Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

It was the subtlest glance that they exchanged then, my mother and sister (because that’s what they were, after all — never mind the steps- and the halfs-), but in it I saw a baton being passed, some responsibility for me transferring from Beema to Rabia. Beema saw that I had seen it and moved quickly into briskness.

‘Well, whatever he’s called, I hope he’s going to give you proper work that makes use of your abilities, not just this quiz show rubbish you’re pretending to be happy about.’

‘Beema, I don’t have abilities. I have acts of desperation which land me in occupations I couldn’t care less about.’ And then, because I was angry about that glance, ‘I told you I just want to take a few months off to do nothing. That’s why I quit the oil company. I don’t even know why I let you interfere.’

She sat down on my bed. ‘You never do nothing. You brood. And I don’t like the thought of you living alone and brooding with Rabia off at work all day and Shakeel locked up in his studio.’

‘I think you overestimate the importance of your presence on my sanity,’ I said, sitting down next to her.

She stroked my hair. ‘I fuss. I know. I can’t help it. It’s what mothers do.’

‘No, it’s what you do.’ I put my arms around her, resting my forehead on her shoulder. ‘Don’t stay away too long, OK?’

As soon as I said it, I realized the awfulness of the demand. Beema was going to Islamabad because her mother was dying. She was going to Islamabad to watch her mother die and know herself incapable of reversing or stalling the process. No amount of love or pleading, no promises or entreaties, could slow the decay of that body of which she had once been a part.

‘Now, don’t say anything silly,’ Beema said, as I lifted up my head to apologize. ‘I know what you mean. And don’t you start worrying about me. I’m not ready for that role-reversal yet. Oh listen, jaan, don’t look so sad. Watching someone die gives you a new way of learning to love them. Imagine, knowing someone for five and a half decades and at the end of that finding a new way to love them. It’s an extraordinary thing.’

Sometimes the sadness of the world can appear beautiful. That was what Beema knew and Rabia, without experience of wrenching loss, believed. It gave them the strength to hold out their arms to grief, their own or anyone else’s.

Do you want me to come with you? Will it help if I’m there? I almost asked Beema as I had almost asked so often these last few days that it almost seemed a matter of habit now to leave it unsaid.

A few hours later, they were gone. Dad and Beema on their way to the airport, Rabia having tea at her in-laws’ house. This was worse than the blankness of the morning, the emptiness vaster because it had sprung up where three people I loved had stood just a few minutes ago.

Rabia lives just through that doorway, I had to remind myself.

I walked through the flat, counting my footsteps from one end of the lounge to a corner of my bedroom, then counting them again from the kitchen to the front door. Such silence. In Dad and Beema’s house there was always some sound — Beema on the telephone, the cook yelling at the gardener, the neighbours’ dog barking, men pushing wooden carts piled with old tins and bottles calling out to announce their presence, whether searching for buyers or sellers I never knew. But here, three storeys up from the world, the windows closed — nothing. All this space and just me to fill it.

I walked over to the boxes of books which surrounded the empty bookshelf in the living room, and opened the one marked ‘REF’. On the top was the dictionary I’d had since I was a child. I closed my eyes, opened the book, and ran my fingers down the page. Opened my eyes. My finger was halfway down the definition of COMBUST. I flipped past CONTRA MUNDUM and CORUSCATE and CUMULAS until I reached CURRENT.

I pulled out all my reference books, moved over to the coffee table, sat on the ground, switched on my laptop and loaded my encyclopaedia software. Currents. I knew something of them already.

I knew the currents of the oceans include the Agulhas, the Hunboldt and the Benguela, I knew currents move in gyres, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern hemisphere. I knew the Poet had told me, years ago, that if we could only view the motion of currents as metaphors for the gyres of history — or the gyres of history as metaphors for the motion of currents — we’d know the absurdity of declaring the world is divided into East and West. I knew my mother’s voice at the beach, cautioning me against undercurrents.

I looked up into the emptiness around me, and was suddenly very grateful that I had an office to go to every day.

A week later, long past midnight, I sat cross-legged in my lounge, watching the shadow-dance of leaves and stems on the window panes. The Xylem and Phloem troupe.

This lounge was my favourite room in the flat. Not for the minimal furnishings (one two-seat sofa, one bean bag, one low coffee table, one bookshelf which tilted forward if you put too many books in it) or the large red and beige rug or the flower-patterned curtains. None of these features — inherited from the previous tenants — held any appeal for me. But I loved the broad windows along the width of one wall, looking out on to the balcony with its profusion of plants and, beyond that, past two rows of buildings too low to obstruct the view from my third-floor vantage point, the sea.

When the touch of a hibiscus tongue sent the money-plant reeling back in anguished pleasure, I understood the performance had reached its crescendo, and turned my attention back to the blank screen of the laptop on the low table in front of me, beside an encyclopaedia opened to ‘I’. I wrote:

Which is the oldest poetic form still in popular use?

a) haiku

b) ghazal

c) sonnet

d) tendi

Answer: b

I had reached that question via the entry on IAMBIC PENTAMETER, which led into a memory of the Poet’s irritation when he read an English scholar’s claim that the sonnet was the oldest extant form.

I flipped the pages of the encyclopaedia and was trying to think of a question which would have as its optional answers my four favourite mediaeval Ibns — Ibn Khaldun (which mediaeval historian wrote Muqadammah , which expresses many of the thoughts of modern sociology?), Ibn Battutah (which mediaeval traveller covered 75,000 miles from Spain to China, Tambouctou to Russia, and left behind written accounts of his journeys?), Ibn Sina (which mediaeval philosopher and physician wrote Kitab-ash-Shifa , covering a range of subjects including metaphysics, Aristotelian logic, psychology and natural sciences?), Ibn-al Nafis (which mediaeval physician was the first to explain pulmonary circulation, in Shark Tashrih al-Qanun? ) — when there came a knock on the newly fitted door that connected Rabia and Shakeel’s flat to my flat (I had already started thinking of it as mine, even though it really belonged to Rabia and Shakeel; they’d bought it some weeks ago in expectation of a future in which their family would double in size and make their one-bedroom flat seem cramped. My timing in needing a place to stay had merely been fortuitous.)

I tossed a tennis ball at the door, signalling my willingness to be sociable, and Rabia walked in, yawning.

‘How’s it going?’ she said, sitting down next to me.

‘I’ve discovered all sorts of fascinating things about I Ching , the Ibibio, and the many suffixes that can be added on to “icthy-”. You want to hear? It’s gripping stuff.’