Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘I think it would be best to just keep things professional, Ed.’

  ‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ he said, moving a little bit closer.

  ‘Lizards. Snakes. Many sentences which start with the word “actually”.’

  ‘Come on, Aasmaani. No games, no masks. Just you and me and two cups of coffee. Would that be so terrible?’

  ‘Actually, yes. Now, could you move your hand? I have work to do.’

  His hand lifted abruptly off the door-handle, and he turned on his heels and strode away. I pushed open the door, switched on the fan, and sat down at my computer to work on quiz show questions.

  What’s the secret which made the mother leave?

  a) a really bad nose job which can’t be fixed

  b) she exchanged her legs for a scaled tail and went to live with her merman beneath the sea

  c) she died. Someone who looks like her took her place, and finally grew sick of the deception

  d) she doesn’t love her daughter any more

  Answer:

  The cursor blinked at me with steady patience, but I just sat there, unutterably weary, with no strength in my fingers even to press down on any one of the keys they were resting on. I sat there, watching the vertical line appear and disappear on the screen until time swallowed itself up in that repetitive motion and there was nothing in my mind but darkness.

  VII

  Far enough into the darkness, I ceased to exist. I was a body, yes, but a body freed of everything that is other than corporeal. Sometimes the only way to be is to remove yourself from yourself. It cannot be done, of course. But illusions—no, delusions—are so much more effective than people give them credit for. I could live for longer than anyone imagined in the delusion that I was just the body of Aasmaani, with nothing within it.

  There was an art to this, of course, a patiently learnt art. Or perhaps a talent. It bore some relationship to sitting in a classroom, with a look that signified attentiveness while the mind skated through every topic except precisely that with which it was supposed to be concerned. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to enter the darkness without my face transforming into blankness, alerting all those around me to what was going on. But now, now I could smile and nod my head, follow key phrases in conversations, occasionally add necessary interjections, while all along I wasn’t really there.

  I was, instead, in that blank space where nothing could touch me. For hours, sometimes, blessed hours of silence.

  And here was the CEO stepping into my office, a female co-worker I recognized but didn’t know behind him.

  ‘Got any gum?’ he said.

  I automatically reached into my handbag and passed him a mint. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He sat down across from me and pulled the telephone closer to him.

  ‘Phones downstairs aren’t working,’ the woman explained to me, as though it were necessary.

  The CEO punched in some numbers and sat with the phone to his ear. The woman compressed her features—lips squished together, eyebrows drawing close, nostrils constricted—as though putting on a battle-mask. The CEO turned towards me and raised his eyebrows in mock-alarm. I managed an upward flicker of my lips in response.

  ‘My only point,’ the woman said, ‘is that a medical show should cover important medical issues.’ And now the tiny part of my brain which continued to concern itself with such things recognized her as the presenter of one of the more boring of STD’s educational programmes.

  ‘BHS is not a medical condition,’ the CEO said, before barking into the phone: ‘Get Tahir.’

  ‘BHS? No, I’m talking about depression.’

  ‘Bored Housewife Syndrome,’ the CEO said. His lips were startlingly red.

  The woman put her hands on her hips. ‘Seven out of ten people in Pakistan suffer some form of depressive disorder in their lifetime. In six per cent it’s serious enough to...’

  ‘Well, all the more reason to shut up about it. If they don’t know they’re sick they won’t expect to be treated like they’re sick. Too much damn whining in this country as it is. Tahir, round of golf?...I’m leaving now.’

  He hung up and pushed himself out of the chair with no inconsiderable effort.

  Leave. Go.

  But in the doorway he turned back to me. ‘You, what’s the story with you and the Poet?’

  I blinked. Two times, three, and then I was in my skin again. ‘I’m sorry? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s his seventieth birthday next year. We’re going to do some grand programme about it.’

  Seventy!

  ‘Tributes, readings, homages, bla bla. It’s going up on our website as a coming attraction for the new year. Someone somewhere in this building thinks it’s a good idea to have a link on the website to a bio of him. And we’ve found one, a bio, on some other website which we’re going to shamelessly steal, just tweak a sentence here and there. But maybe we should check the facts because who knows where that other website gets its information. Last time we stole information off a site without checking it we ended up informing people that the game of cricket got its name because the sound of ball on willow was like the death-cry of the insect of that name. And you know, you’re the research girl so we might as well give you some work. But if you’ve got some trauma associated with him, I’ll tell someone else. Otherwise I’ll be accused of causing depression in my employees, and you’ll take medical leave.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I can check facts.’

  ‘I knew your mother,’ the woman said, stepping forward. ‘We marched together against the Hudood Ordinances.’

  Great.

  ‘Twenty years ago. Can you believe it? Next year it’ll be twenty years.’

  I looked at the CEO. ‘Can you send me the bio?’

  He nodded and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Come on. Out.’

  ‘She was a great lady,’ the woman said, her eyebrows emoting, before the CEO pulled her out and closed the door behind him.

  Seventy. He would have been seventy.

  He once joked that in his old age he’d become respectable—a revered, toothless icon, sufficiently domesticated for governments to trot him out on state occasions so that he could snore his way through ceremonies and receive standing ovations for mumbling, inaudible couplets.

  ‘No, you won’t. I’d kill you first,’ my mother cheerfully promised.

  ‘Now, there’s devotion for you,’ he laughed, taking her hand and kissing it.

  Against my will I found myself trying to age both their features in my mind, picture her as she might look and him as he would have looked. It was a mental exercise I occasionally applied to Mama’s features, so that I would not fail to recognize her if somehow our paths crossed again.

  There was an officious rapping on the door. When I made a sound of enquiry one of the CEO’s underlings shuffled in, so apologetic in his mien that I couldn’t help looking over his shoulder to see if someone else had boldly applied knuckles to door. He handed me a page which consisted of a single paragraph, printed in large bold font.

  I scanned the sentences as the man shuffled out again.

  How could anyone reduce that man’s life to this?

  HE WAS BORN IN A FAR-FLUNG VILLAGE IN PUNJAB AND MOVED TO KARACHI AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN.

  That was the opening. Inaccurate, already. He moved to Karachi at the age of thirteen, in 1945, the year my mother was born there. They liked to say, later, that there was an element of fate in that. (And I could hear his voice: Far-flung? Far-flung? Far from where and flung by whom?)

  FROM THERE HE WENT TO PUNJAB UNIVERSITY TO GET AN MA IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND BECAME WELL KNOWN IN LAHORE’S MUSHAIRAS (POETRY RECITALS).

  ‘Well known’ didn’t begin to describe the reception his poetry received, right from the beginning. His ghazals, in particular, drove the crowd to raptures—not just through the power of his imagery and his ability to mine a word for all its layers of meaning, but also for his capacity to surprise; he w
ould start reciting a couplet, and after a line and a half the crowd would think they knew exactly what rhyme he was leading up to, and they waited with a keen anticipation for him to say it out loud, but suddenly, with just a few syllables to spare before the rhyme and refrain he’d turn it around completely, take it in an entirely different, and quite brilliant, direction. The crowd—often numbering in the thousands—would roar with delight and repeat the rhyme and refrain back to him, shaking the edifices of buildings around them with the sounds of poetry.

  DURING THIS TIME HE TOOK THE PEN-NAME ‘NAZIM’ BECAUSE IT MEANT ‘POET’.

  He took the pen-name Nazim because he adored Nazim Hikmet’s poetry.

  HALFWAY THROUGH HIS UNIVERSITY STINT HE UNFORTUNATELY ABANDONED THE GHAZAL TO EXPERIMENT WITH WESTERN IDEAS OF POETRY.

  He wrote sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, canzones. For those who had loved his ghazals this was a profound betrayal, particularly in light of the nationalistic, anti-colonial feeling that ran high among young Pakistanis in the early 1950s, and they mockingly took to calling him ‘The Poet’ rather than ‘Nazim’.

  AFTER UNIVERSITY HE WENT BACK TO KARACHI which was then still a young cosmopolitan capital that was so busy experimenting with its own form that it wasn’t going to berate anyone else for doing the same

  AND STILL UNDER WESTERN INFLUENCES HE FORGOT POLITICS AND SOCIAL CONCERNS IN FAVOUR OF OBSCENITY AND WAS HAULED UP IN COURT FOR THIS CRIME.

  ‘I don’t know what goes on in the minds of these disgusting people,’ he said, speaking in his defence at his trial for indecency. ‘I’m writing about eating fruit, and they say I’m being vulgar. What exactly do they think the mango’s slippery seed and dripping juices refer to?’ And with that, he put a mango on the table in front of him, cut it open along its equator and started sucking on its seed in a manner so suggestive that the newly married judge ran home to his wife.

  THE CASE WAS DISMISSED BECAUSE THE JUDGE HAD OTHER THINGS TO DO AND HE CONTINUED TO WRITE, WINNING ACCLAIM FOR HIS CRAFT BUT NOT FOR HIS SUBJECT MATTERS.

  By the time he was thirty he was already acknowledged as a craftsman in whose hands language was plastic; even his detractors acknowledged as much, while still complaining that, in contrast to his impassioned student days, he made language do everything except engender ‘worthy’ emotions in those who were listening. In one public gathering he ran into his old teacher who told him that, for all his formal brilliance, he was an inferior poet to his former classmate, Maqsood. ‘When you read a Maqsood poem you feel he’s plucking his heart out of his chest and placing it in your hand,’ the teacher berated him. The Poet replied, ‘Personally I don’t want any of Maqsood’s quivering organs sweating all over my palm.’

  BUT THEN IN 1963 HE TRANSLATED THE POLITICAL POEMS OF AN OBSCURE TURKISH POET WHO SHARED HIS PEN-NAME.

  He said afterwards that in some ways Nazim Hikmet’s death in 1963 affected him even more than the death of his own mother. He barricaded himself in the tiny cubbyhole which was his flat and within a few weeks produced his adaptations—he never used the word ‘translations’—of some of Hikmet’s verse with all its fiery politics. With discontent rife in the country over Ayub Khan’s constitution and its Basic Democracy scheme that made a joke of democracy it was either a brave or politically naive man who could publish such inflammatory verse; the Poet himself never said to which of the two categories he belonged.

  THE AYUB KHAN GOVERNMENT IMPRISONED HIM FOR TWO MONTHS ON SOME CHARGE.

  The deep scars across his face date from that first incarceration. He used to say simply that he got the scars from running into barbed wire. But one day I asked him, ‘How did you manage to run into barbed wire?’

  ‘Simple. The prison guards led me to barbed wire, put a gun to my head and said, “Run.”’

  HE EMERGED FROM PRISON WITH HIS SOCIAL CONSCIENCE RESTORED.

  He emerged from prison with a scarred face and a poetic voice that seared every government in Pakistan for the next two decades.

  BUT HE STILL CONTINUED TO WRITE ROMANTIC VERSE AS WELL, THE MOST FAMOUS OF WHICH WAS LAILA, PUBLISHED IN 1970.

  Oh no. No, no. No leaping from 1963 to 1970. No erasing 1968. That momentous year around the world—student revolutions, a new era dawning, my mother’s first meeting with the Poet. She was twenty-three and he was thirty-six. He was already immortal by then. Immortal and ugly—a short, stout, broad-nosed man with scars across his face. And she—she had just stepped into incandescence.

  She was recently out of university at the time, and had been helping her uncle in his understaffed law firm as research for the book she was planning to write on ‘Women and Jurisprudence in Pakistan’. Her timing, in joining the firm, was either fortuitous or disastrous, depending on how you viewed the path her life took thereafter because, just weeks later, her uncle was engaged to represent a woman who accused her former employer of withholding her pay for six months and locking her in chains when he left the house. As the woman was an illiterate villager and her employer was a wealthy crony of many of the most powerful people in the country, it was a wonder either she or my great-uncle believed she’d ever get a fair trial. Forget fair. The matter didn’t even get to court before the former employer produced before my great-uncle and the woman ‘credible witnesses’ who were willing to attest to the moral depravity and pathological insanity of the woman. The woman walked out of my great-uncle’s office, swearing to him that she believed in justice, broke into the former employer’s house and when he returned she was waiting for him with his gun in her hand. She killed first him, then herself.

  Somehow a Canadian film team which was working on a documentary about Pakistan heard of the story and came to interview my great-uncle. Too sickened by the whole thing to talk about it without exploding in rage, my great-uncle sent my mother to meet the film team instead. On camera, she was ablaze with beauty—and with a sense of justice so newly minted it shone through her eyes. The student revolutions of 1968 had found her on their fringes in her final weeks in the UK, listening, sympathizing, Occasionally even marching, but it took the village woman’s bloodied end to draw all those political ideals away from the abstract margins of her life and place them front-and-centre.

  The Canadian film team must have scarcely been able to believe their luck that day—everything about her cried out, ‘I’m ready for my close up!’ She was wearing a plain white kurta, a thick karra on her wrist—silver inlaid with lapis lazuli—and had her hair tied back with a scarf. And she could speak with passion and intelligence and flashing grey-green eyes. ‘Pakistan’s Gypsy Feminist’ was born. One of the members of the film crew was also a freelance journalist and he wrote a besotted piece about my mother for a hugely popular magazine with a global circulation. Even so, her newly discovered fame would not have penetrated below the upper echelons of Pakistani society—those households that subscribed to foreign magazines—had the Poet not seen the article and expressed an interest in meeting her when one of her cousins was in earshot.

  It was Something at First Sight. Something heady and consuming.

  It can’t be an easy thing for a fiercely independent woman to become a muse. But before she knew how to react against what was happening, my mother found herself being defined by what the Poet wrote about her. He even changed the year of her birth in his poems, made her two years younger than she was so that she was the same age as Pakistan—in many of the poems of this time when he writes about the Beloved his poems have both the intimate resonance of a man speaking to his lover and the grand sweep of a poet declaiming about the nation. What twenty-three-year old could retain her sense of self amidst all this?

  Oh yes, at first she enjoyed it—when he made her a figure of rebellion, of salvation, she played into it. That’s when her initial incarnation as Activist came to pass, though at this point the term was wholly inappropriate—she was still little more than the dogsbody at her uncle’s office, but people all over the country read the Poet’s verse, all dedicated to her, and soon
she was being invited to speak at girls’ colleges, to join panels on Women’s Upliftment, to cut ribbons, to pose for pictures. It helped that the poems placed her on such a high pedestal that is was possible to ignore the sexualized imagery and believe that it was the impossibility of ever winning the love of this young, beautiful creature that fuelled the Poet to write about her so insistently.

  But by the time 1970 was exiting the monsoon season, with civil war beginning to loom and the absurdity of panels and ribbons and pictures asserting itself in my mother’s mind, she walked out of the Poet’s life and went in search of an identity that wasn’t caught up in his shadow. At the outset of her search she found my father, plucked him up by the collar and, weeks later, married him.

  The Poet responded by writing Laila. My mother remained unmoved, and proved this by becoming pregnant just a couple of months after her marriage. When the Poet heard of her pregnancy, he came to see her. (‘He was wearing that grey shawl I loved—it was a hot, hot day, he must have been incredibly uncomfortable. But that didn’t stop him from wearing the grey shawl,’ she told me once when I asked her for details of their reunion. That was as much as I ever got out of her about it.)

  They didn’t move in together, of course—not then, not ever, at least not in Karachi. But her father had already died and left her the two adjoining houses in Bath Island, so she and the Poet became neighbours. Everyone expected a wedding to take place after her divorce with my father came through, but the Poet didn’t believe in marriage—the illegitimate child of a rich landowner and a woman who worked on the lands, he grew up with a fierce dislike for the very institution which would have saved his mother from her outcast status, with only a widowed aunt willing to take her in and help raise her son. And in any case, my mother said, she and the Poet weren’t temperamentally suited to co-habitation and much preferred adjoining houses so there was no need for a formal contract which couched the terms of marriage in monetary terms and demanded a declaration of religious beliefs. She came to see the idiocy of this view when he died, but by then it was too late.