Stems.
‘Khaleel?’
He stepped forward into the garden. ‘If the mountain won’t go to Liaquatabad,’ he said, and squatted beside me.
I turned on to my side to look at him and he lowered his knees to the ground. ‘Hey,’ he said, and I wanted to cup my hand against his larynx and feel the muscles move beneath my palm as he spoke.
‘Hey yourself.’ There was a tiny cut at the base of his index finger, giving me all the excuse I needed to touch. You know what it felt like, the touch. Don’t you? At the very least you’ve imagined it.
‘I have something for you in Sameer’s car.’ I wanted to tell him it could wait, whatever it was. But he was gone already.
I touched the grass on which he’d been sitting. He was here. He was actually here and there was no doubt in my mind now … no, not my mind … there was no doubt now in any part of me that he could break my heart. What a blessing. All the active-passive listening I’d ever done in my life had brought me to this moment, to this darkness in which I awaited light, knowing it was time for me to don my costume, make my entrance and speak the words. Which words I didn’t yet know, but they were, they would become, part of someone else’s story, one generation, or two, or three down the line.
The lights flared back on and I went inside. Sameer was in my parents’ room, the door ajar.
‘But do we know anything about him? What’s his family?’
Sameer ignored Aba’s second question. ‘We know Samia likes him. And Rehana Apa, whose opinion you’d trust completely if you knew her. He’s been to Baji’s for tea. She invited him to return. What more do you need to know?’
I entered the room. ‘He’s staying with his family in Liaquatabad.’
Aba’s eyes rose sharply at this, and even Ami looked unhappy.
‘And he’s brought over dinner, so you can’t say I have to whisk him away before we’ve eaten,’ Sameer added.
‘Dinner? Why? Does he think we’re not capable of feeding our guests?’
‘Nasser, now stop being annoying. It’s a thoughtful gesture, although, of course, he could just be trying to get into our good books. I didn’t really mean that, Aliya. Where is he?’
‘Gone to get something from the car.’
‘Probably the food,’ Sameer said. ‘I’ll help him. Can I just microwave it and tell Wasim we’re eating right away? I’m starving.’
Sameer was so good with exits.
‘This is the boy from the plane, is it?’ Ami asked.
‘What boy from the plane?’ Aba looked wounded.
‘Girltalk, Nasser. You didn’t mention the Liaquatabad part, Aliya. Why not?’
‘Why do you think?’ I blew out the candle which was flickering, forgotten, in the blaze of the lamplight around the room. We had reached an impasse.
Or perhaps not. ‘You know you’re in Karachi now.’ That was Aba, of course. It had taken him several seconds to think up this line. ‘There are certain rules you have to live by. Just as a mark of respect to others.’
I knew that. I knew that I had never admired people who claimed to be non-conformist but were really just self-absorbed. I knew that it was all I could do at that moment to stay in my parents’ company with Khaleel at a short sprint’s distance.
‘I hope he hasn’t brought burgers for dinner.’ Ami didn’t meet my eye as she said this.
‘Food’s on,’ Sameer said, poking his head in. ‘And this is Khaleel.’ Khaleel shook hands with my father, nodded at Ami, smiled. I could see them thinking it was clear that I’d fallen for his good looks alone.
‘Are you having power failures in Liaquatabad, too?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I came straight from the air—’ He bit off the last syllable and looked at me to see if he’d committed a faux pas.
Why hadn’t Sameer just picked me up and driven us to a restaurant?
‘That smell,’ Ami said.
Now what? Don’t tell me he wasn’t using deodorant.
‘Good God!’ Aba said.
I stepped out into the dining area, and then it hit me, too.
A smell that was not so much a smell as a miracle. Different strands of smells coming together like an orchestral symphony. Aba moved to one side, and my eyes helped my nose to pick up each nuance of detail. There on the table: biryani, timatar cut, bihari kebabs, aloo panjabi, raita. But these names don’t tell you enough. They need a prefix: Masoodian.
I grabbed on to Khaleel’s arm.
‘Quite a journey your cousins sent me on. Said they’d arrange my ticket, and next thing I knew I was travelling via Istanbul. Some guy met me at the airport – said he knew your great-aunt – and handed me this package of food. If Sameer hadn’t come to the airport in Karachi, with a list of his connections poised to leap off his tongue in a swallow dive, those customs guys would have confiscated the package for sure. You could see their mouths watering at the thought of it.’
‘Do you know …’ I could barely form the words. ‘Where it came from?’
‘A restaurant. Your great-aunt’s friend translated the name for me. The Garrulous Gourmet.’
Somehow we made it to the table, and sat down. What can I say about the food? That nothing had ever tasted better. That words reveal their inadequacy every time I try to describe it. That sometimes it seemed we were all eating faster than was possible and other times so slowly it defied all the laws of motion. That the grains of rice in the biryani were swollen but separate; that the saffron had been sprinkled with a hand that knew the thin line between stinting and showing-off; that the chicken was so succulent you had to cry out loud. I could tell you about the aloo panjabi with its potatoes that reminded us why a nation could live on potatoes and die without them; I could mention its spices, so perfectly balanced you could almost see the mustard seed leaning on the fenugreek, the cumin poised on the dried chillies. If that’s not enough let me try to evoke the bihari kebabs, the meat so tender it defied all attempts to make it linger in our mouths, and yet it lingered on our tastebuds before graciously making way for all the other tastes worthy of attention. And, while I can still think of it without falling to my knees in thanks, allow me to mention the timatar cut, which takes the familiar tomato and transports it into a world inhabited by ginger, garlic, chillies, green and red, karri pattas, and the sourness of tamarind. To eat that meal was to eat centuries of artistry, refined in kitchens across the subcontinent. The flavours we tasted were not just the flavours in the food, but also the flavours the food reminded us of and the flavours the food remembered.
But saying all of this is not enough. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam in a kitchen, a vast glorious kitchen, brushing saffron off her husband’s neck and dusting it on to her own lips. I saw Mariam listing names of vegetables – mooli, loki, bhindi, shaljam, gajjar, mattar, phool gobi – as though the list were a ghazal, while Masood kneaded mangos to pulp in a bowl which suddenly had four hands, not two, intertwining and pressing. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam older and happy.
Khaleel said something to make Aba laugh and I saw Ami lean forward to Khaleel and speak, speak without stopping until she had to stop because Aba threatened to eat the last piece of chicken on her plate since she didn’t seem interested in it. Khaleel looked at me and I wanted everyone else to disappear. But in some sense they had disappeared while he was looking at me in that way he had of looking at me.
When the meal was finally over – the plates not licked clean, not entirely, because that would have meant that the cook miscalculated quantities, but nearly so, so very nearly so – Khaleel picked up the last grain of rice on his plate and, with everyone else distracted by satiation, he placed the wonder of it all on my tongue.
‘I’m stopping in Istanbul again on my way back to America,’ he said softly. ‘Right before the semester begins. You’re flying out around that time, too, aren’t you?’
Ami turned to ask him something and I was left thinking of all that his question implied. Was it merely coinciden
ce, the timing of all that had happened? Or would I never have asked the questions I asked if I hadn’t met Khaleel? How can we ever know why one thing happens and not another? Perhaps, I thought, watching the curve of his neck as he laughed, perhaps when we tell our stories our stories tell on us; they reveal what is and what is not explicable in our lives. In all those years Mariam lived with us I never asked that she be explained to me. That she was who she was was enough. The answers I’d been searching for so desperately since then all stemmed back to one question. The question of why she loved Masood. I had reasons now, I had explanations for every thing she’d ever not said, for everything she’d done. Her mother’s social status; a desire to subvert hierarchies; a search for answers about why Taimur left; her final conversation with the man whom she had never considered loving (who might even have been Meher Dadi’s friend from Turkey, or his son). All these were answers and together they might even form a whole. Some of them might even be more than conjecture. But none of this tells me why she loved Masood. Khaleel rested a hand on the back on my chair, his palm pressing against the small of my back in the spaces formed by the latticed design of the wood. No, none of this answered the unanswerable question.
The real question, the one that only I could answer, was this: Was I willing to take that first step? To take Khaleel with me into a room full of relatives and say, ‘Mariam and I are not-quite-twins. This man, I don’t know what will happen between us, but I think he’s worth the risk of heartbreak. He’s worth it not because of Masood, not because of Taimur, not because of Taj or Dadi or anyone, but because. Just because. Why do you call us not-quite-twins as though we are something incomplete? More than twins, say that. Or better still, say fallible, like you; capable of error, like you; given to passion, like you.’ This was a speech that I’d prepared, rehearsed in front of the mirror. Could I ever make it when even the best of the Dard-e-Dils, even my parents, had quailed when he walked in?
My mother said something I didn’t catch and Khaleel replied, ‘When our hearts live, we are more than ourselves.’
I stood up and walked over to the window. My parents took this as some sort of signal. They told Khaleel there was no need to clear the table, Wasim would do that, then said goodbye and retreated to their room. Sameer had disappeared somewhere. Wasim took a stack of plates and vanished into the kitchen. There was such an air of familiarity about the silence in the room. I looked out at Mariam’s hibiscus branch. The glass between it and me was both a window and a mirror. I reached out to run my fingers through the air, parallel to the branch. Khaleel bent down to pick up a plate. My fingers traced the curve of his spine.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank: Saman, for the moment of fear; my parents, for double-checking facts and pointing out errors; my grandmother, Begum Jahanara Habibullah, whose memoirs were a wonderful source of information about courtly life; Marianna Karim, for helping with the historical details (the errors are all mine); Aamer Hussein, for correcting my Urdu, and other such helpful matters; the Haiders, for the lizard stories; Elizabeth Porto, for her insight; and Margaret Halton, for making this into a better book.
A Note on the Author
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Pakistan. She is the author of In the City by the Sea, Kartography (shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Salt and Saffron, Broken Verses and, most recently, Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Orange Prize. In 1999 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and in 2004 the Patras Bokhari Award – both awarded by the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Kamila Shamsie lives in London.
By the Same Author
In the City by the Sea
Kartography
Broken Verses
Burnt Shadows
Copyright © 2000 by Kamila Shamsie
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Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
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eISBN: 978-1-62040-591-8
First U.S. Edition 2000
The electronic edition published in June 2013
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Salt and Saffron Page 21