Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

So don’t spend the life that remains to you in a search for me. I can see too easily how you would do that, destroying your own chance at happiness. Put this paper down, and step out to embrace someone near enough to embrace.

Let it be whoever it is, I will accept it. Let it be Shehnaz.

They were right all along, the poets who redefined the Raqeeb. Not just a rival in love but, as a consequence of being a rival in love, also a twin soul, an alter ego, the only one who understands what it means to be afflicted with love for the Beloved.

I used to see the way she looked at you, all those years, and I knew exactly what it meant because wasn’t it how I looked at you, too?

That first time you met her, during the rehearsals of Laila , you said: I hear you do a remarkable imitation of him.

Yes, she said, and she took a strand of your hair between her finger and thumb just as I had done a few minutes earlier. Your two pairs of eyes locked and just before you laughed and turned away, there was an instant when I saw a possibility occur to you which had never occurred to you before.

How well she must know you, how intimately, to have captured you so perfectly on-screen in those heart-stopping moments. And now here she is helping you to send messages to me, though it must kill her to imagine my return.

Am I right about this?

I suspect I am. The surprise of it all is that I feel no jealousy, only a great tenderness for Shehnaz, a desire to sit and talk with her, to grow maudlin in the moonlight discussing your charms. You would not stay for such a conversation, you would not countenance such sentimentality. But Shehnaz would revel in it. Yes, if there must be a Raqeeb then let it be Shehnaz.

Oh, love, I am awash with tenderness now.

Your eyes, your mouth, the taste of you.

Samina, how lucky we have been.

Ed’s bedroom window looked down on the garden. Bougainvillea grew along the boundary wall, though not to such a height that it could obscure the palm trees next door. A boy climbed one of the trees, barefoot, his shalwar rolled above his knee. I watched him until he disappeared into the leaves and darkness. Seconds elapsed, and a green coconut dropped down into — I knew though I couldn’t see it — a pair of hands waiting below.

Coconut thieves. Some crimes have such charm attached to them.

I lifted the pages and read the last sentence as though it were a prayer.

Hfanof, jkm gpesb mc jfzc tcco.

Samina, how lucky we have been.

He had written her name in ash before my eyes. Everything I write can be reduced to one word. And what was that one word to him? It was language become music. Samina. In it, the timbres of love, jealousy, rage, friendship, admiration, passion, hurt and adoration came together in a single pitch. These qualities didn’t exist side by side, didn’t vie for supremacy, didn’t form separate narratives which confounded his attempt to settle on a single definition of her. He knew better than to make such an attempt.

Omi. My Raqeeb, my rival, my father, my twin.

She loved you, always. You’re right about that.

And me, what about me?

Then, this memory:

I have my arms around my mother. It’s just after I’ve been screaming at her for not going to the rally in Lahore. My screams have exhausted into tears. She strokes my hair .

‘Don’t think I don’t know the horrors of adolescence, Aasmaani. One day we’ll raise a glass, you and I, to having survived these concurrent, awful periods in our lives. ‘

A glass of what, Mama?

A glass of air, sweetheart. We’ll drink buoyancy .

Ed stood up from his desk chair and walked towards me. ‘Have you finished?’ he said.

Love deeply and passionately. Love foolishly.

I held out a hand to him, and when he took it I pulled him down into a deep kiss. Everything else could wait.

‘Aasmaani.’ His face, when I touched it, was hot. ‘If what you’re feeling right now is because of what you’ve just read, then I can’t. I can’t take advantage of that.’

‘Of course you can’t, Ed. You can’t take advantage when you’re the one being seduced.’

He laughed and lay down, his arms around me. ‘You can’t seduce someone who wants you so desperately.’

I sat up and pulled off my kameez. ‘We could argue definitions all night, or we could think of some other way to pass the time.’

‘OK. What’s Ginkgo Biloba?’

I lay down on top of him and it was with a satisfaction that came from far within that I felt his fingers move up my spine. ‘A character from Lord of the Rings?’

I didn’t feel the earth move that night. I didn’t feel the boundaries of the universe dissolve. I didn’t feel a single cliché. What I felt was abandon. Not sexual abandon — we played it safe, too aware of the specificities of each body’s desire and too aware also of how our bodies were all but strangers to each other; in those moments when we allowed our past lovers’ proclivities to guide us what ensued was disaster saved only by humour. (‘I’m sure your intentions are good, Ed, but avoid doing that again,’ I had to say at one point.) But in the end, we got it right, and though the earth didn’t move, no part of the universe dissolved, I was moved, I dissolved, and, immediately after, I found myself thinking, love is a fugue, the call and response of it, the improvisations; it was the first time that I understood it wasn’t a misleading euphemism to refer to sex as the act of love.

And that was the abandon — I abandoned myself to imagining, as I lay in Ed’s arms, a future. I abandoned myself to anticipating, with pleasure, how we’d grow to know each other — each muscle, each nerve ending, each scar, each kind of scar, even the kinds we couldn’t see for ourselves and needed someone else to point out to us. It was not a process to be hurried, there was no need for hurry, let each new discovery be a source of pleasure. But one day, eventually, I’d find I had no secrets from him. In all my past relationships I had never once thought the man I was with would ever know everything there was to know.

Our sweat cooled, turned chilly, forced us to huddle closer under his duvet. His fingers were tangled in my hair and his breathing changed to the deep rhythms of sleep. I wanted to stay in his arms, to fall asleep there.

All those years, when I stayed with my mother, she made the Poet sleep next door. Even when they were in Colombia and Egypt he’d have his own room. Such strange nods to social convention. As if I would have cared. I thought it was a tiny thing, for them to sleep apart. But now, as Ed shifted and his mouth touched my shoulder, I thought, Omi, I’m sorry. Mama, you didn’t need to.

I looked at my watch. Rabia would have flown back from Islamabad by now and it was well past the hour when I usually called to tell her not to worry if I was staying out late. The trappings of family. I eased myself out of Ed’s arms, dressed, and picked his cordless phone off the receiver. I’d left my mobile in Shakeel’s car. Another reason for Rabia to worry. I stepped outside into the hallway. It was eerily quiet. The window shutters threw shadows in front of me. If I stepped into the shadows I would be caught between slats.

I dialled Rabia’s mobile, and she answered on the first ring.

Aasmaani, where are you?’

‘Sorry. Just lost track of time. I’m at Ed’s.’

There was silence on the other end, and then Rabia pushed aside whatever questions came to mind and said, ‘Are you going to be there much longer?’

For a moment I wanted to laugh. Shehnaz Saeed may have told me she’d been in love with my mother, but she would still consider it a terrible breach of etiquette if I came down for breakfast with Ed in the morning. I’d probably be too embarrassed to speak myself.