Salt and Saffron Read online

  ‘Be more considerate of your feet,’ Baji said. Had I managed to sleep just a little on the flight from Boston I might have held out for something more gracious, but the situation being what it was I sank into an armchair.

  ‘So,’ Baji said. ‘How is your dadi?’

  I looked at Samia, who whisked a penknife out of Baji’s reach. Very reassuring.

  ‘Oh, Dadi,’ I said, waving my hands vaguely. ‘You know.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I haven’t seen her since Partition.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Partition.’ I wondered if ripping off my clothes and doing the bhangra would help steer this conversation towards less disastrous paths. ‘Not a lot of interesting words that rhyme with Partition. I wanted to write a ghazal, in English, for a class. With Partition as the rhyme. Partition. Ma’s mission. Pa’s wishin’. Turns into a country and western song. Allowing for half-rhymes isn’t too rewarding either. Partition. Fruition. Revision. Condition.’

  ‘Division,’ Baji said.

  ‘Mauritian,’ said Samia, and saved the day.

  Baji leant back against the cushions and smiled at me, not altogether pleasantly. ‘For Samia’s sake, I won’t say anything else on the subject. Except that if you ever write a poem about Partition, it must be a lament.’

  ‘A ghazal,’ I said, determined not to back down before her. ‘It was to be a ghazal. And one of the reasons I love ghazals is that the mood can change entirely from one couplet to the next. Isn’t that how it always is? One person’s lament can be someone else’s elegy.’ Masood once told me that his grandmother walked over a hundred miles to reach Pakistan in August 1947, and when she arrived in her new homeland she fell to her knees and kissed the ground so repeatedly that the dust of Pakistan was permanently lodged in her throat and for the rest of her life she could not breathe deeply without coughing. When, years later, a doctor said he could cure her of the cough she threatened to break his legs. Who was Baji to imply that Masood’s grandmother’s story was not worth celebrating?

  ‘My brother died in a communal riot just after Partition. Your grandparents, and all those other Dard-e-Dils who leapt on to the Pakistan bandwagon, had left by then, were in Karachi; so my brother died in their place.’

  ‘In their place?’

  ‘He died for what they believed in.’

  She was making it up. I knew that with utter certainty. None of the Dard-e-Dils died in the Partition riots; they either left for Pakistan in first-class style, with armed convoys or in the safety of aeroplanes, or they stayed within the four walls of the palace in Muslim-majority Dard-e-Dil until the worst of the troubles died down.

  ‘He was my half-brother,’ Baji said, very softly. ‘We had different fathers. I hardly ever spoke to him. He was not royal, you see. He was not too grand to be killed in something as common as a riot.’

  Why weren’t any of the windows open? I could barely breathe.

  The doorbell rang and even Baji looked relieved by the interruption. Stinky (or was it Smelly) charged out of his room and into the drawing room, leapt over one table, rolled under another, somersaulted over a third, unlocked the front door and leapt, rolled, flipped back into his room before the bellringer had quite finished entering the flat.

  ‘Rehana Apa!’ Samia kissed the newcomer – a younger version of Baji, but with hair halfway down her back. Her elbows were quite ordinary.

  ‘My granddaughter,’ Baji said to me. And then to Rehana, ‘This is Aliya.’ Rehana Apa smiled at me, a lovely smile, and embraced me.

  ‘These cousinly demonstrations can wait until later,’ Baji said. ‘Rehana, why don’t you bring it out?’

  It? I thought. Tea?

  ‘Can I help?’ I said.

  ‘Not if the past is anything to go by,’ was Baji’s response.

  Samia seemed as mystified by this as I was. We sat back in our chairs as Rehana Apa exited the room, and Samia started to talk to Baji about the difficulty of getting saris dry-cleaned in London. I tried to understand why I felt such hostility towards this woman whom I’d never before met. Because she hadn’t greeted me with open arms? I was usually adept at receiving coldness with indifference. Why should she bother me so much, when I knew nothing about her except for that matter of the elbows (and it couldn’t be that because I had no such animosity towards her granddaughter, who had provoked in me only feelings of warmth in the few seconds she’d been in the room)? So what else was there? She’s liable to start ranting at the mere mention of my grandmother’s name. Surely, surely, if anything, that should create a feeling of affinity between us. I’d done my fair share of ranting about Dadi in the last few years. Even as I thought that, I remembered Samia saying Baji blamed Dadi for the family split after Partition, and my face flushed with rage. How dare she? ‘We were girls together,’ Dadi had cried when she missed the chance to meet the mysterious Prufrock relative from India. She had cried. Slipped down on to the marble floor … My Dadi sat on that cold, hard floor and though I was only a child I knew the tears she was weeping were old, old tears.

  I felt tears forming in my own eyes, so to distract myself I looked around at the framed photographs cluttering the walls and tables. A few of them were in colour, but by and large they were black and white and, here and there, sepia. Baji was still talking to Samia, but as my eyes wandered in her direction she extended a hand and pointed at a picture on the wall. I got up and walked over to it.

  The setting was the grounds of the Dard-e-Dil palace. I recognized it instantly from the photographs and paintings that adorned the walls of Dadi’s house in Karachi, recognized it well enough to know that to have snapped that particular vista the photographer must have been backed up against the marble statue of Nur-ul-Jahan, founder of the house of Dard-e-Dil. Behind the figures who posed in the foreground was the arched entryway to the verandah that led to the part of the palace where Dadi’s immediate family lived. Her father, though related to the Nawab only through marriage, had the prized ability to make the Nawab laugh and, as such, was indispensable at court. Officially, he was a minister, but it seems to me he came closer to fulfilling the role of court jester. My other great-grandfather, the courtier-cum-yak-enthusiast, was somewhat more independent (or less favoured) and lived away from the palace. But not so very independent, or so very out of favour; if the photographer had angled his camera up, say, thirty degrees he would have captured that spot on the palace roof where you could stand and look through a gap in the trees to see the house where the yak-man and his wife raised the triplets, just outside the palace walls. (‘House’ is the word Dadi uses to describe the triplets’ home, but within the boundary walls there were stables, a mosque, and fruit orchards, to name just a few accessories to the ‘house’.)

  All this I registered when I looked at the picture, but only to the extent that you might register the details of a frame when looking at the ‘Mona Lisa’. My real interest was in the three boys and the girl who were the reason for the photograph. My first thought when I saw the brothers was how strange it was that I had never before seen a picture of all three of them together. Their arms around each other’s shoulders, they stood so close they could have been Siamese triplets in sherwanis, their necks rising dark from the high white collars, their hair identically parted and slicked down. Abida – she was too young in the photograph for me to think of her as Dadi – stood in front of her three cousins, swaying back just enough to make it impossible to discern from the lens angle whether or not she was leaning against the middle brother’s chest. But whose smile was that on Abida’s face? Not Dadi’s, certainly not. The peculiar expression, ‘her face spilling over with laughter’, made sense for the first time as I looked at that teenaged girl, her back arching towards the impossibly beautiful boy in the centre of the photograph.

  ‘You see, I have a photograph of her, and of your grandfather, on my wall,’ Baji said. ‘Despite what I said earlier. Don’t think my feelings are one-dimensional. Don’t think you can dismiss me as an embittered old woman.’


  ‘Baji,’ Samia said. ‘Please.’

  ‘That’s all I’m going to say about it. Now come and sit down, Aliya.’ Baji waved me over to the floor cushion beside her. I hadn’t seen Rehana re-enter the room, but there she was, helping Samia pull a coffee table a little closer to Baji, a long roll of paper under her arm.

  ‘I want to register my disapproval of this,’ Rehana said.

  ‘Yes, yes, you’ve done that. Now lay it out.’

  ‘You know about Babuji, of course,’ Baji said, motioning to Rehana to hand me a cup of tea from a trolley which had appeared without calling any attention to itself. I nodded my thanks to Rehana, and nodded a yes to Baji. Babuji was the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil family tree, as his father had been before him and his grandfather before that. It was said (which means none of my relatives in Pakistan wanted to admit to being the original teller of this tale because it implied contact with the Indian relatives) that Partition and the subsequent Age of Frequent Flyers had in no way impaired Babuji’s family’s meticulous record-keeping, and all Dard-e-Dil births and deaths made their way to the family tree, regardless of bristling borders.

  ‘This is a copy – a pruned copy – of the family tree, as recorded by Babuji,’ Rehana said, placing the paper on the table and unrolling it. This was a pruned copy? The coffee table must have been about four feet by four feet, and still the edges of the paper curled off three sides of the table and rolled down to the floor. There seemed to be some vastly elaborate colour scheme at work, involving purples, greens, yellows, reds, blues and a whole range of colours and shades besides. It seemed that those who were directly descended from the first Nawab via the patrilineal line had their name inked in purple, but what the other colours were supposed to signify I didn’t know. They probably indicated how far you had strayed from being the offspring of a direct male descendant. Yes, true enough. My grandparents’ generation was hanging over the edge of the table, but I could just make out Dadi’s name in blue. Her mother was red, and you had to go back a generation further to locate Dadi’s purple grandmother. How Dadi must hate that! But it must be some comfort that Akbar’s bloodline allowed Dadi the privilege of purple children. Samia and my generation was hidden from view, but I didn’t need to see our names to know Samia’s direct line hadn’t been purple since her great-great-grandmother. I was purple, but it appeared my children would be red unless I married a fellow purple. I wondered, If I were to marry a non-purple Dard-e-Dil, would my children still be red? Or was there a maroon or something for such cases? Why should it matter, either way?

  ‘Are these what I think they are?’ Samia pointed to a pair of black stars marking two names halfway down the tree. Now that she had pointed it out I could see pairs of starred names scattered across the paper, their familiarity rendering Samia’s question rhetorical. The not-quite-twins. As a child, I had inked those names on to my skin after a hot bath, my pores thirsting for that spiral of legend wrapped around my limbs.

  ‘This is the saddest of all the twin stories.’ Rehana’s thumbnail underlined the starred words ‘Inamuddin’ and ‘Masooma’.

  Baji sighed and laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘What we are, we are.’

  Baji was clearly like Dadi in one thing at least: she could state the obvious and make it sound like revelation.

  ‘Although maybe I only think that because I’m an architect,’ Rehana added.

  Inamuddin and Masooma were twins born on either side of midnight, almost three hundred years before Akbar and his brothers performed that feat with an added twist. The twins’ uncle, Nawab Hamiduzzaman, aware of the curse of not-quite-twins, ordered the royal physician to poison the babies and ascribe the deaths to natural causes. Someone should have told Hamiduzzaman the story of Oedipus. Or of Lady Macbeth, perhaps. Because after the deed was done, old Ham could not sleep. He could not sleep and he could not pray and he could not peel the taste of poison from his lips. Until at last a man with the dust of distance on his feet and the gleam of prophecy in his eyes won entry into the Nawab’s presence and, bending closer than close, whispered a means to redemption. And it was this: raze to the ground the mausoleum you have just started building for the bones of your ancestors and your descendants and those who come in-between. Make that land a holy shrine for pilgrims from every everywhere.

  You may wonder, Then what? And you may wonder, How did that lead to a fall in the family’s fortune? I’ll say this: Think of the Mughals. Think of an image that captures and preserves the glory of the Mughals, and if you have any sense of anything you’ll say the Taj Mahal. Well, the fact is, Shah Jahan bought – in secret and in gold – the plans to that Dard-e-Dil mausoleum from the keeper of the Dard-e-Dil archives, and the only thing he changed when he had the plans copied for the benefit of the contractor was the name. But we know, though you’ll laugh, that Taj Mahal is, was, should have been, Dil Mahal. Other not-quite-twins denied the family wealth, power, freedom, unity; Masooma and Inamuddin’s curse was that they deprived us of posterity. And, oh God, we deserved it.

  (When? you might demand. When did this happen? And now I’m forced to concede that it happened during the glory days of the Mughals, when Dard-e-Dil was not a kingdom at all but merely part of the Mughal Empire and Nawab Hamiduzzaman was not a Nawab, not really, no; that title was only conferred upon him posthumously by the Nawabs that followed after Dard-e-Dil became independent of the Mughals. So really old Ham was merely a scion of a once important family which had the good sense to ingratiate itself with the Mughals early on and received, in return, the position of subehdar- chief administrator – of the province comprising those lands which earlier may have been, and later certainly became, the kingdom of Dard-e-Dil. The position was not hereditary and the Dard-e-Dils were sometimes sent to cool their heels in outposts of the Empire but somehow, in contravention of the standard Mughal policy of keeping administrators on the move, the Dard-e-Dils always returned to those lands. Because they were sycophants, competent as administrators, but otherwise so grovelling and seemingly ineffectual that the Mughals saw them as no real threat? Perhaps. But also perhaps because the Mughals trusted them, admired them, acknowledged them as cousins of the Timurid line, and felt that a few years away from Dard-e-Dil was all it took to remind those cousins that they were entirely dependent on the bounty of the Mughal for their own prestige and power. By and large the plan worked through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By and large. But Hamiduzzaman was less than happy to play the role of needy relation. It was, I believe, the desperation to be ruler not vassal, coupled with an awareness of his own impotence against the Emperor, that made him so susceptible to an act as mad as infanticide. He saw that the reign of the Great Mughal, Akbar, was past and, sensing the faintly glimmering possibility of breaking free from Mughal rule, he was willing to sacrifice anything that might stand in the way of an auspicious future for Dard-e-Dils, even if that thing was a pair of mewling babies.)

  ‘Taj,’ Baji said, interrupting my thoughts. I assumed she must have been thinking, like me, of Shah Jahan’s architectural wonder. But no.

  ‘Taj, the midwife,’ she said, one manicured nail circling the name of the Nawab who killed a tiger with his bare hands. ‘With her head full of family lore and no reason to love those oh-so-legitimate babies she brought into the world. How do we know she didn’t invent, make up … Oh, let’s say it straight. How do we know Akbar, Taimur and Sulaiman didn’t enter the world on the same day, all just before or just after midnight?’

  ‘Because their mother—’

  ‘Samia, please. I’ve given birth in the days before these super painkillers and epidurexes – Rehana, you wouldn’t laugh if you’d been through it yourself – and I would have believed anything, yes anything, anyone said to me afterwards about when the clock chimed and when it didn’t.’ She smiled, as though thinking of something that pleased her inordinately. ‘Maybe Taj saw triplets and wondered if they qualified as not-quite-twins. And then maybe she saw the clock and thought, Why not. L
et me make them believe it’s so. Let this be my revenge for their treatment of my mother and me.’

  I was thinking, believe me, of my earlier conversation with Samia about Taj. I was thinking that, and thinking also that of course I wasn’t the first woman in the family to be bothered by Taj’s role in our narrative. So I said, ‘Well, I can understand why you feel a sense of affinity with Taj.’

  Was it the air, the company, the tilt of my head? I don’t know. I just know that as soon as the words were out something transformed them. At the periphery of my vision, Samia was shaking her head at me and Rehana had turned her face away, but Baji only laughed, throwing her head back and showing all her cavities. ‘Oh, I see Abida in you. I see her so clearly. You with the untainted blood. Here …’

  She swooped forward and picked the trailing end of the family tree off the floor, unrolling it on to my lap. ‘Here’s a pair of not-quites you don’t know about.’

  Beside Mariam Apa’s name, a star.

  A diagonal dotted line connected it to another starred name.

  Mine.

  Chapter Six

  I’d had the opening line of Mariam’s story ready for a long time: In all the years my cousin, Mariam, lived with us she only spoke to order meals. The next line varied, according to my mood. Usually it was: Strictly speaking, she was more aunt than cousin, though I always called her Apa. But when I was feeling more fanciful I sometimes replaced that with: She taught me the textures of silence, the timbres of it, and sometimes even the taste.