Masood did not appear during the meal; he did not double as bearer here, but stayed confined to the kitchen. At the end of the meal, however, Jahangir said, ‘You’ll stay for lunch tomorrow, won’t you? You can see the mosque in the morning and then come back. We’ll have Masood cook whatever you want.’ He turned to the bearer and told him to call Masood. ‘Stay all weekend, in fact. Longer! I had forgotten that it was possible to enjoy company so much. ‘
Aba was already imagining the wedding, and hoping it wouldn’t be a dragged-out series of ceremonies over two weeks.
‘Nasser Sahib,’ he heard behind him, and there stood Masood. Aba stood up and shook his hand warmly, thereby missing the expression on Mariam Apa’s face as she saw Masood for the first time since he’d left.
Masood turned to Mariam. ‘What will you have tomorrow?’ he said. Mariam cupped her palms and pointed them towards Masood. It’s in your hands.
The next morning when Aba went to see why Mariam was sleeping so late her suitcase was gone and a photostat of a wedding licence was on her bed, the print smudged here and there. People said, ‘She just left a copy of the nikahnama without any sign of goodbye or sorry or take care,’ but I knew the smudges were the only gesture of farewell that would allow me to forgive her for leaving. After all, how could I be angry when confronted with her tears?
Aba had no choice but to show his host the nikahnama, and Jahangir said, ‘If you think it best I’ll send my men to find them. It won’t be a problem.’
‘Thank you,’ Aba said. ‘Thank you for making that optional. No, please, I have no right to make this demand, but please don’t do that, not now, not ever.’
‘Bibi?’
I lifted my head from the steering wheel, and ran my palm along my forehead, trying to smooth away the latticed pattern imprinted on my skin.
‘Bibi, is everything all right?’
‘Yes. Yes. Thank you, I’m fine.’
The man peering in at me smiled. He had been sitting with the group of servants – drivers, bodyguards, Older Starch’s mali and chowkidar – when I walked out of the Starched gate.
‘You don’t remember me, Aliya Bibi. I almost didn’t recognize you either. You were very young when I last saw you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you one of my aunts’ servants?’
He shook his head. ‘I saw you sometimes when I lived in the city before. I’m Jahangir Sahib’s driver.’ When I still looked confused he added, quite gently, ‘My brother used to work for you.’
Things I wanted to do: push his hair off his face; shave off his beard; straighten his shoulders; hear his laugh. Anything to find a resemblance to the man Mariam had left all of us for. Or if not that, at least to talk to him, to hear how Masood seemed during those days after he left Karachi, what he said about Mariam, what he said about all those things that he must have said things about but about which I never asked. Things like what he dreamt about, and why he never married, and how come he left his village and whether he was happy.
Instead I said, ‘Did Masood really have to return to the village when your father died?’
‘No.’ His brother looked at me as though I’d asked him about a mystery that he couldn’t quite solve. ‘I was there to look after the family. Masood was gone so long we thought he’d never return. He was too much a Karachiwallah.’
I looked at that man and I knew that I could talk to him for ten minutes or ten hours and he would never mention Mariam, never allude to the fact that our families were connected now and maybe he had nieces who were my nieces too, though we would never, no, not even if we knew where they were, we would never sit together, he and I, at a table watching those nieces blow out candles on a cake. How could we, when even now I could not stay and talk because the other servants were watching and maybe visitors who knew who I was and knew who he was would be arriving. What’s more, I couldn’t go and squat on the ground with him and he couldn’t sit with me in my car, both of us in the front seats like equals, and the longer we stayed as we were, he bending his back to catch my words, the more obvious it would be to both of us that we couldn’t sit together, not in my car, not on the ground, and if not there or there then certainly not across the table from each other in a room filled with balloons and streamers.
I had time, I felt, for one question. ‘What was he really like?’
His brother stepped back. ‘I was going to ask you that.’
I nodded and started the car engine. ‘I pray he’s well. If you ever have any contact with him …’
‘I don’t think I will. He had a passport. He took it with him.’
Chapter Sixteen
I said goodbye to Masood’s brother and drove straight to Dadi’s house. She would be leaving for Paris in a matter of days, but I couldn’t let her go without asking her about Taimur. Where might he have gone when he left Dard-e-Dil? Where, more to the point, might Mariam have grown up? Which is to say, Where might she have returned to when she eloped? In my mind I couldn’t even narrow it down to a single hemisphere. Did she refrain from speech because speech betrays accent, and accent betrays everything? But, then, why speak of food?
I had to have answers about Taimur. I had to have answers, because how could it be that he had left home and there his story ended as far as we were concerned? How could he disappear so completely? How could someone in the family disappear so completely? If Taimur could, then maybe his daughter could, also. Her physical absence I had learnt to accept. But not to know, not even to start to guess, where she was and what she was doing, to be unable to close my eyes and see her in a context that made me smile, that was the real wound.
When I had said to Celeste, ‘Can you draw her older and happy?’ I was really saying that my imagination lets me down. When I picture Mariam she is always unhappy. Sometimes she’s a recluse, seeing no one but Masood, jealous of the time he spends with his friends. She is bitter that he is not excluded from the company of men whose comradeship he seeks, while she cannot meet the kind of people she’s accustomed to meeting because however much they like her they’ll always say, ‘But good God! The husband!’
Other times she’s left Masood, or he’s left her, and she drifts, unable to return to the world from which she’s an outcast, a middle-aged woman with no college degree and no résumé. So how does she live? How does she eat?
And sometimes, apropos of nothing, when my eyes are closed I see her walking from me. I know it’s her although she looks nothing like anyone I could ever want to know – she is stooped and lank-haired and shuffling and entirely alone – and I don’t call out to her because I cannot bear to incur the pain that one look at her face will cause, so instead I tell myself it isn’t her and turn away.
When I told Celeste all this she said, ‘So I guess that could explain the heebie-jeebie dreams.’
The dreams she referred to were mine. The heebie-jeebies were hers, in response. She said I’d jerk upright in bed maybe once, twice a month, looking like someone in a horror movie who only had seven seconds of screen time and was determined to make it memorable, even if it was only memorable for the outrageous overacting. She was generally awake when this happened – she once remarked, though she now denies it, that sleep is a bourgeois luxury – and when she tried to talk to me I wouldn’t answer but she’d go on talking until I fell asleep again. The first time this happened, when we’d been in college for less than a month, she sang lullabies to me. She said it had seemed like a good idea, but after I went back to sleep she worried that it was neo-imperialistic of her to assume that ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ had any significance in my life. (I replied, ‘Your neo-imperialism anticipates my post-colonialism.’ Fortunately, we ceased being enamoured of such talk before long.)
I don’t remember the dreams, but I’m sure Celeste is right in suggesting their connection to Mariam Apa’s departure. Something happened to alter my sleep pattern after Mariam left; my old ability to fall asleep at the slightest opportunity didn’t change, but often I’d w
ake up feeling exhausted, though there was no other evidence to suggest I hadn’t slept soundly through the night. The exhaustion was far less marked when Celeste was around to talk me back to sleep, but it never went away entirely for more than a couple of months at a stretch. After a while I grew so accustomed to it that when I woke up in the morning feeling a strange heaviness of eyelid I’d just look across to Celeste and say, ‘Sorry. Did I startle you?’ and she always shrugged and said something like, ‘You should seriously audition for the next Stephen King movie.’ We stayed room-mates for all four years of college, though we could have got singles by our junior year. She said I did her a favour by not moving out and leaving her to bore herself silly, but I know that I was the one on the receiving end of a generous gesture of friendship.
I honked my horn outside Dadi’s gate and the chowkidar, who was playing Ludo with a group of servants outside a house down the street, ran to my car. ‘Begum Sahib’s gone out,’ he said. ‘But someone who says she’s her sister is waiting for her in the drawing room.’
‘Someone who says she’s her sister? You mean you could have let some stranger into the house.’
The chowkidar spread his hands helplessly. ‘But how should I know? Who am I to forbid a begum from entering the house? She got dropped off and her car left. Should I have told her to wait outside? I got fired from my last job for doing that. And your family is very large.’
He had me there. And Mohommed, Dadi’s cook from Dard-e-Dil, who knew more about the family than I did, was at the bazaar. I briefly considered turning round and going home. ‘Sister’ undoubtedly meant ‘cousin’, and the last thing I wanted was a run-in with another deadly relative. But if Dadi knew I’d left an older relative sitting alone in the house she’d make some withering comment. And I was feeling sufficiently withered already.
The woman in the drawing room had her back to me when I entered. She was looking at a painting of the Dard-e-Dil palace grounds. Hard to believe that my grandparents played in these grounds as children. The long driveway and manicured lawns were a little too tidy for my taste, but I loved the scattered sculptures – particularly the fountain with its statue of a bear cupping his hands to catch the water that spurted out of a baby elephant’s trunk. The palace, with its harmonious mix of straight lines and arches, stood in the background.
‘From the roof we could see forever. In 1947, turn this way and you’d see Hindu mobs burning down Muslim houses; turn that way and you’d see the Muslims doing the same to the Hindus. But not in Dard-e-Dil itself. You have to give the Nawab credit for that.’
Dadi’s sister, Meher, turned around and smiled at me. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking favourably of that depraved aristocracy from which I was so fortunate to escape. Come here and hug me.’
I put my arms around her and she said, ‘Why does my sister persist in cluttering her walls with these mementoes of bygone decadence? What do you think she’d say if we took all the paintings down while she was away?’
‘She’d tell us to put them back up, and not crookedly.’
I pulled back and looked at Meher Dadi and laughed. She was wearing a sari with a sleeveless blouse, and her silver hair was impeccably styled. ‘If this is getting old, bring on those birthday cakes. I thought you weren’t getting in until tomorrow.’
‘Changed my mind. Arrived this morning. I called Sameer last night from Athens airport to tell him I was on my way. My poor grandson! He had to wake up at some terrible hour this morning to pick me up, but what can I do? I so enjoy the element of surprise.’ She sat down, her hands resting on the arms of the chair as though it were a throne.
‘How’s Apollo?’
She looked amused. ‘For the sake of propriety we’re all supposed to pretend that he’s just my banker who has, over the years, become a friend. He’s fine.’
‘Will he ever come to Karachi?’
‘Don’t be silly. Why should my banker come to Karachi?’
‘Have you ever thought about marrying him?’
Her eyebrows rose sharply. ‘Well, we’re suddenly very upfront. Have you been spending time with Samia?’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘I don’t think his wife would approve of the match. Are you shocked?’
‘Yes.’ Deeply, deeply shocked.
‘Good. You should be. I don’t sanction taking marriage lightly. She’s Catholic. Doesn’t believe in divorce. Other than that she’s not too bad. He was in a little accident last year. Nothing serious. But when the police notified her she called me. I thought that very decent. Why don’t you ever visit me in Greece?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to, just so I can meet this mystery man. Does he look like a Greek god?’
‘A fat, bald octogenarian. I’m feeling very prudish now, so let’s change the subject.’
‘Prudish? You’ve asked me to come and stay in the house where the two of you live together.’
‘We do not. He lives with an old friend next door. Well, when any of my relatives come to stay he does. Now change the subject.’
I tried to imagine any of my friends having this kind of conversation with a great-aunt. Impossible. Usually it was people of Meher Dadi’s generation talking about marriage and people my age trying to change the subject.
‘There’s something I want to show you.’ I ran into Dadi’s room and brought out the picture, newly framed, from Baji’s flat. ‘I met Baji in London. She gave me this photograph. I thought Dadi should have it. I never know where I’ll find it when I go into her room. One day it’s by her bedside table, the next day on her dresser, the day after that it’s hidden away in a drawer.’
Meher Dadi took the picture in both hands and looked at it for only a moment before putting it face down on the coffee table. ‘I can’t look at it. It breaks my heart. Even now.’ She looked up at me. ‘Why is that? I can look without sadness at pictures of all the dead I’ve wept for – my parents, my husband, my childhood friends – but this picture, oh Aliya, I wish you hadn’t shown it to me.’
‘Dadi said the man in the centre is Taimur. Not Akbar.’
Meher Dadi’s face went blank. ‘Your Dadi and I were close to all three of the brothers.’
I knew that blank expression. I’d worn it often enough myself. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’
‘And you should respect that.’ Dadi swept into the room in her best imperious manner. ‘Meher, the painting of the palace is crooked. Why can’t you ever …’ The end of the sentence was lost in Meher’s hair as the sisters held each other and swayed back and forth, Meher’s arms around Dadi’s neck. For all their wrinkles and hanging flesh they looked unspeakably lovely. When they drew apart Dadi wiped a tear off her sister’s cheek; the action would have been merely efficient if it hadn’t taken that extra split-second to accomplish.
‘You arrive early just so you can catch me looking less than my best,’ Dadi sniffed. ‘I’m going to freshen up. Aliya will entertain you.’
Meher Dadi rolled her eyes. ‘Oh Apa, I’m not some beau coming to call on you.’
Dadi ignored that comment. Just before she left the room she said, ‘Tell Aliya about Partition.’
‘Which details?’
‘The ones she doesn’t know.’
She was trying to ensure I didn’t ask any more questions about Taimur. He had been gone for nine years by the time Partition took place and, despite my fascination with all family history, I really wasn’t interested in 1947 at that particular instant. But I couldn’t very well tell Meher Dadi that; not with what Partition had meant to her generation.
‘What do you know about the not-quites and nineteen forty-seven?’
Only that of all the twin stories, Akbar and Sulaiman’s was the one I never told to entertain crowds. Not for the same reason that I never told Mariam Apa’s story; no, Akbar and Sulaiman left no great mark on my psyche. Their story was just, well, boring. Judge for yourself: the two brothers (Taimur now long gone) disagreed politically. Akbar was a Leaguer, Sulaiman
was a Congress man. One believed that Nehru and the Congress were dangerously power-hungry; the other believed the same of Jinnah and the League. The brothers fought; the fighting turned bitter. The whole family was drawn into the battle and forced to take sides – all other causes of division and unity among the Dard-e-Dils were forgotten, and all that remained were the Pakistan camp and the united-India camp. When Partition actually took place, one country coming to life on 14 August, the other on 15 August, the Dard-e-Dils sighed, said, ‘Born on opposite sides of midnight like Akbar and Sulaiman,’ and took that as a sign that the family rift was inevitable. It was the curse of the not-quites raining down on the Dard-e-Dils yet again, except this time, instead of losing land, wealth or architectural plans, they were losing each other.
(Later, during the bloodshed of 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh, there were those in my family who said it was inevitable. Because there had been three brothers. If Akbar and Sulaiman were Pakistan and India, then of course there had to be a third country to represent Taimur. The stupidity of that statement is unparalleled, but it seems sagacious compared to the other kinds of stupidity that did the rounds of West Pakistan in those days. Let me take that back. Stupidity is too tame a word to describe justifications of genocide and rape. Dadi always claimed that 1971 killed Akbar. Not the war, the talk. His heart couldn’t take that hatred. One of the last things he said was, ‘But if the three of us couldn’t work things out what hope is there for anyone? We are lost, utterly lost.’ This deserves more than an aside, but I’ve lived too long with silence about those dreadful days, and I lack the heart and stomach to speak of things I don’t even want to believe possible.)
To return to Meher Dadi and her reaction to my version of Akbar and Sulaiman’s fight: she laughed.
‘Look at them,’ she said. She held up the photograph, palm covering Dadi’s face so I was forced to focus on the three boys. ‘Akbar, Taimur, Sulaiman.’ She pointed to each in turn. Yes, that was Taimur in the middle, but he wasn’t keeping the other two apart as I had first thought. Akbar’s arm lay atop Sulaiman’s arm, across Taimur’s shoulder. Akbar’s fingers pulled Sulaiman’s ear lobe; Sulaiman’s palm cupped Akbar’s neck. ‘You think Nehru or Jinnah could have ripped these boys apart? They’d have left the country together, moved to Timbuktoo, if they thought national politics threatened to make enemies of them.’
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