Salt and Saffron

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘And before that, Dods?’

  ‘Before that? I misread his affection, his generous compliments. I thought there was an unspoken understanding that we’d wait for him to come back from Oxford. The unspoken is a dangerous thing to rely on, my darling. Do you know the meaning of Naz?’

  ‘Pride, or something like that. Having airs.’

  ‘That misses the essence of it. Naz is the pride, the assurance, that arises from knowing you are loved. From knowing that no matter what you do you will always be loved. In this picture there is such Naz written across my face.’

  But you were right to have such Naz. How could anyone not love you when you smiled like this? I wanted to say that, but didn’t know how to. ‘Why did he leave?’

  ‘There was another woman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. No one from our social set, or we would have known. Must have been someone in town. That’s what brought on that smokescreen letter of his with its talk of becoming a servant. She was probably of that class, which is why he thought of it. Some truth always seeps into the most elaborate lies.’

  ‘No, wait. If you don’t know who she was, how do you know that she was?’

  ‘There was a ring.’ Dadi directed me to look closely at the oil-painting of my great-grandparents, the yak enthusiast and his wife. He was dapper in his three-piece suit, holding a walking cane; she, rather more demure in her beautifully brocaded gharara, her hand weighed down by a ring so large I was sure if she ever took it off, her finger would remain angled down.

  ‘That’s not jade set in zircons, is it?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Emerald in diamonds. Her father-in-law gave it to her on her wedding day, saying she must not get too attached to it because when her eldest son married it would have to be passed down to his wife. That was before the days of high divorce rates – nowadays I’m sure people wait for their grandchildren to be born before handing down the most precious family jewels.’

  ‘So why don’t you have the ring? Akbar was the oldest of the triplets.’

  ‘Well, of course, no one really knows that. Taj was the only one who was really sure of the birth order, and she disappeared without passing on the information. I think my mother-in-law just guessed that Akbar was the eldest. So, acknowledging the fact that any of the three boys could be the eldest, their grandfather decided that the ring should go to the bride of whichever brother married first. When Taimur left, he took the ring with him.’

  No wonder she used to look at Mariam so strangely sometimes when she thought no one else was watching. She was searching for clues to the identity of that other woman. But Mariam looked so much like Taimur you’d almost believe she was Athena to his Zeus, springing fully formed from his forehead with no one around to whom she could attach the title of ‘mother’.

  ‘So you never loved Akbar?’ I felt a sudden surge of protectiveness towards my grandfather.

  ‘Of course I loved Akbar. What questions you ask. And you should refer to him as “Dada”.’

  I was silent, waiting for more.

  ‘When Akbar came back from Oxford, and I heard his parents were arriving at my house with a rishtah, I was thrilled. Told my parents to accept the proposal with alacrity, and damn etiquette.’ She lay back, smiling wistfully. I waited for her to continue, but she was in a long-ago world.

  ‘And all this is related to the monsoons how?’ I demanded.

  ‘Taimur left during the first of the monsoon rains. All through our married lives, Akbar and I barely spoke to each other when the rains began. Not through anger. We just knew each other’s need to grieve and remember. Yes, Akbar knew I loved Taimur first. Maybe we should have grieved together, but we didn’t.

  ‘Then Akbar had his stroke, and before the ambulance arrived we heard the crack of thunder and the rain poured down. That, too, was the first of the monsoon showers. His last words were, “Oh, Abida, what a wretched time for me to leave you.” Except his words were slurred and at first I thought he had said, “What a wretched time for me to love you.” I’ve avoided the monsoons since. Because I don’t want to know the hierarchy of my love. When the rains begin I don’t want to know which of those two brothers I’ll weep for first.’

  When she said that she did start to weep, for both of them I think; and I wept also, at my own stupidity. For four years I’d thought it was pure snobbery that had made Dadi say, ‘That whore!’ For four years I’d nurtured an image of Dadi based on that notion of her overriding snobbery, and now, with Dadi so old (suddenly she looked so old), I saw that I had lost four years of her life because there had been such snobbery in my reaction to that elopement. I had recoiled with such horror to think that my cousin had run away with the cook, that I hadn’t considered that anyone else could be better than me. I saw now that Dadi’s reaction to Mariam’s elopement was directed not at Mariam, but at her mother – that near-mythical woman who had known what it was to be loved by Taimur. Dadi’s reaction had arisen from love, but I had wanted so desperately to be the self-righteous one that I forgot everything Mariam Apa ever taught me about listening to the silences that bracket every utterance.

  ‘Dadi, I’m sorry.’ I rested my head against her shoulder, and when we’d both finally stopped crying I brushed tear tracks off both our faces and said, ‘Salt.’

  ‘What?’

  I shook my head. ‘Just thinking of something Masood said.’

  ‘You might want to think of calling him Masood Bhai. He is family now, after all.’

  I laughed aloud at her ability to surprise me, and then I thanked God for giving me the chance to know her again. Again? No, for the first time. ‘We can talk about Mariam Apa. If you want to. Whenever you want to.’

  Dadi smiled. ‘Talk? That’s not always necessary, you know.’ She pushed my hair off my face. ‘Let it go, my darling. Some people leave our lives; it happens. People leave. Let it go.’

  I wasn’t about to let it go.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Aliya!’ Younger Starch greeted me at her front door. ‘What an unexpected somersault of joy you’ve made my heart just do. Full triple lutz in my rib cage, I swear, at the sight of you. And what a lovely jora you’re wearing – such a nice change from all these other young girls today who always want to be in the height of fashion. I say a few inches here and there around your hemline isn’t worth the expense of a whole new wardrobe. Unless you’re like Kishoo, who has to look good all the time because she has a certain image, you know. And why haven’t we seen you at the dholkis? I think the Ali Shah boy is definitely interested.’

  ‘Oh, well, actually I know it’s time for you to go for your bridge game and I don’t want to hold you up. I was just stopping by to ask if you were free for lunch tomorrow.’ I knew she wasn’t, but the leap from discussing Taimur with Dadi to fending off matchmaking talk from a Starch was one I couldn’t make without falling into the gaping precipice of incivility, so it seemed best to terminate the conversation as quickly as possible.

  ‘Oh, I would have loved to, but Sunday brunch at the Club is a must. Must, must, must. Oh, now I’m so sad.’

  ‘Well, another time, then. But, since I’m here, I might as well say hello to Hibiscus-Eating Ayah.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bua.’

  ‘Oh, Bua! Such names you have for people. I swear, sometimes I think you must have some private nickname for me. Of course, go and see her, but if she starts talking too much just say goodbye and walk out or she’ll go on and on and on and will not stop. What am I telling you this for? You know all there is to know about her. Okay, sweetie, must run. ‘Bye.’

  She kissed the air around my cheeks and walked out. I heard her screeching for the driver outside as I walked towards her younger children’s bedroom.

  Hibiscus-Eating Ayah had been my ayah, about fifteen years ago. She had come to work for us after her husband died, leaving her children to be brought up by her mother. She would go home to see them once a week, and on very rare occasion
s they’d come to visit her – two wide-eyed girls near my age who I recall playing with in the garden the first time we met. It was winter then. The next time I saw them it was summer and too hot to play outside, so I smiled hello and disappeared into my room. Technically speaking, it was also their mother’s room, inasmuch as there was a little mattress under the bed which she would pull out and sleep on at night, and there was a corner in my closet where she kept her belongings bundled up, but when you’re seven you know better than to pretend technicalities matter. I remember I asked Ami if I could invite them inside, but the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the memory is merely of something I considered doing. Even at that age, I knew about boundaries. No, let’s be honest. They gave the impression of being unwashed, and I didn’t want them to get fingerprints on my new, giant-sized, snow-white stuffed bunny. (And if I had invited them in? How could that have ended any way but badly? Would it have been the first time they really thought about all they couldn’t have?)

  Hibiscus-Eating Ayah, known then simply as ‘Bua’, was a great improvement on her predecessor – a wizened woman who convinced me that my family would suffer not a whit if I regularly took a small amount of money from my father’s wallet and gave it to her for her supply of niswaar, that ghastly, green, tobacco-based concoction which she would spit out in my basin without properly swilling out the spatter afterwards. Her endeavours to lead me into a life of guilt-based crime did not lead to her dismissal, but her penchant for niswaar did. She spat in the wrong direction, and though Aba’s suede shoes bore no permanent mark he saw that as no reason to excuse her uncouthness. Truth is, we all disliked her and were just waiting for a reason to sack her.

  Hibiscus-Eating Ayah’s good-natured youthfulness was such a pleasant contrast to Niswaar-Spitting Ayah that I would stay up at night, past my bedtime, whispering to her about the house I’d own one day when I was married. We’d draw up floor plans for the house, which varied from week to week in every detail but one: a little room for her, between my room and my children’s room, so that she could be on hand for whoever needed her to sing them to sleep.

  But the plans went awry the day she ate the hibiscus.

  I was in my room when I heard sounds of pandemonium in the garden, outside the dining room. On going to investigate I saw Mariam Apa, ashen, staring at Bua in disbelief, while Masood yelled. At first I didn’t know which of the two women he was yelling at, just that he was demanding, ‘What were you thinking? What have you done? What sort of bestiality is this?’ The thought that he could be addressing Mariam Apa in this manner made the blood rush to my head, until I realized, that’s impossible. He’d get fired for that. I moved closer to the dining-room window to look out, and saw that the red flowers of Mariam Apa’s hibiscus bush were lying on the grass, ripped apart. Moving closer still, I saw teeth marks in petals, saw red on Bua’s teeth when she opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Look at her,’ she said, and pointed at Mariam. ‘Look at that look on her face. She shows more emotion over these flowers than over anything else. Why can’t you see that? She’s a mad woman, deranged.’

  ‘Aliya!’ Just as things got interesting Ami appeared, on cue, and whisked me away. That day, Bua earned a nickname and lost a job. And gained another, because Younger Starch, driving to our house, saw Hibiscus-Eating Ayah leaving and hired her on the spot. No one quite understood why Younger Starch did that until a few months later, when she announced she was pregnant. She said, ‘I told him I’m not having children until I know I have the right kind of help for those horrible first months of a child’s life, but once I found Bua I said, “Hubby, let’s go.” ’

  I thought I would never forgive Hibiscus-Eating Ayah for the things she said about Mariam Apa, but Mariam was in such a good mood in the days following the insults that I concluded she hadn’t minded them at all, and I was free to continue to feel affection for my old ayah. In the fifteen years since, my affection had never died, but it had become something I never thought about unless I saw her face to face.

  I opened the door to the children’s bedroom.

  ‘Arré, Aliya!’ Hibiscus-Eating Ayah was folding my young cousins’ clothes, but when she saw me she dropped a T-shirt on to the bed and came over to hug me and whisper prayers over my head. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me leave without coming to say goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye? Why?’

  ‘Didn’t anyone tell you? I’m leaving. Going to work for the Shaikh family who live near the KESC building. Three children, ages five to nine, and none of them as sweet as you were at that age.’

  ‘But, you mean, my aunt’s decided she doesn’t need an ayah any more? How can that be? Imdi’s only eight. How can she do this to you?’

  ‘Aren’t you listening? I’m leaving. She doesn’t want me to go, but she doesn’t want to pay me as much as the Shaikhs are offering either.’

  ‘You’re leaving only because of money? Bua, you’ve raised these children. All four, since the day they were born.’

  ‘Leh!’ she said, pointing at me as though I were a sideshow freak and she was directing the assembled gawkers’ attention to me. ‘Only because of money! I have two granddaughters. Their stepfather is a waster; he just wants to get them married off when they reach puberty, and my daughter – you know Khadija – has always been spineless. She said, “What can I say to him? He doesn’t want to bear the expense.” So I said, “Then I’ll bear the expense. I’ll send them to school.” The eldest is so smart, and there’s a school near where they live where they teach English and they even have computers. Ye-es. You think I’m joking? Some rich man donated all these computers to them. Only money! You think I’m going to let my grandchildren grow up to be servants?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’

  She waved me quiet. ‘Oh, I’m only this upset because I feel bad about leaving here. You said it yourself. I raised these children.’

  Something she had said earlier had caught my attention. ‘You said stepfather? What happened to Khadija’s first husband? Divorce?’

  ‘Two years ago it happened. No one told you? He was killed in police custody. Where he used to live – it’s a poor part of town, not like this – at least one person per family is killed in police custody. Allah, take pity on us.’

  ‘On all of us,’ I said. On my way to school, during my A levels, I used to see Khadija’s husband playing cricket on the streets. He’d raise his bat in greeting as my car went by. When my American friends said arranged marriages were a horrific notion I always thought of the way Khadija leant against her young husband’s shoulder when I saw them together visiting her mother at Younger Starch’s. He was, he would have been, Sameer’s age.

  I felt too sick to ask Hibiscus-Eating Ayah anything else. What could she tell me, in any case? ‘I have to go. Come and visit me. The Shaikhs don’t live so far away.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s been a long time since there was a reason to stay away from your house.’

  She looked squarely at me and I saw I was not the only one with questions.

  ‘We haven’t heard from either of them since they left.’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t think she’d ever do it. That’s what made me angry all those years ago. Not that he stopped noticing me as soon as she walked into the kitchen, but that she knew it and yet she wasn’t willing to stop walking in or to tell him to stop looking. The third thing, the thing she finally did, that I didn’t think she’d ever do. But, after the shock when I first heard of it, I wasn’t that surprised. The way Masood had of looking at her … How could you ever give up being looked at like that?’

  Why did none of us see what Hibiscus-Eating Ayah saw? The question nagged me for days. And then Meher Dadi dropped a chance remark to Sameer, about ghosts. ‘I’ve seen them. Of course I’ve seen them. Not often, but every now and then. You say that, because I believe they exist, I allow my mind to play tricks and create them, but, dear boy, perhaps you don’t see them because you’re unwilling to ac
knowledge the possibility that they might exist.’

  Of course.

  But what made Mariam Apa so different? What made her able to acknowledge possibilities more unlikely than ghosts? Did Taimur really become a servant – while we’re admitting possibilities, why not admit that? Was Mariam’s mother far beneath the Dard-e-Dils on the social ladder, as Dadi believed? Or might there be a possibility unrelated to her parents?

  The only clue we had to Mariam Apa’s life before Karachi was the letter which had arrived at our house, twenty-two years ago, just minutes before she did. If only Ami had saved the envelope we might have known where it came from. I only 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.

  Someone had loved Mariam Apa before Karachi. Someone who might not have been literate – the letter, Aba insisted, sounded like an oral message transcribed. But Mariam Apa had not loved this man, had not even allowed him to think that maybe one day she would. What made him so convinced that he was waiting ‘for what is never’? Who was this man? He was from Dard-e-Dil or the regions around it, else why would he have started the letter with the formal greeting and respectful address: Huzoor! Aadaab! Unless Taimur taught him that …

  Perhaps he was Taimur’s servant.

  ‘Servant?’ Sameer said, when I propounded this theory to him a few evenings later. He had picked me up on his way home from the bank and we’d driven the five minutes from my house to Clifton beach to sit on the sea wall and eat roasted corn sprinkled with red-chilli powder and lemon juice, and to watch the grey, wind-whipped waves of the monsoon season leap at the seagulls in the distance. ‘Look around you.’ Sameer pointed to the crowds around the sea wall. A large section of Karachi had been hit by a power failure and the beach was the best place to escape from the heat. Whole families were out; vans that should have held no more than nine people were disgorging groups of fifteen or sixteen on to the cement pavement where, in addition to the bhutawallah whom Sameer and I had come to patronize, there were cold-drink sellers and chaatwallahs and a man with a tray of sweets hanging around his neck, who chanted, ‘Cheeng-gum, chaaklait, bubbly-gum.’ Other than the families, there were men strolling hand in hand, young couples sitting close together but not touching, and a woman in sneakers and a shalwar-kameez, walking at a great pace which she broke off every couple of minutes to untangle the wires of her Walkman’s headset. Between my jeans and the black burkha of the woman climbing gingerly down the rocks to the sand beneath, between Sameer’s pin-striped shirt with French cuffs and the bright pink kameez of the man selling kites, there was a whole range of styles and colours and materials.