Broken Verses (28 page)

I smiled at him, with all the superiority I could bring to bear on an upturned pair of lips. Not even close, Mirza. Strange how, in testing for wounds, we look first to find our own wounds on the bodies opposite us. Mirza with his unbridled jealousy of anyone with a claim on Omi's affection—of course this would be the story he'd choose. And right then I saw how absurd it was—the notion that anything other than love had been at the very core of their relationship. Whatever else might have got mixed in, nothing could touch or diminish that core. That damned core which had always made it possible for them to fly away together, away from me and the world.

My smile was sagging, and Mirza's eyes took on an air of triumph. I laughed. ‘That's a convenient revision of history, Mirza. It discounts the fact that he loved her most, and serves as role model for your poetic prostitution. Two birds, one stone. You were always economical with language.'

He shook his head. ‘You were the most charming child, you know. And now—how hard you've grown. Or is it just brittle?'

The waiter appeared with my cup of coffee. I took a packet of sugar, tore the top off with my teeth, and measured out half a spoon. I was about to place the half-empty packet next to my cup after stirring in the sugar when I saw Mirza's eyes on it. An old habit of his which always amused Omi came to mind. I skimmed a teaspoon just beneath the surface of the coffee, lifted it out and then sprinkled sugar into the spoon, watching the white grains settle, thinned, at the bottom of the liquid. Carefully, I handed the spoon to him. He took it in his fingers at the point where bowl meets stem and lifted it to his mouth. We seemed to be caught in a painting, an artist we couldn't see drafting the lines of our bodies into positions of ritual that we didn't quite understand but which automatically transferred us into another time.

As he put the spoon down, with a nod of gratitude that acknowledged the tableau we had so unexpectedly found ourselves in, he seemed suddenly avuncular. He was a man who had known me when my hair was in pigtails. Uncle Mirza, I used to call him. More than that, he was a man linked to those golden years when my mother and Omi lived in Karachi, the three-year exile over; a man who knew me before the brittleness set in. All I wanted was to freeze the tableau, and I saw that he wanted it, too. That old tableau in which our presence in the same space always meant the two of them were somewhere nearby.

I felt tears prickling at my eyelids. I wanted both of them somewhere nearby, I wanted it desperately. I rubbed my thumb across the scar on my palm. If I put down the worst I had ever thought of her in a letter, all my anger, all my accusations, it would be so much more vindictive and poisonous than all that Omi had written. Sixteen years locked away from her, how could I expect him never to lash out?

The Sufis were right—Hell is nothing more or less than the absence of the Beloved
.

Mirza first came to Omi's attention with a poem he had written which drew its inspiration from the Sufi version of Lucifer and Adam's expulsion from Eden.
Iblis aur Aadam
, it was called. A poem in rhyming couplets, creating a conversation between Iblis and Aadam, meeting thousands of years after Allah has banished both of them from heaven. It starts with recriminations and petty sniping, and moves on to Iblis challenging Aadam's love for Allah.

I loved him more than you, Iblis says. That's why being banished from his presence placed me in Hell, and you only in this middle ground of mud.

No, Aadam replies. My crime was merely disobedience; yours was pride. That is the reason for our differing punishments.

Our punishment is the same, says Iblis. Exile from his presence. We merely view that exile differently. But since you bring it up, your crime was far worse than mine. Yours arose from wilfulness, mine from love. I hated you because you supplanted me in my Beloved's affection. And if that wasn't pain enough, he asked me then to accept the falling-off of his love by bowing to you. He was unfair, Aadam, to both of us. He gave you curiosity, he gave me this faculty of eternal and undiminishing love—and then he turned those faculties against us. Admit it, we have been wronged.

Aadam replies, I cannot admit it. If I offend him further he may send me to where you are—to that place which is Hell precisely because it offers no hope of reprieve, no hope that I may return to Him in Heaven.

Soon, Aadam and Iblis are weeping in each other's arms. Allah sees this and knows the time has come. He turns the sky to the red of stained leather. Aadam turns joyfully towards Heaven as Iblis begins to make his weary way back to Hell.

Iblis, the Lord speaks. Where are you going?

To the prison of eternal separation to which you have condemned me, Iblis answers.

And the Lord says, Beloved, have you forgotten? Of all my attributes the foremost are these: I am the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Omi had loved that. It is the first and the final love story, he would remind my mother. It is the story in which we all live. Moses and Changez Khan and Marilyn Monroe and you and me, my love, we are all just players in that great story. Iblis and Allah. Love makes us devils, love sends us to hell, love saves us.

I brushed a tear away from my eyes. All these years of watching bad television instead of reading his poetry—it had almost got me believing that love was not a thing that could draw in anger and pettiness. I should have been reading him all these years, I should have been reading early Mirza.

I looked up at Mirza who was rotating the spoon in his hands, catching his face turning convex and concave by turn. How young he must have been when he wrote
Iblis aur Aadam
. He first joined the Poet's circle when he was still a student. The Poet used to refer to him as ‘the next generation'. He was all fire and passion, then, constantly telling the Poet what he should be writing about, where his responsibility lay.

‘They're out there,' he had railed once, walking up and down my mother's dining room, waving his fìnger in the air. ‘They're out there, those men of war and politics, shouting about their God, insisting everyone own up to their relationship with Him, declare your devotion down on your knees, in Arabic, for all to see. It's an obscenity to make love so public.'

It's an obscenity to make love so public
. He had said that with my mother in the room. Was that before or after the caves at the beach? I felt almost embarrassed now to think of those lines—for the first time it seemed simply rude to read words Omi meant for my mother alone. I felt I'd been caught peeping through a keyhole, and I had only myself to blame if what I saw didn't meet my expectations of what my mother and her lover should be saying and doing to each other behind closed doors.

‘Can I hear some poetry, Mirza? Please. For old times' sake.' He looked startled and I realized he was as lost in his thoughts about those days as I had been. ‘Go on. Recite a poem for me.'

‘All right.' He leaned back in his chair. ‘I'll do better than recite. I put this one to music myself.' He plucked at the air as though searching out notes on a sitar, and then, softly, he began to sing.

I closed my eyes. How I had missed this. The Poet never sang his own verse—though he was unrestrained about belting out arias with much confidence and little talent—but sometimes my mother sang his words for him. She had an arresting voice, unashamed to use its own smokiness to haunting effect.

Mirza's voice wasn't arresting, but it was beautiful. Words leaped clear from his throat. ‘Subah kee shahadat...' The martyrdom of morning? Absurdly self-indulgent poetic moment. I opened my eyes. He was weaving his hand through invisible air traffic, gaze fixed far ahead of him.

I leaned my head sideways against the wall, and settled in to listen to the words. It was a poem about childhood, about picking falsas off bushes with friends now dead. Nothing remarkable in most of it. Nostalgia, lyricism, imagery of red, round berries bursting with juices into young mouths, which added a sexual undercurrent that ran through the whole poem and—how obvious and how irritating—got picked up again, more strongly this time, in the inviting fruit with maggots at its core. But amidst the clichés were startling images—the acned boy imagining falsas swelling to ripeness under his skin; the youngest of the boys biting into the fruit to discover a tooth already embedded in a falsa; the boys stuffing falsas down their clothes and then clasping each other close, red stains spreading across the fronts of their white kameezes as they pulled away from the violent embrace.

Mirza stopped singing. ‘So what's your verdict?' he said.

‘You should have been a much better poet by now.' I didn't mean it unkindly and somehow he seemed to see that.

‘Yes,' he said, looking at his manicured fingernails. ‘I should have found a subject to replace all this content. There are some wonderful voices in Urdu poetry these days, despite everything. I'm not even in the second tier. You keep up with it at all? The world of Urdu versification?'

I shook my head. All that went out of my life when he did. I don't even read his poetry any more, let alone anyone else's.'

‘He.' Mirza shook his head. ‘His fault. My failures, all his fault.'

‘That's not fair.'

Mirza didn't look at me. ‘I don't deny he was the best teacher anyone could have hoped for. But his death, Aasmaani. His death taught me the price poets have to pay for their integrity. I saw that price up close, every shattered bone of it.'

‘You saw ... you saw his body?' This is what I had wanted to know from Mirza when I dialled his number, and now it was as though I were hearing the news of Omi's death for the first time. In that instant it seemed possible—no, inescapable—that all those pages had been a hoax, and that ‘shattered beyond recognition' had just been a turn of phrase to mean ‘badly injured'.

But then Mirza said one word, the only word I could have hoped for: ‘Unrecognizable.'

I released a breath I hadn't known I was holding. ‘So it might not have been him,' I said before I could stop myself.

Mirza shook his head. ‘His wallet was in his pocket, stuffed with all those little scraps of paper he used to jot lines of poetry on. And you could still ... the size, the shape of him. And his doctor had medical records. They did tests. It was him. Why wouldn't it be him? Why would anyone fake a poet's death?'

‘The doctor died just weeks later.'

Mirza finally looked at me. ‘Aasmaani, don't you think your mother and I would have clung to any conspiracy theory that allowed us to believe he was alive if there seemed even the slightest chance?' He looked at his hands, turning them back to front. ‘I saw him. I saw what they did to him. When the family went to get his body from the morgue—distant family, third cousins at best, to whom he meant nothing—I was there. I was there outside, and I told one of them that I was the Poet's illegitimate son. He believed me. They'd heard all sorts of stories about him—they would have believed anything. So they let me go with them into the morgue.' He was still looking at his hands. The first part of him I saw was his hand.'

I put my own hand on top of his and squeezed. If only I trusted him just a little bit, I'd have told him the truth.

‘I never told your mother what he looked like. I didn't want her to imagine what I had to remember. What I still remember. I looked at that hand, swollen, discoloured...'

Omi. Oh God, Omi.

It wasn't him. Breathe, Aasmaani. It wasn't him.

‘...that hand which had written the sweetest words of the age, and I knew, right then, that I would never dare try to be the poet he believed I could be. And so here I am now, a middle-aged hack. And you, the closest thing he had to a child, who remembered more of his poetry in your head when you were fourteen than even he or I or your mother could, you're a media underling without enough information about ghazals to fill a five-minute segment.' He shifted sideways in his chair, stretched his legs in front of him and gazed disconsolately at his toes. ‘Don't tell me I'm the only one who learned the value of certain silences.'

If they come home, what will they see when they look at me? A failure, a coward, a small-hearted creature.

I pressed the palm of my hand against the cold edge of the table, and turned to Mirza. ‘And what happened to your love affair with all those poets in love with God?'

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘God has become the most dangerous subject of all. I don't even think of Him any more.'

‘Leave him in the hands of the extremists, is that your plan?'

I hoped to irritate him out of despondency, but he only shook his head.

I ran my hands along the edge of the glass-topped table. ‘The Poet never said you had to write about God or politics to be a good poet. He said, to be a good poet...'

‘...you must write good poetry. That's all.'

‘You must have the freedom, even in times of war and barbarity...”

‘...to write of first love, or the taste of mangoes, or the sight of a turtle gliding over the sand after she's laid her eggs.' He lowered his head into his hands. ‘But I don't want to write about any of those things. I want to write about his death, and how it killed me, and I'm too afraid to do that, so I just go on being dead.'

My brother, I thought. My twin, my alter ego, my brother. I touched him on the sleeve and he looked up.

‘All this emotion.' He brought his hands together in front of his face and traced a globe, his hands separating at the North Pole, meeting again at the South. ‘How am I supposed to know how to react when you're sitting here looking so much like the girl you once were and also so much like the woman your mother was when I first knew her and the world was ours to shape?' He dragged the palms of his hand slowly down his fleshy cheeks. ‘And I was beautiful then.' He caught my hand, brought it to his face and pressed my fingers down, beneath the layers of muscle and tissue, to where his sharply angled cheekbones still resided. ‘I felt so breakable after I saw the Poet's corpse.'