Salt and Saffron (7 page)

Rehana Apa laughed. ‘You must tell Baji that. She'll look offended, but she'll love it. But now get back to the story. You said the bell rang.'

Yes, the bell rang. A few seconds later the ayah, recently
hired in preparation for my arrival into the world, knocked on my parents' door and told them that a begum had arrived and was seated in the drawing room. She hadn't said anything but she'd brought two suitcases.

‘Well,' Ami said. ‘Well. It must be her.'

‘What do we do?' Aba held the letter up to the light as if looking for a secret message written in lemon juice. ‘I mean, what kind of a person do we think she is?'

Ami laughed. ‘If the servants in all their snobbery think she deserves to be seated in the drawing room, she obviously isn't a valet's granddaughter. Most of your relatives only make it to the TV room, and they all think they're princes and princesses.' My mother can be dismissive of lineage in such a manner because, although she never mentions it, everyone knows she can trace her family tree back even further than the Dard-e-Dils. She's from a family of Syeds, yes, descended from the Prophet Mohammed, and there were at least four great poets in her family – one of whom was exiled from Dard-e-Dil by one of the Nawabs who fancied himself a poet. My mother's ancestor read the Nawab's poetry and said, ‘This poem proves Allah's justice. How can religion reconcile the privileges you were born into with the hardship I have had to face from birth? This is how: you have power and emeralds; I have talent. And history has shown that fine couplets live longer than fine banquets. God is great.' My father's family claims that the Nawab showed his greatness by banishing, rather than executing, the offending poet. But they never say so within my mother's earshot.

‘You're diffusing the suspense,' Rehana Apa said.

Mariam Apa was never about suspense.

She stood up as my parents entered the drawing room,
quite assured. ‘Made us feel as though we were the needy relatives, not her,' my mother recalls. ‘Though once we'd taken a look at her we couldn't really think of her as needy.' She was dressed in a blue chiffon sari, three gold bracelets adorned her left arm, and a gold chain with a diamond-studded pendant in the shape of an Arabic Allah hung around her neck. My mother looked at her cheekbones, her clavicle, her straight black hair, and knew she was a Dard-e-Dil.

‘Hello,' Aba said. ‘You're not … Mariam?'

She just smiled that smile of hers which once made a rose burst into bloom, and Ami reached out to hug her. It is always possible to measure my mother's reaction to a person by multiplying the time, in seconds, that she speaks without pause by the number of words she utters in that time. The greater the result, the greater her affinity for the person. When she met Mariam Apa she went into seven digits. So my father says, and he's always been good at calculations. At any rate, the warmth of my mother's reaction to Mariam Apa's smile was so overwhelming that whole minutes went by before my father realized that Mariam Apa hadn't said a word.

Rehana Apa pulled a pen out of her handbag and started writing numbers on a leaf. ‘Seven digits?' she said. ‘Really truly?'

‘Now who's diffusing the suspense?'

Aba stopped Ami's monologue with a tap on her shoulder and said, ‘We just received this letter –' he waved in the direction of the room where the letter lay – ‘and were very sorry to hear about your father. What happened?'

Mariam Apa looked heavenward and raised her hands and shoulders in a gesture of resignation to a higher will.

‘Well, yes, of course there's that,' Aba said. ‘But can you be more specific?'

Mariam Apa tapped her heart.

Ami reached over, grabbed Mariam Apa's hand. ‘Can you speak?'

Mariam Apa nodded.

‘Oh,' said Ami. ‘Well … well … oh. I suppose I should show you your room. Of course you're staying; the issue doesn't arise of not. We only found out so the bed hasn't been made up but it's a lovely room, my favourite in the house actually. I prefer it to our room but Nasser doesn't like it because of some reason he's never seen fit to share with me. But I know you will …'

That's when Masood walked in. He had come to work for my parents a few months earlier, and had been hailed by all who had sampled his cooking as ‘a cook to be hired but never fired'.

‘Begum Sahib,' he addressed Ami in Urdu. ‘What should I make for dinner tonight?'

Before Ami could answer, Mariam Apa said,
‘Aloo ka bhurta, achaar gosht, pulao, masoor ki daal, kachoomar.'

And my mother was so stunned that Mariam Apa had ordered her favourite meal that she went into labour.

Mariam Apa held her hand throughout the birth, while Aba sat in the waiting room practising the self-hypnosis exercises the gynaecologist had taught Ami to help ease the rigours of childbirth. Between contractions Ami revealed that she and Aba had been planning to name their child Mariam, if she was a girl, but there couldn't be two Mariams in the house. Fortunately they had (given the Dard-e-Dil history) considered the possibility of twins, so there was a second name: Aliya.

‘Don't tell me that for this reason you think you qualify. As not-quite-twins,' Rehana Apa snorted.

Mariam and Aliya were supposed to be twins. And Mariam Apa and I entered a world, not
the
world I'll admit, but a world – one inhabited by my parents and Dadi and Masood and Samia and Sameer and all the rest of them – on the same day. But that's not all. Everyone I know grew more garrulous than normal around Mariam Apa, except for me. I've heard that twins communicate in the womb before tongue and throat and larynx form, so they know how to speak to each other without speech.

Am I saying Mariam Apa was in Ami's womb with me?

Not quite.

I fell asleep under the tree and woke up in the spare room of the Palmer House flat, with memories of a dream which involved Rehana Apa pulling out a mobile phone from her bag, Dadi asking me about the quality of Baji's teaset, me lifting myself off the ground and stumbling into a cab with the help of Samia, and Ami saying, ‘But of course you're twins; did I forget to tell you?'

The scent of Samia's perfume and a set of door keys were gone when the eddying noises in my stomach finally convinced me to get out of bed, but in their place was a still-hot
haandi
of chicken
karhai
on the stove and a note instructing me to ‘add whole green chillis and
pudina
– or is it
dhaniya?
That green thing, you know what I mean – and cook on medium heat for two minutes'. A spoon covered in spices and the juice of cooked chicken lay next to the
haandi,
but I ignored it and reached for a clean spoon to stir in the chillis and coriander. Masood always used to say that two hands on one spoon spoilt the flavour of a dish. I watched the clock for the two minutes to be up. ('How much time?' I heard Masood's voice, incredulous. ‘How can I tell you how much time it'll take? When the spices and the meat
dissolve the boundaries between them and flavours seep, one into the other, then it is time.' The day he said that I added new words to his English vocabulary so that he could laugh at, ‘For the true chef, thyme is only a herb.' English is the language of advancement in Karachi, and I taught Masood as much as was necessary to enable him to laugh at my jokes.)

The chicken was good, but it wasn't spiritual.

Someone was calling my name. I looked out of the window into the parking lot, and it was him. Khaleel. Cal Butt from Athol, Mass. My knees buckled absurdly, and I pretended to be leaning into the sink to cover that moment of unsophistication. Although how sophisticated can you look while leaning over a pile of dirty dishes? I pulled a teacup out of the sink and waved it at him. Thumb hooked into the pocket of his jeans, sneakers replaced by brown leather boots, fingers twirling a pair of shades, he looked like an American cliché. I said to myself, ‘I'd like to be clichéd by him.'

‘Hey!' he called out. ‘These are for you.' He held up a bunch of flower stems.

‘Am I being stalked?'

He laughed. ‘I promised myself if you didn't get it, I'd leave.' His expression changed to embarrassment. ‘I can still leave. I don't mean it's my decision to make.'

‘Hang on.' I grabbed the spare keys and ran down the stairs until I came to the final bend leading to the lobby with its glass doors, and then I ambled. ‘How?' I said, when I was through the doors.

‘Your luggage tag. From the airport. I remembered the address on it because I have a friend who used to live in that building.' He pointed across the street. Adam's arm
reaching towards God. When I first stood in the Sistine Chapel I wondered if Michelangelo was aware of his blasphemy. Who even noticed God when naked Adam lolled so sensually?

Khaleel dropped his arm. ‘Look, I'm sorry. This is stupid. It's just that I was thinking of you and then you were there.'

‘And then I wasn't.'

‘Just after I mentioned where my family lives.'

‘What? No, no. Samia just realized it was our stop, that's all. She's a little scatty sometimes.' If I had said a UFO had landed behind the Ritz and its occupants had activated Samia's homing beacon, I might have pulled it off. I can tell stories, but I can't lie particularly well. Samia, scatty!

‘Did you say “catty”?' He grinned and leant back against a car, with arms folded. The I'm-cool-enough-to-handle-anything pose. ‘So what's so terrible about Liaquatabad that you had to run away at the first mention?'

‘Karachi's huge. Really. What was sea and swamp and wasteland not so long ago is now tarmac and concrete and, well, another kind of wasteland.'

‘Tell me about April's cruelty,' he said. ‘Or answer my question.'

It didn't surprise me that he knew his Eliot. On the plane he'd had a copy of John Ashbery's
Selected Poems.
‘I've never been to Liaquatabad. But it's on that side of Karachi.'

‘Which side?'

‘That.'

‘Are you planning to elaborate?'

‘I'm feeling minimalist.' He raised his eyebrows at me, and I thought he was going to walk off. So I said, ‘Don't tell me you don't know about the great class divide of Pakistan.'

‘Oh. It's like that, is it?' He scuffed the toe of one shoe
against the heel of the other. ‘So I'm the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.' Before I could quite decide how to respond to that he said, ‘I had a hard enough time growing up in the States knowing the other kids were laughing behind my back at my parents' accents, their clothes, their whole foreign baggage. The way I dealt with that was by telling those kids to either lay off or stop pretending they were my friends. Most chose the first option. But what I'm saying is, I decided pretty early on that I'd rather risk unpopularity at school than feel embarrassed at home. So don't expect me to start getting defensive about my family now just because …' He put his hand to his scalp. ‘Aaah, hell. Can we go somewhere? And talk?'

Of course we could. But not upstairs; he didn't even suggest that, but followed me around the corner towards a café. When we came to a crossing his hand lightly touched my elbow, convincing me not to make a dash for it between one speeding bus and the next. At the café we sat down at an outdoor table. I ordered coffee; he asked for tea.

‘Tell me about Karachi.'

I dipped a lump of sugar into my coffee and watched it change colour. He hadn't said, ‘What's Karachi like?' as so many people did, as though they thought I could answer that question with a single, simple analogy. My stock answer was, ‘Like a chicken.'

But to Khaleel I talked of June, July and August, the three months that were all I had known of Karachi during my college years. The spring semester always ended by the middle of May, but I'd spend a month or so with college friends, or cousins in New York, having instructed my travel agent to book my flight home for 16 June or as soon
thereafter as possible, by which point Dadi was sure to have departed for Paris, where she spent three months every year with her younger son, Ali, always making a point of being there for his birthday on 16 June.

‘But summer in Paris is horrible,' Khaleel said. ‘Hot, and still. All the Parisians leave for the countryside.'

‘Dadi hates the monsoons. If they come early, she leaves early.'

‘Why?'

‘I've never asked.' I had my suspicions though. In avoiding the monsoons Dadi was avoiding memories of her youth in Dard-e-Dil. Dadi's sister, Meher, had once told me that Dadi's favourite festival of the year when they were children was the festival that marked the first of the rains. In the Dard-e-Dil palace grounds lengths of silken cord were looped around the boughs of trees and held coloured planks of wood a few feet off the ground. The young girls of the family would rush out, bangles clinking together, and would sing the monsoon songs as they swung higher and higher in the air. Beneath numerous tents great feasts were laid out, with special emphasis placed on mangoes. At the height of the mood of dizziness and gaiety the Nawab would produce a rain-shaped diamond from his pocket and bestow it on the girl who swung the highest without faltering in her singing. Dadi left Karachi before the monsoons so that she wouldn't remember all those girls she sang with and all the lustre of her early life.

‘But I thought the monsoons were unpredictable,' Khaleel said. ‘Don't they sometimes start early, sometimes start not at all?'

‘Aren't you the expert on global weather conditions? Karachi monsoons, French summers …'

‘I'm French.'

‘Shut up.'

‘No, really. My parents are professors. Physics. Both of them. And bitten by the travel bug. So they get teaching jobs all over the place. And when we were in France I got citizenship. They didn't want me to be a US citizen because it was the seventies, Vietnam and all that, and they had visions of me growing up and being drafted to fight in some war they considered morally repugnant. Which pretty much covers all wars.'