VI

That suggestion of winter which had coursed past me on the roof of Shehnaz Saeed’s house was nowhere in evidence when I drove out of her gate. Heat rose off the streets, creating mirages—thin, shimmering bands of water. The mind would have to be fevered to believe they were anything other than an illusion—in this heat any puddle would evaporate in seconds, or act as beacon for the thirsty pye-dogs who roamed the streets.

After my mother disappeared I used to see her everywhere—not just in the form of other women but in empty spaces, too. She seemed lodged, like a tear, in the corner of my eye, evaporating in the instant I turned to look at her. I knew what hallucinations were, I knew what mirages brought on by psychological aberrations were, but somehow that seemed too prosaic—too predictable—to explain away my imagined seeing, even when I realized it was entirely imagined. Easier to think in terms of Orpheus and Eurydice—every time I turned to check that it was really her, I lost her. But with that explanation I was attempting to step into a story that wasn’t mine. It was a story that fascinated my mother, but even when she first told it to me, I heard her unasked question, ‘Would my Poet journey to Hades in search of me?’ and though I had wanted to reply, ‘I would, Mama,’ I knew that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. So when she placed herself in that borderland between seeing and imagining, I knew I would have to find something other than a Greek myth in which I didn’t belong to explain her away. Quite by chance, I found mention of ‘the Fata Morgana’ in some piece of writing by Conrad, and when I looked it up and discovered it was ‘a mirage of the looming effect’ I knew I had finally found a name by which I could refer to those images of my mother. I still saw her continuously, but I now knew it wasn’t her, just a Fata Morgana, and I would no more think to turn and look closer than I would think to worry about splashing a passer-by when I drove through the mirage of water.

I stopped at a red light and looked out of the car window at a grey sparrow swooping down on to the footprinted dust between the car and a boundary wall sprayed with political graffiti. As a child I used to believe the sparrow itself was layered with dust, and that if I ever got close enough to one to stroke its feathers with my thumb I’d erase the dust to reveal the colours—emerald-green, electric-blue, pomegranate-red—that were the bird’s natural inheritance. My thumb still twitched, now and then, at the sight of a sparrow.

Someone rapped on the passenger-side window. I looked up and there was a man on a motorbike gesturing towards the traffic light, which turned from green back to red almost as soon as I looked up at it. The man on the motorbike gave me a look which said ‘Women drivers’ as he sped through the intersection, swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic.

I was left waiting for the light to change again. I reached into my handbag for a mint, and my hand touched my mobile phone. I wished I could call Rabia, or Beema, just to talk about the strangeness of Ed, the charm of Shehnaz Saeed. But Rabia was at the inauguration of yet another women’s shelter her NGO had set up, and Beema would be taking her afternoon nap before heading back to the hospital to relieve her sister at their mother’s bedside. My father—I could call my father. Since he and Beema had left Karachi, she had been the conduit of information between him and me, telling me how much he was enjoying his leave from the bank, telling him about my bouts of cooking and my new-found fascination with plants. It wasn’t that he and I avoided speaking to each other, just that it was easier for both of us to speak to Beema and Rabia. But it would be a comfort now to hear his soft voice, its thoughtful quality equally in evidence if we talked about the phenomenon of mirages, the current form of the Pakistan cricket team or the significance of isotope decay in the dating of fossils.

I pulled over to the side of the road and dialled his number. He sounded glad to hear my voice, but our conversation merely skated from small talk to small talk—hospital food, STD coffee, my forward-leaning bookshelf, the light fixtures in his bedroom. Almost from the very start of our conversation I knew I wouldn’t talk to him of Ed and Shehnaz Saeed. Unconventional mothers and their children—that was a subject that made Dad choke on his attempt to be honest without sounding chauvinistic. Which I knew he wasn’t—particularly. Certainly Rabia and I had no cause to complain about his attitudes towards women. He was more than proud of Rabia’s NGO work, and had never done anything other than champion my right to be single, even at the grand old age of thirty-one. But if a woman was a mother, Dad was simply unable to view her life in any way except as it might relate to the well-being of her child.

‘And what about fathers?’ I had challenged him once. ‘Why are they allowed to be irresponsible?’

‘It’s not that we’re allowed. It’s just that we’re less significant, and so less capable of doing damage,’ he had replied, turning away before the sentence was finished.

When he’d exhausted the subject of light fixtures I said I had to go, and hung up. But more than before, I felt the need to call someone and talk, just talk. I scrolled down the names in my mobile phone, considered calling my brother-in-law, but knew he would be entirely uncommunicative during the middle of his work day. I put down the phone, ran my fingers over the steering wheel and, for a moment, had a memory—no, not a memory, a reliving—of sitting behind the wheel and learning to drive at the age of fourteen. I needed to speak to a friend, simple as that—and not just one of my ex-colleagues from teaching or human resources or the cricket magazine, who served so well as dinner or beach companions. A friend who had known me long enough to know me, that was what I needed. A childhood friend. Someone who had changed gears while I held the wheel and pressed the clutch because doing all three things at the same time had seemed a task too complicated even to attempt.

I shifted gears from neutral to first. A few months after my mother’s disappearance, soon after I had stopped my blinding search for clues and conspiracies and waited, instead, simply for her to call or return, my closest schoolfriends had come over to my house, sat me down and said it was time to accept facts. They weren’t going to collude in my delusions any more, they said, it was too painful for them and too harmful for me. Better to face that she’s not coming back, and look, here are our shoulders. Cry on them.

It was their mothers’ voices speaking through them, I knew. All those mothers in whose houses I had done so much of my growing up; those mothers who, even more than their children, had wrapped such a tight, protective circle around me when my mother disappeared that I had hardly been able to breathe in their presences. I stood up in front of all my friends and, one by one, reeled off a litany of complaints about those mothers. The mother who tried too hard. The mother who stifled her children. The mother who was holier-than-thou. The mother with her absurdly bleached hair. And finally I turned to the closest of my friends, the one whose mother had been most like an aunt to me and, unable to come up with any complaint about or accusation against that sweetest of women, I said, ‘And your mother with her arranged marriage. She’d hardly even met your father before the wedding. That means she did it with a stranger. Like a prostitute.’

I knew exactly what I was doing. Mothers were sacred in all our lives, and even while our faith in their worthiness as objects of veneration might falter, it was not something we would ever dream of saying in public. To complain about your own mother was taboo; to insult someone else’s mother was unthinkable. And so, my friends turned and left my room. The following day, in school, my closest friend walked past me in the schoolyard, alone, three times, giving me all the opportunity I needed to call out an apology. But I didn’t, and we hadn’t spoken since.

In the weeks after my betrayal of my friends, I kept waiting for the moment when one of them, or more, would reveal to the world the reasons for their refusal to associate with me, and then, I knew, I would be shunned by everyone in the tiny circles in which I conducted most of my life. But that moment never came, and I knew their silence was a final mark of friendship which all of them handed to me, across that line which now separated us, before retreating from my life.

I looked up to see the traffic light changing from green to red again and I slammed on the accelerator, almost colliding with a bus which had replica nuclear missiles attached to its roof at jaunty angles.

There was one moment when I could have changed course and found my way back to those friends—and their mothers. It was the end of my first year at university in London—my mother had been gone two years by then, and my newly found method of coping with her absence was excess, which meant drugs, drink, men, or any combination of the above. That lasted most of the university year until Beema and fifteen-year-old Rabia arrived in London at the beginning of Rabia’s summer holidays and refused to say anything disapproving at all for two weeks; the weight of their forbearance finally became too much for me and I broke down in tears and promised a reformation of character. The first step was finding a way to pass my exams—which I did, after weeks of dedicated studying which surprised me with the exhilaration it brought to my life. One of my most vivid memories of that year is of walking through Bloomsbury in the rain, after my last exam, repeating one phrase over and over: for peace comes dropping slow. The rain seemed to change its tempo as I whispered those words, each drop hesitating in its arrow-straight descent from sky to my outstretched palm. I, too, am of the sky, I said aloud. My mother named me.

I looked across the street then, and saw my former best friend sitting at one end of a long table in a pub, with a group of students celebrating the end of the exams. I had been avoiding her through the year, but right then if she had turned around and there had been anything at all except indifference in her eyes I would have broken down in tears, and told her of every fear that had made me so cruel. But she didn’t turn, and the rain became a torrent, so I returned to halls and ate baked beans out of a can. It was all so obviously pathetic that I told myself I’d laugh about it one day.

‘Still waiting for the day,’ I said, driving past a police checkpoint that was absurdly blocking an entire lane of a busy road, without bothering to see if a policeman was flagging me down.

Who would I be now if she had stayed? How did I become this person, this quiz show researcher without real friends? I was the girl who could be anything—that’s what my teachers used to say, and I believed them. I just never realized that ‘anything’ could include this.

What have I done to my life, Mama, in your name?

There was a slight tremor running along the back of my hand. It would be so easy to drift into the utter self-absorption of misery.

Absorption. Something or the other absorbs neutrons and then fission occurs, after which...

Aasmaani! There was my mother’s voice. Are you thinking of nuclear weapons as the more cheerful alternative to thinking about me?

No one could ever make me laugh in more unexpected moments. Things I—and everyone else I knew—might find funny, she’d often deem outrageous, such as when Ronald Reagan insisted on referring to Pakistan’s military-picked Prime Minister, Junejo, as Huneho during the latter’s state visit to the US. ‘Cowboys running the world, and treating us like vassals whose names aren’t even worthy of learning to pronounce’, she fumed, and refused to see the joke. But on another occasion, a typo in a warrant for her arrest reduced her to tears of laughter. ‘Aasmaani, look,’ she said, as I clung on to her arm, terrified by the policeman at her doorstep. She handed me the warrant. ‘I stand accused of having “beached the law”.’ I laughed all the way to the police van with her, entirely caught up in picturing the law as a giant whale and my mother as Jonah, the magnetism of her personality throwing off the compass that allowed the whale to navigate away from shore.

I was still thinking about that when I parked the car in my designated spot outside the STD office and got out, ducking my head in greeting at a group of co-workers who were standing around their cars. The ducked head, if executed properly, serves as polite salutation carrying with it the barest suggestion that you’re really just nodding to yourself over some remembered incident and are not making overtures of friendship. It keeps both offence and familiarity at bay.

As the police van had driven away with my mother inside, and it occurred to me to be frightened, the Poet appeared from next door; when I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Run, look up “breach” in the dictionary.’

So I did, and beneath ‘to fail to obey or preserve something, for example, the law or a trust’ I found ‘to leap above the surface of the water (refers to whales)’. That was all the proof I needed that there was order in the world, and that—this followed naturally—my mother would come back soon. She did, that evening. All they wanted was to keep her locked up during a protest rally.

You had your moments, Mama, I’ll give you that. In those—what was it?—ten years out of the first seventeen of my life when you weren’t absent in one way or the other, you had your moments.

I pushed open the front door to the studio and walked in. On the ground floor, life was as chaotic as usual, with people calling out to one another through open office doors, and a steady stream of employees walking from kitchenette to photocopier to downstairs studio to upstairs offices. I stopped next to a group of men and women of mixed ages standing under the television mounted above our heads, watching STD’s repeat broadcast of its mid-morning music video programme.

‘But why is she sitting under an umbrella at the beach like it’s the French Riviera instead of Karachi?’ one said. ‘Put her on an old shawl surrounded by kinoo peels, that’s more like it.’

‘You just go watch your MTV if all you can do with the local stuff is complain.’

‘Oh, baba, I’m saying the local stuff should try less harder to be like MTV.’

‘O-ay, listen. You really planning to boycott American goods when they attack Iraq?’

‘Hanh, well, we have to feel like we’re doing something, right?’

‘OK, but does that mean boycotting movies and music as well? I mean, what if they attack before the new Lord of the Rings?’

‘No, no, no problem. We get that on pirated videos and DVDs. So when you buy those you’re just helping local industry. Same with music. And computer software.’

‘Great, great.’

‘Yeah, great, but there’s one problem remaining. Petrol pumps. Between work, home, supermarket, sabziwallah, and my parents’ house, there’s only Shell and Caltex pumps. What do I do about that?’

A moment of silence. ‘Well ... you have to be realistic, after all. You need the car. The car needs petrol. What to do?’

‘I’ll tell you what to do. You want to piss off the Americans, there’s only one thing to do. Vote in the fundos. I swear next election, I’m doing that. Last time I was tempted, next time I will, for sure.’

‘You just shut up and go sit in your corner. You vote in the fundos, they’ll do nothing about the petrol pumps, and just ban all your precious music videos and put us women in burkhas.’

‘And anyway, the Americans like it these days if you piss them off. You piss them off, they bomb you.’

‘Seriously! But listen, yaar, you think the mullahs are going to join this government?’

‘God forbid. If they do, who knows what killjoy laws they’ll try and pass. Remember in the eighties how boring life got with all that pretend-Islamization?’

Boring? What I wouldn’t have given for some boredom in the 1980s. It was all prison and protest and exile and upheaval around me. Strange, how I was almost nostalgic for that. The battle-lines were so clearly drawn then with the military and the religious groups firmly allied, neatly bundling together all that the progressive democratic forces fought against. Now it was all in disarray, the religious right talking democracy better than anyone else and insisting, unwaveringly (admirably, I would say, if I didn’t recall their political track record), on the removal of the military from power while all the other political parties tiptoed around the matter or see-sawed back and forth; and, on the other side of the equation, the President-General who had been the first head of state in my lifetime to talk unequivocally against extremism was tripping over his own feet in an attempt to create a democratic façade for a government in which the military remained the final authority and the only veto power. All those sacrifices, all those battles—and this is what we had come to. It wasn’t a tragic waste—those lives, that passion; it wasn’t tragic, just farcical.

I made my way up the stairs—leaving the groups below to argue about whether Pakistan’s nuclear capability made America more or less likely to attack—and almost collided with Ed, on his way down.

We both moved away from each other, further than was necessary—him up two steps, and me down two steps—so the distance between us didn’t imply the civility of two people making room for the other to pass but instead implied a mutual feeling of contamination.

The only way past this moment was brazenness, so I took two steps in one stride—at the exact moment that he came to the same decision—and then we really did collide, his foot stepping on mine, my forehead bumping against his nose.

We both cried out, extricated ourselves from the tangle of our bodies, and sat down, side by side, to nurse our injuries. And then, looking sideways at each other—him with a hand over his nose, me with my palm pressing down on my foot—we laughed.

Ed leaned sideways on his elbow and looked at me appraisingly. ‘You’re impossible to figure out, aren’t you?’ That struck me as particularly funny, coming from him. ‘I just spoke to my mother. She said the gift she sent you was that strange nonsensical bit of writing she’d received some weeks ago. Why did you tell me she sent you calligraphy? I thought you meant she’d lifted her Sadequain painting off the wall and had it delivered to you.’

When he put it that way, I couldn’t imagine why I’d said such a thing. I fanned my fingers in front of me, hoping that would convey some sort of adequately inadequate response. ‘You did seem rather upset about it.’ I was embarrassed to remember that it had crossed my mind at some point during the morning that his response had been an admission of complicity—in what, I hadn’t worked out. That search for conspiracies hadn’t entirely died.

‘I have to admit I was a little concerned,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re quite lovely despite all your considerable strangeness, but Sadequain is Sadequain. I’ve loved that bit of calligraphy hanging in my mother’s bedroom since I was a child.’

Lovely. When was the last time it had occurred to anyone to think of me as lovely?

I looked at him, and that thing happened between us. That fizz. Something electric. Our bodies reduced to single nerve cells and the space between us a synapse, pulsing an impulse back and forth.

It doesn’t mean anything, ultimately—I’ve had some of the most unsatisfying encounters of my life with men in whom I’ve mistaken the fizz for potential of one sort or the other. And I’ve had entirely satiating flings with men who’ve made me feel every pleasurable physical sensation—except the fizz. Thus, I know, it doesn’t mean anything. But in the moment you feel it, you forget that.

So who knows what would have happened right then with Ed and me, both our offices just steps away, if Kiran Hilal hadn’t rounded into view with her team behind her, and said, Aasmaani, there you are. The meeting’s in the conference room. What are you doing just sitting there?’

We stood up, and as Ed moved aside to let Kiran pass through, it was gone. The fizz—it had just disappeared, leaving me feeling as though I had indulged in someone else’s fantasy, entirely in opposition to my own tastes. I didn’t even look at him, or say anything in farewell, as I followed Kiran up the stairs and along the corridor to the conference room.

‘We’ve just got a couple of things to wrap up from our previous meeting before we get to you,’ she said, opening the door to the conference room. The room had the twin comforts of an air-conditioner and leather chairs but managed to retain STD’s general air of dishevelment thanks to the scratched surface of the long table which dominated the room and the faded posters on the walls of temples and beaches and city skylines, all advertising an airline which had been out of business for years.

The Boond team—two men and two women in addition to Kiran—settled round the table and launched instantly into a discussion about fine-tuning a particular storyline after seeing the unexpected nuance brought to it by one of the actors before filming had stopped.

As the chatter around me dissolved from words into sound, I ran through the cast list in my head and kept myself entertained inventing monikers for all the actors who were involved in the drama.

In addition to Shehnaz Saeed (enough of a star that her name was a moniker unto itself), there was The Mistress’s Issue (daughter of the ‘hand-job’ lady), Once-Leading, Now-Trailing Man (who had catapulated to fame when he had played Macbeth to Shehnaz Saeed’s Lady), Hero Number Zero (a former cricketer who played brilliantly in a single one-day tournament, was reported for suspect bowling action, and found himself in need of a new career at twenty-one), God of Small Things (a remarkable, beautiful actor endowed with all that is pleasing in a man except—if persistent rumour was to be believed—for one tiny, very, very, tragically, tiny detail), Battle-Axe and Couple Who’ll Get Written Out Soon.

But when I was done with the naming, the chatter about reshaping Hero Number Zero’s role still continued around me, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t help but think back to that cryptic note Shehnaz Saeed had received, and those even more cryptic encrypted lines. Even presuming the lines had been written years ago, by either my mother or the Poet attempting some elaborate script, why? And who had possession of it, and why had he—or she—sent it to Shehnaz Saeed? And now that she was acting again, would more encrypted pages follow?

None of it made any more sense than any of the senselessness I’d latched on to at various points over the years.

My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.

Aasmaani, put it from your mind.

The Minions came again today.

Aasmaani, stop it!

Ffhaffon, hiku ni!

Stop!

Hiku!

I closed my eyes and started to run through the multiplication tables, starting with multiples of thirteen, just to keep things interesting. Somewhere in the multiples of sixteen I lost my way, but even though I realized that sixteen times seven could not be one hundred and twenty I kept going— sixteen eights are one thirty-six, sixteen nines are one fifty-two—until Kiran turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t you tell everyone your idea for Shehnaz’s entrance, Aasmaani?’

So I did. When I finished there was neither the approbation for which I had hoped, nor the derision which I had feared—who was I to walk in with no idea of plot and suggest an opening that would overturn so much the people in this room had worked to create?—but instead a slight pause and then a cascade of questions.

‘But where has she been all these years?’

‘And why is she coming back now?’

‘And what’s she like? I mean, the ex-wife as written for Bougainvillea was all about “must protect my daughter” and this one clearly is not.’

‘Yeah, this is my big problem with it. We want her to be a sympathetic character, right, for later if that black magic internet story is going to stay the way it is, which I’ll admit I’m willing to fight for, because that’s my baby. But now suddenly we’ve got this woman who just left her young daughter and took off. How are we going to make her anything but a monster? Ow! What?’

The woman next to the man who’d been speaking tried to lean her head in my direction with some subtlety.

‘OK, how’s this,’ said the second man in the room, raising his bony fingers for attention. ‘The mother left because of her daughter. She left because something happens which makes it necessary for her to leave, and stay away, in order to protect her daughter. Except, of course, the daughter doesn’t know this.’

The man willing to fight for the internet black magic story looked sceptical, but another woman—one of the twenty-somethings I’d seen on my first day—was nodding her head vigorously. ‘So now that the daughter is a little bit grown up, she’s decided to find out what happened to her mother. And somehow her mother comes to know of this, and that’s why she returns. Because now the only way for her to protect the daughter is by returning and keeping her daughter from uncovering the secret.’

‘Isn’t this getting a little too cloak and dagger?’

‘Oh, and black magic on the internet is so down-to-earth.’

Kiran Hilal raised her hands, and everyone fell silent. ‘What’s the secret?’ she asked.

What’s the secret? What could be the secret? What could keep her away for so long?

Bony Fingers shook his head. I looked down at the scratched wood of the table.

‘OK,’ Kiran said. ‘Never mind. I like that idea. We can work it in with either the industrialist slash criminal world story, or the black magic story. And it might just save the daughter from the Hole of Abject Boredom we’ve been digging for her.’ She smiled at me in a way that meant thank you, you can go now.

The room was silent as I stood up and made my way out, but just as I closed the door behind me—in the instant before the latch actually clicked—I heard someone in the room exaggeratedly release a breath.

There was something unbearable about appearing transparent to people who thought up story lines about black magic on the internet. Get yourself an on-line exorcism, go! I wanted to say to them through the closed door, but that just sounded silly, so I turned towards my office instead. My footsteps echoed in the quiet hallway. Ed stuck his head out of his own office and called out my name.

‘Aasmaani, listen!’ He started to make his way down the corridor towards me. He was walking like a man who would rather be running, but is trying to affect casualness. It made him seem insincere.

‘Hi,’ he said, coming to a stop as both of us reached my office door at the same time. He put his hand up to the door-handle and started fidgeting with it. It may have been a sign of nerves—what was he about to propose that was making him nervous?—but it also effectively barred me from entering my own office without physically pushing past him. ‘I just wondered. After work. How about getting a real cup of coffee? With me. I mean, us. Both. Going for coffee. Wait. Let’s start again. Aasmaani, would you care to accompany me to Café Aylanto for a coffee?’

I had thought he couldn’t appear boyish. I was wrong. Here he was, an awkward teenager in a man’s body, with nothing even remotely appealing about him.

‘I think it would be best to just keep things professional, Ed.’

‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ he said, moving a little bit closer.

‘Lizards. Snakes. Many sentences which start with the word “actually”.’

‘Come on, Aasmaani. No games, no masks. Just you and me and two cups of coffee. Would that be so terrible?’

‘Actually, yes. Now, could you move your hand? I have work to do.’

His hand lifted abruptly off the door-handle, and he turned on his heels and strode away. I pushed open the door, switched on the fan, and sat down at my computer to work on quiz show questions.

 

What’s the secret which made the mother leave?

a) a really bad nose job which can’t be fixed
b) she exchanged her legs for a scaled tail and went to live with her merman beneath the sea
c) she died. Someone who looks like her took her place, and finally grew sick of the deception
d) she doesn’t love her daughter any more

 

Answer:

 

The cursor blinked at me with steady patience, but I just sat there, unutterably weary, with no strength in my fingers even to press down on any one of the keys they were resting on. I sat there, watching the vertical line appear and disappear on the screen until time swallowed itself up in that repetitive motion and there was nothing in my mind but darkness.