Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

‘Do you need glasses?’ he said.

‘I don’t need glasses. Ten pairs of glasses wouldn’t enable me to see that light at this time of day. Look how strong the sun is. It shines on the traffic light so brightly it’s blinding, and you can’t see which colour is lit up. I thought the light just wasn’t working as usual.’

The cop looked up at the cloudy sky.

‘The clouds have just come in,’ I said. ‘Three seconds ago they weren’t there. Look how strong the breeze is; it’s making the clouds rush around.’

The cop shook his head. ‘You can either go to court and pay the fine there, or you can pay it directly to me.’

‘Okay, I’ll go to court.’

The cop was not happy with this deviation from the script. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t talk like this. I have a family to support. The courts will take hours, there’ll be paperwork and all sorts of men hanging around there who misbehave around women. Why don’t you just make life easier for yourself?’

‘How much is the fine?’

‘Three hundred rupees.’

I bargained him down to fifty, waited for him to get change for a five-hundred note from the mango seller who had been watching this with amusement, and continued on to Dadi’s feeling proud of my largesse in omitting to mention to the cop my connection to the high-ranking police officer who was Younger Starch’s sister-in-law’s husband.

When I got to Dadi’s I heard her cook, Mohommed, chastising her as he served her tea in her bedroom. ‘Begum Sahib, that’s a very bad idea. Why stay in the heat of this tandoor if you can help it? You always fall sick in the heat. Remember that summer in Dard-e-Dil when you collapsed near the fountain while Nawab Sahib was talking to you?’

‘That was over fifty years ago, Mohommed. Were you even born then?’

‘Born? Was I born? Who do you think ran to tell Akbar Sahib?’

‘I’m just joking, Mohommed. Old age has made you very crabby. Besides, the heat of Dard-e-Dil was something else.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded. ‘Yes, it was.’ He saw me and made a gesture of relief. ‘Aliya Bibi. You try and talk sense into her. Tell her if she falls sick I’m not going to run around for doctors and medicines, and I’m absolutely not going to cook bland soup. I’ll bring you some tea.’ And with that he left the room.

‘What would you do without him?’ I bent to kiss Dadi’s cheek.

‘Remember when I suggested he retire?’ Dadi smiled wickedly. ‘He was so irate he threatened to quit. Come and sit closer to me.’

I sat cross-legged on the bed beside her, directly across from a framed photograph of Dadi and her female cousins in their childhood, all decked out in ghararas, with tikas of precious and semi-precious stones hanging over their foreheads. Three strands of pearls going over and around the girls’ heads held each tear-shaped tika in place. I used to assume the photograph was taken during some momentous occasion, like Eid or a wedding, but Dadi had told me, no, that’s just how they used to dress every day. It struck me for the first time that she had far more photographs of life in Dard-e-Dil than she did of life in Karachi.

‘No wonder you collapsed in the heat, dressed like that.’ I gestured to the photograph. ‘What was Mohommed going on about?’

‘I’ve changed my booking for Paris. I’m leaving in September.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Hmm. It makes no sense to leave while you and Meher are here. Particularly since your violent tendencies seem to have been curbed.’ She laughed and took my hand in hers, and I clasped my fingers around hers. ‘Besides, I can’t keep running away from the monsoon rains.’

‘Why do you? Run away, I mean.’

Dadi nodded her head slowly. ‘The hierarchy of love. Should I tell you about Taimur?’

I swallowed. ‘Please.’

Mohommed walked in with the tea, and Dadi started talking about her tailor. When he left she told me to check that he wasn’t listening outside the door. He wasn’t.

‘I loved Taimur.’

Her voice was flat, and for a moment I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. Then she smiled, exhaled, and rested her head against the headboard. ‘I loved Taimur. I’ve never said that aloud before. I loved Taimur.’ She started to giggle, but stopped to shake her head in wonder. ‘We were eighteen. So young. What does anyone know at eighteen? But I loved him all the same.’

I didn’t know what to say. I felt … What did I feel? Something similar to the feeling you get at the end of a movie when you can’t quite believe the final twist but, as soon as it happens, you can’t imagine any other ending. The difference was, when you watch a movie, no matter how good it is, you’re never sure if it’ll stay with you for ever.

I needed to say something, so I said, ‘Why him?’

‘Because him. Oh, Aliya.’

What had I said to make her look at me with such sorrow?

‘What was he like, Dadi?’

‘Like nothing else. Like my soul. Like his daughter.’

My spine prickled. I had never heard her speak in this voice before. I had a fleeting image of Taimur leaving Dard-e-Dil with this voice of Abida’s nestled in his breast pocket. ‘So did you … I mean, what did you … What happened?’

‘He didn’t love me.’ She picked up the photograph by her bedside and looked at it closely. ‘He didn’t love me. I’ve never said that aloud either. I didn’t think saying it would give me this urge to cry.’

‘He said he didn’t love you?’ My eyes darted to the photograph of Dadi and the triplets. How could you, Taimur?

‘Aliya, he left. Just weeks after this picture was taken, he left.’ I took the photograph from her. When I first saw the picture on Baji’s wall I looked at the girl’s smile and thought, Was Dadi ever that young? Now I thought, Was I ever that young? Will I ever be that young?

‘And before that, Dods?’

‘Before that? I misread his affection, his generous compliments. I thought there was an unspoken understanding that we’d wait for him to come back from Oxford. The unspoken is a dangerous thing to rely on, my darling. Do you know the meaning of Naz?’

‘Pride, or something like that. Having airs.’

‘That misses the essence of it. Naz is the pride, the assurance, that arises from knowing you are loved. From knowing that no matter what you do you will always be loved. In this picture there is such Naz written across my face.’

But you were right to have such Naz. How could anyone not love you when you smiled like this? I wanted to say that, but didn’t know how to. ‘Why did he leave?’

‘There was another woman.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. No one from our social set, or we would have known. Must have been someone in town. That’s what brought on that smokescreen letter of his with its talk of becoming a servant. She was probably of that class, which is why he thought of it. Some truth always seeps into the most elaborate lies.’

‘No, wait. If you don’t know who she was, how do you know that she was?’

‘There was a ring.’ Dadi directed me to look closely at the oil-painting of my great-grandparents, the yak enthusiast and his wife. He was dapper in his three-piece suit, holding a walking cane; she, rather more demure in her beautifully brocaded gharara, her hand weighed down by a ring so large I was sure if she ever took it off, her finger would remain angled down.

‘That’s not jade set in zircons, is it?’

‘Don’t be absurd. Emerald in diamonds. Her father-in-law gave it to her on her wedding day, saying she must not get too attached to it because when her eldest son married it would have to be passed down to his wife. That was before the days of high divorce rates — nowadays I’m sure people wait for their grandchildren to be born before handing down the most precious family jewels.’