Broken Verses (37 page)

I tapped the pen on the back of my hand, its nib emerging and retracting. Something simple. In two of the across clues I wrote: JAZZ and FUGUES. Then I used the first letter of FUGUES to write FRASS vertically.

‘What are jazz fugues?' Ed asked, watching over my shoulder.

‘He'll know. Omi will know,' I said, going over the letters one more time with the pen to ensure they'd stand out. I closed my eyes and leaned back. All I could hear was the twittering of a sparrow outside and my own heart. Omi would know, Omi would understand. And when he realized his words weren't merely echoing into silence, he would start to write differently. He'd write clues to where he was. Sixteen years of being in a place, you must pick up some clues. A man as smart, as observant, as Omi, he couldn't fail to pick up clues. He'd tell me how to find him, and then I'd bring him home.

I'd bring him home. He'd be home. Aged, yes. Frail, perhaps. Unaccustomed to the din of city life, no doubt. But his first day back, I would take him to the sea. Just Omi and me, walking through the sand towards the surf, taking turns to lead, taking turns to plant our feet into the other one's footprints as we had been doing since the days when he had to stand on the tips of his toes in order not to stamp out my prints. He'd wade into the water, trailing his fingers—now swollen and misshapen from all the times the Minions had broken them—just below the surface, and he'd beckon me to come alongside him. As the first wave loomed ahead of us, we'd shout out together, leap up into its maw, bodies colliding with water, and in that sting, that slap, that wheeling over and floundering, we'd know ourselves to be alive again.

I stood up and put my arms around Ed's neck. He lifted me off the ground and swung me around.

‘I'm going to speak to him, Ed. I'm going to speak to Omi. My Omi.'

‘Can we not talk about him all the time, please?'

I unlooped one arm from his neck and tweaked his ear. ‘Why, Mr Ed, are you jealous of a seventy-year-old man?'

Ed let go of me and I slipped to the ground, yanking his ear as I did so. We both cried out and glared at each other.

‘What?' I said.

He picked up the crossword. ‘I'm going to go and find the director and get this taken care of.'

I caught hold of his sleeve as he started to walk away. ‘What? What is it?'

He looked at me and shrugged. ‘It's just a little thing. A tiny little thing, Aasmaani. You'll never love me as long as you're obsessed with the two of them.'

I loved him a little, right then.

‘Sometimes I want to burn them,' he said. ‘When I have the envelopes in my hand, before I give them to you, sometimes I want to burn them.'

‘You can't, you know you can't. Ed, promise me.'

‘You don't need a promise. You know I won't. I can't.' He said that as though pronouncing a sentence on himself. Then he looking accusingly at me. ‘Even though you won't tell me what “jazz fugues” means, I won't burn them.'

I let go of his sleeve. ‘It's the key to the code. It's two words from the key. You want me to explain the whole thing to you?'

In response, he kissed me, holding my face between his hands, and everything else in the world ceased. When he finally pulled away his smile had nothing boyish about it.

‘No,' he said. ‘I just needed you to make the offer.'

Then he left with the crossword to find the director again.

When he was gone, I drew a long breath. Everything was falling into place, everything was falling. I made my way to my office, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as I walked. Suddenly it all seemed so precarious, no room for any mistakes. Is this how they felt—explorers in search of lost treasures when they saw the spot indicated by ‘X' on the map and knew, finally, there was no stepping back? Were they surprised to find the exhilaration they expected replaced by dread?

I reached my office, sat down, and ran my hands along the cracks in the leather of the desk chair. Today it was cool enough to dispense with the fan, for the first time since I had joined STD, and without that whirring of the blades this room, with its tiny dimensions, felt even more sealed up than usual. Six weeks. Six weeks only since I first stepped into this office with Ed.

Could it really just be chance, everything that had happened since then? The questions worrying at the back of my mind were no longer irritants to be pushed aside. The Poet's messages and I had moved into the world of reactions and consequences. Was it really possible that there was no ordering principle behind anything that had happened—the messages to Shehnaz, her guess that they were written in code, the intersection of her life with mine? Stranger things had happened by chance, it's true. And yet, there was that possibility that I was being played. What game is being played with my life, Omi had asked. Whatever it was, was I now part of it? Had I been placed on the board myself? To what end? What was the purpose behind his captivity, what was the plan?

But even if I were part of the game, how could I act differently, how could I pass this opportunity by? If the explorers knew the treasure map was written by a malevolent hand, would that stop them from digging deep into the earth in search of what was buried? If the box they pulled out said ‘Property of Pandora' would they, even then, find it in themselves to place it back in the earth, tear up the map and turn away?

To understand the game, you must understand the mind that created it. For all my amateur detective work I was no closer to doing that than I had been the day all this started. All I had done in these last weeks was make myself visible, my investigation into Omi's death anything but a secret.

Now comes the gathering.

I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail. There were messages aplenty with the heading
Boond
. I read only a few before deleting them all. Did every person at STD feel the need to send an office-wide message about what their friends and relatives said about the show?

I leaned back in my chair. If my life were a top-rated television show, how would it go from here? I'd send a message to the Poet through a crossword puzzle. He'd realize his scribblings were getting through to me. He'd send messages back. Details of the flora, the fauna, the weather around him. He'd write about a brief but intense shower of rain. I'd find a weather-man. My next-door neighbour would happen to be a weather-man. I'd ask him, where did it rain yesterday, with a ferocity and brevity reminiscent of most passion. He'd say, there was one cloud only, right above this spot here on the map, that's where it rained yesterday. And I'd tell no one, I'd enlist no aid, but I'd make my way to that spot, I'd face down the Minions, I'd rescue the Poet. And somewhere, far away, my mother would open a paper, hear of his return from the dead, and that would dissipate the amnesia she'd been suffering from these past fourteen years and she'd catch the next plane home.

Wasn't that the only season finale that would leave me satisfied?

I turned my attention back to the computer and continued to scroll down my inbox. Near the bottom was a message from my father.

The subject heading: Remember her?

I clicked on the message. It was just a few sentences and a weblink.

I just found this. My first time hearing this side of her. My God! Love, Dad
.

I clicked on the weblink and my computer's audio player popped up.

A voice trying too hard to sound purposeful and trustworthy said: Samina Akram, 2 January 1986, Karachi. In conversation with Maulana Moin Haq.

The voice cut off and the audioplayer started rebuffering the sound file.

I had been there. I had been in that audience in an auditorium in Karachi, 2 January 1986, watching my mother and the maulana square up to each other—an extraordinary match-up that only took place, Omi said, because both my mother and the maulana were convinced of their ability to decimate the other in discussion. I had been sitting between Omi and Beema in the first row of the audience, and while the moderator (the term caused Omi much amusement) was introducing my mother, Omi and I were making faces at her up on the stage, trying to make her laugh, while Beema shrugged apologetically in her direction. At one point, Omi had bunched his features into a exaggerated grimace and it was the maulana, not my mother, who caught his eye. The look on the man's bearded face almost made me fall off my chair with suppressed laughter.

I rubbed my hands over my eyes and my mother's voice filled the office: ‘Maulana Sahib, is it asking too much of you to look at me while I speak?'

A man's gentle voice came back: ‘Mohtarma, if you don't respect yourself and the laws of the Qur'ān enough to keep your head covered in public, I at least respect you enough to keep my eyes averted.'

‘The laws of the Qur'ān?' (‘Now she's got him!' Beema had whispered.) ‘Maulana Sahib, it embarrasses me profoundly to have to remind a scholar such as you of what is written in the Qur'ān—and I don't mean in your translation of it, which I have read with astonishment and wonder.' (Laughter from the audience.) ‘Within the Qur'ān itself, as you well know, there are two verses which refer to the apparel of women. Verse thirty-one of Surah An-Nur and verse fifty-nine of Surah Al-Ahzab. In one, the word “khomoorehenna” is used and in the other the word “jalabib”. Your translation, I'm afraid, seems utterly unaware that khomoorehenna comes from the word “khumar”, which simply means “a covering” rather than “a veil”. It doesn't specify what is covered or how. And “jalabib” means a shirt or cloak. If the Almighty had wished to use the word “hijab” to more precisely indicate a head-covering I'm sure He would have done so. I know you would not want to suggest any deficiencies in His vocabulary or precision.' (Muffled laughter from the audience, as well as some shouts of objection.) ‘It seems fairly evident from a close examination of the text that women are being enjoined, Maulana Sahib, to cover our chests in public, which I am really more than happy to do when in your company.' (Loud laughter, in which Omi's raucous guffaw was unmistakable.)

‘Mohtarma, I am impressed that a woman such as yourself should have taken the time to read our Holy Book. But as Shakespeare said,' and here he switched to English, ‘“the devil can cite the scriptures to his own purposes”. I could mention verses from our own tradition which have similar warnings but I suspect Shakespeare of the West might carry more weight with you. The strictest definitions of “khumar” are irrelevant—what is relevant is its commonly accepted usage. I implore you not to spread your poison through the ranks of our young Pakistani women. It is precisely because of the divisiveness caused in religion by acts of re-interpretation that the gates of Ijtihad were closed in the thirteenth century—'

‘Maulana Sahib, there's a difference between re-interpretation and reading.' (And now there were hoots of delight, in largely female tones.) ‘The strictest definition of a word is never irrelevant to the intended meaning...'

‘The unity of the ummah is of paramount importance. Anyone who works against it works against Islam.'

‘And you know all about the unity of the ummah, don't you?' Her voice moved down a register and hearing it I knew—as I had known nearly seventeen years ago—that no jokes would follow. ‘Last night I was talking to a friend, Maulana, who has seen those planes fly to our border with Afghanistan, with volunteers—young men, little more than boys—ready to join the Afghans and Pakistanis already in the training camps preparing to battle the Soviets. Planes with volunteers from all across the Muslim world. Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt—'

‘Mohtarma, a second ago we were sitting here in Karachi talking about women's religious obligations and suddenly you're taking us all on a world tour.' (He got his laughs, too.) ‘Please don't stray from the subject.'

‘The subject is your obligations to the ummah. You take a territorial issue in Afghanistan and you make it into a matter of religious duty—you and your unlikely bedfellows in the West—and you spout phrases like “the unity of the ummah” as you hand those boys—those young, idealistic, confused, angry, devout, ready-to-be-brainwashed boys—the most sophisticated weapons and the best combat training in the world and tell them to get the infidel Soviets off Muslim soil. Soil has no religion, Maulana. If you had left those boys without that call to unity, they would be separate, untrained, spread all across the world. Some would have picked up guns, yes, and some would have lectured their sisters on how to dress. But some would have turned to local politics, or maybe even to writing bad, impassioned poetry. Or maybe, Maulana, maybe even very good, impassioned poetry.'

‘You are, of course, the expert on impassioned poetry.' (There was no laughter now. Even through the computer's speakers I could hear tension crackle through the room.)

‘What happens after Afghanistan, have you considered that? Where do they go next, those global guerrillas with their allegiance to a common cause and their belief in violence as the most effective way to take on the enemy? Do you and your American friends ever sit down to talk about that?'

The sound file ended.

Mama, could you have known that as your voice took on a power that left us all speechless, and brought tears to Omi's eyes—as it brings tears now to mine and not just for reasons of hindsight—you were singing your swansong?

It was only five days later that she was told Omi had died, and that version of her—that Activist and Icon and woman of
grazia
—we never saw again.

I left the office and drove down to the sea, my windows open to the cool winter breeze. I drove past the lingering Eid revellers, past the theylawallas selling juice and chaat and roasted corn, past the camels with mirror-worked cloth spread over their humps who bowed each time they sat or stood. Finally, in a spot of relative isolation in front of the sea-wall, I parked the car and breathed in the scent of brine.