‘I have no idea.’
She seemed unsurprised. ‘He’s not always the easiest man in the world to be around, I know. But he does like you. A great deal.’
‘Oh? What has he said about me?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t even know you were working together until Kiran told me. He’s furious that I’ve invited you over for lunch.’
‘And this means he likes me?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled in a way that told me she wasn’t going to say anything further on the subject. ‘You know, your mother and I were once talking about the two of you. She’d just had an argument with you, I’d just had a shouting match with Ed, and we both wondered — what would our children say about us if we put them in a room together?’
I nodded, wanting her to go on speaking of Mama, but not wanting to have to add anything to the conversation.
‘God, but we need her these days,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, and in the shift of her tone I could tell that the ‘her’ she was speaking of wasn’t the private Samina any more, but the Samina Akram of blazing eyes and fiery rhetoric who had crowds chanting her name as though she were a religion. ‘It’s already started. The assemblies haven’t even convened yet and already the mullahs in the Frontier are saying, “Of course women can work, but only according to the guidelines of Islam.” What guidelines? There are no such guidelines! Maybe that’s another reason for coming out of retirement. I don’t want to be one of those women the beards approve of, the ones who sit at home and cook dinner.’
I dipped my fingers into a handbowl with a bougainvillea flower floating in it. ‘I hardly think you’d be their poster girl under any circumstance.’
‘Regardless. We desperately need your mother now.’
‘Well, then, perhaps she’ll reappear. The nation needs her to be a heroine — how could she resist?’ Early in October, the night the election results came in, I couldn’t stop myself from sitting with Rabia and Shakeel, watching the news reporters trying to look unsurprised as they announced the gains of the religious alliance whom most political pundits had written off when they failed to muster any compelling street-power for all their anti-government rallies a year earlier. When the votes were counted and the newly united religious bloc emerged as the third-largest party, with forty-five seats, Rabia raged up and down the room, cursing anyone she could blame for the debacle — the Americans, the President, Al-Qaeda, the other political parties, the Americans again, everyone but the 11 per cent of the electorate who voted for the beards. But through all my own disgust at the situation, there was an undercurrent of hope. Now she’d come back. Back to her old self, and then back to us. She couldn’t fail to come back, not with all that was at stake.
Shehnaz Saeed looked at me, shock on her features, and I felt instantly ashamed. Whatever Mama’s failings, her activism was never about personal glory. I owed her that acknowledgement, if nothing else. And then I saw Shehnaz Saeed’s expression soften into pity.
‘She’ll come back? Aasmaani—’
‘This is not a conversation I want to have.’
She looked hurt then, and I was sorry.
‘How did you first get to know her?’
She pulled petals off the rose in her hand and scattered them on the white tablecloth between us. ‘Well, that story takes us back a bit. I married at seventeen, did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘I read any interview of yours I could get my hands on around the time you did Lady Macbeth.’
She seemed to find that genuinely surprising. ‘Your mother never told me.’
‘I don’t think she knew. She wasn’t around in those days. Political exile is more glamorous than a daughter entering adolescence.’ Stop it, Aasmaani. Stop now.
‘Oh, I see.’ She laid her hand flat, palm down, and started putting petals over her unpainted nails. ‘I don’t think I ever revealed in those interviews the extent of my misery. It was an arranged marriage, but it’s not as though I put up any kind of resistance. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do after school that seemed at all plausible. I mean, I wanted to go to London and join RADA. That was it. The only dream I could think of. But everyone convinced me, places like that they don’t even consider Pakistanis. You won’t look right for any of the parts in their plays, they told me.’ Her voice became shrill, as though she were moving her lips in time to the performance of a twisted ventriloquist. ‘Look in the mirror. Are you Juliet, are you Blanche Dubois, are you anyone except the foreign one with the funny accent? And I believed them so completely that I even believed there would be no place for me on a Pakistani stage. And, anyway, I was scared to do anything to risk my parents’ anger, and what respectable family in those days would want to admit their daughter was an actress? So I tried my first major performance: I convinced myself I wanted to be a wife and mother and daughter-in-law and high-society hostess. It was my worst performance ever.’ She scored rose petals with her thumbnail. ‘Every day, every single day, I wanted to be on a stage, speaking lines that could wrap themselves around your chest and squeeze until your rib-cage cracked open and your heart lay exposed.’
She spoke about language the way the Poet and his friends used to — as a living, dangerous entity — and listening to her I felt the blood move quick through my veins and knew she — and they — were right.
Her eyes were bright with memory. ‘I wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt at the end of her days — a seventysomething, one-legged woman playing Portia in scenes from The Merchant of Venice, reclining on a couch the whole time to hide her disability and, in so doing, making the character so coiled with languid power that any standing-up version of her seems feeble by comparison. And then, taking seven curtain calls when it finished.’
‘So when exactly did you see my mother speak in front of a crowd and fill the air with grazia! I’ve read the Italian interview. Don’t tell me her performance before the adoring masses is what convinced you to leave your husband.’
‘No, actually my husband left me. I bored him, he said. Seven years of marriage, one son, and he wakes up one morning, says to me, “You bore me,” and leaves. I was terrified for weeks that he’d come back. And when it was obvious he wouldn’t, I was so lost, Aasmaani. Twenty-four and clueless. Mother of a six-year-old son. Soon after that I went to hear Samina speak. She had a remarkable capacity to make people imagine change. That’s something we certainly need now, when the zealots are the only ones who appear to have that gift.’ She picked up a rose petal between thumb and forefinger and traced circles in its velvet smoothness. ‘The next day I got back in touch with a schoolfriend whose brother was a director, and before I knew quite what was happening I was Laila. I met Samina just a few days into the rehearsals.’ She spread her hands as if to say, ‘the rest was inevitable’ and I acknowledged the gesture with a nod. ‘But I was just starting out, and she and the Poet were in trouble with the government and both of them told me I shouldn’t risk being associated with them or I’d never get any roles on television. I needed to work, Aasmaani, I needed money. So I kept it discreet, my friendship with both of them.’ She touched my shoulder. ‘I miss her terribly.’
We walked down the stairs in silence. When we reached the ground floor, I turned to her again. ‘The gift you sent me. Tell me about it.’
‘It meant something to you.’ She caught my shoulder. ‘What?’
‘First you tell me.’
‘Well, I don’t know really. It came a couple of months ago. There was a covering letter — wait.’ She walked into the room which I had glimpsed on my way in and came out with a piece of paper, filled with childish block letters. A clue or a conspiracy? She handed it to me, and I read: