When I was an adolescent, Mama had sat me down to tell me about the facts of life.
‘Oh, please. I’ve known for years,’ I said, aghast at the prospect of having to hear my mother even say the word ‘sex’.
‘I’m sure you know the technical side of things. The “Insert flap A into slot B” side of things,’ she said, and I almost ran out of the room. ‘But don’t tell me you don’t have questions.’
‘Well.’ I fiddled with something or the other, didn’t meet her eyes. ‘Does it hurt?’
When I looked up I could see her mind reaching back into memory. ‘Mama!’ I said. ‘Please!’
‘What?’
‘You can’t stand in front of me and start thinking about... that.’
She laughed her wonderful, unabashed laugh. ‘Sweetheart, I can’t stop being a woman just because I’m your mother. Stop looking so outraged. It’s not as though I’m showing you pictures of myself in the act.’
‘There are pictures?’
‘Of course there aren’t pictures.’ She bit off the end of the sentence and frowned. ‘Unless your father still has them.’
‘Mama!’
‘I’m joking, silly.’ She placed her palm on the top of my head.
‘You’re really not a normal mother.’
‘I know.’ She sat down on her bed and pulled me down next to her. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Some days.’
‘Aasmaani, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t. Mama, don’t.’
She leaned back, resting her weight on the heels of her hands, and smiled brightly at me. ‘Let me tell you a secret. To answer your earlier question. The first time it happened, it didn’t hurt. But it was definitely strange. And I thought, “You must be doing this wrong. Surely all that fuss can’t be about this.’” Then she rocked back with laughter again, and despite the blood rushing to my face I couldn’t help but see the joke.
When we stopped laughing and I looked up, there was Omi standing in the doorway, smiling. That look in his eyes as he walked over to her and kissed her hand—I had taken that look for nothing but love. And now, what was I to believe now?
The phone had been ringing for a long while now. My anonymous caller again. No one else had such persistence. I knew if I picked it up there would be no answer, and no originating number on my caller ID screen. I stood up to answer it anyway. I would say down the line, ‘Bring him back to me.’ I would say, ‘Keep him locked away for ever.’
But when I picked it up it went dead almost immediately.
I lay down on the sofa. Omi and Mama—what was their great love? Did it end up a catalogue of accusations? Is that what all that early passion shifted into without my even noticing it? It didn’t seem possible. But then, it didn’t seem possible that he would accuse her of perversions. What all had I failed to see about them? How much can a fifteen-year-old really know of the relationship between a man and a woman?
Yeh aag bhee bujh jaye gee.
This fire, too, will burn out.
I pulled myself upright. I wouldn’t start thinking of his poetry.
The phone rang again, my mobile this time, and my gratitude at being interrupted gave way to a feeling of disquiet when I saw the name on the display was MIRZA.
I let it ring two, three, four times. After the fifth ring it would go to voicemail. The fifth ring. I answered.
‘Who is this?’ said Mirza.
‘You’re the one calling me.’
‘I just got home from holiday to a great many tedious messages.’ His voice, as ever, was so languid it was camp. ‘Only one of any interest. Someone swearing, with feeling, into my answering machine and hanging up. I put together the time of the call with the information on caller ID and it appears that obscenity came from this number. So, I just wanted to know. Should I take it personally?
‘Mirza, you take everything personally. Even eclipses.’
There was a pause. ‘Samina?’ he said, the word barely above a whisper.
In my stomach, something somersaulted. ‘Right DNA, wrong generation.’
Another pause, and then a soft laugh. ‘Well, well, well, little Aasmaani.’
There was a crackle down the line. Was it tapped? Mirza had gone for the funeral. What did he know, what did he suspect? What could he tell me about how it really was with my mother and Omi all those years I was too busy weaving a fairytale of love to bother with anything so mundane as reality? ‘Can we meet, Mirza? I’d like to catch up.’
‘Catch up? Aasmaani, even at fourteen, you were way ahead of me.’ He laughed again. ‘But of course we can meet. No time like the present.’
We agreed on a café, which I knew would be free of the scores of Chaand Raat celebrants, and less than ten minutes later—having successfully avoided the traffic jams around areas where families had driven out to see Karachi lit up in lights like a bejewelled bride trying to draw attention away from the ungainliness of her natural façade—I reversed into an empty spot in a plot of land next to the café. As I pulled up the hand-brake I saw a man getting out of his car—a red, gleaming vehicle with aspirations to spottiness. Mirza the Snake.
I turned off my lights and ignition and watched him. The last time I had seen him he had been a man who wore creased kurta-shalwars and an air of glamorous dissipation. Long before heroin chic, Mirza had a startling beauty that was all about emaciation. Whether he picked up a book of poems or reached out to touch the Poet’s shoulder, he treated his body as something that might just fall apart, and yet it was abundantly clear—even to me when I should have been too young to understand these things—that he subjected his flesh to all manner of torments, and that it wasn’t glass but wire of which his bones were fashioned.
I never really had a personal relationship with him, the way I did with many of Omi and my mother’s friends who teased me and spoilt me and asked me for my opinions on adult matters like politics and religion and books. But he was around so often that I knew quite intimately his face, his particular gestures, the cadences of his voice. And I knew he looked at me in a way that made me ashamed to like it. Many people thought he was just another one of the Acolytes—that group of men who I always believed were the main reason my mother and Omi lived in separate homes. She had no time for them—the vaunting egos, the self-absorption, the lachrymose intoxication. ‘I loved him least after two a.m.,’ she once said of Omi, who was always early to bed except when the Acolytes came over and kept him up until dawn with whisky, poetry and hashish. But though Mirza the Snake was always part of those late-night gatherings he wasn’t really an Acolyte. He didn’t ultimately defer to Omi the way the others did, nor preface every criticism with lavish praise. In many ways, Omi regarded him as an equal because he knew more about mystic poetry from a myriad traditions around the world than anyone else. An atheist obsessed with God, that’s how my mother described him. Burdened with that love which was always just beyond reach because he didn’t believe in the Beloved.
After we all thought Omi was dead, Mirza the Snake became the most persistent of his circle who tried to share my mother’s grief with her. I remember him best from this period. One night, he walked up the driveway while my mother and I were sitting in Dad’s garden. She had been avoiding him—and everyone—for weeks.
He ambled up to her and said, ‘Push everyone else away, Samina—they’re fools for thinking they understand what you’ve lost—but this is me, Mirza. You’re the only person whose company I can bear right now and I suspect that’s not a one-way street.’ He held out his hand. ‘Let’s be each other’s companions in grief.’
I was terrified when he said that. Terrified she’d agree. This must have been soon enough after the news of the Poet’s death for me to believe I would have her to myself when the edge of grieving wore off. Before I knew that his death was the one thing with which I would never be able to compete.
But she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Let’s not pretend to be friends, Mirza. He loved me, and that’s one thing you can’
t forgive me.’
He reached out his long fingers, took the cigarette from her hand and held it to his lips. ‘You burnt the only copies of his last poems,’ he said, and turned and walked out, listing slightly with the breeze.
Sixteen years later, the walk had changed. It was the walk now of a portly man able to bear all manner of buffeting. The kurta-shalwar was made of richer fabric now, the kind that didn’t wrinkle. And his features appeared to have had blotting paper held over them for a decade or more.
The Fata Morgana in the backseat of my car was gesturing for me to drive away. Mirza’s real talent, my mother used to say, was for finding a wound and driving a nail through it.
I gestured impatiently at the backseat, got out of the car and walked up to the café. Pushing open the wooden doors, I looked around the cosy space with its five tables of varying sizes, of which only the long table had customers seated at it. There was no sign of Mirza, but one of the waiters, seeing my eyes scan the room, pointed up the stairs. I climbed the steps set alongside a long window which had a tree outside festooned in twinkling fairy lights and it was with a mixture of satisfaction and panic that I saw Mirza was the only person in the small upstairs section, his girth almost spilling off the cushion of the wrought-iron chair.
XV
Mirza stood up when he saw me.
‘Aasmaani Inqalab, all grown up,’ he said. He moved forward, caught me by both shoulders and pressed his lips against my cheek. ‘Chand Raat Mubarak,’ he whispered, his mouth close to my ear, somehow managing to transform the greeting into something verging between intimacy and obscenity.
I pulled away and he smiled. ‘I see I still make you nervous.’ He sat down and gestured to the chair opposite him at the table which seemed incredibly small. Leaning forward, he almost entirely swallowed up the space between himself and the empty chair. ‘Have a seat. And don’t look so suspicious. You’re the one who proposed this rendezvous.’
I pulled the chair away from the table and sat down, legs crossed, one arm crooked on the back. ‘Sorry about the answering-machine message. I was researching something for STD—I work there now—and I had a pressing question I thought you could answer. I’m usually quite adept at hanging up before I start swearing.’
He reached into a bowl on the table and popped a pickled green chilli into his mouth. ‘What was the question?’
I waved my hand dismissively. ‘Something about the history of the ghazal. A minor matter really, for a five-minute segment of a show that never got made in the end—but the producer likes turning a feather into a flock of crows, so there are no minor matters, only minor pay-offs.’ I was moving unthinkingly between English and Urdu, as was he, and though that was common enough, it had been a while since my Urdu vocabulary and syntax heightened into that old, now-vanishing courtly Urdu in which Mirza and the Poet always spoke to each other. I have Omi’s voice in my mouth, I thought.
‘But here we are after all these years. Hardly a minor payoff I’d say.’
He was smiling pleasantly but even so I found myself looking down at my menu and pretending to read it intently just so that he wouldn’t see my unease. Somewhere beneath that mountain of flesh was the first man who had made me wish I wasn’t just a child. I used to fantasize about kissing him when I was too young to fantasize about anything beyond a kiss.
I felt slightly sick at the memory.
‘So,’ Mirza said, after the waiter had taken our orders—coffee for me, grilled chops for him—‘You’re a dogsbody at STD. Is that your Raisin of Death?’
It was an expression the Poet used to use. His version of raison d’être.
‘Is sycophancy your Raisin of Death, Mirza?’ His sporty car and expensive kurta-shalwar confirmed the truth of the rumours I’d been hearing for the last decade: soon after democracy returned to Pakistan in 1988, five months after my mother’s disappearance, Mirza became the unofficial Poet Laureate of Pakistan’s politicos. On birthdays, anniversaries, in the run-up to elections, on the passage of new constitutional amendments, Mirza produced verses to fit the occasion for anyone willing to pay the price, regardless of their political affiliation. When the military had returned to power in 1999 the demand for his sycophantic poetry had only increased among his former patrons; politicians, it seemed, had a greater need for adulation when power was far from their grasp than when they were occupying high office. And with the recent return to pseudo-democracy, he was probably up to his eyeballs in rhymes about both the victors and those who were cheated of their rightful victories.
Mirza the Snake tried not to look irritated, and failed. ‘Not all poets are fortunate enough to have rich mistresses,’ he said. ‘Being a kept man was the price your dear Omi had to pay for the integrity of his art. Face it, he was as much of a whore as I am.’ He bit down on the tip of his thumb and looked at me as though studying my reaction, learning from it whether he’d found the wound through which he could drive a nail.
I smiled at him, with all the superiority I could bring to bear on an upturned pair of lips. Not even close, Mirza. Strange how, in testing for wounds, we look first to find our own wounds on the bodies opposite us. Mirza with his unbridled jealousy of anyone with a claim on Omi’s affection—of course this would be the story he’d choose. And right then I saw how absurd it was—the notion that anything other than love had been at the very core of their relationship. Whatever else might have got mixed in, nothing could touch or diminish that core. That damned core which had always made it possible for them to fly away together, away from me and the world.
My smile was sagging, and Mirza’s eyes took on an air of triumph. I laughed. ‘That’s a convenient revision of history, Mirza. It discounts the fact that he loved her most, and serves as role model for your poetic prostitution. Two birds, one stone. You were always economical with language.’
He shook his head. ‘You were the most charming child, you know. And now—how hard you’ve grown. Or is it just brittle?’
The waiter appeared with my cup of coffee. I took a packet of sugar, tore the top off with my teeth, and measured out half a spoon. I was about to place the half-empty packet next to my cup after stirring in the sugar when I saw Mirza’s eyes on it. An old habit of his which always amused Omi came to mind. I skimmed a teaspoon just beneath the surface of the coffee, lifted it out and then sprinkled sugar into the spoon, watching the white grains settle, thinned, at the bottom of the liquid. Carefully, I handed the spoon to him. He took it in his fingers at the point where bowl meets stem and lifted it to his mouth. We seemed to be caught in a painting, an artist we couldn’t see drafting the lines of our bodies into positions of ritual that we didn’t quite understand but which automatically transferred us into another time.
As he put the spoon down, with a nod of gratitude that acknowledged the tableau we had so unexpectedly found ourselves in, he seemed suddenly avuncular. He was a man who had known me when my hair was in pigtails. Uncle Mirza, I used to call him. More than that, he was a man linked to those golden years when my mother and Omi lived in Karachi, the three-year exile over; a man who knew me before the brittleness set in. All I wanted was to freeze the tableau, and I saw that he wanted it, too. That old tableau in which our presence in the same space always meant the two of them were somewhere nearby.
I felt tears prickling at my eyelids. I wanted both of them somewhere nearby, I wanted it desperately. I rubbed my thumb across the scar on my palm. If I put down the worst I had ever thought of her in a letter, all my anger, all my accusations, it would be so much more vindictive and poisonous than all that Omi had written. Sixteen years locked away from her, how could I expect him never to lash out?
The Sufis were right—Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved.
Mirza first came to Omi’s attention with a poem he had written which drew its inspiration from the Sufi version of Lucifer and Adam’s expulsion from Eden. Iblis aur Aadam, it was called. A poem in rhyming couplets, creating a conversation between Ibli
s and Aadam, meeting thousands of years after Allah has banished both of them from heaven. It starts with recriminations and petty sniping, and moves on to Iblis challenging Aadam’s love for Allah.
I loved him more than you, Iblis says. That’s why being banished from his presence placed me in Hell, and you only in this middle ground of mud.
No, Aadam replies. My crime was merely disobedience; yours was pride. That is the reason for our differing punishments.
Our punishment is the same, says Iblis. Exile from his presence. We merely view that exile differently. But since you bring it up, your crime was far worse than mine. Yours arose from wilfulness, mine from love. I hated you because you supplanted me in my Beloved’s affection. And if that wasn’t pain enough, he asked me then to accept the falling-off of his love by bowing to you. He was unfair, Aadam, to both of us. He gave you curiosity, he gave me this faculty of eternal and undiminishing love—and then he turned those faculties against us. Admit it, we have been wronged.
Aadam replies, I cannot admit it. If I offend him further he may send me to where you are—to that place which is Hell precisely because it offers no hope of reprieve, no hope that I may return to Him in Heaven.
Soon, Aadam and Iblis are weeping in each other’s arms. Allah sees this and knows the time has come. He turns the sky to the red of stained leather. Aadam turns joyfully towards Heaven as Iblis begins to make his weary way back to Hell.
Iblis, the Lord speaks. Where are you going?
To the prison of eternal separation to which you have condemned me, Iblis answers.
And the Lord says, Beloved, have you forgotten? Of all my attributes the foremost are these: I am the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Omi had loved that. It is the first and the final love story, he would remind my mother. It is the story in which we all live. Moses and Changez Khan and Marilyn Monroe and you and me, my love, we are all just players in that great story. Iblis and Allah. Love makes us devils, love sends us to hell, love saves us.
Broken Verses Page 21