Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

I closed my eyes. How I had missed this. The Poet never sang his own verse — though he was unrestrained about belting out arias with much confidence and little talent — but sometimes my mother sang his words for him. She had an arresting voice, unashamed to use its own smokiness to haunting effect.

Mirza’s voice wasn’t arresting, but it was beautiful. Words leaped clear from his throat. ‘Subah kee shahadat…’ The martyrdom of morning? Absurdly self-indulgent poetic moment. I opened my eyes. He was weaving his hand through invisible air traffic, gaze fixed far ahead of him.

I leaned my head sideways against the wall, and settled in to listen to the words. It was a poem about childhood, about picking falsas off bushes with friends now dead. Nothing remarkable in most of it. Nostalgia, lyricism, imagery of red, round berries bursting with juices into young mouths, which added a sexual undercurrent that ran through the whole poem and — how obvious and how irritating — got picked up again, more strongly this time, in the inviting fruit with maggots at its core. But amidst the clichés were startling images — the acned boy imagining falsas swelling to ripeness under his skin; the youngest of the boys biting into the fruit to discover a tooth already embedded in a falsa; the boys stuffing falsas down their clothes and then clasping each other close, red stains spreading across the fronts of their white kameezes as they pulled away from the violent embrace.

Mirza stopped singing. ‘So what’s your verdict?’ he said.

‘You should have been a much better poet by now.’ I didn’t mean it unkindly and somehow he seemed to see that.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at his manicured fingernails. ‘I should have found a subject to replace all this content. There are some wonderful voices in Urdu poetry these days, despite everything. I’m not even in the second tier. You keep up with it at all? The world of Urdu versification?’

I shook my head. All that went out of my life when he did. I don’t even read his poetry any more, let alone anyone else’s.’

‘He.’ Mirza shook his head. ‘His fault. My failures, all his fault.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Mirza didn’t look at me. ‘I don’t deny he was the best teacher anyone could have hoped for. But his death, Aasmaani. His death taught me the price poets have to pay for their integrity. I saw that price up close, every shattered bone of it.’

‘You saw… you saw his body?’ This is what I had wanted to know from Mirza when I dialled his number, and now it was as though I were hearing the news of Omi’s death for the first time. In that instant it seemed possible — no, inescapable — that all those pages had been a hoax, and that ‘shattered beyond recognition’ had just been a turn of phrase to mean ‘badly injured’.

But then Mirza said one word, the only word I could have hoped for: ‘Unrecognizable.’

I released a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. ‘So it might not have been him,’ I said before I could stop myself.

Mirza shook his head. ‘His wallet was in his pocket, stuffed with all those little scraps of paper he used to jot lines of poetry on. And you could still… the size, the shape of him. And his doctor had medical records. They did tests. It was him. Why wouldn’t it be him? Why would anyone fake a poet’s death?’

‘The doctor died just weeks later.’

Mirza finally looked at me. ‘Aasmaani, don’t you think your mother and I would have clung to any conspiracy theory that allowed us to believe he was alive if there seemed even the slightest chance?’ He looked at his hands, turning them back to front. ‘I saw him. I saw what they did to him. When the family went to get his body from the morgue — distant family, third cousins at best, to whom he meant nothing — I was there. I was there outside, and I told one of them that I was the Poet’s illegitimate son. He believed me. They’d heard all sorts of stories about him — they would have believed anything. So they let me go with them into the morgue.’ He was still looking at his hands. The first part of him I saw was his hand.’

I put my own hand on top of his and squeezed. If only I trusted him just a little bit, I’d have told him the truth.

‘I never told your mother what he looked like. I didn’t want her to imagine what I had to remember. What I still remember. I looked at that hand, swollen, discoloured…’

Omi. Oh God, Omi.

It wasn’t him. Breathe, Aasmaani. It wasn’t him.

‘…that hand which had written the sweetest words of the age, and I knew, right then, that I would never dare try to be the poet he believed I could be. And so here I am now, a middle-aged hack. And you, the closest thing he had to a child, who remembered more of his poetry in your head when you were fourteen than even he or I or your mother could, you’re a media underling without enough information about ghazals to fill a five-minute segment.’ He shifted sideways in his chair, stretched his legs in front of him and gazed disconsolately at his toes. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only one who learned the value of certain silences.’

If they come home, what will they see when they look at me? A failure, a coward, a small-hearted creature.

I pressed the palm of my hand against the cold edge of the table, and turned to Mirza. ‘And what happened to your love affair with all those poets in love with God?’

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘God has become the most dangerous subject of all. I don’t even think of Him any more.’

‘Leave him in the hands of the extremists, is that your plan?’

I hoped to irritate him out of despondency, but he only shook his head.

I ran my hands along the edge of the glass-topped table. ‘The Poet never said you had to write about God or politics to be a good poet. He said, to be a good poet…’

‘…you must write good poetry. That’s all.’

‘You must have the freedom, even in times of war and barbarity…”

‘…to write of first love, or the taste of mangoes, or the sight of a turtle gliding over the sand after she’s laid her eggs.’ He lowered his head into his hands. ‘But I don’t want to write about any of those things. I want to write about his death, and how it killed me, and I’m too afraid to do that, so I just go on being dead.’

My brother, I thought. My twin, my alter ego, my brother. I touched him on the sleeve and he looked up.

‘All this emotion.’ He brought his hands together in front of his face and traced a globe, his hands separating at the North Pole, meeting again at the South. ‘How am I supposed to know how to react when you’re sitting here looking so much like the girl you once were and also so much like the woman your mother was when I first knew her and the world was ours to shape?’ He dragged the palms of his hand slowly down his fleshy cheeks. ‘And I was beautiful then.’ He caught my hand, brought it to his face and pressed my fingers down, beneath the layers of muscle and tissue, to where his sharply angled cheekbones still resided. ‘I felt so breakable after I saw the Poet’s corpse.’

‘Tell me about the funeral. Who was there?’

Mirza made a gesture of not knowing. ‘It was all done so quickly and quietly. I only knew about it because I was there when the relatives came for his body. The government’s instructions, I suppose. They didn’t want his funeral to start a riot. I was the only one there who really knew him. Even the schoolmaster’s brother’s family in Karachi weren’t informed. And the schoolmaster and the aunt, the only two people in the village who ever meant anything to him, were dead. So I was the only one mourning. It was awful.’

‘And who burnt his poems?’

Mirza flinched. ‘I don’t know. Some government lackeys.’ Then he looked at me and I was startled by the greed in his eyes. ‘Do you remember them? Any of them? Fragments, even?’