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.
That might have been the moment you lost her, Dad.
But I didn’t really believe it. That they had ever been together was not a mystery, just an aberration.
Regardless. For today, the interview told me all I really needed to know. The Poet wrote prose. Sometimes for Rafael Gonzales and sometimes just as an exercise. So, those cryptic lines were nothing more than some old writing exercise of his, written in code.
All that was out of my life now, and that at least was something for which I should be grateful. The need for codes and secrets, the conspiracies and cover-ups, the weightiness of History pressing down on people who insisted that it was their burden to bear though it showed nothing but disdain for them. All that was over. All that madness. All that life.
I touched my fingers to the calligraphed words. ‘Omi.’
I walked to the balcony, and leaned out into the smell of the waves.
I am so young I count my age in quarter years. In my mother’s house, I turn circles in the master bedroom with arms spread wide. I turn circles and make it look like joy so the whole room joins in and turns with me. We are spinning, the room and I, turning into blurs. If we keep it up we’ll spin right out of this world into some Oz — we can spin ourselves into cyclonic speeds. But I hear voices coming up the stairs, and leaving isn’t so tempting any more, so I stop spinning. But the room doesn’t. I must grope my way to the bed to sit down, my hands clutching on to the frame to make it stop. What urill my mother say if she enters to find her bed has gone to Oz? She walks in, the Poet behind her, and her face is instant concern.
‘What’s wrong?’ she says. ‘Are you sick?’
‘I’m diggy,’ I reply, trying to bring her face into focus. She looks as though she’s partway to Oz herself.
‘Giddy,’ says the Poet. ‘The word is “giddy”.’
Everything has righted itself by now, the bed, my mother, the walls. It seems terrible to be wrong. So I say, ‘No, it’s diggy. That’s when you’re so giddy even the letters in giddy turn topsy-turvy.’ I can’t believe I’ve said something so stupid, but the Poet throws back his head and laughs. He lifts me up in his arms.
‘She’ll be a poet, Samina. She’ll make language somersault through rings of fire. Just watch.’ He brings his face closer to mine and whispers. ‘They say I can do that. Maybe you’re a young me.’
‘Maybe you’re an old me,’ I shoot back. And that’s it, an appellation coined. Old Me. Omi.
I turned, saw the paper lying on the coffee table, blurred through the smudged windowpane, and the thought slipped out: could it have been written by my mother, and recently?
I could almost hear the plants around me exhaling carbon dioxide. I leaned over the balcony again and looked to the right. Here and there, lights shone out of windows and street lamps. There seemed no numerical order to the illumination, no multiples or prime numbers underlying the logic of lights. But perhaps the order was pictorial rather than numerical. Connect the dots, and what do you get?
When my mother had disappeared, fourteen years ago, I saw dots of brightness everywhere. The universe, back then, reconfigured itself into an accumulation of clues and conspiracies. The clues looked like this: any tapping sound or flashing lights; a ringing phone which stopped ringing the instant before I picked it up; a news reporter speaking on a foreign news channel about an unexpected uprising; strangers who whispered indecipherable words as they passed me on the street; a dream of my mother set in a place that I would have known in another instant if the wind (how could I be sure it was just the wind?) hadn’t banged on my window and woken me up. And the conspiracies, they took these shapes: a conversation which stopped the moment I entered the room; a fire burning down a restaurant my mother had loved; a letter intercepted at my gate (I had no proof of such interceptions, but that only made the conspiracy more powerful); the death of anyone she had ever known; the death of anyone, anyone at all, because how could I know for certain all the people she had known? And yes, I had seen patterns start to emerge amidst all those clues and conspiracies. Until, one day, some principle of self-preservation (brought on by Beema’s intervention) had forced me to see that the only clear pattern in any of this was my own rush towards insanity. I was seventeen then, and resilient. I had been able to pull away from that course, and face the harsher truth that everything that happened was Mama’s doing, Mama’s choice.
But what if I had been wrong? What if there had been some conspiracy all along? I shut my eyes against the dots of light and I saw a gathering of people: the customs official downstairs, Beema’s old schoolfriend, the CEO of STD, Kiran Hilal and Shehnaz Saeed. As I watched they discussed their various roles, plotted how each one of them would guide me towards the next one in line, so discreetly, so seemingly unconnectedly, that the arrival of an encrypted page at my door, after I’d been led all the way down the line, would appear coincidence, a confluence of random events. And there was another figure in the gathering: Ed. The man who tried a little too hard to announce himself as my ally from near the beginning of the game. But to what end, all of it, any of it?
I opened my eyes. A street lamp flickered Morse code. I turned away with a gesture of dismissal.
I walked back indoors, and into my kitchen. It had seemed absurdly small when I first saw it, accustomed as I was to the expanse of Beema’s kitchen, but already I had come to enjoy its cosiness, every spice and utensil within easy reach as you stood at the stove. And I had grown, also, to love the little window at the right-hand side of the stove which allowed you extra elbow room when you needed to stir the contents of a haandi with extra vigour. Rabia said it was one of the great sight gags of the block of flats, my elbow jiggling outside the window for everyone to see, as much a source of amusement as the woman in number 9C who would flip her long hair over the balcony after a shower and squeeze, directing the water into a flowerbed below, ensuring that the snapdragons she had planted there stayed alive even through water shortages.
I gathered together all the ingredients I needed for biryani. Gestalt philosophy must have been born in a kitchen of the sub-continent, the Poet once said. In any successful biryani, the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. I switched on the portable radio that perched on the raised back strip of the stove and listened to FM 100 as I soaked the rice, measured out and ground the spices, chopped the potatoes, tomatoes and chicken, and wept over the onions. Beema and Dad’s cook, Abdul, had offered to come and work for me while they were away, but I had told him not to be a fool and just take Dad’s offer of paid leave instead. The truth was, there had been nothing more appealing to me about the idea of living alone than the thought of having my own kitchen, without Abdul finding ways to mark his territory every time I entered it.