Broken Verses (29 page)

‘Tell me about the funeral. Who was there?'

Mirza made a gesture of not knowing. ‘It was all done so quickly and quietly. I only knew about it because I was there when the relatives came for his body. The government's instructions, I suppose. They didn't want his funeral to start a riot. I was the only one there who really knew him. Even the schoolmaster's brother's family in Karachi weren't informed. And the schoolmaster and the aunt, the only two people in the village who ever meant anything to him, were dead. So I was the only one mourning. It was awful.'

‘And who burnt his poems?'

Mirza flinched. ‘I don't know. Some government lackeys.' Then he looked at me and I was startled by the greed in his eyes. ‘Do you remember them? Any of them? Fragments, even?'

I shook my head. ‘No, I'm sorry, Mirza. I wish I did. Mama and I, we both tried so hard to remember. But he only ever read them once or twice after he'd written them, so all we could remember was how it felt to hear him reciting those words with the ink still fresh on the pages.'

‘Yes. It's the same with me. Your mother told me it was the same with her. You know it's the one proof of God's existence I find myself hoping for—words resurrected from ash.'

‘When did she tell you?'

‘Hmm? Oh, I don't know. Sometime after the Poet's death. I did keep trying, Aasmaani. You have to acknowledge that. I kept trying to pull her out of that listlessness she fell into. Usually she'd just hang up when she heard my voice or refuse to see me, but sometimes I'd get a sentence or two out of her.' He shook his head. ‘What a waste.'

‘The burnt poems?'

‘Your mother.' He touched his flabby cheeks again. ‘I always knew I was a coward. But there were all those people who were turned to flame by his death, who wrote and marched and resisted, above all, resisted all those tyrannies he'd fought against. And I would have sworn your mother would have been foremost among their ranks. But no. She and I, we were the two who loved him most and we were the two who failed him most spectacularly when he died.'

‘I loved him, too.' At that moment I knew it to be true, however complicated that truth might have been, however mixed in with jealousy.

‘Yes. I suppose you must have. It was hard not to.'

‘What did you love about him?'

Mirza looked at me as though I were a child again, asking a question that revealed nothing so much as my ignorance. ‘I loved him. That's all there is to it. I loved him the way I've never loved anyone else.'

I wiped the ring of coffee on the saucer, wiped the bottom of the coffee cup. ‘And who hated him, Mirza? Hated him enough to do what was done to him?'
Hated him enough to imprison him all these years?

A great weariness took over Mirza's face. ‘That's what we like to believe, isn't it? That he had to die in such a brutal fashion because of some great reason. Some great fear. Some great hate. That's the only way we can accept it, isn't it? How often do you replay it in your mind, Aasmaani? How do you see it happening?'

I shook my head. ‘Replay what? See what?'

‘His death.' He was whispering now. ‘I see it every day, even now. I see it as avoidable.' He smoothed the tablecloth between us with his fingers which still retained something of their old elegance. ‘I see some low-ranked government lackeys picking him up, taking him for a drive, just to scare him. The way they do with journalists all the time. His new book of poems was nearly done. That wasn't a secret. So some thugs pick him up just to have a talk. Just to scare him out of publishing. It had happened before. He'd got a few punches and a lot of threats and came home to write a poem about the whole thing. But this time, this time something happened differently.' He kept smoothing the tablecloth though there was nothing to smooth. ‘He mocked them, that's what I think. His tongue could be a scythe when his compassion didn't get in the way. I think he mocked them. Mocked their clothes, their occupation, their car, their manhood. Mocked their looks. Mocked their attempts to frighten him. Mocked violence. And one of them picked up something heavy, something that could bludgeon, and hit him, just to shut him up. And then hit him again. And again. And kept on. And the thing about keeping on, Aasmaani—whether you keep on hitting or you keep on obsessing or keep on lying or keep on deceiving—at a point that's all you can do. Keep on. Keep on. Sever his tongue, break each unbroken bone—'

‘Mirza. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.' I took his hand in mine, and squeezed tight. He drew a deep breath, and for a moment we were equals, with nothing in common but our pain, with everything in common because of our pain.

‘Why did he have to be so arrogant? Why couldn't he just have pretended to be scared? They would have let him go. We would all still be whole. The Poet, your mother, you, me. We would all still be whole.'

‘It might not have happened that way, Mirza.'

‘Then how? How do you see it happening?'

I shook my head. ‘I don't know what happened.'

‘But how do you imagine it?'

‘I don't.'

There was a sound of footsteps. The waiter, coming up the stairs with Mirza's food. Mirza waved him away.

‘You don't imagine it? In all these years you haven't imagined it?'

‘No.'

‘That scared of what it did to your mother?'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning, if thinking about it could drive her mad, mightn't it do the same to you?'

‘Drive her mad?'

‘Yes. Drive her mad. Imagining his death and knowing that if she hadn't insisted on coming back to Karachi it wouldn't have happened. If she hadn't insisted on coming back because of you he wouldn't be dead. If it wasn't for her and you he wouldn't be dead.'

I took a long sip of coffee. ‘Well. Things keep coming back to Lady Macbeth. Is that how you imagine her final two years here, Mirza? Years in which you almost never saw her. You think she floated around in a white nightgown, holding a candle above her head, sleepless with guilt, whispering, can all the seas of Arabia wash this blood from my hand?' I tried to put the coffee cup down, but it kept missing the middle of the saucer and hitting the edges. On the third attempt, I managed it.

Then I looked up at him. ‘She didn't come back for me, Mirza. I was never reason to stay or to return for either of them. Neither were you. That's what kills us.'

‘Their shadows kill us, Aasmaani. The shadows we cower in. They asked, how do we change the world? How do we take on dictators without sacrificing the metre of a line? How do we keep from surrendering this nation? And you and I, their heirs, what do we ask? Where did my mummy go? Did my father-figure love me? We look at the mess of our lives, we look at the mess in which we live, and we say they failed us. We say it because that is so much easier than saying we are the ones who have failed. God, Aasmaani, what is this world we're living in? How did we let it get like this? They would never have let it get like this.'

The roots of war are seeped in oil, so we join an oil company. A city we love becomes suspicious of the people of our religion so we leave that city. We don't resist the abuses of power, we just make it clear we're smart enough, aware enough, to understand our powerlessness. And at some level we believe that makes us admirable.

‘Mirza, things keep on. Like you said. They keep on and they keep on. Macbeth again. Remember, Omi always used to say the key to understanding Macbeth is understanding that he doesn't keep killing to retain power. He keeps killing because he's just following the momentum of that initial thrust of a dagger through Duncan's heart. So the world keeps on. The momentum is more than you or I can fight against.'

‘Enough with Macbeth. You know, I don't even think the Poet much liked the play. He was commissioned to translate Shakespeare, so he chose the shortest play.' He laughed shakily. ‘We keep trying to construct meaning out of things. Why was he killed? Why did she become the way she became? Why did he choose Macbeth? We want grand reasons. We always want grand reasons. It was the shortest play. That's it. That is it. Yes. I stopped believing in grandness when the Poet died. Greatness and grandness, stopped believing in them. And you? What do you believe in, Samina's daughter, when you look around at this world in which the only grandness that exists is the grandness of opposing extremisms? What did they teach us, after all, that would be of any use in this stinking mess of a world?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Don't tell me “Nothing.”' His voice was shaking with anger. ‘It can't be nothing. Tell me what they taught us.'

‘They taught us to fight only with words. The words of an individual poet, or the words of a gathering of thousands chanting their slogans of protests.'

Mirza made a noise that would have been a laugh if it wasn't so humourless. Here we both were, Mama and Omi's heirs, drowning in words. We each had thousands at our disposal. And I suspected that Mirza could still see, as I did, that they were right—words continued to be both the battleground and the weapon. Mirza and I could recognize, as well as they ever did, the outrage in the discrepancy between ‘what is' and ‘what is claimed'. But Mirza and I would do nothing about it. We would do nothing because we knew that in our refusal to fight for language with bombs or lies lay our defeat. No, it was nothing so grand as that. We knew how voices could be silenced. We knew that most shameful secret which Mama and Omi had tried so hard to keep from us: violence is more powerful than language.

‘So we lose,' I said.

‘So we are lost.' Mirza looked past me out of the window and I knew he wasn't seeing the fairy lights outside, or even the sky.

We sat there in silence until it became unbearable. And then I left. As I drove away I could see him silhouetted against the window, still looking outside, seeing my mother and the Poet, and seeing himself, too, that version of himself that had existed when he still thought he was unbreakable.

Omi, how will your heart survive everything that has happened here in your absence?

The following morning was Eid. Despite everything that had happened the previous evening, I woke up smiling. Not true. I woke up, first, with a feeling of panic. A month of rising at dawn made waking in broad daylight feel like a transgression. But then I remembered, oh yes, Ramzan's over. It's Eid.

Eid had always been the day when I was simply Beema and Dad's daughter, Rabia's sister. The Poet was dismissive of organized religion (‘The more I sin, the more God will want me in heaven where he can keep an eye on me,' he'd said in one of his more inflammatory interviews) and my mother said it seemed false to celebrate Eid when she hadn't fasted, so even when they were in Karachi I never saw them on that day. And so Eid became, for me, the one day of the year when I could take a break from being her daughter and look around the table at Beema's relatives, who descended on us en masse for lunch, and think, this sanity is, but for a technicality, my family.

Year after year, Eid in Dad and Beema's house followed a pattern as unvarying and comforting as the progression of the moon from sliver to sphere marked with dark seas and craters. We'd wake up early—though it seemed late compared to the dawn rising—and someone (usually Beema) would hold up the morning papers to let us know that once again ritual had been maintained and the papers had prophetically announced that Eid would be celebrated ‘with fervour, festivity'. Before long, the house would fill with the smells of Eid lunch being cooked in the kitchen, and my father would give Rabia and me kulfis on sticks, bought the day before at Sony Sweets, and take us for a drive to get us out of Beema's way as she made her elaborate feast. This was how Dad liked to celebrate Eid. Driving with his daughters, Indian film songs from long ago blasting through the speakers, consuming food in public for the first time in a month. He was always too lost in the music to communicate, so before long whoever was in the passenger seat would get tired of twisting around to talk to her sister and would clamber into the back seat.

Then, Rabia and I would categorize everyone we passed on Karachi's streets. Men whose white shalwar-kameezes were creased in a way that showed they'd been kneeling and prostrating at morning prayers; women whose harried tailors had only finished stitching their clothes late the night before and still hadn't quite got it right, leaving the women to tug at the seams around their armpits or pull up the neckline which revealed just a little too much skin; couples, stiff-backed and silent in cars, who had just been arguing about which relatives they had to call on and how long they had to stay; Parsis; drivers sent out by frantic housewives to find that one missing ingredient needed for today's lunch, in a city where all the shops were closed for the holiday; children disgusted with their parents for running late, because it meant skipping visits to relatives known to be generous with Eidi. Every so often, when we saw someone who didn't fit into any category and who had an air of general dissatisfaction (as opposed to all those with Eid-specific dissatisfaction) we'd whisper to each other, ‘Atheist.' I knew atheists aplenty, thanks to the Poet, but it always seemed possible to forget that on Eid mornings and regard the unbelievers as strange creatures whose afflictions could not be spoken of out loud.

We'd return home in time to greet the mid-morning callers, and every year, without fail, there was a moment of panic between Beema and my father when some distant relatives who hadn't been invited for lunch dropped in to say Eid Mubarak and looked as though they planned to stay beyond the consumption of savaiyan and the distribution of Eidi (‘prize money for being young', my mother used to call it). When the suspense of their unknown intentions grew too much to bear Beema would say, ‘Of course, you're staying for lunch,' and then they'd turn red, get up quickly, say no, no, and start to leave, whereupon Beema would get so embarrassed about appearing to force them out (though that was, of course, exactly her intention) that she'd plead with them to stay, plead so intently that they would grow quite confused, unable to discern what protocol demanded of them. But then—blessedly—they'd remember that, no, they really were expected somewhere else, and couldn't possibly stay for lunch without offending whoever had invited them. When they said that everyone's shoulders would slump in relief, and the relatives would leave, and for a few minutes we'd believe they were really lovely people, next year we should invite them. Then the lunch guests would arrive—about fifteen or twenty of them—and gossip and eat for hours. After they'd left, we'd lock the gate from outside so it appeared no one was home, and settle down to watch a video, some romantic comedy usually, since Beema always got to choose it as recompense for the effort she'd put into getting the lunch organized.