Broken Verses

by Kamila Shamsie

  As I read I found with surprise how many of the poems were still stored in my brain, allowing me to anticipate the line ahead when I paused to turn a page. I found the girl I had once promised to be within the pages of that collection. The girl who knew his poems, who listened to him argue God with Mirza, poetry with my mother, political responsibility with Rafael. The girl who believed without question—I owed this to both him and my mother—that some things in the world you fight for, regardless of the cost to yourself, because the cost of not fighting is much higher. The girl he would have fought for, the girl my mother would have fought for. The girl I had to fight for.

  I didn’t move from my bed all day as I made my way through those 312 poems, and as I read the last line of the final poem and turned to the end-page I saw, tucked into the inside flap of the back cover, a sheet of thin blue paper.

  I think I knew what it was even before I unfolded it and saw the encrypted writing, with a date on top—28 April 1979—which told me this was composed just days after General Zia had Omi imprisoned.

  I read the first three words of that letter, and for a moment it was Ed writing to me. And then I continued through the sentence, and it was no one but Omi speaking to Mama.

  Forgive me, beloved, but your last letter was a thing of such absurdity I had to tear a corner off it and place it beneath my tongue as I slept, knowing it would fill my dreams with barking cats, suns that revolve around the planets in zigzag courses, and Siamese twins on stilts trying to tie each other’s shoelaces.

  You can’t help worry, you wrote, about my imprisonment.

  O my beautiful jailer, why would you wish upon me the indifference of freedom? These bars, those walls, the guards who shoot at unauthorized shadows which slide towards me in the prison yard—do you think I haven’t yet recognized them for what they are? Do you think I don’t know you’re responsible? You have always been so literal about the metaphorical, and I can’t deny that there are moments these days—particularly around meal times—when I wish it were otherwise. I know all the things I’ve said to you—I’m held captive by your heart, imprisoned in your grey-green eyes, and if you hold out the key of freedom to me it will melt with desire the instant my fingers touch yours to take possession of it.

  That, Samina, was figurative language.

  So I really didn’t expect to wake up within this cell, and at first, I’ll admit, I was a little irritated. But now that I’ve learnt to look more closely at the metaphor—did it turn concrete or have I become an abstraction?—I can’t help but applaud what you’ve done. In here, I am nothing but the man who loves you. All else is stripped away. Love and separation and longing—those are the stages of my day. The sun rises in one and sets in the other and darkness embraces me in the third.

  1 think of Qais in exile, so consumed with the rapture of his love for Laila that love becomes entirely self-obsessed, unwilling to drag its gaze away from itself long enough to recognize the object of that love walk across the surrounding wasteland. The object of my love, Qais thinks, would make the ground grow verdant at the touch of her feet, not like this sensibly shod woman who creates only shadows as she walks, her clothes sweat-stained from travel. And as I recall Qais I begin to fear—for how can the woman in my head really exist, how can such a love bear reality? That is the only fear I have in here. The only thing they could do to hurt me, Samina, is to make you other than the woman I believe—no, I know—you really are.

  I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.

  Give Aasmaani the largest possible embrace from me. Ask her to explain metaphors to you if you find yourself struggling with your tendency towards the literal—she understands these things better than either of us could imagine.

  Forever and always yours, entirely.

  Aashiq

  Aashiq.

  The name he was given at birth, which no one but my mother used once his childhood had passed. ‘It’s not a name, it’s what I am to Samina,’ Omi used to say. ‘No one else can use that word for me. I’m her Aashiq, her Beloved.’

  I turned my head away from the page so that my tears wouldn’t smudge the already smudged words. Only now did I have the answer to the question I’d been unable to stop turning around in my mind: how had Ed done it? Even given his obsessive mind, his intelligence, his copies of all those letters to Rafael, how had he been able to re-create Omi on the page, having never known the man at all? And now I knew: he hadn’t.

  If I had put the letters to any kind of serious scrutiny—if I had really looked at the conditions under which the Poet was allegedly writing and considered the things he chose to write, or rather the glaring omissions from the letters—I would have known instantly. How many times in all those weeks after getting the first letter had I thought of Laila and Qais, Iblis and Allah, the Sufis and their interpretation of Hell? And yet it had never crossed my mind. Even when I read those lines in which he declares Merlin and Nimue to be his favourite love story—those lines I read the very day I met Mirza and remembered how the Poet loved Iblis aur Aadam, recalled him saying, ‘This is the first and final love story, the one in which we all live’—even then I didn’t allow myself to see that I was reading lies.

  In all his poems, that is the one trope he always returns to: The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love.

  Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her—half-teasing, half-tender—of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. That great heart of his—it would never have written of broken fingers or of love slipping away, not even if there seemed only the remotest possibility she would ever see the words.

  How had I been so blind?

  Ed had known. Ed had known that the greatest assistance to his deception didn’t come from the poet’s letters to Rafael or his memories of my mother’s stories. It came from my desire to believe. Why had I so suddenly convinced myself that the letters were genuine? In what moment had that decision taken hold? I leaned forward, so that my forehead touched the back cover of the Poet’s collection as though it were a prayer mat. It was in the Archivist’s room, with news cuttings in front of me telling me how Omi had died. Face this, the news cuttings told me, or else convince yourself it wasn’t him who died. And I had taken the latter option. I chose to believe an impossible life over an unbearable death.

  Just as I had done with Mama.

  I raised my head and closed the book.

  My mother suffered from profound clinical depression. She lived with it for over two years until, unable to believe in the possibility of recovery, she killed herself.

  I said the words to myself, silently and then aloud. They didn’t seem to mean anything.

  So I got out of bed and went into the lounge, where Dad was cutting an apple carefully into eighths and reading a book which I recognized from the package Shehnaz Saeed had couriered over to me last week.

  ‘Mama killed herself because she was depressed and didn’t think she could get better,’ I said.

  Dad took off his glasses, put the book to one side and looked up at me. ‘Yes.’

  I sat down beside him on the sofa. He picked an unbruised apple slice off his plate and handed it to me. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something more but I was overtaken by a curious sensation of flatness, as though all metaphors had fled and what remained was irreducible, irrefutable fact.

  ‘Why weren’t you able to accept it all this while?’ he said fina
lly and not without hesitation. ‘Did you think if you had to face her death you’d react the way she reacted to the Poet’s death?’

  I shook my head slowly.

  All those things my mother had done in the first fifteen years of my life which outsiders saw as signs she wasn’t a good mother—every time she left, every occasion she followed the Poet to another city or another country, every school play she missed because she was in prison or at a rally—I had, at the time, forgiven, understood, even been proud of. All those things could be understood as signs of her strength—strength of love, strength of purpose, strength of belief in my ability to understand why she couldn’t be ordinary. I forgave her all her strengths. But I couldn’t see her collapse for what it was because that, to me, would have been a sign of weakness—and I would have regarded that as betrayal.

  ‘I wasn’t willing to accept that she was human, Dad. I wasn’t willing to accept she could be broken.’

  And that was it—so small a thing, and yet it had defined every aspect of my life. It was the conclusion with which I had started when I tried to understand her disappearance—and I had worked backward from it, interpreting and reinterpreting my notions of the world to make the conclusion seem plausible. I didn’t stop and see the idiocy of what I was doing even when the only way to retain the myth I had created was to jettison the things she held so dear—her faith in activism and her love for me.

  ‘Do you see her suicide as desertion?’ He held my hand as he said it.

  I shook my head again. I had played myself as victim of my mother’s lack of love for too long, had wrung myself out thinking it. It would be easy enough to go on, step from one narrative of desertion into another—but when I closed my eyes to allow in that old familiar, almost comforting, story I saw Ed scribbling an encrypted note to his mother to make her believe the woman she loved was still alive; the intended cruelty there double-edged, shredding his own heart as he watched it shred hers.

  ‘I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.

  ‘You know what?’ Dad said. ‘She really was the bravest woman—the bravest human being—I ever knew.’

  I smiled at him for that. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ He tapped the spine of the book he’d been reading. ‘I’ve been rethinking her, too. And I’m sorrier than I can say that I didn’t try to understand earlier.’

  I gripped his hand tighter. ‘I would have liked to have known her.’ Then, feeling so self-conscious I had to rush the words out, I said: ‘I’d like to know you.’

  Dad put his arm around my shoulder, with only a slight trace of tentativeness. ‘Let’s start with this. Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.’

  I rested my head against his chest. ‘I miss her,’ I said, and at last I cried for her death.

  Maybe a bird didn’t start to sing outside the window in notes of heartbreaking beauty. But when I recall that moment, that’s how I remember it.

  XXV

  That was January. Now it’s April. I’m back in Karachi, and yesterday I saw Ed.

  It was at the café at which I’d met Mirza, the café to which Ed had invited me for coffee that day in the office when he decided to tell me the truth, though I don’t think even he knew if he really would have done that when the moment came.

  I was driving near the café when I saw Ed’s car parked outside, and knew I would have to stop.

  ‘You look terrible,’ I said, when I entered and saw him sitting alone, though that was a lie.

  His frame seemed to shrink at the sound of my voice. He looked up from his coffee-cup. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I just want you to know, Ed, in case there’s any confusion about this, that what you did to me was unforgivable.’

  He blinked in weary agreement. ‘But you’ve survived it, as you survive everything, Aasmaani. Whereas I, well, I’ve lost the only two people who have ever mattered to me. You and my mother. She doesn’t want anything to do with me either, it appears. Let that give you some pleasure.’

  I felt achingly sorry for him, despite everything. I remembered lying in his arms, and the abandon of believing we had a future together, and it would be a lie to say I didn’t regret most bitterly that things hadn’t worked out the way I had wanted them to in those few moments when Ed and I found each other and found completion.

  ‘I owe you a great deal,’ I said.

  He looked up with a twisted smile, as though waiting for the punchline.

  ‘I mean it. What you did really was unforgivable—’

  ‘I think you’ve made that point.’

  ‘But it made me look at all those other things I’ve thought of as unforgivable in my life. And it made me look at all the reasons I have to ask for people’s forgiveness. You’re among those people, you know.’

  For a moment, the corners of his mouth started to lift up. And then he said, ‘But you can’t forgive me.’

  ‘I can’t trust you. However much I may continue to love you.’

  He opened his mouth, but I shook my head and he smiled a little sadly and looked down into his coffee-cup. There was nothing more we had to say to each other, and we both knew it.

  I walk along the beach. I walk slowly. The sand is shot through with silver and I have to dodge the clumps of dried seaweed. There’s a tear in the sand. I lift it up, careful not to squash it. A tentacle emerges, translucent. It straightens and then curls, seeking something that will help it sustain life. I carry it to the water which abandoned it on shore and place it in the waves.

  A boy on the rocks at one end of the beach is shouting something, his voice lost in the wind. He raises two pieces of wood, held together in a manner that suggests a gun, and pumps invisible bullets into the sea. He is a boy enraptured by the glamour of certainty: you can read it in his face.

  I draw closer and now I can hear him. There are no words coming out of his throat, just a cry of triumph.

  Did they cry out like that, the men who broke Omi?

  There was no way to find who they were, not when the trail was seventeen years cold. They weren’t men who left clues. And my pathetic attempts at investigation hadn’t caused them the slightest twitch. All those phone calls, it had transpired, came from a lonely man at STD who spent his day calling different women and hanging up when they answered. Sometimes the world is so sad, and so senseless.

  That’s what they did, Omi and Mama: they gave meaning to the world when it seemed senseless.

  It’s true, of course, that I’m just creating another story for myself, another version of my mother’s life, and Omi’s, and mine. But if, in the end, the ways in which we apprehend the world are merely synonymous with the stories in which we feel most comfortable, then this is a story I am willing to claim for my world. And one I’m determined to spread.

  I’ve been in touch with one of STD’s rival companies to volunteer my services as researcher for a documentary about the women’s movement in Pakistan, to be broadcast in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Hudood Ordinances. At first the executives at the company weren’t too enthusiastic. It would be a direct assault, they said, on the religious parties in the Frontier. Well, yes, I said, and I have other plans in mind, too.
When they continued to dither I called Shehnaz Saeed and she said she’d narrate the show and consider talking to the TV channel about future projects, too. There was no dithering after that.

  And Shehnaz did something else for me, something remarkable. Yesterday she sent me a home movie she’d shot at a party, in 1983, and within it, for just a few seconds, Mama and Omi come into focus. They’re standing a few feet apart, and he’s watching her as though he’s never seen anything so beautiful. She’s talking to someone—that journalist who had warned me against prying that day in STD—and the camera finds her halfway through the conversation.

  ‘Look,’ Mama says. ‘It’s not about the ultimate victory. It’s just that a nation needs to be reminded of all the components of its character. That’s what we do when we resist, just as it’s what the poets do, what the artists and dancers and musicians and,’ she shot a glance over towards the camera and smiled, ‘don’t pretend you’re not hoping I’ll say this, Shehnaz—what the actresses do: we remind people, this, too, is part of your heritage and, more importantly, it can be part of your future. Be this rather than those creatures of tyranny.’