Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  I sit here in the fading light, and remember the pleasure of writing while you slept, your breath my only metronome.

  For today, for this moment, I can banish the thought that you weren’t speaking to me through the crossword (how did my words about Frass get to you? Is it the sympathetic Minion who takes away everything I write? The first time he did that, it upset me, but then I began to see it as an act of charity. If everything I wrote remained on my desk, I’d know you’d never read it. By taking it away he created the illusion that perhaps, somehow, my words would reach you. It was never an illusion I really dared to believe.) For today, I can banish the thought that it wasn’t you speaking (it can be no one else. No one else knew of the jazz fugues).

  But for today, I must also think of all those words I’ve written to you these last weeks. All the words which might have reached you. There was some cruelty in there. If I had the chance I would take those pages back and swallow them, letter by letter. Since that is beyond me, let me say this instead—

  Through me, Samina, you found love. If you were to be faithful to me in all my years of absence, you’d be unfaithful to love. I am embalmed memory to you now, and love is not a cucumber—it gains little from being pickled. (That’s a joke—my metaphors haven’t degenerated to that extent.) If the Minions were female, or if my desires were differently constructed, perhaps one of them would have found a place in my heart and my body and my mind.

  So, love. Love deeply and passionately. Love foolishly.

  If you can.

  If you can’t, remember what I now remember, what I have remembered so often all my time in here: Samina, we lived.

  We were the Phoenix and the fire, the flight to the sun and the radiance at the end of it. Even when thorns pierced us, they were plucked from Yggdrasil.

  Only the language of legend can suffice for our lives.

  If I am to remain in here for the rest of my days, if they take all my books from me, take away pen and paper, they will not take away those years I had with you. You, and Aasmaani.

  My God, Aasmaani.

  She must be a woman now.

  Has she eclipsed us already, that brilliant, brilliant child?

  JAZZ FUGUES. FRASS. Such simple messages can change our lives. You may never find me, Samina. I have no way of knowing where I am. But don’t let that cause you pain. Your words have reached out to me, all these years later. The worst I feared was that you had ceased to love me. I know now that isn’t true. That’s enough. There’s very little life left in me now, but you’ve given me enough to carry me in joy through all the days that remain.

  So don’t spend the life that remains to you in a search for me. I can see too easily how you would do that, destroying your own chance at happiness. Put this paper down, and step out to embrace someone near enough to embrace.

  Let it be whoever it is, I will accept it. Let it be Shehnaz.

  They were right all along, the poets who redefined the Raqeeb. Not just a rival in love but, as a consequence of being a rival in love, also a twin soul, an alter ego, the only one who understands what it means to be afflicted with love for the Beloved.

  I used to see the way she looked at you, all those years, and I knew exactly what it meant because wasn’t it how I looked at you, too?

  That first time you met her, during the rehearsals of Laila, you said: I hear you do a remarkable imitation of him.

  Yes, she said, and she took a strand of your hair between her finger and thumb just as I had done a few minutes earlier. Your two pairs of eyes locked and just before you laughed and turned away, there was an instant when I saw a possibility occur to you which had never occurred to you before.

  How well she must know you, how intimately, to have captured you so perfectly on-screen in those heart-stopping moments. And now here she is helping you to send messages to me, though it must kill her to imagine my return.

  Am I right about this?

  I suspect I am. The surprise of it all is that I feel no jealousy, only a great tenderness for Shehnaz, a desire to sit and talk with her, to grow maudlin in the moonlight discussing your charms. You would not stay for such a conversation, you would not countenance such sentimentality. But Shehnaz would revel in it. Yes, if there must be a Raqeeb then let it be Shehnaz.

  Oh, love, I am awash with tenderness now.

  Your eyes, your mouth, the taste of you.

  Samina, how lucky we have been.

  XXII

  Ed’s bedroom window looked down on the garden. Bougainvillea grew along the boundary wall, though not to such a height that it could obscure the palm trees next door. A boy climbed one of the trees, barefoot, his shalwar rolled above his knee. I watched him until he disappeared into the leaves and darkness. Seconds elapsed, and a green coconut dropped down into—I knew though I couldn’t see it—a pair of hands waiting below.

  Coconut thieves. Some crimes have such charm attached to them.

  I lifted the pages and read the last sentence as though it were a prayer.

  Hfanof, jkm gpesb mc jfzc tcco.

  Samina, how lucky we have been.

  He had written her name in ash before my eyes. Everything I write can be reduced to one word. And what was that one word to him? It was language become music. Samina. In it, the timbres of love, jealousy, rage, friendship, admiration, passion, hurt and adoration came together in a single pitch. These qualities didn’t exist side by side, didn’t vie for supremacy, didn’t form separate narratives which confounded his attempt to settle on a single definition of her. He knew better than to make such an attempt.

  Omi. My Raqeeb, my rival, my father, my twin.

  She loved you, always. You’re right about that.

  And me, what about me?

  Then, this memory:

  I have my arms around my mother. It’s just after I’ve been screaming at her for not going to the rally in Lahore. My screams have exhausted into tears. She strokes my hair.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know the horrors of adolescence, Aasmaani. One day we’ll raise a glass, you and I, to having survived these concurrent, awful periods in our lives. ‘

  A glass of what, Mama?

  A glass of air, sweetheart. We’ll drink buoyancy.

  Ed stood up from his desk chair and walked towards me. ‘Have you finished?’ he said.

  Love deeply and passionately. Love foolishly.

  I held out a hand to him, and when he took it I pulled him down into a deep kiss. Everything else could wait.

  ‘Aasmaani.’ His face, when I touched it, was hot. ‘If what you’re feeling right now is because of what you’ve just read, then I can’t. I can’t take advantage of that.’

  ‘Of course you can’t, Ed. You can’t take advantage when you’re the one being seduced.’

  He laughed and lay down, his arms around me. ‘You can’t seduce someone who wants you so desperately.’

  I sat up and pulled off my kameez. ‘We could argue definitions all night, or we could think of some other way to pass the time.’

  ‘OK. What’s Ginkgo Biloba?’

  I lay down on top of him and it was with a satisfaction that came from far within that I felt his fingers move up my spine. ‘A character from Lord of the Rings?’

  I didn’t feel the earth move that night. I didn’t feel the boundaries of the universe dissolve. I didn’t feel a single cliché. What I felt was abandon. Not sexual abandon—we played it safe, too aware of the specificities of each body’s desire and too aware also of how our bodies were all but strangers to each other; in those moments when we allowed our past lovers’ proclivities to guide us what ensued was disaster saved only by humour. (‘I’m sure your intentions are good, Ed, but avoid doing that again,’ I had to say at one point.) But in the end, we got it right, and though the earth didn’t move, no part of the universe dissolved, I was moved, I dissolved, and, immediately after, I found myself thinking, love is a fugue, the call and response of it, the improvisations; it was the first time that I understood
it wasn’t a misleading euphemism to refer to sex as the act of love.

  And that was the abandon—I abandoned myself to imagining, as I lay in Ed’s arms, a future. I abandoned myself to anticipating, with pleasure, how we’d grow to know each other—each muscle, each nerve ending, each scar, each kind of scar, even the kinds we couldn’t see for ourselves and needed someone else to point out to us. It was not a process to be hurried, there was no need for hurry, let each new discovery be a source of pleasure. But one day, eventually, I’d find I had no secrets from him. In all my past relationships I had never once thought the man I was with would ever know everything there was to know.

  Our sweat cooled, turned chilly, forced us to huddle closer under his duvet. His fingers were tangled in my hair and his breathing changed to the deep rhythms of sleep. I wanted to stay in his arms, to fall asleep there.

  All those years, when I stayed with my mother, she made the Poet sleep next door. Even when they were in Colombia and Egypt he’d have his own room. Such strange nods to social convention. As if I would have cared. I thought it was a tiny thing, for them to sleep apart. But now, as Ed shifted and his mouth touched my shoulder, I thought, Omi, I’m sorry. Mama, you didn’t need to.

  I looked at my watch. Rabia would have flown back from Islamabad by now and it was well past the hour when I usually called to tell her not to worry if I was staying out late. The trappings of family. I eased myself out of Ed’s arms, dressed, and picked his cordless phone off the receiver. I’d left my mobile in Shakeel’s car. Another reason for Rabia to worry. I stepped outside into the hallway. It was eerily quiet. The window shutters threw shadows in front of me. If I stepped into the shadows I would be caught between slats.

  I dialled Rabia’s mobile, and she answered on the first ring.

  Aasmaani, where are you?’

  ‘Sorry. Just lost track of time. I’m at Ed’s.’

  There was silence on the other end, and then Rabia pushed aside whatever questions came to mind and said, ‘Are you going to be there much longer?’

  For a moment I wanted to laugh. Shehnaz Saeed may have told me she’d been in love with my mother, but she would still consider it a terrible breach of etiquette if I came down for breakfast with Ed in the morning. I’d probably be too embarrassed to speak myself.

  ‘I don’t have a car here.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be driving alone at this hour in any case,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that Ed of yours going to drop you home?’

  ‘He’s sleeping.’

  There was another pause. Then she said, ‘OK, we’re on our way home from the airport.’ Now I could make out the intermittent sound of late-night traffic in the background. ‘We’re coming to get you. Should I call this number when we get there?’

  ‘You’ll wake up the whole house. Tell me how long it’ll take you to get here and I’ll come down.’

  She told me three minutes. I ended the call and went back into the bedroom.

  ‘Ginkgo Biloba,’ I whispered next to Ed’s ear as I bent down to kiss his neck.

  I looked around for a pen to write him a note and found, instead, his laptop on the desk at the far end of his room. I lifted the lid, pressed the space bar, and the computer hummed to life. He’d been using the word processor and hadn’t exited the program, so as soon as the computer retreated out of its hibernation a blue screen appeared, awaiting white letters to fill it up.

  I turned to look at Ed, my fingers moving across the keyboard as I watched him sleep.

  Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

  Pithy, but to the point.

  I looked back at the screen.

  It said: Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?

  XXIII

  Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

  Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?

  Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?

  I kept looking at the sentence, my brain too attuned to decrypting the code to doubt what I was reading, yet knowing that it was impossible, what I thought I was seeing was impossible.

  Mama, I wrote.

  Afaf, the word appeared.

  The Minions came again today, I wrote.

  Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb, the screen spat back at me.

  My ex calls

  Ab ed efggh

  I jerked my hands off the keyboard. Now it was only my own breath I could hear, ragged.

  The light from the street lamps outside made everything around me part visible. I looked at the bookshelf along the wall, and certain books seemed to draw my eyes to them. Morte d’Arthur. Urdu Poetry: A Study. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—gold letters, black binding.

  My hands were poised in the air, halfway between the keyboard and my eyes. I brought them down—this required great concentration—on to the desk, one on either side of the laptop. My index finger touched a pen, half-hidden under a piece of paper. I lifted it up, unscrewed the top. A calligraphy pen. I remembered the scrawl of Omi’s handwriting in that postcard he’d sent my mother from Colombia. No curves, no loops. For him the aesthetic of language was in its sound, not its visual appearance.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I whispered.

  In the quiet of the room, the words carried. Ed shifted. I turned to look at him. He reached out for me, found I wasn’t next to him, and sat up in bed.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, smiling a beautiful half-asleep smile. ‘There you are.’

  ‘I was going to tell you something, Ed, but I think you already know.’

  He smiled again, lay down and closed his eyes. ‘I love you too, Aasmaani.’

  ‘I was going to tell you, Ed, that my ex calls the ochre winter autumn as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.’

  For a moment he didn’t move and then he was throwing the covers off, running across the room, absurdly naked, his hand reaching out for the laptop and slamming the lid shut.

  ‘A bit late for that, I think.’ I stood up, my face inches away from his. ‘I don’t ... I can’t quite understand this, Ed, but I think you need to tell me the truth and I think I’ll know if you’re lying.’

  ‘Oh God, Aasmaani.’ He cupped my face in his hand, gently stroking my jaw-line with his thumb. ‘Why did you have to do that?’

  I didn’t know how to answer except literally. ‘I wanted to leave you a note. I saw the computer before I saw the pen.’ I frowned, trying to make some sense of things, pulled away from him. ‘Are you one of the Minions?’

  But he only looked at me more sadly.

  ‘No, of course not. That wouldn’t make sense.’

  If the people we’ve buried walked back into our lives would we recognize them or would our brain be so assured of their deaths, and of death’s insistence on obliterating our corporeal selves, that it would make us glance at their faces and then turn away, thinking, I cannot look at this person who reminds me of what I have lost? As I stood there with Ed—the computer screen, the pen, the books all at the edges of my vision—I did not allow myself to see what I was seeing, I did not allow that information to overturn the certainty that had built up in my mind these last weeks. I think I would have believed any lie Ed told me, if it seemed even partially plausible.

  He said, ‘All those encrypted pages you read, I wrote them.’

  I waited for him to laugh. I waited for him to say, ‘And if you believe that one I’ve got a cloud to sell you.’ I waited, and while I waited I knew that I might not survive the inescapable truth that he wasn’t lying.

  ‘Please don’t do this.’ My voice was not something I recognized.

  ‘I love you, Aasmaani. This is all because I love you.’

  ‘What are you saying, Ed? I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  His hands dropped away from me. ‘You weren’t even supposed to see it, that’s the ridiculous part. That first message. The Minions came again today. You weren’t supposed to see it. I didn’t even know you when I wrote it. I wrote it for my mother.’

  ‘I don’t understan
d.’

  ‘I knew the code, Aasmaani. There was no need for your mother to keep it a secret in the end. One night she was here for dinner, and I was here, too. I was at university at the time, I didn’t live here, but...’

  ‘Ed. Please. I don’t need domestic details.’

  ‘She explained the code. She gave us the sentence. The jazz fugues sentence. I went away and wrote it down. Kept it all these years. I was sure my mother would do the same. There was no distinction in my ideas of love and obsession until you.’ He lifted a hand to touch me and then dropped it again. I could still smell him on me.

  ‘Put some clothes on, Ed.’

  He walked past me to the wardrobe, and I watched in silence as he put on jeans and a T-shirt.

  ‘So why did you write it?’ I said at last.

  ‘For years I’d been wanting my mother to act again. I knew she wanted to, only she was scared to take that first step. So I thought, OK, she needs a reason to say yes after all those years she’s been saying no. So I got a job at STD, and I came home and said, Amma, enough of this retirement stuff, OK? And she said no.’ He pulled some tiny clinging thing off his shirt. ‘I was so angry. All these years everyone thought she stopped acting because of motherhood. She didn’t. She stopped because of Samina.’

  He was looking at me as if everything depended on my response to that.

  ‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘Conventional mothers are overrated.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, I wish I could share your attitude, I really do. When she said no, again, all those years later, with me back in Karachi, working for a TV studio, I thought, if she were here, if Samina were here and she told you to act again, you’d do it in a second. It became important for me to prove that to myself, to have that evidence against her, that proof of how little she loved me in comparison. So I mentioned the code in passing to her one day, just casually, “Oh, remember that night when Samina told us...” and then a couple of weeks later I sent her the message in code. You know, to make it more authentic. Just four lines, with an absurd covering note saying, “Act again and I’ll send you more.”’