‘Sure.’
‘Why did you seek him out?’
I had a ready answer. ‘Curiosity. Simple curiosity. My mother once warned me that he was present in my life as an absence, and that if I were only able to fix him in my mind, physically,
that sense of absence would diminish.’
‘But you did that.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what now?’
‘Nothing now. I’m just seeing the thing through. And also, I feel a natural closeness to you guys . . .’
‘Us guys?’
‘The brothers and sisters. I half-suspected it might be that way, that I would make my connection to him through others, with whom there was less emotional baggage.’
He smiled. A quiet unreadable smile. Then he rose and opened the bay windows of his sweeping balcony. The moist night air came through the room. It brought with it again, as distinct as the
night itself, the smell of the sea.
I inhaled it deeply, and said, ‘It seems so close. Like it’s not even a few blocks away. How far is it?’
‘Just beyond,’ Isffy replied distractedly. He seemed himself to have drifted off, as if his thoughts had become entangled in the night breeze. Then, as if aware again of my presence
in the room, he said, ‘Do you want to see a video I made?’
‘Sure.’
He walked into another room, and returning a few minutes later with a silver laptop, came to sit next to me on the beanbag. He opened its screen to reveal an underlit keyboard and a desktop
cluttered with videos. Most of the video files bore the names of girls: Juggan, Maria, Aamina, ZQ. Sensing my eye pass over them, he said, by way of explanation, ‘It’s an obsession for
me. I love seeing the red circle flash on the screen, the way the bland and familiar become interesting, and how even the dullest things can get this air of expectation about them. Ordinary shit,
you know – a cigarette burning; a telephone; a shirt draped over a sofa; a panty; a mirror – seems so powerful. It’s amazing.’
I had rarely heard Isffy speak with such feeling about any of his interests. Perhaps taking my silence to mean a lack of comprehension, he reached, without getting up, for the camera that lay on
the coffee table, and whipping open its screen, showed me the room through its patient eye. Two or three lamps vied for space on the rectangular screen. Their light left a trail of white wandering
fire, like that of burning magnesium. Isffy waited for it to settle, for the lens to adjust, then pushed his arm out. The room rushed by, like the headlights of a car plunging through a night fog.
‘See what I mean?’ he said and grinned. I didn’t really, but was enjoying his enthusiasm too much to say anything.
Then the video came on and it was like nothing I had expected.
It contained none of his own camerawork, but was rather a collage of images from the 9/11 attacks. There were scenes of the planes, of people crying, of dust and fear. In the background, playing
almost like an advertising jingle, was a song entitled, ‘He’s gonna get’ya, Osama’. It was a short, aimless exercise full of blue skies and fire, and it seemed the only
theme as such was the palpable pleasure the filmmaker derived from the fear in the faces of the victims.
Isffy seemed to know that it could not be discussed. Indeed, when it was over, he put it away and turned his mind determinedly to what perhaps he had always intended to say. The video was like a
way of alerting me to the trouble in his life, of giving me an oblique intimation of damage. And, appalled as I was by it, I felt it like a cry for help.
He rose, and in one movement, shut the laptop. He walked across the room to a sideboard on which there was a model of a Roman galley. He stood for a few moments with his back to me, playing with
its little oars. My phone vibrated. As if collecting his thoughts, Isffy put the laptop carefully on the sideboard and turned around. ‘I’m being blackmailed,’ he said. ‘I
made a private video, a sex video, you can say, of me and this girl in the office; I stored it on my laptop; a foolish thing to do, I know, but it’s fallen into the wrong hands and now
I’m being blackmailed.’
It took an instant for his words to have their impact. I pulled my eyes away from the glowing screen of my phone, but my mind remained a moment longer on the contents of the message: one word
from an unknown number: ‘Mirwaiz.’
Aunty Christabel was Narses’s mother. She was a frail half-German woman, who spoke English with an unusually strong subcontinental accent, as if to disguise her foreign
blood. But she seemed to possess nothing of Narses’s scheming nature, and Isffy had a special liking for her.
‘If she knew what he was doing,’ he said, on the way to their house that Sunday morning, ‘she would break his legs.’
‘Come on, Isffy. Are you certain it’s him?’
‘Hundred per cent. It’s his style. He’s always had this homo insecurity related to my father and me. This is just
another version of what he’s been doing to me since I was fourteen. Trust me. He doesn’t want me to get married, you see. Because if I do, and produce the first Tabassum grandchild, it
will seriously weaken his position vis-à-vis my father.’
Isffy was driving, filling the movement of the gears with the charge of his words. We drove through neighbourhoods of honey-coloured bungalows with green and blue reflective glass windows. I had
a strange wish for a landmark, a square, a promenade, a monument, just something to help chart the grid-like sprawl. How nice the sea would be now! The glitter of its water to ease the little
fevers that sprang up in my mind. But it didn’t come.
‘Who’s the girl?’
‘Her name is Mehreen, but everyone calls her Queenie. She works in marketing at QC. There’s nothing too serious between us, but we’ve been fooling around for a
while.’
‘And the videos?’
‘I always make them. It’s a weird thing I have. Ever since I was fourteen . . .’ then he broke off and smiled. ‘I’m not sure I should be telling you
this.’
I shrugged so as to say, ‘Tell me if you want; don’t tell me if you don’t want to’; but really I wanted to know.
A Sunday morning quiet lay over the city; the streets were empty, and the sea-scented air seemed to whistle through the car’s windows. I’d just drunk a coffee, and felt my senses
sharp and awake. It was that distinct freshness of a first morning in a new place, when all your impressions have a mysterious power. Whatever the reason, I’ll never forget the impact of
Isffy’s words, that cloudless day in a city whose shadows moved with the slow precision of a second hand.
‘Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen,’ he repeated, looking into the rear-view mirror, ‘fucking chicks for the first time, it was not enough for it to be between just me and
the girl. I needed another guy, a friend or a senior, to know, even to watch.’ He paused, and glancing at me said, ‘It was not that I needed this person to participate; I just needed
them to be there, I needed them to see; without that, sex was not merely unsatisfactory or unpleasurable, it was incomplete. As I grew up,’ he added, ‘I suppose the camera took the
place of the friend.’
He had slowed the car down to say this, as if second, with its control and tightness, was the right gear for what he needed to express. And now he raced through third into fourth, with the
impatience of a man suddenly embarrassed. But he needn’t have been; I knew, as deeply as if the words had been stolen from the recesses of my own mind, what he meant. And what is more I knew
the cause. I had also, from an experience with fathers – though, in my case, absent rather than wounding – known a need for male approval.
Narses was a different man that afternoon. At Aylanto, he had been guarded, full of hidden currents. But the person I saw, still lying in bed at one in the afternoon, was warm,
open, round-cheeked and jaunty. An air of contentment pervaded his sunlit room. Everything was freshly painted, two large works of art by La Mirage artists, fresh out of their crates, sat awaiting
a place in the house; a Labrador puppy bounded around the room amid a Sunday disarray of scattered newspapers. Narses himself was in loose blue shorts and a Tweety Bird T-shirt.
‘Babs!’ he said, greeting Isffy warmly. ‘And Rehan baba! Welcome to my poor house. Please forgive the mess. Everyone has come at once, painters, guests, caterers, the art
people. Tell me: what will you have to drink? Beer? I’ve just received a case of the most delicious Dutch beer. Dutch? Belgian perhaps. The crabs are on the way. You eat seafood, I hope,
Rehan baba?’
I nodded.
‘Oh good,’ he said, and went off to find us our beers.
When he was gone, Isffy, his face full of distaste, said, with a mordant smile I recognized as my father’s: ‘Do you see? Do you see the signs?’
‘No, of what?’
Isffy rapidly traced the shape of a heart in the air, and punching a hole through it, whispered noisily, ‘Of love. I am tormented for my relationships with women, forced to give them up,
and this Narses is building a love nest for his little Kashmiri boy under my father’s nose.’
I hadn’t seen it that way myself, but it was the kind of assertion that whether true or untrue, once made, exerts an undue influence on the eye. I wanted to ask Isffy more about how
Mirwaiz had ended up working for Narses, but my thought was cut short by the sound of raised voices upstairs. There was a shuffling of feet, the slamming of a door. We listened gravely, then heard
a woman’s voice yell, ‘Narsu, come here this minute. I cannot take it a moment longer.’
When we reached the landing, Aunty Christabel was in great distress, sitting in a large chair with her eyes closed. She wore a red chiffon blouse and one hand was pressed up against her head
while the other hung lifelessly. When Isffy approached, she opened her lidded eyes and raised her wrist.
Isffy took her hand, with its knobby-knuckles and thin blue veins, and said gently, ‘What is it, Aunty?’
‘Isffy, I’ve had it with that boy. He’s going to be the death of me. They’ll have to take out my
janaza
’ – and this Urdu word for funeral was the only
one she said with a foreign accent.
‘Aunty!’ Isffy said, laughing. ‘What happened?’
‘You don’t know what he’s been up to? The cook and bearer, men who’ve worked for me for over twenty years, since the Muree days, have just threatened to leave because of
him. He’s apparently been telling them that they must not call him Mirwaiz; they must refer to him as “sir” or “saab”, if you please!’
Isffy, bending forward, looked under his arm and smiled at me.
‘Sir or saab,’ the old woman repeated, ‘and do you know when I scolded him for it, not only did he not apologize, he stormed out of the house. This is all, by the way,
Narsu’s doing. He’s spoilt the boy, taking him on trips and buying him shirts; it’s all gone to his head. Narsu’s problem is he’s too generous; he doesn’t
understand that the person on the receiving end gets the wrong idea.’
Narses, in the meantime, had crept up.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘Mummy being melodramatic again. Has she fainted? Should I send for the smelling salts?’
‘You might,’ she said bitterly, ‘but there’ll be no one to get them. They’ve all left over the little Kashmiri viper you’ve bred in our midst.’
‘Nonsense,’ Narses said. ‘Mirwaiz! Mirwaiz!’
‘He’s thrown a tantrum and left,’ Aunty Christabel said, ‘because . . .’
‘Mummy . . .’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve already told them.’
The good humour fled Narses’s face. Then he smiled benignly and rolled his eyes. It was a smile that was meant to accentuate the absurdity of the situation so as to dismiss it; it was a
forgiving smile, forgiving of Mirwaiz’s youthful folly; but most of all, it was meant to disguise the obvious tensions that had arisen in the house as a result of Mirwaiz’s presence
there.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go sit in the other room. The crabs should be here any minute. Mummy will you have them served when they arrive?’
Aunty Christabel rose, gently wringing her wrists, and said, ‘OK, OK, let’s see if I can coax my staff back into good humour.’
Some twenty minutes later, Narses, Isffy and I were sitting at a glass dining table, in a bright room of floor-to-ceiling windows and garish art, when Mirwaiz returned. He had changed his
clothes and there were some drops of water or sweat on his face. His handsome features, his intensely black eyes, his coppery skin and raised lips – features which until then I had only ever
seen in the service of charm – now bore the cruel aspect I had thought them capable of when I had re-met him at the airport. He flitted around on the peripheries of the room while we ate,
like a man wandering through a gallery. Narses tried to remain absorbed in his conversation with us, but his eyes followed Mirwaiz.
Abruptly, Mirwaiz stopped. And staring and pointing at something on the floor, he let out a loud, sadistic cackle. Narses looked up, then tried to ignore it, then couldn’t and said,
‘What is it, ja . . .’ He stopped just short of using a term of endearment. Mirwaiz continued to laugh and point. His eyes shone with tears of amusement.
‘The dog,’ he said at last, catching his breath, ‘the dog. Bozo. I didn’t take him out when I should have and now he’s taken a big shit on your new Persian
carpet.’ At this he bent over and laughed louder, a brazen, high-pitched laugh. ‘And it’s green! What have you been feeding him, Narsu?’
Narses paled. He looked to the side to make sure that his mother was not around. Seeing she wasn’t, he hissed, ‘Then why don’t you pick . . . have someone . . .’
‘Oh, what was that?’ Mirwaiz said, his face bright with anticipation. ‘Did I hear you correctly? You want me to start picking up dog shit now, is that right, Narsu?’ Then
suddenly the humour drained from his face, and he spat: ‘Pick it up yourself.’
Narses looked at us with an expression that was like a plea for mercy. Rising, he walked over to where Mirwaiz stood and whispered something to him. There was a frantic exchange, which ended
with Narses reaching out to touch Mirwaiz’s arm. Mirwaiz pulled it away, hissing, ‘Don’t touch me.’
He marched in long strides towards the door, then abruptly stopped, and circling the table, came back over to where we sat. He leaned forward slightly, and whispering loud enough for everyone to
hear, said: ‘Isffy, Rehan, don’t take it badly. Sometimes fights happen. You won’t think me rude if I say that these people, not you both, of course, but the rest, are sick in the
head. Take my word for it, Rehan baba, finish your business and get out. Otherwise, you’ll end up like them. And you won’t even know when the change happened.’ He broke off, and
with an odd tone of finality in his voice, added, ‘Anyway, phir milenge. I still have your number.’