Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t tell me “Nothing.”’ His voice was shaking with anger. ‘It can’t be nothing. Tell me what they taught us.’

‘They taught us to fight only with words. The words of an individual poet, or the words of a gathering of thousands chanting their slogans of protests.’

Mirza made a noise that would have been a laugh if it wasn’t so humourless. Here we both were, Mama and Omi’s heirs, drowning in words. We each had thousands at our disposal. And I suspected that Mirza could still see, as I did, that they were right — words continued to be both the battleground and the weapon. Mirza and I could recognize, as well as they ever did, the outrage in the discrepancy between ‘what is’ and ‘what is claimed’. But Mirza and I would do nothing about it. We would do nothing because we knew that in our refusal to fight for language with bombs or lies lay our defeat. No, it was nothing so grand as that. We knew how voices could be silenced. We knew that most shameful secret which Mama and Omi had tried so hard to keep from us: violence is more powerful than language.

‘So we lose,’ I said.

‘So we are lost.’ Mirza looked past me out of the window and I knew he wasn’t seeing the fairy lights outside, or even the sky.

We sat there in silence until it became unbearable. And then I left. As I drove away I could see him silhouetted against the window, still looking outside, seeing my mother and the Poet, and seeing himself, too, that version of himself that had existed when he still thought he was unbreakable.

Omi, how will your heart survive everything that has happened here in your absence?

The following morning was Eid. Despite everything that had happened the previous evening, I woke up smiling. Not true. I woke up, first, with a feeling of panic. A month of rising at dawn made waking in broad daylight feel like a transgression. But then I remembered, oh yes, Ramzan’s over. It’s Eid.

Eid had always been the day when I was simply Beema and Dad’s daughter, Rabia’s sister. The Poet was dismissive of organized religion (‘The more I sin, the more God will want me in heaven where he can keep an eye on me,’ he’d said in one of his more inflammatory interviews) and my mother said it seemed false to celebrate Eid when she hadn’t fasted, so even when they were in Karachi I never saw them on that day. And so Eid became, for me, the one day of the year when I could take a break from being her daughter and look around the table at Beema’s relatives, who descended on us en masse for lunch, and think, this sanity is, but for a technicality, my family.

Year after year, Eid in Dad and Beema’s house followed a pattern as unvarying and comforting as the progression of the moon from sliver to sphere marked with dark seas and craters. We’d wake up early — though it seemed late compared to the dawn rising — and someone (usually Beema) would hold up the morning papers to let us know that once again ritual had been maintained and the papers had prophetically announced that Eid would be celebrated ‘with fervour, festivity’. Before long, the house would fill with the smells of Eid lunch being cooked in the kitchen, and my father would give Rabia and me kulfis on sticks, bought the day before at Sony Sweets, and take us for a drive to get us out of Beema’s way as she made her elaborate feast. This was how Dad liked to celebrate Eid. Driving with his daughters, Indian film songs from long ago blasting through the speakers, consuming food in public for the first time in a month. He was always too lost in the music to communicate, so before long whoever was in the passenger seat would get tired of twisting around to talk to her sister and would clamber into the back seat.

Then, Rabia and I would categorize everyone we passed on Karachi’s streets. Men whose white shalwar-kameezes were creased in a way that showed they’d been kneeling and prostrating at morning prayers; women whose harried tailors had only finished stitching their clothes late the night before and still hadn’t quite got it right, leaving the women to tug at the seams around their armpits or pull up the neckline which revealed just a little too much skin; couples, stiff-backed and silent in cars, who had just been arguing about which relatives they had to call on and how long they had to stay; Parsis; drivers sent out by frantic housewives to find that one missing ingredient needed for today’s lunch, in a city where all the shops were closed for the holiday; children disgusted with their parents for running late, because it meant skipping visits to relatives known to be generous with Eidi. Every so often, when we saw someone who didn’t fit into any category and who had an air of general dissatisfaction (as opposed to all those with Eid-specific dissatisfaction) we’d whisper to each other, ‘Atheist.’ I knew atheists aplenty, thanks to the Poet, but it always seemed possible to forget that on Eid mornings and regard the unbelievers as strange creatures whose afflictions could not be spoken of out loud.

We’d return home in time to greet the mid-morning callers, and every year, without fail, there was a moment of panic between Beema and my father when some distant relatives who hadn’t been invited for lunch dropped in to say Eid Mubarak and looked as though they planned to stay beyond the consumption of savaiyan and the distribution of Eidi (‘prize money for being young’, my mother used to call it). When the suspense of their unknown intentions grew too much to bear Beema would say, ‘Of course, you’re staying for lunch,’ and then they’d turn red, get up quickly, say no, no, and start to leave, whereupon Beema would get so embarrassed about appearing to force them out (though that was, of course, exactly her intention) that she’d plead with them to stay, plead so intently that they would grow quite confused, unable to discern what protocol demanded of them. But then — blessedly — they’d remember that, no, they really were expected somewhere else, and couldn’t possibly stay for lunch without offending whoever had invited them. When they said that everyone’s shoulders would slump in relief, and the relatives would leave, and for a few minutes we’d believe they were really lovely people, next year we should invite them. Then the lunch guests would arrive — about fifteen or twenty of them — and gossip and eat for hours. After they’d left, we’d lock the gate from outside so it appeared no one was home, and settle down to watch a video, some romantic comedy usually, since Beema always got to choose it as recompense for the effort she’d put into getting the lunch organized.

This year, with Beema in Islamabad, Rabia had taken over the responsibility of the family lunch, and as I was still lying in bed enjoying the light streaming in between the curtains, I heard her push through the connecting door and yell, ‘Smaani! Help! There are six disasters already, and one of them involves the Tyrant!’ The Tyrant was one of Beema’s aunts, and I knew immediately that the disaster was related to the Tyrant’s decision, three years earlier, that she would climb no more stairs. Concomitant with this decision came her discovery of her love for ice-cream, and the sprightly slip of a woman had now transformed into a great mass of lethargy who caused many a marital row in the family when husbands declared that at the next family gathering someone else could help hoist the chair in which the Tyrant got carried up the stairs. And Rabia’s flat was on the third floor.

I got out of bed, laughing. And then I continued laughing all through the morning and afternoon, as I helped Rabia and Shakeel prepare lunch, spoke to Beema and Dad who had tales of two mobile phones destroyed in one evening during Dad’s attempt to demonstrate the principles of aerodynamics to one of his neighbours, and then received the relatives (the men and women resolving the crisis by taking it in shifts to carry the Tyrant up the stairs]. I even managed to remain in good humour while being lectured about my unmarried state by old great-aunts who didn’t allow the absence of blood ties between us to stand in the way of their familial right to lecture me. ‘You could die a virgin]’ the Tyrant said, clutching my hand. ‘It happened to a cousin of mine. And she, poor woman, was married.’ All the women of her age nodded, some of them whispering the name of the cousin to each other with hands covering the side of their mouths to protect the identity of the dead woman, while the younger generations looked for a place to hide their embarrassment, the uncles started talking very loudly about cricket and the new government, and Shakeel sprinted into his studio, from where we could hear him explode into laughter.