Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says. ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘I’m diggy,’ I reply, trying to bring her face into focus. She looks as though she’s partway to Oz herself.

  ‘Giddy,’ says the Poet. ‘The word is “giddy”.’

  Everything has righted itself by now, the bed, my mother, the walls. It seems terrible to be wrong. So I say, ‘No, it’s diggy. That’s when you’re so giddy even the letters in giddy turn topsy-turvy.’ I can’t believe I’ve said something so stupid, but the Poet throws back his head and laughs. He lifts me up in his arms.

  ‘She’ll be a poet, Samina. She’ll make language somersault through rings of fire. Just watch.’ He brings his face closer to mine and whispers. ‘They say I can do that. Maybe you’re a young me.’

  ‘Maybe you’re an old me,’ I shoot back. And that’s it, an appellation coined. Old Me. Omi.

  I turned, saw the paper lying on the coffee table, blurred through the smudged windowpane, and the thought slipped out: could it have been written by my mother, and recently?

  I could almost hear the plants around me exhaling carbon dioxide. I leaned over the balcony again and looked to the right. Here and there, lights shone out of windows and street lamps. There seemed no numerical order to the illumination, no multiples or prime numbers underlying the logic of lights. But perhaps the order was pictorial rather than numerical. Connect the dots, and what do you get?

  When my mother had disappeared, fourteen years ago, I saw dots of brightness everywhere. The universe, back then, reconfigured itself into an accumulation of clues and conspiracies. The clues looked like this: any tapping sound or flashing lights; a ringing phone which stopped ringing the instant before I picked it up; a news reporter speaking on a foreign news channel about an unexpected uprising; strangers who whispered indecipherable words as they passed me on the street; a dream of my mother set in a place that I would have known in another instant if the wind (how could I be sure it was just the wind?) hadn’t banged on my window and woken me up. And the conspiracies, they took these shapes: a conversation which stopped the moment I entered the room; a fire burning down a restaurant my mother had loved; a letter intercepted at my gate (I had no proof of such interceptions, but that only made the conspiracy more powerful); the death of anyone she had ever known; the death of anyone, anyone at all, because how could I know for certain all the people she had known? And yes, I had seen patterns start to emerge amidst all those clues and conspiracies. Until, one day, some principle of self-preservation (brought on by Beema’s intervention) had forced me to see that the only clear pattern in any of this was my own rush towards insanity. I was seventeen then, and resilient. I had been able to pull away from that course, and face the harsher truth that everything that happened was Mama’s doing, Mama’s choice.

  But what if I had been wrong? What if there had been some conspiracy all along? I shut my eyes against the dots of light and I saw a gathering of people: the customs official downstairs, Beema’s old schoolfriend, the CEO of STD, Kiran Hilal and Shehnaz Saeed. As I watched they discussed their various roles, plotted how each one of them would guide me towards the next one in line, so discreetly, so seemingly unconnectedly, that the arrival of an encrypted page at my door, after I’d been led all the way down the line, would appear coincidence, a confluence of random events. And there was another figure in the gathering: Ed. The man who tried a little too hard to announce himself as my ally from near the beginning of the game. But to what end, all of it, any of it?

  I opened my eyes. A street lamp flickered Morse code. I turned away with a gesture of dismissal.

  I walked back indoors, and into my kitchen. It had seemed absurdly small when I first saw it, accustomed as I was to the expanse of Beema’s kitchen, but already I had come to enjoy its cosiness, every spice and utensil within easy reach as you stood at the stove. And I had grown, also, to love the little window at the right-hand side of the stove which allowed you extra elbow room when you needed to stir the contents of a haandi with extra vigour. Rabia said it was one of the great sight gags of the block of flats, my elbow jiggling outside the window for everyone to see, as much a source of amusement as the woman in number 9C who would flip her long hair over the balcony after a shower and squeeze, directing the water into a flowerbed below, ensuring that the snapdragons she had planted there stayed alive even through water shortages.

  I gathered together all the ingredients I needed for biryani. Gestalt philosophy must have been born in a kitchen of the sub-continent, the Poet once said. In any successful biryani, the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. I switched on the portable radio that perched on the raised back strip of the stove and listened to FM 100 as I soaked the rice, measured out and ground the spices, chopped the potatoes, tomatoes and chicken, and wept over the onions. Beema and Dad’s cook, Abdul, had offered to come and work for me while they were away, but I had told him not to be a fool and just take Dad’s offer of paid leave instead. The truth was, there had been nothing more appealing to me about the idea of living alone than the thought of having my own kitchen, without Abdul finding ways to mark his territory every time I entered it.

  There was a burst of static from the radio, telling me it was 4 a.m. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep tomorrow in the middle of my afternoon meeting with Kiran Hilal’s team, I decided, so I put clingfilm over the ingredients, left the ground spices on the kitchen counter and everything else in the fridge, and went to bed, falling easily into a sleep without remembered dreams.

  But the following morning, as I stood in the STD kitchenette shaking the remnants of the instant coffee jar into my mug, Ed walked in, and I had to wonder whether he knew of his mother’s gift to me, and what it meant, and how I was supposed to react.

  ‘How go the haiku?’ he said, reaching across me to pick up a mug. I hadn’t seen very much of him since that first day at the studio, and when we did encounter each other in the hallway he was professional to the point of being brusque. He was officially a producer, but seemed to take on all the responsibilities that the CEO couldn’t attend to because of the pressures of the golf course and his philandering. When Ramzan started Ed was going to accompany a camera crew for the entire month as they filmed the preparation and eating of iftar meals across the country for a documentary about the culinary and cultural variations within Pakistan. He was producing the show, but everyone at STD knew that the show’s presenter was the CEO’s mistress and Ed’s real responsibility was to ensure she stuck to speaking in Urdu (in her previous foray into television work she felt compelled to throw in occasional words of English which would result in perfectly phrased Urdu sentences interspersed with such gems as ‘the women here do very good hand jobs’. This in regard to the production of local crafts in a Sindhi village.)

  ‘Dot, how did you know/Yellow, Emerald, Ruby when/All your world was grey?’ I said, pulling a new jar of instant coffee off the shelf.

  ‘Ah. Wizard of Oz as philosophical conundrum.’ He laughed as he took the jar from my hands and punctured the foil with the tine of a fork, slashing from side to side to widen the rent, and then held the jar up to his nose. His eyebrows rose in mock-pain. ‘Ed, will you recall/The scent of coffee beans when/All you have is instant?’

  ‘One syllable too many,’ I pointed out, though I couldn’t help laughing back.

  ‘I knew this girl in New York—an English girl, always in search of a new expression. When she wanted to say someone had a screw loose she’d say, “He’s one syllable short of a haiku.”’

  I was suddenly ashamed of my prickliness at our first meeting. ‘New York, huh? Is that where you picked up your coffee snobbery?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He poured water from the kettle into his mug and mine, with the wristiness of a spin-bowler. ‘It was my home until a few months ago. Lived there for ten years. Loved the place. The day I arrived I thought, I can just be myself here. Not my mother’s son, just me. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I have some idea,’ I foun
d myself saying, though normally I would not have allowed myself to be pulled into this particular avenue of conversation. But there was a lightness about him today, which made him seem ... I couldn’t find the word for it. Not boyish; it was hard to think of Ed as boyish.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he smiled. He reached out as if to touch my shoulder, but in the last moment changed course and took hold of the sugar-bowl behind my head instead. Then I knew. The word I was looking for: irresistible. Something about his lightness, his assurance, was calling to mind all those men in screwball comedies from the 1930s. Men who’d crack one joke and smile one smile, and that would be enough for you to know the heroines would live happily ever after with them, with great sex lives, lots of laughs, and endless parades of parties. Even if the idea of endless parades of parties normally seemed unbearable, those men with their smiles and charms would make you forget that. If you can be this, I wanted to say, why are you ever anything else?

  ‘So how do you feel about being here rather than there?’ I tried to keep all tones of coquetry from my voice.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ he said by way of answer, passing me a magazine he’d carried in with him. It was the new issue of Asia Now, with an old picture of Shehnaz Saeed on the cover, and the words SHE’S BACK! emblazoned across her shoulders.

  ‘Yeah, the security guard outside was looking at it when I walked in. Amazing. She hasn’t even stepped on to the set yet, has she?’

  ‘Stepped on to the set? She hasn’t even seen a script. And here she is, on the cover of the largest-circulating magazine in Asia. On the cover. My mother! Fifteen years she’s been away from the public eye, and here she is on the cover. Can you beat that?’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, handing the magazine back to him. I knew his last question was merely rhetorical, but I couldn’t help hearing it as one-upmanship, and I found I wanted to say something cutting.

  He took the magazine back, and shrugged. ‘It’s nice for her. The warm embrace of the spotlight, and all that.’

  I had made him self-conscious about his own joy, I could tell. And though I was slightly guilty about that, I was also inexplicably irritated about the cloud of filial smoke into which the promise of a parade of parties and laughter and great sex had vanished. What self-respecting thirty-one-year-old single woman would want the man across from her to transplant himself from a screwball comedy into an episode of Happy Families?

  ‘So.’ I smiled brightly at him. ‘New York.’

  ‘New York. Yeah.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I loved it. Really, truly. I had the best life there; I had my job, my friends, my rent-controlled apartment, my local gym, a place round the corner for Sunday brunch which made Eggs Scandinave you would not believe.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then the Towers fell.’

  ‘And you stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion.’ I said it in a haven’t-we-all-been-down-that-road tone but he didn’t seem to notice.

  He let go of the sugar-bowl without disturbing its contents, and made a vague gesture of acquiescence. ‘The thing of it is, I was never more a New Yorker than on that September day. But even then, almost right away, I knew. There are these moments,’ he held up his thumb and finger, lightly pressed together, as though a moment were held between them, ‘when you think, now history will happen and I can do nothing but be caught up in it.’

  Extraordinary, that someone who’d grown up in Pakistan could say a thing like that, utterly straight-faced, as though history hadn’t been breathing down our necks all our lives. You weren’t looking, that was all, I wanted to tell him. When history seemed to touch your life less obviously, when it happened somewhere out of sight, when seeds were being sown and there was time yet for things to work out differently, you weren’t looking. When my mother warned you, you weren’t listening.

  He would hardly have been more than a boy when she left, I had to remind myself. He wasn’t responsible for making her words worthless.

  ‘It wasn’t anything specific that made me decide to leave,’ he continued, rinsing out his coffee-mug. He was too involved in his own story to see I wasn’t keeping pace with him any more. ‘It was just everything, everything over the last year.’ He wiped his hands on his sleeves, dragging his fingers across the blue cotton and leaving wet imprints that looked like the shadows of elongated fingers clutching at his arms. And then he started off. The INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security check in airports. The visit from the FBI.

  ‘Look, you don’t have to do this.’ I cut him off just as he finished saying ‘The Patriot Act’. ‘It’s OK to tell me you were laid off.’ It was the ‘it wasn’t anything specific’ line that gave him away. It was always something specific; there was always that precise moment when you felt everything inside you break.

  The anger on his face then was of a particularly male variety, one passed through the generations, which must have had its origin the first time a cavewoman told a caveman she knew the reason he was vegetarian was his inability to use a spear.

  ‘I was laid off because I’m Muslim.’

  There was something in his tone that said, ‘You can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside your little world,’ and it was that, more than the unjustified nature of his anger, that made me react as I did. In my most condescending tone I said, ‘Yes, it is comforting to blame our failures on the bigotry of others, isn’t it?’ So you gave up your Eggs Scandinave, whatever they might be, and moved back into the cushy life of the Karachi elite. And you think this is being caught up in history?

  For a moment his entire face changed, something hard and cold settling on it, and then he was smiling and leaning back on one elbow, saying, ‘Are you always this unpleasant in the morning or is it just the instant coffee? Will our relationship undergo a remarkable upswing if we meet around a percolator from now on? I’m prepared to carry one on my person at all times when you’re in the vicinity.’

  There was an instant in which I thought he knew in practice what I only understood in theory: the falseness of character, the malleability of it. With that knowledge he could step from light to dark, from joker to knave in a heartbeat. But then I understood he was only playing with masks. Screwball comic hero, devoted son, angry young man, condescending jerk. ‘Will the real Eddy please stand up?’

  He pulled himself upright, and stepped closer to me. ‘He will, if you will.’

  ‘We’re back to that again, are we? Look, you’re not entitled to get to know me. OK? That’s not a right you have which I’m depriving you of. That’s not how it works down here on Planet Earth.’

  ‘You’re the one who just said you want to know me.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I said I want you to stop being Mr Creepy-Many-Personalities.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ He seemed anything but sorry. ‘I know I’m not entitled to anything. But we have this connection, you know, and it’s stupid to just ignore it.’

  ‘What connection?’

  He lifted up the magazine and waved the cover at me. ‘Larger-than-life mothers.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You really think we’re going to bond over swapping notes about that? You can complain about your mother going on location for weeks on end, and I’ll reciprocate with tales of my mother exiling herself for three bloody years.’ I crossed my arms, pressing them against my chest. ‘Is that what that whole line about getting to New York to escape being your mother’s son was all about? You thought I would embrace you to my bosom as soon as I realized the strong parallels between us? Admit it, Ed—if you so wanted to escape being your mother’s son you wouldn’t have returned to work at a television studio.’

  ‘Are you done?’

  ‘Almost. I just need your mother’s phone number.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘She sent me some calligraphy. I want to call and thank her. She’s not anything like you, is she?’

  ‘What do you mean, she sent you some calligraphy?’

 
He looked so startled that for the first time I knew I had the upper hand. ‘Well, I guess Mummy’s keeping secrets from you,’ I said, and turned to walk out.

  I felt so triumphant about my exit that it wasn’t until I was back in my office that I realized what he’d done. He’d got past the façade. And worse than that, much worse—I knew he realized it, too.

  V

  The month my parents married, the Poet wrote his most famous narrative poem, Laila. Reconfiguring the Laila-Majnu story, the poem centres on Laila, bereft after Qais has been banished from her presence. Unable to endure the thought of a life without him, she seeks out his likeness everywhere—in other men (she is soon regarded as the town whore], in nature (sometimes the wind brushing her neck reminds her of his touch), in art (she risks her life to steal a painting, because a man at the edge of its crowd scene leans forward in a manner suggestive of the angle of Qais’s back the first time he bent to embrace her). But all her attempts to find her Beloved’s exact copy lead only to frustration, so she starts to adopt his manner of speech, his gait, his dress, his expressions in order to keep his characteristics alive. She becomes an outcast, shunned by all for her madness and, driven out of town, she makes her way into the forest where Qais has been living—and walks past without seeing him. He watches her go and senses something familiar in her, but is too distracted by composing love poems about Laila to give the matter much thought. Years go by and one day, wandering through the forest, she meets a young man who greets her by the name ‘Qais’. She realizes she has finally succeeded in becoming her Beloved and need never be without him again. In that moment of triumph she looks into the forest pool and sees Qais’s face where her reflection should have been, and remembers: the one thing Qais could not live without is Laila.