Kamila Shamsie: Salt and Saffron

Perhaps he was Taimur’s servant.

‘Servant?’ Sameer said, when I propounded this theory to him a few evenings later. He had picked me up on his way home from the bank and we’d driven the five minutes from my house to Clifton beach to sit on the sea wall and eat roasted corn sprinkled with red-chilli powder and lemon juice, and to watch the grey, wind-whipped waves of the monsoon season leap at the seagulls in the distance. ‘Look around you.’ Sameer pointed to the crowds around the sea wall. A large section of Karachi had been hit by a power failure and the beach was the best place to escape from the heat. Whole families were out; vans that should have held no more than nine people were disgorging groups of fifteen or sixteen on to the cement pavement where, in addition to the bhutawallah whom Sameer and I had come to patronize, there were cold-drink sellers and chaatwallahs and a man with a tray of sweets hanging around his neck, who chanted, ‘Cheeng-gum, chaaklait, bubbly-gum.’ Other than the families, there were men strolling hand in hand, young couples sitting close together but not touching, and a woman in sneakers and a shalwar-kameez, walking at a great pace which she broke off every couple of minutes to untangle the wires of her Walkman’s headset. Between my jeans and the black burkha of the woman climbing gingerly down the rocks to the sand beneath, between Sameer’s pin-striped shirt with French cuffs and the bright pink kameez of the man selling kites, there was a whole range of styles and colours and materials.

‘You need to join the working world. Escape from your cocoon of Us and Them and the gaping hole between. How do you know he was a servant? He could have been a clerk. A tailor. A shopkeeper. An anything.’

‘But not a social equal.’ I took the letter out of my back pocket and passed it to Sameer.

He read it and handed it back. ‘No, not a social equal. What great conclusion have you reached from that?’

A young boy came round selling plastic combs and spools of elastic. Sameer said we wanted neither but he’d give the boy ten rupees for getting us Cokes from the drinkwallah. I changed the order to one Coke and one Apple Sidra.

‘We know this man was in love with Mariam. We know, we can at least surmise, she gave him no encouragement.’

‘So far you’re on solid ground, but I sense a swamp approaching.’

‘What if it was his social status that stood in the way? What if, because of his social status, Mariam never even considered him a possibility?’

‘Possible. Shaabaash, chotoo.’ Sameer took the drinks from the young boy and handed him a ten-rupee note. A beggar saw Sameer’s wallet and came over to us, palm outstretched. Sameer waved him away.

‘But then, as she was planning to leave for Karachi, the fact that she was leaving allowed this man to say something to her. Maybe something said in hope. Maybe something said as a reprimand. At any rate, it was something that made Mariam see—’

‘Allah bless your union,’ the beggar said, circling back after an unsuccessful foray to the group beside us.

‘Something that made Mariam see everything she had never seen, every possibility she had never even considered considering.’

‘I’ll pray that you pass your exams,’ the beggar said.

‘And so she arrived in Karachi ready to consider the possibility of loving a cook?’ Sameer said.

‘More than ready. Determined to prove that she was capable of doing so. She always had the strangest stubborn streak. Remember Dr Tahir and the sari?’

‘In the name of Allah …’

‘So her silence was subversion.’ For once Sameer was paying attention and not laughing. ‘We look at this guy’s letter and we decide his social status. You think Mariam’s silence was a protest against the prejudice built into language? That’s why even when she did speak it wasn’t to the élite. She only spoke to Masood to order meals and even then — Did you ever notice this? — she spoke in questions not in imperatives. She’d say, “Bhujia? Koftas? Pulao?” Basically, she was undercutting the whole employer-servant paradigm.’

I thought of all I couldn’t say to Masood’s brother. ‘Maybe. Yes, maybe. Why not?’

‘And the ultimate test of her ability to look beyond class was the act of eloping?’

‘Let’s not get carried away.’ I looked suspiciously at Sameer. Was he trying to out-Aliya me with these leaps? But he looked quite serious. ‘By that point she loved him, I’m sure. But only because she first acknowledged that it was possible to do so. Do you think that’s part of the reason society was so outraged? Because by eloping with Masood she made eloping with a servant possible?’

‘May Allah give you many many sons.’

‘Well, I heard of more than one servant being fired straight after the elopement. For looking. For daydreaming. Did you know daydreaming is to be discouraged among servants? I read that somewhere. And Bachelor Uncle sacked his driver because he caught his neighbour’s daughter staring at the driver’s bare chest one day.’ Sameer handed the empty bottles to the beggar and told him he could collect the bottle deposit from the drinkwallah. The beggar made an expression of disgust. What good was a couple of rupees to him?

‘I can get you a job,’ Sameer said, standing up and brushing down his trousers.

‘This is my job,’ the beggar said, and walked away.

‘Works every time,’ Sameer laughed, unlocking the car door for me. As we drove away from the bright redness of the setting sun he said, ‘Is that what’s going on with this guy, Khaleel? You want to prove something to yourself just as Mariam did?’

It had nothing to do with the weather, but Mohommed still insisted on saying, ‘I told her so,’ when Dadi slipped and hit her head and had to be taken to the hospital. The doctor — Great-Aunt One-Liner’s son — said she was fine, no damage done, but no harm, either, in staying in hospital overnight.

I offered to be the one to stay with her, and my parents agreed, but Meher Dadi said her sister had nursed her through measles when they were children so the least she could do in return was sit in the hospital room until Dadi fell asleep. Technically, only one of us should have been allowed to stay after visiting hours, but the nurses and orderlies were no match for the stubbornness of Dadi and her sister. After much wrangling, the nurse on duty finally pretended to believe Dadi’s claim that I had left and gone home, even though I yelped quite loudly when the nurse stepped on my hand as I lay in my hiding place under the bed.

‘And knock before you enter,’ Meher Dadi said to the nurse. ‘Sometimes at night I dance around naked and I don’t want anyone barging in on me when I’m in that state. Not the way my breasts look now. What were once melons are now half-empty bladders.’

Older Starch was more brazen in her manner of ignoring hospital rules. ‘Hello, hello, Abida Khala. What a terrible thing this is.’ She sailed in with arms outstretched. ‘Couldn’t make it for visiting hours so I told the nurse outside of my connection to several trustees of the hospital and here I am with Maliha.’ Her daughter kissed Dadi and Meher Dadi and shot in my direction a look that conveyed all the embarrassment a twelve-year-old can feel at the hands of a parent.

‘There are visiting hours in the morning,’ Dadi said.

‘That’s all the way tomorrow. Can’t let you fall asleep thinking I didn’t look in on you. Besides, Maliha has to be taken for waxing in the morning and it’s her first time so I’m going along to hold her hand.’

‘It’ll hurt, won’t it, Aliya Apa?’ Maliha said.