Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

‘Thrilling. A tissue box in episode two!’

‘The thrill isn’t in the tissue box. It’s in the fact that we reshoot the scene. We reshoot the final shot which has a newspaper in it.’

I took a closer look at the newspaper. It was open on the LOCAL NEWS page, which was largely dominated by a photograph of a burst sewer.

Aasmaani, you’re being uncharacteristically slow here. They won’t still have that old newspaper lying around. And even if they do, I’m going to go over while they’re reshooting — under the excuse that I want to make sure the tissue box is properly placed with its logo and brand name clearly showing — and pay whoever is in charge of set design or props or whatever the hell it is to place today’s newspaper in the scene instead.’ He picked up the morning paper from his desk and folded it to isolate the crossword. ‘Like that.’ I made a gesture of appeal, and he sighed and spoke very slowly. ‘Episode two will end with a shot that has the crossword clearly showing. The crossword grid will not be empty. Some clues will be filled in with bright red pen that draws your eye to it. Do. You. Understand?’

I looked from him to the crossword to the red pen he was holding out to me. I understood.

I took the pen from him.

‘Something simple,’ he said.

I tapped the pen on the back of my hand, its nib emerging and retracting. Something simple. In two of the across clues I wrote: JAZZ and FUGUES. Then I used the first letter of FUGUES to write FRASS vertically.

‘What are jazz fugues?’ Ed asked, watching over my shoulder.

‘He’ll know. Omi will know,’ I said, going over the letters one more time with the pen to ensure they’d stand out. I closed my eyes and leaned back. All I could hear was the twittering of a sparrow outside and my own heart. Omi would know, Omi would understand. And when he realized his words weren’t merely echoing into silence, he would start to write differently. He’d write clues to where he was. Sixteen years of being in a place, you must pick up some clues. A man as smart, as observant, as Omi, he couldn’t fail to pick up clues. He’d tell me how to find him, and then I’d bring him home.

I’d bring him home. He’d be home. Aged, yes. Frail, perhaps. Unaccustomed to the din of city life, no doubt. But his first day back, I would take him to the sea. Just Omi and me, walking through the sand towards the surf, taking turns to lead, taking turns to plant our feet into the other one’s footprints as we had been doing since the days when he had to stand on the tips of his toes in order not to stamp out my prints. He’d wade into the water, trailing his fingers — now swollen and misshapen from all the times the Minions had broken them — just below the surface, and he’d beckon me to come alongside him. As the first wave loomed ahead of us, we’d shout out together, leap up into its maw, bodies colliding with water, and in that sting, that slap, that wheeling over and floundering, we’d know ourselves to be alive again.

I stood up and put my arms around Ed’s neck. He lifted me off the ground and swung me around.

‘I’m going to speak to him, Ed. I’m going to speak to Omi. My Omi.’

‘Can we not talk about him all the time, please?’

I unlooped one arm from his neck and tweaked his ear. ‘Why, Mr Ed, are you jealous of a seventy-year-old man?’

Ed let go of me and I slipped to the ground, yanking his ear as I did so. We both cried out and glared at each other.

‘What?’ I said.

He picked up the crossword. ‘I’m going to go and find the director and get this taken care of.’

I caught hold of his sleeve as he started to walk away. ‘What? What is it?’

He looked at me and shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A tiny little thing, Aasmaani. You’ll never love me as long as you’re obsessed with the two of them.’

I loved him a little, right then.

‘Sometimes I want to burn them,’ he said. ‘When I have the envelopes in my hand, before I give them to you, sometimes I want to burn them.’

‘You can’t, you know you can’t. Ed, promise me.’

‘You don’t need a promise. You know I won’t. I can’t.’ He said that as though pronouncing a sentence on himself. Then he looking accusingly at me. ‘Even though you won’t tell me what “jazz fugues” means, I won’t burn them.’

I let go of his sleeve. ‘It’s the key to the code. It’s two words from the key. You want me to explain the whole thing to you?’

In response, he kissed me, holding my face between his hands, and everything else in the world ceased. When he finally pulled away his smile had nothing boyish about it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I just needed you to make the offer.’

Then he left with the crossword to find the director again.

When he was gone, I drew a long breath. Everything was falling into place, everything was falling. I made my way to my office, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as I walked. Suddenly it all seemed so precarious, no room for any mistakes. Is this how they felt — explorers in search of lost treasures when they saw the spot indicated by ‘X’ on the map and knew, finally, there was no stepping back? Were they surprised to find the exhilaration they expected replaced by dread?

I reached my office, sat down, and ran my hands along the cracks in the leather of the desk chair. Today it was cool enough to dispense with the fan, for the first time since I had joined STD, and without that whirring of the blades this room, with its tiny dimensions, felt even more sealed up than usual. Six weeks. Six weeks only since I first stepped into this office with Ed.

Could it really just be chance, everything that had happened since then? The questions worrying at the back of my mind were no longer irritants to be pushed aside. The Poet’s messages and I had moved into the world of reactions and consequences. Was it really possible that there was no ordering principle behind anything that had happened — the messages to Shehnaz, her guess that they were written in code, the intersection of her life with mine? Stranger things had happened by chance, it’s true. And yet, there was that possibility that I was being played. What game is being played with my life, Omi had asked. Whatever it was, was I now part of it? Had I been placed on the board myself? To what end? What was the purpose behind his captivity, what was the plan?

But even if I were part of the game, how could I act differently, how could I pass this opportunity by? If the explorers knew the treasure map was written by a malevolent hand, would that stop them from digging deep into the earth in search of what was buried? If the box they pulled out said ‘Property of Pandora’ would they, even then, find it in themselves to place it back in the earth, tear up the map and turn away?

To understand the game, you must understand the mind that created it. For all my amateur detective work I was no closer to doing that than I had been the day all this started. All I had done in these last weeks was make myself visible, my investigation into Omi’s death anything but a secret.

Now comes the gathering.

I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail. There were messages aplenty with the heading Boond . I read only a few before deleting them all. Did every person at STD feel the need to send an office-wide message about what their friends and relatives said about the show?

I leaned back in my chair. If my life were a top-rated television show, how would it go from here? I’d send a message to the Poet through a crossword puzzle. He’d realize his scribblings were getting through to me. He’d send messages back. Details of the flora, the fauna, the weather around him. He’d write about a brief but intense shower of rain. I’d find a weather-man. My next-door neighbour would happen to be a weather-man. I’d ask him, where did it rain yesterday, with a ferocity and brevity reminiscent of most passion. He’d say, there was one cloud only, right above this spot here on the map, that’s where it rained yesterday. And I’d tell no one, I’d enlist no aid, but I’d make my way to that spot, I’d face down the Minions, I’d rescue the Poet. And somewhere, far away, my mother would open a paper, hear of his return from the dead, and that would dissipate the amnesia she’d been suffering from these past fourteen years and she’d catch the next plane home.