Broken Verses (11 page)

Lovely. When was the last time it had occurred to anyone to think of me as lovely?

I looked at him, and that thing happened between us. That fizz. Something electric. Our bodies reduced to single nerve cells and the space between us a synapse, pulsing an impulse back and forth.

It doesn't mean anything, ultimately—I've had some of the most unsatisfying encounters of my life with men in whom I've mistaken the fizz for potential of one sort or the other. And I've had entirely satiating flings with men who've made me feel every pleasurable physical sensation—except the fizz. Thus, I know, it doesn't mean anything. But in the moment you feel it, you forget that.

So who knows what would have happened right then with Ed and me, both our offices just steps away, if Kiran Hilal hadn't rounded into view with her team behind her, and said, Aasmaani, there you are. The meeting's in the conference room. What are you doing just sitting there?'

We stood up, and as Ed moved aside to let Kiran pass through, it was gone. The fizz—it had just disappeared, leaving me feeling as though I had indulged in someone else's fantasy, entirely in opposition to my own tastes. I didn't even look at him, or say anything in farewell, as I followed Kiran up the stairs and along the corridor to the conference room.

‘We've just got a couple of things to wrap up from our previous meeting before we get to you,' she said, opening the door to the conference room. The room had the twin comforts of an air-conditioner and leather chairs but managed to retain STD's general air of dishevelment thanks to the scratched surface of the long table which dominated the room and the faded posters on the walls of temples and beaches and city skylines, all advertising an airline which had been out of business for years.

The
Boond
team—two men and two women in addition to Kiran—settled round the table and launched instantly into a discussion about fine-tuning a particular storyline after seeing the unexpected nuance brought to it by one of the actors before filming had stopped.

As the chatter around me dissolved from words into sound, I ran through the cast list in my head and kept myself entertained inventing monikers for all the actors who were involved in the drama.

In addition to Shehnaz Saeed (enough of a star that her name was a moniker unto itself), there was The Mistress's Issue (daughter of the ‘hand-job' lady), Once-Leading, Now-Trailing Man (who had catapulated to fame when he had played Macbeth to Shehnaz Saeed's Lady), Hero Number Zero (a former cricketer who played brilliantly in a single one-day tournament, was reported for suspect bowling action, and found himself in need of a new career at twenty-one), God of Small Things (a remarkable, beautiful actor endowed with all that is pleasing in a man except—if persistent rumour was to be believed—for one tiny, very, very, tragically, tiny detail), Battle-Axe and Couple Who'll Get Written Out Soon.

But when I was done with the naming, the chatter about reshaping Hero Number Zero's role still continued around me, and despite my best efforts, I couldn't help but think back to that cryptic note Shehnaz Saeed had received, and those even more cryptic encrypted lines. Even presuming the lines had been written years ago, by either my mother or the Poet attempting some elaborate script, why? And who had possession of it, and why had he—or she—sent it to Shehnaz Saeed? And now that she was acting again, would more encrypted pages follow?

None of it made any more sense than any of the senselessness I'd latched on to at various points over the years.

My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark
.

Aasmaani, put it from your mind.

The Minions came again today
.

Aasmaani, stop it!

Ffhaffon, hiku ni!

Stop!

Hiku!

I closed my eyes and started to run through the multiplication tables, starting with multiples of thirteen, just to keep things interesting. Somewhere in the multiples of sixteen I lost my way, but even though I realized that sixteen times seven could not be one hundred and twenty I kept going—
sixteen eights are one thirty-six, sixteen nines are one fifty-two—until Kiran turned to me and said, ‘Why don't you tell everyone your idea for Shehnaz's entrance, Aasmaani?'

So I did. When I finished there was neither the approbation for which I had hoped, nor the derision which I had feared—who was I to walk in with no idea of plot and suggest an opening that would overturn so much the people in this room had worked to create?—but instead a slight pause and then a cascade of questions.

‘But where has she been all these years?'

‘And why is she coming back now?'

‘And what's she like? I mean, the ex-wife as written for Bougainvillea was all about “must protect my daughter” and this one clearly is not.'

‘Yeah, this is my big problem with it. We want her to be a sympathetic character, right, for later if that black magic internet story is going to stay the way it is, which I'll admit I'm willing to fight for, because that's my baby. But now suddenly we've got this woman who just left her young daughter and took off. How are we going to make her anything but a monster? Ow! What?'

The woman next to the man who'd been speaking tried to lean her head in my direction with some subtlety.

‘OK, how's this,' said the second man in the room, raising his bony fingers for attention. ‘The mother left because of her daughter. She left because something happens which makes it necessary for her to leave, and stay away, in order to protect her daughter. Except, of course, the daughter doesn't know this.'

The man willing to fight for the internet black magic story looked sceptical, but another woman—one of the twenty-somethings I'd seen on my first day—was nodding her head vigorously. ‘So now that the daughter is a little bit grown up, she's decided to find out what happened to her mother. And somehow her mother comes to know of this, and that's why she returns. Because now the only way for her to protect the daughter is by returning and keeping her daughter from uncovering the secret.'

‘Isn't this getting a little too cloak and dagger?'

‘Oh, and black magic on the internet is so down-to-earth.'

Kiran Hilal raised her hands, and everyone fell silent. ‘What's the secret?' she asked.

What's the secret? What could be the secret? What could keep her away for so long?

Bony Fingers shook his head. I looked down at the scratched wood of the table.

‘OK,' Kiran said. ‘Never mind. I like that idea. We can work it in with either the industrialist slash criminal world story, or the black magic story. And it might just save the daughter from the Hole of Abject Boredom we've been digging for her.' She smiled at me in a way that meant thank you, you can go now.

The room was silent as I stood up and made my way out, but just as I closed the door behind me—in the instant before the latch actually clicked—I heard someone in the room exaggeratedly release a breath.

There was something unbearable about appearing transparent to people who thought up story lines about black magic on the internet. Get yourself an on-line exorcism, go! I wanted to say to them through the closed door, but that just sounded silly, so I turned towards my office instead. My footsteps echoed in the quiet hallway. Ed stuck his head out of his own office and called out my name.

‘Aasmaani, listen!' He started to make his way down the corridor towards me. He was walking like a man who would rather be running, but is trying to affect casualness. It made him seem insincere.

‘Hi,' he said, coming to a stop as both of us reached my office door at the same time. He put his hand up to the door-handle and started fidgeting with it. It may have been a sign of nerves—what was he about to propose that was making him nervous?—but it also effectively barred me from entering my own office without physically pushing past him. ‘I just wondered. After work. How about getting a real cup of coffee? With me. I mean, us. Both. Going for coffee. Wait. Let's start again. Aasmaani, would you care to accompany me to Café Aylanto for a coffee?'

I had thought he couldn't appear boyish. I was wrong. Here he was, an awkward teenager in a man's body, with nothing even remotely appealing about him.

‘I think it would be best to just keep things professional, Ed.'

‘What is it you're afraid of?' he said, moving a little bit closer.

‘Lizards. Snakes. Many sentences which start with the word “actually”.'

‘Come on, Aasmaani. No games, no masks. Just you and me and two cups of coffee. Would that be so terrible?'

‘Actually, yes. Now, could you move your hand? I have work to do.'

His hand lifted abruptly off the door-handle, and he turned on his heels and strode away. I pushed open the door, switched on the fan, and sat down at my computer to work on quiz show questions.

 

What's the secret which made the mother leave?

a) a really bad nose job which can't be fixed
b) she exchanged her legs for a scaled tail and went to live with her merman beneath the sea
c) she died. Someone who looks like her took her place, and finally grew sick of the deception
d) she doesn't love her daughter any more

 

Answer:

 

The cursor blinked at me with steady patience, but I just sat there, unutterably weary, with no strength in my fingers even to press down on any one of the keys they were resting on. I sat there, watching the vertical line appear and disappear on the screen until time swallowed itself up in that repetitive motion and there was nothing in my mind but darkness.

Far enough into the darkness, I ceased to exist. I was a body, yes, but a body freed of everything that is other than corporeal. Sometimes the only way to be is to remove yourself from yourself. It cannot be done, of course. But illusions—no, delusions—are so much more effective than people give them credit for. I could live for longer than anyone imagined in the delusion that I was just the body of Aasmaani, with nothing within it.

There was an art to this, of course, a patiently learnt art. Or perhaps a talent. It bore some relationship to sitting in a classroom, with a look that signified attentiveness while the mind skated through every topic except precisely that with which it was supposed to be concerned. In the beginning, I didn't know how to enter the darkness without my face transforming into blankness, alerting all those around me to what was going on. But now, now I could smile and nod my head, follow key phrases in conversations, occasionally add necessary interjections, while all along I wasn't really there.

I was, instead, in that blank space where nothing could touch me. For hours, sometimes, blessed hours of silence.

And here was the CEO stepping into my office, a female co-worker I recognized but didn't know behind him.

‘Got any gum?' he said.

I automatically reached into my handbag and passed him a mint. ‘That'll do,' he said. He sat down across from me and pulled the telephone closer to him.

‘Phones downstairs aren't working,' the woman explained to me, as though it were necessary.

The CEO punched in some numbers and sat with the phone to his ear. The woman compressed her features—lips squished together, eyebrows drawing close, nostrils constricted—as though putting on a battle-mask. The CEO turned towards me and raised his eyebrows in mock-alarm. I managed an upward flicker of my lips in response.

‘My only point,' the woman said, ‘is that a medical show should cover important medical issues.' And now the tiny part of my brain which continued to concern itself with such things recognized her as the presenter of one of the more boring of STD's educational programmes.

‘BHS is not a medical condition,' the CEO said, before barking into the phone: ‘Get Tahir.'

‘BHS? No, I'm talking about depression.'

‘Bored Housewife Syndrome,' the CEO said. His lips were startlingly red.

The woman put her hands on her hips. ‘Seven out of ten people in Pakistan suffer some form of depressive disorder in their lifetime. In six per cent it's serious enough to...'

‘Well, all the more reason to shut up about it. If they don't know they're sick they won't expect to be treated like they're sick. Too much damn whining in this country as it is. Tahir, round of golf?...I'm leaving now.'

He hung up and pushed himself out of the chair with no inconsiderable effort.

Leave. Go.

But in the doorway he turned back to me. ‘You, what's the story with you and the Poet?'

I blinked. Two times, three, and then I was in my skin again. ‘I'm sorry? What do you mean?'

‘It's his seventieth birthday next year. We're going to do some grand programme about it.'

Seventy!

‘Tributes, readings, homages, bla bla. It's going up on our website as a coming attraction for the new year. Someone somewhere in this building thinks it's a good idea to have a link on the website to a bio of him. And we've found one, a bio, on some other website which we're going to shamelessly steal, just tweak a sentence here and there. But maybe we should check the facts because who knows where that other website gets its information. Last time we stole information off a site without checking it we ended up informing people that the game of cricket got its name because the sound of ball on willow was like the death-cry of the insect of that name. And you know, you're the research girl so we might as well give you some work. But if you've got some trauma associated with him, I'll tell someone else. Otherwise I'll be accused of causing depression in my employees, and you'll take medical leave.'

‘It's fine,' I said. ‘I can check facts.'

‘I knew your mother,' the woman said, stepping forward. ‘We marched together against the Hudood Ordinances.'