Broken Verses (25 page)

‘Aasmaani! How marvellous!' He pulled up a chair next to me, ignoring my three colleagues from the oil company who were sitting at the table with me. ‘Heard about the new amendments? The reserved seats?'

I dipped a piece of na'an into raita and shrugged. ‘My sister's been babbling on about it. Sixty reserved seats for women in the new parliament.'

‘Right.' He drew his chair closer. ‘So how about it? You want to be one of my party's nominees?'

My colleagues exploded into laughter. We had been discussing the amendments earlier and I had said the great benefit of having a quota of women in parliament was that it would add colour and a sense of fashion to the proceedings.

I spooned chicken ginger on to my plate. He picked up a seekh kabab and waved it in my face. ‘Come on. You had a razor-sharp political mind when you were fourteen. Remember that time your mother and I got arrested...'

‘You mean back in the days when you had integrity?' He bit into the seekh kabab and looked amused. ‘We've all got to work with the system. Now, look. Say yes. Come on. This is your chance to do some good for the nation.'

I took the seekh kabab out of his hand and threw it to the cat which had been prowling nearby. ‘The nation can sod off as far as I'm concerned.'

He clapped his hands. ‘Even better. You're perfectly suited.'

I tried not to get irritated by the sight of my colleagues falling about with laughter at the thought of my entrance on to the political landscape. ‘Right. So the way this works is your party gets to decide which women are suitable candidates. And then, with the fourteenth amendment firmly in place, once we join your party we're not allowed to vote against party lines, so if you decide to pass a law saying “Women are morons” we're legally obligated to vote with you? No thanks.'

‘Well, that's a rather limited view of things.' He picked up another seekh kabab. ‘A minimum of sixty women in the house is bound to affect business in some way or the other, don't you think? This is the chance for you to prove right your mother's theories about how women are the real dynamic and revolutionary force in this nation.'

‘My mother's theories, like the nation, can sod off. And so can you.'

And that was that.

But now, standing in the garden at midnight, listening to everyone around me arguing different gloomy scenarios for the future of the nation, I couldn't help wondering what my mother would think if she turned on a TV one day and saw me sitting in the National Assembly.

What if he comes back and she comes back too, and they leave again and don't tell you where?

 

Who, or what, would I need to be to make her stay this time?

a) member of parliament
b) apolitical quiz show researcher
c) capitalist corporate girl
d) translator of obscure Urdu diaries by day, party animal by night
Answer: this is a trick question. All depends on who she is now
.

 

I walked up to my flat, with an old, too-familiar heaviness tugging at my limbs. It was there the following morning, too, as I reached the studio and made my way to my office, to another day in which Shehnaz Saeed didn't send me more encrypted pages, another day in which Ed didn't call, another day in which I was no closer to knowing anything about where the Poet was and how to get to him.

Someone called my name as I climbed the stairs. I looked down to see an elderly journalist who had recently been hired to fill the spot offered to me as host of the political chat show. He was climbing up the stairs from the basement, wiping pancake make-up off his face.

‘Word's got out about what you've been doing,' he said, as we met on the ground floor.

‘The quiz show?' I said.

He took my elbow and steered me away from Kiran Hilal's team who had just walked out of the ground-floor conference room. The first three episodes of
Boond
had been filmed over the last week, and the STD office was still full of talk about the brilliance of Shehnaz Saeed and the idiocy of the Mistress's Daughter who had declared she couldn't film any romantic sequences before sunset because you're supposed to suppress ‘those feelings' while fasting.

The journalist pulled me into the empty kitchen and turned to face me. ‘There was a reporter at the Archivist's flat when you went there. The Archivist is a big gossip. He told the reporter who you were and which file you were looking at. Then Nasreen Riaz told her cousin, who works on our sports page, that you called her, too, asking about her brother's death. Now everyone at the newspaper office is speculating what you might be after.' He dropped his voice. ‘Listen, you're still young and you might be fooled by the illusion of democracy. But believe me, power is still in the hands of the same old people. Nothing's changed.'

And with that, I was back to the habits of my childhood, looking around to see who was there, and then beckoning the journalist through the door into the back garden, out of range of any listening devices.

‘What do you know that I shouldn't know?' I asked him. Even though we'd barely ever spoken before, I trusted him. Omi used to call him ‘the press corps' voice of conscience'.

He smiled a little at my cloak-and-dagger antics. ‘My guess is the only bugs in the kitchen are of the Osama Bin Roach family.' He grew serious again. ‘But if you're asking me if I know who killed the Poet, I know only as much as everyone does. It's an open secret who those men were, the ones who ransacked his house and burnt his poems. Or, if not who they were, then certainly who they worked for. It was a government agency, Aasmaani, and the people who were involved are quite likely still in positions to know when people start snooping around where they shouldn't be.'

‘So you're not one of those people who believed there was more to the story of his death than simply that the government had him killed?'

He looked at me with interest for the first time. ‘If it wasn't the government, then who?'

I had to admit I had no idea, and then he looked offended, as though I were casting aspersions on his skills as an investigative reporter.

‘There was no reason to point a finger in any direction other than the one in which we couldn't ever publicly point it.'

‘But why? Why should they kill him, after all those years when they didn't? Why not just arrest him again?'

‘Are you really such a child? Don't you know enough by now to know they don't need a reason for killing? You think of it as a big decision, whether or not to take a life. They don't. It's like picking teeth to them. Why shouldn't they do it? Who's going to stop them?' He pointed a finger sternly at me. ‘If you're planning to find out who exactly gave the order and who exactly carried it out, if what you're looking for is a name, don't. I know how these people operate, and believe me, you don't want to find yourself in their radar.'

‘You're the last person I'd expect to hear advising someone to lie low. Can I ask, would you be saying that if I wasn't a woman?'

‘But you are a woman.'

‘So's my mother,' I shot back.

‘I rest my case.'

I opened my mouth to argue, but he straightened his pointing finger into a vertical position to demand an end to the conversation. ‘Keep out of trouble. The Poet and your mother were friends of mine. I owe it to them to tell you what a mistake you'd be making to continue with this madness.'

I remembered all the phone calls from unidentified numbers over the last weeks, the caller hanging up as soon as I answered. When had they started? The day I visited the Archivist, wasn't it? That very evening, in fact.

What surprised me then was not the feeling of panic that made me want to step on to a plane and leave the country as soon as possible, but the exhilaration that accompanied the panic. It was genetic, that exhilaration, and suicidal, too. But for a moment I let it wash over me. By God, I would give them reason to train their radars on me!

And then the exhilaration was gone. Who was ‘them'? Who was behind Omi's captivity? Was it an individual or a group, and what were his or their allegiances and contacts and motives? Whom could I trust?

I looked at the journalist. Was he acting on behalf of my mother and Omi, or someone else entirely in telling me to stop my search for answers?

‘You're right,' I said. ‘It was just a moment of silliness. There won't be any more.'

No, no more pathetic attempts at playing detective. It would get me nowhere. The only person who could give me the answers I needed was Omi. If only he would write again. When would he write again?

It was much later that night, as I was drifting to sleep, that I thought, what if he has written again already? My eyes opened to the faint green glow of an octopus reaching its tentacles towards me. What if Ed told his mother I could read the pages? If she knew I'd been lying to her, why should she continue to send the pages to me? She owed me nothing, after all. She was, Beema had said, a woman who regarded trust as a sacred thing, and I had done nothing from the beginning but deceive her.

I thought, I'll call her first thing in the morning. And then I thought, Ed. I thought of his hand reaching out to mine on the other side of sunlight and how I turned away from him, choosing to see everything between us as evidence of his manipulation. When the truth of it was, all he'd done was show he was just as confused as I was by the coded pages. Over three weeks gone now since that last meeting between us, and I hadn't called to apologize, or to say what was simply true—that I missed him.

So, the following morning, as soon as I got to work, I called him. He must have seen the STD switchboard number on his mobile, because he picked up with the words, ‘For the last time, no. We are not shooting her in soft focus.'

‘Does the camera not love the Mistress as much as the CEO does?' I said. I had to speak loudly to cut through the static. ‘Is that the nightmare in which you are living?'

‘Aasmaani?' He said it hesitantly first and then with a great exuberance, ‘Aasmaani!'

‘Ed? Ed!' I replied, echoing his tone. ‘You know you're going to have to get a new nickname. That one doesn't lend itself to passionate declamation.'

‘Baby,' he said, his voice deepening into a Hollywood drawl. ‘You can call me anything, just so long as you call me.'

‘How's this, then? I'll call you Bogie and you can Bacall me.'

‘Are we having a conversation or writing a song?'

‘Actually, this is me apologizing.'

‘Then this is me accepting your apology with a song in my heart. Should I sing it for you?'

‘Sing it when you come home. When are you coming home?'

‘Not soon enough. God, Aasmaani, I've missed you more than seems possible.'

‘I'm going to linger on the compliment and ignore the backhand there.'

‘This is going to sound odd, and maybe it has something to do with the phone reception, which is fairly suspect in these hills—most days I have to climb the tallest tree and lean at a precise angle to get a signal—but you sound lighter. Like someone's just pulled the sadness right out of you. Is it just the reception?'

I shook my head, though I knew he couldn't see it. ‘It's him, Ed, it's really him.'

‘Who?'

‘Omi. He's alive.' It was the first time I had said it to anyone else and that joy welled up inside me again and made my voice crack.

‘Omi?'

‘The Poet, Ed. Don't be thick. The Poet is alive. I know it.'

‘How...?'

‘Ed, don't ask. Just take my word. He's alive. It's not a hoax. Now listen, we have to make sure your mother keeps sending me those pages. Have you told her I can read them? Should we tell her? Ed?'

There was silence.

I moved the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen, expecting to see we'd been disconnected.

‘Ed?' I pressed the phone against my ear again.

‘So that's why you called.' His voice was utterly without expression. ‘Because of the letters.'

‘It's part of the reason,' I admitted. ‘But—you're the other part.'

‘Really? Can you break that down into numbers?' Fissures were appearing in his even tone, anger leaking out. ‘What percentage of your reason for calling is about the letters, what percentage about me?'

‘Ed. This is absurd.'

There was another pause. ‘She doesn't know,' he said at last. ‘My mother. She doesn't know. And though there's no reason for me to dispense good advice to you right now, I'd advise you not to tell her. It'll all become “They're my letters, this is about me.”'

‘She doesn't seem...' I stopped. ‘Sorry. I appreciate the advice. Really, Ed.'

‘If more letters appear I'll make sure you get them,' he said, his tone relenting. ‘Now I really have to go.'

‘Ed. Wait. Fifty.'

‘What?'

‘Fifty per cent because of you.'

‘That's a lie, Aasmaani.'

‘I want it to be the truth.' But this time he really had hung up.

What was there about this man that touched me so unexpectedly?

A girl I knew at university once spoke of ‘secret societies of pain'. Her fiancé had died at the age of twenty-two, and she said sometimes a look in a stranger's eyes, a particular quality of desolation, would tell her the stranger had suffered a similar grief.

I tried calling Ed back to tell him about that girl but he didn't answer, so I sent him a text message saying, ‘Ed. Call me.'

He wrote back, ‘Signal buggered. No tall trees.'

It was impossible to discern the tone of that message—curt or humorous?—but I took it as a good sign when, three days later, Shehnaz Saeed's driver rang my door-bell. He handed me a note from Shehnaz inviting me over on Eid night to watch
Boond
with her and Ed. I read the note, standing in the doorway, while the driver waited for a response, and when I looked up to him to say, ‘Tell her yes,' he was holding out an envelope, addressed to Shehnaz in childish handwriting.