Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

I brushed a tear away from my eyes. All these years of watching bad television instead of reading his poetry—it had almost got me believing that love was not a thing that could draw in anger and pettiness. I should have been reading him all these years, I should have been reading early Mirza.

  I looked up at Mirza who was rotating the spoon in his hands, catching his face turning convex and concave by turn. How young he must have been when he wrote Iblis aur Aadam. He first joined the Poet’s circle when he was still a student. The Poet used to refer to him as ‘the next generation’. He was all fire and passion, then, constantly telling the Poet what he should be writing about, where his responsibility lay.

  ‘They’re out there,’ he had railed once, walking up and down my mother’s dining room, waving his fìnger in the air. ‘They’re out there, those men of war and politics, shouting about their God, insisting everyone own up to their relationship with Him, declare your devotion down on your knees, in Arabic, for all to see. It’s an obscenity to make love so public.’

  It’s an obscenity to make love so public. He had said that with my mother in the room. Was that before or after the caves at the beach? I felt almost embarrassed now to think of those lines—for the first time it seemed simply rude to read words Omi meant for my mother alone. I felt I’d been caught peeping through a keyhole, and I had only myself to blame if what I saw didn’t meet my expectations of what my mother and her lover should be saying and doing to each other behind closed doors.

  ‘Can I hear some poetry, Mirza? Please. For old times’ sake.’ He looked startled and I realized he was as lost in his thoughts about those days as I had been. ‘Go on. Recite a poem for me.’

  ‘All right.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ll do better than recite. I put this one to music myself.’ He plucked at the air as though searching out notes on a sitar, and then, softly, he began to sing.

  I closed my eyes. How I had missed this. The Poet never sang his own verse—though he was unrestrained about belting out arias with much confidence and little talent—but sometimes my mother sang his words for him. She had an arresting voice, unashamed to use its own smokiness to haunting effect.

  Mirza’s voice wasn’t arresting, but it was beautiful. Words leaped clear from his throat. ‘Subah kee shahadat...’ The martyrdom of morning? Absurdly self-indulgent poetic moment. I opened my eyes. He was weaving his hand through invisible air traffic, gaze fixed far ahead of him.

  I leaned my head sideways against the wall, and settled in to listen to the words. It was a poem about childhood, about picking falsas off bushes with friends now dead. Nothing remarkable in most of it. Nostalgia, lyricism, imagery of red, round berries bursting with juices into young mouths, which added a sexual undercurrent that ran through the whole poem and—how obvious and how irritating—got picked up again, more strongly this time, in the inviting fruit with maggots at its core. But amidst the clichés were startling images—the acned boy imagining falsas swelling to ripeness under his skin; the youngest of the boys biting into the fruit to discover a tooth already embedded in a falsa; the boys stuffing falsas down their clothes and then clasping each other close, red stains spreading across the fronts of their white kameezes as they pulled away from the violent embrace.

  Mirza stopped singing. ‘So what’s your verdict?’ he said.

  ‘You should have been a much better poet by now.’ I didn’t mean it unkindly and somehow he seemed to see that.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking at his manicured fingernails. ‘I should have found a subject to replace all this content. There are some wonderful voices in Urdu poetry these days, despite everything. I’m not even in the second tier. You keep up with it at all? The world of Urdu versification?’

  I shook my head. All that went out of my life when he did. I don’t even read his poetry any more, let alone anyone else’s.’

  ‘He.’ Mirza shook his head. ‘His fault. My failures, all his fault.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  Mirza didn’t look at me. ‘I don’t deny he was the best teacher anyone could have hoped for. But his death, Aasmaani. His death taught me the price poets have to pay for their integrity. I saw that price up close, every shattered bone of it.’

  ‘You saw ... you saw his body?’ This is what I had wanted to know from Mirza when I dialled his number, and now it was as though I were hearing the news of Omi’s death for the first time. In that instant it seemed possible—no, inescapable—that all those pages had been a hoax, and that ‘shattered beyond recognition’ had just been a turn of phrase to mean ‘badly injured’.

  But then Mirza said one word, the only word I could have hoped for: ‘Unrecognizable.’

  I released a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. ‘So it might not have been him,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  Mirza shook his head. ‘His wallet was in his pocket, stuffed with all those little scraps of paper he used to jot lines of poetry on. And you could still ... the size, the shape of him. And his doctor had medical records. They did tests. It was him. Why wouldn’t it be him? Why would anyone fake a poet’s death?’

  ‘The doctor died just weeks later.’

  Mirza finally looked at me. ‘Aasmaani, don’t you think your mother and I would have clung to any conspiracy theory that allowed us to believe he was alive if there seemed even the slightest chance?’ He looked at his hands, turning them back to front. ‘I saw him. I saw what they did to him. When the family went to get his body from the morgue—distant family, third cousins at best, to whom he meant nothing—I was there. I was there outside, and I told one of them that I was the Poet’s illegitimate son. He believed me. They’d heard all sorts of stories about him—they would have believed anything. So they let me go with them into the morgue.’ He was still looking at his hands. The first part of him I saw was his hand.’

  I put my own hand on top of his and squeezed. If only I trusted him just a little bit, I’d have told him the truth.

  ‘I never told your mother what he looked like. I didn’t want her to imagine what I had to remember. What I still remember. I looked at that hand, swollen, discoloured...’

  Omi. Oh God, Omi.

  It wasn’t him. Breathe, Aasmaani. It wasn’t him.

  ‘...that hand which had written the sweetest words of the age, and I knew, right then, that I would never dare try to be the poet he believed I could be. And so here I am now, a middle-aged hack. And you, the closest thing he had to a child, who remembered more of his poetry in your head when you were fourteen than even he or I or your mother could, you’re a media underling without enough information about ghazals to fill a five-minute segment.’ He shifted sideways in his chair, stretched his legs in front of him and gazed disconsolately at his toes. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only one who learned the value of certain silences.’

  If they come home, what will they see when they look at me? A failure, a coward, a small-hearted creature.

  I pressed the palm of my hand against the cold edge of the table, and turned to Mirza. ‘And what happened to your love affair with all those poets in love with God?’

  He waved his hand dismissively. ‘God has become the most dangerous subject of all. I don’t even think of Him any more.’

  ‘Leave him in the hands of the extremists, is that your plan?’

  I hoped to irritate him out of despondency, but he only shook his head.

  I ran my hands along the edge of the glass-topped table. ‘The Poet never said you had to write about God or politics to be a good poet. He said, to be a good poet...’

  ‘...you must write good poetry. That’s all.’

  ‘You must have the freedom, even in times of war and barbarity...”

  ‘...to write of first love, or the taste of mangoes, or the sight of a turtle gliding over the sand after she’s laid her eggs.’ He lowered his head into his hands. ‘But I don’t want to write about any of those things. I want to write about his death, and how it killed me, and I’m too afraid to do that
, so I just go on being dead.’

  My brother, I thought. My twin, my alter ego, my brother. I touched him on the sleeve and he looked up.

  ‘All this emotion.’ He brought his hands together in front of his face and traced a globe, his hands separating at the North Pole, meeting again at the South. ‘How am I supposed to know how to react when you’re sitting here looking so much like the girl you once were and also so much like the woman your mother was when I first knew her and the world was ours to shape?’ He dragged the palms of his hand slowly down his fleshy cheeks. ‘And I was beautiful then.’ He caught my hand, brought it to his face and pressed my fingers down, beneath the layers of muscle and tissue, to where his sharply angled cheekbones still resided. ‘I felt so breakable after I saw the Poet’s corpse.’

  ‘Tell me about the funeral. Who was there?’

  Mirza made a gesture of not knowing. ‘It was all done so quickly and quietly. I only knew about it because I was there when the relatives came for his body. The government’s instructions, I suppose. They didn’t want his funeral to start a riot. I was the only one there who really knew him. Even the schoolmaster’s brother’s family in Karachi weren’t informed. And the schoolmaster and the aunt, the only two people in the village who ever meant anything to him, were dead. So I was the only one mourning. It was awful.’

  ‘And who burnt his poems?’

  Mirza flinched. ‘I don’t know. Some government lackeys.’ Then he looked at me and I was startled by the greed in his eyes. ‘Do you remember them? Any of them? Fragments, even?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, I’m sorry, Mirza. I wish I did. Mama and I, we both tried so hard to remember. But he only ever read them once or twice after he’d written them, so all we could remember was how it felt to hear him reciting those words with the ink still fresh on the pages.’

  ‘Yes. It’s the same with me. Your mother told me it was the same with her. You know it’s the one proof of God’s existence I find myself hoping for—words resurrected from ash.’

  ‘When did she tell you?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, I don’t know. Sometime after the Poet’s death. I did keep trying, Aasmaani. You have to acknowledge that. I kept trying to pull her out of that listlessness she fell into. Usually she’d just hang up when she heard my voice or refuse to see me, but sometimes I’d get a sentence or two out of her.’ He shook his head. ‘What a waste.’

  ‘The burnt poems?’

  ‘Your mother.’ He touched his flabby cheeks again. ‘I always knew I was a coward. But there were all those people who were turned to flame by his death, who wrote and marched and resisted, above all, resisted all those tyrannies he’d fought against. And I would have sworn your mother would have been foremost among their ranks. But no. She and I, we were the two who loved him most and we were the two who failed him most spectacularly when he died.’

  ‘I loved him, too.’ At that moment I knew it to be true, however complicated that truth might have been, however mixed in with jealousy.

  ‘Yes. I suppose you must have. It was hard not to.’

  ‘What did you love about him?’

  Mirza looked at me as though I were a child again, asking a question that revealed nothing so much as my ignorance. ‘I loved him. That’s all there is to it. I loved him the way I’ve never loved anyone else.’

  I wiped the ring of coffee on the saucer, wiped the bottom of the coffee cup. ‘And who hated him, Mirza? Hated him enough to do what was done to him?’ Hated him enough to imprison him all these years?

  A great weariness took over Mirza’s face. ‘That’s what we like to believe, isn’t it? That he had to die in such a brutal fashion because of some great reason. Some great fear. Some great hate. That’s the only way we can accept it, isn’t it? How often do you replay it in your mind, Aasmaani? How do you see it happening?’

  I shook my head. ‘Replay what? See what?’

  ‘His death.’ He was whispering now. ‘I see it every day, even now. I see it as avoidable.’ He smoothed the tablecloth between us with his fingers which still retained something of their old elegance. ‘I see some low-ranked government lackeys picking him up, taking him for a drive, just to scare him. The way they do with journalists all the time. His new book of poems was nearly done. That wasn’t a secret. So some thugs pick him up just to have a talk. Just to scare him out of publishing. It had happened before. He’d got a few punches and a lot of threats and came home to write a poem about the whole thing. But this time, this time something happened differently.’ He kept smoothing the tablecloth though there was nothing to smooth. ‘He mocked them, that’s what I think. His tongue could be a scythe when his compassion didn’t get in the way. I think he mocked them. Mocked their clothes, their occupation, their car, their manhood. Mocked their looks. Mocked their attempts to frighten him. Mocked violence. And one of them picked up something heavy, something that could bludgeon, and hit him, just to shut him up. And then hit him again. And again. And kept on. And the thing about keeping on, Aasmaani—whether you keep on hitting or you keep on obsessing or keep on lying or keep on deceiving—at a point that’s all you can do. Keep on. Keep on. Sever his tongue, break each unbroken bone—’

  ‘Mirza. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.’ I took his hand in mine, and squeezed tight. He drew a deep breath, and for a moment we were equals, with nothing in common but our pain, with everything in common because of our pain.

  ‘Why did he have to be so arrogant? Why couldn’t he just have pretended to be scared? They would have let him go. We would all still be whole. The Poet, your mother, you, me. We would all still be whole.’

  ‘It might not have happened that way, Mirza.’

  ‘Then how? How do you see it happening?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘But how do you imagine it?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  There was a sound of footsteps. The waiter, coming up the stairs with Mirza’s food. Mirza waved him away.

  ‘You don’t imagine it? In all these years you haven’t imagined it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That scared of what it did to your mother?’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning, if thinking about it could drive her mad, mightn’t it do the same to you?’

  ‘Drive her mad?’

  ‘Yes. Drive her mad. Imagining his death and knowing that if she hadn’t insisted on coming back to Karachi it wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t insisted on coming back because of you he wouldn’t be dead. If it wasn’t for her and you he wouldn’t be dead.’

  I took a long sip of coffee. ‘Well. Things keep coming back to Lady Macbeth. Is that how you imagine her final two years here, Mirza? Years in which you almost never saw her. You think she floated around in a white nightgown, holding a candle above her head, sleepless with guilt, whispering, can all the seas of Arabia wash this blood from my hand?’ I tried to put the coffee cup down, but it kept missing the middle of the saucer and hitting the edges. On the third attempt, I managed it.

  Then I looked up at him. ‘She didn’t come back for me, Mirza. I was never reason to stay or to return for either of them. Neither were you. That’s what kills us.’

  ‘Their shadows kill us, Aasmaani. The shadows we cower in. They asked, how do we change the world? How do we take on dictators without sacrificing the metre of a line? How do we keep from surrendering this nation? And you and I, their heirs, what do we ask? Where did my mummy go? Did my father-figure love me? We look at the mess of our lives, we look at the mess in which we live, and we say they failed us. We say it because that is so much easier than saying we are the ones who have failed. God, Aasmaani, what is this world we’re living in? How did we let it get like this? They would never have let it get like this.’

  The roots of war are seeped in oil, so we join an oil company. A city we love becomes suspicious of the people of our religion so we leave that city. We don’t resist the abuses of power, we just make it clear we’re
smart enough, aware enough, to understand our powerlessness. And at some level we believe that makes us admirable.

  ‘Mirza, things keep on. Like you said. They keep on and they keep on. Macbeth again. Remember, Omi always used to say the key to understanding Macbeth is understanding that he doesn’t keep killing to retain power. He keeps killing because he’s just following the momentum of that initial thrust of a dagger through Duncan’s heart. So the world keeps on. The momentum is more than you or I can fight against.’

  ‘Enough with Macbeth. You know, I don’t even think the Poet much liked the play. He was commissioned to translate Shakespeare, so he chose the shortest play.’ He laughed shakily. ‘We keep trying to construct meaning out of things. Why was he killed? Why did she become the way she became? Why did he choose Macbeth? We want grand reasons. We always want grand reasons. It was the shortest play. That’s it. That is it. Yes. I stopped believing in grandness when the Poet died. Greatness and grandness, stopped believing in them. And you? What do you believe in, Samina’s daughter, when you look around at this world in which the only grandness that exists is the grandness of opposing extremisms? What did they teach us, after all, that would be of any use in this stinking mess of a world?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me “Nothing.”’ His voice was shaking with anger. ‘It can’t be nothing. Tell me what they taught us.’

  ‘They taught us to fight only with words. The words of an individual poet, or the words of a gathering of thousands chanting their slogans of protests.’

  Mirza made a noise that would have been a laugh if it wasn’t so humourless. Here we both were, Mama and Omi’s heirs, drowning in words. We each had thousands at our disposal. And I suspected that Mirza could still see, as I did, that they were right—words continued to be both the battleground and the weapon. Mirza and I could recognize, as well as they ever did, the outrage in the discrepancy between ‘what is’ and ‘what is claimed’. But Mirza and I would do nothing about it. We would do nothing because we knew that in our refusal to fight for language with bombs or lies lay our defeat. No, it was nothing so grand as that. We knew how voices could be silenced. We knew that most shameful secret which Mama and Omi had tried so hard to keep from us: violence is more powerful than language.