‘And this means he likes me?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled in a way that told me she wasn’t going to say anything further on the subject. ‘You know, your mother and I were once talking about the two of you. She’d just had an argument with you, I’d just had a shouting match with Ed, and we both wondered—what would our children say about us if we put them in a room together?’
I nodded, wanting her to go on speaking of Mama, but not wanting to have to add anything to the conversation.
‘God, but we need her these days,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, and in the shift of her tone I could tell that the ‘her’ she was speaking of wasn’t the private Samina any more, but the Samina Akram of blazing eyes and fiery rhetoric who had crowds chanting her name as though she were a religion. ‘It’s already started. The assemblies haven’t even convened yet and already the mullahs in the Frontier are saying, “Of course women can work, but only according to the guidelines of Islam.” What guidelines? There are no such guidelines! Maybe that’s another reason for coming out of retirement. I don’t want to be one of those women the beards approve of, the ones who sit at home and cook dinner.’
I dipped my fingers into a handbowl with a bougainvillea flower floating in it. ‘I hardly think you’d be their poster girl under any circumstance.’
‘Regardless. We desperately need your mother now.’
‘Well, then, perhaps she’ll reappear. The nation needs her to be a heroine—how could she resist?’ Early in October, the night the election results came in, I couldn’t stop myself from sitting with Rabia and Shakeel, watching the news reporters trying to look unsurprised as they announced the gains of the religious alliance whom most political pundits had written off when they failed to muster any compelling street-power for all their anti-government rallies a year earlier. When the votes were counted and the newly united religious bloc emerged as the third-largest party, with forty-five seats, Rabia raged up and down the room, cursing anyone she could blame for the debacle—the Americans, the President, Al-Qaeda, the other political parties, the Americans again, everyone but the 11 per cent of the electorate who voted for the beards. But through all my own disgust at the situation, there was an undercurrent of hope. Now she’d come back. Back to her old self, and then back to us. She couldn’t fail to come back, not with all that was at stake.
Shehnaz Saeed looked at me, shock on her features, and I felt instantly ashamed. Whatever Mama’s failings, her activism was never about personal glory. I owed her that acknowledgement, if nothing else. And then I saw Shehnaz Saeed’s expression soften into pity.
‘She’ll come back? Aasmaani—’
‘This is not a conversation I want to have.’
She looked hurt then, and I was sorry.
‘How did you first get to know her?’
She pulled petals off the rose in her hand and scattered them on the white tablecloth between us. ‘Well, that story takes us back a bit. I married at seventeen, did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘I read any interview of yours I could get my hands on around the time you did Lady Macbeth.’
She seemed to find that genuinely surprising. ‘Your mother never told me.’
‘I don’t think she knew. She wasn’t around in those days. Political exile is more glamorous than a daughter entering adolescence.’ Stop it, Aasmaani. Stop now.
‘Oh, I see.’ She laid her hand flat, palm down, and started putting petals over her unpainted nails. ‘I don’t think I ever revealed in those interviews the extent of my misery. It was an arranged marriage, but it’s not as though I put up any kind of resistance. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do after school that seemed at all plausible. I mean, I wanted to go to London and join RADA. That was it. The only dream I could think of. But everyone convinced me, places like that they don’t even consider Pakistanis. You won’t look right for any of the parts in their plays, they told me.’ Her voice became shrill, as though she were moving her lips in time to the performance of a twisted ventriloquist. ‘Look in the mirror. Are you Juliet, are you Blanche Dubois, are you anyone except the foreign one with the funny accent? And I believed them so completely that I even believed there would be no place for me on a Pakistani stage. And, anyway, I was scared to do anything to risk my parents’ anger, and what respectable family in those days would want to admit their daughter was an actress? So I tried my first major performance: I convinced myself I wanted to be a wife and mother and daughter-in-law and high-society hostess. It was my worst performance ever.’ She scored rose petals with her thumbnail. ‘Every day, every single day, I wanted to be on a stage, speaking lines that could wrap themselves around your chest and squeeze until your rib-cage cracked open and your heart lay exposed.’
She spoke about language the way the Poet and his friends used to—as a living, dangerous entity—and listening to her I felt the blood move quick through my veins and knew she—and they—were right.
Her eyes were bright with memory. ‘I wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt at the end of her days—a seventysomething, one-legged woman playing Portia in scenes from The Merchant of Venice, reclining on a couch the whole time to hide her disability and, in so doing, making the character so coiled with languid power that any standing-up version of her seems feeble by comparison. And then, taking seven curtain calls when it finished.’
‘So when exactly did you see my mother speak in front of a crowd and fill the air with grazia! I’ve read the Italian interview. Don’t tell me her performance before the adoring masses is what convinced you to leave your husband.’
‘No, actually my husband left me. I bored him, he said. Seven years of marriage, one son, and he wakes up one morning, says to me, “You bore me,” and leaves. I was terrified for weeks that he’d come back. And when it was obvious he wouldn’t, I was so lost, Aasmaani. Twenty-four and clueless. Mother of a six-year-old son. Soon after that I went to hear Samina speak. She had a remarkable capacity to make people imagine change. That’s something we certainly need now, when the zealots are the only ones who appear to have that gift.’ She picked up a rose petal between thumb and forefinger and traced circles in its velvet smoothness. ‘The next day I got back in touch with a schoolfriend whose brother was a director, and before I knew quite what was happening I was Laila. I met Samina just a few days into the rehearsals.’ She spread her hands as if to say, ‘the rest was inevitable’ and I acknowledged the gesture with a nod. ‘But I was just starting out, and she and the Poet were in trouble with the government and both of them told me I shouldn’t risk being associated with them or I’d never get any roles on television. I needed to work, Aasmaani, I needed money. So I kept it discreet, my friendship with both of them.’ She touched my shoulder. ‘I miss her terribly.’
We walked down the stairs in silence. When we reached the ground floor, I turned to her again. ‘The gift you sent me. Tell me about it.’
‘It meant something to you.’ She caught my shoulder. ‘What?’
‘First you tell me.’
‘Well, I don’t know really. It came a couple of months ago. There was a covering letter—wait.’ She walked into the room which I had glimpsed on my way in and came out with a piece of paper, filled with childish block letters. A clue or a conspiracy? She handed it to me, and I read:
Dear Madame. I have bin a fan for many yers. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. I do not undastand them but maybe you will. I know you know the person who rote them. There are more. I will send you more if you act again. Please act again.
I offered the letter back to Shehnaz Saeed, and she gestured to me to keep it. ‘It seemed like lunatic ravings when I first read it. I was about to throw the whole thing away—I’ve received some peculiar fan mail over the years, believe me, though I’ll admit it had been a while since the last one. But it was intriguing enough that I kept it. I don’t know, maybe th
is letter is what planted in me the idea of acting again, and made me more receptive to the idea of Boond. I don’t know. We never really know how our brains work, do we? Anyway, I knew your mother and the Poet had some code they wrote to each other in and when I heard you were involved with Boond I thought, maybe, just maybe. That’s why I sent it to you. Can you read it?’
Some old instinct of secrecy in all matters related to my mother caught hold of me. I found myself saying, ‘No. I don’t know the code. But it does look like some sort of code, and so, like you, when I saw it I thought it might be their code. But I don’t know. Do you have more? If you have more, maybe if I look at them long enough I’ll be able to think of a way to crack the code.’
I sounded entirely unconvincing to my own ears, but she merely nodded. ‘That’s all I have. But who knows, now that I really am acting again maybe whoever wrote the note will send more. If he does, I’ll give them to you.’
She kissed me goodbye at the door, and just before I got into my car she called out into the driveway, ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s probably just some deranged fan.’
‘Yes, of course. I know that.’
I was turning the key in the ignition when she came running down the steps and touched my shoulder through the open car window. ‘But you will tell me, won’t you? If it means anything to you.’
‘Of course I will,’ I lied.
VI
That suggestion of winter which had coursed past me on the roof of Shehnaz Saeed’s house was nowhere in evidence when I drove out of her gate. Heat rose off the streets, creating mirages—thin, shimmering bands of water. The mind would have to be fevered to believe they were anything other than an illusion—in this heat any puddle would evaporate in seconds, or act as beacon for the thirsty pye-dogs who roamed the streets.
After my mother disappeared I used to see her everywhere—not just in the form of other women but in empty spaces, too. She seemed lodged, like a tear, in the corner of my eye, evaporating in the instant I turned to look at her. I knew what hallucinations were, I knew what mirages brought on by psychological aberrations were, but somehow that seemed too prosaic—too predictable—to explain away my imagined seeing, even when I realized it was entirely imagined. Easier to think in terms of Orpheus and Eurydice—every time I turned to check that it was really her, I lost her. But with that explanation I was attempting to step into a story that wasn’t mine. It was a story that fascinated my mother, but even when she first told it to me, I heard her unasked question, ‘Would my Poet journey to Hades in search of me?’ and though I had wanted to reply, ‘I would, Mama,’ I knew that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. So when she placed herself in that borderland between seeing and imagining, I knew I would have to find something other than a Greek myth in which I didn’t belong to explain her away. Quite by chance, I found mention of ‘the Fata Morgana’ in some piece of writing by Conrad, and when I looked it up and discovered it was ‘a mirage of the looming effect’ I knew I had finally found a name by which I could refer to those images of my mother. I still saw her continuously, but I now knew it wasn’t her, just a Fata Morgana, and I would no more think to turn and look closer than I would think to worry about splashing a passer-by when I drove through the mirage of water.
I stopped at a red light and looked out of the car window at a grey sparrow swooping down on to the footprinted dust between the car and a boundary wall sprayed with political graffiti. As a child I used to believe the sparrow itself was layered with dust, and that if I ever got close enough to one to stroke its feathers with my thumb I’d erase the dust to reveal the colours—emerald-green, electric-blue, pomegranate-red—that were the bird’s natural inheritance. My thumb still twitched, now and then, at the sight of a sparrow.
Someone rapped on the passenger-side window. I looked up and there was a man on a motorbike gesturing towards the traffic light, which turned from green back to red almost as soon as I looked up at it. The man on the motorbike gave me a look which said ‘Women drivers’ as he sped through the intersection, swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic.
I was left waiting for the light to change again. I reached into my handbag for a mint, and my hand touched my mobile phone. I wished I could call Rabia, or Beema, just to talk about the strangeness of Ed, the charm of Shehnaz Saeed. But Rabia was at the inauguration of yet another women’s shelter her NGO had set up, and Beema would be taking her afternoon nap before heading back to the hospital to relieve her sister at their mother’s bedside. My father—I could call my father. Since he and Beema had left Karachi, she had been the conduit of information between him and me, telling me how much he was enjoying his leave from the bank, telling him about my bouts of cooking and my new-found fascination with plants. It wasn’t that he and I avoided speaking to each other, just that it was easier for both of us to speak to Beema and Rabia. But it would be a comfort now to hear his soft voice, its thoughtful quality equally in evidence if we talked about the phenomenon of mirages, the current form of the Pakistan cricket team or the significance of isotope decay in the dating of fossils.
I pulled over to the side of the road and dialled his number. He sounded glad to hear my voice, but our conversation merely skated from small talk to small talk—hospital food, STD coffee, my forward-leaning bookshelf, the light fixtures in his bedroom. Almost from the very start of our conversation I knew I wouldn’t talk to him of Ed and Shehnaz Saeed. Unconventional mothers and their children—that was a subject that made Dad choke on his attempt to be honest without sounding chauvinistic. Which I knew he wasn’t—particularly. Certainly Rabia and I had no cause to complain about his attitudes towards women. He was more than proud of Rabia’s NGO work, and had never done anything other than champion my right to be single, even at the grand old age of thirty-one. But if a woman was a mother, Dad was simply unable to view her life in any way except as it might relate to the well-being of her child.
‘And what about fathers?’ I had challenged him once. ‘Why are they allowed to be irresponsible?’
‘It’s not that we’re allowed. It’s just that we’re less significant, and so less capable of doing damage,’ he had replied, turning away before the sentence was finished.
When he’d exhausted the subject of light fixtures I said I had to go, and hung up. But more than before, I felt the need to call someone and talk, just talk. I scrolled down the names in my mobile phone, considered calling my brother-in-law, but knew he would be entirely uncommunicative during the middle of his work day. I put down the phone, ran my fingers over the steering wheel and, for a moment, had a memory—no, not a memory, a reliving—of sitting behind the wheel and learning to drive at the age of fourteen. I needed to speak to a friend, simple as that—and not just one of my ex-colleagues from teaching or human resources or the cricket magazine, who served so well as dinner or beach companions. A friend who had known me long enough to know me, that was what I needed. A childhood friend. Someone who had changed gears while I held the wheel and pressed the clutch because doing all three things at the same time had seemed a task too complicated even to attempt.
I shifted gears from neutral to first. A few months after my mother’s disappearance, soon after I had stopped my blinding search for clues and conspiracies and waited, instead, simply for her to call or return, my closest schoolfriends had come over to my house, sat me down and said it was time to accept facts. They weren’t going to collude in my delusions any more, they said, it was too painful for them and too harmful for me. Better to face that she’s not coming back, and look, here are our shoulders. Cry on them.
It was their mothers’ voices speaking through them, I knew. All those mothers in whose houses I had done so much of my growing up; those mothers who, even more than their children, had wrapped such a tight, protective circle around me when my mother disappeared that I had hardly been able to breathe in their presences. I stood up in front of all my friends and, one by one, reeled off a litany of complaints about those mot
hers. The mother who tried too hard. The mother who stifled her children. The mother who was holier-than-thou. The mother with her absurdly bleached hair. And finally I turned to the closest of my friends, the one whose mother had been most like an aunt to me and, unable to come up with any complaint about or accusation against that sweetest of women, I said, ‘And your mother with her arranged marriage. She’d hardly even met your father before the wedding. That means she did it with a stranger. Like a prostitute.’
I knew exactly what I was doing. Mothers were sacred in all our lives, and even while our faith in their worthiness as objects of veneration might falter, it was not something we would ever dream of saying in public. To complain about your own mother was taboo; to insult someone else’s mother was unthinkable. And so, my friends turned and left my room. The following day, in school, my closest friend walked past me in the schoolyard, alone, three times, giving me all the opportunity I needed to call out an apology. But I didn’t, and we hadn’t spoken since.
In the weeks after my betrayal of my friends, I kept waiting for the moment when one of them, or more, would reveal to the world the reasons for their refusal to associate with me, and then, I knew, I would be shunned by everyone in the tiny circles in which I conducted most of my life. But that moment never came, and I knew their silence was a final mark of friendship which all of them handed to me, across that line which now separated us, before retreating from my life.
I looked up to see the traffic light changing from green to red again and I slammed on the accelerator, almost colliding with a bus which had replica nuclear missiles attached to its roof at jaunty angles.
There was one moment when I could have changed course and found my way back to those friends—and their mothers. It was the end of my first year at university in London—my mother had been gone two years by then, and my newly found method of coping with her absence was excess, which meant drugs, drink, men, or any combination of the above. That lasted most of the university year until Beema and fifteen-year-old Rabia arrived in London at the beginning of Rabia’s summer holidays and refused to say anything disapproving at all for two weeks; the weight of their forbearance finally became too much for me and I broke down in tears and promised a reformation of character. The first step was finding a way to pass my exams—which I did, after weeks of dedicated studying which surprised me with the exhilaration it brought to my life. One of my most vivid memories of that year is of walking through Bloomsbury in the rain, after my last exam, repeating one phrase over and over: for peace comes dropping slow. The rain seemed to change its tempo as I whispered those words, each drop hesitating in its arrow-straight descent from sky to my outstretched palm. I, too, am of the sky, I said aloud. My mother named me.
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