Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

I was more than happy to leave the restaurant and forestall any conversations that might lead to me airing my suspicions. Ridiculous, I was being ridiculous. Beema said I could trust her, and Beema’s instincts were always better than mine.

Although, really, my instincts were to trust her, too. When I was in her company I couldn’t imagine her involved in any form of deception. It was only away from her, when I looked at the evidence, and remembered the moments in which Ed had spoken of his mother as a creature of overwhelming narcissism that I wondered, was all that sweetness just an act?

If so, it was such a good act that even now I was far more convinced by it than not. It was easier to believe Shehnaz Saeed was being manipulated than to see her spinning webs of deceit in which she and her son and I were bound.

Ed paid the waiter, batting away my attempts to reach for my purse, and we left the restaurant. Both of us were quiet as we drove away, a distracted but comfortable quiet. My hand rested on his shoulder, and when his left hand wasn’t changing gears it reached up to caress my fingers. Soft music drifted out of the open windows — the artist was a singer I’d never heard before who threatened in every track to cross the line which separates mellow from soporific, but never actually did.

When he pulled up outside my flat, I said, ‘Will you come up?’

‘Of course. But not tonight.’ He pulled me into a swift kiss — there were neighbours walking down the driveway towards us and even that brief liplock felt risqué—and drew away, grinning like a boy who’s run through a stranger’s kitchen and stolen a hash brownie. ‘Ask me tomorrow. By then I may be your hero.’

‘All I really want is a toyboy,’ I said, stepping out of the car and blowing him a kiss.

He drove away with a screech that was entirely for the benefit of the neighbours.

I was smiling on my way up the stairs when I bumped into Rabia, Shakeel and Dad, headed down.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Rabia complained. ‘Dad’s plane leaves in an hour. We have to get to the airport.’

I looked guiltily at my father. Yesterday, after I’d locked myself in my bedroom, I hadn’t come out for hours, and when I did I refused to talk to Dad about anything to do with my mother. And so our interaction in the last twenty-four hours had returned to centring around cricket and home repairs. He’d spent much of the day correcting the imbalance of my bookshelf, oiling rusty hinges and doing something elaborate with the pipes under my sink which hadn’t yet given me cause to complain. In the evening he’d gone with Rabia and Shakeel to have a look at the renovations being done on the house, and I’d said I would cook dinner for the three of them when they returned. But then Ed arrived to whisk me away and I’d left a note saying, ‘Sorry. Forgot prior commitment. Rain-check?’

‘I didn’t realize you were leaving tonight.’

‘I can stay until tomorrow if you’d like,’ he said.

‘No. No. I’d just be keeping you from Beema. She needs you right now.’

‘Well, you’re coming to the airport, aren’t you?’ Rabia said to me, her tone belligerent.

I was still looking at my father. The boy who played ‘chicken’ on the streets of Karachi with Mama. One drunken evening, I had been talking to some friends at university and said, ‘Not that I’ve ever imagined my conception, of course, but I’m sure it occurred entirely by accident. My mother must have bumped into my father in the dark as their paths crossed somewhere in the vicinity of the linen closet.’

They never stood a chance as a couple, that had always been clear. But since talking to Dad the evening before I had been able to believe that for a moment they — not just he — might not have known that. And, in that moment, perhaps, I happened.

‘Airport goodbyes are horrible,’ Dad said. He came down the stairs until he was standing just beneath me and we were the same height. He put his arms around me. ‘We’re not done talking. I’m just giving you a pause.’ He kissed my cheek and released me. When he got to the bottom of the steps he turned around again. ‘If she were alive, she’d let you know. She loved you.’

After they’d driven away, I went upstairs and sat on the low cement wall that surrounded my balcony, my back pressed against the building’s edifice. The temperature had dipped sharply and there was nothing except a shawl between my short-sleeved cotton shalwar-kameez and the glass-and-tinsel air.

Yes, she loved me. All the years in which she went off with Omi, she loved me. But then he died and she broke that habit. I could never explain that to Dad or Beema or Rabia. I could never say — you want to know what I think happened to her? All right. All right. Here it is: she saw the falseness in everything she had believed. She saw the futility — in activism, in protest, in peaceful resistance, in all those things she had built her identity around. So she decided to un-become the woman she had been for so long. That’s what happened to my mother. She cast off her own skin, and became someone else, someone opposite. It took time, but she was patient, and determined. My God, was she determined. She would let go of everything that held her to her past self. Everything, including me. And when she saw that she couldn’t do that here, because this place and all of us had too many memories of the woman she used to be, she left. She and Omi, they knew so many people who had to vanish from the country, leaving no trace of where they’d gone. She knew it could be done. She knew how to do it.

I could never explain that to my family because there was, within all of them, nothing that would allow them to believe such a monstrous act was possible.

She never deceived herself about the brutality of what she was doing. That’s why she wept as she did when Rabia confronted her with her selfishness. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she kept on. That’s why she had never come back. Because she knew what she had done was unforgivable. She realized it even before she left. Those days she was reduced to an almost coma-like state, lying in bed, her eyes fixed on nothing. Those were the days she was paralysed by the horror of her own decision. She knew exactly what she was doing, and the price she was exacting from all of us who loved her. And she knew, also, that the price she was exacting from herself was this: that she couldn’t change her mind. She couldn’t come back and say, sorry for what I put you through, but here I am and everything’s OK.

But here’s the thing, Mama: you can. I’ll forgive you.

I pulled the shawl closer and for the first time in my life I wondered if I could really do that. Could I forgive her who I had become since her departure?

Would I forgive her if she came back for Omi after all those years in which she didn’t come back for me?

This habit of blame, had it become an addiction, the defining feature of my character? If she came back, would I find it impossible to rein in the momentum of my incessant accusations? Would I find it necessary to interpret her every act as a sign of betrayal or desertion?

Questions without answers. My life seemed filled with them these days.

But Omi would give me all the answers. He’d come back and teach me how to be the girl I could have been. He’d teach me how to step forward instead of circling old wounds. He’d teach me that — and I’d teach Ed the same.

The door-bell rang, and I smiled. Dad was notorious for discovering, halfway to the airport, some crucial item he’d left behind.

But when I opened the door there was an unfamiliar man standing there. His hands were much too small for his body. I noticed this right away and I can’t say why but it struck me as threatening.