Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  No one in the world of officialdom even bothered to inform her of Omi’s death. It was Beema who heard the news from an uncle in the army, just before Mama came by Dad’s house—she was supposed to take me to her tailor to have my first sari blouse fitted. And so it was Beema who broke the news to Mama. Mama wept for a while—wild, crazy tears—but then, while Beema held me tightly as I sobbed, Mama left the house and drove straight to the morgue. She arrived there to find that distant relatives of Omi’s, who hadn’t seen him in years, had already taken the body back to his village for burial. Was it a thought-out decision, or just instinct that made her drive home instead of coming back to Dad’s house for me? Either way, she reached home to find the doorway in the boundary wall between his house and hers bricked up, and policemen barring her from entering through his front gate, saying they needed to search the premises for clues to his murder. There was nothing she could do but watch from her balcony as men who weren’t wearing any uniform made a fire in his garden and burnt all his papers.

  They say it made my mother scream like a madwoman—the smell of all those poems burning. I knew it was more than that; it was the memory of the fight I had witnessed between them just days earlier when he complained that she didn’t take adequate care of the copies of his poems which he left in her house to safeguard against fire or theft. They rarely fought, but when they did their fights were monumental. She yelled, he blustered, and finally she said, fine, gathered her set of his poems into a pile and held a burning match above it. She wouldn’t really have set it alight, I’m sure, but he lunged for her hand and, surprised, she dropped the match. They watched in silence as the papers burnt, flames spreading too fast to attempt any rescue, and when it was all ash, he rubbed his thumb in the greyness and wrote her name with it on a piece of paper.

  ‘You see,’ he told her. ‘Everything I write can be reduced to a single word.’

  Omi, how much you loved being the mad, passionate lover!

  If I am no longer the man mad with love for you does it mean I’m not me any more?

  Yes, it defined you so totally, your love for her. If that love ever dimmed or became an abstraction, you’d wonder if you were still yourself. I know you would.

  A red bougainvillea flower glided into the room.

  Return, then, to the case at hand. Return to the third problem. The problem of reconciling the burnt poems with the story of a faked death. Conventional wisdom has it that a government agency killed the Poet because they feared the effect his new poetry collection would have on a nation which had so recently received just a tiny reminder of the taste of democracy and was clamouring for more. No one had forgotten the impact his Hikmet translations, along with Habib Jalib’s original verse, had on the popular—and successful—uprising against Ayub Khan in 1969. So the government had him killed—and tortured, to teach other revolutionary poets a lesson—and government agents entered his house and burnt his poems.

  That was the story we’d all believed. It seemed to be the only story that made sense. After all, if the men who burnt the poems hadn’t worked for the government, why would the police have stood guard outside while they gathered up the papers and stoked the flames?

  There it was. That’s what everything hinged on. The government burnt his poems after he died, so the government must have been responsible for his death.

  I closed the file and walked back to the cabinet with it.

  I opened the drawer for 1986 and there, in black marker, scrawled on steel in tiny letters was the word: WHY?

  Why was it necessary to conclude that the people who burnt the poems were the very people responsible for his death?

  I put the file back in its place and rested my hands on either side of the drawer, as though it were a podium and I had just stepped up to expound my case.

  Let’s say—just for the sake of argument, let’s say—that someone kidnapped the Poet, convinced the doctor to misidentify a corpse as his, and thereby spread the conviction through the nation—all the way to the very seat of power—that the Poet had died. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, for government agencies to move in immediately to destroy his poems, knowing that his death would only augment their power? Yes, of course. His death would make his poems so much more powerful than his life ever could. How could a government be stupid enough to kill him while everyone knew he was working on a collection of political poems? How could a government be stupid enough to do that when, for all they knew, there were copies of his poems in someone’s house, in someone’s memory, making their way to someone’s mailbox? It made no sense.

  It made far more sense for the government to react to news of his death by burning his poems and hoping there were no copies. Simple as that.

  Ladies and gentlemen, there is no disproving this thesis. I have explained away all your objections.

  Explained away everything, except the most important thing. Motive. Why kidnap the Poet and imprison him for all these years?

  Could it simply be ‘any unpleasant motive’? Simply that someone despised him and wanted him to suffer?

  That wasn’t good enough.

  Perhaps there was a reason that had not yet been revealed to us, or to him, just as the reason for the kidnapping of that young girl was not revealed until all those years later when the man she had come to think of as her father gave her in marriage to her real father and turned her brother to patricide and fratricide.

  I moved away from the cold steel of the cabinets. What dark purpose, Omi, lies behind your capture, biding its time like Hera waiting for Hercules to become a father before she infects him with madness and drives him to kill his wife and children—a sweeter revenge than any she could have had before he knew what it was to love as only a parent can love?

  As I stood in that room surrounded by murder stories, with the life of the city rumbling away beneath me on the bridge, it was obvious that in the absence of ultimate proof any story was possible, any belief was possible. The questions it came down to were these: did I believe that voice in the pages? Did I trust my ability to know Omi’s voice? Did I trust the core of that man—that bawdy, tender, humorous, no-nonsense man with the razor-sharp mind—to remain unchanged even through all these years, all those trials?

  Yes.

  Simply, yes.

  ‘Omi,’ I said, and the word hung in the air, white-gold and sturdy.

  He was still alive. Oh dear God, he was still alive.

  I found I was kneeling on the ground, though I didn’t know how I got there. Light streamed in through the window, almost liquid, almost tactile. The fist of muscle within my chest unfurled. With a great surge something molten shot through my veins—the sensation so unfamiliar, so overwhelming, that it took me a moment to recognize it as joy.

  XIII

  In the hours, and days, that followed, life progressed on an ordinary path. Sehri, work, siesta, iftar, television, dinner, night-cricket. That was the outline of my days. But within that outline I was at once weightless and held fast, as though embraced by an Omi-shaped dream somewhere far above the gravitational pull of the earth.

  While waiting to bat, and between innings, during the games of night-cricket I’d lean back on my elbows in the grass and look up at the sky. Only in its distant mystery could I find the language for my emotions. A knot of gas, made increasingly dense—perhaps by the force of a wave passing through it—will start to contract in on itself, heating up its core until it sets off nuclear fusion and a star is born.

  Does that knot of gas recognize in itself an incipient star? Does it yearn for the wave to pass through it? Of course not. But even if it could, even if it had that faculty of imagination, perhaps it would choose not to use it. Perhaps it would only be at that moment (if millions of years can be a moment) when the knot of gas coalesced into luminescence that it would realize how diffused it had been, and for how long.

  I couldn’t speak of what was happening to me as I moved through the day with the outward semblance of a woman following routine
. But whatever I did, this knowledge, this wave, was constantly making its way through me: he is alive, Omi is alive.

  One evening, in my flat, I realized I had been looking out at the sea for hours without a single thought. That unthinking was the opposite of the deliberate, dark blankness I was driven to when the debris of facts could no longer fill my thoughts. It was the unthinking that came from being full with a certain knowledge, heavy with it. He was alive. That was not a thought, not something that came from the mind. It was knowledge in the form of sensation.

  They noticed it, everyone around me—at work, during the cricket games, in the flat next door. They noticed it but couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, or what it was, and didn’t believe that I was being anything other than deliberately evasive when I just shook my head and smiled when questioned. How could I say, I cannot speak of it? This demands music, not language.

  And it was music with which I filled my days. At the office, in the car, at home, I engulfed myself with the opera he had tried to teach me to love—here, here, he’d say, listen, and he’d make me sit through as much as I could bear of Carmen, The Ring Cycle, Otello, Madama Butterfly, or whatever else it was that he was listening to at the end of a session of writing. But what do the words mean, I would demand, and he’d shake his head. Never learn Italian, he warned me. Why do you think I prefer opera to qawaali? They both have the same degree of passion, but with qawaali I understand the words and that ruins it. As long as you don’t understand the words of opera you can believe they match the sublime quality of the music, you can believe words are as capable as music of echoing and creating feeling, and you need only search hard enough, long enough, for the right combinations to create that perfection. Before the babble of Babel, Aasmaani, people spoke music.

  For four days or five, I remained in the state of quiet joy, unbothered equally by the deprivations of fasting, the phone which kept ringing at odd hours with no originating number showing up on caller ID, the questions and strange looks that came my way. But then one night, as I lay on my stomach in the grass, watching the spinning of a cricket ball illuminated by the headlights of the cars parked side by side in the driveway alongside the makeshift pitch, Rabia lay down beside me and said, ‘Does this have anything to do with your mother?’

  The ball spun away from the bat’s trajectory and dislodged a bail from the stumps. The innings ended.

  I opened my mouth to say, ‘No,’ but the word didn’t quite come out. Sensation distilled into thought, and the thought was: if there is such a thing as a core of being which remains unchanged, her core is her love for Omi. If she knows he’s alive, if she knows his words are making their way to Karachi, then she’ll return.

  I put my head down, feeling blades of grass prickling my face. Rabia put her hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re so different these days, Aasmaani. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. You’re more locked up in yourself than ever. But in a peaceful way, it seems.’

  An understanding that I had been too blind to see in all these years forced me to look up at her. ‘And you think, it can only be my mother who can bring me peace. My mother who left fourteen years ago, who used to leave so often before that, only my mother has that power in my life. You’re the one who’s always been my rock, you and Beema together the anchors who keep me moored to sanity. And you think you’re so much less in my life than her, don’t you?’

  Rabia looked away, her fingers scratching at my shoulder in tiny circles. ‘It’s not a question of competition.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’ I turned over on to my back, and she pirouetted her body round to rest her head against my stomach.

  My Scrabble girls, our father used to call us when we were young and there was no pillow in the world which Rabia would rather rest against than some part of me—shoulder, stomach, thigh—her body always perpendicular to mine so there was only that single point of contact between us.

  Shakeel walked up to us, laughed, and lay down, his head on Rabia’s leg. ‘Double word score,’ he announced.

  ‘No abbreviations allowed, skinny man!’ I said.

  Someone had switched off the car headlights while everyone took a break between innings, and the stars were bright above us. I lay in silence for a while, looking up, listening to Rabia enumerate for Shakeel the different stars which made up the Orion constellation—Betelguese and Bellatrix at the Hunter’s shoulders, Rigel and Saiph twinkling at his knees—and remembered when I had taught her to look up to the sky and greet the distant points of light by name.

  Rabia the Patient, daughter of Beema the Sane.

  I had never really thought to question why she maintained that scrapbook about my mother, long after I had discarded it; never stopped to consider that in those two years when my mother lived with me in the upstairs portion of my father’s house, Rabia always kept a distance, not knowing how to react to that unfamiliar creature lurking beneath the shell of the woman she had once known; never wondered how much resentment Rabia felt towards Mama for being the strongest pull in my life. But now it was so clear.

  I sat up, causing a reverse domino effect to take hold of my sister and brother-in-law.

  ‘You have that look of purpose in your eyes,’ Rabia said. ‘What’s that all about?’

  ‘It just occurred to me to wonder something. When did you become such a fan of my mother, Rabia, and why? I know your feelings for her weren’t uncomplicated when we were growing up.’

  Rabia drew her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She didn’t seem particularly surprised by the question. ‘I admire what she did as an activist. I admire it particularly because I read all those condolence letters addressed to you in the months after she disappeared, which you used to throw into the bin after reading the first three words. So I know what a difference she made to people’s lives, and how important she was to the women’s movement in the eighties. But beyond that,’ she glanced over at Shakeel, who nodded encouragingly, ‘beyond that, Aasmaani, everything I think or feel about your mother is really just about you. I cut out those articles and put them in the scrapbook because your memory is so incredibly one-sided, so totally blinkered, that you need the black-and-white reminders of what you used to admire and idolize her for, just in case the day comes along when you’re able to let go long enough to remember her as she really was, with all her flaws and in all her glory.’

  There it was again. Let go.

  I tapped my bare toes against her ankle. ‘I don’t think that’s what it’s about at all, Rabia. Reminding me of her activism won’t make any difference to the way I think about her—it’s not her activism I’ve ever resented. Admittedly, it turned out to be a waste of energy, but I don’t resent her for not knowing that at the time.’

  ‘It wasn’t a waste,’ Rabia said quietly. ‘Read those articles. It wasn’t a waste at all. What do you gain by believing it was a waste? Why are you so insistent about that point?’

  ‘Don’t turn this back on me, Rabo. We’re talking about why you keep the scrapbook. And here’s what I think. I think you cut those articles out to remind yourself that she was this creature of ideals and courage and everything else you admire so much. Because you need that reminder, don’t you, to keep all your resentment at bay? All those years of resentment which only grows with every second she continues to be the siren pulling me away from you and the world of normality and good sense you live in. You can’t let that resentment out, can’t admit to it. You can’t, because you’re the rock, you’re the anchor. Those are the roles I pushed you into when you were so young you should have been trying on different personalities every week just to find the one which suited you best. And even now, you believe that role so completely that you can’t admit to your resentment, and you have to cloak it in concern for me. Rabia, you don’t have to do that any more.’

  When I was done, Shakeel said, ‘Oh, boy,’ stood up and walked away, stopping long enough only to look back at Rabia and say, ‘She’s stronger than you think, you know.’


  ‘What does that mean?’ I demanded from my sister.

  ‘It means,’ she clutched her knees closer, ‘it means, I’m not you, Aasmaani. People’s minds, their psyches, don’t all work in the same ways.’ She made an exclamation of irritation. ‘Do you want me to spell this out? Who is there in your life whom you once resented, then felt you weren’t allowed to resent because it would be so selfish and so wrong, and whose memory you now revere above everyone else who has ever lived on this planet?’

  I pushed myself off the ground and she sprang up next to me and caught me by the shoulder. ‘Dammit, will you stop running away every time I try to talk to you about this!’

  There was a crackle of lightning inside my head. ‘You’re talking rubbish. Yes, there were moments of irritation. I’ve had them with everyone. But you think I resented him? Rabia, the one thing I wanted most of all was to be his daughter. Not Dad’s daughter. Not your half-sister. Not Beema’s stepdaughter. I would have given all that up to be his child, I would have given all that up in a heartbeat.’

  For an instant I thought she was going to hit me, and then her face took on a concentration of utter pity. ‘Of course that’s what you wanted. Because if you had been his child, he wouldn’t have made your mother choose between the two of you every time he went away and asked her to follow.’

  ‘That’s not how I saw it.’

  ‘That’s exactly how you saw it.’

  There we stood, my sister and I, looking at each other from opposite shores of perspective. I was no longer in my skin, but hovering above, watching both of us with a curious detachment. We could spend all night out there, I knew, plunging our hands into the ice-cold river and pulling out squirming facts, entirely distinct from one another, which would wriggle out of our grasp almost as soon as we hoisted them above the fast-moving surface.