Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

I would have told her all this, I swear, but as I held the phone pressed against my ear until it stung all I heard was a ringing tone, repeating and repeating until the sound lost meaning and became the staccato victory laugh of Hope.

I called Beema at the hospital later that afternoon. Her voice was wrung out with exhaustion, and when I asked how her mother was she replied, ‘Still dying.’

‘Talk to me about other things,’ Beema said. So I told her about life at STD, and my daily phone conversations with the architect responsible for renovating our house, and all the mini-dramas that were unfolding in the block of flats. When her voice finally seemed restored to itself, I said, ‘Beema, what do you think of Shehnaz Saeed?’

‘Gem of a human being,’ Beema said without hesitation. ‘One of the most generous, warm-hearted people I have ever known. The way she was with your mother — my God — it was extraordinary.’

‘How was she with my mother?’

‘Patient.’

I nodded, my chin bumping against the receiver. ‘Unlike me.’

‘Unlike everyone else in the world.’

‘Please, Beema. You were patient.’

‘Not always. I loved her, she was one of the dearest people to me in the world. No one braver or more charismatic than your mother. But I had other, stronger loyalties. Shehnaz didn’t. Shehnaz didn’t look at your mother and think about what her depression was doing to you, or to our household. She only saw Samina.’

Her depression. That was Beema’s explanation for my mother’s behaviour before she left. Something unwilled, in which my mother played no part, had no agency. Everything could be explained away under the neat label ‘depression’. Everything except the fact that my mother made a choice and slowly, painstakingly executed it.

‘Would you trust her? Shehnaz Saeed?’

When Beema replied it was almost in a tone of revelation. ‘You know, it’s a strange thing. I’ve hardly seen Shehnaz in fourteen years. And we were never friends as such, just two people with a dearly loved friend in common. But now that you ask that question, I know the answer is yes, absolutely. Some people you can trust because of your relationship with them. Because they’ve earned your trust. And other people you trust simply because you know that they regard trust as a sacred thing, and if you hand it to them they’ll hold on to it with their dying breath. And that’s Shehnaz for you. Trust her? I wouldn’t just trust her with my life, Aasmaani, I’d trust her with yours.’

The thing about Beema was this: for a remarkably generous woman she was also remarkably right about people.

When I ended the call and hung up the phone, I didn’t know what to think any more. But it came down to this: if the pages were hoaxes, I could ignore them. I could call Shehnaz Saeed and say, if any more of those letters arrive, I don’t want them. In her response perhaps I would learn whether to trust her or not. Whether to trust Ed or not.

But I couldn’t call Shehnaz Saeed and say that because what if, what if.

I was back to where I had been the night before. Back to that need for a single piece of evidence that would assure me Omi was dead.

So I went down to the office of a news anchor, who was also a freelance journalist and a part-time sociology teacher, and, while chatting to her about the ideal consistency of a jalaibee (I came down on the side of gooey in the gooey/crunchy jalaibee divide), I flipped through the phone book on her desk, under the guise of being impressed by how many minor celebrities were filed in there and located and memorized the number I needed. I knew she’d have it — I had read the article on Ghalib she’d written in which she’d quoted Mirza the Snake.

And then, I did nothing. Nothing for the rest of that day, and nothing the following day and nothing the day after and so on until somehow we were into the third week of Ramzan and I had done nothing except have one brief conversation with Shehnaz Saeed.

It was very soon after my chat about her with Beema. I was in the office, rewriting bulletins from AP and Reuters for the evening news programme, when she called and invited me over for iftar the following day.

‘No, sorry, I’m… I’m expected somewhere else. Relatives.’

‘What a pity. But listen, drop in sometime, will you? It really was so lovely to see you the other day.’

She said it as though it were the most true thing in the world, and I found that I wanted Beema to be right about her, I wanted it almost painfully. ‘I will, of course.’

‘Good.’

‘Oh, and thanks for sending me that second set of…’

‘Any luck making sense of them?’ she asked very quickly, as though the question had been lodged in her throat, straining to burst out.

‘Not really, no. But I’m enjoying the challenge.’

She laughed. ‘Imagine if you put hours into it and it turns out to be nothing more than recipes for cold soups. Should I continue sending you any more that I receive?’

‘Sure,’ I said casually. ‘Why not? I’d hate to miss out on the gazpacho.’

The conversation wound down after that and I hung up thinking, I really have to call Mirza.

I had that thought each day, several times a day. No, more than several times a day. It was the thought with which I fell asleep and the thought with which I woke up. And in between, it was the thought of my dreams. But I was like a woman in the grips of a powerful addiction who keeps delaying that inevitable moment of last cigarette, last drink, last touch. It isn’t as though I believed the Poet was alive. Not for a second did I believe that. But going to Mirza in search of that tiny scrap of evidence which would kill the possibility of ever believing that he was alive, that I couldn’t do. Just as I couldn’t call Ed, who made no attempt to get in touch himself. Just as I couldn’t drop in on Shehnaz Saeed. Just as I couldn’t speak to anyone about the coded pages, or keep from opening War and Peace and rereading the pages until they were burnt into my memory.

And also, I had to admit, I didn’t want to call Mirza because he was Mirza — the most beautiful, arrogant man I had ever known. An angel undomesticated and with no need for earthly morality.

In any case, with Ramzan’s strict structure it was all too easy to pretend there was no time for phone calls or visits. Wake at five for sehri, read the newspaper, return to sleep for a couple of hours, get to work by nine, leave by three, sleep until iftar, watch television with Rabia and Shakeel, have the lightest of light dinners, and then play night-cricket with the neighbours in the communal garden until it was midnight and time to sleep.

But finally one day, as I stood in the STD garden assisting in the painting of a sky-blue backdrop for the set of a religious discussion programme (‘The sky suggests heaven,’ someone explained as our brushes slapped against the canvas), a spray of paint arced through the air, came to rest on my arm, and when I turned to see who was wielding the guilty paintbrush I saw the journalist/newsreader/sociology teacher. ‘Sorry, A,’ she said. ‘All this fasting has a really bad effect on my coordination. I can’t believe we’re only just past the mid-point of suffering. Doesn’t it seem like for ever ago you stopped in and discussed jalaibees with me?’

‘Yes,’ I said, starting to walk away even as I said it, my brush dripping a trail of blue on to the grass as though I were a literal embodiment of my name, shedding a part of myself. When I was out of my colleagues’ earshot I dialled the number which I’d stored in my mobile phone more than two weeks earlier.

On the first ring, an answering machine picked up and a familiar, slightly hypnotic voice came through. ‘Ramzan is here. I am not. I swore into the phone just as the answering machine beeped. I should have known. He always used to say that there was no place for an alcoholic atheist in Pakistan during Ramzan, so as soon as the month started he’d leave the country.