Kamila Shamsie - Broken Verses

Despite the twentysomething’s entreaties, I hadn’t opened the envelope; doing so seemed to constitute an agreement — to something —so I’d kept curiosity at bay all these hours.

But now I prised open the flap and pulled out the contents — a piece of paper, neatly folded up, with a yellow post-it note stuck on top. I peeled off the note and read: ‘I would love to meet you. Please call me. In the meantime, does the enclosed bit of writing mean anything to you? — Shehnaz.’

I unfolded the paper, laid it on the table, and smoothed the creases with the palm of my hand. An unintelligible series of letters, beautifully calligraphed, filled the top of the page.

Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.

That was the first line. The rest of the writing didn’t make any more sense.

Why would someone I had never met put this in a box and imagine it might mean something to me?

I looked at the page one more time, then pushed it aside. Some foreign language, no doubt. Live in a port city all your life and you get used to finding pieces of paper with indecipherable scripts formed into paper cones for roasted pine-nuts, or just drifting along on the breeze in empty lots used as garbage dumps. Did Shehnaz Saeed think I was a linguist?

I walked away from the page, and was all the way to my bedroom before dormant neurons in my brain fired themselves awake.

My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark .

I turned. My feet were heavy lifting themselves off the bare floor and my body sluggish in response.

I reached the paper, lifted it up.

Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.

The letters stepped out of their disguises — haltingly at first, but then all in a rush and swirl of abandon — and transformed into words:

The Minions came again today.

The edge of the low table bit into my skin, just inches below my elbow. I raised my arm, and looked at the diagonal indentation. Close up and out of context, this groove running through a square of skin could as easily be a dried river-bed in a desert as a thread of sap on the vein of a leaf.

I ran my thumb along the furrow, and returned my attention to the four lines on the page. It was startlingly easy to read the code after all these years, read it as though it were a language of its own — but it might as well have been Albanian for all my success at comprehension. From a writing pad on the table, I tore out a page and pressed it against the encrypted lines. The black calligraphy showed through as if covered by nothing thicker than the membrane of an onion skin.

I picked up a felt-tip pen, and traced the twirling letters on to the overlying paper. It took much longer than I would have thought to follow every line and loop of that intricate hand. I began to feel as though I were replicating an abstract painting, each stroke of my nib inscribing my inability to understand how a mind could conceive of those shapes and combinations. What was I hoping for as my pen moved in and out of curlicues? That the act of tracing would bring me closer to whoever wrote those sentences, allow me to slip between the words and understand the mind that placed them on the page?

What was I hoping for? It was a question that had been following me for a long time.

I put down the pen.

Other than me, who knew the code? Only my mother and the Poet. And the Poet had been dead sixteen years. He had been killed, so the story went, by a government agency which feared the combination of his national popularity and international reputation — although the military government in power at the time countered those claims by declaring a national day of mourning for that ‘flower of our soil’. All over the country anti-government groups of every hue boycotted the government’s day of mourning and announced their own day of mourning (on the same day) for that ‘voice of resistance’.

Of course, there were those who believed he wasn’t really dead. The art of storytelling, so ingrained in this nation, had turned — in all the years of misrule and oppression — into the art of spinning conspiracy theories, each one more elaborate than the one before. So when the Poet died it took only hours for the weavers of tales to produce their versions of what really happened. There were variants from one teller to the next, but the bottom line remained the same: that poor tortured corpse, they said, was a look-alike, his features slashed and gouged where they didn’t match the Poet’s. Where the Poet really was, and why anyone should fake his death, was a rather more difficult issue to contend with, but — just weeks after the funeral — when the conspiracy theorists were beginning to acknowledge the illogic of staging a death when it would be so much easier actually to kill a man, the doctor who claimed to have verified the identity of the corpse died in a car crash. And then all the tales spun with whispers and perverted glee were brought out again.

But my mother never accepted that claim of a faked death, and so I had never believed it either. Why would she, of all people, ridicule such an idea if it seemed to contain even a fibre of truth?

If only she had believed it. Perhaps hope would have allowed her to cling on to her own character, instead of setting it adrift like a widow sending her possessions out to sea in the wake of a bier.

I lifted the page off the table again. From what distance was I regarding this object? How long ago had it been written?

Long ago. Had to be. When they first invented the code. Surely they must have practised? I couldn’t have been the only one who did that, turning Peter Pan into Ucicl Ufo and Mama into Afaf? I picked up Rabia’s file again and looked through the cuttings once more until I found the one for which I was looking. An interview with the Poet, first published in 1971, the year I was born, and later reprinted in 1996, on the tenth anniversary of his death:

Q: The acclaimed Colombian novelist Rafael Gonzalez has said of you: ‘He is my twin, in political and aesthetic temperament. It’s a good thing he writes poetry because if he ever turned his hand to the novel he would write my books faster than I myself write them.’ Has fiction ever lured you?

A: I’m lured frequently and indiscriminately. But in my life allure is always fleeting. Well, always except twice. The first, the allure of poetry. The second I’m too gallant to mention. Or perhaps, also, too cowardly. Newly-wed husbands can be violent in their jealousies. But, to answer your question more directly, Rafael and I have often played games of diving into each other’s skin. I send him a fragment of a story in English, our mutual language, and in response he sends me a dramatic monologue, also in English. I tell him, that’s cheating. You’ve written me a short story with line breaks! Then he sends me a perfect couplet, and I’m filled with envy. Yes, yes, for Rafael I have written prose. And sometimes I just do it to restore suppleness to my wrist which is locked in place from agonizing for days over a single word of poetry. It’s interesting… always English, my prose. I suppose it’s just habit now.

In all the interviews published during his lifetime, this is his sole reference to my mother as something other than his first reader and only editor. What had Mama felt when she first read it, just weeks into her marriage? And my father, how must he have reacted? That was easier to answer: with silent anger, directed less at the Poet’s continued feelings for my mother than at the publicizing of those feelings. Omi must have known that, of course. Must have known how much my father would have hated to have himself referred to in print, in a discussion of something so tawdry as jealousy.