Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  I unlocked my front door, walked through the balcony and then through the second set of doors, locked the connecting door to Rabia’s flat and, with a muttered prayer (‘Silently,’ I heard Beema tell me. ‘Silently. Prayer is as quiet and as resonant as a single raindrop falling on a desert’), I sat down with the sheaf of papers in my hand.

  The first line told me the Poet had written it.

  I wonder if I’m still allergic to peaches.

  It would be too absurd to bear if age and solitude worked their way through my body and mind erasing all defining characteristics, until nothing remained recognizable of the man I once was except my need to break out into gasps and hives each time I encounter that fruit.

  I have a rash, therefore I am.

  Sounds about right.

  The Minions brought a bagful of peaches for me yesterday. My last experience with peaches was three decades ago, when you bit into a peach and then kissed me. Those were early days, before you learned I never did anything by half-measures; not love, not poetry, not allergies. I think of that experience now as a cautionary tale that stays my hand from the inviting plumpness of the fruit before me—remember how my tongue swelled up and nearly cut off all breath? I also have some memory of the momentarily overwhelming pleasure of your peachjuicemouth, but that is just background. And I remember what you said in the hospital room when we had ascertained I would live: even your allergies have to be poetic. Do you dare, Alfred Prufrock, do you dare?

  That pleased me more than I ever told you.

  If someone is reading this, it must be you, so you must still be alive despite claims to the contrary. I’m sorry I can’t appear to care more about this. I’ll never see you again, so how can it matter? Still, now that they have allowed me to write at last, I’m writing to you. That must mean something.

  I’m not really writing to you. How will this ever reach you, even if you are alive?

  But why am I writing in our code, if not to write to you?

  There is nothing like solitary confinement to make you lose any interest you ever had in self-analysis. Self-analysis! It’s self-narrative, that’s what it is. Create a story about yourself, and shape everything to fit that story. In my story I was always the one driven mad by love for you, even before I met you. I don’t know how to interpret my actions now that I’m falling into an entirely different sort of insanity—the insanity of a twilight life, in which there is no distinction to be made between real and fictional worlds. Sometimes Rustum and Sohrab visit me in here, reliving over and over the battle in which father struck down son, until the room is so filled with recrimination and guilt that I have to banish them. The next day it’s Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and the next thing you know she’s rearranging your syntax as though it were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some foreign dignitary who disdains your nation’s table manners.

  If I am no longer the man mad with love for you, does it mean I’m not me any more?

  How tedious I’ve grown.

  What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this?

  Should I tell you I can’t write poetry any more. Poetry? I can’t write Urdu. My hand moves left to right across the page. There is a tide in the handwriting of men and I must flow with it. The first year they brought me here...

  Why go back to that?

  The first year they brought me here was the worst for many reasons but among those reasons was this: I had to break my addiction to writing. There was no paper anywhere. They kept me confined to the house—it was a room then; the Minions have added on over the years. Oh, the joy when they finally completed the kitchen! What a gourmet cook I’ve become, able to use anything they bring me. Sometimes they bring the strangest vegetables, things for which I have no vocabulary. I almost wonder if it’s become a contest among them to try to produce something I cannot use.

  Being confined to my one room meant I couldn’t even walk out and pluck leaves from trees to serve as paper. And no watchband to write on either, as Hikmet did in his prison days. You know how fastidious I’ve always been, but enough days of remembering ‘Make dust our parchment and with rainy eyes pour sorrow on the bosom of the earth’ and I put aside the cleaning rags they had given me and let all surfaces around me become dulled. Then, a fingertip touched in saliva, and I was off! Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings. I who had always scribbled endlessly, covering page after page with doodles and letters and words that I merely liked to look at (you’ve noticed already the elaborate hand with which I’ve written this. I cannot bear the absence of physical beauty in the lines of the English alphabet. English has lines; Urdu has curves. Perhaps my use of English is mere sign of a dead libido. It’s the sort of statement my critics would make. But no, look, haven’t I restored splendour to this language with my near calligraphic flourishes?), I learned to hone phrases in my mind, and only write what I was sure of. The physical act of writing required me to suck dust off my fingers after every few characters. That made me think of you.

  The Minions came in and found my words, remarkable words, the best I ever wrote, on every surface of the room. They filled buckets and drowned each image. Then they broke all my fingers, and left. This sort of thing went on for a while, though the first stands out in my memory most clearly.

  Those were the early Minions. They’ve become more civilized since. Or perhaps I’m just too neutered to pose a threat.

  You must have aged. In all the time I knew you, you only grew more beautiful.

  Here is a memory of you that always makes me laugh:

  It is 1971. I wrap around my shoulders that grey shawl you love. I haven’t seen you in nearly four months, not since just before your wedding, haven’t spoken to you since the day of the nikah when I phoned you to say I wasn’t going to be dramatic and whisk you away on my white charger just seconds before you inked your contract and joined yourself in legitimate union to that weedy man, so you’d have to get out of the wedding on your own if you had the intelligence and courage to do it. I knew that would make you go through with the wedding which otherwise (I’m sure, though you always denied it) you were going to back out of at the last minute. I thought that was the surest way to win you back. I thought you’d last three days and then appear on my doorstep, humbled.

  I underestimated your stubbornness.

  In the end I had to make all the moves. I wrote Laila for you. Not the most conventional wooing poem ever written, but you knew it meant I was going insane with missing you. I alluded to you in an interview for a magazine to which I knew you subscribed. I flaunted my affairs in public, all with women you knew were not in any way to my taste. None of this was enough for you. You were silent, then more silent, and then, as though it were nothing, you announced to your friends who were also my friends that you were pregnant.

  I still haven’t entirely forgiven you for that.

  So I wrap the grey shawl around my shoulders, let myself in through your gate and ring your door-bell. The Weed answers, and I think he or I would have put a knife through the other’s heart if you hadn’t been standing behind him asking who it was. He steps aside, and then I see you: your pregnancy still invisible to everyone including him, but to someone who knows your body as well as I do it is instantly obvious. You are holding a cookbook in one hand, a courgette in the other. I laugh so hard I have to lean against the door frame for support. ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?’ I ask. ‘Which of the two has this man driven you to?’

  And bless you, you laugh with me.

  ‘Both,’ you say, and I know you are mine for ever.

  This is why it’s best not to write. Not even English. It jolts the memory. I had to put aside this page for days after writing that previous paragraph. I’ll talk now only of my time in here, the years without you.

  One day I just decided to stop. Stop trying to find ways to write in secret, stop writing in my head, stop
remembering how it felt in those sweet moments when language obliterated me. You were so entwined in every word I wrote that I had to banish you too, though you did nothing to make that easy for me.

  Then one day the Minions arrived with a book. A book! Not just any book, my love, but Shakespeare. The Complete Works of. That memory I wrote of earlier, the one from 1971, even that turns pale compared to this one. I kept thinking it meant they were going to kill me. Shakespeare as last meal. I didn’t care. I held that book to my heart—black binding, faded gold lettering—and I wept. Huge great sobs from a place so far inside I didn’t know it existed.

  What I remembered then was Orwell. In 1984, two years before they brought me here. Winston sometimes dreams of a world beyond the world of grey order, a world of green fields in which a woman takes her clothes off in a careless gesture that defies all authority. Without understanding why, Winston wakes up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.

  I told you once I would rather have written in English, despite its absence of curves. It was my politics that made me choose Urdu, more accessible to the public, less colonized. You rolled your eyes at me, but I was speaking the truth. I would rather have written English, purely because of Shakespeare. My first—and, it appears, most enduring—love. Another lie. The first love was Rashida, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who was the only reason I went to his house for extra classes after school. Her hips, even at thirteen! And while I’m confessing lies, let me admit the choice of Urdu had nothing to do with public accessibility and everything to do with the fact that the grandeur of Shakespeare’s language has gone out of English—it’s a language that learned to use a knife and fork, though once it ripped chickens apart with its bare hands. Urdu still allows for lushness.

  My favourite word in the English language: intrinsicate.

  Shakespeare uses it to describe the bond between Antony and Cleopatra. The knot intrinsicate. He had the advantage, had Will, of living before dictionaries. He could do what he wanted with words and no one would use the awful phrase ‘experimental’, with all its connotations of impending failure. Intrinsicate. Both intricate and intrinsic.

  My favourite definition in the English language: frass. It means ‘excrement of boring larvae’. I choose to read ‘boring’ as a comment on personality. Is there any greater insult that you can think of? You frass! Not just excrement, not just excrement of larvae, but excrement of boring larvae. I yell it at the Minions sometimes. Frass! Frass! They continue to look impassive.

  Did I always ramble this much?

  They didn’t kill me. (The Minions, I mean—keep up!—when they gave me Shakespeare.) They might even have looked amused. Since then, from time to time, they’ve added on to my library. I have to commend them on their tastes. Or on their knowledge of my tastes, perhaps. Or no, they are merely the delivery boys. For whom? There is the question to which I have no answer, though I’ve given it more than a little thought these last sixteen years.

  Oh, and there you were, just as I wrote that last line, your eyebrows rising to impossible heights and your voice that extraordinary mix of sarcasm and tenderness: ‘You always have an answer, sweetheart. It’s just not always the right one.’

  I’m beginning to miss you now, and I can’t allow that to happen.

  IX

  It had to be a hoax. It could only be a hoax.

  Yes, a hoax. That’s what it was. The Poet was dead.

  But even if it was a hoax—no ‘even if’, Aasmaani, it is a hoax—who could have written it?

  I thought I was the only person left in the world who knew it, but it seems there are two of us now.

  My mother had said that the day I told her I still knew the code. If she was right, the only person who could have forged that communication and pretended it came from the Poet was her. Could my mother have tried to become the Poet just as Laila became Qais? I could feel myself falling into the strangeness of that thought, began picturing my mother running into barbed wire, and then I pulled my mind sharply out. It was an absurd idea, both too far-fetched and too neatly symmetrical—life never imitated art in quite that way—to be anything but false.

  But if only three people ever knew the code and I could rule out my mother and myself as writers of that piece, what conclusion was left?

  Someone else had to have known the code.

  And yet it sounded so much like him.

  Too much like him. It sounded too much like him. No, that wasn’t true. There was a resignation to that tone which was never part of his voice.

  So then it’s proof he didn’t write it.

  But in sixteen years of course he would have changed.

  He’s dead, Aasmaani.

  Yes, of course he’s dead, but all I’m saying is...

  Is what?

  That it sounds so much like the way it would sound if it were true.

  All right. List them. List the ways in which it sounds like him, and the ways it doesn’t, and in those lists you’ll find the flaw, the lie which will blow down that elaborate edifice.

  And if I don’t find the flaw?

  You’ll find it.

  But if I don’t?

  Make the lists!

  All right. All right.

  The ways it doesn’t sound like him: Resignation. Giving up poetry and my mother. (But he explains that. And the explanation makes sense. And he doesn’t really give her up, does he, because he’s writing to her.) Becoming an enthusiastic cook. The story of the courgette. There—that’s the lie. That isn’t how it happened.

  See, I told you.

  But...

  What?

  If it had happened that way, Mama would never have told me. We’re talking about the moment she left my father. How could she tell me such a line as ‘Domesticity or a dildo’? No, she would not tell me that. But I could imagine him—the Poet—I could imagine him saying it. There was that bawdy streak in him, and she loved it, though she pretended not to.

  Keep going, then. Keep going with the list of all the ways it doesn’t sound like the Poet.

  That’s it. That’s the list. He’s learnt resignation, he’s given up poetry and he’s become an enthusiastic cook.

  So then, it isn’t him.

  But I’ve done all those things in the last sixteen years, though it seemed inconceivable when I was fourteen and he was alive.

  The other list, then. All the ways in which it sounds like him.

  Everything. The voice. What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this? That was a sentence structure he liked to use. What will you become, you with the eclectic mind? He wrote that on a card for me, on my thirteenth birthday. You were silent, then more silent. That’s an echo of something he said when he described to me the first time he saw my mother. She was beautiful, then more beautiful.

  But he’s a poet. Of course he has a distinctive voice. It only means it’s more easily imitated.

  In Urdu. It’s easily imitated in Urdu, not in English. Urdu was his public language. And then, there are all those detáils. The peach allergy. The schoolmaster’s daughter and her hips. The grey shawl. Shakespeare. Yes, that particularly. I was there when he told my mother he would rather have written in English. That entire conversation. It was him and me and her. I was studying Julius Caesar for an exam. That’s what started it. Just weeks before he died. There was no one there but the three of us.

  He doesn’t mention you. Doesn’t that prove something?

  No. Nothing.

  But one of them could have told someone else about the conversation.

  Gue.

  Yes. I thought of that. Gue.

  He loved finding oddball definitions in dictionaries. One day he called me up from Colombia, sat by the phone for hours waiting for the trunk call to be put through, so he could say, ‘Look up “gue” in the dictionary, Aasmaani.’ He and I had the same dictionary; he gave it to me as a present precisely so we could play this game. Gue is ‘a kind of rude violin’. He loved that. He would love Frass. It is
exactly the sort of thing he would love.

  But it’s impossible.

  It’s extremely improbable.

  You can’t allow yourself to start believing this.

  But no matter how hard I looked for a sign that would prove, incontrovertibly, that is wasn’t him, I couldn’t find it. Hours went by, in which I first read and reread the pages, then wrote them out in plain English, just to have some different way of approaching them. When that proved fruitless I tried to impose order: start with paragraph one, I told myself, reread it and consider what it means. Why would someone put down that information rather than any other? Find the mind behind the words. But the only mind I encountered was the Poet’s.

  I heard Rabia come home. I wanted to call out to her, but then I imagined her look of panic if I told her what had happened, imagined her tearing up the pages, saying, someone’s just playing a sick game with you, I’m calling Beema and Dad. And if I showed anything but utter willingness to agree with her and accept it as a hoax then it would all return to the days just after Mama left when I used to ask operators to trace calls, and searched everywhere for clues and conspiracies. In those days, Dad, Beema and Rabia were constantly accumulating and weighing evidence about whether I was getting better or not, watching me at all times, suggesting we ‘talk’ about ‘feelings’, forcing me to lie more and more convincingly just so that they would stop watching, stop gathering evidence, think I was improving. Sometimes I managed to fool Dad and Rabia, but never Beema. But now Beema had a dying mother, and the least I could do for her was allow that to be the centre of her world.

  I heard Rabia and Shakeel go out. They knocked on the connecting door first but I stayed utterly still and didn’t answer. It was only when they were gone that I wanted to take the letters to Rabia and tell her what they said.

  Peaches. Broken fingers. My mother’s kisses. Hikmet. The Poet alive. Someone trying to convince me—no, Shehnaz Saeed—that the Poet was alive. Why Shehnaz? The words were not my mother’s. This wasn’t the sign from her I’d been waiting for. I was no closer. And yet, the Poet alive. Not true. Domesticity or a dildo. Larvae. Her unforgivable pregnancy. I couldn’t piece any of it together, couldn’t hold on to one thought long enough to produce a reaction before another thought barrelled around the corner and derailed the first one.