He laughed—dazzlingly—and beckoned me towards the office out of which he’d just walked. ‘You’re expected.’
Inside the office, a portly man sat behind a large, cluttered desk. He nodded as I walked in, placed both hands on the arms of his chair and pressed down with them, leaning forward at the same time. It was clearly his way of expressing that while he would like to rise and greet me, the effort was overwhelming—so I did what was expected of me, and said, ‘No, please,’ while patting down the air with both my hands to indicate he should stay seated.
‘So,’ he said, after we’d finished the formalities of whether I wanted tea or coffee, and how exactly I knew his sister-in-law, and why it had been necessary to move the interview up by a few hours, ‘so you’re looking for employment.’
‘Yes—’ and then I realized how unprepared I was for this meeting. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t bring a CV or references.’
He waved his hand in dismissal. ‘If you want a job here, that’s all the reference you need. We’re in no position to be fussy. And as for a CV,’ he smiled and picked at his teeth with the corner of an envelope, ‘your background is CV enough.’ He leaned forward again with that anticipation I knew so well, and said, We’re starting up a political talk show. Hard-hitting stuff, one-on-one interviews with our newly elected ministers. You could be ideal to host. If you have even a fraction of your mother’s fire, the camera will just lick you up.’
‘I’m entirely anti-flammable, I’m afraid. And I’d like to stay unlicked while at work if that’s OK.’ The CEO of STD held up his hands as though warding off an accusation. ‘Is there anything off-camera I could do? And nothing about politics, please. It’s not really something I’m interested in.’
He looked offended, as though I had made my way into his office under false pretences. ‘I suppose you’re not interested in poetry either.’ Then he turned red, as strangers often did when they alluded to the Poet’s position in my life.
I shrugged. ‘I occasionally write haiku. Munchkin verse is how I think of the form, ergo I’m working on a Wizard of Oz series.’
So this is who I was planning to be in my media incarnation. A woman who penned constipated verse and who could use the word ‘ergo’ before her morning cup of coffee. This could be the most insufferable version of me yet.
The CEO’s face brightened—not from any poetic feelings, I was sure, but merely because he was grateful to be past the awkward moment. He made a clumsy gesture of appeal, and my mind worked furiously, counting syllables and reaching for the most obvious way out.
‘Follow the yellow/Brick road, follow the yellow/Brick road. Follow it.’
From behind his desk, he looked uncertainly at me, obviously unable to decide whether this was humour or an appalling lack of talent.
Someone behind me cleared his throat. I turned, and it was Mir Adnan Akbar Khan, known to his friends as Ed, standing in the doorway.
‘There is wit in straw/Courage in fear. Love echoes/In vast tin caverns.’
He had his eyes fixed on me as he spoke. I kept my hands hidden beneath the desk as I counted syllables on my fingertips, unaccountably hoping that he’d got it wrong.
The man behind the desk had lost all interest in poetry—and me—by now, and indicated this by hiring me on the spot. ‘Ed will show you your office. Wait in there until someone comes to talk to you about a contract and then you can leave. Or stay. Whichever suits you.’ He raised his bulk out of his chair.
‘But what’s my job description?’ I asked.
‘Bit of this and bit of that. Same as most people here. You do actually want to work, don’t you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re not one of the eye-liner girls? The ones who come here to find husbands.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Because if you are, I’ve got this nephew...’
Mir Adnan Akbar Khan cleared his throat again. ‘Do you have any particular talents or abilities we should be taking advantage of?’ he asked.
‘Not really. Except, facts. I have many of them in my head. About all sorts of things. I don’t know if that’s at all useful. I take some pride in it not being useful, actually.’
‘That’s perfect,’ the CEO said, smiling a gold-capped smile. ‘We need a research assistant for our new quiz show. You have to come up with questions in different categories, and list four possible answers. Quiz show researcher. That’s your official designation, but you’ll soon find everyone here does a little bit of everything.’ He addressed himself to the man behind me. ‘I’ll be at the golf course, Ed. Deal with anything that needs dealing with. That includes finding someone to read the five o’clock news. Amina has to leave at four—there’s a tea at her place and her mother needs her to hand out pakoras. You, haiku girl, how do you feel about cockroaches?’
‘The sight of their antennae makes me sneeze.’
‘Well, then you can’t be our newsreader,’ he said, and waved me away.
I followed Mir Adnan Akbar Khan out of the office and up the staircase at the end of the hall. The ground floor’s buzz of activity fell away as we stepped on to the landing which led into a lemon-yellow hallway with a window at the far end, framing a bough clustered with pink blossoms set against the pale sky. ‘The creatives are on the ground floor,’ Mir Adnan Akbar Khan said. ‘Along with the CEO, of course, but only because he’s too lazy to walk up stairs. The studio is in the basement. There’s a lone cockroach living there at the moment, resisting all attempts to take him dead or alive—we call him Osama Bin Roach. He makes some of our live shows far more interesting than they would otherwise be. And up on this floor you’ve got producers, researchers, analysts and other people who prefer quiet. My office is down the end. This is yours—’ He pointed to a door halfway down the hallway.
I pushed open the door and entered. A glass-topped desk and computer took up the bulk of space in the tiny room. It was hard to imagine being able to move in there without bumping into something—the desk, a computer peripheral, your own ribs. There was no window, only four blue walls and a duct for central air-conditioning, which didn’t seem to be turned on.
‘A room with a vent. How charming.’
‘If it’s luxury you’re looking for, you’re in the wrong place.’ Mir Adnan Akbar Khan squeezed in past me, and reached under the desk for a pedestal fan, which he deposited on the desk. He reached down again, and pulled out a pile of books. He stacked the books vertically against the wall, and put the fan on top. The blades were rimmed with blackness. He turned to face me, amused. ‘Think you can handle it?’
I walked around the other side of the desk, and sat down in the worn, leather chair, elbows propped on the armrests. My mother would tell me to count myself fortunate. She’d work out how many political prisoners could be squeezed, like pomfiret, into prison cells this size. She’d refuse to say, ‘Like sardines,’ because sardines are a colonial residue.
‘So, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan—’
‘It’s Ed. Short for Eddy. As in, a whirling current. And there’s no need to laugh—it’s a childhood name which just stuck.’
‘Don’t get so defensive, Eddy.’ He looked annoyed and I waved my hand in a gesture of peace. ‘It’s just that I woke up thinking of seas and currents, and now here you are.’
‘Oh.’ He blushed, and that made me suddenly self-conscious. The office was so small that for the two of us to be sharing its space seemed like an intimacy.
He rested his hand on the edge of my desk, and, looking down, smiled. There was a tiny stick-on heart near his thumb, the kind I had covered my pencil-box with when I was a girl.
‘Tell the Tin Man to call off the search,’ he said.
‘Who first did that?’ I asked, levering my nail between glass and sticker to prise it off. ‘Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers—a castrated organ?’
‘The same people who turned angels into harp-playing, effete creatures in nightgowns, floating on clouds. The ones who like to do
mesticate the dangerous.’
I busied myself removing bits of sticky paper from my nail. It was an answer too near my own way of thinking for me to know how to respond to it. I didn’t know what to say to him—there was a subject between us, a history going back one generation, which I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to allude to or avoid.
‘Look, there are plenty of jobs available here,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to get stuck with this quiz show nonsense. It’s obviously not what you want to be doing.’
I looked up, flicking the last bit of sticky paper into the space between us. ‘What makes you think you know what I want to be doing?’
‘Oh, please!’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The enigmatic-woman act is so overdone.’
Don’t you dare, I found myself thinking, and then almost—almost, mind—before I knew what I was doing, I angled my head just so as to draw out the cords of my neck, clenched my jaw, narrowed my eyes to obscure the grey and make the green flash through.
Ed stepped back, the expression on his face telling me to what extent I had just left my own skin, allowed someone else’s personality to brush its hand across my features and leave its ghostly mark there.
I looked away, aware of feeling smaller, more useless, as soon as I had returned to myself.
‘What’s your story, Aasmaani Inqalab?’ he said in a tone of voice I couldn’t decipher. He moved the fan on to the floor, and sat down on the stacks of books. ‘No, don’t give me that look. I hate that look.’
‘You’ve just met me. You can’t hate my looks already.’
‘Your looks are actually quite stunning.’ I raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not making a move on you. I’m just stating a fact. You like facts. You said so. Although, here’s a question. Why?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you like facts? Or maybe you don’t like them. You just collect them. See, we’ve just met and here’s what I know about you. You say you’re not interested in politics, you claim to write haiku though clearly you don’t, which casts some suspicion on the veracity of your claim about politics, you pride yourself on collecting useless facts, you woke up thinking about currents, your friends call you Arse-Many Inflagrante, and cockroach antennae make you sneeze. You’ll have to agree, this is a strange collection of information to have about someone you’ve only just met. It’s ... well, isn’t that interesting?’ He leaned back against the wall. ‘You’ve given me a lot of useless facts about yourself. Huh. Clever. I bet you do that a lot as an alternative to actually revealing information.’
‘There’s something really creepy about you, you do know that, don’t you?’
‘You’re just upset that I’m on to you.’ He stood up. ‘Look upon it as a gift. I’ve seen past the façade instantly. Isn’t that a relief?’
‘There’s a difference between seeing a façade as a façade and seeing past it, Eddy. So enjoy the arches and parapets, take your pictures, buy your postcards. The guard dogs at the gate have been alerted to your presence.’
‘I hear the clatter of a gauntlet,’ he said, stooping down as though to pick something off the floor before walking out.
‘Irritating sod,’ I muttered after him.
It was a long time I continued to sit there, waiting for someone to come and find me. I recited Song of Myself in my head, not knowing why it had occurred to me until I came to the line about ‘eddies of the wind’.
At length, my mind wandering back to my first moments in the STD building, I found pen and paper in the desk drawers and began to write:
To: the woman in the hallway who asked me if I was planning to watch Boond.
My turn to beg forgiveness for presumption. But I’ve been thinking about your concerns re Shehnaz Saeed’s role in your drama. It seems to me your biggest problem is knowing how to both use and downplay her status as A GREAT. That first moment the camera alights on her—how can you make that moment work both at the level of the television drama and at the level of the larger ‘real-life’ drama of Shehnaz Saeed returning to a medium she once owned more fully than any other actress in Pakistan’s history? I have a suggestion:
Let the show start with her return to Karachi, after years away. Let those years be years of mystery, and silence. That allows her to step on to the screen both as a character who has been away from her family for many years and as Shehnaz Saeed returning to all our lives. Those initial moments of recognition that her family has when she comes back, those gasps of shock, those searching inquisitions of every aspect of her appearance to see how she has changed, can both mirror the audience’s responses to her and set up the character’s position as ‘the familiar/unfamiliar-mother/friend/enemy/ex-wife’. You said the show starts with her ex-husband’s proposal to another woman. Think how the drama increases if his proposal coincides with Shehnaz Saeed’s return to town. Yes, this is staple fare of low-brow soap operas—but no less effective for that.
As I wrote, I saw it in my mind. A woman is disembarking a plane in Karachi. On the walk from tarmac to terminal she pauses to light a cigarette and look around her. This terminal was not built when she last left, and for a moment she is terrified by all that must have changed, and all that must have stayed the same, in this city she departed without explanation so long ago, leaving behind her only child.
I put down the pen and bent my head forward to rest in my cupped hands.
Oh, Mama.
II
‘Don’t you want to know what’s in the water?’
My father extended his hand into the space between us, tilting a glass jug; the liquid inside flowed towards the mouth of the vessel and then receded—a captive ocean with a memory of tides.
‘It’s only rust.’ Rabia took the jug from our father’s hand and slid open the bedroom window. At a twist of her wrist a thick rope of orange-brown water spilled out of the glass lip. I imagined a variant on the Rapunzel story in that instant before the water scattered into thousands of drops, racing in their descent to the garden, three storeys beneath us. ‘That tap hasn’t been used in months.’ She leaned out of the window. ‘Look, the madman of 3B is proposing to a flowerpot.’
Dad reached over and pulled Rabia in, and I slammed the window shut. The weather had been bearable this morning when I set off for my interview at STD but now, in mid-afternoon, it was a different matter. The October heat was a haze over Karachi, yet despite its diffused appearance it could pummel its way into any room through even the slightest crack in the window. Dad walked across to the air-conditioner and held his face up to the vents. Outside, crows circled slowly in a sky near white. When I was a child, the Poet told me that the sky-painters’ union had negotiated reduced working hours on days of oppressive heat, so the painters only slapped on a single coat of blue under cover of darkness before packing away their brushes for the day. When I repeated this to Dad he sat me down and explained wavelengths and particles, which sounded so entirely unreal I thought he was making up an extraordinary story which I was too young to understand, just as I was too young to understand why Wuthering Heights was a story my mother could love when it was so choked with misery.
Rabia rested her chin on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my waist. ‘I think the flowerpot is turning him down.’
‘Just as well. He was only after her money-plant.’ I leaned back into her, feeling rather than hearing laughter ripple out from her body.
Rabia was really my half-sister, four years younger than me, married to an artist, and employed by an NGO. Her features were all soft curves to my sharp angles, and her sense of humour stemmed from joy rather than irony. The only thing we had in common was our father’s gene pool—clearly filled with recessive genes since there was nothing of him apparent in either of us—and our overly protective attitudes towards each other.
‘Make sure you look after each other while we’re away,’ my father said, and I couldn’t help smiling at the unexpected—and rare—confluence of our thinking. Dad walked over to the two of
us. ‘And come and visit, often.’ The air ducts had given his hair a windswept look and, seeing it, Rabia laughed again and combed it back into place with her fingers before leaving the room to find Beema—last seen with the customs official downstairs, deep in conversation about Shehnaz Saeed’s return to acting.
‘You’re sure you’ll be OK, living alone?’
‘Dad, I’m thirty-one.’
‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Linearity?’ I suggested. His face had that slightly bemused expression I had seen at various points in my life when I announced my age to him, as though he couldn’t quite believe the gap between my conception and the present moment.
‘It’s not too late to decide you want to come with us, you know.’
I threw him an exasperated look. ‘Welcome to the third millennium, Dad. Single women in Karachi do occasionally live alone without the world coming to an end. Besides,’ I jerked my thumb towards the lounge, ‘there’s the connecting door to Rabia and Shakeel’s flat. I’m not exactly camping out in the wilderness. Subject closed.’
He nodded and ran his fingers over the network of hairline cracks in the paint which gave the turtle on the wall a wrinkled brow.
‘I could go out and get some paint, and help you slap on a coat before our flight out,’ my father said. ‘Unless the marine life is growing on you.’
‘Now there’s a pleasant image. Barnacles on my skin, seaweed draped around my neck. It’s fine, Dad. I can take care of it. You know, you don’t have to be so useful all the time.’
He smiled and scratched his chin, as he always did when he wasn’t quite sure what to say. The chin was growing more prominent as the passage of time carved itself into his frame, gradually removing all excesses of flesh. Old age would happen to his face suddenly, and soon, I realized, but for the moment, with his trim physique and thick grey hair, he looked better than he had since the days of his boyhood, just past adolescence—a time in which, if photographs were to be believed, there was a promise of extraordinary beauty in each angle of his face.
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