Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘And so she agreed to do Boond?’

  ‘No. She thought it was a deranged fan and ignored it. She couldn’t read the code, she didn’t believe your mother was still alive. And I felt stupid for having sent it to her.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It should all have ended there. A few weeks went by and that actress dropped out of Boond and Kiran Hilal came to me and said, I think your mother should do it. Let’s all gang up on her. So a whole group of them came to dinner—Kiran, the director, her former co-stars, the costume designer, the sound guy. A whole bunch of people she’d worked with before, and they all said, come on, Shehnaz, take the plunge. And she said no and no and no and maybe and perhaps and then, at about four a.m., she said, OK, I’ll do it. OK.’

  ‘But she kept the encrypted letter.’

  ‘Yes, she kept it. And when she heard you were at STD she must have had a moment of wondering, what if it is that code of Samina and the Poet’s? So she sent it to you. And when you told me you needed to speak to her because she’d sent you some calligraphy I realized what she’d done, and suspected you were able to read it. And then everything became about you.’

  He walked over to the desk I was leaning on and switched on a lamp. It had the effect of making it more difficult to see him, the dull yellow light shining at the periphery of my vision and Ed directly behind it, so that to look at him I had to see almost straight into the light. I swung my hand and the lamp fell to the floor, the bulb shattering. Ed barely moved, though there was glass around his feet.

  ‘It was the most extraordinary thing. There you were, walking around the office, bantering, joking, being witty and poised, and yet it was there. That same vacancy I used to see in your mother’s eyes. It was there, always. I started to ask people questions about you and they all said, Whatever you do, don’t try talking about Samina to her. Do you know the reputation you have around town for becoming ice-cold when anyone mentions her?’

  ‘It appears there’s a lot I don’t know.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it. Be angry, but not this.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do. Keep talking.’

  ‘I tried to get you to talk to me, just to talk, about anything. There was so much we had in common, so much we could discuss. But you just treated me like I was nothing. My God, you made me angry. I thought, watch it, girl, I’ll get a reaction out of you.’ He finally lifted his feet, shook the glass off almost daintily, and stepped away from the shards. ‘And instead, I went and fell in love with you.’

  I had got so used to touching him. Even before tonight. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I would reach out for him, even if it was just to rest my fingers on his wrist or playfully slap his shoulder. I had to keep my arms hugging my chest because otherwise I didn’t know what to do with them. I suspected I would hit him, just for some physical contact. His hands were balled into fists, perhaps for the same reason.

  ‘When my mother said you’d asked her to send any more messages I felt sick. And then we bumped into each other on the stairs in STD and we were laughing together and something happened...’

  That spark, that fizz.

  ‘I was going to tell you the truth. That I wrote it for my mother, that I was sorry if it had upset you. I practised a little speech, trying to explain it, and I came to your office to ask you out for coffee, so I could tell you. But you just pushed me away, with that vacant look again. You made it so clear that what had happened on the stair, that connection I had felt, meant nothing to you. You were so lost, you looked so lost. And I just wanted to do something that you couldn’t turn away from with that blank look, that look which told me I was nothing. So I thought, I’ll write another message. But I couldn’t write in your mother’s voice. I couldn’t put Samina’s voice on paper, couldn’t capture it at all. But the Poet was a different matter. I had been weirdly fascinated with him since I first found out about your mother and mine—’

  I opened my mouth to correct his misconception, and then closed it without speaking.

  ‘- so I had all these interviews of him, all his poems, all his letters to Rafael Gonzales which were published when Gonzales got the Nobel. And I had stories about him, stories your mother would tell us over dinner. About riding the Hurdy-Gurdy with you and how he ended up in hospital with the peach allergy. I could write in his voice, I knew I could.’

  ‘No. No, that’s impossible. Why are you lying to me, Ed?’

  ‘For the first time, Aasmaani, I’m not.’

  ‘I know his voice. I know it. No one else has a voice like that. No one else writes such sentences.’

  There was unbearable pity in his eyes. ‘That’s what made it easy.’ He lifted a book off his desk. The Letters of Rafael Gonzales. ‘Read this?’ I shook my head. Beema had given me a copy, but I’d known it would bring me nothing but pain. There was a 150-page section of letters between Omi and Rafael—lovely, shaggy-haired Rafael who was the only one of Omi’s friends whom Mama didn’t turn away from in the last years of her life; Rafael who was on his way to Karachi to see Mama, months before she disappeared, when he had the stroke which left him incapacitated for the last ten years of his life.

  ‘The Poet wrote to him about everything. Poetry, politics, food, childhood, your mother—always your mother. It was one of those friendships you almost never see between men.’ Ed opened the book to a bookmarked page and held it out to me. ‘Every sentence construction, every literary allusion, every shift in tone that you read in those encrypted letters is in here. I took the content of one sentence, forced it into the structure of another. Took a story your mother told me, transposed it onto the stories he told Rafael. Look, look at this.’ My eyes couldn’t help following his finger as it moved across the page. Mirza appeared, a spark against the ashen-brained surroundings.

  ‘Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings,’ I said, that line from the second set of encrypted pages falling instantly off my tongue.

  ‘Yes. You see? All I did was imitate him. The distinctiveness of his voice was what made it easy. That, and your desire to believe.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, again.

  ‘I know.’ We were both leaning against the desk with our hands clasped together, not making eye contact, not daring to touch. ‘I just wanted you to wake up. No, no, that’s not true. When you looked through me, Aasmaani, you made me feel powerless, and worthless. It set off, I think, a little madness in my brain. You will not ignore me, you will not treat me like scum, I thought. I will make myself important in your life.’ He unclasped his hands and looked at his palms as though trying to find, in their intersecting and dividing lines, an explanation. ‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly.’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘And so I wrote another message. Oh, here—’ He pulled open a desk drawer and I saw an inkpad and stamps from different postal districts in Pakistan rattling around. ‘When I moved into my office, the CEO handed over boxes of supplies and it included all these postmark stamps. I don’t know what he used them for. Something shady, I imagine. But anyway, I dropped the second envelope into the letter slot at home. When my mother saw it she told her driver to give it to you—and the idiot handed it to me instead. I took it to the office, unsure what to do. Finally I realized I was acting crazy. I took the envelope and I was heading towards the shredder downstairs. But I stopped in your office on the way, and you saw the envelope.’

  ‘And made you give it to me.’

  ‘Yes. I was sick with guilt, again. That’s why I went over to your place that evening. To tell you. To explain. And then I got there, and I just couldn’t. Because it would have meant saying goodbye to you.’

  We were both silent, thinking back to that evening.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you the truth. I couldn’t even tell you it was impossible that he was writing the pages. I just couldn’t. It just kept going from there.’

  ‘Things keep on and keep on.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long were you
planning to keep it going, Ed?’

  ‘Today’s was to be the last. I thought maybe—I hadn’t thought it through properly—but maybe I’d send you a final letter from one of the Minions to say the Poet had died peacefully in his sleep.’

  ‘You were going to make me lose him again?’

  ‘I would have helped you get through it. I’m sorry, Aasmaani. It got beyond my control. I couldn’t continue lying to you any more than I could tell you the truth.’

  ‘One letter from the Minions and it would have been over? You really believed that?’

  He lifted his hand in a gesture of futility. ‘I knew I had to find a way to make it stop. I just didn’t quite know how.’

  ‘The crosswords. Why, Ed? Why intensify the fantasy by making me believe I could speak to him?’

  ‘I had to. For your sake. How else could I keep you from continuing your public enquiries about what happened to him? God, you terrified me when you said you were doing that.’ He took my hand, finally. ‘I loved you almost from the first moment we met. I knew instantly that something was happening between us, something that I couldn’t control or stop. You knew my heart, Aasmaani. You had my heart, it was beating in your chest, my damaged, obsessive heart.’

  I gripped his hand more tightly. I wanted to kiss him quiet, kiss him wordless, but he was looking at me so intensely that I couldn’t move.

  ‘And those letters, they were the only way you’d let me into your life. As the delivery boy.’

  ‘You didn’t have to be the delivery boy. You were you, that’s enough. You don’t have to jump off a tree and break your leg to make someone stay with you, don’t you know that?’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had become so adept at walking away from people. Ed was here with me now because he’d found the one chink, the one part of me which was wound instead of armour.

  ‘Let’s be honest. The only way I could get into your life was as Merlin, possessing the information you needed. I’m sorry about that letter—the one about your mother’s perversions. I was so angry when I wrote that one. But all the others, all the others, Aasmaani, they weren’t cruel, were they? When I saw all that unhappiness in your life, I knew I could use the letters to make it better. I only wanted to make you happy in the end. I couldn’t do it on my own. But in the Poet’s voice, I could. This one today, it was to be the final letter. The one you could go back to and know that he and your mother had something together which no one could take away from them. I didn’t know that myself until I met you. Isn’t that strange? Between you and the letters, you rewrote me. Turned me into someone who could understand love, and what a blessing it is. Two nights ago after we saw Boond together, when you fell asleep in my arms, I knew I couldn’t continue the deception any longer. I had to put an end to it. I realized that as you slept. I started working out the contents of that letter in my head as you slept—your breath my only metronome.’

  I smiled. ‘It was the first detail you got wrong, as far as I know. I would have realized it if I’d had time to think it over. He didn’t write when she slept. He wrote in the mornings after they’d had breakfast together.’ I said that, and then I saw Omi, bent over his desk. I saw him, because I was in the room with him. I was the only person in the world he allowed into his study when he wrote. I’d sit there, and read one of the books from his library—Elizabeth Bishop and Mir were two of our joint favourites—learning to love their word combinations before I really understood what they meant.

  I pulled my hand out of Ed’s grasp.

  All the while he’d been talking, I had followed along his story, Ed the conflicted hero at the heart of it. It was his story I was listening to and concentrating on, the camera was on him alone. How could it have taken so long to think what I should have thought instantly?

  ‘Omi died sixteen years ago.’ I stepped away from him.

  ‘Aasmaani?’

  A hammer smashed down, all the weight of a grown man’s body behind it. A bone split in two. Omi called out, ‘Samina!’ The hammer lifted again, smashed down again. Another bone split. They pulled his teeth out, one by one. Took the hammer to his bones again. His body becoming pulp. ‘Samina. Samina.’ My mother every day after his death had to imagine this. Every single day she could not help but imagine this. They cut out his tongue. He continued to mouth her name. Samina. Their fists on his face, his nose, his cheekbones. Bruises spreading across his face like rivers melting through ice, crawling together into a mass of blue. The only thing recognizable in him any more the shape his mouth kept forming. Samina. My love. Samina.

  I was down on my knees. Ed was crouching next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him through the screams. And then the door was flung open, and Beema ran to me, Rabia and Shakeel and Shehnaz Saeed behind her. Beema put her arms around me, pulling me close to her, never letting go until there was no voice left in me and then Shakeel lifted me in his arms, and they thought I had stopped screaming as he carried me down the stairs and into the car, but I hadn’t. I didn’t stop screaming for a very long time.

  XXIV

  They have it easy, the ones who can mourn the dead.

  I sat hunched over in bed, in the spare bedroom of Dad and Beema’s Islamabad house, staring into the red bars of the electric heater. If I looked long enough that image would sear itself on to my retina and when I shut my eyes those bars would be all I’d see. Not Omi, not rivers melting through ice, not my mother drowning in the thought of those rivers.

  I had never properly mourned Omi. I realized as much the day Beema packed my clothes and took me away from Karachi and Ed and Shehnaz Saeed, into the green, unreal calm of Islamabad. That he had left my life, yes, I mourned that, but never the manner of his dying. And now that I tried to complete the process of grief, the man I mourned was the Omi of the encrypted pages. The man who shouted, ‘Frass! Frass!’ to the Minions, who wanted to grow maudlin in the moonlight with Shehnaz Saeed discussing the woman they both loved, who spoke of my mother’s ‘peachjuicemouth’, who wondered if I had overshadowed him yet. I mourned him and, while mourning, remembered that the man I was crying for had never even existed, and I had no language then to articulate my loss.

  And Ed. I tried to tell myself that the Ed I loved had never really existed either, but I knew that wasn’t true. I had loved Ed most for the pain he carried around, and the secrets which he revealed that night in his room did nothing to lessen the pain—quite the contrary. And also, that voice in the pages, the voice I thought was Omi’s, the voice I had loved, that was Ed’s voice, too.

  A shadow fell across the red bars. I looked up and saw Beema standing in the doorway.

  ‘Do you ever sleep?’ she said.

  ‘I suppose I must. There are lost hours of almost every day, these days. Do you?’

  She partway lifted her shoulders, and then dropped them before the gesture could become a shrug. The doctors had said there was nothing more they could do for Beema’s mother, so we’d brought her home to die. Beema spent hours at a stretch sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, moving only when someone opened the door to let in a draught—then she’d smooth down the goosebumps that appeared on her mother’s skin, though the old lady was well past being aware of such things. Watching her, I sometimes felt envy.

  She moved towards the heater, and held her hands inches from the red bars, her back towards me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t give up on yourself. You shouldn’t just decide you’ll never be OK again.’

  I didn’t respond and a little while later she said, ‘What he did to you was unspeakable, and if I ever see him again I’ll probably draw blood. But there’s a part of me that’s almost grateful to him.’

  ‘To Ed?’

  ‘You’d been slipping, Aasmaani, away from us and from yourself for so long now. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about you. And you’d just say, I’m fine, I’m fine.’

  ‘So now I know I’m not fine, and how does that help me?’

  She straighte
ned up and turned towards me. ‘Fight for yourself. My God, child, what you’ve been through, from such a young age. It’s a wonder you’re still standing. My guess is, you’re stronger than all of us.’

  Strong? I could barely get out of bed any more.

  It might have been two minutes or two hours later that Beema left the room. I heard her whispering something to someone outside, and then my father’s voice, carrying clearly through the night’s silence, said, ‘You have to allow her this.’

  ‘That’s what we said about Samina.’ Beema’s voice was fierce with anger. ‘For God’s sake do something. I don’t know if I can bear this any longer.’ And then I heard something from her that I hadn’t heard in all the hours I watched her sit by her mother—weeping. I tried to feel some sympathy, some shame, but there was nothing in me to give, however hard I tried to locate it.

  I suppose I slept at some point that night. It was something my body did while my mind proceeded relentlessly with its continuous feed of images—hammers and rivers and a thread of blood on Omi’s tongue as the razor cut through it. Or maybe I didn’t sleep. Maybe I just closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them there was daylight and my father stood beside my bed with a book in his hands.

  ‘This was your mother’s,’ he said, and placed the book beside me before leaving the room.

  It was the Poet’s collected works. The book that lay on her bedside in the years after his death, which I was unable to pick up without picking up her grief along with it. Or my own grief, perhaps.

  I opened the front cover. Turned to the table of contents. Turned past that. Kept going.

  And there he was, rising out of the pages.

  So many of the poems carried memories of Omi reciting them, Omi listening to my mother sing them, Omi talking about them. Here he was bawdy, here funny, here tender, here impassioned. In some places he sounded exactly like the man who had written about frass and minions, and in other places he sounded like someone else entirely, a voice that could never be imitated. It was mostly in his poems about my mother that I heard that inimitable voice. What struck me most about his poems—what I had quite forgotten—was not his mastery of form, or the complexity and concision of his thinking, or even his extraordinary sensitivity to the sound of each syllable. What struck me most was, simply, the greatness of his heart. Here was a man who faced exile, imprisonment, betrayal and deprivation without losing his sense of wonder. In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.