Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  Ed sat down on the edge of the desk, his shadow falling on me. ‘Do you mind if I talk about her?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Samina,’ he said again, as though he hadn’t said her name aloud in a long time and was surprised by the sound of it. ‘She always insisted I call her that instead of “Aunty”. I used to see her and the Poet, now and then, when I was growing up. Not often. Maybe a handful of times. But after the Poet died, she and my mother...’ He stopped, unbuttoned and rebuttoned the cuff of his sleeve. ‘She moves in and out of your features, you know? It’s uncanny.’

  ‘She and your mother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were saying: after the Poet died...’

  ‘Right. She and my mother became close, so she’d come by quite often. I used to drop in sometimes to see my mother and find her there. I wasn’t living at home then—was at IBA, sharing a flat with a couple of guys near the campus.’

  ‘Your delinquent university years. I remember hearing about them.’

  ‘From your mother?’

  ‘No. Just generally. When your mother quit acting.’

  He stood up, rocking the desk. ‘You mean when they all said she gave up the great passion of her life because of me. Because I was such a disaster she wanted to make sure she didn’t make the same mistakes with the children from her second marriage.’

  ‘Ed.’ I touched his sleeve. ‘I know how people in this town talk.’

  ‘Yes. Of course you do.’ He sat down again, closer this time. ‘It was so unfair the way people treated your mother. All those years, she was only ever with the Poet. But because they didn’t get married, and because they never really tried to hide the nature of their relationship, people thought they could say terrible things about her, and turn their backs on her when the Poet died.’ He shook his head. ‘All those people, married people, having their affairs, and no one says anything or treats them any differently as long as they keep it secret. As though there’s some virtue in that. As though discretion and lies are the same thing. Your mother and the Poet, they were discreet. If you saw them in public and you wanted to believe they were just close friends and neighbours, hell, you could believe that.’

  ‘Close friends and neighbours don’t follow one another into exile.’

  He waved his hand. ‘There was just something so honest about their relationship. That’s all I’m saying. They didn’t flaunt it, but they didn’t lie and sneak around either. They didn’t deceive anyone. And you’re the proof of that. You, growing up here, where everything goes on behind closed doors and yet everyone acts outraged about the tiniest suggestion of impropriety. You’re not embarrassed or angry that your mother was involved with a man she never married. You don’t hold it against her.’

  ‘I loved him before I knew the meaning of the term “social convention”, Ed. It’s just that simple.’

  ‘You never had to find out she was lying to you. It’s that simple.’

  Shehnaz Saeed had always confounded the purveyors of gossip by keeping her private life utterly private. Through all the years she was in the public eye there was never even a whiff of scandal attached to her. So, when she married her second husband, everyone was startled. He had been part of her wide social circle, but no one imagined he was anything more than that. Not even Ed?

  ‘I remember the first time I saw your mother after the Poet died,’ he said. ‘At a supermarket—Paradise, maybe. Somewhere near Bath Island, at any rate.’

  She never got used to thinking of the neighbourhood around my father’s house as her neighbourhood. On those rare occasions when she did go out to shop it would always be back to her old haunts, the places where she looked on in exasperation as Omi took more time than seemed possible choosing the perfect watermelon, the ideal selection of green chillies. Even when it came to toothpaste and shampoo and soap, Omi would regard all the possible options as though being asked to locate a talisman, never choosing the same brand twice in a row.

  ‘She looked so lost. And there were these two women staring at her and obviously talking about her. Samina was ignoring them. But then one of the women said, out loud, “Well, you can’t expect people to treat you like a widow if you haven’t been a wife.”’

  I folded my arms, pressed them against my chest. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I went up to her, held her like this,’ he placed his hands on my arms halfway between shoulder and elbow, ‘kissed her on both cheeks and said how sorry I was. She seemed so grateful and surprised. There’s nothing more unfair than your mother being placed in a position where she should have been grateful that some nineteen-year-old idiot didn’t cut her dead when he saw her.’

  I could love you, I thought.

  He moved his hands slowly up to my shoulders. ‘So, tell me something. What do you believe happened to your mother fourteen years ago?’

  I leaned back, tipping my chair on to two legs, so that he had to let go of me to avoid toppling forward. If he had said ‘think’ instead of ‘believe’ I might even have answered him. But ‘believe’? As though the fact of Mama’s continued life was so implausible it could only belong in that realm in which atheists placed God, that realm in which faith and fantasy were synonymous. I could understand his scepticism, it wasn’t something I would hold against him. But why did he have to look at me as though he were trying so hard—too hard—to convince me he was ready to double the numbers of this religion to which I alone subscribed, not because he believed the message but because he could not see me walk through the wilderness alone?

  Come down to it, Ed was just another one of those men who wanted to fix me and believed that he could.

  Take me broken, I wanted to say. But I knew already that in his eyes each one of my breaks would shift from challenge to reproach. Why can’t you be fixed by me, he’d want to know. Why aren’t I enough? Why do you resist my attempts?

  I stood up and walked over to the wall without either window or door which was almost completely covered by an oil-paint poster advertising SHEHNAZ SAEED IN ‘MACBETH’.

  ‘If we’re going to swap theories here, Ed, let’s make it about a present-day mystery. Who’s writing those hoax pages and sending them to your mother, and why?’

  ‘Leave it alone, Aasmaani. It isn’t the Poet.’

  ‘I know that. But I’m still entitled to be curious, aren’t I?’

  ‘Of course.’ He picked up the pile of photographs from his desk, pulled one out, and threw the rest into the waste-paper basket. ‘But I can’t help you. I’ve got no theories.’

  His manner was so affectedly casual I knew he was hiding something. Irritation, or even hurt, at the way I had brushed him off? Or was it something else? I looked up again at the poster. Shehnaz Saeed’s face was painted on it with strokes so meticulous they avoided every flaw except that of excessive precision. There was no animation in the face; everything human had been replaced by perfection—except for the eyes, which seemed to look down at me in both invitation and warning. What was it I had thought the other day when I recalled her Lady Macbeth? Anyone in that audience would have plunged a dagger into a heart for her.

  After the Poet died there was no reason for my mother to keep the code secret any more. She told me no one else knew it, but that was a year before she disappeared. What all did she say in that intervening year to the woman with whom she spent so much time? What did she say of codes and peaches and Shakespeare and shawls?

  Ed said my name, his voice rising in a question.

  I turned towards him. There he sat—Mama’s boy and his own man knotted into one. It made perfect sense. Why else would he have brought the letter to my office, then refused to give it to me? Why else tell me the Poet couldn’t be alive, then tell me that he could, then wake up the next morning and tell me no again? Poor Ed, caught between filial love and conscience.

  He held out his hand to me. Not just conscience. There was something more going on here, something which Shehnaz Saeed couldn’t possibly have anticipa
ted.

  Between Ed and me there was a sheet of sunlight, speckled with dust. I could walk to him through the sunlight and take his hand. I could play him. I could play his mother through him, pretending to be the fool while all along gathering information about what exactly was going on, and once I had figured that out I would find a way to turn it on its head.

  ‘You’re angry with me for something,’ he said.

  As he said it I realized how strange that, no, I wasn’t. Not at all. I was—I felt this all along the muscles of my back—incredibly disappointed. And without the heart to keep this going any longer. Whatever Shehnaz Saeed’s game, I wanted nothing more to do with it.

  ‘Angry? No. Just a little guilty. Look, I’m going to have to be blunt here. You’ve outlived your usefulness for me.’

  ‘What?’ He looked so startled—so wounded—that it was all I could do to keep going.

  ‘The pages are hoaxes, Ed. I looked them over again last night, and it was obvious they’re fakes. Whoever wrote them did very well with the broad strokes, but there are certain fine details which are just completely wrong. So, sorry, but I don’t need you or your mother in my life to act as the courier service any more.’

  I moved towards the door, and he came through the sunlight and caught my arm. ‘To hell with my mother and the letters. What about us?’

  He was so beautiful right then.

  ‘Listen, sweets, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.’ I pulled my arm away. I don’t know how to tell you what a monster your mother is. ‘Call me a bitch if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘You’re not,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing.’

  ‘I’m saying goodbye.’ I kissed him on the angle of his cheekbone. ‘Safe travels, Ed.’

  I walked out and returned to my office. By the time I was sitting at my chair, I could feel white-hot anger taking over my mind. I picked up the phone and called Shehnaz Saeed. I would tell her a thing or two. I would tell her she didn’t have the intelligence to sound like the Poet. I would tell her all she’d done was make her son unhappy. I would tell her my mother used to laugh at her behind her back. I would tell her she was wrinkled and that everyone knew her husband couldn’t bear to touch her any more. I would say ‘casting couch’ and ‘neglectful mother’ and ‘has-been’ and ‘mediocre talent’.

  I would have told her all this, I swear, but as I held the phone pressed against my ear until it stung all I heard was a ringing tone, repeating and repeating until the sound lost meaning and became the staccato victory laugh of Hope.

  XII

  I called Beema at the hospital later that afternoon. Her voice was wrung out with exhaustion, and when I asked how her mother was she replied, ‘Still dying.’

  ‘Talk to me about other things,’ Beema said. So I told her about life at STD, and my daily phone conversations with the architect responsible for renovating our house, and all the mini-dramas that were unfolding in the block of flats. When her voice finally seemed restored to itself, I said, ‘Beema, what do you think of Shehnaz Saeed?’

  ‘Gem of a human being,’ Beema said without hesitation. ‘One of the most generous, warm-hearted people I have ever known. The way she was with your mother—my God—it was extraordinary.’

  ‘How was she with my mother?’

  ‘Patient.’

  I nodded, my chin bumping against the receiver. ‘Unlike me.’

  ‘Unlike everyone else in the world.’

  ‘Please, Beema. You were patient.’

  ‘Not always. I loved her, she was one of the dearest people to me in the world. No one braver or more charismatic than your mother. But I had other, stronger loyalties. Shehnaz didn’t. Shehnaz didn’t look at your mother and think about what her depression was doing to you, or to our household. She only saw Samina.’

  Her depression. That was Beema’s explanation for my mother’s behaviour before she left. Something unwilled, in which my mother played no part, had no agency. Everything could be explained away under the neat label ‘depression’. Everything except the fact that my mother made a choice and slowly, painstakingly executed it.

  ‘Would you trust her? Shehnaz Saeed?’

  When Beema replied it was almost in a tone of revelation. ‘You know, it’s a strange thing. I’ve hardly seen Shehnaz in fourteen years. And we were never friends as such, just two people with a dearly loved friend in common. But now that you ask that question, I know the answer is yes, absolutely. Some people you can trust because of your relationship with them. Because they’ve earned your trust. And other people you trust simply because you know that they regard trust as a sacred thing, and if you hand it to them they’ll hold on to it with their dying breath. And that’s Shehnaz for you. Trust her? I wouldn’t just trust her with my life, Aasmaani, I’d trust her with yours.’

  The thing about Beema was this: for a remarkably generous woman she was also remarkably right about people.

  When I ended the call and hung up the phone, I didn’t know what to think any more. But it came down to this: if the pages were hoaxes, I could ignore them. I could call Shehnaz Saeed and say, if any more of those letters arrive, I don’t want them. In her response perhaps I would learn whether to trust her or not. Whether to trust Ed or not.

  But I couldn’t call Shehnaz Saeed and say that because what if, what if.

  I was back to where I had been the night before. Back to that need for a single piece of evidence that would assure me Omi was dead.

  So I went down to the office of a news anchor, who was also a freelance journalist and a part-time sociology teacher, and, while chatting to her about the ideal consistency of a jalaibee (I came down on the side of gooey in the gooey/crunchy jalaibee divide), I flipped through the phone book on her desk, under the guise of being impressed by how many minor celebrities were filed in there and located and memorized the number I needed. I knew she’d have it—I had read the article on Ghalib she’d written in which she’d quoted Mirza the Snake.

  And then, I did nothing. Nothing for the rest of that day, and nothing the following day and nothing the day after and so on until somehow we were into the third week of Ramzan and I had done nothing except have one brief conversation with Shehnaz Saeed.

  It was very soon after my chat about her with Beema. I was in the office, rewriting bulletins from AP and Reuters for the evening news programme, when she called and invited me over for iftar the following day.

  ‘No, sorry, I’m ... I’m expected somewhere else. Relatives.’

  ‘What a pity. But listen, drop in sometime, will you? It really was so lovely to see you the other day.’

  She said it as though it were the most true thing in the world, and I found that I wanted Beema to be right about her, I wanted it almost painfully. ‘I will, of course.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Oh, and thanks for sending me that second set of...’

  ‘Any luck making sense of them?’ she asked very quickly, as though the question had been lodged in her throat, straining to burst out.

  ‘Not really, no. But I’m enjoying the challenge.’

  She laughed. ‘Imagine if you put hours into it and it turns out to be nothing more than recipes for cold soups. Should I continue sending you any more that I receive?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said casually. ‘Why not? I’d hate to miss out on the gazpacho.’

  The conversation wound down after that and I hung up thinking, I really have to call Mirza.

  I had that thought each day, several times a day. No, more than several times a day. It was the thought with which I fell asleep and the thought with which I woke up. And in between, it was the thought of my dreams. But I was like a woman in the grips of a powerful addiction who keeps delaying that inevitable moment of last cigarette, last drink, last touch. It isn’t as though I believed the Poet was alive. Not for a second did I believe that. But going to Mirza in search of that tiny scrap of evidence which would kill the possibility of ever believing that he was ali
ve, that I couldn’t do. Just as I couldn’t call Ed, who made no attempt to get in touch himself. Just as I couldn’t drop in on Shehnaz Saeed. Just as I couldn’t speak to anyone about the coded pages, or keep from opening War and Peace and rereading the pages until they were burnt into my memory.

  And also, I had to admit, I didn’t want to call Mirza because he was Mirza—the most beautiful, arrogant man I had ever known. An angel undomesticated and with no need for earthly morality.

  In any case, with Ramzan’s strict structure it was all too easy to pretend there was no time for phone calls or visits. Wake at five for sehri, read the newspaper, return to sleep for a couple of hours, get to work by nine, leave by three, sleep until iftar, watch television with Rabia and Shakeel, have the lightest of light dinners, and then play night-cricket with the neighbours in the communal garden until it was midnight and time to sleep.

  But finally one day, as I stood in the STD garden assisting in the painting of a sky-blue backdrop for the set of a religious discussion programme (‘The sky suggests heaven,’ someone explained as our brushes slapped against the canvas), a spray of paint arced through the air, came to rest on my arm, and when I turned to see who was wielding the guilty paintbrush I saw the journalist/newsreader/sociology teacher. ‘Sorry, A,’ she said. ‘All this fasting has a really bad effect on my coordination. I can’t believe we’re only just past the mid-point of suffering. Doesn’t it seem like for ever ago you stopped in and discussed jalaibees with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, starting to walk away even as I said it, my brush dripping a trail of blue on to the grass as though I were a literal embodiment of my name, shedding a part of myself. When I was out of my colleagues’ earshot I dialled the number which I’d stored in my mobile phone more than two weeks earlier.

  On the first ring, an answering machine picked up and a familiar, slightly hypnotic voice came through. ‘Ramzan is here. I am not. I swore into the phone just as the answering machine beeped. I should have known. He always used to say that there was no place for an alcoholic atheist in Pakistan during Ramzan, so as soon as the month started he’d leave the country.