Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  I could never explain that to my family because there was, within all of them, nothing that would allow them to believe such a monstrous act was possible.

  She never deceived herself about the brutality of what she was doing. That’s why she wept as she did when Rabia confronted her with her selfishness. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she kept on. That’s why she had never come back. Because she knew what she had done was unforgivable. She realized it even before she left. Those days she was reduced to an almost coma-like state, lying in bed, her eyes fixed on nothing. Those were the days she was paralysed by the horror of her own decision. She knew exactly what she was doing, and the price she was exacting from all of us who loved her. And she knew, also, that the price she was exacting from herself was this: that she couldn’t change her mind. She couldn’t come back and say, sorry for what I put you through, but here I am and everything’s OK.

  But here’s the thing, Mama: you can. I’ll forgive you.

  I pulled the shawl closer and for the first time in my life I wondered if I could really do that. Could I forgive her who I had become since her departure?

  Would I forgive her if she came back for Omi after all those years in which she didn’t come back for me?

  This habit of blame, had it become an addiction, the defining feature of my character? If she came back, would I find it impossible to rein in the momentum of my incessant accusations? Would I find it necessary to interpret her every act as a sign of betrayal or desertion?

  Questions without answers. My life seemed filled with them these days.

  But Omi would give me all the answers. He’d come back and teach me how to be the girl I could have been. He’d teach me how to step forward instead of circling old wounds. He’d teach me that—and I’d teach Ed the same.

  The door-bell rang, and I smiled. Dad was notorious for discovering, halfway to the airport, some crucial item he’d left behind.

  But when I opened the door there was an unfamiliar man standing there. His hands were much too small for his body. I noticed this right away and I can’t say why but it struck me as threatening.

  ‘You live alone,’ he said.

  With a quickness I didn’t know myself capable of I slammed the door shut and locked it.

  There was no sound from the other side of the doorway, but when I stepped back I could see, in that slice of space beneath the door, his feet, unmoving. Then, there came a gentle rapping on my door, of knuckles that knew they didn’t have to exert any strength to achieve their effect.

  ‘Madam,’ said the soft voice. ‘I only want you to see this.’

  A paper slid beneath the door and stopped at my feet.

  I picked it up. Amidst columns of words, a colour picture of a man lying on the ground, his head cradled in blood.

  I knew, right away, that they’d intercepted Omi’s letters. Intercepted them, and killed him. And now they were here just to tell me what they had done. That was all they needed to do to me.

  The caption beneath the picture said: DON’T LET THIS BE YOU.

  The voice behind the door warned, ‘Madam, it won’t take long.’

  ‘You bastards.’ No fear, only rage.

  ‘Madam?’

  And then I looked down at the paper in my hand again. SECURE-CITY SECURITY said the words at the top of the page.

  It was a newsletter from a private security company, one recently hired to manage the block of flats. A circular sent around the building had said representatives of the company would be stopping by to speak to all tenants, on an individual basis.

  There was suddenly no strength in my legs and I had to lean all my weight against the wall.

  ‘Madam?’ And now the voice was concerned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. My lips felt numb. ‘Please come back later.’

  ‘Sorry to bother.’ Footsteps moved away from the door. Then they stopped and the man’s voice said, ‘Be assured, we will be watching at all times.’

  The footsteps started again—towards, and down, the stairs.

  Just the security man, I told myself. But why hadn’t he stopped next to knock on Rabia and Shakeel’s door? I leaned over the balcony and looked down. Ten, eleven seconds went by. He was talking to the downstairs neighbours, no doubt. But then he stepped out of the stairway, into the driveway, his small hands lighting up a cigarette, and walked towards the gate, without stopping at any other flat along the way.

  I ran inside and called one of the neighbours.

  ‘The security man?’ she said. ‘Oh, there’ve been many of them through the day. I got my visit this afternoon while I was asleep, 9D was woken up at seven a.m. to get her briefing. What nonsense is this? Why not just have the whole block get together and tell us in one shot?’

  This is not sinister, I told myself, putting down the phone. None of this is sinister.

  I lay awake at night repeating that thought over and over, and when I finally slept I dreamed of pushing my way through tangled weeds in murky water, ahead of me a bend in the river which would lead to sun-dappled waters and herons in flight if I could only swim clear of the little hands which wrapped themselves around my limbs.

  XX

  The following morning, when I walked into STD, there was a palpable air of victory about the place. Telephones, e-mails, websites, internet chat rooms, newspapers—praise for Shehnaz Saeed’s comeback had choked all mediums of communication. So today, the first day most of us were back after the Eid holidays, the ground floor had the air of a school hallway in the intense flicker of time between lessons. All the previous night’s fears seemed absurd.

  ‘Did you see, yaar, that moment? Oh my God, that moment.’

  ‘The one when Shehnaz...?

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Man, wow.’

  ‘Who taped it? I need to see the whole thing again. That look when she sees the daughter.’

  ‘Taped it? Taped it? Oh, ehmuk, we work for STD. We’re in the building with the original tapes.’

  And then the knot of people dissolved into near-hysterical laughter.

  How had Shehnaz played the moment when she sees the daughter?

  A door opened and Kiran Hilal held her fingers up in victory. ‘Pulled it off, didn’t we?’ She danced, unexpectedly sinuously, across the floor. Then she stopped, mid-gyration, and turned to me. ‘Any idea why Ed’s taken a rough cut of the second episode? He’s not going to start interfering, is he? They say he’s a little strange when it comes to his mother.’

  I shook my head, shrugged and then ran to find Ed. At some point in the middle of the night I had woken to realize, for the first time, the full impact of what it meant for Omi to be watching Boond. It had taken every atom of self-restraint within me not to call Ed and demand to know his plan but instead to do what he had asked and give him until the morning.

  As I rounded into the hallway, I saw Ed standing outside his office watching Boond’s director stalking away from him. Halfway down the hall, the director turned around—as though she’d just thought up a punchline—and said, ‘It’s prostitution.’

  ‘No, it’s a box of tissues,’ Ed replied with elaborate patience, and the director stormed her way past me.

  Ed came down the hall towards me, caught me around the waist and waltzed me down to his office.

  ‘What?’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Product placement, baby,’ he said, closing the office door behind him and picking up a box of A-TISHOO tissues from his desk. He twirled the box on the tip of his fingers. ‘The day after Boond aired I got a call from an old classmate of mine who works in marketing at the company that produces these luxurious, two-ply wisps of heaven.’ He pulled one tissue after another out of the box and threw them in the air. ‘And my friend said, “Ed, yaar, remember how you asked me if we wanted to buy spots to advertise our wares during Boond and I said no? Well, mea mucho culpa. Is it too late? Can we still get in there? We’ll pay double the rates.” And I said, “Ali, yaar, I don’t think so.”’


  ‘Punchline, please.’

  ‘Punchline is this. Last night, after reading the decrypted pages, I thought—product placement. Why not? Instead of giving A-TISHOO a spot during the ad breaks, why not have their product placed in every home and every office and every back seat of every car in the Boond universe? And make the folks at A-TISHOO pay through their running noses for it.’

  ‘You read Omi’s pages and it made you think of how to generate revenue for STD?’

  He threw the last of the tissues at me. ‘Don’t be silly. Look, watch this. It’s the last scene of episode two, to be aired in four days. Obviously, we can’t reshoot the whole episode to include tissue boxes in every scene. But we can make a start.’ As he was speaking he ushered me into his desk chair and pressed some combination of keys on his computer keyboard.

  An interior shot appeared on the computer screen. Some generic living room, so tastefully decorated it was entirely without personality. The only sign that it wasn’t just a show-room in a furniture store was a newspaper carelessly tossed on the coffee table. There was the sound of a door opening. Then someone—the camera didn’t show us who—walked into the room and placed something on the coffee table. The figure turned and walked out. The camera panned back to the table. There, lying on top of the newspaper, was a faded picture of Shehnaz Saeed, her on-screen ex-husband and their infant daughter—Shehnaz’s eyes had been poked out.

  Ed pressed another key and the picture stilled.

  ‘The black magic storyline?’ I said.

  ‘Forget the storyline. This is the last shot of the episode. This is the shot on which the episode “freezes” as the credits roll. Don’t you see? It would take very little effort to reshoot the scene. They’re still using those interiors for the new episodes. They can reshoot the scene, with a tissue box placed on the coffee table, and have it ready in time for the second episode to be aired.’

  ‘Thrilling. A tissue box in episode two!’

  ‘The thrill isn’t in the tissue box. It’s in the fact that we reshoot the scene. We reshoot the final shot which has a newspaper in it.’

  I took a closer look at the newspaper. It was open on the LOCAL NEWS page, which was largely dominated by a photograph of a burst sewer.

  Aasmaani, you’re being uncharacteristically slow here. They won’t still have that old newspaper lying around. And even if they do, I’m going to go over while they’re reshooting—under the excuse that I want to make sure the tissue box is properly placed with its logo and brand name clearly showing—and pay whoever is in charge of set design or props or whatever the hell it is to place today’s newspaper in the scene instead.’ He picked up the morning paper from his desk and folded it to isolate the crossword. ‘Like that.’ I made a gesture of appeal, and he sighed and spoke very slowly. ‘Episode two will end with a shot that has the crossword clearly showing. The crossword grid will not be empty. Some clues will be filled in with bright red pen that draws your eye to it. Do. You. Understand?’

  I looked from him to the crossword to the red pen he was holding out to me. I understood.

  I took the pen from him.

  ‘Something simple,’ he said.

  I tapped the pen on the back of my hand, its nib emerging and retracting. Something simple. In two of the across clues I wrote: JAZZ and FUGUES. Then I used the first letter of FUGUES to write FRASS vertically.

  ‘What are jazz fugues?’ Ed asked, watching over my shoulder.

  ‘He’ll know. Omi will know,’ I said, going over the letters one more time with the pen to ensure they’d stand out. I closed my eyes and leaned back. All I could hear was the twittering of a sparrow outside and my own heart. Omi would know, Omi would understand. And when he realized his words weren’t merely echoing into silence, he would start to write differently. He’d write clues to where he was. Sixteen years of being in a place, you must pick up some clues. A man as smart, as observant, as Omi, he couldn’t fail to pick up clues. He’d tell me how to find him, and then I’d bring him home.

  I’d bring him home. He’d be home. Aged, yes. Frail, perhaps. Unaccustomed to the din of city life, no doubt. But his first day back, I would take him to the sea. Just Omi and me, walking through the sand towards the surf, taking turns to lead, taking turns to plant our feet into the other one’s footprints as we had been doing since the days when he had to stand on the tips of his toes in order not to stamp out my prints. He’d wade into the water, trailing his fingers—now swollen and misshapen from all the times the Minions had broken them—just below the surface, and he’d beckon me to come alongside him. As the first wave loomed ahead of us, we’d shout out together, leap up into its maw, bodies colliding with water, and in that sting, that slap, that wheeling over and floundering, we’d know ourselves to be alive again.

  I stood up and put my arms around Ed’s neck. He lifted me off the ground and swung me around.

  ‘I’m going to speak to him, Ed. I’m going to speak to Omi. My Omi.’

  ‘Can we not talk about him all the time, please?’

  I unlooped one arm from his neck and tweaked his ear. ‘Why, Mr Ed, are you jealous of a seventy-year-old man?’

  Ed let go of me and I slipped to the ground, yanking his ear as I did so. We both cried out and glared at each other.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He picked up the crossword. ‘I’m going to go and find the director and get this taken care of.’

  I caught hold of his sleeve as he started to walk away. ‘What? What is it?’

  He looked at me and shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A tiny little thing, Aasmaani. You’ll never love me as long as you’re obsessed with the two of them.’

  I loved him a little, right then.

  ‘Sometimes I want to burn them,’ he said. ‘When I have the envelopes in my hand, before I give them to you, sometimes I want to burn them.’

  ‘You can’t, you know you can’t. Ed, promise me.’

  ‘You don’t need a promise. You know I won’t. I can’t.’ He said that as though pronouncing a sentence on himself. Then he looking accusingly at me. ‘Even though you won’t tell me what “jazz fugues” means, I won’t burn them.’

  I let go of his sleeve. ‘It’s the key to the code. It’s two words from the key. You want me to explain the whole thing to you?’

  In response, he kissed me, holding my face between his hands, and everything else in the world ceased. When he finally pulled away his smile had nothing boyish about it.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just needed you to make the offer.’

  Then he left with the crossword to find the director again.

  When he was gone, I drew a long breath. Everything was falling into place, everything was falling. I made my way to my office, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as I walked. Suddenly it all seemed so precarious, no room for any mistakes. Is this how they felt—explorers in search of lost treasures when they saw the spot indicated by ‘X’ on the map and knew, finally, there was no stepping back? Were they surprised to find the exhilaration they expected replaced by dread?

  I reached my office, sat down, and ran my hands along the cracks in the leather of the desk chair. Today it was cool enough to dispense with the fan, for the first time since I had joined STD, and without that whirring of the blades this room, with its tiny dimensions, felt even more sealed up than usual. Six weeks. Six weeks only since I first stepped into this office with Ed.

  Could it really just be chance, everything that had happened since then? The questions worrying at the back of my mind were no longer irritants to be pushed aside. The Poet’s messages and I had moved into the world of reactions and consequences. Was it really possible that there was no ordering principle behind anything that had happened—the messages to Shehnaz, her guess that they were written in code, the intersection of her life with mine? Stranger things had happened by chance, it’s true. And yet, there was that possibility that I was being played. What game is being played with my life, Omi had a
sked. Whatever it was, was I now part of it? Had I been placed on the board myself? To what end? What was the purpose behind his captivity, what was the plan?

  But even if I were part of the game, how could I act differently, how could I pass this opportunity by? If the explorers knew the treasure map was written by a malevolent hand, would that stop them from digging deep into the earth in search of what was buried? If the box they pulled out said ‘Property of Pandora’ would they, even then, find it in themselves to place it back in the earth, tear up the map and turn away?

  To understand the game, you must understand the mind that created it. For all my amateur detective work I was no closer to doing that than I had been the day all this started. All I had done in these last weeks was make myself visible, my investigation into Omi’s death anything but a secret.

  Now comes the gathering.

  I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail. There were messages aplenty with the heading Boond. I read only a few before deleting them all. Did every person at STD feel the need to send an office-wide message about what their friends and relatives said about the show?

  I leaned back in my chair. If my life were a top-rated television show, how would it go from here? I’d send a message to the Poet through a crossword puzzle. He’d realize his scribblings were getting through to me. He’d send messages back. Details of the flora, the fauna, the weather around him. He’d write about a brief but intense shower of rain. I’d find a weather-man. My next-door neighbour would happen to be a weather-man. I’d ask him, where did it rain yesterday, with a ferocity and brevity reminiscent of most passion. He’d say, there was one cloud only, right above this spot here on the map, that’s where it rained yesterday. And I’d tell no one, I’d enlist no aid, but I’d make my way to that spot, I’d face down the Minions, I’d rescue the Poet. And somewhere, far away, my mother would open a paper, hear of his return from the dead, and that would dissipate the amnesia she’d been suffering from these past fourteen years and she’d catch the next plane home.