Dear Madame. I have bin a fan for many yers. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. I do not undastand them but maybe you will. I know you know the person who rote them. There are more. I will send you more if you act again. Please act again.
I offered the letter back to Shehnaz Saeed, and she gestured to me to keep it. ‘It seemed like lunatic ravings when I first read it. I was about to throw the whole thing away — I’ve received some peculiar fan mail over the years, believe me, though I’ll admit it had been a while since the last one. But it was intriguing enough that I kept it. I don’t know, maybe this letter is what planted in me the idea of acting again, and made me more receptive to the idea of Boond. I don’t know. We never really know how our brains work, do we? Anyway, I knew your mother and the Poet had some code they wrote to each other in and when I heard you were involved with Boond I thought, maybe, just maybe. That’s why I sent it to you. Can you read it?’
Some old instinct of secrecy in all matters related to my mother caught hold of me. I found myself saying, ‘No. I don’t know the code. But it does look like some sort of code, and so, like you, when I saw it I thought it might be their code. But I don’t know. Do you have more? If you have more, maybe if I look at them long enough I’ll be able to think of a way to crack the code.’
I sounded entirely unconvincing to my own ears, but she merely nodded. ‘That’s all I have. But who knows, now that I really am acting again maybe whoever wrote the note will send more. If he does, I’ll give them to you.’
She kissed me goodbye at the door, and just before I got into my car she called out into the driveway, ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s probably just some deranged fan.’
‘Yes, of course. I know that.’
I was turning the key in the ignition when she came running down the steps and touched my shoulder through the open car window. ‘But you will tell me, won’t you? If it means anything to you.’
‘Of course I will,’ I lied.
VI
That suggestion of winter which had coursed past me on the roof of Shehnaz Saeed’s house was nowhere in evidence when I drove out of her gate. Heat rose off the streets, creating mirages — thin, shimmering bands of water. The mind would have to be fevered to believe they were anything other than an illusion — in this heat any puddle would evaporate in seconds, or act as beacon for the thirsty pye-dogs who roamed the streets.
After my mother disappeared I used to see her everywhere — not just in the form of other women but in empty spaces, too. She seemed lodged, like a tear, in the corner of my eye, evaporating in the instant I turned to look at her. I knew what hallucinations were, I knew what mirages brought on by psychological aberrations were, but somehow that seemed too prosaic — too predictable — to explain away my imagined seeing, even when I realized it was entirely imagined. Easier to think in terms of Orpheus and Eurydice — every time I turned to check that it was really her, I lost her. But with that explanation I was attempting to step into a story that wasn’t mine. It was a story that fascinated my mother, but even when she first told it to me, I heard her unasked question, ‘Would my Poet journey to Hades in search of me?’ and though I had wanted to reply, ‘I would, Mama,’ I knew that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. So when she placed herself in that borderland between seeing and imagining, I knew I would have to find something other than a Greek myth in which I didn’t belong to explain her away. Quite by chance, I found mention of ‘the Fata Morgana’ in some piece of writing by Conrad, and when I looked it up and discovered it was ‘a mirage of the looming effect’ I knew I had finally found a name by which I could refer to those images of my mother. I still saw her continuously, but I now knew it wasn’t her, just a Fata Morgana, and I would no more think to turn and look closer than I would think to worry about splashing a passer-by when I drove through the mirage of water.
I stopped at a red light and looked out of the car window at a grey sparrow swooping down on to the footprinted dust between the car and a boundary wall sprayed with political graffiti. As a child I used to believe the sparrow itself was layered with dust, and that if I ever got close enough to one to stroke its feathers with my thumb I’d erase the dust to reveal the colours — emerald-green, electric-blue, pomegranate-red — that were the bird’s natural inheritance. My thumb still twitched, now and then, at the sight of a sparrow.
Someone rapped on the passenger-side window. I looked up and there was a man on a motorbike gesturing towards the traffic light, which turned from green back to red almost as soon as I looked up at it. The man on the motorbike gave me a look which said ‘Women drivers’ as he sped through the intersection, swerving out of the way of oncoming traffic.
I was left waiting for the light to change again. I reached into my handbag for a mint, and my hand touched my mobile phone. I wished I could call Rabia, or Beema, just to talk about the strangeness of Ed, the charm of Shehnaz Saeed. But Rabia was at the inauguration of yet another women’s shelter her NGO had set up, and Beema would be taking her afternoon nap before heading back to the hospital to relieve her sister at their mother’s bedside. My father — I could call my father. Since he and Beema had left Karachi, she had been the conduit of information between him and me, telling me how much he was enjoying his leave from the bank, telling him about my bouts of cooking and my new-found fascination with plants. It wasn’t that he and I avoided speaking to each other, just that it was easier for both of us to speak to Beema and Rabia. But it would be a comfort now to hear his soft voice, its thoughtful quality equally in evidence if we talked about the phenomenon of mirages, the current form of the Pakistan cricket team or the significance of isotope decay in the dating of fossils.
I pulled over to the side of the road and dialled his number. He sounded glad to hear my voice, but our conversation merely skated from small talk to small talk — hospital food, STD coffee, my forward-leaning bookshelf, the light fixtures in his bedroom. Almost from the very start of our conversation I knew I wouldn’t talk to him of Ed and Shehnaz Saeed. Unconventional mothers and their children — that was a subject that made Dad choke on his attempt to be honest without sounding chauvinistic. Which I knew he wasn’t — particularly. Certainly Rabia and I had no cause to complain about his attitudes towards women. He was more than proud of Rabia’s NGO work, and had never done anything other than champion my right to be single, even at the grand old age of thirty-one. But if a woman was a mother, Dad was simply unable to view her life in any way except as it might relate to the well-being of her child.
‘And what about fathers?’ I had challenged him once. ‘Why are they allowed to be irresponsible?’
‘It’s not that we’re allowed. It’s just that we’re less significant, and so less capable of doing damage,’ he had replied, turning away before the sentence was finished.
When he’d exhausted the subject of light fixtures I said I had to go, and hung up. But more than before, I felt the need to call someone and talk, just talk. I scrolled down the names in my mobile phone, considered calling my brother-in-law, but knew he would be entirely uncommunicative during the middle of his work day. I put down the phone, ran my fingers over the steering wheel and, for a moment, had a memory — no, not a memory, a reliving — of sitting behind the wheel and learning to drive at the age of fourteen. I needed to speak to a friend, simple as that — and not just one of my ex-colleagues from teaching or human resources or the cricket magazine, who served so well as dinner or beach companions. A friend who had known me long enough to know me, that was what I needed. A childhood friend. Someone who had changed gears while I held the wheel and pressed the clutch because doing all three things at the same time had seemed a task too complicated even to attempt.