I got taken away from my mother, Katherine told me over the phone.
You’re making that up.
I’m not.
Katherine liked to phone me from Hamilton late at night after her mother got sick.
She said, My mother wasn’t married when she got pregnant and they put her in a reformatory for being incorrigible. When I was a baby they took me away.
How did she get you back?
She had to fight for me. Kids get taken away and survive. There’s a jazz fan in New York everyone calls Baroness. Her real name’s Nica Rothschild and she takes care of Monk, drives him around Harlem in her big limousine. She had to give up her five children to be a jazz fan. At least you got Lai back.
Lailuma was withdrawn, especially around Ali. Our lively daughter stayed in her room, used her little-girl-Abbu voice to please him. Her surfaces became reserved and she covered herself with large sweaters that I knew she took off at school. She no longer lingered in the kitchen to talk when she came home in the afternoons. She answered Ali’s questions without looking at him and he moved struttingly. Living without forgiveness made me feel empty. Ali said to me, She is respectful now. You would never have taught her that.
I loved the smell of her hair and the feel of her firm arms and back and my cheek briefly on her soft face when she let me hug her. But mostly she avoided me, stepped away before I could touch her. Her eyes accused, You let him.
Katherine said, Thirteen was when I started to shake my fist at the universe. It is normal.
I remembered thirteen.
Then Katherine said, Mahsa, give her a way to escape if she needs it.
I was ashamed to talk about it. I asked, Want to hear what I’m playing?
She answered, Yes, I always do.
But the next day I went to my bank and I came home and gave Lailuma a thin envelope with a lot of money in it from my old student account, and Katherine’s telephone number. I said, Hide this well. Keep it with you. In case. Memorize Katherine’s number. You may never need it, but the children belong to the father.
Lailuma’s eyes cracked like a china teacup. She asked, What would I do, Ma?
I pressed the envelope into her hand and said, It would depend on what happens. You will know what to do. I hope you do not have to.
Some women leave their husbands and children. In the dark, doubting hours I tried to imagine how it would be, the next morning, the next week, a decade later. I imagined pain waning in time. I imagined Lailuma and Asif’s story: Our mother left us.
This could not be me. I could not live cut off from my children.
I put my troubles into a small box and forced myself to practise. My concentration became more and more pure. Month after month became a year, and then the next, my only precious life. I taught Lailuma verses of the Quran to please Ali and I said to her, Work hard, try for a scholarship, get your own money.
I watched the little frown-wrinkle like Ammi-jaan’s deepen between her eyes.
Things were unalterably changed between us. I stayed home. I played. It was the only thing left to me. One day Lailuma came out of her room when I was practising and said, Mor, I can’t concentrate with all that noise. I thought you wanted me to study.
Noise.
Finally I called Jean St. John, said, Jean, I’m dying.
Mahsa, you are coming to your senses. De quoi tu meurs?
You’re lucky to have nothing to do but play. I hate administration. All I do is take care of broken contracts and students with broken fingers and pianos with broken strings.
I laughed.
He said, Ne ris pas! I have a Japanese student whose father has donated a great deal of money to us. He wants her to play jazz and not one of my instructors can do anything with her.
Let me give her a master class at my house in the mornings. I will pick up my pay in your office. Don’t mail it.
Jean said, Merde! The mountain must come to Mahsa. Then he laughed and said, Tu me manques. I’ll bring her tomorrow. Get yourself out, Mahsa, come play at Biddle’s with me.
He never stopped believing in me.
To live, you must risk calamity. Abandon old ways to create something new. Love the life under the visible life. When Lailuma forgot that she was angry I saw in her grey eyes Mor’s lively, laughing nature. I sometimes thought she smelled like Mor. I loved her firm, small breasts and her dark hair. I started to write music telling the story of Lailuma and Mor. I saw my mother’s crumpled shot body on the floor. I saw the rigid body of a grieving child. Why is honour worth more than a child’s love? All this I put in my piece and I called it “I Miss You, Mor.”
With each day, the phrases and chords and ideas came from the thing in me that most needed to speak. After weeks and weeks, I sent it to Katherine and she called me back and played it to me over the telephone.
She said, Mahsa, this is beautiful. Do you want my real opinion? Try a major chord in the third line. Contrast the darkness.
Then she said, I love this piece.
I am a strange Karachiite to love winter as I do. Match came through the door, shaking snow from her boots and pulling off thick mitts and hat and unwinding her scarf. She wore her straight hair pulled back in a spiky ponytail. She had no ear for jazz. She loved Bach and she could not bring herself to improvise. She said, Who can improve on Bach? She wore short schoolgirl skirts and carried pink and black accessories and purses decorated with cartoons.
She said, My father is disappointed. He wants me to play like Toshiko Akiyoshi.
I said, I know all about people having dreams they inflict on others.
She said, You are the first genius I ever met.
Improvising is all about adding your own note, I told her, you can do it.
The next class she played a Bach fugue and when she came to the end she paused dramatically, added a single note, then lifted her hands from the keys and turned to look at me. She had her own wit. Jean called and said, I need tutors like you. Take some more students, but you need to come here.
So I found an easy solution. I went, every Wednesday. I told Ali I was volunteering at Lai’s school. I wore a niqab on the street so I would not be recognized and stuffed it in my bag on campus.
I even played with Jean. He brought his double bass into my practice room and kicked my student out. He said, My turn.
He left the door open and students gathered in the hall to hear us and they gossiped about whether we were lovers. Sometimes I got up off the piano bench and went to the doorway and riffed on the poetry of Kabir, Do not cut a goat’s throat … cut the throat of control while Jean played ostinato. They told one another that we had played together when I was a student and Professor St. John was still a young professor. They heard, in our music, the technique of decades mixed with youth’s eros. One day, Jean looked at his watch and said, I have to go. I’ve got a meeting. Mahsa, let’s run away, ditch it all. He shouted to the students in the hall, Go make your own music.
What a sad waste, my family pretending to be happy. I did not know where Asif went with his friends, or where Lailuma wore the red-heeled shoes she hid in her backpack.
Ali became unwell and they found a prostate cancer. During the time of his sickness when I was driving him to treatments and appointments I had to give up teaching again. He directed the office by telephone. I took him in to work for a few hours, waiting, reading magazines, and saw how his staff loved him and were loyal to him. He was charming, talking about hockey and asking after their families. I was reminded of the young man I met in Pakistan. On our drives home he used to tell me with satisfaction how successful he was.
Soon Asif will take over, he said. I’ve built a good business. One day when he was tired and ill he said, Mahsa, we made a good life.
Jean said, I can pick up all your students, except Match. You’ve got to see her through. You owe me that.
I taught her a few standards with simple chord patterns she could perform for her father. I pulled out my old Minimoog and we played around. She learned to add few more notes. One spring day near the end of term, I asked her if she had a boyfriend.
He is in Japan, she said. I’m going to marry him in the summer and move to Vancouver. The Richmond Symphony has hired me part-time. My father is coming and I will introduce you and tell him you are my best friend in Montreal.
Does he like your boyfriend?
Oh yes. I am lucky.
Why lucky?
It is difficult for a Japanese girl when the parents do not approve.
I said, That is true everywhere.
Oh no, she said. Here is free.
I said, If you love him, be with him soon. Now, you improvise and I’ll recite a poem:
Ask the lightning,
when it cracks through the nightcalm, if it saw my love.
It makes me think of him.
Then Match said, You play and I will say a poem:
In dreams, on dream paths
with no rest for my legs
I go often, to you
all this is less than a glimpse
in the waking world.
Jean came for her official exam. He stood looking out the window, listening to Match play. I showed him her transcriptions.
Jean asked, What is that?
Match said, It is the Abhogi raga scale.
Jean asked, Jazz?
I said, Jazz is whatever you are. Who said that, Match? Earl Hines.
What did Ellington say about Mary Lou Williams?
She was like soul on soul.
What did Mary Lou Williams say about men?
Working with men you get to think like a man. You become strong, but this does not mean you are not feminine.
Jean raised an eyebrow, asked me, Are you teaching music or politics?
I said, Match and I prepared an Arabic poem by Umm Ja far bint Ali. She improvised the accompaniment. Ready? My mother taught it to me.
Match put her hands on the keys and played a few notes and I began to recite:
Leave me alone, you are not my equal.
You are not a man of the world
nor a man of faith
yet you want to own me,
you mindless twit.
Match riffed a little to end it, and we were all laughing and Jean said, Match, I see you learned to improvise. You pass, good work.
Then he put on his coat and said, Mahsa, come play at Biddle’s tonight. You can recite that poem, I’ll be the mindless twit who plays with you. Ça fait des lunes qu’on s’est pas vu.
I can’t tonight, Jean. Ali’s not well.
Merde, Mahsa, for a few hours? We are making the next musique actuelle festival in Victoriaville. Dig out your gold sari and find a way to get yourself there. I’ll drive you if your worthless husband won’t. Oh, this letter came from Australia for you, to the faculty. I forgot about it. Anyway, it is not my fault, c’est toi qui as disparu dans la brume. Get yourself out.