Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘And he comes up to me and slams the book down on the table in front of me, flipping it open to a page which his thumb had been marking. And I see it’s an Urdu dictionary he’s holding. And he says — Amma, tell her.’

‘He says,’ her voice turned squeaky, its rhythms truncated, ‘“I’ve found your dirty secret. You TV people with your loose morals. Why Boond of all names, I wondered. Why a drop of rain? What sort of title is this? And now I see you’re having your vulgar jokes at the country’s expense.’ And he points to the definition of Boond and — even I didn’t know this, Aasmaani. In addition to rain or blood, which is what Kiran had in mind when she came up with the title, it also means—’

‘Semen,’ I finished.

‘You knew?’ Ed laughed.

‘Of course. One of the Poet’s early ghazals has “boond” as the radif. It also means spotted silk, by the way.’

‘We must talk about his poetry one day,’ Shehnaz Saeed said. ‘It would be such a pleasure to discuss it with you.’

As she said it, I imagined calling her up to say I was coming over to discuss poetry, and then leading Omi into this house with me. The look on Shehnaz Saeed’s face.

She had walked ahead of us into the lounge, and Ed was about to follow when I caught hold of his hand and squeezed it. He looked away as though he couldn’t bear my hopefulness. He didn’t quite believe Omi could still be alive and I knew, as though he’d whispered it into my ear one night so that it made its way into my dreams, that he couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to me if I had to face Omi’s death again. The sweetness of Shehnaz Saeed’s character resided in Ed, too, but in a concentrate at his very core. I rubbed my thumb along the back of his palm and he looked at me, eyes grave.

For a moment I thought he was going to say something and then he shook his head and we walked through the doorway into the room of Bukhara rug, Gandhara Buddhas and muted elegance which I had seen through the partially open door my first time in this house. On the walls were prints of Indian landscapes and monuments etched by English artists from the colonial era.

Shehnaz Saeed switched on the television, and put it on mute. There were only a few minutes to go before the start of Boond . ‘I’m so nervous I might throw up,’ she said, sitting down on a plush cream sofa. ‘I never used to be this nervous about watching myself.’

‘You’ll be fabulous.’ Ed sat down next to her. ‘You are Shehnaz Saeed. How could you not be fabulous?’

She looked up at him in surprised gratitude.

He can do and say anything he wants, I thought, and she won’t stop loving him. He’ll always be her baby boy. For all his faults, she’ll blame herself; not him. That knowledge made me tired, and again I thought of leaving. But Ed reached out and caught hold of my hand, right there with his mother watching, as though to say, no backing out now. We’re official.

Difficult, but worth it — that’s how my mother had once described life with Omi. I could see myself saying that about Ed.

As I sat down, still holding Ed’s hand, I caught Shehnaz Saeed looking over at us, and I thought I saw some wistfulness there, but not unhappiness. I wondered if she’d been in love with any of those other men Ed had talked about.

‘So you want to hear about the travails of my month?’ Ed asked. ‘Dictionary man aside. My mother’s already sat through part of the story.’

‘Oh, I’m more than happy to hear it again. Go bring the camera so Aasmaani can see the pictures.’

Ed nodded and left the room.

‘Now, I’m not one of those mothers who interferes in her son’s relationships,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, leaning over to me and lowering her voice. ‘So I’ll say only this. I’m glad it’s you. I’m glad enough to give you this piece of advice: what you did back there — standing up for me when he started to attack me — don’t do that again.’

‘I wasn’t standing up for you. I was objecting to his bad manners.’

‘Whatever it was. I’ve been the stumbling block in every relationship he’s had. Don’t stumble over me, Aasmaani. Kick me out of the way if you must, but don’t stumble over me. I’m so tired of being the reason for his loneliness.’

‘You feel guilty about him, don’t you?’

‘I wasn’t the mother I should have been.’

‘You could have done what my mother did. Sent him away to be raised by someone more fitting.’

Shehnaz straightened up, almost offended, it seemed. ‘Samina loved you.’

‘Abstractly.’

‘Relentlessly.’

‘For her, loving the Poet was addictive. Loving me was merely habit-forming.’

‘What is it with you children? Don’t you understand that lovers can never be to us what you are? You don’t occupy the same space.’ She stopped and raised her eyebrows. ‘That sounded really vulgar, didn’t it?’

‘I wasn’t going to be the one to mention it.’ I laughed and pointed to the clock. ‘The show’s about to begin.’

Ed came back into the room, carrying a digital camera. He had just started to cycle through the pictures, sitting next to me, his arm around my shoulder, when there was a cry of expectation from Shehnaz Saeed. Ed raised the volume. Shehnaz Saeed’s come-back began.

Within the first few minutes it was obvious that Boond would not send critics scrambling for their thesauruses, as had happened with Kiran and Shehnaz’s first collaboration, nearly two years ago, which the newspapers proclaimed ‘a miracle, a revelation and possibly a hallucination’.

But, although Boond was clearly not going to inspire the same sort of outpouring, it was solid, eminently watchable, with the occasional marvellous moment. The Mistress’s Daughter could actually act, and the only disappointment was the one I’d dubbed Once-Leading, Now-Trailing man, who looked strangely uncomfortable, as though too aware that this might be his last chance to restore his reputation as an actor of subtlety and depth.

And then. Shehnaz Saeed stepped on to the screen and into a flashback. I hated flashbacks in television shows — everyone seen through a soft-filter lens to make them appear younger — but even so I caught my breath at how the lighting turned her back into the woman I remembered from the days of Lady Macbeth. The flashback occurred in Shehnaz Saeed’s mind as she lands in Karachi — from where, we don’t know — and we see her returning in her memory to the early days of her marriage, Once-Leading walking with her along the beach, an anatomically unlikely bulge under her kameez denoting her pregnancy. It was the worst kind of flashback — sappy music drowned out all conversation as the young couple wandered barefoot in the sand, shadows falling across their path with the exhausted air of overused metaphors. Compared to the light touch evidenced in the rest of the episode, it should have been laughable. And yet. Something remarkable happened in that scene: Shehnaz Saeed. I couldn’t believe that just minutes earlier Ed had snapped at her and, despite her dignity, she had seemed reduced, weak, when he did that.

On screen, she was remarkable. She turned away from Once-Leading and held her face up to the breeze, and in her expression she told us everything about her desire to feel the clichéd happiness that this scene demanded and her inability to stop yearning for something beyond this moment. And Once-Leading, who had been moving through his lines like a man weary of wasting his talents, suddenly started to act. He was madly in love, hopelessly daring to dream that she was in love with him too. An echo of their long-ago performance as the Macbeths flickered through them, not enough to be distracting but enough to make us feel that anything could happen from here — regicide, insanity, love, hauntings.