Broken Verses (15 page)

But she couldn't burn my memory. When the Poet was released from prison, and she followed him to Colombia, I wrote the sentence down again. Each time I started to think about her I would turn my mind to translating sentences into code instead, until I was so adept at it I sometimes had to concentrate hard in school in order to avoid filling exam papers with clumps of words unintelligible to everyone except me. I never broke my promise to her. I never told anyone else about it.

No one except her, years later, after the Poet's death. She had only a dim memory of the card I had written for her, and thought I was joking when I told her that there was still a muscle in my brain which knew how to read and write in code.

Can it be you, out there, reading these words?

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Maybe, just maybe.

Why would anyone send that encrypted page to Shehnaz Saeed? Because my mother wrote it. Whoever wrote that covering letter knew of the strength of my mother's friendship with Shehnaz Saeed in those two years before she left.
It is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want ... I know you know the person who rote them
.

Oh, surely it was the only explanation that made sense?

A hoax. It could—think, Aaasmaani!—be a hoax. Someone else could have written it, pretending to be my mother. But then why write it in code, when Shehnaz might not understand it or know where it came from? Why not sign it, at least? Why send someone a forgery while making it as difficult as possible for them to guess whose words were being forged?

My mother had written those pages to me. That was it.

After she disappeared. She had written those words since her disappearance, knowing I was the only person who would understand it. But somehow, it never reached me. It fell into the hands of someone else who sent it to Shehnaz Saeed and, by some miracle—no, by chance, nothing more—the page had come to me weeks, months, maybe years after it was first written.

But why write something so mystifying? Why? And why, again, in code?

Because she was in danger. That had to be it. They only used the code when there was danger of the words being intercepted. But what was there in those words that she didn't want intercepted?

There are more. I will send you more if you act again
.

I sat down, trying to breathe slowly, trying to control the rush of blood to my head.

What situation could make it necessary for her to send encrypted messages?
The Minions came again today
. If that wasn't a line of fiction, what could it mean?

‘Mama!' I called out, without understanding why.

The door was pushed open. There was Ed, with the curious faces of three of our first-floor colleagues behind him. He took one look at me and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.

‘Get out,' I said.

He made no move either to come closer or leave. Instead, he looked around the room, searching out clues. His eyes came to rest on the letter and encrypted page on my desk.

‘Get out,' I said again, more softly, through clenched teeth. And then I saw the envelope in his hand addressed in childish block letters.

Not daring to speak, I pointed to it.

Ed glanced down and looked surprised, as though he'd forgotten he was holding it.

I lifted myself out of the chair, walked over to him, and caught hold of the envelope. Though it was mid-afternoon, a hint of aftershave still clung to Ed. It had the scent of a citrus tree growing by the sea. I leaned forward, very slightly, and then pulled away, only to find Ed was still holding on to the envelope. For an instant I thought he was gripping it so tightly in order to keep me near him, and then I realized that he had no intention of relinquishing the envelope to me.

He said, ‘What's going on?'

‘That's mine. You have no right to it.' I continued to cling on to one end of the envelope.

‘No, it's my mother's.'

‘She sent it here for me, didn't she? Didn't she?'

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. Not looking at me, he said, ‘Don't.'

‘What?'

But he only shook his head, and still held on to the envelope.

‘Don't think I won't break your fingers to get it, Ed.' My voice had a degree of calm which only came when I was sliding into hysteria.

He looked up then. ‘Don't think I won't pick you up and throw you out of the nearest window if you try that.' His voice was equally calm, though I had no way of knowing what that denoted. For a moment neither of us said anything more, and then his mouth shaped itself into a sneer and he dropped the envelope on the floor and left the room.

I crouched down, knees touching the ground, and picked it up. The postmark said Quetta. I turned the envelope round to open the flap and saw a scribbled note:
This arrived during lunch. From Quetta? Tell me if it makes any sense. Shehnaz
.

I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of encrypted, calligraphed pages.

I put the pages in my handbag, and exited the office, stopping only to mumble some explanation to the CEO about feeling unwell—he was on his way to the golf course and I'm sure it was impatience rather than concern that made him wave me out towards the door, towards my car, towards home as fast as the potholed streets would allow.

But once home, I climbed slowly, almost hesitatingly, up the steps to my third-floor flat. My life may be about to change, I thought. I became starkly aware of everything around me—the speckled pattern on the stairs; the mangy cat slouching through the driveway beneath; the multitude of potted plants in front of the doorway of one of the two first-floor flats accessible via this stairway; the tink-tink-tink sound from a nearby plot of land where someone repeatedly drove a hammer against nails, eliciting a rhythmic, near-musical sound; the rush of heat from a kitchen window; the glimpse, over at the horizon, of white-blue waves which might appear a mirage to an untutored eye seeing them, as I now did, through a wave of smoke from a fire in an empty plot; the fire itself, an even orange colour which made it possible to wonder if it, too, were a trick of the eye, really just a ragged piece of bright chiffon flapping back and forth in the breeze. And most of all, most of all I was aware of the papers clutched tight in my hand.

I unlocked my front door, walked through the balcony and then through the second set of doors, locked the connecting door to Rabia's flat and, with a muttered prayer (‘Silently,' I heard Beema tell me. ‘Silently. Prayer is as quiet and as resonant as a single raindrop falling on a desert'), I sat down with the sheaf of papers in my hand.

The first line told me the Poet had written it.

 

I wonder if I'm still allergic to peaches.

It would be too absurd to bear if age and solitude worked their way through my body and mind erasing all defining characteristics, until nothing remained recognizable of the man I once was except my need to break out into gasps and hives each time I encounter that fruit.

I have a rash, therefore I am.

Sounds about right.

The Minions brought a bagful of peaches for me yesterday. My last experience with peaches was three decades ago, when you bit into a peach and then kissed me. Those were early days, before you learned I never did anything by half-measures; not love, not poetry, not allergies. I think of that experience now as a cautionary tale that stays my hand from the inviting plumpness of the fruit before me—remember how my tongue swelled up and nearly cut off all breath? I also have some memory of the momentarily overwhelming pleasure of your peachjuicemouth, but that is just background. And I remember what you said in the hospital room when we had ascertained I would live: even your allergies have to be poetic. Do you dare, Alfred Prufrock, do you dare?

That pleased me more than I ever told you.

 

If someone is reading this, it must be you, so you must still be alive despite claims to the contrary. I'm sorry I can't appear to care more about this. I'll never see you again, so how can it matter? Still, now that they have allowed me to write at last, I'm writing to you. That must mean something.

I'm not really writing to you. How will this ever reach you, even if you are alive?

But why am I writing in our code, if not to write to you?

There is nothing like solitary confinement to make you lose any interest you ever had in self-analysis. Self-analysis! It's self-narrative, that's what it is. Create a story about yourself, and shape everything to fit that story. In my story I was always the one driven mad by love for you, even before I met you. I don't know how to interpret my actions now that I'm falling into an entirely different sort of insanity—the insanity of a twilight life, in which there is no distinction to be made between real and fictional worlds. Sometimes Rustum and Sohrab visit me in here, reliving over and over the battle in which father struck down son, until the room is so filled with recrimination and guilt that I have to banish them. The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and the next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though it were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some foreign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners.

If I am no longer the man mad with love for you, does it mean I'm not me any more?

How tedious I've grown.

 

What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this?

Should I tell you I can't write poetry any more. Poetry? I can't write Urdu. My hand moves left to right across the page. There is a tide in the handwriting of men and I must flow with it. The first year they brought me here...

Why go back to that?

The first year they brought me here was the worst for many reasons but among those reasons was this: I had to break my addiction to writing. There was no paper anywhere. They kept me confined to the house—it was a room then; the Minions have added on over the years. Oh, the joy when they finally completed the kitchen! What a gourmet cook I've become, able to use anything they bring me. Sometimes they bring the strangest vegetables, things for which I have no vocabulary. I almost wonder if it's become a contest among them to try to produce something I cannot use.

Being confined to my one room meant I couldn't even walk out and pluck leaves from trees to serve as paper. And no watchband to write on either, as Hikmet did in his prison days. You know how fastidious I've always been, but enough days of remembering ‘Make dust our parchment and with rainy eyes pour sorrow on the bosom of the earth' and I put aside the cleaning rags they had given me and let all surfaces around me become dulled. Then, a fingertip touched in saliva, and I was off! Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings. I who had always scribbled endlessly, covering page after page with doodles and letters and words that I merely liked to look at (you've noticed already the elaborate hand with which I've written this. I cannot bear the absence of physical beauty in the lines of the English alphabet. English has lines; Urdu has curves. Perhaps my use of English is mere sign of a dead libido. It's the sort of statement my critics would make. But no, look, haven't I restored splendour to this language with my near calligraphic flourishes?), I learned to hone phrases in my mind, and only write what I was sure of. The physical act of writing required me to suck dust off my fingers after every few characters. That made me think of you.

The Minions came in and found my words, remarkable words, the best I ever wrote, on every surface of the room. They filled buckets and drowned each image. Then they broke all my fingers, and left. This sort of thing went on for a while, though the first stands out in my memory most clearly.

Those were the early Minions. They've become more civilized since. Or perhaps I'm just too neutered to pose a threat.

You must have aged. In all the time I knew you, you only grew more beautiful.

Here is a memory of you that always makes me laugh:

It is 1971. I wrap around my shoulders that grey shawl you love. I haven't seen you in nearly four months, not since just before your wedding, haven't spoken to you since the day of the nikah when I phoned you to say I wasn't going to be dramatic and whisk you away on my white charger just seconds before you inked your contract and joined yourself in legitimate union to that weedy man, so you'd have to get out of the wedding on your own if you had the intelligence and courage to do it. I knew that would make you go through with the wedding which otherwise (I'm sure, though you always denied it) you were going to back out of at the last minute. I thought that was the surest way to win you back. I thought you'd last three days and then appear on my doorstep, humbled.

I underestimated your stubbornness.

In the end I had to make all the moves. I wrote
Laila
for you. Not the most conventional wooing poem ever written, but you knew it meant I was going insane with missing you. I alluded to you in an interview for a magazine to which I knew you subscribed. I flaunted my affairs in public, all with women you knew were not in any way to my taste. None of this was enough for you. You were silent, then more silent, and then, as though it were nothing, you announced to your friends who were also my friends that you were pregnant.

I still haven't entirely forgiven you for that.

So I wrap the grey shawl around my shoulders, let myself in through your gate and ring your door-bell. The Weed answers, and I think he or I would have put a knife through the other's heart if you hadn't been standing behind him asking who it was. He steps aside, and then I see you: your pregnancy still invisible to everyone including him, but to someone who knows your body as well as I do it is instantly obvious. You are holding a cookbook in one hand, a courgette in the other. I laugh so hard I have to lean against the door frame for support. ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?' I ask. ‘Which of the two has this man driven you to?'