Ayesha’'s Gift

In the end, Ayesha knocked at my door. She came with a confectioner’s box of gulab jamun and sugared chomchom. The sweets were a peace offering, she said, a token of her sympathy and friendship. She proffered her hand and I felt tears unexpectedly in my eyes. Her appearance on my doorstep seemed an acknowledgement of a shared sorrow that should outweigh our previous differences.

‘Well . . . What’s this you’ve brought? How did you find those in London? I’m surprised you’re not wearing a sari.’

‘I didn’t find them, Martin; I made them. There are lots of things you don’t know about me.’

‘You can say that again. Who taught you Pakistani cooking, for instance? I thought you were such an Englishwoman.’

‘Who do you think? My mother, of course. We Pakistani girls all learn cooking from our mothers; it’s part of our DNA, all those spices and smells and flavours. It makes us who we are.’

‘Yes. Part of your identity . . . I don’t really associate you with your mother, though. The one time I saw you together you seemed so remote . . . as if you had nothing in common.’

Ayesha frowned. ‘Why are you talking about my mother? It’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘I don’t know why you said that, Martin. It’s a stupid thing to say. And just when you and I were getting on together.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. And I am happy to see you. I’ve been through a lot since Karachi. Just as you have . . .’

‘Yes. It binds us together. The loss. It means we understand each other; we understand what’s important.’

‘It’s all right, Martin; there’s no need to explain. I know what you’re feeling. And now you know what I’ve had to deal with.’

We sat. I said I would put the kettle on. When I returned the table was covered in documents.

‘Martin, I want you to see these. This is what I found after you flew home. It changes everything.’

‘It was Guddu who told me. We should have gone to him straight away, instead of wasting our time with those awful policemen and bureaucrats. He asked me to explain to him what it was that I was pursuing and I said it was the men who committed the murder. But Guddu told me to think again. He said that what I was really pursuing was my father; that I was haunted by his absence, by the sorrow and the pain of it, and by the need to reconnect with him. Guddu said we uncover the spirit of the dead in the places that have been dear to them. It’s superstition, Martin, but it’s got a truth to it. We don’t give these things enough credence. So he took me to the house my dad had been building, the mansion with the gold taps that everyone’s been getting so worked up about. It’s in the country outside Kahin Nahi. You can look back over Orangi to the skyscrapers away in Karachi. Guddu had a key because my dad trusted him. He said the house may hold answers to my questions and he left me there. The place is only half-finished; the walls need plastering and the floors haven’t been tiled. But it was quiet and I just sat there on my own. I thought about my dad coming to Pakistan to build it. It was his new dream home, the one he’d been driven to build because his dreams in England had been crushed. And I could feel him there with me. It sounds corny but it’s true. I knew he was there with me, Martin. And I knew he was telling me to carry on searching.’

Ayesha looked so serious and so convinced by what she was saying. I felt for her in a way I hadn’t done since our first meetings over a year ago.

‘So where did the documents come from? You said they change everything . . .’

‘Yes. It was obvious no one had been in the house since Dad died. I started looking around and I found his passport – here it is. It was lying on the table, covered in dust. The police hadn’t even bothered to come and search the place. And then I found his air tickets. Look, you can see the date he flew to Pakistan; and here on the next coupon you can see he had a return flight to London booked for 20 August, a week after he was murdered. I can’t believe no one even thought to look for these things. The police couldn’t care less.’

‘It’s pretty slapdash. But knowing about Ibrahim’s travel plans doesn’t change much. What else did you find?’

‘I found letters that he’d been writing. To my mum in Burnley. They’re so sad. When I read them for the first time in Kahin Nahi I was in tears . . .’

‘I’ll translate for you. “Dearest Asma, my sweetest spice” – he was always calling her by pet names – “I write to you in the cool of the evening. The sun that warmed the land has set, the fireflies are flitting in the dusk.” He’s quite lyrical, isn’t he? I never realised he was such a poet.’ Ayesha laughed. ‘Then he tells Mum how things have been going with his own mother. She’s quite old and we think she’s suffering from dementia, so Dad was looking after her. He writes about the weather and some bits of local news. He asks how things are back in Burnley and . . .’ Ayesha swallowed, ‘he says how much he misses his children . . . He asks about me and how I’m doing with the government contract I was bidding for. And then he tells her about the house and you can see he’s so proud of what he’s doing, so excited by the way the place is taking shape. It’s exactly how I remember him when he was doing up his first dream home in Burnley; he gets so wrapped up in it, Martin, so carried away by it all. Listen to this bit: “I am doing all this for you, my little tamarind seed; for you and our beautiful children. This place will be my gift to you – the gift of more than a house, the gift of a country and everything it means to me . . .” When you read that, how can you even think he was involved in anything crooked? He’s an honest, simple man, full of enthusiasm and good intentions. There’s nothing hidden or evil!’

I wanted to reply; I wanted to tell her how I had read my brother’s messages, how I too had learned things that Tom had never told me in life. But Ayesha held up her hand.

‘Wait. There’s more. There was a filing cabinet in one of the bedrooms. It had a lock on it, but I found the key under a mat – Dad was never much good at hiding things. Inside it there were papers and documents, all the stuff you can see here now. Lots of it was to do with the house construction; there were receipts for building materials and lists of payments to labourers and so on. But what I couldn’t find were any ownership documents for the land, like the ones the patwari showed us. I thought that was odd. There was stuff Dad had obviously been collecting for his records. And there was a sort of diary he’d been keeping. He didn’t write it in any systematic way; he just seemed to note things down as they came into his head. So there’s a lot about us, his children, and about Mum; and some less nice stuff about my dad’s brother, uncle Ahmed, how they fell out as young men and how angry and bitter Ahmed was with him. I’d heard most of that already. But there were also references to an argument he seemed to be having with someone in Karachi. I tried to figure out what that was about, but it wasn’t easy. His handwriting is terrible for a start, and it’s as if he’s trying to disguise some of the details. He uses abbreviations and he doesn’t write people’s names but just puts initials. At first I couldn’t make sense of it. Then at the end of his diary, tucked in the back cover, I found this . . .’

Ayesha opened a folder and took out a newspaper cutting. It was crumpled and torn. The Urdu text meant nothing to me, but half way down the page was a photograph of a smiling, middle-aged man in a suit. I asked who it was.

Karachi City government is examining a proposed $400 million project to improve water supply to Orangi and its environs. Municipal water supply in Karachi has become grossly inadequate with regard to users’ needs. Suburban locations, especially low-income settlements, have no access to piped water. Serious shortages have become a feature of life and nowhere more so than in Orangi township, Karachi’s largest informal settlement. In the districts of Ghaziabad, Gulshan-e-Zia, Mansoor Nagar, Gulshan-e-Bihar and Raees Amrohvi Colony, the population must rely on standpipes, awami tanks or private tankers. The proposal now being examined will involve the construction of a new downstream dam on the Hub River to ensure adequate water volume is provided via new feeder canals and underground pipes. The project, which has been put forward by Karachi entrepreneur Mr Javed Shafik, pictured (left), has been granted initial funding with the promise of further large-scale investment by the Karachi Regional Authority.’

Ayesha jabbed her finger at the smiling man. ‘That’s him, Martin! That’s the man who killed my father!’

‘He does keep cropping up,’ I said. ‘Javed Shafik, the bad penny. But how does finding a newspaper cutting in your father’s papers prove Shafik killed him? The patwari said the two of them were best of friends . . .’

‘You’re not listening, Martin. I said the newspaper article was the key to Dad’s diary. As soon as I found it, everything else made sense. I told you Dad referred to people by their initials; well, I went back and I found references to “JSh”. There was “visit by JSh” and “phone call from JSh”. Just a few days after he arrived in Pakistan, Dad writes “JSh – my land!” Then there’s a list of other local landowners, all with dates next to them. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Shafik was threatening my dad because he needed Dad’s land for his big dam contract – a scam, if ever I saw one! – and Dad was refusing to play ball. He was contacting the other landowners to get them to stand up to Shafik. The diary and the newspaper cutting prove what I’ve said all along: Dad wouldn’t cave in to the mafia, so the mafia killed him. It’s as clear as day.’

‘Well, that’s one way of interpreting it. But couldn’t there be a different explanation? Who’s to say the phone calls and visits from JSh weren’t friendly ones? Who’s to say the two of them weren’t getting together to discuss mutual business? And who’s to say your dad’s approaches to the other landowners weren’t on behalf of Shafik himself, threatening them into selling up?’

Ayesha shook her head. ‘I think I will never understand you, Martin. And you certainly don’t understand me. I don’t think you understand people at all. I thought your brother dying might make you a bit more compassionate, but you’re as cold as ever.’

‘It can be the same thing. You think you’re so clever at analysing stuff and reasoning things out, but you always miss what’s most important. You need some emotional intelligence, Martin. You need to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and you can’t do that.’

‘How would you know what’s best for me? You don’t know anything about me.’

‘I want to make a success of this. I listen to you when you come up with things. But I don’t think you ever listen to me!’

‘Why have we always argued, Martin? Why are we arguing now, when we both want the same thing? We both want to find the truth about a person we loved . . .’

‘Maybe. Or maybe one of us wants to create a sanitised version of the truth, something we can live with, that romanticises the dead and defuses the past . . .’

‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I do need that. But don’t you need it, too? Aren’t you doing the same thing with Tom?’

‘I know what I am doing with Tom!’ I felt the anger; tried to contain it. ‘I’m not saying I’ve got everything figured out . . . But what you are asking me to do is to lie. You want me to accept a version of your father that suits you. You want me to write the story without following it to the end, without tracking down the people involved in it and asking for their version. And it’s because you’re scared what it might throw up.’

‘Yes . . .’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘Maybe . . . It’s just so loaded with meaning. It’s about who he was . . . and who I am.’

‘What? Finding out that Ibrahim was doing something wrong would make you bad too?’

‘No . . . But his death has made me question my own identity. I told you how I used to think I was British and I used to think I was Pakistani too, but now I think I’m neither . . .’

‘Come on, Ayesha. I understand all that. And I sympathise with you – even though you think I’m incapable of sympathy. But there’s something more, isn’t there? You’re scared of something. And since we’re being frank now, why don’t you tell me why you were so angry when I mentioned your mother? Why is that such a painful topic?’

She sighed. ‘Yes . . . Okay . . . When I was young, my mother and I were close. I told you how we both had to wait in Pakistan before we could get permission to come to England, and that brought us together. But as I grew up, things changed. Something came between us. At the time I didn’t know what it was. But looking back I think I had the sense that my mother was hiding things from me; things she knew but didn’t want to share, that she felt she had to cover up.’

‘In Burnley you asked her why she didn’t tell you what Ibrahim was doing on his trips to Pakistan.’

‘That was part of it. But it goes back further. To the time of the Kelly Stafford saga. That was the start of it. And there was another thing . . .’

‘You need to tell me, Ayesha, if we’re ever going to get anywhere with this.’

‘It was to do with Tariq, my brother. You met him briefly; he burst in on us when we were talking to my mother . . .’

The image of the wild man with the mobile phone came to me, with his boiling anger and frenzied declarations about slashing the throat of his father’s killers.

‘Tariq had never been like that before. He’d been a quiet boy, shy even. He made a good career as a surveyor. Then a few years ago he just went crazy. He stormed out of the house and said he was never coming back. I have no idea what happened. My father wouldn’t talk about it. And when I asked my mother I could tell she wanted to speak about what had gone wrong, but for some reason she couldn’t do it. I thought it was because she didn’t trust me any more. I got angry. Things got chilly between us. And they’ve never recovered.’

CHAPTER 28