Salt and Saffron

by Kamila Shamsie

  My first thought when Baji showed me those stars was, the opening line will have to change. The story must begin with the curse of not-quites.

  I should have thought, How is this possible? Given chronology, given science, given my life. How? But Rehana Apa was up and moving towards me, distracting me with her purposefulness as she pulled me up and said, ‘Baji, remember Hamlet? I’m taking Aliya out for something to eat. Samia, stay and look after my grandmother. She’s about to go into regret.’ She turned to me. ‘Where to?’

  I thought, Hamlet? I said, ‘Any doughnut shop.’

  ‘To Piccadilly Circus then,’ Rehana Apa said. She allowed me silence as we walked. I suppose she thought I was thinking of that star beside my name. But actually I was thinking of America. My college days, so recently finished, were days of empty spaces in my head. Spaces without chatter, spaces without textured silences. I was so utterly foreign there, so disconnected from everything that went on that I could afford to be passionate about the tiniest injustice in the domestic news.

  ‘I don’t really want a doughnut,’ I said. I put on my best academic voice. ‘The word “doughnut” is a sign, the visual image of the doughnut is the signifier and a nostalgia for another life is the signified.’ I gestured vaguely with my hand. ‘Can we just go and sit under a tree instead?’

  Rehana Apa said she knew a wonderful tree, and indeed she did. A shady beech in Green Park. Or perhaps it was an elm. Or an oak. I know nothing about trees, but I’ve read enough novels set in England to be pretty sure no other trees of importance exist there.

  ‘What about Hamlet should Baji remember?’ I sat down, unmindful of the damp.

  Rehana Apa touched her palm to the tips of the grass, found the grass wet, dried her palm with a tissue and sat down anyway. ‘When Polonius says he’ll treat the players as they deserve, and Hamlet says, “Use them after your own honour and dignity; the less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty.” ‘

  ‘Such an aristo remark,’ I said. ‘Combat abuse with nobility; it’ll make the other guy look so small.’

  Rehana Apa shook her head at me. ‘I love Hamlet in that moment. It makes me weep for everything he’s forced to become.’

  I leant against the tree trunk and tried not to stare at her. My cousin. She must have been a dozen or so years older than me, and suddenly that didn’t seem very much. And here we were, talking about Hamlet. With everything else there was to talk about, we were talking about Hamlet.

  ‘Those kids at Baji’s. Are they yours?’

  ‘Stinky and Smelly?’ Rehana Apa laughed. ‘Yes. When the older one was born Baji said he had eyes like the old Nawab, Binky. So I said to my newborn child, “Should we call you Binky?” and he put his hand to his nose and scrunched up his face. My husband said, “He’s saying not Binky but Stinky.” And it stuck as such names do. The second born didn’t have a chance.’

  ‘Their real names?’

  ‘Omar and Aliya.’

  ‘Really? Aliya?’

  Rehana Apa nodded. ‘Samia told me there’s a Stinker in the Pakistani side of the family.’

  ‘Yes. And his brother is Pongo. Weird, isn’t it? How our names overlap despite, you know, the complete lack of communication between the two sides of the family. How did Samia get in touch with you?’

  ‘We met at an art exhibition. Treasures of the Indian princes. We both kept circling back to a cabinet which displayed the sword our illustrious ancestor, Nur-ul-Jahan, used in the Battle of Surkh Khait. Once we started talking it took about seven seconds to work out the connection. Do you think your – our – relatives in Pakistan will criticize her for fraternizing with the enemy?’

  ‘No. Well, maybe one or two will. But I suppose the overwhelming emotion will be curiosity about how you’ve all fared. And the Indian relatives?’ It occurred to me suddenly that we didn’t support the same cricket team, this cousin and I. We’d never share that joy or camaraderie or heartrending despair that Samia, Sameer and I – and various other cousins – had so often experienced as we sat together in Sameer and Samia’s TV room, digging our nails into each other with anticipation during the final overs of a one-day game.

  ‘Probably react the same. Except, as you say, for one or two.’ Rehana Apa pulled a twig out of my hair. ‘Besides, almost everyone who stayed in Dard-e-Dil is now locked in some kind of property dispute with other relatives, so we’re expending our quotas of familial animosity within the national borders. And, for the record, I think Pakistan was a huge mistake.’

  ‘For the record, I don’t see it that way. Glad we’ve got that part of the conversation over with.’

  She laughed and slapped my hand lightly. For a while we were silent and I found myself thinking again of him. Khaleel. I tried to picture him in Liaquatabad, but I had no idea what Liaquatabad looked like, so I just imagined tiny storefronts and burst sewerage pipes and cramped flats with laundry hanging over the balconies, spattered with crow droppings. I didn’t know if I was imagining a place I’d seen, or one I’d had nightmares about when I had nightmares about Mariam Apa. I looked at Rehana Apa’s elbows and I knew I had lied to myself when I said that crippling memories were what made me recoil at the prospect of Liaquatabad. I was born into a world that recoiled at such prospects. If Rehana Apa were to tell me that she was in touch with Baji’s mother’s family, I’d be shocked. I’d wonder what she could possibly have to say to them, and how she could bear to be reminded that she was one of them just as much as she was one of the Dard-e-Dils. But for all I know, I reminded myself, they could have risen in the world in the last few generations. They could be as polished and urbane as Rehana and I. They could be as polished and urbane as Khaleel.

  Rehana Apa must have seen my brows furrowing deeper and deeper because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘If I understand correctly, Mariam’s older than you, older than me. What I mean is, you do realize that this twin stuff is absurd, don’t you? Babuji won’t say why he added it to the tree, but you know, just because we claim he’s always right, it doesn’t mean he is.’

  So I told her the story of Mariam Apa’s arrival, and of mine.

  It started with a letter to my father; another one, like Taimur’s, with an indistinguishable postmark. It was addressed to Sahibzada Nasser Ali Khan, and my mother was still new enough to our family to laugh at the pomp of that address. The letter (my mother still has it) said:

  Huzoor! Aadaab!

  I hope you are well and I hope you hope the same of me. I am writing because there is a young lady, Mariam, who soon before was motherless but since last month is an orphan. Her father (late) was Sahibzada Taimur Ali Khan whose name you must know and maybe even his face if you have old pictures. But even if not his face is your father’s face and so you will recognize her also because she has the familiarity. She is coming to look you up and I like her so much that I want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never!

  In true Hollywood fashion the gate-bell rang as soon as my parents finished reading out the letter and, in a further cinematic twist, my mother was so surprised by the sound she spilt her tea over the paper and it washed away the signature, which my parents had read when reading the letter, but could not afterwards remember because the letter’s sentence structure convinced them that the writer was no one they knew.

  So the bell rang and my father, certain that the laws of Hollywood had no part in his life, frowned at the spilt tea and told my mother it was probably just the night-watchman come to collect his monthly gratuity (which was and still is a tiny amount, but how much can you pay a man for riding through the neighbourhood on a bicycle while blowing a high-pitched whistle which sounds as if it’s the shriek of something supernatural).

  At this point in my tale, Rehana Apa stopped me to enquire what I thought of Pakistani movies. I had to
concede I’d never seen one of Lollywood’s productions, though Samia’s brother, Sameer, once went to see a local flick with his driver and cook and came home howling with laughter. ‘So the hero’s at this party, looking suave in his safari suit, and a waitress – not a waiter, a waitress! I ask you, From where? – asks him what he’ll have to drink. And I’m thinking, Is he going to do a shocker and ask for alcohol? But no, he asks for Coke with ice. Except he says it in English in some pseudo-smooth accent, so how it really comes out is “Cock on rock.” ‘

  Rehana Apa laughed. ‘You must tell Baji that. She’ll look offended, but she’ll love it. But now get back to the story. You said the bell rang.’

  Yes, the bell rang. A few seconds later the ayah, recently hired in preparation for my arrival into the world, knocked on my parents’ door and told them that a begum had arrived and was seated in the drawing room. She hadn’t said anything but she’d brought two suitcases.

  ‘Well,’ Ami said. ‘Well. It must be her.’

  ‘What do we do?’ Aba held the letter up to the light as if looking for a secret message written in lemon juice. ‘I mean, what kind of a person do we think she is?’

  Ami laughed. ‘If the servants in all their snobbery think she deserves to be seated in the drawing room, she obviously isn’t a valet’s granddaughter. Most of your relatives only make it to the TV room, and they all think they’re princes and princesses.’ My mother can be dismissive of lineage in such a manner because, although she never mentions it, everyone knows she can trace her family tree back even further than the Dard-e-Dils. She’s from a family of Syeds, yes, descended from the Prophet Mohammed, and there were at least four great poets in her family – one of whom was exiled from Dard-e-Dil by one of the Nawabs who fancied himself a poet. My mother’s ancestor read the Nawab’s poetry and said, ‘This poem proves Allah’s justice. How can religion reconcile the privileges you were born into with the hardship I have had to face from birth? This is how: you have power and emeralds; I have talent. And history has shown that fine couplets live longer than fine banquets. God is great.’ My father’s family claims that the Nawab showed his greatness by banishing, rather than executing, the offending poet. But they never say so within my mother’s earshot.

  ‘You’re diffusing the suspense,’ Rehana Apa said.

  Mariam Apa was never about suspense.

  She stood up as my parents entered the drawing room, quite assured. ‘Made us feel as though we were the needy relatives, not her,’ my mother recalls. ‘Though once we’d taken a look at her we couldn’t really think of her as needy.’ She was dressed in a blue chiffon sari, three gold bracelets adorned her left arm, and a gold chain with a diamond-studded pendant in the shape of an Arabic Allah hung around her neck. My mother looked at her cheekbones, her clavicle, her straight black hair, and knew she was a Dard-e-Dil.

  ‘Hello,’ Aba said. ‘You’re not … Mariam?’

  She just smiled that smile of hers which once made a rose burst into bloom, and Ami reached out to hug her. It is always possible to measure my mother’s reaction to a person by multiplying the time, in seconds, that she speaks without pause by the number of words she utters in that time. The greater the result, the greater her affinity for the person. When she met Mariam Apa she went into seven digits. So my father says, and he’s always been good at calculations. At any rate, the warmth of my mother’s reaction to Mariam Apa’s smile was so overwhelming that whole minutes went by before my father realized that Mariam Apa hadn’t said a word.

  Rehana Apa pulled a pen out of her handbag and started writing numbers on a leaf. ‘Seven digits?’ she said. ‘Really truly?’

  ‘Now who’s diffusing the suspense?’

  Aba stopped Ami’s monologue with a tap on her shoulder and said, ‘We just received this letter –’ he waved in the direction of the room where the letter lay – ‘and were very sorry to hear about your father. What happened?’

  Mariam Apa looked heavenward and raised her hands and shoulders in a gesture of resignation to a higher will.

  ‘Well, yes, of course there’s that,’ Aba said. ‘But can you be more specific?’

  Mariam Apa tapped her heart.

  Ami reached over, grabbed Mariam Apa’s hand. ‘Can you speak?’

  Mariam Apa nodded.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ami. ‘Well … well … oh. I suppose I should show you your room. Of course you’re staying; the issue doesn’t arise of not. We only found out so the bed hasn’t been made up but it’s a lovely room, my favourite in the house actually. I prefer it to our room but Nasser doesn’t like it because of some reason he’s never seen fit to share with me. But I know you will …’

  That’s when Masood walked in. He had come to work for my parents a few months earlier, and had been hailed by all who had sampled his cooking as ‘a cook to be hired but never fired’.

  ‘Begum Sahib,’ he addressed Ami in Urdu. ‘What should I make for dinner tonight?’

  Before Ami could answer, Mariam Apa said, ‘Aloo ka bhurta, achaar gosht, pulao, masoor ki daal, kachoomar.’

  And my mother was so stunned that Mariam Apa had ordered her favourite meal that she went into labour.

  Mariam Apa held her hand throughout the birth, while Aba sat in the waiting room practising the self-hypnosis exercises the gynaecologist had taught Ami to help ease the rigours of childbirth. Between contractions Ami revealed that she and Aba had been planning to name their child Mariam, if she was a girl, but there couldn’t be two Mariams in the house. Fortunately they had (given the Dard-e-Dil history) considered the possibility of twins, so there was a second name: Aliya.

  ‘Don’t tell me that for this reason you think you qualify. As not-quite-twins,’ Rehana Apa snorted.

  Mariam and Aliya were supposed to be twins. And Mariam Apa and I entered a world, not the world I’ll admit, but a world – one inhabited by my parents and Dadi and Masood and Samia and Sameer and all the rest of them – on the same day. But that’s not all. Everyone I know grew more garrulous than normal around Mariam Apa, except for me. I’ve heard that twins communicate in the womb before tongue and throat and larynx form, so they know how to speak to each other without speech.

  Am I saying Mariam Apa was in Ami’s womb with me?

  Not quite.

  Chapter Seven

  I fell asleep under the tree and woke up in the spare room of the Palmer House flat, with memories of a dream which involved Rehana Apa pulling out a mobile phone from her bag, Dadi asking me about the quality of Baji’s teaset, me lifting myself off the ground and stumbling into a cab with the help of Samia, and Ami saying, ‘But of course you’re twins; did I forget to tell you?’

  The scent of Samia’s perfume and a set of door keys were gone when the eddying noises in my stomach finally convinced me to get out of bed, but in their place was a still-hot haandi of chicken karhai on the stove and a note instructing me to ‘add whole green chillis and pudina – or is it dhaniya? That green thing, you know what I mean – and cook on medium heat for two minutes’. A spoon covered in spices and the juice of cooked chicken lay next to the haandi, but I ignored it and reached for a clean spoon to stir in the chillis and coriander. Masood always used to say that two hands on one spoon spoilt the flavour of a dish. I watched the clock for the two minutes to be up. (’How much time?’ I heard Masood’s voice, incredulous. ‘How can I tell you how much time it’ll take? When the spices and the meat dissolve the boundaries between them and flavours seep, one into the other, then it is time.’ The day he said that I added new words to his English vocabulary so that he could laugh at, ‘For the true chef, thyme is only a herb.’ English is the language of advancement in Karachi, and I taught Masood as much as was necessary to enable him to laugh at my jokes.)

  The chicken was good, but it wasn’t spiritual.

  Someone was calling my name. I looked out of the window into the parking lot, and it was him. Khaleel. Cal Butt from Athol, Mass. My knees buckled absurdly, and I pretended to be leaning int
o the sink to cover that moment of unsophistication. Although how sophisticated can you look while leaning over a pile of dirty dishes? I pulled a teacup out of the sink and waved it at him. Thumb hooked into the pocket of his jeans, sneakers replaced by brown leather boots, fingers twirling a pair of shades, he looked like an American cliché. I said to myself, ‘I’d like to be clichéd by him.’

  ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘These are for you.’ He held up a bunch of flower stems.

  ‘Am I being stalked?’

  He laughed. ‘I promised myself if you didn’t get it, I’d leave.’ His expression changed to embarrassment. ‘I can still leave. I don’t mean it’s my decision to make.’

  ‘Hang on.’ I grabbed the spare keys and ran down the stairs until I came to the final bend leading to the lobby with its glass doors, and then I ambled. ‘How?’ I said, when I was through the doors.

  ‘Your luggage tag. From the airport. I remembered the address on it because I have a friend who used to live in that building.’ He pointed across the street. Adam’s arm reaching towards God. When I first stood in the Sistine Chapel I wondered if Michelangelo was aware of his blasphemy. Who even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?

  Khaleel dropped his arm. ‘Look, I’m sorry. This is stupid. It’s just that I was thinking of you and then you were there.’

  ‘And then I wasn’t.’

  ‘Just after I mentioned where my family lives.’

  ‘What? No, no. Samia just realized it was our stop, that’s all. She’s a little scatty sometimes.’ If I had said a UFO had landed behind the Ritz and its occupants had activated Samia’s homing beacon, I might have pulled it off. I can tell stories, but I can’t lie particularly well. Samia, scatty!

  ‘Did you say “catty”?’ He grinned and leant back against a car, with arms folded. The I’m-cool-enough-to-handle-anything pose. ‘So what’s so terrible about Liaquatabad that you had to run away at the first mention?’

  ‘Karachi’s huge. Really. What was sea and swamp and wasteland not so long ago is now tarmac and concrete and, well, another kind of wasteland.’