Mehreen took me in hand. It must have been during the war. We’d been told not to come to school because there were rioters on the streets; the nuns thought they were likely to attack cars with diplomatic number plates. Then Mehreen dialled 51112. We listened on extensions. After asking for Madeline, we called her, in a chorus of fake American accents, Mad Madeline, Ottawa owl, Canadian Cat, and Ontario Idiot. All poor Madeline said was: Is this some kind of joke?
Another afternoon, Mehreen, hair set with beer and arranged in a shining waterfall, came with us to our exhibition of paintings at school and I noticed Madeline, awe in her eyes, staring.
Was that before, or after, the war?
It was said that Madame Noor Jehan the Melody Queen, the country’s most famous singer who’d once been a movie star, had gone to the radio station on the first day of war with a sheaf of lyrics in praise of our soldiers and pilots and sailors tucked under an ample arm. She’d set them to music right there, demanding they be recorded on the spot. Her songs filled the airwaves – Ai watan ke sajile javano, merya dhol sipaiya – and we sang them all day, even at school, but the nuns didn’t say a word. We wondered whose side they thought the Child Jesus was on.
When we came home we’d have to draw the curtains at sundown and make sure not a ray of light escaped. There were blackouts and sirens all evening and on the radio the resonant tones of newscaster Shakeel Ahmed would tell of General Musa and the valiant exploits of our boys at the border. There were also tales of how Khizr in the form of Darya Pir, the green man of the river Indus, had led soldiers out of trouble or into battle. And for days people stood in their gardens for a glimpse of the comet they’d been told was flashing in the sky: Zulfikar, they said, the sword of Ali himself, a symbol of the victory we’d soon be celebrating.
At home Safinaz and I played Indian and Pakistani soldiers. The carpet was India, the sofas, divans and window ledges were Pakistan. Pakistan, of course, won every time, but Safinaz and I would fight about our roles: who’d play the enemy, who the valiant soldier.
Being sent home during the last three or four days of war meant being without Tina and Ashley and Mark and Jamil and all the rest. Worse, it meant not seeing Madeline.
When ceasefire was declared, people on the streets went mad: they set fire to the United States Information Centre, where we went to borrow books, because they held America responsible for Pakistan’s decision, considered cowardly, to abandon the war. I wonder what Karachi’s resident foreigners felt about the fighting. Their own great war was, after all, twenty years behind them; but the Americans were involved at the time in a fierce combat, in distant Vietnam. Madeline, though she was Canadian, belonged to a group that must have felt at least mildly anxious, in a city where all whites looked the same to the natives.
Mother’s American friend Genevieve had got off her ship at Karachi and spent a day with us, earlier that year, on her way to Vietnam. She was going there to look for her son; he was twenty-five, had been drafted and was now Classified Missing. His Mormon wife, convinced he was dead, wanted to remarry. His mother was sure he was still alive.
Throughout the war Daddy had been stranded in Bombay, where our mother’s sister lived. He’d stopped there on his way back from Ceylon, little knowing that war would be declared when he landed. His family and friends had to break curfew to see him there. He couldn’t get in touch with us for those three weeks, though Bombay was less than an hour’s flight away. We had to be sure he was safe. We never dared to think he might go missing too. We’d been too busy to worry, with our celebrations of victory, our war games, our glamorous president Ayub. Until we got tired of warfare and generals.
Now the war was over: Daddy was coming home. He called from Beirut. He’d been able to fly there as soon as they let foreigners leave Bombay. He’d be back as soon as he’d got us some gifts. Our gaudy rag dolls, which we’d bought from some market on the Rajasthan border on holiday in India, were dancing on the day he came back to a melody we’d composed, sung in gipsy voices, inspired by the songs the passing night musicians play, with a lyric we’d written ourselves.
The Eve of St Agnes
Daddy’s gifts: great balls of salty-sour Dutch cheese in red waxed paper, white chocolate which we took to school to share with friends, and magic slates – all you had to do was write or draw on a waxy sheet and lift it off the black slate surface below when you were tired of what you’d written or drawn.
One day 1 left my slate behind in the big room we called our study. One of our sisters – Yasmine, I seem to remember, though she didn’t have much time for us – came to play table tennis there with Mehreen’s brother Zeyn, her best friend. She picked it up, probably to scribble a score on it. Engraved in the sticky black, where their traces remained after the paper on which they’d been written had been lifted off to erase them, she saw the letters that spell Madeline’s name. In fact, she may even have read:
AAMER LOVES MADELINE
Yasmine and Shahrukh brought it to me in a spirit of accusation. Safinaz sulked. Of course I denied I’d written it, told my parents it was a web of conspiracy woven by my sisters to trap me, shame me. I said they’d written it themselves. I might have cried with embarrassment, had I known how. I couldn’t confess to writing Madeline’s name or to my authorship of those words of love.
I’d only spoken to Madeline once. I think Fiona forced me to. For one day, for some reason, I found us sitting side by side, seating rules broken; perhaps two classes had been forced to study together because of the absence of a teacher. I can’t remember what we said. I don’t think there was a second time. Sometimes I wonder if I missed those sweaty cloakroom encounters with her, the meeting of hands and eyes and breath, the fear, the anger, the heat.
The White Lamb
My lamb had been taken away for shearing by Jiju, the erstwhile wrestler. He didn’t show up once during the war, because of the curfew. But he did appear when it was over. He said his family had been hungry and the war had made things difficult; they’d killed and eaten the lamb. I remember my fists on his broad back, hammering it, the only time I ever hit anybody older or poorer, hammering until my mother, who’d sent the lamb away with him, pulled me off his back and made me apologise.
He used to tell stories, Jiju, about a princess whose husband thought she was dead because her maid betrayed her and took her place, and a green parrot who called to her across the water. When the princess asked the parrot, How much water, the parrot would respond, So much water, so she could cross the river when the tide was low to see and kiss her children while they slept. He had cauliflower ears, Jiju, and a cauliflower nose, because he’d been a fighter. Years later, I made him the hero of one of my stories, but the life I gave him was only half his.
Last year, a poem Faiz Ahmed Faiz once wrote in his lonely voice about cages and gardens and flowers and the breezes of spring became a runaway success as a song on the radio. Sometimes, half a mile from home, on our way to school, we’d see the poet in his garden.
The window of our classroom framed the sea. The waves lapped the sand ten steps away from the school wall. Further up there was a tongue of sand where you could stroll, play on a slide, or eat salt peanuts in newspaper cones on a Sunday. But by the time I left the convent, the local building authorities had started to reclaim land, and the sea was receding, giving way to tall structures of concrete and glass.
On my last day at school, the older girls came down and set up a disco in the assembly hall amid the statues of the Mater Dolorosa and the Pieta. Two of the tough girls, Roxane and my old pal Norwegian Helen, showed me how to french kiss under the piano. I heard Marianne Faithfull sing ‘This little bird that somebody sent...’ for the first time, and I learned the tune and most of the words in a sitting. We danced. Madeline must have been there: I can imagine her, surrounded by playmates, watching every move. I must have been performing for her. But she’s invisible, I can’t see her there.
I was going to Rome with my parents that night, my
first trip westward. I had a party for my classmates and Safinaz’s to say goodbye because the boys in my class were leaving school; the rest were going to the Brothers at St Pat’s but I wanted to go to the American School or, failing that, to Karachi Grammar School where my cousins already were. All my classmates came to my farewell party. But Tina begged off at the last moment because her mother wouldn’t let her go to parties attended or given by boys. And Madeline wasn’t there. I don’t remember whether she’d said she couldn’t come or I hadn’t got the message to her on time. Perhaps I hadn’t invited her at all.
My farewell was a replay of the garden party my parents had given earlier that year. There were bags of sweets and comics for everyone from the lucky dip, and we played past sunset, till seven thirty, when cars came to take our playmates home. I left for the airport at midnight. It had been a year of parties.
La Befana
I should tell you about Rome: apricot juice and brioche at breakfast, hot chestnuts and La Befana the bearded Epiphany witch on Piazza Navona, the odious smell of parmesan, missing Safinaz, espressos sipped in pavement cafes on the Via Veneto, green suede shoes bought at Rafael’s (is that how they spell it?), still missing Safinaz, movie diva Virna Lisi at a ball in a villa on the Appian Way naming me Bell’occhio (beautiful eyes) while I feel like a fop in my frilly white Roman shirt, the wind blowing the grey silk trousers of my grownup suit against my thighs as importunate guides insist on speaking Spanish to my tall, dark-haired mother in her long red coat on the steps of St Peter’s, missing Safinaz a little less, walking for miles in search of the English bookshop on Via Barberini – or was it Babbuino? – and the English cinema on Via...but I went back again to Rome eleven times at least in the next three decades and those memories are overlaid by later ones... all I see are the fountains of Tivoli, the streets of Pompei, the silver-tipped blue of the Bay of Naples in winter.
And yes, outside a restaurant somewhere near the Spanish Steps, late on New Year’s Night, an old fat Russian gipsy in the rain, black-and-white checked coat over her head like a nun’s veil, playing the accordion, swaying, singing a merry drinking song...
Then we went to La Fontana di Trevi in the dark before morning. I got into the water, calf-deep, with Julie, a Swedish-American opera singer with whom I’d been singing Broadway duets that week. I cast my coins and wished I’d see Madeline again. I thought the fountain granted wishes.
Intermezzo
Many years later, when I was twenty-two, a friend of mine who’d fallen in love with Vanessa Redgrave in the role of Julia gave me the story by Lillian Hellman on which the film was based. That’s how I read it, as a story, because I’d always felt good narrative should have the intensity of fiction, and the best stories carried the electric charge of lived experience. So, when people began to say that Hellman had never met Julia and her memoir was a figment of her diseased fantasies, I was bewildered. It was, after all, a fragment of her emotional life; I’d never expected it to be truthful in some photographic fashion. And as for films, they never pretend to be true to the texts they’re taken from.
Stories are about finding the pattern, arranging elements in a shape that makes sense. But now, faced with the chronology of my father’s movements in the months that follow, I feel disinclined to explain, unable to deal in the documentary mode. Though every word I write here is as true as memory can make it, I’m merely chasing the flickering of light.
My friend Humma, who’s spent time in Beijing, tells me the Chinese have an evocative name for images captured on film: Electric shadows.
ACT II
Majnoun
Daddy didn’t come back to Karachi with us in January ‘66. He’d decided to stay on to see if he could make a new life for us: a few years in Rome, maybe, or in London. It was if he knew that horizons were shrinking at home, that all too soon Karachi wouldn’t contain us, and we’d have to leave. Or else, by showing us how restless he was with our old life, the only one we’d ever had, he’d made us restless too, so that the desire to leave was, unwittingly, spreading its swallow wings in us, wings too fragile to catch or hold.
I battled with my mother over school. She didn’t approve of my choices, because children at Karachi Grammar School spoke coarse English and swore, and American kids chewed gum. I didn’t agree to her preference for an all-male establishment where emphasis was placed on physical training and good Urdu. Neither particularly appealed to me: I didn’t like sports and the subtleties of the Arabic script bewildered me.
I spent those months at home reading: I’d developed a passion for history, but all you could find on the market in English were books about the Inquisition or the Armada, the Fall of Rome or the Sack of Jerusalem. In Urdu novels, you could read, in lush vivid language, about the Holy Prophet’s time, or the Arabs in Granada and the Mughals in Lahore. I finally found heroes closer to home, with names like Aasim and Tariq, figures I could identify with. And then there was the legend of Kais, the one they called mad, Majnoun: in love with Laila, constantly writing messages to her on sand, hoping the desert wind would carry the grains of his love to her. Kais and Laila, cousins, shared my given name: they were the Children of ‘Amer.
If I’d gone to the American School I’d have been with Madeline, who’d left Jesus and Mary at the same time as I had. I didn’t seen her there any more when I went in the car to pick up my sisters.
(I did see Tina, though, as soon as I got back from Rome. I took her a bottle of scent – Ma Griffe, I think – which I’d bought for her on the plane. I presented it to her in front of a clapping crowd of ex-classmates. I was a little in love with her, but my faithful mind didn’t have room for two loves, so I just thought of her as a friend.)
Borrowed Gold
Mehreen called Madeline again on 51112 – I don’t know if I’d asked her to. And Madeline said she’d liked me very much but I hadn’t paid her any attention, and later I seemed to like Tina. Then, at the exhibition, she saw Mehreen who was so beautiful and she thought Mehreen was my girl. Anywway, she was sort of seeing someone else. Some months later sweet Madeline left with her family for Islamabad and probably never shed a tear for her silent beau. Or maybe I melted into her violet dreams.
Karachi ceased to be the capital that year. Natives, who’d loved the coming and going of foreigners, would suddenly, on barbecue picnics beneath tamarind trees on cloudy days, throw up hands and voice a desire to be elsewhere, everything suddenly seemed to be happening somewhere else. And then they’d get on with parties and with living.
I never saw or heard from Madeline again.
(Tina I did speak to. For some reason her mother didn’t allow her out, so we became telephone friends. She’d ring and tell the servants her name was Rani but I knew, of course, it was her and we’d be on the line for hours. At some point I walked the half-mile to her house by the ponds with my sister Shahrukh, to be told Tina was out. But her younger brother decided, for a fortnight or so, to be my best friend. He’d drive over to my gate in his Mercedes and take me out for a spin, or get dropped off at my house and spend the afternoon telling me very tall tales. I guess I wasn’t very good company because I didn’t play cricket or talk much and spent my time reading weighty books. One day we were playing about by some thorny bushes on the footpath that led down the hill our house was on when something he did provoked me to run off and he followed and twisted my arm behind my back until I saw stars and fell. I wasn’t used to being touched by boys. I’d never really liked boys very much, apart from two or three at school. The friendship with Tina’s brother was over and though I didn’t hold Tina’s brother’s ways against her I don’t remember speaking to Tina again after that. She might have gone away, to a boarding school in Murree.)
In the seventh century after our prophet, the poet Sa‘di sang:
O camel driver, drive slowly, for my soul’s rest is leaving, and with her the heart I thought was mine is leaving
But I’d learned, after Snowy and Madeline, not to want what I couldn’
t have or what threatened to disappear. In spite of the letters erased from the slate, in spite of my name, I was neither father nor son of that Kais bin ‘Amer who pines in the sands for Laila and spends his hours kissing the letters of her name. Love feeds on the anticipation of what you know will come back, it grows and thrives. But there are summer days that betray you with their borrowed gold. Love fades when you know you’re longing for nothing. Your hands grasp air. Love chokes on absence.
Pause
In our garden, between the almond tree and the hibiscus, there’s a fountain of yellow-white stone. The white lamb loved to drink there. Sometimes I think I hear the sound of her bleating or her collar’s blue bells behind me in the garden. But Madeline, when I look in the water for her reflection, just isn’t there. In her place there’s a shadow of shame and guilt.
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