Broken Verses (38 page)

Omi and I used to come walking here some evenings. He told me, on one of those walks, about the first time he came to Karachi. After his mother's death, when the rich landlord who was his father continued refusing to acknowledge Omi as his illegitimate son, the schoolmaster in the village took him under his wing and sent him to the city to live with his brother and enrol in the school at which the brother taught. Still mourning for his mother, Omi was desperately miserable the first days in the home of the schoolmaster's brother, despite all the kindness everyone in the household lavished on him. The schoolmaster's nephew, three years older than Omi, was the only one who didn't fuss over him and try a little too hard to make him feel welcome. Instead, he left him alone for two days and on the third day told Omi to climb on to the back of his father's Vespa, and drove recklessly through Karachi's dusty streets all the way to Clifton beach—clear blue waters and fine sand, before the waste of cargo ships slicked down its wild beauty.

That was as far as Omi took the story, but it was enough. He stopped walking, looked out towards the water, scanning the horizon from right to left, and I knew that in some way he pitied me for having grown up so near the sea that I couldn't help but take it for granted.

Is this really the most we can ask from them, the ones who have raised us? That they leave us with memories we can cherish?

My mother won that round with the maulana, no one could deny it. But to what end? She was the safety-valve who allowed us all to release some of our frustrations as we cheered her on and said that she, too, was a voice of the nation, a voice that would make itself heard. But what came of it except a lesson to all the daughters in the audience, learnt slowly over the years, that voices such as hers could be ignored or stifled or extinguished completely? My mother's life as an activist, brave as it had been, was a lesson in futility—and in the end, she knew it.

So I had been telling myself for a long time now. But now I had her voice echoing in my ear, the laughter of the women in the audience echoing with it. And then all the sound of the world fell away and I was left in that silence—that almost holy silence—which had grown up around her, sentence by sentence, as she so artfully moved the debate to the exact space in which she had all along intended it to exist—that accountable space. How could I call that nothing? And the thrum of my own blood as I heard her speak, how could I repudiate that?

Why is it so necessary for you to believe the version of her which you cling on to so desperately, Rabia had asked me.

Because. I looked out at the water. Sunlight cut a path through the sea.

Because. Just because.

It had been forty-six hours and seventeen minutes since the second episode of
Boond
ended with a shot of the crossword grid, perfectly in focus. Forty-six hours and seventeen minutes, and no word from Omi. Forty-six hours and eighteen minutes now, and I was lost in a vision of dark blues and reds and jagged lines.

‘What are you thinking?'

I turned my attention away from the ceiling of the Sadequain gallery and towards my brother-in-law, who was gesturing around the large room as though he were a game-show host and this was the grand prize. Less than fifteen minutes ago he had received a phone call offering him a solo exhibition at the gallery, and he'd run into my flat and insisted that I had to accompany him to the gallery so that I could watch him leap with joy around it and then describe it all to Rabia when she got back from her weekend trip to Islamabad.

‘Don't you mind having that as competition?' I said, pointing my thumb at the gloriously worked ceiling.

‘Silly girl. Sadequain's not competition. He's the giant whose shoulders are imprinted with my feet. He's the guy who made me stand open-mouthed in front of a painting at the age of twelve and think, my God, this is possible. You can be just human, and do this.'

‘He died a poor, depressed alcoholic, didn't he?'

Shakeel rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Yeah. But that doesn't erase a single line he drew.'

As we were walking down the stairs—after Shakeel had, quite literally, leapt with joy around the gallery—my phone rang.

‘Where are you?' Ed said. ‘I'm standing outside your flat ringing your door-bell. I'm paying you a surprise visit.'

‘Well, we're a bad O'Hara story, then. I'm around the corner from your place contemplating dropping in on you.'

‘I'm turning around. I'm walking towards the stairs. I'm almost tripping over a cat. I'll see you at mine in a few minutes.'

Shakeel was smirking at me when I hung up. ‘We're a bad O'Hara story,' he said in a high-pitched voice, batting his eyelids. I slapped the back of his head and he put an arm around me. ‘When do we meet this guy? I want to see the man whose name need only be mentioned to send my sister-in-law into a paroxysm of blushes. Let me demonstrate: Ed. There you go. Beetroot Inqalab!'

‘Oh, shut up and drop me at his house. And no, you can't come in and wait for him.'

It took only a few seconds to get to Ed's, and it wasn't until the chowkidar opened the gate for me and Shakeel drove away that I realized Shehnaz Saeed might be home, and if so, there could be no avoiding her any longer.

She had called me the day after .we'd watched that first episode of
Boond
, and I had seen her number flash up on my caller ID screen and let my answering machine pick it up. Her message had been brief. Just, ‘Please call me.' I hadn't—and when I mentioned it to Ed he said, ‘It's between you and her. If you don't want to talk to her, don't.' I didn't know if she'd tried calling in the last few days. I had pulled my phone out of its socket several nights ago when the crank calling had become intolerable.

If I was lucky, I thought, pushing open the front door, I would make it up the stairs to Ed's section of the house without bumping into her.

But the sort of luck I needed wasn't possible in a house with a yapping chihuahua. I was only a few feet down the entrance hall when the creature heard me and launched into what sounded like a demented version of ‘O Sole Mio'.

‘Who's there?' I heard Shehnaz Saeed call out, and then I had no option but to walk into that elegant room from which I had so dramatically departed nine days ago.

‘Ed's not home,' were her first words.

‘I know. He's on his way.' I was sufficiently ill at ease that I was grateful to have the canine falsetto twirling at my feet, giving me an excuse to bend down and fuss over her. I thought that would pass the conversational ball into Shehnaz Saeed's court but she didn't say anything, and when I couldn't bear having my hand licked any more I stood up and said, ‘I'm sorry I didn't call you back. Things have been very busy. My father was in town, and work's a little crazy.'

‘Aasmaani, you don't have to lie. I understand that you're angry. Ed's told me you have no desire to hear my excuses. And I'm sorry for that, I really am.'

‘I never said that to Ed.' The chihuahua's front paws were scrabbling at my shins. ‘Director, basket!' I ordered and the animal darted out of the door.

‘Your mother never liked chihuahuas either,' Shehnaz said.

And once again, in her presence, it was impossible to feel anything but utterly at ease. I walked over to the sofa and sat down across from her. ‘So why did you do it? Imitate my mother?'

‘Why do you imitate your mother?'

‘When?'

‘All the time. You have all these gestures. Like now. The way you're sitting. The way your arm is crooked on the back of the sofa and your head is resting on your hand. That. Right there.'

I moved my arm down to my side. ‘I'm not...'

‘No, of course not. You're not imitating her. You're just sitting. That's how you sit. You may have learnt it from her. You may have copied her at one point in time, but now that's just the way you sit.'

‘I don't understand your point.'

‘Look, my character in
Boond
, she smokes. It's a big plot point. She smokes a very particular imported brand of cigarette from Guatemala or Ecuador or some other place that exports bananas. She has always smoked that brand, ever since she was a college student. In episode three, someone she's trying to hide from will know that she's been in his office because he'll find a stub of her cigarette in his waste-paper basket. So, she's a smoker, always has been. When we were filming that flashback pregnancy scene, the director said, OK, no smoking in this scene because she's pregnant. She said, Shehnaz, do that air cigarette thing you did in
Nashaa
to show us she's trying to quit. Did you ever see
Nashaa
, Aasmaani?'

‘Yes.' It was the last telefilm she acted in before she retired.

‘Yes. Here.' She uncurled herself from the sofa and put a tape in the VCR. ‘I was thinking of sending this to you with my driver but I didn't know if it would make things worse.' She pressed ‘
PLAY
', and there, on-screen, was a young Shehnaz Saeed smoking air cigarettes as my mother used to.

‘I got it from her, from Samina. When I did
Nashaa
, early on when I was still finding my way into the character's skin, I was having dinner with Samina and she'd run out of cigarettes so she started air smoking. And I said, can I borrow that mannerism? Take it, she said, and continued to demonstrate it for me so that I'd get it right. But once I got it right it became mine. That's how I smoke cigarettes that aren't really there. I don't think of it in terms of your mother any more than you think of her when you rest your arm on the back of a sofa. I learned gestures and expression from her, Aasmaani, turns of phrase and a way of squaring my shoulders when I don't want to show that I'm intimidated. All these things and more, I learned from your mother. But in time you internalize all that you learn, and it becomes yours. I wasn't imitating your mother in
Boond.'
She gestured to the screen once more. ‘I was imitating myself imitating her all those years ago. I'm sorry that I didn't stop to think that it would upset you. Believe me, that possibility didn't even cross my mind.'

‘I see.' I looked down at my hands. ‘You said, I have all these gestures which are hers.'

‘Gestures, cadences, entire sentences of speech.'

‘Like what? Tell me.'

‘It'll only make you self-conscious. You are your own woman, Aasmaani. But it does make my breath stop sometimes, the way Samina peeps out from behind your eyes.'

There was something in her voice as she said my mother's name for which I couldn't quite find a word.

‘You should come for dinner next week,' she said, her tone changing into briskness. ‘My husband will be back from Rome for a few days. I think you'd like him. Although, no, actually, let me retract that invitation until I check with Ed. The two of them alternate between being civil and pretending the other one doesn't exist.'

I'd almost forgotten there was a husband. ‘Why does he spend so much time in Rome?'

‘His boyfriend lives there.' ‘Oh.'

She cracked a peanut shell open with her teeth and looked remarkably pleased with herself. ‘That was almost exactly your mother's reaction all those years ago. Don't start giving me those pitying looks, darling. He's a lovely man and he's given me both unstinting friendship and stability.' She gestured around the opulent room. ‘In exchange I've given him the freedom to be with the love of his life, his university sweetheart, who, being Jewish and male—a terrible combination, in these parts—was entirely unacceptable to his family, who threatened to disinherit him. Also, his mother kept having a stroke each time he said he would rather live without money than live a lie, and he's a real mother's boy. So, he married me. Made Mummy happy—and convinced her that homosexuality is cured with just a little bit of parental firmness and a friendly doctor who's happy to misdiagnose heartburn. And after that, he could spend as much time as he wanted in Rome on “business trips” with David. Close your mouth, Aasmaani, you look undignified.'

‘But...' I looked at her curled on the couch, unsure if she was playing another game with me as she had that first time we met. ‘But you're Shehnaz Saeed. You could have found plenty of men who would have given you financial stability and also...'

‘Sex?'

‘In a nutshell.'

‘Yes, well, there's the rub.' She squared her shoulders.

And just like that, it was clear. The Others, Ed had called her various lovers, and it hadn't occurred to me to think about the absence of gender in that term.

‘You and Mama. You were in love with her.'

She looked steadily at me. ‘Yes.'

‘Oh.' I leaned back in my sofa and tried to form a reaction to that. ‘When did that happen?'

‘Why?' she demanded, with sudden force. ‘Does the timing of it alter the unnaturalness of the emotion?'

‘Unnaturalness? Is that what you think I think? Shehnaz—Aunty—my mother didn't raise any bigoted children.'

At that she ducked her head and smiled, and I smiled back, my mother's disdain for the sheer stupidity of narrow-mindedness filling the room around us.

When Shehnaz Saeed looked up again, there was almost palpable relief on her face. ‘It probably started the first time we met. At least that seems inevitable now. But I became aware of it a few months after the Poet died.'

‘And how did she...? Did she reciprocate?'

Shehnaz Saeed laughed. ‘It's sweet of you to pretend to believe that's a possibility.'

‘Well...” I spread my hands. ‘You're a total babe. And I can't pretend to know the range of my mother's ... interests.'

‘You really are so much like her. Her way of letting me down gently was to say, “My hormones are too inscribed with the habit of Him to consider anyone else. Of any gender.”'