‘When he started ringing me up in Karachi – don’t even ask how he found my number, a friend told me he’d started getting so drunk and weeping so desperately that he couldn’t bear not to give it to him – when he started ringing me up every night, would you believe...I felt sorry for him? And he was so far away...I could just sense his anguish, and the old tenderness came back, you know how lovely his voice can be when he’s like that.’
It had taken Yasir, she told Sameer, nine months to break down the door of her reserve. One day she found flowers at her door, then again, and on the third day they were attached to a lyric in his handwriting and a compact disc of ‘I Will Always Love You’ – the Dolly Parton version she loved.
‘He was in Karachi,’ Iman said. ‘He’d found an excuse, and come after me, all the way. I saw him for lunch, then a week or so later for dinner. He started off on the old stuff again, and I said I didn’t want to go back, only forward. He said he’d give me time, as much time as I wanted, to make up my mind. Then he went off to see his family in Pindi and Faisalabad. When he came back he asked me for a fresh start, to live with him again. It was the first night of a new decade. Like the first time he’d asked me to spend my life with him. And I said yes.’
4
But Iman and Yasir stayed together only till the end of the next year. She didn’t get pregnant; he found himself in trouble over a phony deal with a Greek and a credit card scam. When Iman told him to stay where he was (in Nicosia, if Sameer remembers rightly) and not bother coming back because she’d changed the locks, Yasir cleared out all the money from their deposit account, left her with their double mortgage, and went back to Mummy in Pakistan. As usual, Iman escaped to the healing powers of her African landscape. But Africa was also becoming a place of passage for her restless wings: too long in Uganda, and the lures of North or South would entice her again, and it would be London or Karachi for her, with shorter spells in Lombok or Istanbul, Dusseldorf or Prague. And she’d move just as restlessly from writing to painting on canvas or textiles or practising her calligraphy. Then she came back to London with a plan. She was finally going to get that post-graduate degree, from Birkbeck this time, so she could take two years over it and work once again as a journalist and freelance editor to earn her way.
That year – it must have been ’92 – Sameer was working overtime to finish his first book of fiction, which was scheduled for the following year. Since several stories of his were coming out in print here and there he’d sometimes be called upon to appear at bookshops, theatres and galleries, to read or sign books, or simply join in celebrations.
Things had come full circle now. Five years or six years ago, Iman would call him at the last minute from her office: ‘The Parrot Club now. Maya Angelou’s launching a book. There’s someone I’m seeing there – a brilliant black editor you MUST meet. She’s involved with a new publishing company. Okay. Come late if you want to. Dinner later at Mr Chow’s.’
Sameer would leave his typewriter, shower, put on something studiedly casual, and find his way to Lower Sloane Street and her in the rush hour. Iman not only gave him his first ever cheque for a review; she actually showed him the way round the life of a London writer. Book launches, review copies, agents, publicity schedules were words in a foreign vocabulary Sameer had acquired from her.
Now he was the one who dragged Iman from his own signings to a friend’s launch and on to dinner with another gang of writers and actors and hacks. She was used to them; she smiled and joked; she occasionally, laconically announced to them she was a first-rate talent spotter because she’d spotted Sameer and been there for him from the start. If he was the one to mention how she’d discovered him she’d say: ‘When they told us at school that Speke discovered the source of the Nile I’d say nonsense, the source of the Nile was already there, how can some colonial have discovered it? Of course I didn’t discover Sameer. Just like the source of the Nile, he was already there.’
But she never once tried to re-establish literary connections or fish for a commission, preferring to write quiet reports for specialist journals, on slavery, human rights and international trade; and, always, Africa.
More often than not, now, they’d leave parties early, to dine in one of their old South East Asian haunts in Maida Vale, or look for a new place for Laksa and Indonesian noodles. Sometimes, after a gruelling session at Birkbeck, she’d come and pick him up from wherever he was, and they’d go somewhere to walk by water and look at swans: Windsor, Marlowe, or just Hyde Park. (Over the years, Iman and Sameer, they’ve seen swans at every hour of the evening, even in rain and chilly autumn. This summer they’ve befriended a black swan they saw once preening its wings with its vermilion beak as the sun set in the river.)
But their hearts were heavier than they’d been six years ago. Then she’d hidden her hurt behind the smoke screen of literary chat, while he’d still been excited enough by the call of a vocation to live for tomorrow. If they fell short of cash they’d walk around in Chinatown for hours, then end up pooling their remaining money to give five pounds to a homeless black man they’d adopted who camped on the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street and who swore murderously at them. Now Iman was a diligent student again, and Sameer had found that the grooming he was getting for his own five minutes of fame was like any other job – only, at times, more exhausting. Mona had finally fled London for Karachi when he started writing too frenetically and asked, as she left, for a permanent rain check on their relationship. So he, too, had been on his own for more than a year. (But all that, and the nervous breakdown the horrors of the Gulf War nearly gave him, are part of another story, which Sameer has yet to tell and probably never will.)
One evening Iman waited for Sameer outside an old brownstone in Aldwych for twenty minutes. A ginger-whiskered publisher had been trying to push his newest two-minute Indian superstar’s ethnic epic at him and he thought Iman would be furious he’d kept her waiting. She wasn’t. She didn’t often smoke, but while she waited she’d lit up a silver-tipped low tar. He noticed, in the last rays of the evening sun, that she’d cut and highlighted her brown hair. She grinned and said:
‘Tandoori tonight. There’s someone I’m dying for you to to meet.’
She parked her car just off Euston Square. The restaurant they went to was modest outside, and the minimalist interior was bare, white and just bright enough. Abida Parveen sang softly in the background – ‘tera ishq nachaya, thayya thayya’. Sameer didn’t ask Iman who they were going to meet, he was used to being joined at supper by one or another of her erstwhile Canterbury colleagues, with or without spouses in tow. Iman walked up to ask the head waiter something, then handed him a folded note. He nodded the indeterminate nod that implies ‘maybe’, then Sameer saw the sharper sideways tilt that indicates a definite negation.
Next, a robust, long-haired man who’d had one or two lurched up from his corner table with a pint glass in his hand and gave Iman that ghastly clap on the shoulder blade they called the Punjabi salute. Sameer saw a flicker of anguish on her forehead for a second and then, perfectly composed, she brought him over to their table. She had a tenderness for waifs, strays and stragglers, and Sameer was terrified she’d ask her friend to join them at their tiny table. He couldn’t think why she’d wanted them to meet.
‘Sameer, meet Niaz. Niaz Hassan, you know, the director? He’s not staying, such a pity, he says he just made other plans on his mobile. He’s been waiting for Kashif, too. Niaz, this is my friend Sameer, the budding literary genius, you know. You should get him to write a script for you.’
5
‘What do you call those birds, Sameer?’
Iman looked up at the purple sky. Greyish birds with black-tipped wings were dipping down and skimming the Serpentine, probably to fish up scraps of bread or other flotsam from the water’s turbid surface.
‘Gulls, I suppose. Can’t be seagulls, though, so far away from the sea.’
‘And those ones at the seaside in
Karachi?’
‘I don’t call them anything, Iman, I don’t remember birds at the seaside in Karachi. Curlews? Cormorants?’
‘The ones you see at night. They’re tiny white birds, really little...’
‘Tiny white birds you see at night? I don’t know, I left Karachi before I ever had a chance to see birds on the beach at night, and anyway you know I’m not an ornithologist. Now tell me about those friends of yours at the restaurant.’
‘Niaz directs films for TV, smart soaps with a moral. Kashif’s a friend of both of ours. He left a message on my machine for me to meet him there, then he didn’t show up. Have you ever thought of writing a teleserial, or a play, Sameer? I bet you could do it and then I’ll give it to Niaz.’
‘Oh, so it was Niaz you wanted me to meet. To peddle my wares to him.’ Sameer had tried for a crusty tone, but he was laughing. Iman slipped her cool hand into his.
‘No, silly, I didn’t even know he was going to be there. But listen. Seriously. Why don’t you write for him?’
‘I love Karachi TV soaps. I’d die to write one. But they want family dramas, feuds, marriages, breakups – I couldn’t write such stories.’
‘I’ve got great ideas. I’ll tell you one.’
‘Over coffee? There’s a chill breeze blowing.’
6
‘I met Kashif when I’d just gone back to Karachi in ’89. I was quite lonely, and as I said men around could be predatory, particularly if they knew I was divorced. I’d met him even before I got engaged to Yasir, but I never got to know him. This time I ran into him at a coffee shop with friends, and though he didn’t say much to me I liked him immediately. You remember that story you wrote, about a man with very blue eyes? That’s what I immediately thought of when I saw Kashif, that he looked like one of these blue-eyed devils you write about. But he wasn’t a devil at all. He’s from a respectable, middle class family, Kashmiri like mine, but soon someone told me he was in trouble over a girl, or rather that he’d got involved with a girl his parents didn’t approve of. Then, because I drove around all over Karachi on my own, I’d keep bumping into him. When he asked me to have a croissant and coffee with him at the Pearl Continental, I didn’t see how there could be any harm.
‘That’s when he told me about Sania. He’d started seeing her when he was eighteen – their parents were friends, even distantly related – and by the time they were in their twenties they were engaged. But recently things had gone terribly wrong. Their fathers had fought, then their mothers; it may have been over dowry, or a promise he believed his father may have made to Sania’s, to help him out with his flagging garment business. Sania and he had begun to grow apart, but they’d decided to give it time, until, suddenly, Sania’s father collapsed into his dinner plate one night because a paper had printed the news that he was bankrupt, and five days later his heart stopped beating. Sania blamed Kashif’s family for his death and now she was working at a travel agency to support her mother, a younger brother and a sister. He’d offered to help, financially, but she’d accused him of trying to offload his responsibilities and then cried, saying he wanted to abandon her.
‘Then I remembered: I’d met Sania. Once. She was attractive, in a florid Punjabi manner. What came back to me vividly, though, wasn’t the way she looked: it was the weird story she’d been telling. She said she’d gone to see a psychic because she was suffering from a chronic stomach ailment which made her bleed and bleed and she’d been told that an old, jealous woman had put the evil eye on her. The psychic gave Sania some coloured powder which he told her to bake in a little bun with some white flour and place that on the highest wall for the birds to eat, every day at sunrise, for a week. Sania said she baked the buns with the powder every day and placed them on the wall but they just lay drying there in the harsh sunlight, the birds wouldn’t touch them and she kept getting sicker and sicker. She was convinced that her future mother-in-law had cast the evil eye on her, so that she’d die of the blood she was losing, and Kashif would be free to marry another, richer girl. She said what Kashif’s family had against hers was that they hadn’t been able to give him the money to go to Harvard for further education. On the last day of that week Sania baked the last batch of buns with all the powder she had left. Soon she saw, from the window, a swarm of crows descending. Later in the day she went out to see: there were many dead crows, some on the wall, some on the dusty ground below. She screamed and ran to get the sweeper to take them away to the garbage dump. The next day she simply stopped bleeding.’
‘Kashif and I became friends,’ Iman said in the Soho coffee bar they’d found open, as she lit up a cigarette she’d taken from Sameer’s pack. ‘At first we’d meet during the day, for coffee or a snack, or just go shopping for curios together, me for the Clifton house, he for his restaurants in London. Most often, we’d talk on the phone: he’d usually call at night. It became a habit. I’d come home in time for his call. I couldn’t sleep if I missed it. That’s when Yasir had started calling too; once Kashif called and I said Oh, Yasir, because I’d just told Yasir to get off the line; so I was forced to pour it all out to him, about Yasir, the marriage, the separation, the divorce I hadn’t taken, the decision, to leave him or go back, I still had to make.
‘That evening Kashif suggested we have dinner and then go for a drive to the sea. We talked about our respective relationships, his fraying so badly there seemed no purpose in trying to mend it, mine on ice. Yasir had gone off just then, to give me some time; he was with his family in Pindi.
‘We’d just finished eating our fresh prawns with crispy noodles. Kashif said: Have you ever seen the seabirds? Which ones? I asked. He called them by some local name that started with a syllable like cha or sha. (Maybe, Sameer, you know the word.) Come on, I’ll take you to see them, he said.
‘It was one of those winter nights, moonless, but the light seemed to come from the water and a sprinkling of stars in that very, very dark Karachi sky. We walked down the cliff not far away from where I lived – it was still pretty quiet and empty three years ago – and found a place beneath a rock. We were slightly cold, but he’d brought a Sindhi shawl from the car. The sand was shining. He told me to close my eyes and only open them when he’d counted to ten. I shut them. He counted. Then he said, look! And I opened my eyes. I’d never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anything comparable since. Dozens of little birds, coming down to drink, playing on the crest of the tide. Some were riding the waves like horses. Little greyish white birds. Not beautiful, perhaps, but prettier than sparrows, and quite luminous in the sealight. The whispering water was full of their shadows. I don’t know, Sameer, I tell you. Sometimes I think it was a trick of the light, something that happens when moonbeams refract from rock to water, mirage or hallucination. But that night it took my breath away. When I turned, I noticed Kashif, who’d taken my hand in his for the first time, was crying, actually crying.
‘On the way back he told me he loved me, that he’d loved me from the start. I didn’t respond. Then he kissed my eyes. I knew he’d tried really hard with Sania, like I’d tried for at least the last three years with Yasir, but Sania was giving him a bad, bad time, and as for me, I didn’t know whether it was regret, pity or self-vindication that compelled me to give Yasir a moment more than the time of day. You know what it’s like. You can put everything into a relationship but when there’s only ugliness coming from the other person, you start to retreat, to wither, at least if you’re someone like me.
‘Don’t, Kashif said as I got down from his jeep, don’t go back to Yasir. Whatever you do.
‘He was asking me to wait. I knew I’d be all right with him. After all these years, he’d made me feel something again, something fragile, but there. I didn’t answer. I didn’t make plans. That’s where we left it. I knew he’d call me the next day. He didn’t. I tried his mobile number. No answer. I didn’t hear from him for three days.
‘On the fourth day,’ Iman said, in her car on the way back to Maida Val
e, ‘he showed up at my door. It was Christmas, ’89. I’d made plans for that evening with a couple of friends visiting from Bangkok. He wouldn’t come inside. He looked – devastated. He said, we have to talk, Iman. I can’t remember what I said to him about that evening’s plans, or whether I asked him where he’d been all these days, but I knew I had to go with him, wherever he took me, however far away.
‘He drove in silence for more than two hours. I don’t even know if he drove past the airport into Sindh or by the sea to Baluchistan. I know the landscape changed colour, became redder and rockier, and I thought for a moment I was back in East Africa.
‘He stopped the jeep at an unforgettable place: rugged, austere, but beautiful. It made me think of those lines from the Surah of the Benificent: How many of His wonders will you deny? On the banks of a deep, deep creek in which silver water flowed there were tufts of tall grass and yellow flowers that looked like dahlias nestling in the sparse green. Dragonflies darted here and there. One of those scenes that make you realise how small you are in the scheme of things.
‘We got out and walked. I’m not going to try to remember his words. Nor the reasons he gave. He had to marry Sania. Just had to. His parents, furious, were saying they’d disown him. His brothers were boycotting the wedding. He didn’t know what to do. But he couldn’t let Sania down. He was marrying her on the second day of the New Year.
‘Don’t marry her, I said, and I didn’t register his response, till I understood what he was saying.
‘I need a sister to stand by me, Kashif said. Someone to lead the wedding procession, welcome the bride, dance and sing. Will you play my sister on the day of my wedding?
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