Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

Love to the family (excl. Starcheds),

Samia.

The passage we didn’t take. The door we never opened. What was I thinking? Sameer was right — I’d talked to Khaleel for half an hour … No, actually, it was more like an hour. I’ve never drunk a cup of coffee so slowly. Still, just an hour. Besides, I had no intention of getting married before I finished my MA, and let’s be honest, when I thought of Khaleel it wasn’t wedding bells I heard but something a little more akin to slow jazz. And yet … Samia had said something to me the night before I left London. She said, ‘I don’t believe in love at first sight, and neither do you. But I know, and after today you know also, that sometimes it only takes a few minutes to recognize that a person is capable of breaking your heart.’ Yes.

I had mentioned heartbreak to Mariam Apa when I was sixteen and devastated over a boy who was flirting with me just to make some bleached blonde jealous. Not dyed, bleached. I ask you!

I said to Mariam Apa, ‘Well at least I found out now. Bruised ego, but no broken heart. Must avoid broken hearts.’

She shredded a piece of Masood’s roast chicken, flavoured with chillis and garlic and yoghurt, and poured gravy over the shreds. She gestured to the chicken on my plate, still in one piece. A broken heart has more surface area than a heart that is intact. Anyone who’s bilingual knows that shock of surprise when you think you’ve been speaking in one language and someone else points out that no, you haven’t. It was like that with Mariam Apa. I was so accustomed to translating her gestures into sentences that I sometimes wondered why people looked so perplexed when I claimed to be quoting her words exactly.

She had somehow got word to Babuji to star our names on the family tree. I was convinced of it. She had starred the names and now I would never hear the term not-quite-twins without adding myself and Mariam Apa to their list. And soon the rest of the family would add our names to the list, too, if they hadn’t already. How long before word of the latest not-quites crossed the border? The news would not be met with surprise. I could think of only a handful of relatives who would refrain from saying that Mariam had already brought about the inevitable disaster by robbing us of our pride. And, to be quite honest, even that handful probably wouldn’t refrain from thinking it. Was I about to compound our disgrace by mirroring her actions, with a choice far less shocking than hers, yet also more significant for its refusal to walk a path far removed? Or were we, was I, in a position to show the others that not-quites were not necessarily harbingers of doom? This, then, was Mariam’s farewell gift to me: the courage to take Khaleel’s hand in mine and say to my parents, say to Dadi, say to Sameer and Samia and the Starched Aunts and Great-Aunt One-Liner and Bachelor Uncle and Mousy Cousin and all the rest of them, Just because a thing has always been so, it does not always have to be so.

I opened my desk drawer and smiled at Celeste’s painting of Mariam, greying and radiant.

Then I remembered what Samia had said. No one, not even you, will trust any feelings you have for him.

Sameer barged into the room. ‘There was a love triangle in your house. Mariam and Masood and Hibiscus-Eating Ayah.’

‘No, you have to go to see your grandmother instead.’

‘Aba!’

‘Aliya, this is not open to discussion.’ Aba turned to Ami. ‘I can’t believe you told her.’

Ami looked up from the samples of red carpet material laid across the floor. ‘Nasser, you opened the bag. The cat was going to let itself out soon enough, so I saw no harm in giving it a little prod. At least our daughter can say we weren’t keeping secrets from her when she was old enough to deal with everything that has twisted our lives around for the last four years. And now this man wants not only the reddest carpet in the world but one which bird droppings will not show up against.’ She returned to staring gloomily at her samples.

‘Well, fine then, you’ve told her. So there’s no need for her to go and see any ayahs and start discussing family members with them.’

‘Aba, please! She hasn’t told me anything except that Hibiscus-Eating Ayah left in some jealous fit because of Masood.’

‘Well, there’s nothing more for her to tell you. That’s all we know. In fact, let me correct that. We don’t even know that; it’s just conjecture.’

Ami snorted.

Aba and I glowered at each other.

‘I’ll go to see her after I see Dadi. Happy?’

‘No. You’re not going. I forbid it. Who knows what stories that woman will invent just to see your reaction.’

‘That woman, Aba? Oh, so she could be trusted to look after me when I was a child, but she’s not trustworthy enough to repeat a few simple facts.’

‘Don’t you speak to me like that, young lady.’

His words were a roar, and I grabbed on to a table to give myself strength. ‘Just because you’re too ashamed to discuss Mariam with anyone doesn’t mean—’

‘Ashamed? Ashamed! How dare you think you have a monopoly on unconditional love!’ That took me aback. He had always been so tight-lipped about Mariam’s marriage; I had taken his silence as censure, but perhaps it was only pain. Lord, what had I been doing these last four years? In what cocoon of self-pity had I been stifling myself?

But before I could apologize or ask him what he was feeling, my mother cut in. ‘Stop it. Both of you.’ I could answer back to my father any time, even in the face of his rage, but when Ami barked out a command, both Aba and I turned into mush. She claimed she had learnt how to counterfeit steely resolve in order to avoid being quashed by her mother-in-law, and it certainly worked. There’s no one else with whom Dadi gets on so harmoniously. Nine times out of ten Ami allows Dadi to be domineering, but that tenth time she just raises an eyebrow and Dadi subsides. There’s a great deal I need to learn from Ami.

‘Aliya, go and see your Dadi. Ask her if she needs help with packing. She’ll say no, but you should ask all the same. Nasser, go out and find me some samples of bird droppings.’

‘Would you like them gift-wrapped?’

‘My jaan, the red carpet was your idea. Now stop looking ineffectual.’

Aba turned to me. ‘Aliya, collect bird droppings. Go and stand motionless — Ha ha! Motionless, get it? — under the badaam tree for an hour. If you whistle bird-calls you may only have to be there half an hour. Wear a hat, otherwise your mother won’t let you wash your hair until she’s sorted out this carpet problem.’

‘Men are so easily restored to good humour,’ I whispered, bending down near my mother to pick up the car keys.

She nodded. ‘Any lavatorial remark will do the trick.’

‘Hat!’ Aba yelled as I walked out.

I drove to Dadi’s, thinking of Celeste’s e-mail. She walks out of her élite neighbourhood and notices the poverty in other parts of the city. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but affluence and lack sat cheek by jowl in Karachi. Between the large old houses near Mohatta Palace and the smaller, modern houses on Khayaban-e-Shujaat, which displayed their wealth in accessories rather than in size, was a shortcut that took you past streets where shiny cars and designer shalwar-kameezes and English-speaking voices all but disappeared, replaced by tiny storefronts, narrow streets crowded with people and cycles and the occasional goat, children selling vegetables or fixing tyres or chasing each other along the roads without pavements.

I was thinking about this with such concentration that I ran a red light. Sameer did that at least twice a day and nothing ever happened to him, but I try it just once and a traffic cop appears. The cop pulled me over and stuck his head in through the window.