Broken Verses (6 page)

I picked up a felt-tip pen, and traced the twirling letters on to the overlying paper. It took much longer than I would have thought to follow every line and loop of that intricate hand. I began to feel as though I were replicating an abstract painting, each stroke of my nib inscribing my inability to understand how a mind could conceive of those shapes and combinations. What was I hoping for as my pen moved in and out of curlicues? That the act of tracing would bring me closer to whoever wrote those sentences, allow me to slip between the words and understand the mind that placed them on the page?

What was I hoping for? It was a question that had been following me for a long time.

I put down the pen.

Other than me, who knew the code? Only my mother and the Poet. And the Poet had been dead sixteen years. He had been killed, so the story went, by a government agency which feared the combination of his national popularity and international reputation—although the military government in power at the time countered those claims by declaring a national day of mourning for that ‘flower of our soil'. All over the country anti-government groups of every hue boycotted the government's day of mourning and announced their own day of mourning (on the same day) for that ‘voice of resistance'.

Of course, there were those who believed he wasn't really dead. The art of storytelling, so ingrained in this nation, had turned—in all the years of misrule and oppression—into the art of spinning conspiracy theories, each one more elaborate than the one before. So when the Poet died it took only hours for the weavers of tales to produce their versions of what really happened. There were variants from one teller to the next, but the bottom line remained the same: that poor tortured corpse, they said, was a look-alike, his features slashed and gouged where they didn't match the Poet's. Where the Poet really was, and why anyone should fake his death, was a rather more difficult issue to contend with, but—just weeks after the funeral—when the conspiracy theorists were beginning to acknowledge the illogic of staging a death when it would be so much easier actually to kill a man, the doctor who claimed to have verified the identity of the corpse died in a car crash. And then all the tales spun with whispers and perverted glee were brought out again.

But my mother never accepted that claim of a faked death, and so I had never believed it either. Why would she, of all people, ridicule such an idea if it seemed to contain even a fibre of truth?

If only she had believed it. Perhaps hope would have allowed her to cling on to her own character, instead of setting it adrift like a widow sending her possessions out to sea in the wake of a bier.

I lifted the page off the table again. From what distance was I regarding this object? How long ago had it been written?

Long ago. Had to be. When they first invented the code. Surely they must have practised? I couldn't have been the only one who did that, turning Peter Pan into Ucicl Ufo and Mama into Afaf? I picked up Rabia's file again and looked through the cuttings once more until I found the one for which I was looking. An interview with the Poet, first published in 1971, the year I was born, and later reprinted in 1996, on the tenth anniversary of his death:

 

Q: The acclaimed Colombian novelist Rafael Gonzalez has said of you: ‘He is my twin, in political and aesthetic temperament. It's a good thing he writes poetry because if he ever turned his hand to the novel he would write my books faster than I myself write them.' Has fiction ever lured you?

A: I'm lured frequently and indiscriminately. But in my life allure is always fleeting. Well, always except twice. The first, the allure of poetry. The second I'm too gallant to mention. Or perhaps, also, too cowardly. Newly-wed husbands can be violent in their jealousies. But, to answer your question more directly, Rafael and I have often played games of diving into each other's skin. I send him a fragment of a story in English, our mutual language, and in response he sends me a dramatic monologue, also in English. I tell him, that's cheating. You've written me a short story with line breaks! Then he sends me a perfect couplet, and I'm filled with envy. Yes, yes, for Rafael I have written prose. And sometimes I just do it to restore suppleness to my wrist which is locked in place from agonizing for days over a single word of poetry. It's interesting ... always English, my prose. I suppose it's just habit now.

 

In all the interviews published during his lifetime, this is his sole reference to my mother as something other than his first reader and only editor. What had Mama felt when she first read it, just weeks into her marriage? And my father, how must he have reacted? That was easier to answer: with silent anger, directed less at the Poet's continued feelings for my mother than at the publicizing of those feelings. Omi must have known that, of course. Must have known how much my father would have hated to have himself referred to in print, in a discussion of something so tawdry as jealousy.

That might have been the moment you lost her, Dad.

But I didn't really believe it. That they had ever been together was not a mystery, just an aberration.

Regardless. For today, the interview told me all I really needed to know. The Poet wrote prose. Sometimes for Rafael Gonzales and sometimes just as an exercise. So, those cryptic lines were nothing more than some old writing exercise of his, written in code.

All that was out of my life now, and that at least was something for which I should be grateful. The need for codes and secrets, the conspiracies and cover-ups, the weightiness of History pressing down on people who insisted that it was their burden to bear though it showed nothing but disdain for them. All that was over. All that madness. All that life.

I touched my fingers to the calligraphed words. ‘Omi.'

I walked to the balcony, and leaned out into the smell of the waves.

I am so young I count my age in quarter years. In my mother's house, I turn circles in the master bedroom with arms spread wide. I turn circles and make it look like joy so the whole room joins in and turns with me. We are spinning, the room and I, turning into blurs. If we keep it up we'll spin right out of this world into some Oz—we can spin ourselves into cyclonic speeds. But I hear voices coming up the stairs, and leaving isn't so tempting any more, so I stop spinning. But the room doesn't. I must grope my way to the bed to sit down, my hands clutching
on to the frame to make it stop. What urill my mother say if she enters to find her bed has gone to Oz? She walks in, the Poet behind her, and her face is instant concern
.

‘What's wrong?' she says. ‘Are you sick?'

‘I'm diggy,' I reply, trying to bring her face into focus. She looks as though she's partway to Oz herself
.

‘Giddy,' says the Poet. ‘The word is “giddy”.'

Everything has righted itself by now, the bed, my mother, the walls. It seems terrible to be wrong. So I say, ‘No, it's diggy. That's when you're so giddy even the letters in giddy turn topsy-turvy.' I can't believe I've said something so stupid, but the Poet throws back his head and laughs. He lifts me up in his arms
.

‘She'll be a poet, Samina. She'll make language somersault through rings of fire. Just watch.' He brings his face closer to mine and whispers. ‘They say I can do that. Maybe you're a young me.'

‘Maybe you're an old me,' I shoot back. And that's it, an appellation coined. Old Me. Omi
.

I turned, saw the paper lying on the coffee table, blurred through the smudged windowpane, and the thought slipped out: could it have been written by my mother, and recently?

I could almost hear the plants around me exhaling carbon dioxide. I leaned over the balcony again and looked to the right. Here and there, lights shone out of windows and street lamps. There seemed no numerical order to the illumination, no multiples or prime numbers underlying the logic of lights. But perhaps the order was pictorial rather than numerical. Connect the dots, and what do you get?

When my mother had disappeared, fourteen years ago, I saw dots of brightness everywhere. The universe, back then, reconfigured itself into an accumulation of clues and conspiracies. The clues looked like this: any tapping sound or flashing lights; a ringing phone which stopped ringing the instant before I picked it up; a news reporter speaking on a foreign news channel about an unexpected uprising; strangers who whispered indecipherable words as they passed me on the street; a dream of my mother set in a place that I would have known in another instant if the wind (how could I be sure it was just the wind?) hadn't banged on my window and woken me up. And the conspiracies, they took these shapes: a conversation which stopped the moment I entered the room; a fire burning down a restaurant my mother had loved; a letter intercepted at my gate (I had no proof of such interceptions, but that only made the conspiracy more powerful); the death of anyone she had ever known; the death of anyone, anyone at all, because how could I know for certain all the people she had known? And yes, I had seen patterns start to emerge amidst all those clues and conspiracies. Until, one day, some principle of self-preservation (brought on by Beema's intervention) had forced me to see that the only clear pattern in any of this was my own rush towards insanity. I was seventeen then, and resilient. I had been able to pull away from that course, and face the harsher truth that everything that happened was Mama's doing, Mama's choice.

But what if I had been wrong? What if there had been some conspiracy all along? I shut my eyes against the dots of light and I saw a gathering of people: the customs official downstairs, Beema's old schoolfriend, the CEO of STD, Kiran Hilal and Shehnaz Saeed. As I watched they discussed their various roles, plotted how each one of them would guide me towards the next one in line, so discreetly, so seemingly unconnectedly, that the arrival of an encrypted page at my door, after I'd been led all the way down the line, would appear coincidence, a confluence of random events. And there was another figure in the gathering: Ed. The man who tried a little too hard to announce himself as my ally from near the beginning of the game. But to what end, all of it, any of it?

I opened my eyes. A street lamp flickered Morse code. I turned away with a gesture of dismissal.

I walked back indoors, and into my kitchen. It had seemed absurdly small when I first saw it, accustomed as I was to the expanse of Beema's kitchen, but already I had come to enjoy its cosiness, every spice and utensil within easy reach as you stood at the stove. And I had grown, also, to love the little window at the right-hand side of the stove which allowed you extra elbow room when you needed to stir the contents of a haandi with extra vigour. Rabia said it was one of the great sight gags of the block of flats, my elbow jiggling outside the window for everyone to see, as much a source of amusement as the woman in number 9C who would flip her long hair over the balcony after a shower and squeeze, directing the water into a flowerbed below, ensuring that the snapdragons she had planted there stayed alive even through water shortages.

I gathered together all the ingredients I needed for biryani. Gestalt philosophy must have been born in a kitchen of the sub-continent, the Poet once said. In any successful biryani, the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. I switched on the portable radio that perched on the raised back strip of the stove and listened to FM 100 as I soaked the rice, measured out and ground the spices, chopped the potatoes, tomatoes and chicken, and wept over the onions. Beema and Dad's cook, Abdul, had offered to come and work for me while they were away, but I had told him not to be a fool and just take Dad's offer of paid leave instead. The truth was, there had been nothing more appealing to me about the idea of living alone than the thought of having my own kitchen, without Abdul finding ways to mark his territory every time I entered it.

There was a burst of static from the radio, telling me it was 4 a.m. It wouldn't do to fall asleep tomorrow in the middle of my afternoon meeting with Kiran Hilal's team, I decided, so I put clingfilm over the ingredients, left the ground spices on the kitchen counter and everything else in the fridge, and went to bed, falling easily into a sleep without remembered dreams.

But the following morning, as I stood in the STD kitchenette shaking the remnants of the instant coffee jar into my mug, Ed walked in, and I had to wonder whether he knew of his mother's gift to me, and what it meant, and how I was supposed to react.

‘How go the haiku?' he said, reaching across me to pick up a mug. I hadn't seen very much of him since that first day at the studio, and when we did encounter each other in the hallway he was professional to the point of being brusque. He was officially a producer, but seemed to take on all the responsibilities that the CEO couldn't attend to because of the pressures of the golf course and his philandering. When Ramzan started Ed was going to accompany a camera crew for the entire month as they filmed the preparation and eating of iftar meals across the country for a documentary about the culinary and cultural variations within Pakistan. He was producing the show, but everyone at STD knew that the show's presenter was the CEO's mistress and Ed's real responsibility was to ensure she stuck to speaking in Urdu (in her previous foray into television work she felt compelled to throw in occasional words of English which would result in perfectly phrased Urdu sentences interspersed with such gems as ‘the women here do very good hand jobs'. This in regard to the production of local crafts in a Sindhi village.)

‘Dot, how did you know/Yellow, Emerald, Ruby when/All your world was grey?' I said, pulling a new jar of instant coffee off the shelf.

‘Ah.
Wizard of Oz
as philosophical conundrum.' He laughed as he took the jar from my hands and punctured the foil with the tine of a fork, slashing from side to side to widen the rent, and then held the jar up to his nose. His eyebrows rose in mock-pain. ‘Ed, will you recall/The scent of coffee beans when/All you have is instant?'