Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  And then. Shehnaz Saeed stepped on to the screen and into a flashback. I hated flashbacks in television shows—everyone seen through a soft-filter lens to make them appear younger—but even so I caught my breath at how the lighting turned her back into the woman I remembered from the days of Lady Macbeth. The flashback occurred in Shehnaz Saeed’s mind as she lands in Karachi—from where, we don’t know—and we see her returning in her memory to the early days of her marriage, Once-Leading walking with her along the beach, an anatomically unlikely bulge under her kameez denoting her pregnancy. It was the worst kind of flashback—sappy music drowned out all conversation as the young couple wandered barefoot in the sand, shadows falling across their path with the exhausted air of overused metaphors. Compared to the light touch evidenced in the rest of the episode, it should have been laughable. And yet. Something remarkable happened in that scene: Shehnaz Saeed. I couldn’t believe that just minutes earlier Ed had snapped at her and, despite her dignity, she had seemed reduced, weak, when he did that.

  On screen, she was remarkable. She turned away from Once-Leading and held her face up to the breeze, and in her expression she told us everything about her desire to feel the clichéd happiness that this scene demanded and her inability to stop yearning for something beyond this moment. And Once-Leading, who had been moving through his lines like a man weary of wasting his talents, suddenly started to act. He was madly in love, hopelessly daring to dream that she was in love with him too. An echo of their long-ago performance as the Macbeths flickered through them, not enough to be distracting but enough to make us feel that anything could happen from here—regicide, insanity, love, hauntings.

  The sub-plot of Once-Leading’s fiancée worrying that he was still in love with his ex—a sub-plot which I’d taken to indicate terrible insecurity on the part of the fiancée—reshaped itself as I watched that scene. The fiancée is right, I thought, watching the man rest his hand on his wife’s head to prevent her hair from blowing into her eyes as a gust of wind raced in from the sea.

  How could he not be blindly and—in some way—eternally in love with her? Even her Lady Macbeth hadn’t moved me so profoundly, and yet she had done little except walk across the sand, miming the actions of a smoker because although her pregnancy demanded she give up the habit her hand stayed addicted to the motion of lifting a cigarette to her lips and...

  I pulled myself upright. ‘What are you doing?’ I said to the Shehnaz Saeed sitting just feet away from me.

  She had been looking at her hands instead of the screen, and now she looked up at me. ‘I don’t like watching myself.’

  ‘No.’ I pulled myself off the sofa and pointed at the screen. ‘There. What are you doing there?’ In soft focus, she repeated the gesture. She brought her index and middle fingers to her lips, held them there for two long beats, her eyes closed, their lids tremoring lightly. Then she turned her head to one side and let her hand move away to the other side, slowly, as she exhaled from between barely parted lips. As she exhaled, her fingers curled back into a fist.

  ‘That’s my mother.’ I was aware of the curious flatness of my voice. ‘You’ve turned that character into my mother.’

  ‘What? No.’ She looked up at the screen, and the denial caught in her throat.

  Beside me, Ed had covered his face with his hand, muffling whatever words were coming out of his mouth.

  I knew what would come next. Shehnaz Saeed’s character would return. Back to Karachi, back to her daughter, back from all those years of disappearance. She’d speak in a smoky voice with a lisp so buried you wouldn’t notice it unless you’d grown up with it, heard it every time she spoke your name. Every time she said Aasmaani. Every time she said sweetheart.

  I stood up. I couldn’t quite feel my limbs but I managed to stand up and move towards the door. Shehnaz Saeed was saying something, and Ed, too, but all I was aware of was the Fata Morgana’s hand pressed against the small of my back, keeping my shoulders straight as I departed without looking back.

  XVIII

  My father sat across from me at the dining table, warming his hands around a cup of tea. It wasn’t particularly cold—not in this sunlit spot around my dining table, in mid-afternoon—and it occurred to me that this way of holding a cup was a habit he’d picked up in the colder climes of Islamabad. Was that all that had changed in his life since he’d been gone? His way of holding a tea-cup?

  He was here because Rabia had told him I needed some talking to. I knew this even though no one had told me so. This morning, when I woke up at dawn, having slept only a very few hours, I heard Rabia’s phone ringing. I thought she’d still be asleep. She had been up until late, holding me as I wept after returning from Shehnaz Saeed’s. When she had asked me what was wrong, her question had set off such a bout of inexplicable, painful crying, the sort that seems to pull the flesh from your ribs, that she had fallen silent. She was still holding me when I finally fell asleep, exhausted and aching from the physical toll of weeping, and only after that did she leave my room to return to her flat. So when I woke up in the morning and heard the phone, I went through the connecting door to answer it and allow her and Shakeel a little more rest.

  But just as I walked through the door I heard her pick up the extension in her bedroom. ‘Why didn’t you call back last night?’ she said, and from her tone of voice with its echoes of adolescence, I knew she was talking to Beema. ‘Oh ... oh ... when are you bringing her home?...Oh. Ma, I know you have enough going on but seriously it’s bad here ... Yes. Yes. I don’t know ... I don’t know; I’m telling you, I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me. It’s worse than ever before. Can’t you leave Nani for just a day and fly down? Just a few hours even ... Send Dad?’ Rabia’s voice was incredulous. ‘What can he do with her?’

  But here he was, holding on to his cup of tea for dear life as though it was a lifebuoy that would save him from drowning in this attempt to converse with his first-born. No newspaper, television, fused light-bulb, broken door hinge, Beema, or Rabia between or beside us to obscure the fact that my father and I had nothing significant to say to each other, never had. When I had become a cricket fan at the age of thirteen, Dad—who had always disdained sport—decided it was time to give himself over to the national passion too, just so that he and I could have something in common. It sometimes seemed to me that the only reason I kept up with cricket as avidly as I did, despite my growing disgust at the state of the national team, was to fill the silence between us. I suspected he felt the same.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Your mother sends her love,’ he said. Then he gripped the cup more tightly. ‘I mean, Beema.’

  ‘I didn’t think you meant anyone else.’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t.’ He peered down into his tea. ‘I saw that television show which you helped out with. There was some interesting...’ If the sentence had an ending, it got lost in the tea-cup as he brought it to his lips.

  Had he, too, recognized Mama on the screen? And if so, did he think the actor opposite her was him? Once-Leading Man. Did he think that character was based on him? After my one meeting with the Boond team I had told Beema I had helped with the Shehnaz Saeed storyline, and she would doubtless have passed that information on to him. Did he believe I had helped turn his marriage with my mother into material for a television series that would have all of Karachi whispering and bringing up the past once more?

  ‘I only saw the first few minutes of it,’ I said. ‘At Shehnaz Saeed’s. Then I left.’

  He nodded his head slowly. ‘It was the damndest thing, wasn’t it? I had forgotten she used to do that.’

  ‘Was there more? After that first scene?’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Did she go on playing that character like it was Mama?’

  ‘Oh God, no. No. Just that one mannerism. So that is what made you cry so much. I thought it might have been.’

  I didn’t know where to take the conversation from there. We never talked about my mother, except obl
iquely. In the two years after Omi’s death when they lived under the same roof I never saw them being anything but utterly polite to each other. He never ventured upstairs, to the best of my memory, in all that time, and she largely stayed confined to her room and to Rabia and my communal play area. When she did come downstairs—to have a meal in the dining room instead of eating from a tray upstairs—it was always for lunch, and always when he was at work. The rare exceptions to that rule, in the early days, were such strained occasions—with neither of my parents able to simulate ease in each other’s presence—that I think everyone in the household was relieved when they ceased altogether.

  ‘So you want to talk about it?’ my father said.

  ‘Talk about what? The fact that I miss Mama? There—I miss her. We’ve talked about it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He tilted a spoonful of sugar so that it fell a few granules at a time into his cup.

  ‘You mind, don’t you? That I miss her. That I love her as much as I do. You think she never deserved that.’

  ‘Don’t you think I understand anything about loving your mother? She broke my heart when she left me. And if she’d been even slightly less brutal about the way she did it, I expect I would have gone on loving her and missing her through all eternity.’

  ‘Domesticity or a dildo.’

  His hand jerked, spilling tea on to the tablecloth. ‘She told you about that?’

  ‘No. I ... overheard it. Once when the Poet was speaking to her.’

  He nodded, took off his glasses and wiped them absent-mindedly on a tissue he’d taken out of its box to sop up the tea.

  ‘Dad, I’m sorry. That was cruel of them. You’ve never done anything to deserve such unkindness.’

  He put his glasses back on and pressed the tissue against the tea stain. ‘It was for the best. Someone leaves you like that, you don’t waste time harbouring thoughts of reconciliation. Anyway. It was a long time ago. All I’m saying is, I didn’t love her without reason. There was always all the reason in the world to love Samina. So how can I mind that you loved her? How can I mind that you loved your own mother?’

  ‘Tell me about you and her. How it really was.’

  ‘It was great. It was perfect.’ He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘When we were seventeen. It was the best thing in the world during those few months we were together before university split us apart. You know, first love and all that. We’d talk on the phone for hours every night. About everything, everything. And we used to play an idiotic form of “chicken” in which I’d drive through Karachi with her hands covering my eyes, trusting her to tell me when to brake and go. We drove all the way from KDA to Clifton like that once. She told me afterwards she made me run three red lights along the way. We never played that game again.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t really believe he was talking about himself.

  ‘So what happened? How did first love go bad?’

  ‘She went to Cambridge. I stayed in Karachi. She wrote to me to say it was great, now it’s over. That was the gist of it, though she phrased it more kindly. By the time she finished university and came back to Karachi, she was someone else, and then I met your stepmother, and she and I were at that point of silent acknowledgement that something was about to happen between us. And that should have been it. But then one day Samina just bursts into my office, eyes sparkling, and I haven’t seen her in months, haven’t had any conversation with her in years, and she says, “Well, are you going to ask me to marry you or not?”’ He laughed, chin resting on his hand, and I saw the young, infatuated boy he had been. ‘I knew about her and the Poet. Who didn’t? But she looked ... luminescent. And I was chafing at the person I was turning into—this responsible, practical banker who would never play “chicken” for even five seconds, let alone from KDA to Clifton—and she was my way out of that. So.’

  ‘So you just dumped Beema?’

  He looked away guiltily. ‘I hadn’t exactly, you know, picked her up at that point.’

  ‘I’m amazed she ever spoke to you or Mama after that.’

  ‘Well, that’s your Beema for you. After Samina left me, she was so incredibly kind. I found I was only going out to social gatherings if I thought I’d run into her. And then Samina called me one day—she was about eight months pregnant by then—and said, “Get a move on. She’s not going to wait around for ever for you.” I said, “What business is it of yours?” and she said, “You’re still technically my husband. I’m allowed to interfere in your life. Besides, she’d make a wonderful mother to our child.” It was all weird and so utterly right.’ He put his hand on mine. ‘Sometimes there’s so much of her in you. Your voice, your eyes, your quickness with language. And it reminds me of the Samina I loved, that girl who stole my heart. So for the last time—I have never minded or been even slightly surprised by your love for her.’ He moved his hand away, wrapped it around his cup again. ‘But if there’s something I mind about you ... well, not even mind. It’s just something I think about from time to time. Not that there’s anything to be done about it, or ... it’s just that, of your four parents, I’m the one you’ve always loved least effusively, and sometimes I’ve wished that wasn’t so.’

  I touched the back of his hand with the tips of my fingers. ‘Sorry.’ And I was. Sorry and profoundly ashamed.

  He shook his head to indicate there was nothing to apologize for.

  ‘I don’t know about the four parents bit, though. I don’t think the Poet was ever a second father to me.’ What I meant by that was that I could see no correlation between Dad’s and Omi’s positions in my life. Fathers were efficient in matters of finance, and rewiring. They didn’t lack emotion, they simply didn’t express it except in tiny bursts. And they were always there. That was their most abiding quality—their thereness. That was Dad, that was fathers. Omi was nothing like that.

  But my father didn’t understand the meaning behind my words. He looped his finger into the handle of the tea-cup and spun it in slowly oscillating half-circles. ‘It’s childish and immature and my wife would be horrified to hear me say this, but: good.’

  I looked at his neck, the one part of him which belonged on a much older man, and for the first time his mortality became real to me. ‘You hated him, huh?’

  My father nodded, still watching the tea-cup.

  ‘Because you lost her to him?’

  ‘I suppose that would have to be the core of it. But, even apart from that, I just disapproved of everything he stood for.’

  ‘Poetry? Resistance?’

  ‘Debauchery. Selfishness.’

  ‘Debauchery?’

  ‘All those nights he stayed up with his artsy friends, imbibing whisky and God-knows-what-else until dawn, laughing at those of us who had to go to work for a living. Vertical readers, he used to call us. Because we’d spend our days poring over numbers in columns instead of words written across a page.’ My father waved his hand through the air to indicate lines of print and the tea-cup went crashing on to the floor. His face was red as he bent to pick up the pieces.

  ‘How do you know?’ How have you managed to keep from making me feel I’m betraying you every time I spoke his name with affection?

  ‘Because one night you were spending the night at your mother’s house and I came to pick you up for school on my way to work. As I drew up, the gate next door opened and those friends of his stumbled out, eyes red and puffy, slurring goodbyes to each other. He was there, seeing them out, and when he saw me he said, “It’s a vertical reader.” You know, it’s just as well your mother didn’t marry him. I don’t think I would have allowed you to stay overnight in a house with all that going on.’

  ‘Just as well she didn’t marry him?’ I couldn’t believe he’d said that. ‘After everything she went through after he died because she wasn’t his wife, you can say it was just as well she didn’t marry him?’

  ‘You know I didn’t mean it that way. You know that. Dammit, Aasmaani, why must you always make me feel as though I’m failing
you?’

  I sat back down on the chair opposite him. ‘They didn’t sit around talking about your day in the office. The Acolytes. That’s not what they were about. They talked about poetry, and politics—don’t do that’—he had dropped his head into his hands—‘and what language could and couldn’t do in a censored and censorious world. Some evenings I’d wander in there and I’d sit and I’d listen to them, just listen. Then I’d go back to Mama’s house and she’d be sitting with her friends, her fellow activists, and they’d be talking about forcing changes in laws, about setting up schools and defining curricula, about appealing to international bodies. I went from one house to the other, listening to all that, and it was exhilarating. It made me feel like I was on fire, breathing fire, walking on fire.’

  ‘And what have you got to show for it?’ As soon as he said that he was reaching for my hand. ‘No, I’m sorry. That really did come out wrong.’

  ‘Did it?’ I pulled away from him.

  ‘See, you still glamorize both of them. I’m sure it was exciting, Aasmaani. I used to see it in your face some days when you’d come back home after spending a day or a weekend or longer at her house. You’d come back and you’d look around at us, your other family, as we talked about renting videos and going to the Chinese for dinner, and there would be this look on your face saying: is this it? Is this all you’re capable of? Well, I’ll tell you something. Something they were capable of and we weren’t: leaving.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You want to know why I hated him? That’s why. Because he kept forcing her to choose between him and you. He kept getting himself into situations and then he’d have to leave the country, or he’d get carted off to prison, and then she’d be gone, poof! just like that, and I’d have to hear my daughter crying herself to sleep at night. That time they stayed away for three years. Three years, Aasmaani. Why? Because it was dangerous for him to come back, and when she wanted to return, she even called me to let me know which flight she was on, he scared her into thinking they’d arrest her to get to him. He even made her think she might put you in danger.’