Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  I’d almost forgotten there was a husband. ‘Why does he spend so much time in Rome?’

  ‘His boyfriend lives there.’ ‘Oh.’

  She cracked a peanut shell open with her teeth and looked remarkably pleased with herself. ‘That was almost exactly your mother’s reaction all those years ago. Don’t start giving me those pitying looks, darling. He’s a lovely man and he’s given me both unstinting friendship and stability.’ She gestured around the opulent room. ‘In exchange I’ve given him the freedom to be with the love of his life, his university sweetheart, who, being Jewish and male—a terrible combination, in these parts—was entirely unacceptable to his family, who threatened to disinherit him. Also, his mother kept having a stroke each time he said he would rather live without money than live a lie, and he’s a real mother’s boy. So, he married me. Made Mummy happy—and convinced her that homosexuality is cured with just a little bit of parental firmness and a friendly doctor who’s happy to misdiagnose heartburn. And after that, he could spend as much time as he wanted in Rome on “business trips” with David. Close your mouth, Aasmaani, you look undignified.’

  ‘But...’ I looked at her curled on the couch, unsure if she was playing another game with me as she had that first time we met. ‘But you’re Shehnaz Saeed. You could have found plenty of men who would have given you financial stability and also...’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘In a nutshell.’

  ‘Yes, well, there’s the rub.’ She squared her shoulders.

  And just like that, it was clear. The Others, Ed had called her various lovers, and it hadn’t occurred to me to think about the absence of gender in that term.

  ‘You and Mama. You were in love with her.’

  She looked steadily at me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ I leaned back in my sofa and tried to form a reaction to that. ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded, with sudden force. ‘Does the timing of it alter the unnaturalness of the emotion?’

  ‘Unnaturalness? Is that what you think I think? Shehnaz—Aunty—my mother didn’t raise any bigoted children.’

  At that she ducked her head and smiled, and I smiled back, my mother’s disdain for the sheer stupidity of narrow-mindedness filling the room around us.

  When Shehnaz Saeed looked up again, there was almost palpable relief on her face. ‘It probably started the first time we met. At least that seems inevitable now. But I became aware of it a few months after the Poet died.’

  ‘And how did she...? Did she reciprocate?’

  Shehnaz Saeed laughed. ‘It’s sweet of you to pretend to believe that’s a possibility.’

  ‘Well...” I spread my hands. ‘You’re a total babe. And I can’t pretend to know the range of my mother’s ... interests.’

  ‘You really are so much like her. Her way of letting me down gently was to say, “My hormones are too inscribed with the habit of Him to consider anyone else. Of any gender.”’

  ‘And that didn’t stop you loving her?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  For a little while we both sat where we were, looking straight ahead. Then I went over and sat down beside her. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  I leaned back and breathed in deeply. ‘For loving her unreservedly after Omi died. I’ve thought she didn’t have that from anyone.’

  ‘Oh, darling. She had it from you.’

  ‘We both know that isn’t true.’

  Shehnaz Saeed sighed. ‘She understood. She said adolescence is horrible enough without having to deal with a mother unable to cope with the world and a father-figure brutally killed.’

  ‘She talked to you about me?’

  ‘Of course she did.’ She rested her palm on the top of my head. That was one of my mother’s gestures of affection, but somehow I knew this time that Shehnaz wasn’t imitating, merely replicating a gesture she’d learnt from my mother and made her own through using it unselfconsciously. ‘She talked to everyone about you. You were the world to her.’

  ‘The Poet was the world to her.’ Despite everything, that particular scar still bit down into my bones.

  Her hand slipped off my head. ‘They were mythic,’ she said. ‘The Poet and the Activist. They walked into a room and crowds parted for them. The sea itself would have parted for them if they’d so demanded. That’s how we felt, all of us who were their audience.’ She looked down at her finger nails, and pushed a cuticle back to reveal a tiny sliver of a half-moon between her nail polish and skin.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me about her. Tell me about you and her.’

  ‘You sure this doesn’t make you uncomfortable?’

  ‘Why should it?’ And then I knew: Ed. The Others, he had spat out. ‘It’s your son, isn’t it? He’s the one who called it unnaturalness?’

  ‘Don’t think badly of him for it. If there’d been other men in my life he wouldn’t have been any happier. Oh, and I dealt so badly with it. It wasn’t until several years after my divorce that I was able to face the truth about myself, and then I was ashamed, Aasmaani, of who I was. Ed was such a sensitive child. I think he picked up that feeling of shame from me. And of course I wasn’t going to tell him outright. So I lied and sneaked around. Made him spend the night at the homes of cousins he didn’t like. I don’t even know when or how he found out—but one day in his adolescence he hurled it at me. You’re not a real woman, he said.’

  I could see him saying it. And I could see him hating himself for saying it afterwards.

  ‘He was angriest about your mother. He thought we were having an affair and I never denied it.’

  ‘Why let him think something that would make him so angry if it wasn’t true?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t any of his business. That’s what Samina taught me—that it wasn’t anyone’s business and no one had a right to question me about it and demand answers. She was, you know, the person who finally made me dispense with all feelings of shame. My husband was largely responsible, too, but it was Samina who took that final filament of shame off my skin and just blew it away.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I delivered some tortured monologue to her one evening. About desire and identity and what we admit to ourselves and what we admit to others and how do we know when reining in desire is repression and when it’s just good manners? I went on and on about this. And when I finally stopped to draw breath, Samina shrugged and said, “I’ve never liked mangoes. People say it means I’m not a true Pakistani, but I’ve never liked mangoes. Nothing to be done about it, and frankly I don’t see why I should bother to try. The way I see it I’m just expanding people’s notions of what it means to be Pakistani.” And that was the entire conversation for her, right there.’

  Mama. Always a woman who could cut to the quick of things.

  ‘I do wonder sometimes,’ Shehnaz Saeed went on. ‘Did I love her enough to love her unselfishly, really unselfishly? If she’d pulled out of her depression and found herself in a frame of mind to consider being with someone else, and that someone else wasn’t me, would I have been able to accept it?’

  ‘We’re back to the depression storyline, are we? The one which meets with such high viewer approval it’s going to keep running for ever.’

  ‘You don’t accept that she suffered depression?’ She was looking at me as though I’d just told her the world was flat.

  I shrugged. ‘She stepped out of her character.’

  ‘She did what?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Forget it.’

  ‘Stepped out of her character?’ I didn’t know if she was ignoring me or if I hadn’t actually spoken aloud. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it, I suppose. Though it’s more a question of your character stepping out of you, isn’t it? Or of the different parts not holding together, or one part overwhelming the rest. There’s still so little we understand about it, isn’t there, for all the strides science has made in the last decade and a half?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ />
  Shehnaz Saeed walked over to her bookshelf and pulled out an armload of books. ‘Here. Take these home. Read them.’ She opened her arms and the books fell on to the sofa with a thomp! which released a spray of dust from the sofa cushions. I looked at the titles. Living With Depression. Brain Chemistry. What Can We Do? Virginia Woolf: Diaries and Letters.

  I looked up at her, my eyebrow arching. ‘Virginia Woolf ? Oh, come on.’

  She sat down again. ‘Sometimes, near the end, I didn’t see her for days or weeks because she couldn’t even come to the phone or get out of bed. I used to go to your house in the morning, while you were at school, and just sit by her bedside talking to her, or not talking, just sitting there. Some days she’d come over and all she’d do was weep. Your stepmother and I, we convinced Samina she should get professional help. But we were both so clueless. We just saw a sign outside a clinic saying “PSYCHOTHERAPIST” and we took her there. Without a single reference. The man was a complete nightmare. He told her that what she was experiencing was delayed guilt about having an extra-marital relationship for all those years. She said—it was one of her stronger days—she said, “Doctor, then I’m afraid things are going to get much worse for me. Because I think I might do it again, and this time it might even be with a woman.”’

  ‘There you go. She was making fun of him. And of the whole process. Because she knew it wasn’t depression. She knew she didn’t need to seek out professional help.’

  ‘It was one of her periods of reprieve. That’s what she called them. She always knew they wouldn’t last very long.’

  I hated those periods most of all. Those moments, those days, sometimes weeks, when she reverted to her old self and became the Samina of grazia again. I didn’t understand then what she was doing, what was happening to her, what she was making happen. And so those days were just reminders of what I’d lose when she retreated into her self-imposed darkness again.

  Incandescent. Aflame. Those were the words we all used about her. She was supposed to be the Olympic torch, the fire that never burnt out. I would have thrown myself into that fire to keep it alight, but that power was never mine. So all I could do in those last two years was watch with dread each time she emerged into brilliance.

  ‘That was the cruellest thing she did. Remind us what she used to be like, what she could be like.’

  Shehnaz Saeed closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘It was like watching beautiful, fragile butterfly wings exploding out of a chrysalis. It could never be anything but short-lived.’

  Stay believing that, I thought. Keep loving her without anger. I won’t be the one to tell you the truth.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Why did you stop acting? It wasn’t because you were planning to have more children, was it?’

  ‘I don’t know how that story got started. I never publicly gave any reason. Well, I suppose that is how the story got started. People need reasons, don’t they? If you don’t give them one, they’ll pick one for you. I just stopped. That’s it.’

  ‘So it’s just coincidence that it happened just a few months after the Poet died? No correlation there?’

  She stood up and walked towards the windows. It was dark now. She drew the heavy silk curtains. ‘I was offered a part which would have required being away from Karachi for several weeks. I didn’t want to leave her. And I was recently married—he’d put this house in my name—so my bank account didn’t require me to work any more. Things snowballed in my mind after that.’

  ‘You quit acting so that you could be around for my mother at all times?’

  ‘Yes. But don’t think of it as a sacrifice. It was entirely self-serving.’

  ‘Tell me another. I know how difficult it was to be around her in those days.’

  ‘What was difficult was the jealousy, in the beginning. Before I understood the way depression works. What was difficult was the period in which I’d think, why can’t I make you stop going mad with grief over him? Why does he have such complete power over you, even in death?’

  Hearing her say that was like flipping through an old family album and finding one of your own features—the one you most despise—on the face of someone who’s turning deliberately towards the camera at an angle designed to pronounce that exact feature. And looking beautiful doing it.

  ‘And then what? You just learned to live with it?’

  ‘I learned to understand what she was going through.’ She gestured to the books beside me. ‘What an odd breed humans are. We climb mountains, delve beneath the sea, discover how to leave the planet entirely—but the ultimate zone of exploration, the unknown country more mysterious even than death, is right here.’ She tapped my head. ‘Right within us. We use only ten per cent of our brain, and that figure is high compared to how much of it we actually understand. We think it’s a part of us, and it is, but it also controls us. It’s smarter than us, so much smarter. Always several hundred steps ahead. Some of its decisions, it lets us in on—other decisions it simply executes and we never know about them even as they shape our entire lives.’

  ‘The tyranny of character,’ I whispered.

  ‘Tyranny. Yes, that’s a good word. All power dynamics—all instances of repression and authoritarianism and manipulation—are just failed metaphors for the ways our own brains interact with us. That was the grand irony of your mother’s life—she could fight all those external tyrannies, but not the internal one.’

  ‘Wait. What?’

  ‘The Poet’s death released it. Released something in her brain. Something that ate her up. And once it was released, it stopped having anything to do with the Poet. That’s the thing I needed to understand. That’s what you must understand, Aasmaani. Understand the tyrant within her.’

  ‘How do you know you’re not just making up a story that’s bearable?’

  ‘Darling, there was nothing bearable about watching your mother go through that. Near the end she even said, “I would give anything to believe this is about his death. I would give anything to have something to which I could attach this. If there’s a cause I can grapple with it. If there’s a reason, there’s a way out.” But in the end, that’s what she couldn’t believe—that there was a way out.’ There were tears in her eyes now.

  ‘You tell yourself one story, I’ll tell myself another. Either way, Mama is lost to both of us. Does it really matter how we get to that bottom line?’

  ‘It isn’t the bottom line, Aasmaani—it’s the starting point of how we learn to live without her. She didn’t kill herself because you weren’t reason enough for her to stay alive—that’s not why she did it. And it isn’t that she was leaving you for the Poet. Those aren’t the reasons. You must accept those aren’t the reasons. She hung on to an intolerable existence for two years because of you. Not me—I’ve always known that. She didn’t hang on for me. She did it for you. She did it until she simply couldn’t do it any more.’

  I stood up. I couldn’t even be angry with her for consigning my mother to the role of suicide victim. If that was the panacea she needed to cope with Mama’s disappearance, let her have it. ‘I really have to go.’

  Someone blew a car-horn outside the gate. ‘That’s Ed. He’s home. Please, don’t let me make you leave. He won’t forgive me for that.’

  I nodded. ‘Did he hate my mother? If he believed you were having an affair...’ The enormity of what he had kept concealed from me was only just beginning to register.

  ‘Oh no. Not at all. He adored her. He hated me for what he believed was my seduction of a grieving woman. Or used to. But it’s the funniest thing. Sometimes there’s almost a symmetry in the world, isn’t there? The other day, just after he’d spent an evening with you, he came into my room and he said, “Amma, I’m beginning to understand love.”’ She stood up, put her arms around me and kissed my forehead. ‘Thank you for that. Now, go on, go up and wait for him. Tell him as much or as little as you want about
our conversation. I advise the former. And Aasmaani, borrow these books and read them.’ She gestured back to the pile on the sofa. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’

  I embraced her without answering and then ran up the stairs to the second floor. I stopped at the first door on the left. It was a linen closet. I laughed softly to myself and opened the second door, which led into a TV lounge. I was about to walk in when I changed my mind and stepped through the third door into his bedroom.

  It was a long room, with a bed at one end, next to a window which looked out on to the garden. At the other end was a built-in wardrobe and a desk with a laptop computer on it. There were bookshelves along the length of one wall. I walked over to the bedside table. A lamp, a copy of Rafael Gonzales’s Umbrellas, which I had been urging him to read, a framed picture of a very young Ed hugging his mother. I opened Umbrellas. A bookmark fell out. I picked it up and saw it was a picture of me, which he’d taken from my flat two days earlier when he’d come over to watch the second episode of Boond. We’d stayed up talking until late that night, and I’d fallen asleep on the sofa with his arms around me. I’d woken up the following morning to find myself in bed; on the pillow beside me were buds of raat-ki-rani which had filled my dreams with gardens and moonlight.

  The door opened, and Ed walked in. He saw me, smiled, and held out an envelope.

  . . .

  Samina, if we turn away hope when it flies down on to our shoulders and offers its wings to those of our limbs which have long been accustomed to stooping, then how shall we be forgiven?

  That’s a metaphor I could once have turned with precision in Urdu. Stooping limbs makes no sense. Can arms stoop? You would not let me get away with such slippages of language. A bird must be a bird before it can be hope, you would remind me, and rightly so. And so, you’d continue, what kind of bird are we talking about here? The shambling vulture with its own stoop or a drillbeaked woodpecker, destroying your antique furniture? A nightingale! I’d say. Oh please, God, not that cliché again; you’d roll your eyes.