Omi, if I could only believe you were still alive.
I made my way into Rabia’s flat and found her arm-wrestling her husband on the living-room floor. I stopped a moment, unnoticed, to watch them. They made an incongruous couple—Rabia, petite and full of energy, and Shakeel, tall and languid. They had met at his first solo exhibition—Rabia didn’t know who he was, just saw a skinny man with long eyelashes who seemed to be the only person not oohing and aahing over the paintings, and went over to him. Her opening remark to Shakeel was, ‘So this guy claims he’s not interested in being an artist for high-society ladies to collect and then he goes and paints such massive canvases that only really rich people with huge rooms will be able to hang up any of his paintings.’ They were married within a year.
Rabia, yelling in frustration, had Shakeel’s hand caught between both her hands. Shakeel was looking at her in adoration and making no attempt to win the struggle. Hearing me laugh, Shakeel looked up, and Rabia took that moment of distraction to slam his hand on to the floor and let out a cry of victory.
‘Well, so much for being the brawn,’ Shakeel said, standing up. He walked up to me and whispered, ‘Who was the gentleman caller I saw leaving your flat as we were returning last night, young lady?’
I slapped him lightly on the shoulder. Shakeel liked to make much of the three-week age gap between us. He and I had a relationship in which frivolous conversation combined with deep affection in a way that meant I would never tell him any of my secrets or worries but was always perfectly content for him to be in the room on those rare occasions when I talked to Rabia about the things that were on my mind.
‘If he turns out to be significant, I’ll let you know.’
Shakeel laughed as he walked towards his studio—for him Ramzan was an opportunity to start work early. ‘He walked down the stairs like a man who thinks he is significant.’
It hadn’t taken long after Ed left for me to regret reading the pages out to him, and to wonder what he really believed they meant. It was so sudden, his shift from disbelief to conviction, that I couldn’t help wonder if it was a change of heart or manipulation. But it was no more sudden, I had to admit, than my shifts in thinking about him. Just as I felt relieved that he was going to be leaving for a month I’d remember the promise and lack of insistence of his lips on mine and then I wanted nothing more than for Ed to stay.
Rabia called out my name and I followed her voice into the kitchen, where she had tea and French toast ready for us—a sisterly ritual for the first day of Ramzan that went back as long as I could remember.
‘I’m considering a boycott of Ramzan,’ I said. ‘To protest the rising power of the Machiavellian Mullah Alliance.’
‘If you boycott religion because of them you only strengthen their claim to being guardians and interpreters of that religion.’
‘Oh, shut up. I was being facetious.’ I opened the window to the sounds of people clanking around kitchens in surrounding flats. This was one of the chief joys of Ramzan—this evidence of everyone engaged in eating before daybreak, the transformation of that solitary hour into something communal.
Rabia pulled up two high stools to the kitchen counter and sat down to eat. ‘Day before yesterday, at seven a.m., I found biryani ingredients, chopped and ground, in your kitchen. They weren’t there at one a.m. the night before when I went to get a glass of water while you were on the balcony. Therefore,’ she pointed her finger at me, and I couldn’t tell if what was to follow was a punch-line or a verdict, ‘you were preparing a meal between one a.m. and seven a.m.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘Was there a spice curfew on during the night of which I’m unaware? Have I transgressed the unwritten laws of when a chicken can be chopped?’
Rabia crossed her arms. ‘I know what it means when you cook at strange hours. What was on your mind?’
‘Food, I imagine.’
‘That’s not even amusing.’
‘Do I detect an edge there, Rabia? Are you trying to get angry with me?’
‘Trying? You think I can’t get angry at you?’
‘You don’t get angry, Little, you get compassionate.’ I cut off a piece of French toast and held it in front of my eyes. There was nothing even remotely appealing about it.
‘I was angry when you joined the oil company,’ Rabia said. ‘I was bloody furious then.’ She attacked her French toast with knife and fork, cutting it into pieces with a concentration which suggested that the eating of the toast was an incidental afterthought. ‘I still am. What point were you trying to make?’
She had been asking me this question at regular intervals over the last three years and the demise of my corporate persona had done nothing to put it out of her head.
‘Some people, Rabia, have the luxury of doing things they love. Of knowing, this is what I want to spend my life in pursuit of, and then being in pursuit of it. Whether it’s Shakeel with his art, or you with your women’s uplifitment projects—though, honestly, Rabia, that sounds like you’re a plastic surgeon.’ She didn’t laugh, which was a bad sign. ‘You’re the lucky ones. You don’t have to spend the greater proportion of your life in an office somewhere, unable to remember quite why it is that you’re doing this particular thing rather than any of those other things out there, rather than any of those things you wanted to do when you were eleven years old. But we don’t all have that luck. Some of us just go to work and get through the day. Now will you cut my toast?’
‘No. Because impressive as that little speech is, it doesn’t answer “Why you, why the oil company?”’ She swapped plates with me, and began cutting my French toast.
Why the oil company, she wanted to know. Because why not, Rabia? Because it makes no difference. That was what I could throw at her if she made me just a little angrier.
But she sat across from me, cutting the toast according to an elaborate system of diagonals, and she was still my baby sister. ‘Why the oil company? For the same reason I’m not going to give you a straight answer: to irritate the life out of you.’ I reached across and made an incision in the toast which ruined the pattern she’d been carving.
She didn’t look at me. ‘You have no idea how hard it is to be your sister sometimes.’
There was silence for a few seconds as we both chewed on our toast. ‘Do I embarrass you?’ I said at length, more bothered by her comment than I was willing to admit. ‘Around all your NGO friends, when you have to admit that your sister used to work for the oil company, and now she’s moved on to a quiz show. Does that embarrass you? Is that why it’s hard being my sister?’
She looked at me in such surprise it made me want to weep. ‘All the sadness in my life has to do with you. That’s what’s hard. And please don’t tell me that you’re fine.’
I held my mug up to the side of my face, the porcelain burning against my cheek. ‘I get through the day, Rabia.’
‘Oh, Smaani.’ She pushed down on my wrist so the mug of tea came to rest on the kitchen counter. ‘When did that start being nearly enough?’
I lifted my shoulders and let them drop again. ‘So long ago I’m surprised you remember when it was different.’
She put her hand on mine. ‘Don’t you know how much I hero-worshipped you when I was a kid? You were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to me when I was ten. And when I told you that, you said my cultural references were the sign of a colonized mind.’
‘I didn’t! You mean I was that irritating, even at fourteen?’
‘You were that smart. That’s how I saw it. Particularly when you were around the Poet. You and he were always talking about things I couldn’t even begin to understand.’
There was nothing he ever believed I was too young to understand or discuss. Religion, politics, the tension that can be generated by the need for a rhyme. ‘What do you remember about him?’
‘The Poet? Not that much. I was so young when he died. And even before that, I always felt I wou
ld be disloyal to Dad if I went too often with you to your mother’s house when they were in Karachi.’ She shook her head. ‘He really is the only person I can think of who could get Dad so riled up. And I don’t even remember them having a single conversation, ever. But just the mention of his name and poof! Dad’s face would turn red like he’d heard some incantation to overturn mild-manneredness. Do you think we’ll ever hear the full details of the day your mother left him for the Poet?’
Domesticity or a dildo? To which of those horrors has this man driven you?
And Mama had laughed and said, ‘Both.’ What must it have taken for Dad to have agreed to allow her to move back into his house after the Poet died, with the memory of that ‘Both’ in his mind? And before that, what must it have taken for him to stand by and watch Beema and my mother become as close as they were without ever, to my knowledge, objecting? All because of me, I knew. Yet when I was growing up I only saw that he never allowed the Poet into his house, not even at my birthday parties, and that he barely spoke to Mama himself and always kept utterly quiet when Beema told me how much cause I had to be proud of my mother.
‘But I also used to resent him a lot,’ Rabia said. ‘The Poet, I mean. Him and your mother.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’d go into exile and take you away from me. Why is that funny?’
‘It’s not. It’s ironic. I used to resent how much I got left behind.’
‘Every summer and winter holiday, Aasmaani, you’d be gone. Colombia, Egypt, wherever. I was the only girl in school who hated the holidays.’
Eleven weeks a year. That’s all the time I had with my mother from the age of nine to twelve. She wasn’t there when I got my first period, had my first crush, bought my first music album. She wasn’t there for any of that. But I realized now that the time I spent with Mama, brief as it was, must have seemed immense to Rabia during those years. How old was she—only eight?—when they came back from the three-year exile? In those early years of her life I idolized my mother so completely and always yearned to be where she was—Rabia must have learned to fear that one day Mama would really take me with her, and then I would become a houseguest who occasionally flitted through my sister’s life while on holiday from schools in distant parts of the world.
‘I’m sorry.’
She shook her head, suddenly brisk with that air she had when she decided it was time to get to the bottom of a mystery—whether that mystery was a choked drainpipe or some knotty part of my psyche. ‘What I want to know is when did it stop?’ She gathered up the plates and walked over to the sink. ‘Do you even know? When did you stop believing in all those things you were so passionate about? All those political ideals, notions of inspiration and activism and all that good stuff which you used to lecture me about in response to a question as seemingly apolitical as “Can I borrow your Walkman?” Was it when the Poet died or when your mother disappeared? I can’t remember.’
The precise moment when everything inside you breaks. ‘Neither. It was over a month after Mama left. It was 17 August, 1988.’
‘Why does that date ring a bell? Oh. Oh yes.’
In June that year, General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq dismissed the civilian government he had handpicked which, against expectations, was showing signs of independence. Amidst his grievances against the government, Zia included a lack of progress in the Islamization of the country and announced that henceforth sharia would be the supreme law of the land. This move towards theocracy sent violent tremors down the spine of the women’s movement, which knew that Zia’s Islam concerned itself primarily with striking down the rights of women and befriending fundamentalists. But when I heard the news, I felt that same impulse of joy that I relived just a few weeks before when the religious alliance won all those seats in the elections. Now Mama will return, I thought to myself, even though she hadn’t yet removed her physical presence from our midst. She’ll return to being herself. I wasn’t the only one to think so; more than one of her activist friends called up to say they were planning a massive protest rally in Lahore, and would she come? She refused to take any of their calls. When I found that out, I ran into her room.
‘You’re going, you’re going!’ I yelled at her. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll hate you for ever.’
‘You’re liable to do that in any case,’ she replied, and before I could respond she had drifted away though she remained standing just feet away from me.
Later that night she came into my room so late she must have thought I would be asleep. She sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair. ‘Mama, who will save the world if you don’t?’ I said, but though she wept a little my entreaties had no more effect on her than my anger. I kept trying, though—for the next couple of weeks I applied myself single-mindedly to convincing my mother to go to the rally. No manipulation, no cruelty was out of bounds. She put up with it for a couple of weeks and then, just days before the rally, she left.
But even when she was gone, I held on. To what, I don’t know. I had no name for it, but I had a clear picture of what it was. The picture was of a group of young soldiers, looking up at a sky bursting with stars, their expressions purely of longing. My mother had that picture framed by her bedside when she lived next door to the Poet. She said it expressed so clearly that our greatest desire was for contentment, that was the strongest pull of all. To sit under a starry sky with your friends and dream. That is what the human soul wants, that is humanity in repose. Whether we’re fighting unjust laws, or dictatorial governments, or the destruction of the mangrove swamps, Aasmaani, we’re ultimately fighting for the luxury of that repose.
Even after the Poet died and the picture disappeared from her bedside, even after she left, I continued to believe the essential truth of what that picture had told me. Humanity in repose ~ that was a phrase I loved. She would find her way back to that truth, back to the necessity of fighting for it, I knew, and all the strangeness of the previous two years would be replaced by a return to the woman she was when she believed it. And that woman would come home.
But, instead, on 17 August 1988, General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq boarded a plane in Bahawalpur, which exploded minutes after take-off.
When news reached me of his death, that was the moment I saw all my mother’s stories of contentment and repose as nothing more than fairy stories. Even if true, they counted for nothing. That was the moment I broke. All those years she had fought against Zia’s government—she and the Poet—with rallies and speeches and poems. And it had got them nowhere. It had got him tortured and killed; it had got her—well, there were no words for that, either. Those little victories they’d achieved, they were nothing but little. And that rally in Lahore, what had come of that? Nothing. Nothing. All those noble means of resisting came to nothing. But then someone—no one even knew who—put a bomb in a plane, and the General exploded, and already, within hours of his death, they were saying, there really might be elections now, real elections. There might be—oh God, I had been raised to whisper the word like a prayer—democracy. Because someone put a bomb on a plane. That is how things happen in the world. That is how you resist tyranny. By becoming it, by becoming it absolutely. It was the only effective way.
Everything you ever did, Mama, was nothing. All those years you fought, all those bruises, all the agonies I went through when you were imprisoned—for nothing. And you saw that, didn’t you, well before I did? When the Poet died—no words of his powerful enough to turn away a hammer or a fist—you saw the futility of that life you had lived so passionately. That’s why you made the choice you did, the one I started to understand that 17 August, though it would be a long time before I fully acknowledged it.
‘Should we be happy?’ thirteen-year-old Rabia had asked, coming into my room and hearing me say Zia was dead. When I heard that—my baby sister, all wide eyes and good intentions, wanting to know whether to feel happy about a bomb blast that killed a planeload of people—I banged my head against the wall and howled with tea
rs that left my throat raw.
‘God, you scared the life out of me that day,’ Rabia said, her hands covered in soapy water. ‘All that bawling and flailing. It didn’t help that I’d just seen The Exorcist.’
I laughed, and ran my hand through my hair. ‘Rabia, I’ve had a wretched week.’
‘Hallelujah!’ she said. ‘An admission of misery. You going to tell me why?’
I shrugged and went to dry the dish she was holding out to me. ‘Some days just seem to have so many hours in them.’
‘I see. It’s Aasmaani the Obscure again. Let me make a wild guess here—when you had lunch with Shehnaz Saeed, she spoke to you about your mother, didn’t she?’
‘She tried. She gave me the oh-how-the-nation-needs-her speech.’
Rabia dunked the frying pan in soap suds and flicked her wet hands in the direction of a hanging plant—a trick she’d learned from our snapdragon neighbour. ‘Well, the nation does.’
‘Oh, please.’
‘You do, too—no one’s denying that...’
‘I’m not accusing anyone of denying that.’ The words came out angrier than I expected. I was so tired of the way Rabia always approached me with such care around the subject of my mother, as though I might shatter into a million pieces if she didn’t say exactly the right thing. ‘Sorry. I’m still sleepy, that’s all.’ I kissed her forehead and started to walk away.
‘We’re just starting a conversation here,’ Rabia said, but I shook my head and kept going. ‘Why is it so necessary for you to believe that version of her life, Aasmaani?’ she called out. I turned slightly. ‘Why is it so necessary for you to believe her activism amounted to nothing?’
What was that line in the encrypted pages? Create a story about yourself, and shape everything to fit that story.
I entered my flat and locked the door behind me. Here, in my mind, were so many different images of my mother. My mother at twenty-three in a white kurta, lapis lazuli at her wrist. My mother at twenty-six, unable to resist an ex-lover in a grey shawl. My mother at twenty-seven, carrying me into a prison. My mother at thirty-four, rallying women together. My mother at thirty-five, running after the Poet to Colombia, leaving the women and me behind. My mother at thirty-eight, her body covered in bruises from a policeman’s lathi, preparing to go out and lead another demonstration. My mother at forty, still dancing to old Donna Summers records. My mother at forty-one, allowing her grief over the Poet to consume her. My mother at forty-two, worse than she had been the year before. My mother at forty-three, gone.
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