Salt and Saffron

by Kamila Shamsie

  My only moment of glory in an Urdu class was when I put up my hand and said, yes, I knew a word for sun other than sooraj. It was aftab. I almost flubbed the moment by appending a Sahib, but decided, instead, that I could be on a first-name basis with someone who Masood referred to with formality.

  Wasim asked, ‘Have you started cooking there?’

  ‘There’ was America. I shook my head. I’d watched Masood cook, seen shape and colour transformed into texture, witnessed odour becoming aroma, observed vegetables that grew away from each other in the garden wrapping around each other and rolling through spices in his frying pan. Cook? I may be proud but I know my limitations.

  Wasim handed me a cup of tea and I left the kitchen. When Wasim first came to cook for us, four years ago, I was sure he wouldn’t last. How could anyone attempt to replace Masood? One cook had already tried, but he was gone, passed on to a newly-wed relative just days after Mariam Apa eloped with Masood. But Wasim was different; he recognized, early on, that everyone in our house had some hesitancy about ordering meals and, without question or comment, he took over the kitchen entirely, serving up meals which, by any standards other than Masood’s, were very good indeed. I suppose he must have known about Masood and Mariam. After all, Auntie Tano, the greatest purveyor of gossip in Karachi, reputedly got most of her salacious tidbits from her children’s ayah. Aba, commenting on this, said that if you put together the servant’s information network with that of Dadi’s bridge-playing crowd you’d eliminate the need for Intelligence Services in Pakistan.

  I sipped my tea and approached Mariam Apa’s door. Time for the ritual that in the last four years had become an integral part of my first morning home. But there was a Post-it Note stuck on the door, its bright yellow cheeriness disrupting my attempt to evoke a meaningful atmosphere. ‘Child!’ said the note, in my mother’s hand. ‘You’ve just come home after nine months away and we (your parents) aren’t there to feed you buttered toast and rumbletumble eggs when you wake up. Hai hai! Crisis at work. Hotshot politico has decided he wants a longer driveway for more dramatic red-carpet entrances when he’s entertaining VIPS and VVIPS, not to mention VVVIPS. And construction has already started on the house! Real musibat. But we’ll be back for lunch unless death threats happen. You might even still be asleep then, in which case we’ll tear up this note and pretend we were never away. Lots of love, Ami.’ All this on one Post-it Note. She used both sides, but still.

  I put it out of my mind, closed my eyes, opened the door, and walked in. Memory conjured up a picture of Mariam Apa’s room as it used to be. On the walls, Sadequain’s pictorial rendition of one of Ghalib’s verses. The illustration showed a paper, half filled with Urdu words. In the foreground, a pair of hands with bloodied fingertips. One hand held a red-tipped quill, poised to scratch a finger which dripped blood. The accompanying couplet was one I could recite at the age of three:

  Conventional translations would render it something like this: ‘How long shall I write of my aching heart? Come! I will show my Beloved/My wounded fingers, my pen dripping blood.’ But my family always treats the ‘dard-e-dil’ near the beginning of the couplet as an invocation of our name, rather than allowing it to represent its literal meaning of ‘aching heart’. And so we read the line as: ‘How long shall I write of the Dard-e-Dils?’ And that undefined pronoun generally assumed to refer to the Beloved? We insist the pronoun stands for all of us who ever were and ever will be. No wonder we have such a skewed sense of things. By the age of three I imagined Ghalib – Ghalib! – showing me his blood-stained hands, implicitly beseeching me to allow him to stop.

  There was more Ghalib to be found in the bookshelves that ran along the length of a wall. And not just Ghalib, but also Woolf, Faiz, Faulkner, Rumi, Hikmet, and a whole shelf devoted to Agatha Christie. Some thought it strange, but to me it made sense that such a worldless woman should surround herself with books. Celeste had once asked me, ‘Could she … did she write? To communicate with you?’ No, she did not. But, of course, she could have had she chosen to. The bedside-table drawer was filled with an eclectic mix of music, each tape labelled in her sloping hand. A portable stereo took up the lower ledge of the table.

  Why was the stereo portable?

  I opened my eyes. Mariam Apa’s room was no more. I stood in a drawing room, with plump divans ready to form a makeshift bed in the event of houseguests. Even the curtains had been replaced since my last trip home, the lemon-yellow of Mariam’s choice ripped down to make way for a geometric pattern of blue and white. Now, more than ever, only my ritual of memory preserved Mariam Apa’s room, awaited her return.

  I walked across the marble floor, lay down on the divan, and looked out of the French doors leading to a terrace and to a garden beyond. Mariam and I shared this terrace, our adjacent rooms both leading out on to it. I sipped my tea and looked at my saucer. Cal’s hair was short at the back and the space between his hairline and his collar was the width of a hand. When we said goodbye I slid my hand around to the back of his neck, my fingers straying down to his spine.

  Why was the stereo portable?

  Four years ago Sameer had said, ‘Do you think they … you know? In your parents’ house?’

  ‘Don’t be a moron,’ I replied. ‘Of course not. Of course not.’

  It’s true, my parents and I were light sleepers and, as the number of burglaries increased among people we knew, we’d become increasingly vigilant for late-night noises. So we’d have heard a squeak of door, a rustle of cloth, a tip of toe. But it’s also true that four years ago desire was an abstraction for me.

  I rested my hand on the wall behind the divan. This used to be the wall behind Mariam Apa’s bed. It was also – though I hadn’t realized it until last year – a wall partially shared by Masood’s quarters. I knocked on the wall, put my ear against it. Solid. When my parents designed this house, almost fifteen years ago, they envisaged this as my room and, thinking ahead to my teenage years and the inevitable blare of music that would accompany them, they made certain the walls were soundproof. How I ended up in the room next door no one remembers.

  I stepped out on to the terrace. Not long ago I’d woken up in the middle of the night at college, imagining Mariam Apa easing open the French doors, walking out into the garden in her nightdress, and turning the corner to Masood’s quarters. But there was a wall at that end of the garden, separating the grass from the concrete paving outside the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, and a large, spreading falsa tree grew in front of the wall. With such relief I had curled around my pillow, remembering that wall and remembering, in particular, the outdoor lizards – girgits – that skittered along the falsa tree, keeping away everyone in my family. I told Celeste about the dream, and when she said, ‘Oh, come on. A celibate love affair for possibly eighteen years?’ I stubbornly replied, ‘Pakistan isn’t as obvious as America. Our love stories are all about pining and separation and tiny gestures assuming grand significance.’ But Celeste rolled her eyes. ‘Hormones are hormones,’ she said.

  Khaleel. Khaleel. Khaleel.

  I traced his name on my wrist, in Urdu. Wrote the letters separately and thought, Too curvy, then put them together and traced the word over and over. In the earliest days of Islam the drawing of portraits was forbidden. I’d always heard that ban was meant to discourage the semi-idolatry that might arise if people made pictoral depictions of Allah, or of the Prophet. But was it possible that the ban also recognized that words have a power that remains untapped? When artists turned from portraiture to calligraphy the dazzle of their art restored to words the power to make our eyes burn with tears and longing.

  The ringing phone startled me out of my reverie.

  ‘Awake?’ Aba said, when I finally found the phone, hidden behind a pile of books, and answered it. ‘A miracle!’

  ‘How’s the driveway?’

  ‘With my usual brilliance I’ve convinced the illustrious minister that the driveway should stay as is.’

  ‘Ho
w did you achieve that?’

  ‘Well, I told him that instead of doubling the length of the driveway he should double the intensity of the redness of the carpet.’

  ‘And this was seen as an acceptable solution?’

  ‘Why not? There’s no originality in a long driveway. But to have the reddest carpet in the country, that’s something. Only problem is, now your mother and I have to find the carpet.’

  ‘I sometimes forget how amusing you are.’

  ‘You sometimes forget a lot. Your dadi’s on her way to see you.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now. I told her your mother and I were at home. I lied.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I love you. ‘Bye.’

  I stood with the receiver beeping in my hand. Impossible now to skip over, avoid, forget, the first thought of the morning.

  Dadi.

  Chapter Eleven

  She’d always been strange about Mariam Apa.

  At the time of my birth and Mariam’s arrival Dadi had been staying with my uncle in Paris. She had started that holiday tradition the summer after my grandfather, Akbar, had died much too young. His hair had begun to silver and his eyes no longer had their hawk-like vision, but Dadi’s sister, Meher, doesn’t mention that when she recounts her last glimpse of him, the evening before his stroke. Just arrived in Karachi from Greece, she had driven over to my grandparents’ house and pulled into their driveway in the failing light. Among a group of cricketers in the garden she saw a man silhouetted against the sun, bat in hand. The delivery was short of a length. The batsman danced out of his crease, went down on one knee, and swept the ball to the boundary with the grace of … ‘With the grace of the triplets in their youth,’ Meher Dadi said, the first time she mentioned it to me. ‘Taimur, Akbar, Sulaiman. He could have been any one of them, young and gorgeous with the world at his … at their feet. It was the first time in a long while that I’d thought of what he’d had to learn to live without. Aliya, I backed out and drove away. I didn’t want to wait for the light to change, didn’t want him to step forward and become the gruff man I’d known for so long that I’d forgotten that other Akbar.’ She closed her eyes and I knew she was imagining that other Akbar, and in her imaginings he stood with his brothers.

  Dadi was inconsolable after his death, though it always seemed to me that whenever any of my older relatives mentioned this fact it was with an element of surprise. So when my uncle, Ali, suggested she come to visit him in Paris the whole family agreed she needed a break. Before the summer was over, Ali Chacha and his wife had convinced her that the trip should become an annual ritual. The only time she even considered changing her mind about that was when Ami was pregnant. Dadi offered to stay, but Ami told her, ‘No. Just come back sooner rather than later.’ She did, and on her return Aba greeted her at our front door with, ‘Guess what, Mama! I’ve kept a secret from you. There isn’t just one new addition to our family, there are two.’

  ‘Twins?’ Dadi gasped.

  ‘No, no,’ Aba said. ‘Taimur’s daughter, Mariam, has come to stay.’

  Ami was standing behind Dadi, arms braced, and caught her as she swooned. ‘Honestly, Nasser,’ Ami said.

  I’m on my father’s side. Dadi’s reaction seems a bit extreme. But I suppose, even given how long it had been since she’d seen him, it wasn’t extreme that she cried and cried when Aba told her Taimur was dead. She wanted to know how and when and where had he been and what had he been doing, but when Mariam Apa walked into the room with me in her arms, and Dadi asked all these questions, Mariam just offered me to Dadi to hold. Dadi kept repeating the questions, ignoring me entirely, so Ami took me from Mariam Apa, who still did not answer or even attempt to. Dadi said, ‘Who was your mother?’ Then Mariam Apa’s expression changed to something like pity. She put her hand on Dadi’s arm. Dadi shrugged her off. ‘Some upstart, no doubt, who raised her daughter without manners.’

  I’ll admit that, when I was old enough to understand the story, it annoyed me that Dadi was too concerned about Taimur, whom she hadn’t seen in decades, to coo and fuss over her first grandchild. But, looking around the room that used to belong to Mariam, I tried to imagine decades passing by with no sign of Mariam Apa, until one day a young girl purporting to be her daughter appeared. And if this girl refused to tell me anything of Mariam’s life? I’d shake that girl, yell at her, curse and cajole. No baby would detract me from my purpose.

  ‘So that’s why,’ I said out loud. That’s why Dadi was always so cold towards Mariam.

  Cold didn’t entirely cover it, of course. That’s what made me even angrier at Dadi than I might have been had their relationship consisted of nothing but animosity. But there was more to it than that. I know. I was there when they laughed together at the sight of me parading around in Dadi’s old wigs; I was there when Dadi described to Mariam Apa meals at the Dard-e-Dil palace; I was there when Mariam Apa told Masood to make the lightest soup in the world for Dadi when she was too sick to keep anything down, and I was there when Mariam Apa fed Dadi that soup herself.

  But none of this seemed to matter when Dadi learnt that Mariam had run away with Masood. Just seconds after Aba had told us what had transpired on the farm, while I was still too stunned to feel anything, Dadi walked into the house. Aba told her, simply, in one sentence, ‘Mariam has eloped with Masood.’ Despite my shock I remembered the story of Dadi’s reaction to Mariam’s arrival, and I moved to catch her if she should fall. She did not fall. She stood up straight and said with icy regality, ‘That whore!’

  Then she staggered and almost fell.

  Because I slapped her.

  She left early for Paris that year. Packed her bags and was gone within forty-eight hours of that echoing slap which I can still hear, along with my words: ‘I hate you. I hate this whole bloody clan.’ I would not apologize, would not say goodbye, though everyone in the family – even Sameer – said I must. I had not seen her since.

  Oh, they had tried, of course; everyone in the family, I mean. Letters, phone calls, lectures, I got them all from three generations of relatives in the year just after the slap. Sameer and I’d had our only serious fight, ever, over the matter of my refusal to apologize.

  ‘What’s the point of an apology if there’s no forgiveness?’ I said to him, the first time he called me at college to say Dadi had just got back from Paris, and it really would be a good idea for me to call her.

  ‘I think she will forgive, Aliya.’

  ‘Who’s talking about her?’

  That’s when he called me obstinate, stubborn, and even stupid. He’d called me these things before, and I’d returned the compliments, so I wasn’t too ruffled by any of it. And then he said, ‘Look at it from her point of view.’

  ‘Sameer,’ I said. ‘Even you?’

  Within minutes we were yelling. I was the first to slam down the phone, and then he called back so that he could do the same. If it hadn’t been for Samia making a three-way call and telling us both off so thoroughly that we had no recourse but to band together and gang up against her, who knows how long our stand-off would have continued.

  Sameer never mentioned the matter to me again, except through oblique hints which I ignored, and after my first summer home no one else brought the matter up either. I think my parents must have told everyone that Dadi and I would just have to work it out on our own. They only said that, of course, because they’d spent that whole summer doing everything they could to make me pick up the phone and call her but I’d been intractable. It was the worst summer of my life; worse even than the summer before, when we were all in too much pain about Mariam Apa’s departure to talk about it, or about my fight with Dadi, in anything except quick exchanges which rapidly became silence.

  But now, unmistakably, those were Dadi’s footsteps progressing down the hall. I could drum out the beat of those steps, with their pauses in between one footfall and the next, which had always suggested to me that someone had told her, when she was just past crawl
ing, never to drag her feet while walking. She lifted each foot up, entirely off the ground, and then placed it down, firmly, without any slipping or sliding. I caught myself praying that she hadn’t aged.

  Wasim opened the door. ‘Bari Begum Sahib,’ he announced, and fled.

  I stayed seated on the divan and stared down at her feet and the hem of her sari. I wanted to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her calves as I had done more than once in my childhood when she was leaving for the airport. If we’d been in any other room in the house, I probably would have. But instead I waited for her move and, after a long pause, her move was laughter.

  ‘And you’re still so young,’ she said.

  I flushed and looked up. She wasn’t more wrinkled or stooped or sagging, and I could have kicked myself for having come back now, before June, because I was afraid she would die and I’d be left with nothing but guilt and anger to remember her by. To hell with guilt.

  ‘Better young than old,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Aliya.’ She sat down and shook her head at me. ‘I wasn’t insulting you.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. The last time we saw each other –’ her hand went to her cheek in a gesture that was supposed to look unconscious – ‘just after that, when I was on the plane to Paris, I realized how young eighteen is. So young. How can you hold people responsible for things they did at eighteen? How can you go on clinging to something from that stage in your life?’

  ‘You want me to forget Mariam Apa existed?’

  ‘Aliya, I’m not talking about you. Now stand up and greet me properly.’

  I stood up, performed an aadaab and bent lower to kiss her cheek. Her arms wrapped around me for a moment, then disengaged before I could respond.

  ‘Aba and Ami aren’t home yet.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Your father isn’t always clever.’ She reached into her handbag and pulled out a mobile phone. ‘He said he was calling from the house, but the display showed his office number.’