Broken Verses (20 page)

At second glance, I realized I wasn't looking at the old photograph but more recent pictures re-creating that scene.

‘Bloody fool,' Ed grumbled. ‘We need these for print ads that are supposed to start running next week for
Boond
, but just look at them.' He gestured angrily, and now I saw that the photographs weren't reproductions of a single image, but a series of shots nearly indistinguishable from one another.

‘They look fine to me.'

‘They're not fine at all. Look here, at this shadow, and here, there's too much curtain, and here, her hands just look old—' He stopped and looked up at me. ‘I'm sorry. I seem obsessive, I know. It's all those years of working in advertising in New York. I've developed an eye for detail that is going to drive me crazy here.' He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes for an instant longer than a blink. ‘God, I miss it. New York. That damn city.'

At a student art exhibition I had once seen an installation called ‘Shehnaz Saeed's Voice'. It was a replica larynx, with a pinhole at one end. When you placed your eye against the pinhole, some process of magnification allowed you to read a series of words inside the larynx, arranged in the space between two vocal cords—each word apparently written using the materials that the words themselves signified. Honey. Feather. Gravel. Velvet. Tears. Broken glass. As Ed spoke of New York, I almost believed that if I could direct a ray of sunlight towards his larynx it would shine through a pinhole and show me the proof that he was wholly his mother's son.

It was to continue hearing that timbre of voice that I asked, ‘What do you miss about it?' as I sat down across from him.

He leaned forward and gathered up the photographs into a pile. ‘What do I miss? Sushi.' He smiled and shrugged, as though to say the question could only be answered entirely unsatisfactorily. But I gave him a look to say, keep going. ‘Pizza,' he offered. Then he exhaled and lifted his shoulders. ‘The brunch scene. The cabs you can find everywhere, except when it rains. I miss talking politics in Urdu with cab drivers who are always left wing, and I miss being able to have anything delivered, free of charge—from dry-cleaning and saline solution to food from any part of the world. The Korean deli round the corner from me, particularly, which delivers ice-cream at four in the morning. What else? So much. Knicks games, and that New York attitude, and the way neighbourhoods keep changing. The Trinidadian steel drummer at the 42nd Street subway station, and the Bangladeshi corner cigar-ettewalla who calls to me in the early morning as I pass by him on my way home from a night on the town. And the way the city clears out on long weekends. I miss snow in the West Village, and summers, New York summers, I miss those maybe most of all.'

As he was speaking, I thought at first that his look of pain resembled that of a man considering the end of a passionate love affair and then I realized, no, this is how the survivors of lost lands must look when they recall their former homes—Pompeii in ashes, Atlantis under the sea. ‘Why leave, Ed? Really. Were the inconveniences so great that you couldn't live around them? I mean, there are inconveniences aplenty round here, though of a different variety. And surely your yuppie persona protected you somewhat?'

‘I was made to feel powerless,' he said flatly.

‘Is that really so terrible? I've always thought that the moment when Prospero renounces power at the end of
The Tempest
is when he's most powerful. The power to renounce power. What are those great Rilke lines about your friends, the scary angels?'

‘“They serenely disdain to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”'

‘Yes.'

‘Don't look so surprised, Aasmaani. Even yuppies read poetry sometimes. Besides, the point is, I never renounced power. I just woke and realized I didn't have it, that's all.'

‘So what? Until then you believed you could live the American dream—become a billionaire, donate generously to a political party and find yourself dictating government policy?'

‘No, Miss Cynical. I believed I had the power to live freely, with no one bothering me if I only stayed within the law. The FBI knock on your door at two a.m. to ask about the flying lesson you took five years ago, and that illusion shatters in an instant. Listen, you want to know why I came back to the world of television after trying to live outside my mother's shadow? Because my mother's shadow is powerful. Because I walked into the CEO's office and said, “My mother might act if I ask her to,” and now I'm all but running the place.'

‘Karachi may not be New York but there are things to love around here as well.'

‘People to love, certainly,' he said, looking up at me and then down at the photographs and then off to one side. Before I could think of something to say to that he was looking up again, smiling. ‘I never did tell you the funny anecdote I promised yesterday. I was driving home from STD a couple of days ago—and you know I have to go past the police checkpoint near the US Consul General's house, right? So, as per usual, the police pull me over, write down my licence number and ask for my name—'

‘You're right. That's a funny story.'

‘I haven't got to the punchline.'

‘Of course you have. You left your great life in New York because you disliked all the suspicion and prejudice, and you return to Karachi only to find that on a daily basis you get pulled over by the police who want to make sure you aren't endangering the safety of the US Consul General. How is that anything but the punchline?'

‘I see your point. Thanks, you just killed my joke.'

‘Oh, go on. What's your version of the punchline?'

‘The police pulled me over, asked my name, and I thought, why do I always give them my real name? Let me lie. Let that be my attempt at resisting this nonsense. So I said, “Agamemnon.” And the first policeman looked at me as though he was about to take me in for questioning but the second one said to him, “Write it down. Hurry up. Agha Memon.”'

I laughed. He leaned further forward and rested his hand on mine.

And it was back again. The fizz. ‘Hey,' I said, ‘it's Ramzan. We're supposed to keep our thoughts pure until sunset. And while we're on the subject, don't stick bottles of wine on my office door.'

He lifted my hand and touched his lips to my knuckles.

I had almost forgotten how this felt; this anticipation, this drowning.

At length, he let go of my hand, stood up and walked towards the window. He jiggled the strings that controlled the workings of the blinds and held his palm against the windowpane as though to absorb its heat though it was far from cold in his office. Looking out at the garden with its pink-blossomed trees he said, ‘Aasmaani, I don't believe the Poet wrote those pages. I think it's all some kind of hoax.'

‘I think so, too.'

He turned to face me. ‘Oh, thank God. I was afraid you'd actually started to believe...'

‘No, no.' I could feel embarrassment spread across my cheeks.

‘It's just, you know, it's so obviously, well, ridiculous, to start with. But also, everything you read to me. It's exactly what someone would write if it were a hoax, isn't it? I mean, if someone was trying to convince you that it was all real that's just how they'd do it. Drop in references to the peach allergy, dredge up a few old memories, throw in some clues about his present situation, do a quick summary of some aspect of all the intervening years. It's all too neat.'

‘You knew he had a peach allergy?'

‘Sorry?'

‘The way you said “the peach allergy” as though it was something you know about.'

‘Well, yeah.' He came closer to me. ‘Once when your mother was over at my mother's place for dinner, there were peaches in the fruit-bowl. And Samina said that when the Poet was alive she never bought peaches. She said, “Now I can buy all the peaches I want, but as silver linings go that's pewter.”'

I could hear her voice saying it. Her voice as it became when the Poet died—all hesitancy and brittleness.

Ed sat down on the edge of the desk, his shadow falling on me. ‘Do you mind if I talk about her?'

I shook my head.

‘Samina,' he said again, as though he hadn't said her name aloud in a long time and was surprised by the sound of it. ‘She always insisted I call her that instead of “Aunty”. I used to see her and the Poet, now and then, when I was growing up. Not often. Maybe a handful of times. But after the Poet died, she and my mother...' He stopped, unbuttoned and rebuttoned the cuff of his sleeve. ‘She moves in and out of your features, you know? It's uncanny.'

‘She and your mother.'

‘What?'

‘You were saying: after the Poet died...'

‘Right. She and my mother became close, so she'd come by quite often. I used to drop in sometimes to see my mother and find her there. I wasn't living at home then—was at IBA, sharing a flat with a couple of guys near the campus.'

‘Your delinquent university years. I remember hearing about them.'

‘From your mother?'

‘No. Just generally. When your mother quit acting.'

He stood up, rocking the desk. ‘You mean when they all said she gave up the great passion of her life because of me. Because I was such a disaster she wanted to make sure she didn't make the same mistakes with the children from her second marriage.'

‘Ed.' I touched his sleeve. ‘I know how people in this town talk.'

‘Yes. Of course you do.' He sat down again, closer this time. ‘It was so unfair the way people treated your mother. All those years, she was only ever with the Poet. But because they didn't get married, and because they never really tried to hide the nature of their relationship, people thought they could say terrible things about her, and turn their backs on her when the Poet died.' He shook his head. ‘All those people, married people, having their affairs, and no one says anything or treats them any differently as long as they keep it secret. As though there's some virtue in that. As though discretion and lies are the same thing. Your mother and the Poet, they were discreet. If you saw them in public and you wanted to believe they were just close friends and neighbours, hell, you could believe that.'

‘Close friends and neighbours don't follow one another into exile.'

He waved his hand. ‘There was just something so honest about their relationship. That's all I'm saying. They didn't flaunt it, but they didn't lie and sneak around either. They didn't deceive anyone. And you're the proof of that. You, growing up here, where everything goes on behind closed doors and yet everyone acts outraged about the tiniest suggestion of impropriety. You're not embarrassed or angry that your mother was involved with a man she never married. You don't hold it against her.'

‘I loved him before I knew the meaning of the term “social convention”, Ed. It's just that simple.'

‘You never had to find out she was lying to you. It's that simple.'

Shehnaz Saeed had always confounded the purveyors of gossip by keeping her private life utterly private. Through all the years she was in the public eye there was never even a whiff of scandal attached to her. So, when she married her second husband, everyone was startled. He had been part of her wide social circle, but no one imagined he was anything more than that. Not even Ed?

‘I remember the first time I saw your mother after the Poet died,' he said. ‘At a supermarket—Paradise, maybe. Somewhere near Bath Island, at any rate.'

She never got used to thinking of the neighbourhood around my father's house as her neighbourhood. On those rare occasions when she did go out to shop it would always be back to her old haunts, the places where she looked on in exasperation as Omi took more time than seemed possible choosing the perfect watermelon, the ideal selection of green chillies. Even when it came to toothpaste and shampoo and soap, Omi would regard all the possible options as though being asked to locate a talisman, never choosing the same brand twice in a row.

‘She looked so lost. And there were these two women staring at her and obviously talking about her. Samina was ignoring them. But then one of the women said, out loud, “Well, you can't expect people to treat you like a widow if you haven't been a wife.”'

I folded my arms, pressed them against my chest. ‘What did you do?'

‘I went up to her, held her like this,' he placed his hands on my arms halfway between shoulder and elbow, ‘kissed her on both cheeks and said how sorry I was. She seemed so grateful and surprised. There's nothing more unfair than your mother being placed in a position where she should have been grateful that some nineteen-year-old idiot didn't cut her dead when he saw her.'

I could love you, I thought.

He moved his hands slowly up to my shoulders. ‘So, tell me something. What do you believe happened to your mother fourteen years ago?'

I leaned back, tipping my chair on to two legs, so that he had to let go of me to avoid toppling forward. If he had said ‘think' instead of ‘believe' I might even have answered him. But ‘believe'? As though the fact of Mama's continued life was so implausible it could only belong in that realm in which atheists placed God, that realm in which faith and fantasy were synonymous. I could understand his scepticism, it wasn't something I would hold against him. But why did he have to look at me as though he were trying so hard—too hard—to convince me he was ready to double the numbers of this religion to which I alone subscribed, not because he believed the message but because he could not see me walk through the wilderness alone?

Come down to it, Ed was just another one of those men who wanted to fix me and believed that he could.

Take me broken, I wanted to say. But I knew already that in his eyes each one of my breaks would shift from challenge to reproach. Why can't you be fixed by me, he'd want to know. Why aren't I enough? Why do you resist my attempts?