Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘What should I be if not useful?’ he said, spreading his arms as if indicating a willingness to take on any possibility.

  ‘It’s a moot point. All you can be is yourself. Consistency, thy name is Dad.’

  ‘You have this way, darling, of paying compliments that sound so very much like insults.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I will miss you, you know.’

  ‘You say it as though it just occurred to you for the first time. Please, don’t respond to that.’

  It was my turn then to smile and not know what to say. So finally I said, ‘What are you going to do in Islamabad? Couldn’t the bank just have transferred you to their branch there instead of giving you time off?’

  ‘They could have. They offered to. I said no. I thought my wife might have need ... well, that she wouldn’t regard it as unwelcome if I were with her during the day instead of behind some desk. The financial world won’t be too disturbed by my absence, I expect.’

  ‘Because we’re only irreplaceable to those who love us? That’s the subtle point you’re trying to make here, right? Let’s concentrate on the domestic and leave the world to take care of itself. Thank God Louis Pasteur didn’t take that view. We’d all be out milking cows every morning for our daily cups of tea.’

  He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘The subtle point I’m making is that I’m not a very good banker. And anyway, someone else would have figured out pasteurization eventually—there’d just be a different word for it.’

  ‘And if Shakespeare had stayed in Stratford with Anne Hathaway and the kids, someone else would have written Hamlet eventually, too.’

  He half-shrugged, summing up his view of both Hamlet and this oft-repeated dance around our differences, and there was something approaching relief on his face as we heard the sounds of Rabia and Beema’s footsteps and rushed voices headed towards the bedroom.

  ‘Such excitement,’ Beema declared, walking into the room, Rabia behind her. When my stepmother and half-sister stood next to each other, it was remarkable to notice the resemblance between them which had nothing to do with features replicating themselves from one generation to the next, and everything to do with the way personality can be a physical presence, particularly around the eyes and mouth. ‘About Shehnaz Saeed’s return. I was talking to the customs guy about it and next thing I knew I was in the centre of a throng, buzzing away about the Great Comeback.’

  ‘I told you it would happen eventually,’ my father said drily. ‘Some people just need their spotlight.’

  ‘Be fair to her.’ There was a hint of rebuke in Beema’s voice. ‘It’s been fifteen years, and why shouldn’t she have her spotlight?’

  ‘I never said she shouldn’t have it. I’m entirely unconcerned with whether she has it or not. I’m just saying what I’ve always said. People don’t change.’

  ‘People change entirely,’ I said. ‘Look at Narcissus. Became a flower. I call that a change.’

  ‘A metamorphosis, even,’ Rabia added. ‘Ma, you knew Shehnaz Saeed, didn’t you?’

  ‘A little.’ Beema put a hand on my wrist. ‘She was a friend of your mother, remember?’

  My father made a noise in his throat, muttered something about something that needed fixing, and left the room. It was his standard operating procedure where anything to do with my mother was concerned.

  ‘Oh, everyone who was ever within ten paces of Mama claims to have been a friend of hers at some point,’ I said as airily as I could manage, though I knew it had been a different story with Shehnaz Saeed. ‘No wonder she had to leave all the time. So many friends, so many birthday presents to buy.’ I thought of Ed’s initial reaction to me, that moment when he stepped back as though seeing something impossible, and it struck me forcibly that he must have known my mother when she was in Karachi—not just through pictures in the paper or from the viewpoint of audience, but actually known her.

  ‘I met the son at work,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Shehnaz Saeed’s son. He seems to be in charge of the place.’

  ‘The delinquent?’ Rabia said.

  ‘Doesn’t seem like a delinquent so much as a jackass. He wants to be called Ed. And, despite this, he thinks he’s so slick.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Rabia was grinning at me. ‘So you like him?’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘Don’t be so judgmental, Aasmaani.’ Creases appeared between Beema’s eyebrows. ‘Just because the name’s silly it doesn’t mean the man is.’

  ‘Hear that, Celestial Revolution?’ Rabia laughed.

  ‘Beema, why don’t you take the brat to Islamabad with you and give me some peace?’

  It was the subtlest glance that they exchanged then, my mother and sister (because that’s what they were, after all—never mind the steps- and the halfs-), but in it I saw a baton being passed, some responsibility for me transferring from Beema to Rabia. Beema saw that I had seen it and moved quickly into briskness.

  ‘Well, whatever he’s called, I hope he’s going to give you proper work that makes use of your abilities, not just this quiz show rubbish you’re pretending to be happy about.’

  ‘Beema, I don’t have abilities. I have acts of desperation which land me in occupations I couldn’t care less about.’ And then, because I was angry about that glance, ‘I told you I just want to take a few months off to do nothing. That’s why I quit the oil company. I don’t even know why I let you interfere.’

  She sat down on my bed. ‘You never do nothing. You brood. And I don’t like the thought of you living alone and brooding with Rabia off at work all day and Shakeel locked up in his studio.’

  ‘I think you overestimate the importance of your presence on my sanity,’ I said, sitting down next to her.

  She stroked my hair. ‘I fuss. I know. I can’t help it. It’s what mothers do.’

  ‘No, it’s what you do.’ I put my arms around her, resting my forehead on her shoulder. ‘Don’t stay away too long, OK?’

  As soon as I said it, I realized the awfulness of the demand. Beema was going to Islamabad because her mother was dying. She was going to Islamabad to watch her mother die and know herself incapable of reversing or stalling the process. No amount of love or pleading, no promises or entreaties, could slow the decay of that body of which she had once been a part.

  ‘Now, don’t say anything silly,’ Beema said, as I lifted up my head to apologize. ‘I know what you mean. And don’t you start worrying about me. I’m not ready for that role-reversal yet. Oh listen, jaan, don’t look so sad. Watching someone die gives you a new way of learning to love them. Imagine, knowing someone for five and a half decades and at the end of that finding a new way to love them. It’s an extraordinary thing.’

  Sometimes the sadness of the world can appear beautiful. That was what Beema knew and Rabia, without experience of wrenching loss, believed. It gave them the strength to hold out their arms to grief, their own or anyone else’s.

  Do you want me to come with you? Will it help if I’m there? I almost asked Beema as I had almost asked so often these last few days that it almost seemed a matter of habit now to leave it unsaid.

  A few hours later, they were gone. Dad and Beema on their way to the airport, Rabia having tea at her in-laws’ house. This was worse than the blankness of the morning, the emptiness vaster because it had sprung up where three people I loved had stood just a few minutes ago.

  Rabia lives just through that doorway, I had to remind myself.

  I walked through the flat, counting my footsteps from one end of the lounge to a corner of my bedroom, then counting them again from the kitchen to the front door. Such silence. In Dad and Beema’s house there was always some sound—Beema on the telephone, the cook yelling at the gardener, the neighbours’ dog barking, men pushing wooden carts piled with old tins and bottles calling out to announce their presence, whether searching for buyers or sellers I never knew. But here, three storeys up from the world, the windows closed—nothing. All this space and just me to fill it. />
  I walked over to the boxes of books which surrounded the empty bookshelf in the living room, and opened the one marked ‘REF’. On the top was the dictionary I’d had since I was a child. I closed my eyes, opened the book, and ran my fingers down the page. Opened my eyes. My finger was halfway down the definition of COMBUST. I flipped past CONTRA MUNDUM and CORUSCATE and CUMULAS until I reached CURRENT.

  I pulled out all my reference books, moved over to the coffee table, sat on the ground, switched on my laptop and loaded my encyclopaedia software. Currents. I knew something of them already.

  I knew the currents of the oceans include the Agulhas, the Hunboldt and the Benguela, I knew currents move in gyres, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere. I knew the Poet had told me, years ago, that if we could only view the motion of currents as metaphors for the gyres of history—or the gyres of history as metaphors for the motion of currents—we’d know the absurdity of declaring the world is divided into East and West. I knew my mother’s voice at the beach, cautioning me against undercurrents.

  I looked up into the emptiness around me, and was suddenly very grateful that I had an office to go to every day.

  III

  A week later, long past midnight, I sat cross-legged in my lounge, watching the shadow-dance of leaves and stems on the window panes. The Xylem and Phloem troupe.

  This lounge was my favourite room in the flat. Not for the minimal furnishings (one two-seat sofa, one bean bag, one low coffee table, one bookshelf which tilted forward if you put too many books in it) or the large red and beige rug or the flower-patterned curtains. None of these features—inherited from the previous tenants—held any appeal for me. But I loved the broad windows along the width of one wall, looking out on to the balcony with its profusion of plants and, beyond that, past two rows of buildings too low to obstruct the view from my third-floor vantage point, the sea.

  When the touch of a hibiscus tongue sent the money-plant reeling back in anguished pleasure, I understood the performance had reached its crescendo, and turned my attention back to the blank screen of the laptop on the low table in front of me, beside an encyclopaedia opened to ‘I’. I wrote:

  Which is the oldest poetic form still in popular use?

  a) haiku

  b) ghazal

  c) sonnet

  d) tendi

  Answer: b

  I had reached that question via the entry on IAMBIC PENTAMETER, which led into a memory of the Poet’s irritation when he read an English scholar’s claim that the sonnet was the oldest extant form.

  I flipped the pages of the encyclopaedia and was trying to think of a question which would have as its optional answers my four favourite mediaeval Ibns—Ibn Khaldun (which mediaeval historian wrote Muqadammah, which expresses many of the thoughts of modern sociology?), Ibn Battutah (which mediaeval traveller covered 75,000 miles from Spain to China, Tambouctou to Russia, and left behind written accounts of his journeys?), Ibn Sina (which mediaeval philosopher and physician wrote Kitab-ash-Shifa, covering a range of subjects including metaphysics, Aristotelian logic, psychology and natural sciences?), Ibn-al Nafis (which mediaeval physician was the first to explain pulmonary circulation, in Shark Tashrih al-Qanun?)—when there came a knock on the newly fitted door that connected Rabia and Shakeel’s flat to my flat (I had already started thinking of it as mine, even though it really belonged to Rabia and Shakeel; they’d bought it some weeks ago in expectation of a future in which their family would double in size and make their one-bedroom flat seem cramped. My timing in needing a place to stay had merely been fortuitous.)

  I tossed a tennis ball at the door, signalling my willingness to be sociable, and Rabia walked in, yawning.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she said, sitting down next to me.

  ‘I’ve discovered all sorts of fascinating things about I Ching, the Ibibio, and the many suffixes that can be added on to “icthy-”. You want to hear? It’s gripping stuff.’

  ‘You and all your information,’ she grumbled, leaning her slight frame away from me. ‘You should have been a mathematician—one who works with pure mathematics, not the applied variety. Just live in an abstract, self-referential world.’

  It was an appealing thought, despite my inability to grapple with numbers at any level beyond the most basic. If you asked me which historical figure had the grandest death, I’d skip over martyrs and lovers and warriors, and settle on Archimedes, who was so engrossed in making diagrams in the sand one day that he rebuked a Roman soldier who came up to him. Don’t disturb my diagrams, were the last words he ever spoke, so legend has it. Not that Archimedes was a man of pure mathematics alone; among his many inventions was a weapon of great power—a magnifying glass which could be used to direct the sun’s rays to set the enemy’s boots on fire. If all wars were fought using giant magnifying glasses as the only weapons, perhaps we’d have seen long ago the absurdity of armed combat as a means of resolving disputes. Oh, the tragedy of boots lost to friendly fire!

  ‘What are you so amused by?’ Rabia said. The idea of you as a mathematician? Believe me, Smaani, when we were growing up that would have seemed a lot more plausible than the notion of you as some low-level researcher for a quiz show which blatantly steals its format from foreign TV.’

  Clearly, my sister’s delight at my departure from the corporate world had given way to her customary stance of disapproval, which had followed me through the years as I taught at a school for the educationally disinclined children of the elite, edited a monthly cricket magazine, translated the Urdu diaries of a nineteenth-century, narrow-minded, petty bureaucrat from an Indian princely state for an Anglophone historian, and finally landed up in human resources at the oil company. ‘I’m not low-level,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m the only level.’

  Rabia placed one finger against my shoulder-blade and pressed down—her childhood gesture of ensuring you were paying her attention. ‘It’s such a powerful medium, television. Think of all you could do.’

  ‘What could I do?’

  ‘Influence people’s thinking.’

  ‘Ah.’ I lay back, fingers interlaced in a cradle for my head, which rested on the bean bag. ‘How can you be so certain of your own certainties, Rabia, knowing that if you trace back belief far enough it always leads to mist?’

  ‘What mist?’

  ‘Mists, really. There are so many. The mist of received wisdom, the mist which confuses subjective experience with truth, the mist that is afraid of believing otherwise, the mist which acts as panacea.’

  She nodded, her large eyes fixed on me. ‘Tell me just one thing, Aasmaani. Is it that you don’t want to be your mother, or that you’re afraid you’ll fail so dismally to live up to her that you won’t even try?’

  I sat back up and bowed my head before her, my hand twirling away from my body in a gesture of submission inspired by the shadow-leaves. ‘Either way, you’ve proved my point. All that I am, all that I believe or try not to believe, it’s got nothing to do with larger truths, and everything to do with being the daughter of Samina Akram.’

  Rabia sighed, and shook her head.

  I leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘And besides, the quiz show isn’t all I’m doing at STD.’

  After I’d written my plot suggestions for Boond, that first day in my cubicle, I had folded up the paper and put it in my desk drawer. Writing it had helped fill up the time I waited for someone from personnel to appear and, as far as I was concerned, that was the extent of its usefulness. But a few days ago, in the STD kitchenette, I had run into the harried scriptwriter again—by now Ed had told me she was Kiran Hilal, one of the most respected figures in the industry—and as we waited together for the kettle to boil she said she was going insane. She’d been working with her story-development team round the clock, but all they’d concluded was that the entire script would have to be reworked to accommodate Shehnaz Saeed. They’d torn up almost everything they’d already written, and been compelled to tell
the director that she’d have to scrap most of the footage she’d already shot of the opening episodes (filming had ceased when the bougainvillea-phobic actress quit). And the show was to premiere in less than five weeks. It was all a disaster, a total disaster.

  The real worry, she admitted, was that Shehnaz Saeed wouldn’t approve of the role created for her, and back out at the last minute. Her contract had an escape clause which she could invoke if the show didn’t meet ‘certain creative standards’. Meanwhile, the hype about her return to the screen had got so out of hand that if she withdrew STD might never recover. When Kiran said that I thought it was wild exaggeration, but then she told me how much money advertisers had paid to secure spots for their products during Boond’s run—with the caveat that they would withdraw from their contracts if Shehnaz Saeed wasn’t in the show—and I almost dropped my cup of tea. (Later that day, the hoopla around Shehnaz Saeed’s unretirement reached another level: as talks between the various political groups entered one more round in their attempts to form a coalition government, nearly a month after the elections, a leading politician was quoted in the evening papers as saying, ‘Of course a powerful central government is possible under the circumstances. Shehnaz Saeed is acting again—doesn’t that tell you all hope is possible?’)

  ‘Got any ideas?’ Kiran Hilal said to me, as the kettle whistled and two jets of steam came shooting out of the holes in the spout. She meant it rhetorically, but I found myself repeating back to her everything I had written down that first day in the office about Shehnaz Saeed’s return to the screen. She thanked me, spooned a staggering quantity of sugar into her tea and went away, leaving me feeling foolish. But the next day—that is, two days ago—she’d asked me if I would sit in on the next meeting of her team and pitch my idea.