Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘I know she did. I saw it.’

‘Saw what?’

The cricket game was starting up again and we were perfectly positioned to be hit by a well-timed cover drive, so we stepped into the driveway and pulled ourselves on to the bonnet of a car, leaning back against the windshield.

‘It was during those last two years. When she was living upstairs. She’d promised you she’d go to Sports Day to watch you in the long jump, but then she couldn’t get out of bed that day. And you cried. You thought I didn’t know. You always thought I didn’t know.’ For a moment a look flitted over her face that was nothing but the triumphant look of a twelve-year-old who has just discovered her big sister’s secret. ‘Anyway, the next day, you’d gone out with some schoolfriends and Dad was at work and Beema was giving maths tuition. So I marched up to your mother’s room and I said, “We need to talk.”’

‘Aged twelve, you marched up to my mother’s room and said, “We need to talk?”’

‘Yes. I said, “Listen, lady.” I think I’d just been watching some gangster movie. I said, “Listen, lady. It’s OK with me that you’re living in my room now, and I’ve had to move downstairs. But don’t forget this is my room you’re in, and if you’re going to go on living here you owe me something. Let’s call it rent.”’

‘You prepared this speech beforehand, didn’t you?’

‘Wrote it down, memorized it, practised it in front of the mirror. Your mother, bless her — she was having a better day that afternoon — just nodded really seriously and said, ‘That seems fair.’ So I said, “I don’t want money. It’s not like that. I want you to stop making my sister sad, that’s the rent you owe me.”’

‘Oh, Rabia.’

‘She started crying, Aasmaani. Really crying. I’ve never heard such crying, not even when Beema told her the Poet was dead. She just cried and cried like it was the only thing in the world she knew how to do any more, and I got so frightened I ran out of there. I’ve asked myself since, what was I so scared of? Because honestly, nothing has been more terrifying to me since. And I think it was this. That I saw, this is what can happen to a life, this can happen to anyone. That was the last day I ever hated your mother.’ She wiped my eyes with the heel of her palm.

‘You and Beema,’ I said, blowing my nose. ‘Saints-in-waiting, occasionally disguised as gangsters.’ And in their saintliness so ready to choose pity over censure.

‘She should at least have moved out of our house,’ I said, balling up the tissue paper in my hand. ‘If nothing else she could have done that. Why should you and Dad and Beema have had to suffer through all her suffering?’

‘She tried to leave. Beema wouldn’t hear of it. And she was in no state to look after herself, Aasmaani, you know that.’

I could have gone with her. I could have looked after her. I never offered. I never wanted, at that point, to have to be alone in a house with her, watching her strip away herself.

‘How did Dad put up with it? I really don’t know.’

‘With gritted teeth.’ Rabia shrugged. ‘I don’t think he was ever too happy about how close Beema and your mother were. It would have suited him better, I’m sure, if they got on civilly enough not to make life uncomfortable for you, and no more.’ One of the cricketers yelled out that her feet were blocking the headlights, so she pulled herself into a cross-legged position. ‘Remember Beema saying to your mother — this was before the Poet died, when they were back from exile and you were so happy you could hardly walk without dancing — Beema said, “Put us together, Samina, and the two of us form the one Superwoman that every individual woman needs to be if she’s to go through this absurd world with even the barest sense of responsibility. We take on governments, buy the groceries, wrest religion out of the hands of patriarchs, raise our daughters into women, and accompany our men to places they’ll never survive alone because they’re still little boys in the bodies of competent adults.” That was it, I think. The heart of their friendship. They saw themselves as complementary, and not only in your life. Your mother would never have left you all those times, Aasmaani, if it wasn’t Beema she was leaving you with.’

‘She would never have left me unless she could bear to leave me.’ I slid off the bonnet. ‘She did me a favour, I know. I’m much better off having been raised by Beema, and in your company. But that was the result of, not the reason for, her decisions.’

From the fielders there came a roar of delight as the batsman struck a slower delivery back into the hands of the bowler.

‘My turn,’ I called out, making my way to the pitch.

I could tell, by the way my sister hovered near me when the game was over, that she wanted to continue our conversation. But I was sick of my own self-obsessed whining, and partly resentful for the dissipation of that utter peace I had known for the last few days, so after the game I loitered in the garden, talking politics with the neighbours.

During Ramzan, the country had finally got a government. Not a very convincing one, but the main reaction among the people I encountered at STD and in the communal garden was relief that the religious alliance had refused to join a coalition government. ‘Bugger, but they talk democracy better than anyone else,’ Rabia had groaned a few days earlier, watching the fiery leader of the beards lay into military intervention in matters of government as the inaugural session of the National Assembly was broadcast live on one channel after another.

I had looked at the scenes from Parliament, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to be sitting there, part of the action.

Earlier in the year, soon after the President announced the new constitutional amendments prior to holding elections to end the three-year suspension of Parliament, I ran into a one-time friend of my mother, a man who’d been a brave and admired participant in the pro-democracy activities of the 1980s, only to turn into a corrupt, vindictive politician when democracy actually returned to the country and he found himself in a position of power. I hadn’t seen him in years, but when we found ourselves at adjoining tables on the rooftop of my favourite restaurant his eyes registered delight.

‘Aasmaani! How marvellous!’ He pulled up a chair next to me, ignoring my three colleagues from the oil company who were sitting at the table with me. ‘Heard about the new amendments? The reserved seats?’

I dipped a piece of na’an into raita and shrugged. ‘My sister’s been babbling on about it. Sixty reserved seats for women in the new parliament.’

‘Right.’ He drew his chair closer. ‘So how about it? You want to be one of my party’s nominees?’

My colleagues exploded into laughter. We had been discussing the amendments earlier and I had said the great benefit of having a quota of women in parliament was that it would add colour and a sense of fashion to the proceedings.

I spooned chicken ginger on to my plate. He picked up a seekh kabab and waved it in my face. ‘Come on. You had a razor-sharp political mind when you were fourteen. Remember that time your mother and I got arrested…’

‘You mean back in the days when you had integrity?’ He bit into the seekh kabab and looked amused. ‘We’ve all got to work with the system. Now, look. Say yes. Come on. This is your chance to do some good for the nation.’

I took the seekh kabab out of his hand and threw it to the cat which had been prowling nearby. ‘The nation can sod off as far as I’m concerned.’

He clapped his hands. ‘Even better. You’re perfectly suited.’

I tried not to get irritated by the sight of my colleagues falling about with laughter at the thought of my entrance on to the political landscape. ‘Right. So the way this works is your party gets to decide which women are suitable candidates. And then, with the fourteenth amendment firmly in place, once we join your party we’re not allowed to vote against party lines, so if you decide to pass a law saying “Women are morons” we’re legally obligated to vote with you? No thanks.’