Kamila Shamsie: Salt and Saffron

Taimur smiled. ‘Yes, I think she might. Maybe I’d stay if we weren’t not-quites; maybe if we hadn’t grown up believing ourselves capable of bringing about something terrible. Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Because I, and you, and she, we all love Akbar. Here.’ He pressed a velvet box into Sulaiman’s hands. ‘I have no right to this. One day you might even know what to do with it. I certainly don’t. Tell Mama I love her.’

‘You already did that.’

Smiling, Taimur left.

When Sulaiman finished talking I was close to tears, but Dadi did something entirely unexpected. She laughed.

‘Sulaiman, that’s sheer melodrama. My life! Such passion, such tragic miscommunication, such revelations in the aftermath of the main action. It’s too absurd.’ She took the ring from Sulaiman and weighed it in her hand. ‘It would have broken my finger.’

‘No regrets?’

‘To be loved by two such brothers. That’s a rare gift. You’ve given me back my Naz.’

‘Make that three such brothers,’ Sulaiman said, and kissed her hand. ‘Just to increase the melodrama.’

Dadi laughed again, and then she turned to me. ‘Aliya, did the thought that flashed through my mind flash through yours?’

‘Which thought is that?’ I felt strangely shy in the presence of my great-uncle, who had only just seen me.

‘Mariam’s mother might well have been high-born.’

‘No, Dadi. I didn’t think that at all.’

‘Good. That’s a start.’

Sulaiman stood up. ‘I wonder who she was. The wife. Whoever she was, she was much later. Samia told me Taimur’s daughter — Mariam — is much younger than your children and mine. He must have waited a long time before he was ready to love someone else.’

‘Or maybe he and his wife were so happy together, just the two of them, that it was many years before they felt they could allow anyone else into their lives. Why not that, Sulaiman? Let’s love Taimur enough to believe that. Aliya, look!’

I turned to look out of the window, but the thudding sound against the glass had already told me what she was staring at.

‘Take me to the balcony, Sully.’ He lifted her up in his arms, that man nearing eighty, and I opened the glass door to let them out. The sound of the rain beating down was almost deafening, but though I couldn’t hear I could see her telling him to put her down.

Sulaiman slid the door between us closed so that the rain wouldn’t whip into the room, and then it really was as though they were two characters in a movie and I was watching them with the sound turned off. What an evening, what an evening! Taimur left because he loved Abida, and stayed away because he loved Akbar. He went to Turkey. Yes, he did. He went to Turkey and looked up his uncle’s Turkish friend — the Dard-e-Dil uncle who went to Turkey talked often of his Turkish friends. Through these friends he found employment, occupation. Perhaps he taught Urdu somewhere. Or English. Or Persian. Then he met the mechanic from Dard-e-Dil, and together they talked of their ancestral home. One day the mechanic told him that Meher was in Greece, and Taimur knew at last he had found a way to receive word of all the Dard-e-Dils without any of them receiving word of him. And how did Mariam and Masood’s story fit into this? And how did mine?

I looked out on to the balcony again. She’d waited almost sixty years for this story, Dadi had. How different would her life have been if she had heard it earlier? These stories, this salt … How could we ever exert ourselves to the simplest physical action when all our lives were so dependent on this seemingly passive act of listening?

I stepped out on to the balcony. Dadi raised her hands to the skies, her nightgown clinging to her frame, and inhaled the heady scent of parched mud gulping water. As I watched her I knew that the monsoon rains would wash away streets, blow down electricity wires, create stagnant pools of water prime for mosquito orgies, but for those few minutes there seemed no price too high for the sight of rainwater eddying bougainvillea flowers around Abida’s bare feet.

‘Sulaiman!’ she cried out above the noise. ‘I’m so glad I’ve had my life.’

Of course I was happy that Sulaiman was in Karachi. To watch him with Dadi and Meher was like watching a dance in which a group of three would become two against one, and then three again, and then a different two against one, but always back to three again. Sulaiman and Abida teased Meher about being the youngest, the one who always wanted to act older than her age (‘What on earth were you doing talking to Binky about Akbar’s broken heart?’ Dadi said, but she laughed as she said it); Sulaiman and Meher teased Abida about her regal airs (‘Remember when Abida got stuck up that tree with the cradling branches, and instead of admitting she was stuck she said, “I am not in the habit of descending.” How old were you, Abbie? Eight?’); and Meher and Abida teased Sulaiman about the folly of men (‘Well, of course that ended in divorce. You only married her because she did that thing with her lips, Sulaiman. That sensuous, snarling thing. Remember when Ama, with an air of pious innocence, asked her whether her mouth had those muscle spasms often?’).

How could I not be happy?

But every day that he was there I’d hear some mention of Taimur and remember: I had understood Taimur’s story, but I was no closer to understanding Mariam’s. Perhaps all the explanations I had thought of were true. Perhaps none of them were. But if I were to retell her story, with what would I fill the gaps between all I knew and all there was to know?

That may have been what I was thinking about that July evening when I lay in my garden, mosquito coils around me, watching a candle flame bobbing past the windows of the house as Ami searched frantically for something — Ami always seemed to feel the need to search frantically for something when we were swallowed up by the darkness brought on by a power failure.

‘I’ve brought you a surprise,’ Sameer said, turning the corner of the garden and coming into view. ‘I think I should start a limo service between the airport and town.’ So saying, he disappeared into Mariam’s old room through the French doors and promptly tripped over something. I heard the thud as he fell. Ami came running. ‘Oh good, you’ve found the box. But why are you lying down, Sammy?’

In that moment a bunch of thin, green, stringlike things came flying towards me and fell, several feet from where I lay. I rolled over to them.

Stems.

‘Khaleel?’

He stepped forward into the garden. ‘If the mountain won’t go to Liaquatabad,’ he said, and squatted beside me.

I turned on to my side to look at him and he lowered his knees to the ground. ‘Hey,’ he said, and I wanted to cup my hand against his larynx and feel the muscles move beneath my palm as he spoke.

‘Hey yourself.’ There was a tiny cut at the base of his index finger, giving me all the excuse I needed to touch. You know what it felt like, the touch. Don’t you? At the very least you’ve imagined it.

‘I have something for you in Sameer’s car.’ I wanted to tell him it could wait, whatever it was. But he was gone already.

I touched the grass on which he’d been sitting. He was here. He was actually here and there was no doubt in my mind now … no, not my mind … there was no doubt now in any part of me that he could break my heart. What a blessing. All the active-passive listening I’d ever done in my life had brought me to this moment, to this darkness in which I awaited light, knowing it was time for me to don my costume, make my entrance and speak the words. Which words I didn’t yet know, but they were, they would become, part of someone else’s story, one generation, or two, or three down the line.