Broken Verses Read online

  Then a chill hooked through me, and I almost cried out. It had gone. That peace, that joy, it had gone. With a great surge, questions finned in, jostling against each other, filling up all the crevices of my mind. How will you find the Poet? How will your mother know you’ve found him? What if no more letters come? Suppose Ed is angry enough to keep the letters from coming to you? How do you know you can trust Shehnaz Saeed? What if he comes back and she comes back, too, and they leave again and don’t tell you where?

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Please, not again.

  ‘Aasmaani?’ Rabia stepped closer to me.

  I shook my head and held up a hand for her to stay away. Slow, heart, slow. Calm yourself. You’ll find him. Look how far you’ve come already. He’s alive. Say it. He is alive.

  Omi.

  It had the feel of a mantra.

  Om Omi Om Omi.

  How many of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?

  I opened my eyes and exhaled slowly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I took her hand in mine. ‘I didn’t mean what I said. I wouldn’t give up being your sister for anything. And I know it seems like I take you all for granted. You and Beema and Dad. But it’s just ... it’s just that sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life missing Mama.’

  Rabia wrapped her arms around me and pulled me to her. ‘I know. Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole life watching you miss her. You’re wrong about me resenting her for being the stronger pull in your life. I’ve never resented her for that. But I’ve hated her for causing you so much pain. I’ve hated her for making you cry. Just as she hated herself for it.’

  I pulled away. ‘You think she did?’

  ‘I know she did. I saw it.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  The cricket game was starting up again and we were perfectly positioned to be hit by a well-timed cover drive, so we stepped into the driveway and pulled ourselves on to the bonnet of a car, leaning back against the windshield.

  ‘It was during those last two years. When she was living upstairs. She’d promised you she’d go to Sports Day to watch you in the long jump, but then she couldn’t get out of bed that day. And you cried. You thought I didn’t know. You always thought I didn’t know.’ For a moment a look flitted over her face that was nothing but the triumphant look of a twelve-year-old who has just discovered her big sister’s secret. ‘Anyway, the next day, you’d gone out with some schoolfriends and Dad was at work and Beema was giving maths tuition. So I marched up to your mother’s room and I said, “We need to talk.”’

  ‘Aged twelve, you marched up to my mother’s room and said, “We need to talk?”’

  ‘Yes. I said, “Listen, lady.” I think I’d just been watching some gangster movie. I said, “Listen, lady. It’s OK with me that you’re living in my room now, and I’ve had to move downstairs. But don’t forget this is my room you’re in, and if you’re going to go on living here you owe me something. Let’s call it rent.”’

  ‘You prepared this speech beforehand, didn’t you?’

  ‘Wrote it down, memorized it, practised it in front of the mirror. Your mother, bless her—she was having a better day that afternoon—just nodded really seriously and said, ‘That seems fair.’ So I said, “I don’t want money. It’s not like that. I want you to stop making my sister sad, that’s the rent you owe me.”’

  ‘Oh, Rabia.’

  ‘She started crying, Aasmaani. Really crying. I’ve never heard such crying, not even when Beema told her the Poet was dead. She just cried and cried like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to do any more, and I got so frightened I ran out of there. I’ve asked myself since, what was I so scared of? Because honestly, nothing has been more terrifying to me since. And I think it was this. That I saw, this is what can happen to a life, this can happen to anyone. That was the last day I ever hated your mother.’ She wiped my eyes with the heel of her palm.

  ‘You and Beema,’ I said, blowing my nose. ‘Saints-in-waiting, occasionally disguised as gangsters.’ And in their saintliness so ready to choose pity over censure.

  ‘She should at least have moved out of our house,’ I said, balling up the tissue paper in my hand. ‘If nothing else she could have done that. Why should you and Dad and Beema have had to suffer through all her suffering?’

  ‘She tried to leave. Beema wouldn’t hear of it. And she was in no state to look after herself, Aasmaani, you know that.’

  I could have gone with her. I could have looked after her. I never offered. I never wanted, at that point, to have to be alone in a house with her, watching her strip away herself.

  ‘How did Dad put up with it? I really don’t know.’

  ‘With gritted teeth.’ Rabia shrugged. ‘I don’t think he was ever too happy about how close Beema and your mother were. It would have suited him better, I’m sure, if they got on civilly enough not to make life uncomfortable for you, and no more.’ One of the cricketers yelled out that her feet were blocking the headlights, so she pulled herself into a cross-legged position. ‘Remember Beema saying to your mother—this was before the Poet died, when they were back from exile and you were so happy you could hardly walk without dancing—Beema said, “Put us together, Samina, and the two of us form the one Superwoman that every individual woman needs to be if she’s to go through this absurd world with even the barest sense of responsibility. We take on governments, buy the groceries, wrest religion out of the hands of patriarchs, raise our daughters into women, and accompany our men to places they’ll never survive alone because they’re still little boys in the bodies of competent adults.” That was it, I think. The heart of their friendship. They saw themselves as complementary, and not only in your life. Your mother would never have left you all those times, Aasmaani, if it wasn’t Beema she was leaving you with.’

  ‘She would never have left me unless she could bear to leave me.’ I slid off the bonnet. ‘She did me a favour, I know. I’m much better off having been raised by Beema, and in your company. But that was the result of, not the reason for, her decisions.’

  From the fielders there came a roar of delight as the batsman struck a slower delivery back into the hands of the bowler.

  ‘My turn,’ I called out, making my way to the pitch.

  I could tell, by the way my sister hovered near me when the game was over, that she wanted to continue our conversation. But I was sick of my own self-obsessed whining, and partly resentful for the dissipation of that utter peace I had known for the last few days, so after the game I loitered in the garden, talking politics with the neighbours.

  During Ramzan, the country had finally got a government. Not a very convincing one, but the main reaction among the people I encountered at STD and in the communal garden was relief that the religious alliance had refused to join a coalition government. ‘Bugger, but they talk democracy better than anyone else,’ Rabia had groaned a few days earlier, watching the fiery leader of the beards lay into military intervention in matters of government as the inaugural session of the National Assembly was broadcast live on one channel after another.

  I had looked at the scenes from Parliament, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to be sitting there, part of the action.

  Earlier in the year, soon after the President announced the new constitutional amendments prior to holding elections to end the three-year suspension of Parliament, I ran into a one-time friend of my mother, a man who’d been a brave and admired participant in the pro-democracy activities of the 1980s, only to turn into a corrupt, vindictive politician when democracy actually returned to the country and he found himself in a position of power. I hadn’t seen him in years, but when we found ourselves at adjoining tables on the rooftop of my favourite restaurant his eyes registered delight.

  ‘Aasmaani! How marvellous!’ He pulled up a chair next to me, ignoring my three colleagues from the oil company who were sitting at the table with me. ‘Heard about the new amendments? The reserved seats?’

/>   I dipped a piece of na’an into raita and shrugged. ‘My sister’s been babbling on about it. Sixty reserved seats for women in the new parliament.’

  ‘Right.’ He drew his chair closer. ‘So how about it? You want to be one of my party’s nominees?’

  My colleagues exploded into laughter. We had been discussing the amendments earlier and I had said the great benefit of having a quota of women in parliament was that it would add colour and a sense of fashion to the proceedings.

  I spooned chicken ginger on to my plate. He picked up a seekh kabab and waved it in my face. ‘Come on. You had a razor-sharp political mind when you were fourteen. Remember that time your mother and I got arrested...’

  ‘You mean back in the days when you had integrity?’ He bit into the seekh kabab and looked amused. ‘We’ve all got to work with the system. Now, look. Say yes. Come on. This is your chance to do some good for the nation.’

  I took the seekh kabab out of his hand and threw it to the cat which had been prowling nearby. ‘The nation can sod off as far as I’m concerned.’

  He clapped his hands. ‘Even better. You’re perfectly suited.’

  I tried not to get irritated by the sight of my colleagues falling about with laughter at the thought of my entrance on to the political landscape. ‘Right. So the way this works is your party gets to decide which women are suitable candidates. And then, with the fourteenth amendment firmly in place, once we join your party we’re not allowed to vote against party lines, so if you decide to pass a law saying “Women are morons” we’re legally obligated to vote with you? No thanks.’

  ‘Well, that’s a rather limited view of things.’ He picked up another seekh kabab. ‘A minimum of sixty women in the house is bound to affect business in some way or the other, don’t you think? This is the chance for you to prove right your mother’s theories about how women are the real dynamic and revolutionary force in this nation.’

  ‘My mother’s theories, like the nation, can sod off. And so can you.’

  And that was that.

  But now, standing in the garden at midnight, listening to everyone around me arguing different gloomy scenarios for the future of the nation, I couldn’t help wondering what my mother would think if she turned on a TV one day and saw me sitting in the National Assembly.

  What if he comes back and she comes back too, and they leave again and don’t tell you where?

  Who, or what, would I need to be to make her stay this time?

  a) member of parliament

  b) apolitical quiz show researcher

  c) capitalist corporate girl

  d) translator of obscure Urdu diaries by day, party animal by night

  Answer: this is a trick question. All depends on who she is now.

  I walked up to my flat, with an old, too-familiar heaviness tugging at my limbs. It was there the following morning, too, as I reached the studio and made my way to my office, to another day in which Shehnaz Saeed didn’t send me more encrypted pages, another day in which Ed didn’t call, another day in which I was no closer to knowing anything about where the Poet was and how to get to him.

  Someone called my name as I climbed the stairs. I looked down to see an elderly journalist who had recently been hired to fill the spot offered to me as host of the political chat show. He was climbing up the stairs from the basement, wiping pancake make-up off his face.

  ‘Word’s got out about what you’ve been doing,’ he said, as we met on the ground floor.

  ‘The quiz show?’ I said.

  He took my elbow and steered me away from Kiran Hilal’s team who had just walked out of the ground-floor conference room. The first three episodes of Boond had been filmed over the last week, and the STD office was still full of talk about the brilliance of Shehnaz Saeed and the idiocy of the Mistress’s Daughter who had declared she couldn’t film any romantic sequences before sunset because you’re supposed to suppress ‘those feelings’ while fasting.

  The journalist pulled me into the empty kitchen and turned to face me. ‘There was a reporter at the Archivist’s flat when you went there. The Archivist is a big gossip. He told the reporter who you were and which file you were looking at. Then Nasreen Riaz told her cousin, who works on our sports page, that you called her, too, asking about her brother’s death. Now everyone at the newspaper office is speculating what you might be after.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Listen, you’re still young and you might be fooled by the illusion of democracy. But believe me, power is still in the hands of the same old people. Nothing’s changed.’

  And with that, I was back to the habits of my childhood, looking around to see who was there, and then beckoning the journalist through the door into the back garden, out of range of any listening devices.

  ‘What do you know that I shouldn’t know?’ I asked him. Even though we’d barely ever spoken before, I trusted him. Omi used to call him ‘the press corps’ voice of conscience’.

  He smiled a little at my cloak-and-dagger antics. ‘My guess is the only bugs in the kitchen are of the Osama Bin Roach family.’ He grew serious again. ‘But if you’re asking me if I know who killed the Poet, I know only as much as everyone does. It’s an open secret who those men were, the ones who ransacked his house and burnt his poems. Or, if not who they were, then certainly who they worked for. It was a government agency, Aasmaani, and the people who were involved are quite likely still in positions to know when people start snooping around where they shouldn’t be.’

  ‘So you’re not one of those people who believed there was more to the story of his death than simply that the government had him killed?’

  He looked at me with interest for the first time. ‘If it wasn’t the government, then who?’

  I had to admit I had no idea, and then he looked offended, as though I were casting aspersions on his skills as an investigative reporter.

  ‘There was no reason to point a finger in any direction other than the one in which we couldn’t ever publicly point it.’

  ‘But why? Why should they kill him, after all those years when they didn’t? Why not just arrest him again?’

  ‘Are you really such a child? Don’t you know enough by now to know they don’t need a reason for killing? You think of it as a big decision, whether or not to take a life. They don’t. It’s like picking teeth to them. Why shouldn’t they do it? Who’s going to stop them?’ He pointed a finger sternly at me. ‘If you’re planning to find out who exactly gave the order and who exactly carried it out, if what you’re looking for is a name, don’t. I know how these people operate, and believe me, you don’t want to find yourself in their radar.’

  ‘You’re the last person I’d expect to hear advising someone to lie low. Can I ask, would you be saying that if I wasn’t a woman?’

  ‘But you are a woman.’

  ‘So’s my mother,’ I shot back.

  ‘I rest my case.’

  I opened my mouth to argue, but he straightened his pointing finger into a vertical position to demand an end to the conversation. ‘Keep out of trouble. The Poet and your mother were friends of mine. I owe it to them to tell you what a mistake you’d be making to continue with this madness.’

  I remembered all the phone calls from unidentified numbers over the last weeks, the caller hanging up as soon as I answered. When had they started? The day I visited the Archivist, wasn’t it? That very evening, in fact.

  What surprised me then was not the feeling of panic that made me want to step on to a plane and leave the country as soon as possible, but the exhilaration that accompanied the panic. It was genetic, that exhilaration, and suicidal, too. But for a moment I let it wash over me. By God, I would give them reason to train their radars on me!

  And then the exhilaration was gone. Who was ‘them’? Who was behind Omi’s captivity? Was it an individual or a group, and what were his or their allegiances and contacts and motives? Whom could I trust?

  I looked at the journalist. Was he acting on behalf of my mother a
nd Omi, or someone else entirely in telling me to stop my search for answers?

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It was just a moment of silliness. There won’t be any more.’

  No, no more pathetic attempts at playing detective. It would get me nowhere. The only person who could give me the answers I needed was Omi. If only he would write again. When would he write again?

  It was much later that night, as I was drifting to sleep, that I thought, what if he has written again already? My eyes opened to the faint green glow of an octopus reaching its tentacles towards me. What if Ed told his mother I could read the pages? If she knew I’d been lying to her, why should she continue to send the pages to me? She owed me nothing, after all. She was, Beema had said, a woman who regarded trust as a sacred thing, and I had done nothing from the beginning but deceive her.

  I thought, I’ll call her first thing in the morning. And then I thought, Ed. I thought of his hand reaching out to mine on the other side of sunlight and how I turned away from him, choosing to see everything between us as evidence of his manipulation. When the truth of it was, all he’d done was show he was just as confused as I was by the coded pages. Over three weeks gone now since that last meeting between us, and I hadn’t called to apologize, or to say what was simply true—that I missed him.

  So, the following morning, as soon as I got to work, I called him. He must have seen the STD switchboard number on his mobile, because he picked up with the words, ‘For the last time, no. We are not shooting her in soft focus.’

  ‘Does the camera not love the Mistress as much as the CEO does?’ I said. I had to speak loudly to cut through the static. ‘Is that the nightmare in which you are living?’

  ‘Aasmaani?’ He said it hesitantly first and then with a great exuberance, ‘Aasmaani!’