragraph one, I told myself, reread it and consider what it means. Why would someone put down that information rather than any other? Find the mind behind the words. But the only mind I encountered was the Poet's.

I heard Rabia come home. I wanted to call out to her, but then I imagined her look of panic if I told her what had happened, imagined her tearing up the pages, saying, someone's just playing a sick game with you, I'm calling Beema and Dad. And if I showed anything but utter willingness to agree with her and accept it as a hoax then it would all return to the days just after Mama left when I used to ask operators to trace calls, and searched everywhere for clues and conspiracies. In those days, Dad, Beema and Rabia were constantly accumulating and weighing evidence about whether I was getting better or not, watching me at all times, suggesting we ‘talk' about ‘feelings', forcing me to lie more and more convincingly just so that they would stop watching, stop gathering evidence, think I was improving. Sometimes I managed to fool Dad and Rabia, but never Beema. But now Beema had a dying mother, and the least I could do for her was allow that to be the centre of her world.

I heard Rabia and Shakeel go out. They knocked on the connecting door first but I stayed utterly still and didn't answer. It was only when they were gone that I wanted to take the letters to Rabia and tell her what they said.

Peaches. Broken fingers. My mother's kisses. Hikmet. The Poet alive. Someone trying to convince me—no, Shehnaz Saeed—that the Poet was alive. Why Shehnaz? The words were not my mother's. This wasn't the sign from her I'd been waiting for. I was no closer. And yet, the Poet alive. Not true. Domesticity or a dildo. Larvae. Her unforgivable pregnancy. I couldn't piece any of it together, couldn't hold on to one thought long enough to produce a reaction before another thought barrelled around the corner and derailed the first one.

At length, I stopped trying. I lay on my sofa, looking at the sun setting fiercely into the sea, individual words and phrases littered round my head like crumbs that can never be reconstituted into a slice of sense.

There was a cobweb in a corner of the room, so delicate my breath could send each thread spiralling into the darkness. Prufrock. Intrinsicate. Left to right. Right to left. Frass, Shakespeare, the grey shawl, no mention of me.

A shadow of an explanation swerved into my mind, and then swerved away again. I almost had it. A way out of here. That missing piece which would reveal the face of the mystery. But I would never have that missing piece—that was the torture of this near-delirium of overwrought thinking. I would only repeat the leaps from one thought to the other, each leap pushing the words further away from meaning. But I couldn't stop, I couldn't do anything but leap.

Someone was ringing the door-bell. Door-bells don't ring for ever. You just need the patience to wait them out. But this one kept on, an insistently merry ‘ding' that soon grew frenzied, its cheer transmuting into increasing hysteria the longer I ignored it. Then the phone started ringing. At the same moment, my mobile beeped to announce a text message. The mobile was next to me. I raised a hand, pressed down on the keypad. Whose number was that? I pressed again and a message appeared:
PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR. ED

Ed. Go away.

But then I sat up. He would prove it to me. I would read him the decrypted message, and he would tell me that it was impossible. He would tell me why it was impossible. My mind was too desperate for hope. I must be missing something, something obvious. But Ed would see it. Ed was smart. Ed would release me from this.

I was on my feet, running to the door. I opened it, and there he stood, holding up a brown bag moulded in the shape of a bottle, in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty.

‘I've brought a bottle of wine and an amusing anecdote as peace offerings.'

‘Wine here tastes like vinegar.' I turned to walk back into the flat. There was a slight pause, and then I heard him following me in.

I headed towards the lounge, towards the encrypted pages, but Ed saw the kitchen, sauntered into it and came out with a corkscrew and two tumblers. I surprised myself by thinking that there was something in the way he entered my kitchen that I liked; not proprietary, not like so many men in Karachi who assumed they could walk into your home and act as though they owned it, but more familiar, as though we were past the need to be formal with each other. Then he held out a glass to me, and in that instant when it passed from his hand to mine I remembered the distaste with which he had thrown the envelope at my feet.

‘Look, I'm sorry,' he said. ‘My mother sent the letter for you. None of it was my business. It's just...'

‘Yes?' When he was speaking, my mind could latch on to his words. Words which made sense, each letter slotting neatly into its place, all the letters together forming words and sentences with spaces between them, the spaces acting as transmitters of meaning and not as gulfs which kept each word, each sentence, separate and unbridgeable.