Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘You live alone,’ he said.

With a quickness I didn’t know myself capable of I slammed the door shut and locked it.

There was no sound from the other side of the doorway, but when I stepped back I could see, in that slice of space beneath the door, his feet, unmoving. Then, there came a gentle rapping on my door, of knuckles that knew they didn’t have to exert any strength to achieve their effect.

‘Madam,’ said the soft voice. ‘I only want you to see this.’

A paper slid beneath the door and stopped at my feet.

I picked it up. Amidst columns of words, a colour picture of a man lying on the ground, his head cradled in blood.

I knew, right away, that they’d intercepted Omi’s letters. Intercepted them, and killed him. And now they were here just to tell me what they had done. That was all they needed to do to me.

The caption beneath the picture said: DON’T LET THIS BE YOU.

The voice behind the door warned, ‘Madam, it won’t take long.’

‘You bastards.’ No fear, only rage.

‘Madam?’

And then I looked down at the paper in my hand again. SECURE-CITY SECURITY said the words at the top of the page.

It was a newsletter from a private security company, one recently hired to manage the block of flats. A circular sent around the building had said representatives of the company would be stopping by to speak to all tenants, on an individual basis.

There was suddenly no strength in my legs and I had to lean all my weight against the wall.

‘Madam?’ And now the voice was concerned.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. My lips felt numb. ‘Please come back later.’

‘Sorry to bother.’ Footsteps moved away from the door. Then they stopped and the man’s voice said, ‘Be assured, we will be watching at all times.’

The footsteps started again — towards, and down, the stairs.

Just the security man, I told myself. But why hadn’t he stopped next to knock on Rabia and Shakeel’s door? I leaned over the balcony and looked down. Ten, eleven seconds went by. He was talking to the downstairs neighbours, no doubt. But then he stepped out of the stairway, into the driveway, his small hands lighting up a cigarette, and walked towards the gate, without stopping at any other flat along the way.

I ran inside and called one of the neighbours.

‘The security man?’ she said. ‘Oh, there’ve been many of them through the day. I got my visit this afternoon while I was asleep, 9D was woken up at seven a.m. to get her briefing. What nonsense is this? Why not just have the whole block get together and tell us in one shot?’

This is not sinister, I told myself, putting down the phone. None of this is sinister.

I lay awake at night repeating that thought over and over, and when I finally slept I dreamed of pushing my way through tangled weeds in murky water, ahead of me a bend in the river which would lead to sun-dappled waters and herons in flight if I could only swim clear of the little hands which wrapped themselves around my limbs.

The following morning, when I walked into STD, there was a palpable air of victory about the place. Telephones, e-mails, websites, internet chat rooms, newspapers — praise for Shehnaz Saeed’s comeback had choked all mediums of communication. So today, the first day most of us were back after the Eid holidays, the ground floor had the air of a school hallway in the intense flicker of time between lessons. All the previous night’s fears seemed absurd.

‘Did you see, yaar, that moment? Oh my God, that moment.’

‘The one when Shehnaz…?

‘Yeah, yeah. Man, wow.’

‘Who taped it? I need to see the whole thing again. That look when she sees the daughter.’

‘Taped it? Taped it? Oh, ehmuk, we work for STD. We’re in the building with the original tapes.’

And then the knot of people dissolved into near-hysterical laughter.

How had Shehnaz played the moment when she sees the daughter?

A door opened and Kiran Hilal held her fingers up in victory. ‘Pulled it off, didn’t we?’ She danced, unexpectedly sinuously, across the floor. Then she stopped, mid-gyration, and turned to me. ‘Any idea why Ed’s taken a rough cut of the second episode? He’s not going to start interfering, is he? They say he’s a little strange when it comes to his mother.’

I shook my head, shrugged and then ran to find Ed. At some point in the middle of the night I had woken to realize, for the first time, the full impact of what it meant for Omi to be watching Boond . It had taken every atom of self-restraint within me not to call Ed and demand to know his plan but instead to do what he had asked and give him until the morning.

As I rounded into the hallway, I saw Ed standing outside his office watching Boond ’s director stalking away from him. Halfway down the hall, the director turned around — as though she’d just thought up a punchline — and said, ‘It’s prostitution.’

‘No, it’s a box of tissues,’ Ed replied with elaborate patience, and the director stormed her way past me.

Ed came down the hall towards me, caught me around the waist and waltzed me down to his office.

‘What?’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Product placement, baby,’ he said, closing the office door behind him and picking up a box of A-TISHOO tissues from his desk. He twirled the box on the tip of his fingers. ‘The day after Boond aired I got a call from an old classmate of mine who works in marketing at the company that produces these luxurious, two-ply wisps of heaven.’ He pulled one tissue after another out of the box and threw them in the air. ‘And my friend said, “Ed, yaar, remember how you asked me if we wanted to buy spots to advertise our wares during Boond and I said no? Well, mea mucho culpa. Is it too late? Can we still get in there? We’ll pay double the rates.” And I said, “Ali, yaar, I don’t think so.”’

‘Punchline, please.’

‘Punchline is this. Last night, after reading the decrypted pages, I thought — product placement. Why not? Instead of giving A-TISHOO a spot during the ad breaks, why not have their product placed in every home and every office and every back seat of every car in the Boond universe? And make the folks at A-TISHOO pay through their running noses for it.’

‘You read Omi’s pages and it made you think of how to generate revenue for STD?’

He threw the last of the tissues at me. ‘Don’t be silly. Look, watch this. It’s the last scene of episode two, to be aired in four days. Obviously, we can’t reshoot the whole episode to include tissue boxes in every scene. But we can make a start.’ As he was speaking he ushered me into his desk chair and pressed some combination of keys on his computer keyboard.

An interior shot appeared on the computer screen. Some generic living room, so tastefully decorated it was entirely without personality. The only sign that it wasn’t just a show-room in a furniture store was a newspaper carelessly tossed on the coffee table. There was the sound of a door opening. Then someone — the camera didn’t show us who — walked into the room and placed something on the coffee table. The figure turned and walked out. The camera panned back to the table. There, lying on top of the newspaper, was a faded picture of Shehnaz Saeed, her on-screen ex-husband and their infant daughter — Shehnaz’s eyes had been poked out.

Ed pressed another key and the picture stilled.

‘The black magic storyline?’ I said.

‘Forget the storyline. This is the last shot of the episode. This is the shot on which the episode “freezes” as the credits roll. Don’t you see? It would take very little effort to reshoot the scene. They’re still using those interiors for the new episodes. They can reshoot the scene, with a tissue box placed on the coffee table, and have it ready in time for the second episode to be aired.’