Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

I drew in a long breath. What sort of proof would be enough for me? His body was smashed beyond recognition. Even Mirza couldn’t give me the proof I needed. No, the proof I needed could only come in the form of an exhumation of a grave in a distant village. I turned away from the thought. What would be in a grave seventeen years later? Nothing I wanted to see. And nothing that would be of any help, either, since he had no close surviving relatives that I knew of, except some branch of his father’s family who never acknowledged him, and whom he never acknowledged, and who would only throw me out of their grand houses if I burst in babbling about DNA and opening graves and wild conspiracy stories. And in any case, I would never get permission for an exhumation, and I would never bring myself to ask for it either.

So there could be no proof.

Except his voice. His voice coming through to me in those pages, so utterly him, so utterly unlike any other voice I’d ever known. I knew my brother. That’s my proof , she had said, and there was no way of arguing with that. But I knew my Poet.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, just for the sake of argument, I had to make a case for the pages being genuine. How would I construct the case?

First, stranger things go on. That was an important point. There was that story in the papers not so long ago — two feuding families, the infant daughter of one disappears and is never found. Fifteen years later, the families agree to end the blood feud that has gone on for generations between them. The patriarch of one family gives his absurdly young daughter in marriage to the elderly patriarch of the other family. The morning after the wedding night the bride’s father tells her new stepson, your stepmother is also your sister . The young man takes an axe, bursts into the newly-wed’s bedchamber, and kills the couple. The tribal jirga acquits him of murder, saying he did what was necessary for family honour.

Yes, stranger things go on.

Second, the only person to identify the body died mysteriously shortly afterwards. And though his sister refused to sully his memory by believing him involved in a cover-up, the fact remained that honourable men could be convinced into most dishonourable actions by anyone who knew just how and where to place the right degree of pressure.

Third. Third was a problem. Third was the matter of the burnt poems.

When Omi and my mother first moved into their adjoining houses, both houses belonged to my mother. Of the two of them, she was the one who was financially solvent, courtesy of her inheritance from her father. But when Omi received the first major cheque of his life, as prize money for the Rumi Award, he transferred the money to my mother’s account and she responded by signing over the house he lived in to him, much to his irritation. How much she must have regretted that gesture the day she heard of his death! That was the day she learned exactly the price she would have to pay for never marrying him, the day she learned that their unwillingness to sign a piece of paper meant she had no rights, no claims to his life except the ones he accorded her while there was breath in him.

No one in the world of officialdom even bothered to inform her of Omi’s death. It was Beema who heard the news from an uncle in the army, just before Mama came by Dad’s house — she was supposed to take me to her tailor to have my first sari blouse fitted. And so it was Beema who broke the news to Mama. Mama wept for a while — wild, crazy tears — but then, while Beema held me tightly as I sobbed, Mama left the house and drove straight to the morgue. She arrived there to find that distant relatives of Omi’s, who hadn’t seen him in years, had already taken the body back to his village for burial. Was it a thought-out decision, or just instinct that made her drive home instead of coming back to Dad’s house for me? Either way, she reached home to find the doorway in the boundary wall between his house and hers bricked up, and policemen barring her from entering through his front gate, saying they needed to search the premises for clues to his murder. There was nothing she could do but watch from her balcony as men who weren’t wearing any uniform made a fire in his garden and burnt all his papers.

They say it made my mother scream like a madwoman — the smell of all those poems burning. I knew it was more than that; it was the memory of the fight I had witnessed between them just days earlier when he complained that she didn’t take adequate care of the copies of his poems which he left in her house to safeguard against fire or theft. They rarely fought, but when they did their fights were monumental. She yelled, he blustered, and finally she said, fine, gathered her set of his poems into a pile and held a burning match above it. She wouldn’t really have set it alight, I’m sure, but he lunged for her hand and, surprised, she dropped the match. They watched in silence as the papers burnt, flames spreading too fast to attempt any rescue, and when it was all ash, he rubbed his thumb in the greyness and wrote her name with it on a piece of paper.

‘You see,’ he told her. ‘Everything I write can be reduced to a single word.’

Omi, how much you loved being the mad, passionate lover!

If I am no longer the man mad with love for you does it mean I’m not me any more?

Yes, it defined you so totally, your love for her. If that love ever dimmed or became an abstraction, you’d wonder if you were still yourself. I know you would.

A red bougainvillea flower glided into the room.

Return, then, to the case at hand. Return to the third problem. The problem of reconciling the burnt poems with the story of a faked death. Conventional wisdom has it that a government agency killed the Poet because they feared the effect his new poetry collection would have on a nation which had so recently received just a tiny reminder of the taste of democracy and was clamouring for more. No one had forgotten the impact his Hikmet translations, along with Habib Jalib’s original verse, had on the popular — and successful — uprising against Ayub Khan in 1969. So the government had him killed — and tortured, to teach other revolutionary poets a lesson — and government agents entered his house and burnt his poems.

That was the story we’d all believed. It seemed to be the only story that made sense. After all, if the men who burnt the poems hadn’t worked for the government, why would the police have stood guard outside while they gathered up the papers and stoked the flames?

There it was. That’s what everything hinged on. The government burnt his poems after he died, so the government must have been responsible for his death.

I closed the file and walked back to the cabinet with it.

I opened the drawer for 1986 and there, in black marker, scrawled on steel in tiny letters was the word: WHY?

Why was it necessary to conclude that the people who burnt the poems were the very people responsible for his death?

I put the file back in its place and rested my hands on either side of the drawer, as though it were a podium and I had just stepped up to expound my case.

Let’s say — just for the sake of argument, let’s say — that someone kidnapped the Poet, convinced the doctor to misidentify a corpse as his, and thereby spread the conviction through the nation — all the way to the very seat of power — that the Poet had died. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, for government agencies to move in immediately to destroy his poems, knowing that his death would only augment their power? Yes, of course. His death would make his poems so much more powerful than his life ever could. How could a government be stupid enough to kill him while everyone knew he was working on a collection of political poems? How could a government be stupid enough to do that when, for all they knew, there were copies of his poems in someone’s house, in someone’s memory, making their way to someone’s mailbox? It made no sense.