Broken Verses (33 page)

‘So what happened? How did first love go bad?'

‘She went to Cambridge. I stayed in Karachi. She wrote to me to say it was great, now it's over. That was the gist of it, though she phrased it more kindly. By the time she finished university and came back to Karachi, she was someone else, and then I met your stepmother, and she and I were at that point of silent acknowledgement that something was about to happen between us. And that should have been it. But then one day Samina just bursts into my office, eyes sparkling, and I haven't seen her in months, haven't had any conversation with her in years, and she says, “Well, are you going to ask me to marry you or not?”' He laughed, chin resting on his hand, and I saw the young, infatuated boy he had been. ‘I knew about her and the Poet. Who didn't? But she looked ... luminescent. And I was chafing at the person I was turning into—this responsible, practical banker who would never play “chicken” for even five seconds, let alone from KDA to Clifton—and she was my way out of that. So.'

‘So you just dumped Beema?'

He looked away guiltily. ‘I hadn't exactly, you know, picked her up at that point.'

‘I'm amazed she ever spoke to you or Mama after that.'

‘Well, that's your Beema for you. After Samina left me, she was so incredibly kind. I found I was only going out to social gatherings if I thought I'd run into her. And then Samina called me one day—she was about eight months pregnant by then—and said, “Get a move on. She's not going to wait around for ever for you.” I said, “What business is it of yours?” and she said, “You're still technically my husband. I'm allowed to interfere in your life. Besides, she'd make a wonderful mother to our child.” It was all weird and so utterly right.' He put his hand on mine. ‘Sometimes there's so much of her in you. Your voice, your eyes, your quickness with language. And it reminds me of the Samina I loved, that girl who stole my heart. So for the last time—I have never minded or been even slightly surprised by your love for her.' He moved his hand away, wrapped it around his cup again. ‘But if there's something I mind about you ... well, not even mind. It's just something I think about from time to time. Not that there's anything to be done about it, or ... it's just that, of your four parents, I'm the one you've always loved least effusively, and sometimes I've wished that wasn't so.'

I touched the back of his hand with the tips of my fingers. ‘Sorry.' And I was. Sorry and profoundly ashamed.

He shook his head to indicate there was nothing to apologize for.

‘I don't know about the four parents bit, though. I don't think the Poet was ever a second father to me.' What I meant by that was that I could see no correlation between Dad's and Omi's positions in my life. Fathers were efficient in matters of finance, and rewiring. They didn't lack emotion, they simply didn't express it except in tiny bursts. And they were always there. That was their most abiding quality—their thereness. That was Dad, that was fathers. Omi was nothing like that.

But my father didn't understand the meaning behind my words. He looped his finger into the handle of the tea-cup and spun it in slowly oscillating half-circles. ‘It's childish and immature and my wife would be horrified to hear me say this, but: good.'

I looked at his neck, the one part of him which belonged on a much older man, and for the first time his mortality became real to me. ‘You hated him, huh?'

My father nodded, still watching the tea-cup.

‘Because you lost her to him?'

‘I suppose that would have to be the core of it. But, even apart from that, I just disapproved of everything he stood for.'

‘Poetry? Resistance?'

‘Debauchery. Selfishness.'

‘Debauchery?'

‘All those nights he stayed up with his artsy friends, imbibing whisky and God-knows-what-else until dawn, laughing at those of us who had to go to work for a living. Vertical readers, he used to call us. Because we'd spend our days poring over numbers in columns instead of words written across a page.' My father waved his hand through the air to indicate lines of print and the tea-cup went crashing on to the floor. His face was red as he bent to pick up the pieces.

‘How do you know?'
How have you managed to keep from making me feel I'm betraying you every time I spoke his name with affection?

‘Because one night you were spending the night at your mother's house and I came to pick you up for school on my way to work. As I drew up, the gate next door opened and those friends of his stumbled out, eyes red and puffy, slurring goodbyes to each other. He was there, seeing them out, and when he saw me he said, “It's a vertical reader.” You know, it's just as well your mother didn't marry him. I don't think I would have allowed you to stay overnight in a house with all that going on.'

‘Just as well she didn't marry him?' I couldn't believe he'd said that. ‘After everything she went through after he died because she wasn't his wife, you can say it was just as well she didn't marry him?'

‘You know I didn't mean it that way. You know that. Dammit, Aasmaani, why must you always make me feel as though I'm failing you?'

I sat back down on the chair opposite him. ‘They didn't sit around talking about your day in the office. The Acolytes. That's not what they were about. They talked about poetry, and politics—don't do that'—he had dropped his head into his hands—‘and what language could and couldn't do in a censored and censorious world. Some evenings I'd wander in there and I'd sit and I'd listen to them, just listen. Then I'd go back to Mama's house and she'd be sitting with her friends, her fellow activists, and they'd be talking about forcing changes in laws, about setting up schools and defining curricula, about appealing to international bodies. I went from one house to the other, listening to all that, and it was exhilarating. It made me feel like I was on fire, breathing fire, walking on fire.'

‘And what have you got to show for it?' As soon as he said that he was reaching for my hand. ‘No, I'm sorry. That really did come out wrong.'

‘Did it?' I pulled away from him.

‘See, you still glamorize both of them. I'm sure it was exciting, Aasmaani. I used to see it in your face some days when you'd come back home after spending a day or a weekend or longer at her house. You'd come back and you'd look around at us, your other family, as we talked about renting videos and going to the Chinese for dinner, and there would be this look on your face saying: is this it? Is this all you're capable of? Well, I'll tell you something. Something they were capable of and we weren't: leaving.'

‘Stop it.'

‘You want to know why I hated him? That's why. Because he kept forcing her to choose between him and you. He kept getting himself into situations and then he'd have to leave the country, or he'd get carted off to prison, and then she'd be gone, poof! just like that, and I'd have to hear my daughter crying herself to sleep at night. That time they stayed away for three years. Three years, Aasmaani. Why? Because it was dangerous for him to come back, and when she wanted to return, she even called me to let me know which flight she was on, he scared her into thinking they'd arrest her to get to him. He even made her think she might put you in danger.'

‘No.' As soon as I said it, there it was. A memory making its way to the surface in that inexplicable way of latent memories which need just the right spark to wake them up. I stood up, sat down again, tried to bring my father's face into focus. It wasn't Omi who told her to stay away. It was me. When my father came to my room to say he'd spoken to her and she was coming back, I was the one to call her back and say, ‘Don't.' I wanted her with me. It's not that I didn't. But when she was abroad, I felt safe. Omi wouldn't be imprisoned, she wouldn't be beaten and bruised in demonstrations, or spirited away in the night, never to be seen again, as happened to so many people she and Omi knew. I said, stay away, I'll come to you in the summers and winters. I said, what if I'm at your house when they come knocking at your door in the middle of the night, looking for you? What will happen to me then? I said that knowing, with all the assurance in the world, that she might be willing to risk herself, but she wouldn't risk me—not my physical self, not my state of mind. I said, Mama, when you're here I get scared.

Only now, when I had a mere fraction of the reason she ever had to jump when the phone rang, to hold my breath when a motorcycle seemed to be following me, to know what it meant to feel you were being watched—only now, in those moments when the ringing phone made me look next door and think, suppose it isn't just paranoia, suppose someone is after me and they come here and find Rabia instead of me—only now did I understand something of what I must have put her through when I said, supposing I'm in the house when they come to take you away?

I opened my mouth to say, ‘Dad, she stayed away for my sake,' but then I saw the expression of anger still on his face and I knew he'd think I was just trying to defend Omi. So I said, ‘What did you want him to do? Stop writing? Write pretty little verses about the sparrows and the rainbows? You expected him to stop writing because of me? For God's sake, Dad, I wasn't even his daughter.' Everything my father had said, I'd thought a million times over for more than half my life now. But I had blamed her, not him. I wasn't his daughter, but I was hers. And she chose him over me every time—that's what I had believed for so long.

My hands were rubbing the length of my thighs. I couldn't quite stop them, couldn't render myself into stillness.

But even if you thought of coming back, Mama, and I talked you out of it, why did you allow me to do that? I was a child. How could you let me make those decisions for you unless they were the decisions you wanted all along? Even if you wanted to come back, that does nothing to change the fact that you left to begin with. It's not natural. Mothers aren't supposed to choose anyone else over their children. You unnatural woman. Oh, stop, stop, stop.

I got out of the chair again and walked away from the table, aware of my father's expression beginning to cross from concern into worry. Unnatural? I wasn't going to fall for that one; she'd taught me too well to allow me to buy into such stories.

When I was twelve and Mama was at the forefront of political activism with the Women's Action Forum, the mother of one of my friends said I mustn't be angry at my mother for getting thrown in jail when she should have stayed at home and looked after me; after all, the woman said, she was doubtless just doing it because she thought she could make the world a better place for me. I looked at the woman in contempt and told her I didn't have to invent excuses or justifications for my mother's courage, and how dare she suggest that a woman's actions were only of value if they could be linked to maternal instincts. At twelve, I knew exactly how the world worked and I thought that by knowing it I could free myself of the world's ability to grind people down with the relentlessness of its notions of what was acceptable behaviour in women.

‘I had you and Beema and Rabia,' I told my father, things that I once believed coming back to me. ‘Mama knew that. The Poet had no one really, except her. I mean, there were admirers aplenty, but people who would follow him into exile, relocate their lives to see him in jail, no. No one except her. Don't ask me to hold it against her that she stood with him. Didn't stand
by
him, didn't follow him, didn't give up her life to the dictates of his plans. She stood with him. Would you have preferred it if she took me with her every time she left?'

‘Oh, come off it, Aasmaani. Don't pretend that everything you had to give up was OK by you. All in service of the greater goods of freedom and poetry, which—I might add—have got this nation nowhere.'

It was nothing that I hadn't thought myself. The futility, the utter futility, of everything Mama and Omi did in the name of politics. But they didn't know it was futile, a voice in my head insisted, and I recognized it from a time in my life when I knew how it felt to walk on fire, unharmed. A voice which didn't blame or whine but simply remembered the facts as they had been before hindsight changed the shape of everything Mama-related. I pushed back my chair, and strode into the lounge to retrieve Rabia's file about my mother. My father sat watching me as I flipped through the articles. When I came to the one I wanted I meant to turn it towards him, but instead I found my own eyes unable to pull away from it; I had never before been able to do more than just glance at it.

It was a newspaper article from an Egyptian paper, two decades old, covering a protest rally against the Hudood Ordinance. One of my mother's friends in Cairo had sent it to me shortly after my mother disappeared, along with a message about the importance of my mother's role in linking Muslim feminists from around the world; the message sounded too much like a letter of condolence to be bearable, so I tossed it, and the article, into the garbage from where Rabia retrieved them. What Arabic I had learnt in ‘82, the year my mother and the Poet moved from Colombia to Egypt and I visited them over my summer holidays, I had now forgotten, but the text wasn't what was important about the article.

In grainy black and white, my mother is the centre of both photographs that accompany the text. In the first, she is surrounded by policewomen brandishing lathis. She is holding on, with both hands, to a pole that must have helped support a banner, but she's been separated from whoever held the second pole, and the banner has ripped in two. They must have held on tight to each pole, she and the other woman, to make that banner tear down the middle as they were pushed apart. The half-banner is furled in on itself, making it impossible to read the words on it. Even so, one of the policewomen is reaching for the pole, which my mother holds upright, resisting the temptation to wield it like a weapon. A second policewoman holds a lathi horizontally. The photographer has caught the moment when the policewoman's arm recoils after striking my mother across her midriff with the lathi, and my mother is just beginning to double over, mouth open, eyes closed, face strangely serene.