Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  Somehow my hand was on the drawer-handle again. I moved it over to the telephone and phoned Shehnaz Saeed to thank her for lunch.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘My pleasure entirely. I don’t know why we haven’t been in touch all these years. You know, I was just going to call you myself to ask if you’d made any sense of that page of garbled letters.’

  ‘No, sorry. Haven’t had time to really look at it. But as a matter of interest, do you remember the postmark on the envelope?’

  ‘I did check,’ she said. ‘But some of the letters were smudged so I only know it started with “M” and ended with “AN”. Either Multan or Mardan, I suppose. The stamp was local.’

  That really didn’t help, but it wasn’t as though I could think of any postmark that would have furnished a helpful clue about the origin of the letter.

  I was going to end the call, but she said, ‘Aasmaani, can I ask you a personal question?’ Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow. But I merely made a noise of acquiescence, and Shehnaz Saeed asked, ‘Is there some kind of problem with you and Ed?’

  I had heard his distinctive gait—one stride followed by three short steps—outside my office several times today. Each time he passed I thought of opening my door and calling out to him, but I remained unsettled about how my feelings towards him could swing so quickly and so arbitrarily from irritation to camaraderie to desire to disdain, and not knowing what I wanted from him made it impossible to know what to say to him.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I mentioned your name during dinner last night and he reacted strangely. Surly, in a way that was almost adolescent. And I’m not sure if it’s because of your name or because I’m mentioning it, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘No. No, I suppose you don’t. It’s just that—I’m going to be very frank now—I think he likes you. A lot. And he’s not going to want me befriending you, because then, you see, you’ll be my person and not his. That’s how he’ll think of it. It’s not easy, I suppose, having a mother like me.’

  For a woman who had managed to maintain an air of secrecy around her private life for so long, she was surprisingly voluble.

  ‘You’re wondering why I’m telling you this?’ she said, and I couldn’t help laughing in embarrassment at being caught out. ‘It’s just that, my dear, when we were growing up no one taught us how to be mothers and something else at the same time. Motherhood was an all-or-nothing business. You can tell me, if anyone can, how should I be his mother and be famous? He’s thirty-five years old, Aasmaani, and I still don’t know what he wants me to be. When I acted, he hated that it took me away from him. When I stopped acting, he hated that I’d given up that part of myself. He kept hounding me to act again, and now that I’ve said yes, he’s even more moody than before.’

  If she wasn’t going to be subtle, neither was I. ‘You’re trying to talk to me about my relationship with my mother, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, darling, I’m being much more self-involved than that.’

  She was probably lying, but I liked her all the same. ‘I’m really not the person to talk to about Ed. I can’t even begin to fathom him. I’ll try not to be unpleasant to him, that’s as much as I can promise. But I’m trying for your sake, not his.’

  She sighed then. ‘If he hears that he’ll say, you see, Ma, you’ve gone and done it again. And I suppose I have.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Oh, I hear him. He’s here for lunch. I’ll speak to you later.’ And she hung up.

  What an odd household.

  The thought had barely crossed my mind when I smiled at the irony. Who was I to talk of odd households, when between the ages of fifteen and seventeen I had lived under the same roof as a divorced couple, his second wife and their daughter? And before that I’d spent all those years shuttling between the picture-perfect normality of life with Dad, Beema and Rabia and the utter unconventionally of my mother’s house with its connecting door to her lover’s garden. How unremarkable those arrangements had seemed to me.

  I put down the receiver and sent around an e-mail to a choice group of colleagues, enquiring, ‘Time for a breakout, Chinese style?’ and within minutes I’d assembled a group of three women and two men who were more than happy to join me at the nearest Chinese restaurant for lunch. (That was one of my carefully nurtured talents—the ability to enter a new workplace and almost instantly find people who would provide companionship to speed up the day without demanding anything so emotionally exhausting as friendship.)

  Over chow mein, lemon chicken, egg-fried rice and beef chilli dry I brought the conversation around to Ed and everyone rolled their eyes or held up their chopsticks in gestures of confusion.

  ‘If he was a woman, the letters PMS would be attached to his name like it was a university degree,’ the news anchor asserted, picking off the little pieces of carrot from the egg-fried rice on her plate, and leaving everything else untouched.

  ‘Oh, he’s sweet enough. Leave him alone,’ said one of the women on the Boond team. ‘You can’t blame a guy for getting frustrated if he’s been working abroad and then has to come back and deal with goats in the budget.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said between mouthfuls.

  ‘Don’t you know this?’ The news anchor leaned in. ‘Whenever there’s some major production in the works the budget includes the cost of several goats—the bigger the production, the more goats. That way, when something goes wrong, a goat gets sacrificed without disrupting the balance sheet. Two goats if the problem is major.’

  ‘Boond is a seven-goat production,’ the Boond woman said, not without pride. ‘But what with Bougainvillea dropping out, and then waiting to see if Shehnaz Saeed would agree to do it, we’re already four goats down and filming has hardly even begun.’

  The conversation moved on from there and I could find no seamless way of bringing Ed back into it. That felt like failure. Later, in my office again, I found myself tracing widening circles on my desk and thinking of them as Eddies. Then, my mobile phone beeped to tell me it had been twenty-four hours since I left Shehnaz Saeed’s house.

  It was with a sense of occasion bordering on the ritualistic that I pulled open my desk drawer and lifted out the covering letter. I set it down in front of me, an empty coffee jar filled with pens holding down one corner and the edge of my mouse pad holding down the corner diagonally across from it. It struck me instantly that the handwriting was too deliberately childish, the misspellings too obvious. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. Though. Perhaps. Might. Those were words you’d associate with someone who was more than just marginally literate. And a sentence structure that employed a sub-clause offset by commas—that required a certain level of sophistication.

  I felt a moment of satisfaction mixed with contempt. Whoever had written this could have tried just a little harder to make the fiction convincing. And yet ... I adjusted the neck of the desk lamp so the light shone on to the letter, and tried unsuccessfully to find a watermark or some other distinguishing feature. And yet, if the intention of the writer of this letter were merely to disguise his (or her) identity, then the plan had been successful. I continued to look at the letter for a few more minutes, but no amount of staring could force it to yield up any clues, so I turned my attention to the encrypted page.

  The Minions came again today. That sounds like a beginning.

  I held my hands in front of me, as though in prayer, as understanding dawned. Of course. It was written by someone who was trying to write something—the Poet trying to write a story for Rafael Gonzales, perhaps—except his mind was having trouble forming plot and sentences. So he wrote one line, and then he wrote, triumphantly, that it sounded like the start of something.

  What more can I say?

  But having go
t his opening line, he didn’t know how to continue. Of course, of course.

  Can it be you, out there, reading these words?

  That could only have been addressed to my mother. Why? Just to be playful, perhaps. Just to say, I know you can’t resist picking up things I’ve been working on, and reading them. Except, she never did as far as I knew—she always respected the privacy of his work, never read anything until he asked her to.

  Something else was troubling me. I looked at the paper again. Why do it? Simply that. Why write in code for any reason except to write letters to my mother that he wanted no one else to read? Yes, I used to write in the code all the time—I wrote stories, wrote letters to my mother, wrote in the steam of the bathroom mirror. But that was only because it gave me the thrill that children get from partaking in adult behaviour that is forbidden to them. It was the most illicit of pleasures to write in code, and then tear it up or rub it out instantly before anyone—anyone—could see. I was a child then, and the flexibility of my child’s mind was able to grasp and learn the code with an ease that defied grown-ups. But for my mother and the Poet writing in code was hard, laborious work; it carried with it the scent of jail cells and dread. My mother told me so after the Poet had died—and I had surprised her then by saying, yes, I know it. I still know the code.

  It was supposed to be their secret, just the two of them. But I was eight years old when they devised the code—curious and small; an excellent combination when your mother locks up her study which has grilles outside its window to prevent any grown person slipping through.

  In a drawer, in her study, I found a paper on which she had written:

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

  And below that, two columns. One which listed all the letters of that odd sentence, and another beside it listing letters of the alphabet:

  M=A

  Y=B

  E=C

  X=D

  C=E

  A=F

  L=G

  L= (Repeated)

  S=H

  and so on.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out after that.

  I copied the sentence and the two columns of letters into the mini-notepad with the spy-sized mini-pen which I carried around in the back-pocket of my jeans, and that afternoon I asked, ‘What’s fugue, Mama?’

  ‘What? Why are you asking me that, Aasmaani?’

  ‘I saw the word somewhere. In a book at the school library,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh. Well, to start with it’s not fug-you. That could sound rude.’ She pulled me down into her lap and put her arms around me, her chin resting on the top of my head. ‘The more conventional meaning has to do with music. A sort of call and response. Two or more musicians responding to one another’s music. The second meaning is much more interesting. It means deliberate amnesia. You know what amnesia is, sweetheart?’

  ‘Mama! Of course. But that’s so silly. Why would you deliberately forget something?’

  The following day, I handed my mother a card which said:

  AFAF, N GKZC BKP.

  When I first handed it to her, she thought it was nonsense words. I dug my hands in my pocket and rocked on the balls of my feet as the Poet did when he was offended by someone’s misreading of his work. ‘It says “Mama, I love you”.’ That’s when she shook me, made me promise to forget about it, made me swear never to mention it to anyone. Then she tore out the pages of my notebook which contained evidence of the code—and though I wept to save the jellyfish which I had laboured over drawing on the reverse side of the page which contained the jazz fugues sentence, she shook her head firmly, told me there were consequences for taking people’s secrets, and burnt the pages.

  But she couldn’t burn my memory. When the Poet was released from prison, and she followed him to Colombia, I wrote the sentence down again. Each time I started to think about her I would turn my mind to translating sentences into code instead, until I was so adept at it I sometimes had to concentrate hard in school in order to avoid filling exam papers with clumps of words unintelligible to everyone except me. I never broke my promise to her. I never told anyone else about it.

  No one except her, years later, after the Poet’s death. She had only a dim memory of the card I had written for her, and thought I was joking when I told her that there was still a muscle in my brain which knew how to read and write in code.

  Can it be you, out there, reading these words?

  I pushed my chair back and stood up. Maybe, just maybe.

  Why would anyone send that encrypted page to Shehnaz Saeed? Because my mother wrote it. Whoever wrote that covering letter knew of the strength of my mother’s friendship with Shehnaz Saeed in those two years before she left. It is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want ... I know you know the person who rote them.

  Oh, surely it was the only explanation that made sense?

  A hoax. It could—think, Aaasmaani!—be a hoax. Someone else could have written it, pretending to be my mother. But then why write it in code, when Shehnaz might not understand it or know where it came from? Why not sign it, at least? Why send someone a forgery while making it as difficult as possible for them to guess whose words were being forged?

  My mother had written those pages to me. That was it.

  After she disappeared. She had written those words since her disappearance, knowing I was the only person who would understand it. But somehow, it never reached me. It fell into the hands of someone else who sent it to Shehnaz Saeed and, by some miracle—no, by chance, nothing more—the page had come to me weeks, months, maybe years after it was first written.

  But why write something so mystifying? Why? And why, again, in code?

  Because she was in danger. That had to be it. They only used the code when there was danger of the words being intercepted. But what was there in those words that she didn’t want intercepted?

  There are more. I will send you more if you act again.

  I sat down, trying to breathe slowly, trying to control the rush of blood to my head.

  What situation could make it necessary for her to send encrypted messages? The Minions came again today. If that wasn’t a line of fiction, what could it mean?

  ‘Mama!’ I called out, without understanding why.

  The door was pushed open. There was Ed, with the curious faces of three of our first-floor colleagues behind him. He took one look at me and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘Get out,’ I said.

  He made no move either to come closer or leave. Instead, he looked around the room, searching out clues. His eyes came to rest on the letter and encrypted page on my desk.

  ‘Get out,’ I said again, more softly, through clenched teeth. And then I saw the envelope in his hand addressed in childish block letters.

  Not daring to speak, I pointed to it.

  Ed glanced down and looked surprised, as though he’d forgotten he was holding it.

  I lifted myself out of the chair, walked over to him, and caught hold of the envelope. Though it was mid-afternoon, a hint of aftershave still clung to Ed. It had the scent of a citrus tree growing by the sea. I leaned forward, very slightly, and then pulled away, only to find Ed was still holding on to the envelope. For an instant I thought he was gripping it so tightly in order to keep me near him, and then I realized that he had no intention of relinquishing the envelope to me.

  He said, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘That’s mine. You have no right to it.’ I continued to cling on to one end of the envelope.

  ‘No, it’s my mother’s.’

  ‘She sent it here for me, didn’t she? Didn’t she?’

  He closed his eyes and lowered his head. Not looking at me, he said, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What?’

  But he only shook his head, and still held on to the envelope.

  ‘Don’t think I won’t break your fingers to get it, Ed.’ My voice had a d
egree of calm which only came when I was sliding into hysteria.

  He looked up then. ‘Don’t think I won’t pick you up and throw you out of the nearest window if you try that.’ His voice was equally calm, though I had no way of knowing what that denoted. For a moment neither of us said anything more, and then his mouth shaped itself into a sneer and he dropped the envelope on the floor and left the room.

  I crouched down, knees touching the ground, and picked it up. The postmark said Quetta. I turned the envelope round to open the flap and saw a scribbled note: This arrived during lunch. From Quetta? Tell me if it makes any sense. Shehnaz.

  I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of encrypted, calligraphed pages.

  I put the pages in my handbag, and exited the office, stopping only to mumble some explanation to the CEO about feeling unwell—he was on his way to the golf course and I’m sure it was impatience rather than concern that made him wave me out towards the door, towards my car, towards home as fast as the potholed streets would allow.

  But once home, I climbed slowly, almost hesitatingly, up the steps to my third-floor flat. My life may be about to change, I thought. I became starkly aware of everything around me—the speckled pattern on the stairs; the mangy cat slouching through the driveway beneath; the multitude of potted plants in front of the doorway of one of the two first-floor flats accessible via this stairway; the tink-tink-tink sound from a nearby plot of land where someone repeatedly drove a hammer against nails, eliciting a rhythmic, near-musical sound; the rush of heat from a kitchen window; the glimpse, over at the horizon, of white-blue waves which might appear a mirage to an untutored eye seeing them, as I now did, through a wave of smoke from a fire in an empty plot; the fire itself, an even orange colour which made it possible to wonder if it, too, were a trick of the eye, really just a ragged piece of bright chiffon flapping back and forth in the breeze. And most of all, most of all I was aware of the papers clutched tight in my hand.