Broken Verses (7 page)

‘One syllable too many,' I pointed out, though I couldn't help laughing back.

‘I knew this girl in New York—an English girl, always in search of a new expression. When she wanted to say someone had a screw loose she'd say, “He's one syllable short of a haiku.”'

I was suddenly ashamed of my prickliness at our first meeting. ‘New York, huh? Is that where you picked up your coffee snobbery?'

‘Uh-huh.' He poured water from the kettle into his mug and mine, with the wristiness of a spin-bowler. ‘It was my home until a few months ago. Lived there for ten years. Loved the place. The day I arrived I thought, I can just be myself here. Not my mother's son, just me. You know what I mean?'

‘I have some idea,' I found myself saying, though normally I would not have allowed myself to be pulled into this particular avenue of conversation. But there was a lightness about him today, which made him seem ... I couldn't find the word for it. Not boyish; it was hard to think of Ed as boyish.

‘Yes, of course,' he smiled. He reached out as if to touch my shoulder, but in the last moment changed course and took hold of the sugar-bowl behind my head instead. Then I knew. The word I was looking for: irresistible. Something about his lightness, his assurance, was calling to mind all those men in screwball comedies from the 1930s. Men who'd crack one joke and smile one smile, and that would be enough for you to know the heroines would live happily ever after with them, with great sex lives, lots of laughs, and endless parades of parties. Even if the idea of endless parades of parties normally seemed unbearable, those men with their smiles and charms would make you forget that. If you can be this, I wanted to say, why are you ever anything else?

‘So how do you feel about being here rather than there?' I tried to keep all tones of coquetry from my voice.

‘Have you seen this?' he said by way of answer, passing me a magazine he'd carried in with him. It was the new issue of
Asia Now
, with an old picture of Shehnaz Saeed on the cover, and the words SHE'S BACK! emblazoned across her shoulders.

‘Yeah, the security guard outside was looking at it when I walked in. Amazing. She hasn't even stepped on to the set yet, has she?'

‘Stepped on to the set? She hasn't even seen a script. And here she is, on the cover of the largest-circulating magazine in Asia. On the cover. My mother! Fifteen years she's been away from the public eye, and here she is on the cover. Can you beat that?'

‘Congratulations,' I said, handing the magazine back to him. I knew his last question was merely rhetorical, but I couldn't help hearing it as one-upmanship, and I found I wanted to say something cutting.

He took the magazine back, and shrugged. ‘It's nice for her. The warm embrace of the spotlight, and all that.'

I had made him self-conscious about his own joy, I could tell. And though I was slightly guilty about that, I was also inexplicably irritated about the cloud of filial smoke into which the promise of a parade of parties and laughter and great sex had vanished. What self-respecting thirty-one-year-old single woman would want the man across from her to transplant himself from a screwball comedy into an episode of Happy Families?

‘So.' I smiled brightly at him. ‘New York.'

‘New York. Yeah.' He shook his head. ‘God, I loved it. Really, truly. I had the best life there; I had my job, my friends, my rent-controlled apartment, my local gym, a place round the corner for Sunday brunch which made Eggs Scandinave you would not believe.'

‘And then?'

‘And then the Towers fell.'

‘And you stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion.' I said it in a haven't-we-all-been-down-that-road tone but he didn't seem to notice.

He let go of the sugar-bowl without disturbing its contents, and made a vague gesture of acquiescence. ‘The thing of it is, I was never more a New Yorker than on that September day. But even then, almost right away, I knew. There are these moments,' he held up his thumb and finger, lightly pressed together, as though a moment were held between them, ‘when you think, now history will happen and I can do nothing but be caught up in it.'

Extraordinary, that someone who'd grown up in Pakistan could say a thing like that, utterly straight-faced, as though history hadn't been breathing down our necks all our lives. You weren't looking, that was all, I wanted to tell him. When history seemed to touch your life less obviously, when it happened somewhere out of sight, when seeds were being sown and there was time yet for things to work out differently, you weren't looking. When my mother warned you, you weren't listening.

He would hardly have been more than a boy when she left, I had to remind myself. He wasn't responsible for making her words worthless.

‘It wasn't anything specific that made me decide to leave,' he continued, rinsing out his coffee-mug. He was too involved in his own story to see I wasn't keeping pace with him any more. ‘It was just everything, everything over the last year.' He wiped his hands on his sleeves, dragging his fingers across the blue cotton and leaving wet imprints that looked like the shadows of elongated fingers clutching at his arms. And then he started off. The INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security check in airports. The visit from the FBI.

‘Look, you don't have to do this.' I cut him off just as he finished saying ‘The Patriot Act'. ‘It's OK to tell me you were laid off.' It was the ‘it wasn't anything specific' line that gave him away. It was always something specific; there was always that precise moment when you felt everything inside you break.

The anger on his face then was of a particularly male variety, one passed through the generations, which must have had its origin the first time a cavewoman told a caveman she knew the reason he was vegetarian was his inability to use a spear.

‘I was laid off because I'm Muslim.'

There was something in his tone that said, ‘You can't possibly be expected to understand anything outside your little world,' and it was that, more than the unjustified nature of his anger, that made me react as I did. In my most condescending tone I said, ‘Yes, it is comforting to blame our failures on the bigotry of others, isn't it?'
So you gave up your Eggs Scandinave, whatever they might be, and moved back into the cushy life of the Karachi elite. And you think this is being caught up in history?

For a moment his entire face changed, something hard and cold settling on it, and then he was smiling and leaning back on one elbow, saying, ‘Are you always this unpleasant in the morning or is it just the instant coffee? Will our relationship undergo a remarkable upswing if we meet around a percolator from now on? I'm prepared to carry one on my person at all times when you're in the vicinity.'

There was an instant in which I thought he knew in practice what I only understood in theory: the falseness of character, the malleability of it. With that knowledge he could step from light to dark, from joker to knave in a heartbeat. But then I understood he was only playing with masks. Screwball comic hero, devoted son, angry young man, condescending jerk. ‘Will the real Eddy please stand up?'

He pulled himself upright, and stepped closer to me. ‘He will, if you will.'

‘We're back to that again, are we? Look, you're not entitled to get to know me. OK? That's not a right you have which I'm depriving you of. That's not how it works down here on Planet Earth.'

‘You're the one who just said you want to know me.'

‘No, I didn't. I said I want you to stop being Mr Creepy-Many-Personalities.'

‘Look, I'm sorry.' He seemed anything but sorry. ‘I know I'm not entitled to anything. But we have this connection, you know, and it's stupid to just ignore it.'

‘What connection?'

He lifted up the magazine and waved the cover at me. ‘Larger-than-life mothers.'

‘Oh, come on. You really think we're going to bond over swapping notes about that? You can complain about your mother going on location for weeks on end, and I'll reciprocate with tales of my mother exiling herself for three bloody years.' I crossed my arms, pressing them against my chest. ‘Is that what that whole line about getting to New York to escape being your mother's son was all about? You thought I would embrace you to my bosom as soon as I realized the strong parallels between us? Admit it, Ed—if you so wanted to escape being your mother's son you wouldn't have returned to work at a television studio.'

‘Are you done?'

‘Almost. I just need your mother's phone number.'

‘For what?'

‘She sent me some calligraphy. I want to call and thank her. She's not anything like you, is she?'

‘What do you mean, she sent you some calligraphy?'

He looked so startled that for the first time I knew I had the upper hand. ‘Well, I guess Mummy's keeping secrets from you,' I said, and turned to walk out.

I felt so triumphant about my exit that it wasn't until I was back in my office that I realized what he'd done. He'd got past the façade. And worse than that, much worse—I knew he realized it, too.

The month my parents married, the Poet wrote his most famous narrative poem,
Laila
. Reconfiguring the Laila-Majnu story, the poem centres on Laila, bereft after Qais has been banished from her presence. Unable to endure the thought of a life without him, she seeks out his likeness everywhere—in other men (she is soon regarded as the town whore], in nature (sometimes the wind brushing her neck reminds her of his touch), in art (she risks her life to steal a painting, because a man at the edge of its crowd scene leans forward in a manner suggestive of the angle of Qais's back the first time he bent to embrace her). But all her attempts to find her Beloved's exact copy lead only to frustration, so she starts to adopt his manner of speech, his gait, his dress, his expressions in order to keep his characteristics alive. She becomes an outcast, shunned by all for her madness and, driven out of town, she makes her way into the forest where Qais has been living—and walks past without seeing him. He watches her go and senses something familiar in her, but is too distracted by composing love poems about Laila to give the matter much thought. Years go by and one day, wandering through the forest, she meets a young man who greets her by the name ‘Qais'. She realizes she has finally succeeded in becoming her Beloved and need never be without him again. In that moment of triumph she looks into the forest pool and sees Qais's face where her reflection should have been, and remembers: the one thing Qais could not live without is Laila.

I couldn't help thinking of that poem as I drove over Lily Bridge and headed toward Shehnaz Saeed's house in the colonial part of town. Kiran Hilal had given me her number and when I had called she didn't wait beyond the moment when I identified myself to invite me over for lunch that afternoon. I said I wasn't sure I could get away from work for an extended period of time, and she laughed, and said, ‘We'll call it a professional meeting, then.'

What kind of meeting it really would be, I couldn't say. Even though we'd never met, she had been part of my memory since I was three years old. It was 1974 then, and one of the Poet's acolytes had adapted
Laila
for the theatre, with the Poet himself in the role of Qais and Shehnaz Saeed as Laila. Though the poem was less than four years old at the time it had already attained the status of a national classic, and though no one objected to the Poet playing the part of the impassioned young Qais, even though his age (forty-two), physical appearance (underwhelming, at best) and previous theatrical experience (none) all marked him as being wholly unsuited to the role, there was more than a little grumbling about an unknown actress taking on the role of Laila. An estranged relative of the play's director had spread the rumour that my mother was to play Laila, and Shehnaz Saeed had to bear Karachi's collective disappointment when it transpired that there was no truth to that story. ‘The unbarked sapling whose pretty foliage will scatter before the cold blast of expectation, leaving only denuded branches, scabbed with the blight of inexperience and folly' is how one theatre critic famously described Shehnaz Saeed on the morning of the press preview.

The following day he was singing a different tune, with the rest of Karachi's critics acting as chorus. In the wake of the announcement that Shehnaz Saeed was to return to acting, one of the newspapers had reprinted the volte-face review from all those years ago.

 

The script is appalling, the costume and set design absurd, and someone should tell the greatest of our poets that it is an embarrassment to watch a man whom we hold in such high esteem brought so low by his own insufficiencies. He cannot act. But despite all this
, Laila
is without doubt the greatest thing to have ever happened on the Pakistani stage. Can I write the words without swooning? Let me try: Shehnaz Saeed
.

As the young, infatuated Laila of the opening scenes she is sublime. But as the play progresses and she becomes the mad Laila who metaphorically casts off her own living tissue to knit Qais's flesh on to her bones, she exceeds all adjectives. The play's greatest failure is to dim the stage lights as Laila looks into the pool and to bring them up again to reveal Qais standing where she had been a second before. After the brilliance of Shehnaz Saeed's performance, even the original Qais seems an inadequate impersonator of himself
.

 

If I ever saw a performance—or even part of a rehearsal—of
Laila
I had no memory of it. But I did recall sitting at my mother's dining table, colouring in a poster advertising the play. I was young enough to regard the alphabet in terms of shape rather than sound, and I loved the way my hand curved into the bends of ‘S' that appeared not just once but twice in Shehnaz Saeed's name. I made a mess of the poster, of course, but the Poet merely said, ‘This one's too special to hang up for the crows to shit on. We'll frame it and put it in my study.' I knew he was saying it wasn't good enough for public display, but I loved him for the way he chose to say it, and for his free use of ‘shit' in my presence, and when he actually did frame and hang it between the paintings of two of Pakistan's finest artists, with the words, ‘I think you're a perfect bridge between their contrasting styles, Aasmaani,' then I loved him most. The poster stayed there until I took it down and tore it up, years later, in adolescent embarrassment at proof of my childhood. It was one of the few times he was ever really angry with me.