‘You have a mobile phone?’
‘I’m an uppie. A yuppie no longer young. Sameer suggested prefixing “geriatric” but I will not be a guppie.’
I wouldn’t allow myself to laugh, so instead I said archly, ‘Nothing less than smoked salmon for Dadi.’
‘I was thinking along the lines of a swordfísh.’
Had she always possessed this virtue of self-parody? Yes. That’s partly why I’d loved her so much. Why had all those relatives wasted so much time in talking about rapprochement? If they’d only thought, instead, of a way of bringing us together, physically together, so that I could see her ear lobes. Yes, I said ear lobes. As a child I was always fascinated by their softness; I would grip a lobe between thumb and finger and fall asleep, and nothing on earth would persuade Dadi to move while I still had her in my grip. When I’d wake up and say, ‘Dadi, you could have pushed me away,’ she’d reply, ‘My darling, one day you’ll push yourself away. I’m making the most of this while I can.’ I swore that would never happen.
I looked at her ears and felt an overwhelming anger towards myself. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you.’
‘No shit, Sherlock, as your Americans would say.’
‘Dadi!’
She leant back and looked at me, amused. ‘English is capable of such vulgarity. But sometimes that’s good. When you live in euphemism you can’t speak to people who are accustomed to direct speech.’
‘Is this a euphemistic jab at me? What haven’t I understood?’
‘Love, Aliya. You never understood love.’
What I had never understood, I now saw quite clearly, was her. I had left at an age when understanding had only just become possible, and I’d spent the intervening years reducing her to a tilted head and a cheek that provoked slapping. How had I let myself do that? How could one remark undo eighteen years of love? Because hating Dadi was easier than facing the truth. I thought that, but then I didn’t know what it meant. What truth?
‘Sameer says you met Baji?’
I hadn’t been at all sure how to bring this up. But she seemed only curious; perhaps even relieved. ‘Yes.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘The first not-quites. Kulsoom and Shahrukh. A story I’d never heard before.’
‘If you’d been around at all over the last few years I’m sure I would have told it to you by now.’ Her tone was entirely matter of fact. My anger caught me off guard. This time the anger was all outward. I really did hate her for the pretence that nothing had ever been wrong; the pretence that my absence meant nothing more than a few missed opportunities to tell family stories. I had felt, just seconds earlier, the urge to cry for having stayed away from her for so long, and she couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge that there were moments when she had missed me.
‘Touché,’ I said, matching her tone of indifference. ‘I don’t believe you, but touché.’
Dadi raised her eyebrow just enough to let me know that I had come perilously close to accusing her of lying. ‘Did Baji mention me?’ And now I saw that she was, unmistakably, hungry for news of her family. My God, I thought, it’s only pride that’s kept her from writing a letter, making a phone call, doing something, anything, to get in touch with the family on ‘the other side’. Pride, and the fear of being rebuffed. Were those absurd reasons partly to blame for my decision not to call Dadi or write her a letter these past years? What else? What were my other reasons?
‘She asked how you were,’ I said. ‘Then she said she saw you in me.’
‘What did you do to deserve that?’ Dadi smiled sadly, and I thought back to that laughing girl framed in Baji’s apartment. No trace remained. ‘I always liked her, though I don’t think she knew that. I told you that once. Remember?’
I couldn’t say I did. Dadi persisted, ‘When you were studying twentieth-century thought at school. Condensed in one chapter of seven pages. The green history book. Remember?’
Yes, I remembered. Remembered that I had fallen asleep with the history book on my lap, and when I awoke Dadi was sitting beside me. She started talking about a cousin of hers whose mother had tantalizing elbows. She asked me two questions: ‘How does royalty treat a washerwoman? How does a daughter treat a mother?’ Before I could answer Dadi said, ‘What do you do when the two questions are really just one question?’ That was Baji’s story – convinced her father’s relatives considered her their inferior; equally convinced that her mother’s relatives should treat her as their superior. Dadi pointed at the bearded man on the open page of my text book. ‘Although she couldn’t demonstrate any sympathy for the lower classes herself, it was Baji who made a Marxist of me.’
A decade later, recalling that remark, I found it even more absurd than I had at the age of twelve. ‘Baji made a Marxist of you?’ I said to Dadi.
‘You’re thinking, If she’s a Marxist, I’m an eland,’ Dadi said. ‘But I was. So was Taimur. We were both so young.’
Elands. Yaks. We couldn’t be common and deal in dogs and goats. ‘And Akbar?’ I asked. ‘Did the two of you fall in love over shared political views?’
‘Akbar? He said the difference between a royal who inherits power and a plebian who achieves it –’ she used the word ‘plebian’ without a grain of self-consciousness – ‘is that the royal is tutored in the arts, in social graces, in subtlety. So his misuse of privilege is blanketed in ghazals and aadabs. The plebian, unused to power, hungry for it, desperate to grab it while it lasts, does not bother with niceties. And niceties, Akbar said, cannot be undervalued.’
‘You disagreed with this?’
Dadi shrugged. ‘Yes, but politely.’
‘With subtlety and art.’
‘Precisely.’
I didn’t know what to do with the silence that followed, so I picked up the morning newspaper and looked at the front page. ‘Who’s flaying who?’ Dadi asked.
There is no institution in the world which uses the word ‘flay’ as wantonly as the Karachi morning papers. Government flays opposition. Opposition flays PM. Politician flays bureaucracy. Journalists flay censorship. Batsmen flay bowlers. Hygienist flays fleas. Foreign Minister flays Foreign Hand. The other wantonly used word is ‘miscreant’. Whenever anything untoward happens – be it the spread of vulgar graffiti or the detonation of a bomb – miscreants are blamed. No one seems to realize that the seriousness of the crime is undermined by the use of the word ‘miscreant’, which conjures up an image of little gnomes scampering around with flaming torches in their hands. When the papers are feeling particularly reckless they’ll print a headline which announces that someone has flayed a miscreant.
‘I’ll say this for Akbar Dada’s theory.’ I tossed the paper aside. ‘If a politician flayed someone in verse, he’d get my vote.’
‘My darling, relative to the times, you’re a bigger snob than I was at your age.’
‘It’s intellectual snobbery.’
Dadi laughed. ‘Around here who but the privileged have the luxury to commit poems to memory?’
‘Your butcher, for one.’ Dadi’s butcher had his shop miles away from where she lived, but she wouldn’t hear of patronizing anyone else in the meat trade, because no other butcher could quote poetry so beautifully while slicing through hunks of flesh. ‘I wouldn’t vote for your butcher if he took to politics. I can’t dissociate him from the image of a cleaver.’
‘Advancement without bloodshed.’ Dadi polished her solitaire ring with the puloo of her sari. ‘Unheard of at one time.’
‘Well, yes.’ I sat up. ‘At some point, when whatshis-name, the founder of Dard-e-Dil, swept down into India with his forces … Dadi, we were the nouveau riche.’
‘The word then was “marauders”. Actually, whatshis-name was a Timurid from Samarkand, so you’re wrong about him.’ Her tone suggested reproach, but this time I didn’t mind. She was reproaching me for having forgotten, if only for a minute, the stories of our family that she had so often told me, and in that reproach was
an acknowledgement of all the hours we’d spent together. Dadi held her ring up to the sunlight and checked for smudges, then slipped it back on and tried to smooth out the wrinkles on her fingers. She grimaced, then smiled in resignation. ‘But go back far enough and, of course, we were all swinging from trees.’
‘So, we’ve had our turn. Power, wealth, the whole tamasha. Too bad we were born during the downward swing.’
‘That is our chief blessing. Now we can fade with dignity.’
‘A moment ago we were monkeys. Now we’re cloth. Milao-ing your metaphors, Dods.’
It was the old nickname that did it. She put her hand on mine, and absently scratched away the curve of nail polish that my swab with the polish-remover had missed. ‘Akbar knew my Marxist ideals – unformed and uninformed as they were – were based on a world that did not exist. In this world, the one we must live in, Baji will never fully belong to either side of her family. And if Mariam has a daughter, as beautiful and intelligent as Baji was when I knew her, you’ll never be able to forget that her father was a servant.’
I’d been wondering how I’d feel when she first mentioned Mariam Apa’s name. Sorrow, and an overwhelming physical exhaustion. And somewhere deep down, somewhere horrible, the nausea of knowing I agreed with her. It came to me then – that truth about why I’d tried so hard to hate her: when I told the story of Mariam’s departure … No, when I told my story of Mariam’s departure, I could allow myself to figure as the heroine. Here was the story as I’d told it to myself over and over and over: Mariam eloped with Masood and I was shocked to hear about it, but then Dadi walked in and called her a whore so I slapped Dadi because whoever Mariam might have married she was still Mariam and I would defend her against all those who couldn’t see beyond their own class prejudices.
Bravo, Aliya.
But I had felt something other than shock. When Aba told me she’d eloped I felt humiliation. Also, anger. Worse, I felt disgust. She’s having sex with a servant. Those words exactly flashed through my mind. Not Masood; just, a servant. How could I possibly have acknowledged that reaction as my own? So much easier to remember, instead, that I championed Mariam, seconds later. So much easier to say that in slapping Dadi I proved I did not think like her.
I felt a terrible emotion, too complicated for a monosyllable, well up inside me. I cried out, ‘But Dadi, at the end of the day can’t we at least hope to be better than ourselves!’
‘What we are, we are.’
Chapter Twelve
I had planned to tell Dadi and my parents about Baji’s copy of the family tree over lunch, but just as we sat down at the table Sameer sauntered in.
‘Aadaab. Hello. Hi,’ he said, pushing me over so that he could sit on the edge of my chair. He raised an eyebrow, silently enquiring about my meeting with Dadi, and I rolled my eyes slightly and smiled. He seemed to understand what I was trying to say. I hadn’t forgiven and forgotten what she’d said four years ago; but I had remembered why, prior to her terrible words about Mariam Apa, I had adored her so completely. Of course, I now adored myself a lot less completely than I had a few hours earlier … but no, that wasn’t quite true either. At least now I could put my finger on why it was I had so often felt the urge to smash my fist through my reflection in the mirror in the weeks after Mariam left. But how much had I changed in the last four years? That really was the question. I had learnt to reclaim my old affection for Masood, and it had been a long time since I felt anger at Mariam Apa. But there was still that matter of Liaquatabad.
Sameer touched my ankle with his foot, to let me know how glad he was that things were approaching normality between me and Dadi, and he and my parents exchanged looks of relief. He raised my glass as in a toast, then thought better of it and turned to Dadi. ‘Abida Nani, Mummy was about to call but I volunteered to deliver the news, person-to-person. Some relative just had an ultrasound.’
‘Mini,’ said Dadi. ‘Booby’s daughter. Everything’s okay, I hope.’
Sameer spooned haleem on to my plate and sprinkled green chillis and ginger over it. ‘Twenty fingers and twenty toes.’
Aba rolled his eyes. ‘More twins.’
There had been much holding of breath a couple of summers ago when some random cousin whose existence I was only dimly aware of had an ultrasound which detected twins. I was back at college by the time the twins were born and Aba left a two-word message on my answering machine to announce the event: ‘They’re quite.’
Sameer tore a naan in two, and gave me one half. ‘The Starched Aunts are clearly thrilled because it gives them something to speculate about. Particularly since the father’s name is Farid. Short for Fariduddin, which is supposedly significant.’
Dadi jangled the little bell which was always placed within her reach when she ate with us. When Wasim appeared she said, ‘Quickly give my driver something to eat. Tell him we have to go to Booby Sahib’s house as soon as I’ve finished lunch. And didn’t you see Sameer Mian walk in? Set a place for him straightaway.’ Before he was out of earshot she said, still in Urdu, ‘I remember the days when servants were fired if their hands shook while they were serving food.’
Marx would have liked that. I decided to relay the thought to her telepathically and it must have worked because she paid me no attention.
‘There was a famous Fariduddin in your family, wasn’t there?’ Ami said. ‘Wasn’t he the twitchy one?’
‘No, the twitchy one was the necrophiliac,’ Sameer said.
Aba clicked his tongue. ‘The stammerer was the necrophiliac, and for the record he wasn’t a necrophiliac as such – he just had some difficulty accepting his wife’s death.’
‘I thought the stammerer and the twitchy one were the same person,’ said Ami.
‘I didn’t know there was a stammerer.’
‘Sameer, everyone knows there was a stammerer.’
‘Are the stammerer and the stutterer the same person?’
Dadi jingled the bell so softly I wouldn’t have heard it if I hadn’t seen it. When I was very young she had taken me to a kathak performance. It was my first experience of classical dance and I was transfixed by the sound of the ankle bells – the ghungroo – which accompanied the tabla and sitar as the dancer whirled and glided across the stage. Dadi, however, declared the performance amateur. A real kathak dancer, she said, such as the ones she remembered at the Dard-e-Dil court, did not rely on a ‘crowd-pleasing chhing-chhing’ of hundreds of bells. A real kathak dancer demonstrated mastery by isolating one bell from all those hundreds, through sheer muscle control, and ringing it with the clarity and purity that was lost in multitude. It was that way with family histories, too, she said. One could not simply say that our family was involved in battles and treaties, patronized poetry and dance, was sometimes generous and sometimes cruel. To say someone committed patricide and someone infanticide, that heads were severed and hearts broken, that there was great glory and also falls from grace, with no symmetry to the reversals unless chance has its own peculiar symmetry, to say all this is not enough. You have to isolate each life, have to say that here lies the first discordant note and look how it is echoed in this life and see the discordance transformed into a necessary part of the whole as it, through contrast, heightens the harmony of this chord.
‘Fariduddin was the ugly Nawab,’ I said, and everyone aahed.
So ugly that all the paintings of him show a tall, strikingly handsome man with lashes so long and luxurious you ache to run your fingers through them. Of course, the painters were all his subjects, so what do you expect? (Besides, one of the Starched Aunts noted, none of the paintings show the back of his head, and that omission must mean something.) Regardless of details, the bottom line is he was ugly, and he knew it. He knew also that his wife’s brother, Askari, was not ugly and he knew his wife knew it, too. But he didn’t realize the extent to which she knew it until she gave birth to twins. One, the spitting image of Fariduddin. One, the spitting image of Askari.
Perhaps Fari
duddin had read too many Greek myths and too few biology texts. It was the middle of the eighteenth century – literature was more important than science in the education of a prince. Yes, yes, I’m referring to Leda and her twin eggs again. One egg encased the mortal children of her husband, Tyndareus; the other egg incubated the immortal children of Zeus. No one tells us what Tyndareus thought when he saw his children hatch and saw, also, that other egg from which the children of Zeus – Helen and Pollux – emerged. Let’s face it, Tyndareus could do nothing about the fact that his children, Clytemnestra and Castor, were twinned with twins who were no relation to Tyndareus. There is nothing to do against a god but rage, and quietly. But Fariduddin, having read his mythology, saw his wife’s children and knew that those twins were not-quite-twins in the way that Castor and Pollux were not-quite-twins. Except, it was no god who held Fariduddin’s wife in his beak and his wings. It was Askari who thought he could take that which was most forbidden to him and escape without detection. But Askari’s beauty – his eyes, his smile, his rose-shaped mouth – was his doom. Fariduddin saw his wife’s children, saw one who was ugly and would never be anything else, and saw another who was beautiful in the way that only one other man in the kingdom was.
Fariduddin said to his wife, ‘I will kill Askari first. Then his son. Then you.’ You’d do well to suspect the veracity of this part of the story. We’ve watched enough movies, all of us, to know that when you say a thing like that all three of your intended victims will survive, and you’ll be the one with the bullet through your heart. You see, I’m not even pretending there’s suspense attached to this bit. Did I mention that by now the Dard-e-Dils were well and truly independent of the Mughals and had their first real chance of becoming great princes, free from all overlords, enlightened rulers of a stable kingdom? Did I mention that the year was 1773? Guess which trading company in India was dealing in more than spices by now.
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