Kamila Shamsie: Salt and Saffron

‘What are you up to, Ailment?’ she shouted. ‘Have you gone mental?’

‘No, just sentimental,’ I said, and rolled my suitcase to the front door.

Upstairs, Samia flung her arms around me and pulled me into the flat. ‘Look at you, you America-return! Graduated and all! Can’t believe it’s been five years since.’ She held me at arm’s length and scrutinized me. For a moment I felt as though I were a child again and she was the oh-so-cool elder cousin whose opinion mattered so much to me that I would go out of my way to annoy her just so that she wouldn’t detect my devotion. ‘You’re looking so … I mean, so! Swear to God. When your mother told me you had cut your hair, I wasn’t sure your face could bear the attention, but it can. It really can.’

‘Thanks, and you look quite ugly,’ I said, irritated at myself for feeling so grateful for that non-compliment. I glanced around at the new decor with its Bukhara rug and paisleyed floor-cushions and Mughal miniatures. Samia, it appeared, had become one of those desis who drink Pepsi in Pakistan and lassi in London.

‘You lie so well, everyone will know we’re related,’ Samia said, handing me a mug of tea. She didn’t add, No one would know it by looking at us, though that was true enough. She had the angular features, prominent clavicle and straight black hair of Dadi and my father, a throwback to the Rajput princess who was so beautiful that one of my ancestors from the Dard-e-Dil royal family abducted her and dragged her to a battlefield, hoping that her face would seduce enemy soldiers into dropping their swords and rushing for paper to compose ghazals of devotion. The plan might have worked had it not been that the princess, outraged that common soldiers were to look upon her, slashed her face with her fingernails before the battle began. My ancestor was so overcome by her proud courage that he married her, and went on to win the battle anyway.

Somehow, that story seemed quite romantic when I was fifteen.

Needless to say, I do not look like the Rajput princess. Which doesn’t bother me much, though I really would have liked a prominent clavicle. Family members use words like ‘agreeable’ and ‘pleasant’ regarding my features, and go on so much about the beauty mark (no one ever says ‘mole’) on my cheek that it’s obvious that’s my only redeeming feature. My ‘bedroom eyes’ also attract much comment, but let’s be frank, they only make me look like Garfield.

I have the unfortunate habit of looking very focussed when I am in fact distracted; a tendency that is a great asset in most classrooms, but has often landed me in trouble elsewhere. I suppose while my mind wandered down ancestral paths my eyes must have been fixed on some aspect of the flat’s new decor, because Samia said, ‘Look, Aloo, I know this has always been your home away from, so it must be just a little bizarre to think I’ve taken it over, but really, truly, I’m only here doing research for a few months.’

‘Oh, please, Samia, you’re such a moron sometimes. It’s family property.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Can we avoid the tangle of family rights and privileges for just a few more seconds?’

Samia grinned. ‘Yes. Good. Top Ten remark. I was just leading up to telling you that you’re stuck in the spare bedroom.’

‘No hass. It’s where I always sleep when I stay here with my parents.’

‘Yes, but there are new tenants next door, and their bedroom shares a wall with yours. They’re newly-weds. The walls might shake a little. Speaking of which …’

‘Yes?’

Samia raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I just thought I’d generously provide you with a lead-in to any goosy jossip in your life,’ she said.

‘I think you’re confusing my life with yours.’

‘No goose?’

‘Well, maybe a gander or two. Nothing worth mentioning.’ What a thing to say about all the boys at college I had liked enough to consider liking even more. They were all brimming with rage against the world’s injustices, those boys. All of them. So how could I tell them the story I would have to tell them if there was to be anything approaching intimacy between us? I learnt many things at college, but the only art I perfected was the art of stepping away with a shrug.

‘Hunh.’ Samia fiddled with the heart-shaped pendant around her neck, but I wasn’t about to sit through an exhaustive — or should I say, exhausting — account of her romantic entanglements, so I just sipped my tea and frowned at the calcium spot on my thumb nail.

‘Oh, well. Good flight?’

I shrugged. ‘I kept the galleries entertained with stories about the family.’

Samia rolled her tongue under her upper lip. With relatives, even those you haven’t seen for many years, as I hadn’t seen Samia since I was seventeen and she twenty-one, you can recognize what their expressions hide because someone you know well — in this case, my father — has exactly the same manner of concealment.

‘No,’ I said, skimming my palm on the underside of the mug before setting it down, and then wiping my palm vigorously on my jeans. ‘Not that story. I take it you’ve heard some melodramatic family version of how I reacted to all that stuff four years ago.’

Samia tugged my earlobe. ‘I wanted to come back home, you know. Mainly because of you. But between summer jobs and research and other stuff …’

‘Like Jack, short for John.’

‘Yeah, that loser.’ We fell silent for a moment and then Samia said, ‘Have you ever asked yourself why you don’t tell that story?’

‘Uf tobah! You’re a historian not a psychologist, Samo.’ I stood up and dragged my suitcase into the spare bedroom, pushing away my cousin’s hand when she tried to help me. It was happening already. Five minutes with a relative and I was becoming a moody cow. Moo-dy cow. Well, that’s all right. Still a shred of humour remaining.

‘So, how long before you head off to the homeland?’ Samia asked, following me into the bathroom.

‘Tomorrow morning. You didn’t read the e-mail I sent, did you?’ I yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it at Samia.

‘Not with any kind of obsessive attention to detail.’

I turned on the shower. The rest of Samia’s reply was punctured by the needles of water that tattooed my body, so her words became indistinct and all that remained was the lilt and tempo of her voice, which could have been the lilt and tempo of any of my female relatives except one. I was not showering, I was carrying out a ritual, a ritual of arrival in London, and part of the ritual was to miss Mariam Apa, which I did, but the other part of the ritual was to imagine what she was doing, right now, and that I couldn’t do. My imagination could accommodate aliens and miracles and the taste of certain men’s sweat, but not that.

I turned off the shower and said, ‘I don’t tell that story, because it still doesn’t have an ending.’

‘Is yaks’ milk really green?’ I asked Samia, settling down to my second mug of tea.

She shrugged and pulled my wet hair to check that it squeaked. ‘That’s really so not important.’

Which is the closest she’s ever come to conceding ignorance. Fact is, I’m sure no one in the family knows any more than she or I do on the subject. But we all know that my great-grandfather’s declaration, on 28 February 1920, that he had just heard yaks’ milk was green and, therefore, he felt impelled to inform his cousin, the Nawab, he was giving up his courtier’s life in order to become a scientist and study yak milk production, was what jolted my great-grandmother into premature labour.