Broken Verses (31 page)

‘We've all got our different wounds, Ed. At least she didn't ever leave you. See, that's what I obsess about. The leaving.' He stood there with his hands jammed into his pockets and I could see the young boy who jumped off a tree and broke his leg to distract his mother away from everything else in the world.

And I had hidden Omi's postcard from Mama.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours that I had felt this tug of recognition towards the man opposite me—but with Mirza that recognition had only led to self-pity. With Ed, it brought on something more complicated. Here stood a man of such intelligence and ability—a man of such potential—unable to regard the scars of adolescence as markers of injuries he'd survived rather than as evidence of the pain inflicted on him. And what reason did he have to be scarred? Because he was something less than her entire world?

‘It's none of my business, but, you know, she didn't stop being a woman because she became a mother.' Wasn't that really, ultimately, what I had wanted of Mama? That she be my mother to the exclusion of all else? Is that why I remembered all the days and weeks and months she went with the Poet, and never the ones during which she stayed with me? She was twenty-six when I was born. Twenty-six years old: a mother and a woman desperately in love—could she have known right away that she would, at so many times in her life, be forced to choose between those two incarnations? If yes, then the wonder of it is that she didn't choose that moment to disappear, to step right out of the heart-cleaving complication that her life became the moment I was born.

‘Think about it, Ed, she wasn't even twenty-five when your father left. What did you want her to do? Take a vow of celibacy for your sake? Would you, at twenty-five, have sworn off sex for ever, under any circumstances?'

‘Please. You can't compare...'

‘What? Can't compare the needs of men to the needs of women? Ed, try not to be an insufferable bastard.'

‘Why are the things you can't get past any more acceptable than the things I can't get past?' he demanded.

‘Oh, don't even try that. You didn't want your mother to have anyone in her life other than you. I never demanded anything quite so selfish.' No, I didn't want her to have no one else. I just wanted to always be first. And why shouldn't I? I was her child, I was the defenceless one. But I couldn't even pretend to believe that. In the sanctuary of Beema and Dad's house the only thing I needed defending against was my mother's absence.

He looked down at the carpet, the toe of his shoe tracing over the intricate paisley pattern, and when he spoke his voice was very soft. ‘But I didn't have anyone in my life other than her. No father who cared to know me, no siblings, no cousins, no real friends.' He looked up. ‘Don't you have any idea how lucky you are, how fortunate your life has been? I have every right to be obsessive. You have none. Why are you wasting your life being obsessed? Don't you have any idea how wonderful you could be if you just gave yourself the chance?'

I shook my head. ‘I don't know who you see when you look at me.'

He leaned back against the desk, giving himself the extra distance to see me in my entirety. I couldn't help pushing my hair off my face. ‘A woman no one could ever choose to leave.' He took a step closer to me. ‘So don't run away to pre-empt a move I'm never going to make.'

‘You're not the first man to be fascinated by the enigma that is Aasmaani, Ed. And you won't be the first to—'

‘You aren't even remotely enigmatic. I've never met anyone less opaque. Are you fashioned of different material to everyone else in the world, Aasmaani, and is it possible that I'm the superhero whose only talent—whose unparalleled talent—it is to see you clearly, down to the atoms of the stuff of which you're made? I'll take that superpower over all others in the world, even if I'm promised nothing more than just the seeing.'

Memory prickled the back of my neck. Omi had spoken of my mother in those terms. Mirza had once asked him whether he thought that by marrying my mother the mystery would go out of their relationship, and Omi had said, ‘There is no mystery—that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.'

The paisleys were a bridge between us across the blue sea of the carpet, each one the footprint of a god as he searched for his Beloved.

‘Are you going to start wearing a cape and spandex leggings, SuperEd?'

‘Whatever works,' he smiled back. I started to move towards him and he held up a hand. ‘First promise me something. Promise you won't go asking more questions about the Poet. Promise you'll keep yourself safe.'

‘I don't even know where to go looking...'

‘Promise me. Promise me you won't ask questions. Promise me that.'

‘Ed, I have to find him. However I can.'

‘Then rely on him. Rely on his letters. If you start asking questions—' He looked around as though something in the room might end his sentence for him. When nothing did, he settled for, ‘I don't want to think about what they could do to you.'

‘I have to be willing to risk something. You have to be willing to risk some things when the stakes are high enough. Don't you see that?' There was my mother's voice coming out of my mouth, her very words.

‘But what if you alert them?' He came up to me and took me by the hands. ‘What if your questions arouse their suspicions and they find out about the letters?'

‘I don't know how not to fight for this.'
Mama, how long have you been hiding inside me?
‘Don't talk to me as though there's a choice involved. I must do whatever I can.'

His grip on my hands was almost painful. ‘If you won't protect yourself, protect him. Secrecy is your ally here. If anyone knows you've discovered he's still alive...'

I leaned my head on to his chest. His heart was like a piston. I was no threat, but Omi was. If anyone started to wonder why I was asking questions and traced the encrypted letters back to him...

‘Yes.'

‘What?' he said.

‘You're right.'

He exhaled and kissed the top of my head.

‘This doesn't mean I'm giving up, Ed. I'm just going to have to think through my next move carefully.'

‘Can I think with you?'

‘It's really not your mind I'm interested in, spandex boy.'

He put his arms around me and laughed. ‘Ditto, darling.'

There was no gloom any more in the shadowed room; the dull light was a softness of colour against which I could close my eyes to transmigrate into that darkness in which all discovery occurs through touch and smell and taste. Sea-blown citrus, and the sliver of skin at the borderland of stubble and lip.

And sound. There was also sound. A hand jiggling the doorknob.

Ed and I pulled apart, each of us stepping backward along the paisleyed bridge as the door opened and Shehnaz Saeed entered.

In her chiffon sari, with a diamond bracelet around her wrist, Shehnaz Saeed looked so utterly the part of the star that it was possible to believe the rectangle of illumination she stood in hadn't been thrown by the bright lights of the hallway but simply followed her everywhere she went.

‘Oh, there you are. I thought I heard you drive up. Eid Mubarak, Aasmaani.' She walked over and kissed me on the cheek, then looked at Ed and raised her eyebrows. ‘Am I interrupting something?' she said low into my ear.

‘You don't have to whisper.' Ed's voice was cold, even more so than it had been when I first walked in. I glanced at him, wondering what I had missed. I was suddenly very conscious that this was the first time I was seeing the two of them together.

‘And you don't have to be so edgy,' Shehnaz Saeed said in that not-in-front-of-the-guest tone which I had often given Beema reason to employ during my adolescence.

Ed picked up the paperweight again and tossed it from palm to palm with affected casualness. ‘You should have walked in a few minutes ago. We were having a conversation I'm sure you could have added a lot to.'

‘Oh?' She seemed not to see that he was baiting her. ‘What about?'

‘Mothers and sex.'

‘Ed!' I couldn't believe he'd actually said it.

Shehnaz Saeed looked from him to me, her cheeks colouring. ‘What has he been saying to you?'

I shook my head, mute with horror at the impropriety of it all.

‘I haven't said anything, Mother.'

She continued to look at me, and I shook my head again, this time to indicate no, he hasn't said anything.

At last she turned back to him and said with simple dignity, ‘Aasmaani and I will be in the lounge. Join us when you've had time to grow up.' She put her hand on my arm. ‘Come on, darling.'

‘Get your hand off her,' Ed said, his voice still icy. ‘Otherwise I'll tell her all those things you don't want told, and she'll push you off herself.'

‘Ed, enough with the Jekyll and Hyde bit,' I said.

At that, Shehnaz Saeed dropped her hand from my arm and turned to her son again. ‘You'd be a fool to let me get between you and her. I can't undo what I've done, or who I am. Tell her. Go on. I don't mind. I'm not ashamed of it. And I won't have your shame over it—over me—wreck your own chance of happiness.'

All of a sudden, Ed looked as though he was going to weep. ‘I'm sorry, Amma.' He came up to her and leaned his head on her shoulder. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘My boy,' she said, stroking his hair. ‘My baby boy.'

I stood to one side, wishing they weren't between the door and me so that I could simply slip away. My God, Ed, have you any idea how lucky you are that she's still here to forgive you? Let her do that. Do yourself a favour, and let her forgive you for everything. For all the accusations, all the hurt, all the betrayals, all the ways in which you weren't enough.

‘Aasmaani?' Shehnaz Saeed held a hand out to me. ‘The horribly awkward moment is over. Come on, let's go into the lounge.'

We walked into the hallway together, all three of us, and in that magical way in which families can be restored to good humour seconds after they've all but cut out one another's hearts, Ed and his mother had their arms around each other, their voices as they spoke consisting of nothing but lightness.

‘Have you told Aasmaani about the dictionary man?' Shehnaz Saeed said. ‘Aasmaani, did you hear about the dictionary man in Multan?'

I shook my head, and Ed and his mother laughed.

‘You tell her, Amma. You tell it better than me.'

‘I wasn't even there when it happened.'

‘Never mind. You tell it.'

Shehnaz Saeed stopped walking and put a hand on my wrist. ‘So Ed's in Multan last week, filming the Ramzan special. And at the end of a long day he's relaxing in the coffee shop of his hotel...”

‘Drinking instant coffee.'

‘Drinking instant coffee. And in walks this irate man with jowls so droopy they could carry him away in a strong wind. And he's got a book in his hand which he starts waving at Ed like a fanatic holding the Word of God, ready to produce the black-and-white evidence that drinking anything other than percolated coffee is an unpardonable sin.'

‘And he comes up to me and slams the book down on the table in front of me, flipping it open to a page which his thumb had been marking. And I see it's an Urdu dictionary he's holding. And he says—Amma, tell her.'

‘He says,' her voice turned squeaky, its rhythms truncated, ‘“I've found your dirty secret. You TV people with your loose morals. Why
Boond
of all names, I wondered. Why a drop of rain? What sort of title is this? And now I see you're having your vulgar jokes at the country's expense.' And he points to the definition of
Boond
and—even I didn't know this, Aasmaani. In addition to rain or blood, which is what Kiran had in mind when she came up with the title, it also means—'

‘Semen,' I finished.

‘You knew?' Ed laughed.

‘Of course. One of the Poet's early ghazals has “boond” as the radif. It also means spotted silk, by the way.'

‘We must talk about his poetry one day,' Shehnaz Saeed said. ‘It would be such a pleasure to discuss it with you.'

As she said it, I imagined calling her up to say I was coming over to discuss poetry, and then leading Omi into this house with me. The look on Shehnaz Saeed's face.

She had walked ahead of us into the lounge, and Ed was about to follow when I caught hold of his hand and squeezed it. He looked away as though he couldn't bear my hopefulness. He didn't quite believe Omi could still be alive and I knew, as though he'd whispered it into my ear one night so that it made its way into my dreams, that he couldn't bear the thought of what it would do to me if I had to face Omi's death again. The sweetness of Shehnaz Saeed's character resided in Ed, too, but in a concentrate at his very core. I rubbed my thumb along the back of his palm and he looked at me, eyes grave.

For a moment I thought he was going to say something and then he shook his head and we walked through the doorway into the room of Bukhara rug, Gandhara Buddhas and muted elegance which I had seen through the partially open door my first time in this house. On the walls were prints of Indian landscapes and monuments etched by English artists from the colonial era.

Shehnaz Saeed switched on the television, and put it on mute. There were only a few minutes to go before the start of
Boond
. ‘I'm so nervous I might throw up,' she said, sitting down on a plush cream sofa. ‘I never used to be this nervous about watching myself.'

‘You'll be fabulous.' Ed sat down next to her. ‘You are Shehnaz Saeed. How could you not be fabulous?'

She looked up at him in surprised gratitude.

He can do and say anything he wants, I thought, and she won't stop loving him. He'll always be her baby boy. For all his faults, she'll blame herself; not him. That knowledge made me tired, and again I thought of leaving. But Ed reached out and caught hold of my hand, right there with his mother watching, as though to say, no backing out now. We're official.