Broken Verses (26 page)

 

 

 

 

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We confuse conflict and suffering with tragedy. Hamlet is not the most tragic of Shakespeare's figures, nor is Lear. Hamlet is the most conflicted, Lear is the one whose suffering is most brilliantly rendered. But the most tragic figure is Macbeth, who has no illusions. Unlike Brutus, he does not attempt to justify murdering his friend and benefactor; unlike Othello, he is not drawn into murder by the perfidiousness of an Iago. Macbeth's tragedy is absolute self-knowledge allied to an unflinching awareness of the dire consequences of his action and a profound understanding of the immorality of his deeds.

 

I know whose voice that is: Darius Mehta, Impassioned Professor of English, Adjectivus Emeritus.

 

Myself, I have always gravitated to the tragedy of lovers. Laila Mujnu, of course. But also Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth and his Lady (their passion for each other the real story of the play), Sassi Punoo, Samson and Delilah (of whom I owe my knowledge to Cecil B. de Mille rather than the Bible), Saleem and Anarkali, Oedipus and Jocasta (why pretend his tragedy is greater than hers; she who discovers she has married her patricidal son? She hangs herself—not because of incest committed in ignorance, but because of her continued desire for her son against all laws of morality and custom). But the saddest of love stories is Arthurian—not the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, or even of Tristan and Iseult. Merlin and Nimue, that is the saddest of sad stories.

Not in all versions, of course. In some she is the cruel enchantress who seduces him, learns everything he knows and then imprisons him, leaving him to die a lingering death. But the story of Nimue and Merlin which I choose to believe is this: for love of the goddess whom she serves she must learn Merlin's lore, and so she seeks him out to seduce him. But Merlin will not fall for just any pretty face, particularly not when he knows he is destined to be betrayed in love. He is a man on his guard for falsehood in a beautiful guise. The only way for Nimue to convince Merlin is to fall truly in love with him. And so she falls, and he falls after her, and even at the moment of their falling she knows she doesn't love him quite enough to turn away from her goddess, and he knows that he truly loves, for the first time in his life, and if it is his destiny to be betrayed by the woman he loves then Nimue will be the one to betray him.

Why is this so great a tragedy? Because, like Macbeth, they always know the truth. Not for a heartbeat does she believe the goddess will release her from her obligation; not for an indrawn breath does he believe he can cheat destiny. I think this makes them gentle with each other; I think it makes them nostalgic for each moment before it's even past. I think it strengthens love to be thus caught in the fierce embrace of inevitability.

 

How did I get to that sentimental moment?

Oh, yes. Darius Mehta. He who, in the twilight of his life, was fired from his teaching job for discussing
Richard II
as a political rather than a literary text. You admired him for his courage in taking that stand. And I thought, what could he tell his students about politics that they didn't already know? What a waste—all those young minds that will now be deprived of the chance to hear Darius Mehta speak of Shakespeare and what it means to be human. What made him think he should be anything other than that of which he was so gloriously capable? Who made him believe that what he was wasn't good enough?

If someone came in here and started to talk to me of politics when I was reading
Richard II
I would shoo them away.

Stop it. Stop disapproving.

Woman who abandons her child for her lover and flaunts the affair in public while the child is growing up should know better than to disapprove of others.

Woman whose life achieved so little should know better than to demand political commitment in others.

How did this become about you? I promised myself I wouldn't let that happen again.

I'm beginning to resent pen and paper.

It was far better when I had only my books and my daily routine. My life was strictly regimented. But since I've started writing, you've come along, barging in at all moments, disrupting the tides that govern my day. Everything is infected by you, and I can't distinguish now between fiction, memory and my own imagination. Even now, as I write, I have to ask myself: is this gift or punishment? What game is being played with my life? All I know is, I want the Minions to remove from here all temptations to fill these blank pages. Only then can I begin again to forget all that I've lost. Only then can I attempt to forget all that someone else must have gained. Then, I don't need to ask myself questions such as: whose bed do you slip into at night? On whose body do you make your voracious demands?

Sometimes I am happier believing you dead.

Remember the beach that night. How we left the party and found our way to that musty cave and I wanted to leave because of the smell of stale urine, but you pulled me close and soon the cave was filled with another, muskier scent. Then that noise, someone was outside, someone watching, and you didn't care, you only grew more aroused. I could have accused you so many times of perversion, but I always loved you too much to throw that word at you. You had no such inhibitions when it came to my feelings.

How often thoughts of you can lead to anger. And then that goes, as fast as it came, and all I want, my love, is to hold you in my arms, away from all the world.

Come, find me, and let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world.

If the door opened and the Poet walked through, I would kill him.

Let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world
.

I scrunched the papers tightly into a ball, and hurled them across the room. ‘You're not taking her away again!' I shouted. The ball of paper hit the window and ricocheted back to land at my feet.

Woman who abandons her child for her lover and flaunts the affair in public
.

Bastard.

I could have accused you so many times of perversion
.

Bastard. Bastard. You fat, old, ugly, scar-faced bastard.

For this man, Mama, you left Dad. For this man, you left me, again and again.

I knew those caves at the beach. The scent of them on days when it had been too long since the last time the tide came through and washed them clean of memory. I wanted to be washed clean of memory. I wanted to be embalmed. All fluids, all juices removed. If I angled my face down towards my armpit I'd catch the mingling of my body's odour and deodorant. Angle it further down. Concupiscence.

Things I didn't want to imagine, I was imagining. The beach at night, a cave, her eyes watching someone watching her as she pulled the Poet closer, deeper. I bit down on my knuckle, hard.

Away from all the world
.

Rabia had been right. There was nothing unfamiliar in this explosion of anger, this desire to have him here so I could bang his head against a wall. I had grown up with this anger, it was almost like a long-lost friend.

‘Bastard. You goddamn bastard.'

Woman who abandons her child
.

How dare you? After all she gave up for you. After all you demanded she give up.

Woman whose life achieved so little
.

Because of you, bastard, because of you.

In 1980, when the Poet went to Colombia she stayed in Karachi because of all those political commitments in her life. And what did he do? He sent her a postcard.

 

S—I've been trying to work on a ghazal but all I can think is this: you are qafia and radif to me—the fixed rhyme and refrain of all the couplets that make up my life. That line would be adolescent drivel if it wasn't entirely true. Love, Yours. P. S. Call me! Write! Come here (I promised I wouldn't make that demand, but this isn't a demand, it's an entreaty. The Sufis were right—Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved.)

 

When that postcard arrived, I had hidden it away from her. For two days I kept it hidden until I couldn't bear the expectation in her eyes every time the phone rang or she saw the postman toss something over her gate. And so I handed her the postcard. She read it, and then she reached out and gathered me in her arms.

‘What do I do?' she had wept into my hair.

I said, ‘Go to him.'

What had I hoped? That by saying it I would make her stay? Didn't I know any better by then? But even though I wanted her to stay, I also wanted her to be with him. Theirs was the great love story I worshipped, even as it relegated me to a walk-on role. I was so proud—what a strange word, but that's what it was—of the way she was loved by him, and the way she loved him in return.

Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved
.

How did I see that as love, when it was so obviously just posturing? The Poet calling to his Muse, throwing himself into the drama of separation.

If someone came in here and started to talk to me of politics when I was reading
Richard II
I would shoo them away
.

And they call you the great revolutionary poet. They put your name in a Master File ranked far above hers. What did you ever do in all those years she was out on the streets, risking her life, crying herself hoarse in rallies? Where were you, great poet? Hiding away in your study, writing and listening to opera, telling us all that you wouldn't publish anything until the collection was complete, tantalizing us all with little glimpses as you read out your politically impassioned verse. What were you going to do? Leave the country again and have it published from afar, while you were safely tucked away somewhere with my mother, having made sure your words were so inflammatory that there was no hope for a reprieve, no chance you and she would ever return from that exile?

Or were you never going to publish them at all? Three years you worked on that collection. How much longer would it have continued? We couldn't call you a coward as long as you were writing, couldn't say you had lost your nerve.

Did you stage your own death, Omi? Did you stage your death and arrange for your poems to be burnt so that my mother's reaction could give you a whole new world of inspiration to draw on for your next collection? Did you stage your death so that those poems would pass into legend as only lost works can? Never learn Italian, never publish your writing. That way it's possible to believe the words have transformed into music. Yes, those poems became myth, and you became legend. And what about my mother? What did she become? What did you make her, first by your refusal to marry her and then with your alleged and too convincing death? You always were, always have been, the Poet. Through everything. Through the scandal of your affair with my mother, through all the affront people took to the vulgarity of your early poems, through everything else, you always were, always will be, the Poet. But my mother who gave so much of her life to fighting forces she knew she had little hope of defeating, she is first and foremost the Jezebel, the fallen woman who abandoned her husband and child. And if anyone tries to say, but what about her activism?, there are all too many people ready to point out that her commitments to the cause must have been pretty feeble if she could run off for three years just because you snapped your fingers in Colombia.

Let us fly away somewhere, away from all the world
.

You bastard, you bastard, I wish you were dead, I wish they had tortured you until you burst their ear-drums with your screaming.

I leaned forward and then jerked back, banging my head against the wall with all the violence I could muster. Before the pain could fully make itself known, a painting above me jiggled off its hook and fell towards me. I had a momentary vision of red and black swirls coming at me, and I put up my arms with a shout and batted it away.

The painting fell to one side, face down, and then I was just a woman with an aching head, looking down at a cracked frame.

I stood up, holding my head, and went to the kitchen. I grabbed a fistful of ice out of the freezer, wrapped the ice in a dupatta, and held it to my head.

A burst of gunfire punctured the silence which surrounded me. The dupatta fell from my hand. But then I realized what the gunfire must be about and I leaned out of the window to look for the shaving of moon which the Ruhat-e-Hilal committee must have seen in order to declare tomorrow Eid. I couldn't see it—but rounds of ammunition were now being pumped into the sky from all directions and there was no mistaking the celebration in the air.

When I heard you were dead, Omi, there was a moment in which I thought, at least now he'll never take her away from me again.

The thought made me stop as I was bending down to retrieve the fallen dupatta. My fingers dangled just inches from the cloth which was already seeping liquid on to the tiled floor. Leucippus, in the fourth century BC, wondered how water, having transformed into ice, could then melt into water again. He concluded that there was an essence which remained immutable through the transformation which allowed the water to move from one state to another and then back again. Leucippus coined the term ‘atoms'. What would Leucippus say about the atoms of our character, the atoms of love?