Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

I had to have answers about Taimur. I had to have answers, because how could it be that he had left home and there his story ended as far as we were concerned? How could he disappear so completely? How could someone in the family disappear so completely? If Taimur could, then maybe his daughter could, also. Her physical absence I had learnt to accept. But not to know, not even to start to guess, where she was and what she was doing, to be unable to close my eyes and see her in a context that made me smile, that was the real wound.

When I had said to Celeste, ‘Can you draw her older and happy?’ I was really saying that my imagination lets me down. When I picture Mariam she is always unhappy. Sometimes she’s a recluse, seeing no one but Masood, jealous of the time he spends with his friends. She is bitter that he is not excluded from the company of men whose comradeship he seeks, while she cannot meet the kind of people she’s accustomed to meeting because however much they like her they’ll always say, ‘But good God! The husband!’

Other times she’s left Masood, or he’s left her, and she drifts, unable to return to the world from which she’s an outcast, a middle-aged woman with no college degree and no résumé. So how does she live? How does she eat?

And sometimes, apropos of nothing, when my eyes are closed I see her walking from me. I know it’s her although she looks nothing like anyone I could ever want to know — she is stooped and lank-haired and shuffling and entirely alone — and I don’t call out to her because I cannot bear to incur the pain that one look at her face will cause, so instead I tell myself it isn’t her and turn away.

When I told Celeste all this she said, ‘So I guess that could explain the heebie-jeebie dreams.’

The dreams she referred to were mine. The heebie-jeebies were hers, in response. She said I’d jerk upright in bed maybe once, twice a month, looking like someone in a horror movie who only had seven seconds of screen time and was determined to make it memorable, even if it was only memorable for the outrageous overacting. She was generally awake when this happened — she once remarked, though she now denies it, that sleep is a bourgeois luxury — and when she tried to talk to me I wouldn’t answer but she’d go on talking until I fell asleep again. The first time this happened, when we’d been in college for less than a month, she sang lullabies to me. She said it had seemed like a good idea, but after I went back to sleep she worried that it was neo-imperialistic of her to assume that ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ had any significance in my life. (I replied, ‘Your neo-imperialism anticipates my post-colonialism.’ Fortunately, we ceased being enamoured of such talk before long.)

I don’t remember the dreams, but I’m sure Celeste is right in suggesting their connection to Mariam Apa’s departure. Something happened to alter my sleep pattern after Mariam left; my old ability to fall asleep at the slightest opportunity didn’t change, but often I’d wake up feeling exhausted, though there was no other evidence to suggest I hadn’t slept soundly through the night. The exhaustion was far less marked when Celeste was around to talk me back to sleep, but it never went away entirely for more than a couple of months at a stretch. After a while I grew so accustomed to it that when I woke up in the morning feeling a strange heaviness of eyelid I’d just look across to Celeste and say, ‘Sorry. Did I startle you?’ and she always shrugged and said something like, ‘You should seriously audition for the next Stephen King movie.’ We stayed room-mates for all four years of college, though we could have got singles by our junior year. She said I did her a favour by not moving out and leaving her to bore herself silly, but I know that I was the one on the receiving end of a generous gesture of friendship.

I honked my horn outside Dadi’s gate and the chowkidar, who was playing Ludo with a group of servants outside a house down the street, ran to my car. ‘Begum Sahib’s gone out,’ he said. ‘But someone who says she’s her sister is waiting for her in the drawing room.’

‘Someone who says she’s her sister? You mean you could have let some stranger into the house.’

The chowkidar spread his hands helplessly. ‘But how should I know? Who am I to forbid a begum from entering the house? She got dropped off and her car left. Should I have told her to wait outside? I got fired from my last job for doing that. And your family is very large.’

He had me there. And Mohommed, Dadi’s cook from Dard-e-Dil, who knew more about the family than I did, was at the bazaar. I briefly considered turning round and going home. ‘Sister’ undoubtedly meant ‘cousin’, and the last thing I wanted was a run-in with another deadly relative. But if Dadi knew I’d left an older relative sitting alone in the house she’d make some withering comment. And I was feeling sufficiently withered already.

The woman in the drawing room had her back to me when I entered. She was looking at a painting of the Dard-e-Dil palace grounds. Hard to believe that my grandparents played in these grounds as children. The long driveway and manicured lawns were a little too tidy for my taste, but I loved the scattered sculptures — particularly the fountain with its statue of a bear cupping his hands to catch the water that spurted out of a baby elephant’s trunk. The palace, with its harmonious mix of straight lines and arches, stood in the background.

‘From the roof we could see forever. In 1947, turn this way and you’d see Hindu mobs burning down Muslim houses; turn that way and you’d see the Muslims doing the same to the Hindus. But not in Dard-e-Dil itself. You have to give the Nawab credit for that.’

Dadi’s sister, Meher, turned around and smiled at me. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking favourably of that depraved aristocracy from which I was so fortunate to escape. Come here and hug me.’

I put my arms around her and she said, ‘Why does my sister persist in cluttering her walls with these mementoes of bygone decadence? What do you think she’d say if we took all the paintings down while she was away?’

‘She’d tell us to put them back up, and not crookedly.’

I pulled back and looked at Meher Dadi and laughed. She was wearing a sari with a sleeveless blouse, and her silver hair was impeccably styled. ‘If this is getting old, bring on those birthday cakes. I thought you weren’t getting in until tomorrow.’

‘Changed my mind. Arrived this morning. I called Sameer last night from Athens airport to tell him I was on my way. My poor grandson! He had to wake up at some terrible hour this morning to pick me up, but what can I do? I so enjoy the element of surprise.’ She sat down, her hands resting on the arms of the chair as though it were a throne.

‘How’s Apollo?’

She looked amused. ‘For the sake of propriety we’re all supposed to pretend that he’s just my banker who has, over the years, become a friend. He’s fine.’

‘Will he ever come to Karachi?’

‘Don’t be silly. Why should my banker come to Karachi?’

‘Have you ever thought about marrying him?’

Her eyebrows rose sharply. ‘Well, we’re suddenly very upfront. Have you been spending time with Samia?’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘I don’t think his wife would approve of the match. Are you shocked?’

‘Yes.’ Deeply, deeply shocked.

‘Good. You should be. I don’t sanction taking marriage lightly. She’s Catholic. Doesn’t believe in divorce. Other than that she’s not too bad. He was in a little accident last year. Nothing serious. But when the police notified her she called me. I thought that very decent. Why don’t you ever visit me in Greece?’