Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Seriously?’ Rabia said. ‘You’ll be working on the Shehnaz Saeed show? Why didn’t you tell me?’ High political ideals did nothing to stand in the way of my sister’s love of celebrity.

  ‘Let’s not get carried away. I’m sitting in on one meeting with Kiran’s team. That’s what she calls it—her team. I’m like the outside coach who’s called in to help correct a particular bowling action, and then sent away again.’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe when they see your own bowling action, they’ll want you to be a part of the team, too.’

  There she was again, in front of my eyes, walking from tarmac to terminal. ‘I don’t want to be part of the team.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  My sister put her arm around my neck. ‘Once in a while, you need to let things be complicated.’

  I stood up, aware of Rabia watching me closely as I walked towards the screen door, pulled it open and stepped on to the balcony. There was a mingled scent of sewerage and sea in the air which I should have found a great deal more unpleasant than I did. It was only at these early-morning hours that it was quiet enough to hear the waves, and then I loved this place despite how quickly window grilles and outdoor antennae turned to rust and how rapidly the paint on the façade faded. This proximity to the sea, I knew, might have as much to do with the mermaid dream—which had come back again last night—as the wall paintings did, but it was easier to blame the paintings since they weren’t anything I loved.

  The Poet used to say we all have a particular topography in which we feel ourselves at home, though not all of us are fortunate enough to find the landscape which makes us so aware of that thing called ‘the soul’. It is mountains for some, deserts for others, wide open plains for the most obvious in our midst. But you and I, Aasmaani, he’d tell me, we are creatures of water.

  I heard Rabia get up and walk back to her flat.

  In a few minutes she returned, carrying a file full of news cuttings that I hadn’t seen in many years, though it didn’t surprise me that she still had it.

  ‘Sit,’ she commanded, when I returned to the lounge. When I failed to comply, she clicked her tongue—there were moments when it was frighteningly easy to see what she’d be like as a grandmother—and flipped through the various cuttings until she came to the one she wanted. ‘Read it,’ she said, and retreated to her flat again.

  I ignored it for almost an hour, and contented myself with surfing the internet for further information about Archimedes’ magnifying glass and checking e-mail. Just three new messages. One from my father, commenting on the latest news from the world of cricket and suggesting we switch our sporting allegiances to the game of curling. One from an ex-colleague at the multinational corporation, giving me an update on office politics and saying we must get together one of these days. I wondered if she was at all surprised to find how easily I had slipped out of her life, just as I had slipped out of the lives of everyone with whom I had ever worked. The third e-mail was a petition to ban some sport of which I had never heard, because it was endangering a species of animal for which I had no regard in a country that couldn’t care less what I thought of its laws. I forwarded it to Rabia with the message: ‘The modern woman’s preferred method of political engagement.’

  Finally I logged out, and hefted the green ring-binder file on to my lap. Its contents had increased quite considerably since I last saw it, which came as something of a revelation.

  The article Rabia had left the file open on was an interview with Shehnaz Saeed, conducted in 1982 when she was touring festivals around the world with Macbeth. It had been published in Italian, and someone in Milan had mailed the article to my mother’s Karachi address. Mama was having one of her bouts of self-imposed exile at the time, so I was the one who found the letter when I went with Beema on our monthly inspection of my mother’s house. Attracted by the foreign stamps, I had opened the envelope and, finding the contents indecipherable, I had made Beema drive me to the Italian consulate, where a young official with the bluest eyes had taken pity on me and translated the article. Those were the days when you could just walk into a European consulate without encountering road blocks and several layers of security guards and the need for appointments. Those were also the days when it was me, not my half-sister, who maintained this file about my mother with a near-religious zeal. I shook my head to clear away the memory, and read the translation, which I had glued next to the cutting:

  Q: Watching your performance of Lady Macbeth at the festival, even though I couldn’t understand the Urdu, there was an Italian word which came to mind: sprezzatura. The illusion of ease with which the most gifted artistes imbue their most complex performances. Are you familiar with this word?

  A (laughing): Yes, I am. Thank you. I’m very ... thank you.

  Q: If you had to name a performer who embodies sprezzatura, who would it be?

  A: I can think of a number of actors. But, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s an Italian word which is applied to performances which are a level above mere sprezzatura.

  Q: You mean grazia. I have to say, I’m impressed.

  A: Yes, grazia. Divine grace. The feeling that something almost out of this world is happening through the performer. You can admire sprezzatura, but in the presence of grazia you feel actually honoured, you feel you’ve changed. You’ve glimpsed something of the immortal mysteries. I’ve only witnessed grazia once—and it wasn’t while watching a play. The feminist icon Samina Akram, I heard her address a crowd in Karachi once. In the interaction between her and the audience and some ineffable presence, grazia happened. I was in that audience—and I know without doubt that my most important performance was that, just being one of the crowd of several hundred people who created that atmosphere which allowed her to be so fully herself. I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything like it again.

  That was my mother’s greatest cruelty. She allowed you enough time to luxuriate in her grazia, and then she went away, taking it with her, leaving you with the knowledge that you would never feel anything like it again and you would certainly never produce it yourself. Small wonder my father was never able to look squarely at her after their divorce—in all my memories of the two of them sharing the same space he is always distracted by something on her periphery: a sunset, a fleck of paint, an ant. I used to think it was because he hated her too much to look at her, but it was only after she left that final time that I thought to wonder if he was afraid of glimpsing grazia in her again. They were married for eleven months; she left him after four months, but agreed to delay the divorce until after I was born.

  ‘Which did you resent more,’ I had asked Dad in one of the rare moments in which either of us mentioned my mother to the other, ‘that she left you or that she married you to begin with?’

  He said, ‘If she hadn’t married me, I wouldn’t have you. If she hadn’t left me, I wouldn’t have Rabia.’

  He was right to evade the question, I suppose. Even before my mother left, she was an unspoken presence standing between Dad and me. His disapproval of her, and my disapproval of his disapproval, made silence the only possibility between us in regard to her.

  I ran my fingers over the plastic sheet which covered the newspaper clipping and held it in place. What did Rabia think she’d achieve by reminding me of this article? More reason not to have even the slightest involvement with Boond, that’s all it was. And yet. I knew Shehnaz Saeed had really been a friend of my mother—and not just in the way of all those people who claimed to have been her friends but had really only fallen under the spell she could cast so quickly, so pervasively, over almost anyone she met. In those last two years before she disappeared, I would sometimes pick up the phone to make a call, only to hear my mother on the extension speaking to a voice I knew so well from all those hours of listening to it on the stage and TV. Mama would always hear the click of the receiver when I picked up and say, ‘Who is it?’ so I’d have to hang up, but even though I never heard
their conversations, the mere fact that Mama was talking to Shehnaz Saeed in those years when she barely talked at all said volumes about their closeness during that period.

  I had never met Shehnaz Saeed—this struck me as odd for the first time—though I knew that Mama went to visit her during those two years—sometimes several times a week, sometimes not for weeks at a stretch. After Mama disappeared, I sometimes thought of calling Shehnaz, but I never knew what it was I wanted to say to her.

  But now Shehnaz Saeed herself had handed me a reason to call her. I walked over to the oversized handbag I had carried to work that day, and took out the envelope addressed to me that had been lying there, unopened, since the morning. It was from Shehnaz Saeed: ‘Thank you for helping with my character’ was scribbled on the envelope. One of the twenty-somethings at STD who’d been in reception when the package arrived had almost fainted at this evidence of Shehnaz Saeed’s unstarlike attitude to ‘underlings’. I hadn’t been so convinced. I knew a thing or two about women who were legends. I knew how desperately they wanted to be treated as though they weren’t legends—but only by people whom they deemed worthy of such impertinence. I was worthy, in Shehnaz Saeed’s eyes. It didn’t matter that we’d never met.

  Despite the twentysomething’s entreaties, I hadn’t opened the envelope; doing so seemed to constitute an agreement—to something—so I’d kept curiosity at bay all these hours.

  But now I prised open the flap and pulled out the contents—a piece of paper, neatly folded up, with a yellow post-it note stuck on top. I peeled off the note and read: ‘I would love to meet you. Please call me. In the meantime, does the enclosed bit of writing mean anything to you?—Shehnaz.’

  I unfolded the paper, laid it on the table, and smoothed the creases with the palm of my hand. An unintelligible series of letters, beautifully calligraphed, filled the top of the page.

  Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.

  That was the first line. The rest of the writing didn’t make any more sense.

  Why would someone I had never met put this in a box and imagine it might mean something to me?

  I looked at the page one more time, then pushed it aside. Some foreign language, no doubt. Live in a port city all your life and you get used to finding pieces of paper with indecipherable scripts formed into paper cones for roasted pine-nuts, or just drifting along on the breeze in empty lots used as garbage dumps. Did Shehnaz Saeed think I was a linguist?

  I walked away from the page, and was all the way to my bedroom before dormant neurons in my brain fired themselves awake.

  My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.

  I turned. My feet were heavy lifting themselves off the bare floor and my body sluggish in response.

  I reached the paper, lifted it up.

  Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.

  The letters stepped out of their disguises—haltingly at first, but then all in a rush and swirl of abandon—and transformed into words:

  The Minions came again today.

  IV

  The edge of the low table bit into my skin, just inches below my elbow. I raised my arm, and looked at the diagonal indentation. Close up and out of context, this groove running through a square of skin could as easily be a dried river-bed in a desert as a thread of sap on the vein of a leaf.

  I ran my thumb along the furrow, and returned my attention to the four lines on the page. It was startlingly easy to read the code after all these years, read it as though it were a language of its own—but it might as well have been Albanian for all my success at comprehension. From a writing pad on the table, I tore out a page and pressed it against the encrypted lines. The black calligraphy showed through as if covered by nothing thicker than the membrane of an onion skin.

  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 po
etry. 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.