Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

Rehana Apa must have seen my brows furrowing deeper and deeper because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘If I understand correctly, Mariam’s older than you, older than me. What I mean is, you do realize that this twin stuff is absurd, don’t you? Babuji won’t say why he added it to the tree, but you know, just because we claim he’s always right, it doesn’t mean he is.’

So I told her the story of Mariam Apa’s arrival, and of mine.

It started with a letter to my father; another one, like Taimur’s, with an indistinguishable postmark. It was addressed to Sahibzada Nasser Ali Khan, and my mother was still new enough to our family to laugh at the pomp of that address. The letter (my mother still has it) said:

Huzoor! Aadaab!

I hope you are well and I hope you hope the same of me. I am writing because there is a young lady, Mariam, who soon before was motherless but since last month is an orphan. Her father (late) was Sahibzada Taimur Ali Khan whose name you must know and maybe even his face if you have old pictures. But even if not his face is your father’s face and so you will recognize her also because she has the familiarity. She is coming to look you up and I like her so much that I want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never!

In true Hollywood fashion the gate-bell rang as soon as my parents finished reading out the letter and, in a further cinematic twist, my mother was so surprised by the sound she spilt her tea over the paper and it washed away the signature, which my parents had read when reading the letter, but could not afterwards remember because the letter’s sentence structure convinced them that the writer was no one they knew.

So the bell rang and my father, certain that the laws of Hollywood had no part in his life, frowned at the spilt tea and told my mother it was probably just the night-watchman come to collect his monthly gratuity (which was and still is a tiny amount, but how much can you pay a man for riding through the neighbourhood on a bicycle while blowing a high-pitched whistle which sounds as if it’s the shriek of something supernatural).

At this point in my tale, Rehana Apa stopped me to enquire what I thought of Pakistani movies. I had to concede I’d never seen one of Lollywood’s productions, though Samia’s brother, Sameer, once went to see a local flick with his driver and cook and came home howling with laughter. ‘So the hero’s at this party, looking suave in his safari suit, and a waitress — not a waiter, a waitress! I ask you, From where? — asks him what he’ll have to drink. And I’m thinking, Is he going to do a shocker and ask for alcohol? But no, he asks for Coke with ice. Except he says it in English in some pseudo-smooth accent, so how it really comes out is “Cock on rock.” ‘

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.