Broken Verses (3 page)

‘So, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan—'

‘It's Ed. Short for Eddy. As in, a whirling current. And there's no need to laugh—it's a childhood name which just stuck.'

‘Don't get so defensive, Eddy.' He looked annoyed and I waved my hand in a gesture of peace. ‘It's just that I woke up thinking of seas and currents, and now here you are.'

‘Oh.' He blushed, and that made me suddenly self-conscious. The office was so small that for the two of us to be sharing its space seemed like an intimacy.

He rested his hand on the edge of my desk, and, looking down, smiled. There was a tiny stick-on heart near his thumb, the kind I had covered my pencil-box with when I was a girl.

‘Tell the Tin Man to call off the search,' he said.

‘Who first did that?' I asked, levering my nail between glass and sticker to prise it off. ‘Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers—a castrated organ?'

‘The same people who turned angels into harp-playing, effete creatures in nightgowns, floating on clouds. The ones who like to domesticate the dangerous.'

I busied myself removing bits of sticky paper from my nail. It was an answer too near my own way of thinking for me to know how to respond to it. I didn't know what to say to him—there was a subject between us, a history going back one generation, which I couldn't decide whether I wanted to allude to or avoid.

‘Look, there are plenty of jobs available here,' he said. ‘You don't have to get stuck with this quiz show nonsense. It's obviously not what you want to be doing.'

I looked up, flicking the last bit of sticky paper into the space between us. ‘What makes you think you know what I want to be doing?'

‘Oh, please!' He rolled his eyes. ‘The enigmatic-woman act is so overdone.'

Don't you dare
, I found myself thinking, and then almost—almost, mind—before I knew what I was doing, I angled my head just so as to draw out the cords of my neck, clenched my jaw, narrowed my eyes to obscure the grey and make the green flash through.

Ed stepped back, the expression on his face telling me to what extent I had just left my own skin, allowed someone else's personality to brush its hand across my features and leave its ghostly mark there.

I looked away, aware of feeling smaller, more useless, as soon as I had returned to myself.

‘What's your story, Aasmaani Inqalab?' he said in a tone of voice I couldn't decipher. He moved the fan on to the floor, and sat down on the stacks of books. ‘No, don't give me that look. I hate that look.'

‘You've just met me. You can't hate my looks already.'

‘Your looks are actually quite stunning.' I raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed. ‘Don't worry. I'm not making a move on you. I'm just stating a fact. You like facts. You said so. Although, here's a question. Why?'

‘What?'

‘Why do you like facts? Or maybe you don't like them. You just collect them. See, we've just met and here's what I know about you. You say you're not interested in politics, you claim to write haiku though clearly you don't, which casts some suspicion on the veracity of your claim about politics, you pride yourself on collecting useless facts, you woke up thinking about currents, your friends call you Arse-Many Inflagrante, and cockroach antennae make you sneeze. You'll have to agree, this is a strange collection of information to have about someone you've only just met. It's ... well, isn't that interesting?' He leaned back against the wall. ‘You've given me a lot of useless facts about yourself. Huh. Clever. I bet you do that a lot as an alternative to actually revealing information.'

‘There's something really creepy about you, you do know that, don't you?'

‘You're just upset that I'm on to you.' He stood up. ‘Look upon it as a gift. I've seen past the façade instantly. Isn't that a relief?'

‘There's a difference between seeing a façade as a façade and seeing past it, Eddy. So enjoy the arches and parapets, take your pictures, buy your postcards. The guard dogs at the gate have been alerted to your presence.'

‘I hear the clatter of a gauntlet,' he said, stooping down as though to pick something off the floor before walking out.

‘Irritating sod,' I muttered after him.

It was a long time I continued to sit there, waiting for someone to come and find me. I recited
Song of Myself in
my head, not knowing why it had occurred to me until I came to the line about ‘eddies of the wind'.

At length, my mind wandering back to my first moments in the STD building, I found pen and paper in the desk drawers and began to write:

 

To: the woman in the hallway who asked me if I was planning to watch
Boond.

My turn to beg forgiveness for presumption. But I've been thinking about your concerns re Shehnaz Saeed's role in your drama. It seems to me your biggest problem is knowing how to both use and downplay her status as A GREAT. That first moment the camera alights on her—how can you make that moment work both at the level of the television drama and at the level of the larger ‘real-life' drama of Shehnaz Saeed returning to a medium she once owned more fully than any other actress in Pakistan's history? I have a suggestion:

Let the show start with her return to Karachi, after years away. Let those years be years of mystery, and silence. That allows her to step on to the screen both as a character who has been away from her family for many years and as Shehnaz Saeed returning to all our lives. Those initial moments of recognition that her family has when she comes back, those gasps of shock, those searching inquisitions of every aspect of her appearance to see how she has changed, can both mirror the audience's responses to her and set up
the character's position as ‘the familiar/unfamiliar-mother/friend/enemy/ex-wife'. You said the show starts with her ex-husband's proposal to another woman. Think how the drama increases if his proposal coincides with Shehnaz Saeed's return to town. Yes, this is staple fare of low-brow soap operas—but no less effective for that
.

 

As I wrote, I saw it in my mind. A woman is disembarking a plane in Karachi. On the walk from tarmac to terminal she pauses to light a cigarette and look around her. This terminal was not built when she last left, and for a moment she is terrified by all that must have changed, and all that must have stayed the same, in this city she departed without explanation so long ago, leaving behind her only child.

I put down the pen and bent my head forward to rest in my cupped hands.

Oh, Mama.

‘Don't you want to know what's in the water?'

My father extended his hand into the space between us, tilting a glass jug; the liquid inside flowed towards the mouth of the vessel and then receded—a captive ocean with a memory of tides.

‘It's only rust.' Rabia took the jug from our father's hand and slid open the bedroom window. At a twist of her wrist a thick rope of orange-brown water spilled out of the glass lip. I imagined a variant on the Rapunzel story in that instant before the water scattered into thousands of drops, racing in their descent to the garden, three storeys beneath us. ‘That tap hasn't been used in months.' She leaned out of the window. ‘Look, the madman of 3B is proposing to a flowerpot.'

Dad reached over and pulled Rabia in, and I slammed the window shut. The weather had been bearable this morning when I set off for my interview at STD but now, in mid-afternoon, it was a different matter. The October heat was a haze over Karachi, yet despite its diffused appearance it could pummel its way into any room through even the slightest crack in the window. Dad walked across to the air-conditioner and held his face up to the vents. Outside, crows circled slowly in a sky near white. When I was a child, the Poet told me that the sky-painters' union had negotiated reduced working hours on days of oppressive heat, so the painters only slapped on a single coat of blue under cover of darkness before packing away their brushes for the day. When I repeated this to Dad he sat me down and explained wavelengths and particles, which sounded so entirely unreal I thought he was making up an extraordinary story which I was too young to understand, just as I was too young to understand why
Wuthering Heights
was a story my mother could love when it was so choked with misery.

Rabia rested her chin on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my waist. ‘I think the flowerpot is turning him down.'

‘Just as well. He was only after her money-plant.' I leaned back into her, feeling rather than hearing laughter ripple out from her body.

Rabia was really my half-sister, four years younger than me, married to an artist, and employed by an NGO. Her features were all soft curves to my sharp angles, and her sense of humour stemmed from joy rather than irony. The only thing we had in common was our father's gene pool—clearly filled with recessive genes since there was nothing of him apparent in either of us—and our overly protective attitudes towards each other.

‘Make sure you look after each other while we're away,' my father said, and I couldn't help smiling at the unexpected—and rare—confluence of our thinking. Dad walked over to the two of us. ‘And come and visit, often.' The air ducts had given his hair a windswept look and, seeing it, Rabia laughed again and combed it back into place with her fingers before leaving the room to find Beema—last seen with the customs official downstairs, deep in conversation about Shehnaz Saeed's return to acting.

‘You're sure you'll be OK, living alone?'

‘Dad, I'm thirty-one.'

‘Yes.' He shook his head. ‘How did that happen?'

‘Linearity?' I suggested. His face had that slightly bemused expression I had seen at various points in my life when I announced my age to him, as though he couldn't quite believe the gap between my conception and the present moment.

‘It's not too late to decide you want to come with us, you know.'

I threw him an exasperated look. ‘Welcome to the third millennium, Dad. Single women in Karachi do occasionally live alone without the world coming to an end. Besides,' I jerked my thumb towards the lounge, ‘there's the connecting door to Rabia and Shakeel's flat. I'm not exactly camping out in the wilderness. Subject closed.'

He nodded and ran his fingers over the network of hairline cracks in the paint which gave the turtle on the wall a wrinkled brow.

‘I could go out and get some paint, and help you slap on a coat before our flight out,' my father said. ‘Unless the marine life is growing on you.'

‘Now there's a pleasant image. Barnacles on my skin, seaweed draped around my neck. It's fine, Dad. I can take care of it. You know, you don't have to be so useful all the time.'

He smiled and scratched his chin, as he always did when he wasn't quite sure what to say. The chin was growing more prominent as the passage of time carved itself into his frame, gradually removing all excesses of flesh. Old age would happen to his face suddenly, and soon, I realized, but for the moment, with his trim physique and thick grey hair, he looked better than he had since the days of his boyhood, just past adolescence—a time in which, if photographs were to be believed, there was a promise of extraordinary beauty in each angle of his face.

‘What should I be if not useful?' he said, spreading his arms as if indicating a willingness to take on any possibility.

‘It's a moot point. All you can be is yourself. Consistency, thy name is Dad.'

‘You have this way, darling, of paying compliments that sound so very much like insults.'

‘I know. I'm sorry. I will miss you, you know.'

‘You say it as though it just occurred to you for the first time. Please, don't respond to that.'

It was my turn then to smile and not know what to say. So finally I said, ‘What are you going to do in Islamabad? Couldn't the bank just have transferred you to their branch there instead of giving you time off?'

‘They could have. They offered to. I said no. I thought my wife might have need ... well, that she wouldn't regard it as unwelcome if I were with her during the day instead of behind some desk. The financial world won't be too disturbed by my absence, I expect.'

‘Because we're only irreplaceable to those who love us? That's the subtle point you're trying to make here, right? Let's concentrate on the domestic and leave the world to take care of itself. Thank God Louis Pasteur didn't take that view. We'd all be out milking cows every morning for our daily cups of tea.'

He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘The subtle point I'm making is that I'm not a very good banker. And anyway, someone else would have figured out pasteurization eventually—there'd just be a different word for it.'

‘And if Shakespeare had stayed in Stratford with Anne Hathaway and the kids, someone else would have written
Hamlet
eventually, too.'

He half-shrugged, summing up his view of both
Hamlet
and this oft-repeated dance around our differences, and there was something approaching relief on his face as we heard the sounds of Rabia and Beema's footsteps and rushed voices headed towards the bedroom.

‘Such excitement,' Beema declared, walking into the room, Rabia behind her. When my stepmother and half-sister stood next to each other, it was remarkable to notice the resemblance between them which had nothing to do with features replicating themselves from one generation to the next, and everything to do with the way personality can be a physical presence, particularly around the eyes and mouth. ‘About Shehnaz Saeed's return. I was talking to the customs guy about it and next thing I knew I was in the centre of a throng, buzzing away about the Great Comeback.'

‘I told you it would happen eventually,' my father said drily. ‘Some people just need their spotlight.'