‘What’s the matter?’ the quiz show host asked, walking out into the garden as I was on my way back to my office. ‘You look like a woman whose soufflé has sunk.’
I briefly considered advising him against using kitchen metaphors with twenty-first-century women who were already in a bad mood, but that wasn’t a conversation for which I had sufficient energy. ‘It’s no big deal. I’m supposed to be researching something, but my source is out of town.’
‘If you mean the Archivist, he got back from Lahore yesterday.’
The Archivist. Maybe, just maybe.
‘Do you have his number?’
The quiz show host delicately scratched away at a dot of blue paint on my forearm. ‘You don’t need to call. During the day he’s quite happy for people to just drop in.’
I patted his arm in thanks as though he were an old uncle and he shook his head, laughing again, and said, ‘If I were even ten years younger than I am...’
‘Instead of being at least ten years older than you claim to be?’
‘Aasmaani, Aasmaani. So much like your mother. You whet words and use them to skewer our weaknesses, and we only adore you for it. Those of us who have any sense do, at least.’ He took my hand and scribbled an address on it. ‘That’s where you’ll find the Archivist.’
The Archivist was something of a Karachi institution. For over three decades now he’d been clipping out articles of interest from all Karachi’s English and Urdu newspapers and filing them away according to an elaborately ordered system. The All-Pakistan Newspaper Association had, some twenty years ago, passed a motion requiring that a copy each of all daily Karachi papers be delivered to the Archivist free of charge. The Archivist responded by saying that since he took his scissors to the newspapers he’d appreciate it if the motion was amended to require that either two copies of each paper be delivered to him or that the papers started printing articles on one side of the page only. There was some grumbling about ingratitude, but he got his two copies.
In all the years since I’d first heard about the Archivist, I had imagined him in a huge house with multiple floors, paper strewn everywhere. But it transpired he lived in a block of flats, near Clifton Bridge, and when he opened the front door to let me in my first impression of his flat was of extreme orderliness.
‘What particular news item are you looking for?’ he said, without waiting for an introduction. He was an entirely ordinary-looking man, old but not remarkably so, in nondescript beige shalwar-kameez, with thinning hair and a slight stoop.
‘The Poet’s death.’
He looked disappointed. ‘Well, that’s not very original. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the kidnapping of a top bureaucrat’s son in 1982? I’ve been transferring my files on to a computer and I just came across that old story.’
‘Thank you, but no. It’s the Poet I’m here for.’
The Archivist sighed, but beckoned me into the flat and led me down the brightly lit corridor past rooms without doors, each filled with floor-to-ceiling-high filing cabinets. In one of the rooms I saw a man standing on the top of a ladder, reaching into a cabinet near the ceiling. ‘Some young scribe searching out information on the Builders’ Mafia,’ the Archivist explained. ‘You need a good head for heights to be an effective researcher around here.’
We walked towards a room with a door and I stopped in front of it, wondering what top-secret files must lie on the other side.
‘It’s where I work,’ he said, pushing the door open to reveal the voice of a perky American aerobics instructor (‘One and two and work those abs!’) coming through the television speakers. Across from the television was a large table; the chair at the end of it was pushed back to suggest the person who had been sitting in it had only got up to answer the door and intended to return to that spot with a minimum of delay. A scissor lay on top of the front page of one of the morning papers, which had a block of flower-printed plastic in place of a lead article. It took a moment for my brain to understand I was looking at a section of the tablecloth. Multiple stacks of papers, which had clearly already been through surgery, were on the floor near the chair, and a smaller stack, still unattended to, was on the table.
‘You do this every day?’
He pointed at the aerobics instructor, who was now exhorting her viewers to ‘Feel it! Feel it!’
‘We all have our obsessions. At least I’m leaving something behind with mine.’ He stepped over to the table, finished cutting out an article which was attached to the front page by only one corner, and placed it in one of the several piles of clippings in front of him.
‘Do you enjoy it? Doing what you do?’
He looked up at me and smiled. ‘This isn’t what I do. It’s who I am.’ He looked at me a little more closely and nodded. ‘And I know who you are.’
‘I’m a researcher for STD television.’
‘No, no. That’s what you do. What I’m saying is, I know who you are. Those eyes. I’ve only ever seen one other set of those eyes. You’re the daughter who can’t let go. I’ve heard about you. What’s it been? Near fifteen years now? Young lady, you put even me to shame.’
For a moment I considered turning on the ceiling fan, but instead I straightened my shoulders and waited for him to show me what I had come to see.
All he said was ‘Hmm.’ Then he walked out of the room, gesturing for me to follow, and led me into a room larger than any of the others we’d passed so far. ‘This is the murder room.’
I looked at the cabinets, wedged together in the white, uncarpeted, sun-drenched room, and felt dizzied. Extraordinary, how anyone in this city could walk around with the pretence of normality when there was so much horror pressing around us at all times. But the Archivist seemed immune to such thinking as, humming the song that had been playing in the background of the aerobics programme, he pointed to a cabinet level with his chest and said, ‘That’s the one. 1986.’ He opened the cabinet, ran his fingers along the hanging folders and pulled out one which was disappointingly slim. He handed it to me and I read the tab, ‘31–7–6. Nazim: aka the Poet. Unsolved.’
‘Please, no eating or drinking in here. And if you’re using a pencil or pen keep it well away from the clippings. There’s a reading room next door if you require it. When you’re done, put the folder back in its place, and if you aren’t sure where it goes, come and find me. Don’t feel the need to say goodbye when you leave and don’t take any item with you when you go, not even if you intend to return it within minutes.’ He said all this with a slight air of boredom as though he’d said it so often the words no longer had any meaning. But then he leaned forward to me. ‘What is it you hope to find here?’
I didn’t entirely know. Something. Anything. Words to tell me he was dead. ‘A reminder.’
‘About the Poet’s death?’ He laughed. ‘All you’ll find in there is journalists parroting the official line, with one or two subtle suggestions that there’s more to the story than they can say.’
‘Such as?’
He expelled air noisily from his mouth. ‘Who knows? Even the journalists didn’t.’
He left the room, shaking his head. I opened the folder. The inside cover had two lines of handwritten text on it:
Master File: 1–10–1.
See also: Akram, Samina. Master File: 1–24–76.
See also. Was that the equivalent of reducing her to a footnote in his life?
‘Bastard,’ I muttered under my breath in the direction of the Archivist’s room. I sat on the window sill, which looked down on Clifton Bridge with its steady stream of traffic, and turned my attention to the first clipping, pasted on to stiff white paper. The first thing I saw was a banner headline: WEEP, PAKISTAN!
The memory of his death stepped into my mind.
It was just a sound at first, a low sobbing. And then a taste—guava. I had been in the back garden of my father’s house, eating fruit that wasn’t yet ripe enough to be eaten without consequences, and my stomach hurt. So when I walk
ed indoors and heard the sobbing I was in no mood to be sympathetic towards Rabia, weeping over her favourite pair of jeans which the dhobi had lost.
‘Stop the melodrama!’ I yelled towards the room from which I could hear the weeping. ‘You’ll find a replacement soon enough.’
The door, which was slightly ajar, opened, and I saw my mother through it, her face grotesque with mascara tears, looking at me with such shock that I knew I had given rise to an emotion within her which she never before knew she could feel towards me. Then Beema walked through the door, shut it behind her and put both her hands on my shoulders.
‘Your Omi’s dead,’ she said. ‘Jaan, I’m so sorry.’
My Omi.
It was the first time I learned about the body’s ability to react to news which our minds haven’t yet registered. I started crying right away, leaning against a wall, weeping, with my head in my hands. We never know the structure of grief until it comes to us, each time differently. Those of us who imagine a loss are always wrong in our predictions of how it will feel to find ourselves struggling to imagine emptiness in the shape of a loved body. I wasn’t prepared for how unmoored grief could be; for days after, I was all tears, but not—as I had imagined—because of memory triggers, mention of his name, phrases of his poetry. It was just tears because there were tears and, within, not so much a desolation or sense of loss as a heaviness.
At some point in the hours just after I heard the news I locked myself in my bedroom to hide from my mother’s blank gaze and the peculiar shuddering of her hands, and for want of something else to do, I scanned, without concentration, a newspaper. My eyes were arrested by an article with the heading: EVE TEASERS GO ON RAMPAGE: Modest Women Afraid to Leave Home.
And that’s the first time I knew what it meant to be without him, because at that moment I wanted only to call him up and say, ‘Have you seen the paper, Omi?’
I gripped the folder with both hands, and forced myself to start reading. The first clipping concerned itself mainly with extolling the Poet’s genius, and lamenting the nation’s loss. The only details about his death were that the body had been found ‘with marks of violence’ in the late morning the previous day, in an empty plot of land in Nazimabad. (Was the location mere coincidence? Omi used to love the fact that Karachi had a part of town called Nazimabad—Dwelling of Poets, he’d say, would you find such a locality in any of the so-called civilized parts of the world?) The Poet’s wallet was found in the corpse’s pocket, and Dr Basheer Riaz, who had been the Poet’s doctor for years, was called in by the police to confirm that the body was the Poet’s. A full investigation was underway. Nothing there that I didn’t know.
But the next clipping was from one of the sensationalist Urdu tabloids. Here were details, graphic details, of the broken bones, the features smashed beyond recognition, the purple bruise that his face had become.
No teeth remained inside his mouth.
His tongue was a stump of muscle.
I dropped the folder. Pushed the window open and leaned out. Omi. Oh God, Omi.
They had protected me from this knowledge, all of them, everyone. I knew there had been torture, I knew there were marks of violence, but my father, my matter-of-fact father who never exaggerated or cloaked a detail in metaphor, was the one to tell me, ‘He had the face of a man who was indestructible. So when he died, his face changed. It lost that indestructible quality and became unrecognizable. That’s why they needed a doctor to confirm who it was. That’s why a simple identification wasn’t possible.’ I knew they were keeping something from me, but I chose not to look any further for the details.
How could anyone do that to Omi? Why would anyone do that to Omi?
Smashed beyond recognition.
Beyond recognition.
I stood up.
Sometimes we find ourselves in a moment which feels like a pause; a suspension between the present and the possible. A moment in which our lives prepare to turn.
I bent down and sheafed together all the pages of the folder which had fanned out as they fell. My hands were utterly steady. I flipped through the cuttings—the tributes, the eulogies, the mention of the fire on the day after his death which destroyed all his papers, including the new collection he’d been working on—until I came to clippings from several weeks later, reporting the death of the Poet’s doctor, Basheer Riaz. The one man who’d had the absolute proof, certain as dental records, undeniable as blood. The newspaper reports shed little light on the traffic accident which killed him—though almost all the reports, tellingly, mentioned that he had been the only person who was called in to identify the Poet’s body. But there was also something that the Poet never had—a funeral notice. At the bottom left-hand side of the notice: MOURNER: Nasreen Riaz (sister). At the bottom right-hand side, a phone number.
It was a six-digit number, which started in 5–3.
I took my mobile phone out of my bag, and now my hands weren’t quite so steady any more. Changing the 3 to an 8–5, I dialled the number. An automated voice told me the number didn’t exist. I tried changing the 3 to an 8–3 and this time a woman’s voice, elderly, answered.
‘Nasreen Riaz?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
I reached out of the window and gripped the thin trunk of a bougainvillea vine that climbed along the wall. Purple, papery flowers twirled and drifted on to the concrete below.
‘I’m a television researcher,’ I said, and then, ‘No, no. I mean, I am. But that’s not why I’m calling. My name is Aasmaani. My mother ... my mother’s name might be familiar to you. Samina Akram.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ Her voice was both curious and hesitant.
‘I’m sorry to intrude like this, but I’m calling about your brother.’
‘You’re not another one of those conspiracy nuts, are you?’
I gripped the vine tighter. ‘If you don’t mind, I just wanted to know. I’m sorry if this sounds strange or callous. But were you close to your brother?’
There was the sound of something crashing to the floor. And then her voice came at me, furious. ‘To hell with you. That’s all anyone wanted to know. How close I was to my brother. Not because he was my brother and he was dead, but just because they wanted to know what he might have told me. His death was part of some grand plot, the tying up of loose ends. That’s what everyone thought. He was not a loose end. He was my brother. Do you understand that?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...’
‘No one ever does. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Listen to me. He died in a car accident. He had bad night vision, he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. But there was an emergency at the hospital and his driver was off sick that day. That’s the story. That’s all there is to it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘How is anyone ever sure of anything?’ she said, her voice weary. ‘You want to know if he was involved in a cover-up around the Poet’s death, don’t you? Well, I never asked him. It would have been a stupid question. But I know it was the Poet. I know it because my brother was an honourable man.’
‘That’s your proof?’
‘That’s my proof. I knew my brother. That’s my proof.’ She slammed down the phone.
The purples and reds of the bougainvillea flowers were sparks of a fire, burning his last poems.
I drew in a long breath. What sort of proof would be enough for me? His body was smashed beyond recognition. Even Mirza couldn’t give me the proof I needed. No, the proof I needed could only come in the form of an exhumation of a grave in a distant village. I turned away from the thought. What would be in a grave seventeen years later? Nothing I wanted to see. And nothing that would be of any help, either, since he had no close surviving relatives that I knew of, except some branch of his father’s family who never acknowledged him, and whom he never acknowledged, and who would only throw me out of their grand houses if I burst in babbling about DNA and opening graves and wild conspiracy stories. And in any case, I would never g
et permission for an exhumation, and I would never bring myself to ask for it either.
So there could be no proof.
Except his voice. His voice coming through to me in those pages, so utterly him, so utterly unlike any other voice I’d ever known. I knew my brother. That’s my proof, she had said, and there was no way of arguing with that. But I knew my Poet.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just for the sake of argument, I had to make a case for the pages being genuine. How would I construct the case?
First, stranger things go on. That was an important point. There was that story in the papers not so long ago—two feuding families, the infant daughter of one disappears and is never found. Fifteen years later, the families agree to end the blood feud that has gone on for generations between them. The patriarch of one family gives his absurdly young daughter in marriage to the elderly patriarch of the other family. The morning after the wedding night the bride’s father tells her new stepson, your stepmother is also your sister. The young man takes an axe, bursts into the newly-wed’s bedchamber, and kills the couple. The tribal jirga acquits him of murder, saying he did what was necessary for family honour.
Yes, stranger things go on.
Second, the only person to identify the body died mysteriously shortly afterwards. And though his sister refused to sully his memory by believing him involved in a cover-up, the fact remained that honourable men could be convinced into most dishonourable actions by anyone who knew just how and where to place the right degree of pressure.
Third. Third was a problem. Third was the matter of the burnt poems.
When Omi and my mother first moved into their adjoining houses, both houses belonged to my mother. Of the two of them, she was the one who was financially solvent, courtesy of her inheritance from her father. But when Omi received the first major cheque of his life, as prize money for the Rumi Award, he transferred the money to my mother’s account and she responded by signing over the house he lived in to him, much to his irritation. How much she must have regretted that gesture the day she heard of his death! That was the day she learned exactly the price she would have to pay for never marrying him, the day she learned that their unwillingness to sign a piece of paper meant she had no rights, no claims to his life except the ones he accorded her while there was breath in him.
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