Salt and Saffron

by Kamila Shamsie

  In Book VIII of The Odyssey a bard at the court of King Alcinous entertains the assembly with tales of the crafty Odysseus, hero of the Trojan war, beloved of the grey-eyed goddess, wanderer in search of a way home. Before the bard has finished his tale a stranger weeps and is asked to identify himself. He says, ‘Behold Odysseus!’

  Imagine how the bard must have felt to see before him that legendary figure whose name was more familiar on his tongue than the names of his own children. Imagine that, and you might begin to understand how I felt when I saw Sulaiman. I had always assumed that he was, like Taimur and Akbar, a man from another age, mythical, our lives not destined to overlap. His presence, just feet from me, had to be a trick or an apparition. How could he be alive when his brothers had been dead so long?

  ‘Look at you.’ His voice was strangely familiar; I had heard something like it many times when Aba imitated his own father’s voice with all its velvety softness. He propped his cane against a chair and sat down on Dadi’s bed. ‘Look at you. I thought I never would.’

  Dadi’s hands trembled across his face. She touched a white scar at the corner of his mouth. That was where Akbar had punched him so many years ago. She clenched her hands and sat back. ‘Why now?’

  ‘Because we’re dying. We can’t rely on tomorrows.’

  Dadi patted her hair. ‘You could have waited for one more tomorrow. I look quite good for my age, you know, when I have a little time to get dressed and put on some make-up.’

  Sulaiman laughed. I liked his laugh; it hinted at a vast capacity for delight. ‘The vanity of Abida. Still unchecked.’

  ‘The same can’t be said of the Naz of Abida.’

  ‘No one has ever had more right to Naz than you.’

  Dadi patted his hands. ‘Where shall we begin? Not with apologies.’

  ‘No, never with that. With an answer to your question. Why now? Because I was just in London, where my charming great-niece, Rehana, introduced me to my even more charming great-niece, Samia, and both of them then proceeded to give me an absolute earful for my stubbornness, called up a travel agent, and gave me your address. They had everything organized, from connections at the visa office to a car driven by Meher’s grandson waiting for me at Karachi airport. Poor Mohommed nearly fainted when he saw me.’

  Dadi waved her hands. ‘Those details can wait. Tell me about you, Sulaiman. Tell me about, oh, everything. You have children? Grandchildren?’

  Sulaiman touched her knee. ‘Abida, did he hate me to the end?’

  ‘So you know he died.’

  ‘Yes. I heard about it just weeks after it happened. Someone who knew someone who knew someone in Karachi told me. Tried to find Taimur after that, but nothing. Then I heard that his daughter was here and that Taimur, too, was dead.’

  ‘Sulaiman, that someone in Karachi was me. I saw to it that you were notified. I was sure you would come. I was sure at the very least you would write.’

  ‘I was sure you would write. Besides, it was nineteen seventy-one. There was a war on. And after that, as I said, you keep waiting for tomorrow. Did Akbar hate me to the end?’

  ‘Your name, and Taimur’s, were the last words on his lips.’

  I think he knew she was lying. He looked at her as if to say that Akbar’s last words couldn’t possibly have been about anyone other than her.

  ‘Abida, there’s something I should have told you long ago. Something about Taimur.’

  What he told her was this: when Abida and Meher’s parents returned to Dard-e-Dil in 1938, after a year of living in Delhi, Akbar and Taimur and Sulaiman took one look at their childhood playmate, the erstwhile tomboy Abida, and did a triple take. The other girl-cousins had become women at the ages of fifteen or sixteen (in Baji’s case, closer to fourteen), but Abida had bided her time, waiting for a moment when her transformation could be extraordinary. And it was. The wonder of it, Sulaiman said, was not that Taimur and Akbar had fallen in love with her, but that he hadn’t. Perhaps, he said, he had, but he kept it buried because right from the start he saw that if she were to make a choice between the three of them she’d have no difficulty in reducing the list to two.

  (‘You always had that edge of insecurity,’ Dadi said, when he mentioned that. ‘You were the one who held yourself away, starting the day we got back from Delhi. I wasn’t even sure you liked me any more.’)

  That Taimur was in love with Abida was easy for anyone to see. He turned cartwheels in the garden, sang ghazals of longing, offered to be twelfth man in cricket matches so that he could sit beside her among the spectators. But Akbar’s love was a more brooding thing, though that may simply have been because, except on that day he hit Sulaiman and then hit him again, he could always foresee consequences.

  Sulaiman came upon Akbar one day, slumped at the wheel of their father’s Daimler, on the road between Dadi’s house and the palace. Sulaiman dismounted his horse and got into the passenger seat.

  ‘Rotten luck,’ Akbar said. ‘I suppose I should be happy for him.’ He handed Sulaiman a piece of paper. ‘Found this on the path. Abida’s handwriting.’

  She’d written Taimur’s name all across the page, in Urdu.

  ‘So that’s that,’ Akbar said. ‘Oh, well. Better this way. No long drawn-out rivalry. Not as though this is a surprise. How could anyone choose anyone over that brother of ours?’

  ‘Sorry,’ was all Sulaiman could think of to say.

  Akbar closed his eyes and leant back in the seat. ‘Abida.’

  Sulaiman got out, walked around to the driver’s side, pushed his brother over to the passenger seat, and drove him home, the horse cantering after them.

  The next day he saw Taimur, sitting on an old garden swing, looking forlorn.

  ‘What?’ Sulaiman said.

  Taimur looked up. ‘I overheard Meher talking to HH.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Hard to imagine Meher and Binky having anything to say to each other. Were they discussing affairs of state?’

  ‘Affairs of the heart. She thinks Akbar’s so down today because he’s in love. With Abida. Is he?’

  Taimur’s obliviousness to his brother’s feelings shocked Sulaiman. ‘What if he is?’

  Taimur kicked the ground. ‘If he is and I haven’t seen it then maybe there are other things I haven’t seen. Maybe she’s in love with him.’

  Sulaiman knew right then that the whole matter had to be straightened out as quickly as possible. ‘She’s not. She is in love, but not with Akbar. And Akbar knows it. She’s in love with someone else. Wait here, I’ll bring you written proof. In her own hand.’ And off he went to find the paper which Akbar had crumpled up and tossed in the back of the car the day before.

  It was Sulaiman’s need for the dramatic gesture which did it. He couldn’t just say, ‘She loves you, Taimur.’ He had to go and find the paper, had to give Taimur those moments of suspense, had to see Taimur’s face when the suspense was over. But how can we blame Sulaiman for not anticipating what would happen next? Who could have? Taimur saw Sulaiman rush off, saw him run into Abida on his way to the car, saw her put an arm on Sulaiman’s sleeve, and leapt to a conclusion: Abida had written Sulaiman a love letter.

  ‘That’s why he left,’ Sulaiman told Dadi as the moon angled its rays on to her bed, creating the illusion that she and Sulaiman were still young and raven-haired, the moonlight alone responsible for the silvered quality of their manes. ‘He was gone before I returned. He thought you loved me.’

  ‘But, the other woman?’ Dadi gasped.

  ‘What other woman?’

  ‘The one he took the ring for. The one who was the reason for that letter he wrote when he left. There had to be truth in the letter, there had to.’

  ‘More truth than we cared to acknowledge. He wrote that because he was angry with Akbar and me. With me because he thought you loved me. With Akbar because Akbar loved you but seemed to have found a way to live without being loved by you, a thing Taimur knew he couldn’t do. So he wrote in anger, but also in truth. The
re was truth to what he said about Akbar and me. And also – Abida, he was eighteen – he knew that letter was the one way of angering the whole family sufficiently to keep us from searching for him.’

  ‘But Sulaiman, the ring.’

  Sulaiman reached into his pocket. ‘I went to London thinking I’d sell this.’ I knew what was in that little velvet box even before he opened it. Dadi sighed, a woman past surprises now that this had happened. She touched the tip of a finger to the emerald. ‘Explain this to me, Sulaiman.’

  Taimur took the ring with him because he was eighteen and broken-hearted, and that combination often leads to a desire for symbolic gestures. He took the ring so that Sulaiman would never place it on Abida’s finger. Sulaiman knew all this because Taimur had told him so.

  ‘So he really did come back?’ Dadi said. I had pressed myself against the wall by now, each muscle constricted into a mass of tension. Each muscle, especially the heart.

  Sulaiman pressed her hand in apology and nodded. It was just after Abida and Akbar were married. Sulaiman was in his mother’s room, watching her sleep, trying not to notice how like a claw her hand had become, and Taimur opened the window and hopped in. Even in the dark Sulaiman knew it was him. He was taller and broader and the English suits he had favoured were replaced by a long achkan over churidar pyjamas, but his smile was still pure Taimur.

  ‘It’s your idiot brother, Sully,’ he said. He said it in English.

  Sulaiman held him and thought, Everything will be all right now.

  ‘Can’t let a girl get between us, can we?’ Taimur said, when he finally pulled away.

  Sulaiman had long ago guessed why Taimur had left; for a moment he hesitated, and then he told Taimur the truth. Taimur tried to shrug, opened his mouth, closed it again. ‘She loved me?’ he said at length. Sulaiman nodded. ‘Does she still?’

  ‘She married Akbar.’

  ‘Oh,’ Taimur said. ‘I see.’

  He went over to his sleeping mother and held her hand. A long time went by.

  Summer had ended and the breeze was cool enough for some members of the family to sleep with their windows closed. Sulaiman was about to shut the window which Taimur had flung open, when he heard the window in the room next door creak open.

  ‘Look at that moon, Akbar,’ Abida exulted.

  Taimur got up and walked over to the window. If he leant out, just a little, she would see him. He didn’t lean out. He pushed the window closed and rested his head against the wall. ‘God help me,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay. I thought I could. But I can’t.’

  ‘Taimur?’ It was their mother waking up.

  He stayed by her side all night, telling her all the memories he had of her from his childhood. She seemed to derive greater comfort from that than from any of the medicines, or prayers, or tales of miracle cures with which she’d been regaled in the preceding months. But he barely looked at his brother, and Sulaiman knew that as Taimur sat there his rage was mounting against his brother for allowing him to misinterpret his words so completely. At one point Sulaiman tried to leave, but Taimur was up and barring his way to the door before he was halfway across the room. ‘If you leave to call Akbar I’ll be gone before you knock on his door.’

  But in the early morning, when their mother finally fell asleep, Taimur turned to Sulaiman with an expression of sorrow. ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘And Akbar’s a far finer chap than I. Don’t tell him I was here; it’ll break his heart. And never a word to Abida about any of this.’

  ‘Where will you go? Where have you been?’

  ‘Far away. It doesn’t matter. I’m well, that’s all you need to know. Goodbye, Sully.’

  Sulaiman would have done anything to make Taimur stay, so he tried the most unforgivable thing he could think of. ‘She might still love you,’ he said.

  Taimur smiled. ‘Yes, I think she might. Maybe I’d stay if we weren’t not-quites; maybe if we hadn’t grown up believing ourselves capable of bringing about something terrible. Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Because I, and you, and she, we all love Akbar. Here.’ He pressed a velvet box into Sulaiman’s hands. ‘I have no right to this. One day you might even know what to do with it. I certainly don’t. Tell Mama I love her.’

  ‘You already did that.’

  Smiling, Taimur left.

  When Sulaiman finished talking I was close to tears, but Dadi did something entirely unexpected. She laughed.

  ‘Sulaiman, that’s sheer melodrama. My life! Such passion, such tragic miscommunication, such revelations in the aftermath of the main action. It’s too absurd.’ She took the ring from Sulaiman and weighed it in her hand. ‘It would have broken my finger.’

  ‘No regrets?’

  ‘To be loved by two such brothers. That’s a rare gift. You’ve given me back my Naz.’

  ‘Make that three such brothers,’ Sulaiman said, and kissed her hand. ‘Just to increase the melodrama.’

  Dadi laughed again, and then she turned to me. ‘Aliya, did the thought that flashed through my mind flash through yours?’

  ‘Which thought is that?’ I felt strangely shy in the presence of my great-uncle, who had only just seen me.

  ‘Mariam’s mother might well have been high-born.’

  ‘No, Dadi. I didn’t think that at all.’

  ‘Good. That’s a start.’

  Sulaiman stood up. ‘I wonder who she was. The wife. Whoever she was, she was much later. Samia told me Taimur’s daughter – Mariam – is much younger than your children and mine. He must have waited a long time before he was ready to love someone else.’

  ‘Or maybe he and his wife were so happy together, just the two of them, that it was many years before they felt they could allow anyone else into their lives. Why not that, Sulaiman? Let’s love Taimur enough to believe that. Aliya, look!’

  I turned to look out of the window, but the thudding sound against the glass had already told me what she was staring at.

  ‘Take me to the balcony, Sully.’ He lifted her up in his arms, that man nearing eighty, and I opened the glass door to let them out. The sound of the rain beating down was almost deafening, but though I couldn’t hear I could see her telling him to put her down.

  Sulaiman slid the door between us closed so that the rain wouldn’t whip into the room, and then it really was as though they were two characters in a movie and I was watching them with the sound turned off. What an evening, what an evening! Taimur left because he loved Abida, and stayed away because he loved Akbar. He went to Turkey. Yes, he did. He went to Turkey and looked up his uncle’s Turkish friend – the Dard-e-Dil uncle who went to Turkey talked often of his Turkish friends. Through these friends he found employment, occupation. Perhaps he taught Urdu somewhere. Or English. Or Persian. Then he met the mechanic from Dard-e-Dil, and together they talked of their ancestral home. One day the mechanic told him that Meher was in Greece, and Taimur knew at last he had found a way to receive word of all the Dard-e-Dils without any of them receiving word of him. And how did Mariam and Masood’s story fit into this? And how did mine?

  I looked out on to the balcony again. She’d waited almost sixty years for this story, Dadi had. How different would her life have been if she had heard it earlier? These stories, this salt … How could we ever exert ourselves to the simplest physical action when all our lives were so dependent on this seemingly passive act of listening?

  I stepped out on to the balcony. Dadi raised her hands to the skies, her nightgown clinging to her frame, and inhaled the heady scent of parched mud gulping water. As I watched her I knew that the monsoon rains would wash away streets, blow down electricity wires, create stagnant pools of water prime for mosquito orgies, but for those few minutes there seemed no price too high for the sight of rainwater eddying bougainvillea flowers around Abida’s bare feet.

  ‘Sulaiman!’ she cried out above the noise. ‘I’m so glad I’ve had my life.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Of course I was happy that Su
laiman was in Karachi. To watch him with Dadi and Meher was like watching a dance in which a group of three would become two against one, and then three again, and then a different two against one, but always back to three again. Sulaiman and Abida teased Meher about being the youngest, the one who always wanted to act older than her age (‘What on earth were you doing talking to Binky about Akbar’s broken heart?’ Dadi said, but she laughed as she said it); Sulaiman and Meher teased Abida about her regal airs (‘Remember when Abida got stuck up that tree with the cradling branches, and instead of admitting she was stuck she said, “I am not in the habit of descending.” How old were you, Abbie? Eight?’); and Meher and Abida teased Sulaiman about the folly of men (‘Well, of course that ended in divorce. You only married her because she did that thing with her lips, Sulaiman. That sensuous, snarling thing. Remember when Ama, with an air of pious innocence, asked her whether her mouth had those muscle spasms often?’).

  How could I not be happy?

  But every day that he was there I’d hear some mention of Taimur and remember: I had understood Taimur’s story, but I was no closer to understanding Mariam’s. Perhaps all the explanations I had thought of were true. Perhaps none of them were. But if I were to retell her story, with what would I fill the gaps between all I knew and all there was to know?

  That may have been what I was thinking about that July evening when I lay in my garden, mosquito coils around me, watching a candle flame bobbing past the windows of the house as Ami searched frantically for something – Ami always seemed to feel the need to search frantically for something when we were swallowed up by the darkness brought on by a power failure.

  ‘I’ve brought you a surprise,’ Sameer said, turning the corner of the garden and coming into view. ‘I think I should start a limo service between the airport and town.’ So saying, he disappeared into Mariam’s old room through the French doors and promptly tripped over something. I heard the thud as he fell. Ami came running. ‘Oh good, you’ve found the box. But why are you lying down, Sammy?’

  In that moment a bunch of thin, green, stringlike things came flying towards me and fell, several feet from where I lay. I rolled over to them.