Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

I had been about to pick up the lemon tart on my plate, but drew my hand back when I heard the word ‘imposter’. Anything I ate now would taste like ashes.

‘Thought of what?’ Ami said, and now she wasn’t even pretending to keep her voice cordial.

‘Ayeshoo, this is no reflection on you, sweetie.’ If there’s one thing my mother dislikes more than being called ‘sweetie’ it’s being called ‘Ayeshoo’. ‘We were all taken in by her, and no one has anything but praise for the hospitality you showed her, but what proof did we ever have that she was one of the Dard-e-Dils?’

‘She looked just like her father,’ Great-Aunt One-Liner said. She was having a wild, wild day. ‘Didn’t she, Abida?’

‘Just like him,’ Dadi said. ‘Right down to her smile.’

What a smile it was. I had taken with me to college the one picture in the world which captured it and Celeste, remarking on it, said, ‘Looks like she’s seeing angels beckon in the camera lens.’

‘Well, Booby looks like Orson Welles,’ Bachelor Uncle said, pointing at his stocky cousin. ‘That doesn’t mean he should be getting percentages from video rentals of Citizen Kane.’

Older Starch leapt upon that with alacrity. ‘Exactly! I’m not saying she wasn’t clever, probably looked around to find a family she could fit into and, let’s face it, we’re prominent. Pictures in the papers all the time. Social pages. Business pages. Art pages. Front pages. My theory is this …’ She leant forward, and I tried to determine the trajectory of my lemon tart if I were to get so engrossed in her theory that my hand pressed down with all its weight on the edge of my plate. I shifted the plate slightly. But I couldn’t help listening. ‘I’m not saying Mariam was some dehati who’d never seen a big city before. Clearly she had learnt social graces somewhere. But we’ve all heard the stories of girls from good families who go bad and are disowned. Usually because of some man. So what if Mariam was disowned. Because of some man. Probably lower class. And then he didn’t want her because it was only her money he was after. And maybe somehow she’d heard the story of our family. It’s no secret. And she saw pictures and saw her features repeated in those pictures. So she wrote a letter, sent it to Nasser and Ayesha. The address is in the phone book, always has been. Then she arrived. But she couldn’t speak because speaking would mean answering questions which would mean revealing the truth. So she remained quiet. Except about food because she knew if she developed one eccentric trait it would shield her. Then if she ever did something odd, something out of keeping with the way our family behaves, we would just say, “Oh, that’s just Mariam. She lives by her own rules.” And we did. We said it often.’

You bitch, I thought. You absolute stupid bitch.

‘And what about Masood?’ Bachelor Uncle asked.

Younger Starch raised a hand for attention. ‘That letter which announced she was arriving, we’ve all read it, we all agree it’s strange. Clearly not written by someone like us. So what if this man — the one who waltzed her up the garden path — what if she made believe, to herself, that he was the one writing the letter. To make herself feel better about him not wanting her. She imagined she was the one choosing to leave and he was the one writing the letter. So she wrote it the way she imagined he would write it. That tells us what kind of man he was. Lower class. Definitely. So from him to Masood was no big leap. For some reason she’s just attracted to that type.’

‘She had no birth certificate, it’s true,’ Bachelor Uncle said. ‘Remember all those strings I pulled to have a passport and ID card made for her? Broke the law, but anything for family, I said. But there’s no way of knowing if that’s what she really was.’

Around the room I saw people nodding their heads, murmuring to each other. Great-Aunt One-Liner seemed to be crying; Aba had gone red; Ami had gone white; Sameer’s mother was trying to restrain her husband from attacking the Starched Aunts, though it might have been the other way round.

The oldest of the relatives, a woman who had doted on Mariam Apa said, ‘Perhaps it is best to say just that. For the sake of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Family reputation is the most precious jewel in a young bride’s jahez.’ She sighed. ‘There was a time we were so close to the heavens no stigma could reach us. But what we were we no longer are.’

I could almost hear the scissors snipping away the strings which bound Mariam Apa to our lives. Here, now, the story was shaping; the one that would be repeated, passed down, seducing us all with its symmetry. In parentheses the storytellers would add, ‘There are still those who say she really was a Dard-e-Dil, but a new identity was fabricated for her by those who felt she blemished the family name.’ Would she hear the story one day, wherever she was, whatever she was doing? Was her life so separate now from ours that even the wind carrying our lies would never play with her hair, swirl it away from her ears and make all hearing possible?

Or did she know us better than we knew ourselves?

Who starred her name and mine on the family tree?

If Mariam Apa were ever to send me a message it would be wordless. A strain of music pushing open my window and creeping through; a fistful of saffron sprinkling over my eyelids while I slept; a shell yielding to my cochlea the whisper of waves allied to the sound of footsteps running away from the rushing tide. These were the signs I waited for. But how could I forget the stars?

Mariam Apa used to point out constellations to me; she’d show me the clusters of light as a lesson, not in astronomy but in our lives. No star, except the brightest, has meaning on its own. During nights at the beach she’d sweep her arm in the direction of the sky, showing me this star and that and the other one there, and we could not discern the difference between them. But when we saw the middle of Orion’s belt or the handle of the Big Dipper, then the stars ceased to be interchangeable, one no different to the other. Mariam would point out a star and make a shadow picture of a bear against the wall of the beach hut. Her hand would reach out as though to extinguish that star and as she did so the shadow picture would disappear. Without that star, there’s no Ursa Minor. Without Ursa Minor the sky is less than it can be. Somehow Ursa Minor became our favourite and we’d talk (so to speak) of buying a boat and sailing for ever within sight of that constellation as the seasons shifted and the bear moved away from us.

She had starred the family tree. She wanted me to know we were bound together, she and I and all of us. I had to buy that boat. I had to find out where she had gone. Maybe the only way of doing so was to find out where she had come from.

‘It could be true,’ I heard. It was a mousy cousin speaking. ‘It could be true that she’s not a relative. But if I ever see her again I’ll put my arms around her and I’ll hold her so close. And there’s no one else in this room about whom I can say the same.’

Dadi rang the bell to have the tea things cleared away. ‘She is Taimur’s daughter. If she wasn’t, don’t you think I would know?’

The next morning, reclining on the sofa in Mariam Apa’s old room, I thought that the only thing shocking about the Starched Aunts’ version of Mariam’s life was that it took them four years to come up with it. Still, after four years you’d expect them to do better than the psychobabble of ‘she imagined she was the one choosing to leave and he was the one writing the letter’. Not to mention ‘she knew if she developed one eccentric trait it would shield her’. Honestly. That made about as much sense as the theory my cousin, Usman, had propounded when he was little more than a toddler: ‘Maybe she doesn’t know any words that aren’t about food.’