IX

It had to be a hoax. It could only be a hoax.

Yes, a hoax. That’s what it was. The Poet was dead.

But even if it was a hoax—no ‘even if’, Aasmaani, it is a hoax—who could have written it?

I thought I was the only person left in the world who knew it, but it seems there are two of us now.

My mother had said that the day I told her I still knew the code. If she was right, the only person who could have forged that communication and pretended it came from the Poet was her. Could my mother have tried to become the Poet just as Laila became Qais? I could feel myself falling into the strangeness of that thought, began picturing my mother running into barbed wire, and then I pulled my mind sharply out. It was an absurd idea, both too far-fetched and too neatly symmetrical—life never imitated art in quite that way—to be anything but false.

But if only three people ever knew the code and I could rule out my mother and myself as writers of that piece, what conclusion was left?

Someone else had to have known the code.

And yet it sounded so much like him.

Too much like him. It sounded too much like him. No, that wasn’t true. There was a resignation to that tone which was never part of his voice.

So then it’s proof he didn’t write it.

But in sixteen years of course he would have changed.

He’s dead, Aasmaani.

Yes, of course he’s dead, but all I’m saying is...

Is what?

That it sounds so much like the way it would sound if it were true.

All right. List them. List the ways in which it sounds like him, and the ways it doesn’t, and in those lists you’ll find the flaw, the lie which will blow down that elaborate edifice.

And if I don’t find the flaw?

You’ll find it.

But if I don’t?

Make the lists!

All right. All right.

The ways it doesn’t sound like him: Resignation. Giving up poetry and my mother. (But he explains that. And the explanation makes sense. And he doesn’t really give her up, does he, because he’s writing to her.) Becoming an enthusiastic cook. The story of the courgette. There—that’s the lie. That isn’t how it happened.

See, I told you.

But...

What?

If it had happened that way, Mama would never have told me. We’re talking about the moment she left my father. How could she tell me such a line as ‘Domesticity or a dildo’? No, she would not tell me that. But I could imagine him—the Poet—I could imagine him saying it. There was that bawdy streak in him, and she loved it, though she pretended not to.

Keep going, then. Keep going with the list of all the ways it doesn’t sound like the Poet.

That’s it. That’s the list. He’s learnt resignation, he’s given up poetry and he’s become an enthusiastic cook.

So then, it isn’t him.

But I’ve done all those things in the last sixteen years, though it seemed inconceivable when I was fourteen and he was alive.

The other list, then. All the ways in which it sounds like him.

Everything. The voice. What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this? That was a sentence structure he liked to use. What will you become, you with the eclectic mind? He wrote that on a card for me, on my thirteenth birthday. You were silent, then more silent. That’s an echo of something he said when he described to me the first time he saw my mother. She was beautiful, then more beautiful.

But he’s a poet. Of course he has a distinctive voice. It only means it’s more easily imitated.

In Urdu. It’s easily imitated in Urdu, not in English. Urdu was his public language. And then, there are all those detáils. The peach allergy. The schoolmaster’s daughter and her hips. The grey shawl. Shakespeare. Yes, that particularly. I was there when he told my mother he would rather have written in English. That entire conversation. It was him and me and her. I was studying Julius Caesar for an exam. That’s what started it. Just weeks before he died. There was no one there but the three of us.

He doesn’t mention you. Doesn’t that prove something?

No. Nothing.

But one of them could have told someone else about the conversation.

Gue.

Yes. I thought of that. Gue.

He loved finding oddball definitions in dictionaries. One day he called me up from Colombia, sat by the phone for hours waiting for the trunk call to be put through, so he could say, ‘Look up “gue” in the dictionary, Aasmaani.’ He and I had the same dictionary; he gave it to me as a present precisely so we could play this game. Gue is ‘a kind of rude violin’. He loved that. He would love Frass. It is exactly the sort of thing he would love.

But it’s impossible.

It’s extremely improbable.

You can’t allow yourself to start believing this.

But no matter how hard I looked for a sign that would prove, incontrovertibly, that is wasn’t him, I couldn’t find it. Hours went by, in which I first read and reread the pages, then wrote them out in plain English, just to have some different way of approaching them. When that proved fruitless I tried to impose order: start with paragraph one, I told myself, reread it and consider what it means. Why would someone put down that information rather than any other? Find the mind behind the words. But the only mind I encountered was the Poet’s.

I heard Rabia come home. I wanted to call out to her, but then I imagined her look of panic if I told her what had happened, imagined her tearing up the pages, saying, someone’s just playing a sick game with you, I’m calling Beema and Dad. And if I showed anything but utter willingness to agree with her and accept it as a hoax then it would all return to the days just after Mama left when I used to ask operators to trace calls, and searched everywhere for clues and conspiracies. In those days, Dad, Beema and Rabia were constantly accumulating and weighing evidence about whether I was getting better or not, watching me at all times, suggesting we ‘talk’ about ‘feelings’, forcing me to lie more and more convincingly just so that they would stop watching, stop gathering evidence, think I was improving. Sometimes I managed to fool Dad and Rabia, but never Beema. But now Beema had a dying mother, and the least I could do for her was allow that to be the centre of her world.

I heard Rabia and Shakeel go out. They knocked on the connecting door first but I stayed utterly still and didn’t answer. It was only when they were gone that I wanted to take the letters to Rabia and tell her what they said.

Peaches. Broken fingers. My mother’s kisses. Hikmet. The Poet alive. Someone trying to convince me—no, Shehnaz Saeed—that the Poet was alive. Why Shehnaz? The words were not my mother’s. This wasn’t the sign from her I’d been waiting for. I was no closer. And yet, the Poet alive. Not true. Domesticity or a dildo. Larvae. Her unforgivable pregnancy. I couldn’t piece any of it together, couldn’t hold on to one thought long enough to produce a reaction before another thought barrelled around the corner and derailed the first one.

At length, I stopped trying. I lay on my sofa, looking at the sun setting fiercely into the sea, individual words and phrases littered round my head like crumbs that can never be reconstituted into a slice of sense.

There was a cobweb in a corner of the room, so delicate my breath could send each thread spiralling into the darkness. Prufrock. Intrinsicate. Left to right. Right to left. Frass, Shakespeare, the grey shawl, no mention of me.

A shadow of an explanation swerved into my mind, and then swerved away again. I almost had it. A way out of here. That missing piece which would reveal the face of the mystery. But I would never have that missing piece—that was the torture of this near-delirium of overwrought thinking. I would only repeat the leaps from one thought to the other, each leap pushing the words further away from meaning. But I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t do anything but leap.

Someone was ringing the door-bell. Door-bells don’t ring for ever. You just need the patience to wait them out. But this one kept on, an insistently merry ‘ding’ that soon grew frenzied, its cheer transmuting into increasing hysteria the longer I ignored it. Then the phone started ringing. At the same moment, my mobile beeped to announce a text message. The mobile was next to me. I raised a hand, pressed down on the keypad. Whose number was that? I pressed again and a message appeared: PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR. ED

Ed. Go away.

But then I sat up. He would prove it to me. I would read him the decrypted message, and he would tell me that it was impossible. He would tell me why it was impossible. My mind was too desperate for hope. I must be missing something, something obvious. But Ed would see it. Ed was smart. Ed would release me from this.

I was on my feet, running to the door. I opened it, and there he stood, holding up a brown bag moulded in the shape of a bottle, in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty.

‘I’ve brought a bottle of wine and an amusing anecdote as peace offerings.’

‘Wine here tastes like vinegar.’ I turned to walk back into the flat. There was a slight pause, and then I heard him following me in.

I headed towards the lounge, towards the encrypted pages, but Ed saw the kitchen, sauntered into it and came out with a corkscrew and two tumblers. I surprised myself by thinking that there was something in the way he entered my kitchen that I liked; not proprietary, not like so many men in Karachi who assumed they could walk into your home and act as though they owned it, but more familiar, as though we were past the need to be formal with each other. Then he held out a glass to me, and in that instant when it passed from his hand to mine I remembered the distaste with which he had thrown the envelope at my feet.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My mother sent the letter for you. None of it was my business. It’s just...’

‘Yes?’ When he was speaking, my mind could latch on to his words. Words which made sense, each letter slotting neatly into its place, all the letters together forming words and sentences with spaces between them, the spaces acting as transmitters of meaning and not as gulfs which kept each word, each sentence, separate and unbridgeable.

‘You were treating me like some no-account delivery boy. My ego objected.’

‘It wasn’t about you, Ed.’ I sat down on the sofa and glanced over to the papers on the low table.

‘That’s what my ego objected to.’ He looked into his wine glass and then up at me again. ‘You want to hear the amusing anecdote?’ The sunset had been swallowed up in darkness and now a single beam of light from an unknown source came through the balcony window and lit up the wine in his glass to ruby, everything else in the flat existing in muted shades at the midpoint of colour and shadow.

‘No. Do you want to know what was in the envelope your mother sent me?’

He had brought the rim of the glass up to his face again but the question made him forget to tilt the wine into his mouth, so he just stood there, his lower lip adhered to the glass, looking like a man who has seen a gorgon at a cocktail party.

Then he blinked, sipped, and put the glass down on the coffee table. ‘I know it was more ... what did you call it ... calligraphy, if that’s what you’re going to tell me. I opened the envelope and looked inside before I brought it to you.’

‘Your mother didn’t show it to you?’

For a moment he was silent as though trying to decide what exactly to tell me. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly pleased with my mother for giving you the first piece of calligraphy. So when that second one arrived during lunch she sneaked off without showing it to me and asked her driver to deliver it to you at STD. Fortunately the driver is a lazy bastard and decided just to wait until I was returning to the office and hand it over to me instead.’

‘Does she know...?’

‘That I’m aware of her deception? No.’

‘So it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to say you have a somewhat strained relationship with your mother, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan.’

He smiled and looked just a little embarrassed. ‘I love her, I really do. And I’m close to her, more than most men and their mothers. But that’s why it just drives me crazy when she acts like we’re in some soap opera in which every tiny moment has to have secrecy and suspense added to it. Really.’ He was laughing now as though it had just occurred to him that he’d been living in a joke. ‘The cook comes in with some thing that’s been delivered in the letterbox. My mother sees the familiar handwriting on the envelope. She leaps up from her chair and darts to get it. The unsuspecting son asks her what it is. She says, nothing important. She is clearly lying. Then she says she just remembered she needs the driver to run an errand for her. She rushes out. When she comes back, she is clearly flustered. Exclamation exclamation.’ He smiled again and rolled his eyes. ‘It gets a bit exhausting.’

She had seemed so utterly different to me—too ironic about her profession to become the stereotype of the actress who cannot separate reality from drama. But I only said, ‘Mothers can be that way.’

He came to sit next to me on the sofa and touched the back of my hand, very lightly. ‘She told me about that code your mother and the Poet used. She told me she thought those garbled lines might be written in code. That’s why I was angry with her for sending it to you. I thought she wasn’t taking into account how you might feel about getting something you couldn’t read and then wondering if it was your mother and the Poet’s code. That’s why, even with the second set of pages, I didn’t know whether to give them to you or not. I was, I’ll be honest, I was on my way to shred them when I heard a sound from your office and I went in to see if you were OK. I didn’t intend for you to get those pages. I don’t...’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘Look, my mother told me you still think your mother is alive and,’ he held up his hands before I could react, as though anticipating a blow, ‘I’m not saying she isn’t. I don’t know, I ... that’s your thing, your situation ... I’m just ... I don’t think getting pages of weird writing you can’t read but which you imagine is written by her will help anything. I saw that covering letter. It’s obviously some crazy fan of my mother’s. They send her all kinds of oddball stuff, just to get her attention.’

‘Ed, I can read it.’

‘Oh.’ He leaned back against the sofa cushions. ‘Oh. Oh, God. I really was going to shred it.’

I hadn’t known until then if I was going to read the pages to him. I had no reason to trust him, to believe anything he might say about them. But right then it was clear—I needed to read them simply to give him a reason not to shred the next set of pages that might arrive at his house. With that clarity came such relief, as though all I had really wanted all along was a reason to have someone else share the burden of so inexplicable a secret. From the papers I had been holding, I pulled out the decrypted version of the coded pages and started reading out loud. He didn’t say anything all the way through, just sat there sipping wine, first from his glass and then from mine.

When I finished reading, Ed said, ‘Lordalmighty.’

That seems as good a response as any I can think of. Did you follow all of it?’

‘All?’ He put a hand to his head. ‘I don’t follow any of it. It’s not...’ He frowned. ‘Did you read that it’s been sixteen years the writer of that has been trying to figure out who his captor is?’ I nodded. ‘And how long has it been...?’

‘Since the Poet died? Sixteen years.’

‘But you can’t really ... I mean, it can’t...’ Those were the words, the ones I had wanted him to say and suddenly, passionately—I had to turn away so he wouldn’t know—hated him for saying. Then he said, ‘Can it?’

There was a single drop of wine on the bottom of my tumbler. I tilted the glass, reached in and held my finger lightly against its surface. When I moved my finger away, the drop came with it.

Ed stood up. ‘There were all those rumours, weren’t there? That he hadn’t really died.’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t know any more what I wanted of him.

‘But your mother must have seen the body. Right? And she’d know if it was his body.’ He turned red. ‘I don’t mean that in any vulgar way.’

It was the oddest moment of propriety. ‘She never saw the body.’

‘But...’

‘But, it’s still absurd. I know. And impossible.’ There, I had said it, and as soon as I said it I saw it must be true. The flaw was not in his style, his voice, his anecdotes. The flaw was simply in the situation, so utterly ridiculous that no one could actually intend the whole fabrication to be taken seriously. ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake. How can someone be kept prisoner for sixteen years, with shifting sets of lackeys looking in on him, without anyone else finding out about it? You’re right, it’s absurd.’ I stood up, feeling nothing but embarrassed for having revealed too much of my own weaknesses to him. ‘I’m sorry for having taken up so much of your time.’ I didn’t mean for my voice to sound so distant, so formal. ‘I see that it’s absurd.’

He nodded, and stood up. I held out my hand to him, unable to move out of formality or to find some way to ask him to stay and talk to me of other things. He took my hand. Outside there was gunfire, rapid bursts of it into the sky. His fingers pressed down on mine in surprise and I remembered that he’d been away for years.

‘It’s just celebration,’ I said. ‘The Ruhat-e-Hilal committee must have seen the new moon. Ramzan starts tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ he said, still holding my hand.

‘I suppose that means you’ll be heading off to film that Ramzan special. Guess I’ll see you in another month. Hope it goes well.’

I tried to pull my hand out of his but he held on, rotated his wrist so that his hand was covering mine, clasping it. ‘What would it mean to you?’ he said. ‘If I said, no, it’s not absurd. Believing those pages might be genuine. It’s not necessarily absurd.’

‘How can it not be absurd?’ My voice a whisper.

He smiled. ‘Oh, you urban girl in your modern world. Have you no idea of the kinds of things that go on in secret, for generation after generation, in parts of the country that exist outside the reach of the law? When people have power, land, opportunity and no one to say no to them, the only limits on what they can do is the limit of their own imaginations. Years of secret imprisonment may be absurd, but it’s possible.’

‘Sixteen years, Ed!’ I pulled my hand out of his.

‘Sixteen days, sixteen years. What difference does it make? Ask this question—’ All at once he was fired up. ‘Why would someone imprison a man, and make his family believe he was dead?’

I stepped back and crossed my arms. It was as though we were in the office, talking about storylines for a proposed drama. ‘You make them believe he’s dead so no one comes looking for him. That’s easy. You imprison him, I don’t know. For hatred, fear, vengeance. Any unpleasant motive will do.’

‘And how many people had cause to hate him, to fear him!’ Ed said. ‘Think about that. God, he spat on the powerful with impunity. He was fearless, utterly.’

No. If he was fearless, he wouldn’t have left all those times, taking my mother with him.

She left. She chose to go. He didn’t force her, he never once forced her.

‘Once you imprison him and make the world believe he’s dead, then what? You can’t just let him go when you’ve had fun with the game. If you let him go, there’ll be an investigation, there could be complications. He’s too famous for there not to be complications. And really, why should you want to let him go? Once you’ve set everything up—set up the place you keep him, set up the loyal or terrified underlings who attend to him—you can just leave him there to rot. Leave him there, hidden away somewhere in your vast land holdings, until he dies.’

‘So you think it’s a landowner who’s behind all this?’ I couldn’t stop myself.

Ed held up his palms to the ceiling in a gesture that encompassed all the strangeness of the universe. ‘It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s possible. Stranger things go on around here every day. There are vast parts of this country, Aasmaani, which are still mediaeval in both their mindsets and their rules. And if these pages aren’t some kind of forgery or game, well then, his jailer could be anyone, really, with enough money to pull it off. Can you pinpoint a location it’s coming from? Postmarks?’

‘The first from Multan or Mardan. The second from Quetta. And, anyway, the cover letter, I don’t know, it...’

‘Seems false. Yes. And why would someone send all that to my mother in the first place?’ He looked suddenly unconvinced.

‘I don’t know. But there are things in there which sound so much like him, Ed, that it would be uncanny for someone to have made it up.’

There was a moment of silence in which we simply looked at each other.

‘Aasmaani, do you really think it’s him?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s too often, Ed, I’ve slipped into believing things only to find they weren’t true. I can’t keep doing it. And yet. If it is true...’ I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall.

I felt his hand brush my cheek. ‘What can I do?’

I shook my head, my eyes still closed. ‘Will you be offended if I ask you to leave?’

‘Don’t be silly. How could I be offended at anything you might choose to say right now?’ My eyes were still closed, and I felt his breath on my mouth before his lips followed. I put my arm around his neck, and for a few seconds we stayed like that, our lips just resting on each other, the only movement my fingers stroking the nape of his neck.

When we moved apart, he said, ‘I don’t have to leave until tomorrow afternoon. So I’ll see you in the morning, OK? Come and find me when you get to work.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘I’ll let myself out.’

As soon as I heard the door close behind him, my body slid down to the ground. I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.

The Poet—my almost-stepfather—was being imprisoned somewhere by an unknown captor. He had been there sixteen, nearly seventeen, years. Sixteen years during which he’d had no human contact except for his captor’s lackeys who broke his fingers and erased his poems. He’d been told my mother was dead. He’d lost the ability to write Urdu. But he was alive. Omi was alive.

For a moment I felt something surge up inside and I had to clasp my hands against my chest as though that could push it down. I would not do this again. I would not move back into that seductive place which promised answers, that place which could only lead to despair each time an expected resolution revealed itself to only be a mirage. The Poet was dead. Omi was dead. Somewhere in the world there was proof. Where? Who knew the details of his death, who could give me the proof I had never before felt the need to search out?

Mirza the Snake. He went to the morgue and then to the funeral. He would have seen the body. Yes, he had the proof. Mirza had the proof. Whoever was playing this sick game with Shehnaz Saeed, and for whatever purpose, it had nothing to do with me.

I carried the pages to the bookshelf, paying no attention to the Fata Morgana shaking its head behind me as I placed them between the covers of War and Peace, two-thirds of the way through the book, and knelt on the ground to push the tome into an empty space on the bottom shelf.