Broken Verses (24 page)

Rabia looked away, her fingers scratching at my shoulder in tiny circles. ‘It's not a question of competition.'

‘No, it isn't.' I turned over on to my back, and she pirouetted her body round to rest her head against my stomach.

My Scrabble girls, our father used to call us when we were young and there was no pillow in the world which Rabia would rather rest against than some part of me—shoulder, stomach, thigh—her body always perpendicular to mine so there was only that single point of contact between us.

Shakeel walked up to us, laughed, and lay down, his head on Rabia's leg. ‘Double word score,' he announced.

‘No abbreviations allowed, skinny man!' I said.

Someone had switched off the car headlights while everyone took a break between innings, and the stars were bright above us. I lay in silence for a while, looking up, listening to Rabia enumerate for Shakeel the different stars which made up the Orion constellation—Betelguese and Bellatrix at the Hunter's shoulders, Rigel and Saiph twinkling at his knees—and remembered when I had taught her to look up to the sky and greet the distant points of light by name.

Rabia the Patient, daughter of Beema the Sane.

I had never really thought to question why she maintained that scrapbook about my mother, long after I had discarded it; never stopped to consider that in those two years when my mother lived with me in the upstairs portion of my father's house, Rabia always kept a distance, not knowing how to react to that unfamiliar creature lurking beneath the shell of the woman she had once known; never wondered how much resentment Rabia felt towards Mama for being the strongest pull in my life. But now it was so clear.

I sat up, causing a reverse domino effect to take hold of my sister and brother-in-law.

‘You have that look of purpose in your eyes,' Rabia said. ‘What's that all about?'

‘It just occurred to me to wonder something. When did you become such a fan of my mother, Rabia, and why? I know your feelings for her weren't uncomplicated when we were growing up.'

Rabia drew her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She didn't seem particularly surprised by the question. ‘I admire what she did as an activist. I admire it particularly because I read all those condolence letters addressed to you in the months after she disappeared, which you used to throw into the bin after reading the first three words. So I know what a difference she made to people's lives, and how important she was to the women's movement in the eighties. But beyond that,' she glanced over at Shakeel, who nodded encouragingly, ‘beyond that, Aasmaani, everything I think or feel about your mother is really just about you. I cut out those articles and put them in the scrapbook because your memory is so incredibly one-sided, so totally blinkered, that you need the black-and-white reminders of what you used to admire and idolize her for, just in case the day comes along when you're able to let go long enough to remember her as she really was, with all her flaws and in all her glory.'

There it was again.
Let go
.

I tapped my bare toes against her ankle. ‘I don't think that's what it's about at all, Rabia. Reminding me of her activism won't make any difference to the way I think about her—it's not her activism I've ever resented. Admittedly, it turned out to be a waste of energy, but I don't resent her for not knowing that at the time.'

‘It wasn't a waste,' Rabia said quietly. ‘Read those articles. It wasn't a waste at all. What do you gain by believing it was a waste? Why are you so insistent about that point?'

‘Don't turn this back on me, Rabo. We're talking about why you keep the scrapbook. And here's what I think. I think you cut those articles out to remind yourself that she was this creature of ideals and courage and everything else you admire so much. Because you need that reminder, don't you, to keep all your resentment at bay? All those years of resentment which only grows with every second she continues to be the siren pulling me away from you and the world of normality and good sense you live in. You can't let that resentment out, can't admit to it. You can't, because you're the rock, you're the anchor. Those are the roles I pushed you into when you were so young you should have been trying on different personalities every week just to find the one which suited you best. And even now, you believe that role so completely that you can't admit to your resentment, and you have to cloak it in concern for me. Rabia, you don't have to do that any more.'

When I was done, Shakeel said, ‘Oh, boy,' stood up and walked away, stopping long enough only to look back at Rabia and say, ‘She's stronger than you think, you know.'

‘What does that mean?' I demanded from my sister.

‘It means,' she clutched her knees closer, ‘it means, I'm not you, Aasmaani. People's minds, their psyches, don't all work in the same ways.' She made an exclamation of irritation. ‘Do you want me to spell this out? Who is there in your life whom you once resented, then felt you weren't allowed to resent because it would be so selfish and so wrong, and whose memory you now revere above everyone else who has ever lived on this planet?'

I pushed myself off the ground and she sprang up next to me and caught me by the shoulder. ‘Dammit, will you stop running away every time I try to talk to you about this!'

There was a crackle of lightning inside my head. ‘You're talking rubbish. Yes, there were moments of irritation. I've had them with everyone. But you think I resented him? Rabia, the one thing I wanted most of all was to be his daughter. Not Dad's daughter. Not your half-sister. Not Beema's stepdaughter. I would have given all that up to be his child, I would have given all that up in a heartbeat.'

For an instant I thought she was going to hit me, and then her face took on a concentration of utter pity. ‘Of course that's what you wanted. Because if you had been his child, he wouldn't have made your mother choose between the two of you every time he went away and asked her to follow.'

‘That's not how I saw it.'

‘That's exactly how you saw it.'

There we stood, my sister and I, looking at each other from opposite shores of perspective. I was no longer in my skin, but hovering above, watching both of us with a curious detachment. We could spend all night out there, I knew, plunging our hands into the ice-cold river and pulling out squirming facts, entirely distinct from one another, which would wriggle out of our grasp almost as soon as we hoisted them above the fast-moving surface.

Then a chill hooked through me, and I almost cried out. It had gone. That peace, that joy, it had gone. With a great surge, questions finned in, jostling against each other, filling up all the crevices of my mind. How will you find the Poet? How will your mother know you've found him? What if no more letters come? Suppose Ed is angry enough to keep the letters from coming to you? How do you know you can trust Shehnaz Saeed? What if he comes back and she comes back, too, and they leave again and don't tell you where?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Please, not again.

‘Aasmaani?' Rabia stepped closer to me.

I shook my head and held up a hand for her to stay away. Slow, heart, slow. Calm yourself. You'll find him. Look how far you've come already. He's alive. Say it. He is alive.

Omi.

It had the feel of a mantra.

Om Omi Om Omi.

How many of your Lord's blessings would you deny?

I opened my eyes and exhaled slowly.

‘I'm sorry.' I took her hand in mine. ‘I didn't mean what I said. I wouldn't give up being your sister for anything. And I know it seems like I take you all for granted. You and Beema and Dad. But it's just ... it's just that sometimes it feels like I've spent my whole life missing Mama.'

Rabia wrapped her arms around me and pulled me to her. ‘I know. Sometimes it feels like I've spent my whole life watching you miss her. You're wrong about me resenting her for being the stronger pull in your life. I've never resented her for that. But I've hated her for causing you so much pain. I've hated her for making you cry. Just as she hated herself for it.'

I pulled away. ‘You think she did?'

‘I know she did. I saw it.'

‘Saw what?'

The cricket game was starting up again and we were perfectly positioned to be hit by a well-timed cover drive, so we stepped into the driveway and pulled ourselves on to the bonnet of a car, leaning back against the windshield.

‘It was during those last two years. When she was living upstairs. She'd promised you she'd go to Sports Day to watch you in the long jump, but then she couldn't get out of bed that day. And you cried. You thought I didn't know. You always thought I didn't know.' For a moment a look flitted over her face that was nothing but the triumphant look of a twelve-year-old who has just discovered her big sister's secret. ‘Anyway, the next day, you'd gone out with some schoolfriends and Dad was at work and Beema was giving maths tuition. So I marched up to your mother's room and I said, “We need to talk.”'

‘Aged twelve, you marched up to my mother's room and said, “We need to talk?”'

‘Yes. I said, “Listen, lady.” I think I'd just been watching some gangster movie. I said, “Listen, lady. It's OK with me that you're living in my room now, and I've had to move downstairs. But don't forget this is my room you're in, and if you're going to go on living here you owe me something. Let's call it rent.”'

‘You prepared this speech beforehand, didn't you?'

‘Wrote it down, memorized it, practised it in front of the mirror. Your mother, bless her—she was having a better day that afternoon—just nodded really seriously and said, ‘That seems fair.' So I said, “I don't want money. It's not like that. I want you to stop making my sister sad, that's the rent you owe me.”'

‘Oh, Rabia.'

‘She started crying, Aasmaani. Really crying. I've never heard such crying, not even when Beema told her the Poet was dead. She just cried and cried like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to do any more, and I got so frightened I ran out of there. I've asked myself since, what was I so scared of? Because honestly, nothing has been more terrifying to me since. And I think it was this. That I saw, this is what can happen to a life, this can happen to anyone. That was the last day I ever hated your mother.' She wiped my eyes with the heel of her palm.

‘You and Beema,' I said, blowing my nose. ‘Saints-in-waiting, occasionally disguised as gangsters.' And in their saintliness so ready to choose pity over censure.

‘She should at least have moved out of our house,' I said, balling up the tissue paper in my hand. ‘If nothing else she could have done that. Why should you and Dad and Beema have had to suffer through all her suffering?'

‘She tried to leave. Beema wouldn't hear of it. And she was in no state to look after herself, Aasmaani, you know that.'

I could have gone with her. I could have looked after her. I never offered. I never wanted, at that point, to have to be alone in a house with her, watching her strip away herself.

‘How did Dad put up with it? I really don't know.'

‘With gritted teeth.' Rabia shrugged. ‘I don't think he was ever too happy about how close Beema and your mother were. It would have suited him better, I'm sure, if they got on civilly enough not to make life uncomfortable for you, and no more.' One of the cricketers yelled out that her feet were blocking the headlights, so she pulled herself into a cross-legged position. ‘Remember Beema saying to your mother—this was before the Poet died, when they were back from exile and you were so happy you could hardly walk without dancing—Beema said, “Put us together, Samina, and the two of us form the one Superwoman that every individual woman needs to be if she's to go through this absurd world with even the barest sense of responsibility. We take on governments, buy the groceries, wrest religion out of the hands of patriarchs, raise our daughters into women, and accompany our men to places they'll never survive alone because they're still little boys in the bodies of competent adults.” That was it, I think. The heart of their friendship. They saw themselves as complementary, and not only in your life. Your mother would never have left you all those times, Aasmaani, if it wasn't Beema she was leaving you with.'

‘She would never have left me unless she could bear to leave me.' I slid off the bonnet. ‘She did me a favour, I know. I'm much better off having been raised by Beema, and in your company. But that was the result of, not the reason for, her decisions.'

From the fielders there came a roar of delight as the batsman struck a slower delivery back into the hands of the bowler.

‘My turn,' I called out, making my way to the pitch.

I could tell, by the way my sister hovered near me when the game was over, that she wanted to continue our conversation. But I was sick of my own self-obsessed whining, and partly resentful for the dissipation of that utter peace I had known for the last few days, so after the game I loitered in the garden, talking politics with the neighbours.

During Ramzan, the country had finally got a government. Not a very convincing one, but the main reaction among the people I encountered at STD and in the communal garden was relief that the religious alliance had refused to join a coalition government. ‘Bugger, but they talk democracy better than anyone else,' Rabia had groaned a few days earlier, watching the fiery leader of the beards lay into military intervention in matters of government as the inaugural session of the National Assembly was broadcast live on one channel after another.

I had looked at the scenes from Parliament, and I couldn't help wondering what it would feel like to be sitting there, part of the action.

Earlier in the year, soon after the President announced the new constitutional amendments prior to holding elections to end the three-year suspension of Parliament, I ran into a one-time friend of my mother, a man who'd been a brave and admired participant in the pro-democracy activities of the 1980s, only to turn into a corrupt, vindictive politician when democracy actually returned to the country and he found himself in a position of power. I hadn't seen him in years, but when we found ourselves at adjoining tables on the rooftop of my favourite restaurant his eyes registered delight.