Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  What connected all the women in those images—the activist, the mother, the lover, the mourner, the dancer, the deserter? What allowed a single ‘version’ to arise from such variedness? There was a word for it: character. That imaginary tyrant. We pretend we all have one, and that it is something to be relied upon, something knowable and true, even when it oppresses and constrains us. When someone behaves ‘out of character’ we frown a little, a voice inside us whispering something that makes us uneasy, but then our brows clear. We’ve found a way to reinterpret the action as being in character. Or we say we were wrong about the person’s character to begin with, and now, magically, our memory is able to furnish us with clues which would have revealed as much had we but picked up on them earlier. Otherwise, the person is deceptive; showing one face to the world while knowing all along that face was just a mask, ready to be ripped off with dramatic force. We don’t dare consider that the internal voice which makes us uneasy is a voice that whispers: there is no such thing as fixed character, there is only our need to join the dots into a single picture.

  Anything that doesn’t fit the picture, we just forget about, or re-imagine.

  I moved away from the door I had been leaning against and started to pace the length of the room. The joke of it, of course, is that we ourselves become slaves to the stories of our own characters. Our invented narratives of self determine our actions and reactions—1 am brave; I am fickle; in such and such a situation I will behave in such and such a fashion. Character is just an invention, but it’s an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that guides our lives, worming its way so deep beneath the levels of conscious thought that we forget there might have been a time when our ‘defining traits’ seemed less than inevitable. We are able to look back on our lives and chart our ‘development of character’, never seeing that it’s the development of a storyline, and the longer we live with it the more boxed in we are by the rapidly diminishing variedness of our imagined selves. What we can’t ever accept is that we might never know who we are.

  I pushed open the door that led out to the balcony and breathed deep the carbon dioxide expelled by the plants around me. No—it’s more terrifying than even that. What we can’t begin to consider is that there is no consistent T, only a somewhat consistent outward form that houses such a vast set of possibilities that there would be anarchy if not for the tyranny of character. What frightens us most about this is knowing how easily we might have picked up another script, been governed by another tyrant, and so lived another life. I sank my hand into the loam in a flowerpot, and held it up to my nose. It smelt of hope, awful and richly glorious at the same time.

  And all around us, people are reinforcing our notions by telling us, directly and in their treatment of us, who we are, what we believe in. At what point does character-playing become habit, something for which we are grateful because it allows us to go through the world with the ease that comes from being predictable to ourselves, even if that predictability takes the form of neurosis, hysteria, depression? And at what point does that habit turn darkly into addiction? I wiped my hands clean. We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges.

  When did my mother realize all of this and seek to break out of the character she and the world had invented for her? When did she see she couldn’t successfully achieve that breakout so long as she was in the company of anyone who would try to re-impose that old narrative of character on to her life? Was it in the summer of ‘88 when all those activists and I demonstrated we still believed—well over two years after she had ceased to give us reason to believe it—that given the right opportunity, the right cause, she would become the Samina of grazia once more? And was it before or after that—the moment when she looked at me and thought, while I am discarding everything of myself I will also discard this child of mine?

  I looked up at the starless sky. The dark began to diminish. Night was turning over in its sleep, turning to day. Surely there was some part of us that could be relied upon to remain consistent regardless of what life threw at us, some tiny kernel of being? Surely if Omi really had been locked up for sixteen years he would sound as he did in those hoax pages—still so like himself, despite everything? Surely some seed of the girl I had been when he was alive—the laughing girl who believed in belief and change—still remained within me, ready for reclamation? Or had that girl never existed—was she just part of the story I made up about myself? Self-analysis as the construction of self-narrative: I was once her, but she couldn’t survive what was happening in her life, so I became me, but one day I’ll be strong enough to go back to her. Was that the story I clung to? But if I still needed to believe that story, if I still had the will to want to be her rather than me, wasn’t that hope?

  In the cool dawn air, I was sweating. What I felt was anything but hope.

  And it was time for the morning prayer. Every prayer of mine for the last fourteen years had been one single word: Mama.

  Every prayer and every curse.

  Without her here, I didn’t know how to create for myself any story but that of the daughter she deserted, time and again; the one who never gave her a reason to stay. The one who now gave her no reason to return.

  XI

  But surely, I thought a few hours later, my neck weaving in search of an opening in the short kurta tented over my head, surely our understanding of hope is entirely informed by a misreading of the Pandora myth. When she opens the box everything evil escapes into the world and only Hope remains for humanity, to comfort and lead us through misfortune. So the story goes. But what, I wondered as my head emerged out of the bright yellow fabric, was Hope doing mingled with all that evil? Why wasn’t she off somewhere else with love and charity and friendship? Because her rightful place is amidst plague and sorrow, that’s why. Hope stays in the box because she knows she can work her destruction best from within, in the form of a friend and a guide. Hope’s crimes can only be successful if they are inside jobs.

  I bunched up my hair at the nape of my neck, and twisted a band on to it. Hope was Zeus’s ultimate revenge on humanity for Prometheus’s theft of fire. And in what strange forms Hope comes to us—missives from the dead, lost languages brought to life, men bearing wine in paper bags.

  I wasn’t due at the office for another hour, but I picked up my car-keys and went straight there all the same.

  Already, just a few hours into Ramzan, there was that feeling of something different in the air at STD. The kitchen was empty except for a pregnant woman who had the slightly guilty air of one who is so used to fasting in Ramzan that she feels she’s betraying herself by brewing a cup of tea. In every other part of the studio, there was a sense of simultaneous deprivation and purpose. You could see it particularly with the chain-smokers who were constantly twirling pens in their fingers or fidgeting with paper clips. On the television mounted in the hallway, tea and biscuit commercials were replaced by washing powder and water cooler ads.

  I went up the stairs—bypassing a group arguing heatedly about where the best jalaibees in the city could be found—and when I reached my office I found a piece of paper stuck on the door. There was no message, only a cartoon, expertly drawn, of a man handing a bottle to a woman, a smarmy smile on his face. The label on the bottle said VINEGAR in bright red letters, but the last three letters had been crossed out and the V turned into a W with a green marker. The woman’s face was impassive.

  I carefully peeled the cartoon off the door and walked down the hall to Ed’s office. His door was ajar and I could hear his voice coming through, cold with fury.

  ‘Well then, I’ll be happy to treat your pay cheque as “just a little thing�
�. Now get out.’

  A man whom I recognized as a well-respected photographer, best known for his fashion shoots, walked out of the office and, seeing me, pointed back towards Ed’s office and made a strangling motion with his hands before walking on.

  I considered going back to my office, but Ed’s voice called out, ‘Is someone there?’ so I pushed through the door and walked in.

  His office was much larger than mine, and brighter. Sunlight angled in from the windows in two adjacent walls and converged on his desk, which was covered with black-and-white pictures. He was looking fixedly at the pictures when I walked in, but when I said his name he raised his head and smiled such a smile it made me feel I was a teenager again.

  ‘Are those the reason you were chewing that poor man’s head off?’ I asked, pointing to the photographs. They were all pictures of Shehnaz Saeed, standing at a window, looking out, one hand resting on the curtain. It was the hallmark Shehnaz Saeed photograph, taken during the filming of Aik Ajnabi aur Mehbooba, her first collaboration with Kiran Hilal, over two decades ago. The actor I’d dubbed Once-Leading-Now-Trailing man had played the man she loved, and in the scene during which this photograph was taken she is watching him leave her house after she’s told him she can never marry him. How the entire nation had wept during that scene!

  At second glance, I realized I wasn’t looking at the old photograph but more recent pictures re-creating that scene.

  ‘Bloody fool,’ Ed grumbled. ‘We need these for print ads that are supposed to start running next week for Boond, but just look at them.’ He gestured angrily, and now I saw that the photographs weren’t reproductions of a single image, but a series of shots nearly indistinguishable from one another.

  ‘They look fine to me.’

  ‘They’re not fine at all. Look here, at this shadow, and here, there’s too much curtain, and here, her hands just look old—’ He stopped and looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry. I seem obsessive, I know. It’s all those years of working in advertising in New York. I’ve developed an eye for detail that is going to drive me crazy here.’ He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes for an instant longer than a blink. ‘God, I miss it. New York. That damn city.’

  At a student art exhibition I had once seen an installation called ‘Shehnaz Saeed’s Voice’. It was a replica larynx, with a pinhole at one end. When you placed your eye against the pinhole, some process of magnification allowed you to read a series of words inside the larynx, arranged in the space between two vocal cords—each word apparently written using the materials that the words themselves signified. Honey. Feather. Gravel. Velvet. Tears. Broken glass. As Ed spoke of New York, I almost believed that if I could direct a ray of sunlight towards his larynx it would shine through a pinhole and show me the proof that he was wholly his mother’s son.

  It was to continue hearing that timbre of voice that I asked, ‘What do you miss about it?’ as I sat down across from him.

  He leaned forward and gathered up the photographs into a pile. ‘What do I miss? Sushi.’ He smiled and shrugged, as though to say the question could only be answered entirely unsatisfactorily. But I gave him a look to say, keep going. ‘Pizza,’ he offered. Then he exhaled and lifted his shoulders. ‘The brunch scene. The cabs you can find everywhere, except when it rains. I miss talking politics in Urdu with cab drivers who are always left wing, and I miss being able to have anything delivered, free of charge—from dry-cleaning and saline solution to food from any part of the world. The Korean deli round the corner from me, particularly, which delivers ice-cream at four in the morning. What else? So much. Knicks games, and that New York attitude, and the way neighbourhoods keep changing. The Trinidadian steel drummer at the 42nd Street subway station, and the Bangladeshi corner cigar-ettewalla who calls to me in the early morning as I pass by him on my way home from a night on the town. And the way the city clears out on long weekends. I miss snow in the West Village, and summers, New York summers, I miss those maybe most of all.’

  As he was speaking, I thought at first that his look of pain resembled that of a man considering the end of a passionate love affair and then I realized, no, this is how the survivors of lost lands must look when they recall their former homes—Pompeii in ashes, Atlantis under the sea. ‘Why leave, Ed? Really. Were the inconveniences so great that you couldn’t live around them? I mean, there are inconveniences aplenty round here, though of a different variety. And surely your yuppie persona protected you somewhat?’

  ‘I was made to feel powerless,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Is that really so terrible? I’ve always thought that the moment when Prospero renounces power at the end of The Tempest is when he’s most powerful. The power to renounce power. What are those great Rilke lines about your friends, the scary angels?’

  ‘“They serenely disdain to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t look so surprised, Aasmaani. Even yuppies read poetry sometimes. Besides, the point is, I never renounced power. I just woke and realized I didn’t have it, that’s all.’

  ‘So what? Until then you believed you could live the American dream—become a billionaire, donate generously to a political party and find yourself dictating government policy?’

  ‘No, Miss Cynical. I believed I had the power to live freely, with no one bothering me if I only stayed within the law. The FBI knock on your door at two a.m. to ask about the flying lesson you took five years ago, and that illusion shatters in an instant. Listen, you want to know why I came back to the world of television after trying to live outside my mother’s shadow? Because my mother’s shadow is powerful. Because I walked into the CEO’s office and said, “My mother might act if I ask her to,” and now I’m all but running the place.’

  ‘Karachi may not be New York but there are things to love around here as well.’

  ‘People to love, certainly,’ he said, looking up at me and then down at the photographs and then off to one side. Before I could think of something to say to that he was looking up again, smiling. ‘I never did tell you the funny anecdote I promised yesterday. I was driving home from STD a couple of days ago—and you know I have to go past the police checkpoint near the US Consul General’s house, right? So, as per usual, the police pull me over, write down my licence number and ask for my name—’

  ‘You’re right. That’s a funny story.’

  ‘I haven’t got to the punchline.’

  ‘Of course you have. You left your great life in New York because you disliked all the suspicion and prejudice, and you return to Karachi only to find that on a daily basis you get pulled over by the police who want to make sure you aren’t endangering the safety of the US Consul General. How is that anything but the punchline?’

  ‘I see your point. Thanks, you just killed my joke.’

  ‘Oh, go on. What’s your version of the punchline?’

  ‘The police pulled me over, asked my name, and I thought, why do I always give them my real name? Let me lie. Let that be my attempt at resisting this nonsense. So I said, “Agamemnon.” And the first policeman looked at me as though he was about to take me in for questioning but the second one said to him, “Write it down. Hurry up. Agha Memon.”’

  I laughed. He leaned further forward and rested his hand on mine.

  And it was back again. The fizz. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘it’s Ramzan. We’re supposed to keep our thoughts pure until sunset. And while we’re on the subject, don’t stick bottles of wine on my office door.’

  He lifted my hand and touched his lips to my knuckles.

  I had almost forgotten how this felt; this anticipation, this drowning.

  At length, he let go of my hand, stood up and walked towards the window. He jiggled the strings that controlled the workings of the blinds and held his palm against the windowpane as though to absorb its heat though it was far from cold in his office. Looking out at the garden with its pink-blossomed trees he said, ‘Aasmaani, I don’t believe the Poet wrote t
hose pages. I think it’s all some kind of hoax.’

  ‘I think so, too.’

  He turned to face me. ‘Oh, thank God. I was afraid you’d actually started to believe...’

  ‘No, no.’ I could feel embarrassment spread across my cheeks.

  ‘It’s just, you know, it’s so obviously, well, ridiculous, to start with. But also, everything you read to me. It’s exactly what someone would write if it were a hoax, isn’t it? I mean, if someone was trying to convince you that it was all real that’s just how they’d do it. Drop in references to the peach allergy, dredge up a few old memories, throw in some clues about his present situation, do a quick summary of some aspect of all the intervening years. It’s all too neat.’

  ‘You knew he had a peach allergy?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The way you said “the peach allergy” as though it was something you know about.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ He came closer to me. ‘Once when your mother was over at my mother’s place for dinner, there were peaches in the fruit-bowl. And Samina said that when the Poet was alive she never bought peaches. She said, “Now I can buy all the peaches I want, but as silver linings go that’s pewter.”’

  I could hear her voice saying it. Her voice as it became when the Poet died—all hesitancy and brittleness.