I pushed open the front door to the studio and walked in. On the ground floor, life was as chaotic as usual, with people calling out to one another through open office doors, and a steady stream of employees walking from kitchenette to photocopier to downstairs studio to upstairs offices. I stopped next to a group of men and women of mixed ages standing under the television mounted above our heads, watching STD’s repeat broadcast of its mid-morning music video programme.
‘But why is she sitting under an umbrella at the beach like it’s the French Riviera instead of Karachi?’ one said. ‘Put her on an old shawl surrounded by kinoo peels, that’s more like it.’
‘You just go watch your MTV if all you can do with the local stuff is complain.’
‘Oh, baba, I’m saying the local stuff should try less harder to be like MTV.’
‘O-ay, listen. You really planning to boycott American goods when they attack Iraq?’
‘Hanh, well, we have to feel like we’re doing something, right?’
‘OK, but does that mean boycotting movies and music as well? I mean, what if they attack before the new Lord of the Rings?’
‘No, no, no problem. We get that on pirated videos and DVDs. So when you buy those you’re just helping local industry. Same with music. And computer software.’
‘Great, great.’
‘Yeah, great, but there’s one problem remaining. Petrol pumps. Between work, home, supermarket, sabziwallah, and my parents’ house, there’s only Shell and Caltex pumps. What do I do about that?’
A moment of silence. ‘Well… you have to be realistic, after all. You need the car. The car needs petrol. What to do?’
‘I’ll tell you what to do. You want to piss off the Americans, there’s only one thing to do. Vote in the fundos. I swear next election, I’m doing that. Last time I was tempted, next time I will, for sure.’
‘You just shut up and go sit in your corner. You vote in the fundos, they’ll do nothing about the petrol pumps, and just ban all your precious music videos and put us women in burkhas.’
‘And anyway, the Americans like it these days if you piss them off. You piss them off, they bomb you.’
‘Seriously! But listen, yaar, you think the mullahs are going to join this government?’
‘God forbid. If they do, who knows what killjoy laws they’ll try and pass. Remember in the eighties how boring life got with all that pretend-Islamization?’
Boring? What I wouldn’t have given for some boredom in the 1980s. It was all prison and protest and exile and upheaval around me. Strange, how I was almost nostalgic for that. The battle-lines were so clearly drawn then with the military and the religious groups firmly allied, neatly bundling together all that the progressive democratic forces fought against. Now it was all in disarray, the religious right talking democracy better than anyone else and insisting, unwaveringly (admirably, I would say, if I didn’t recall their political track record), on the removal of the military from power while all the other political parties tiptoed around the matter or see-sawed back and forth; and, on the other side of the equation, the President-General who had been the first head of state in my lifetime to talk unequivocally against extremism was tripping over his own feet in an attempt to create a democratic façade for a government in which the military remained the final authority and the only veto power. All those sacrifices, all those battles — and this is what we had come to. It wasn’t a tragic waste — those lives, that passion; it wasn’t tragic, just farcical.
I made my way up the stairs — leaving the groups below to argue about whether Pakistan’s nuclear capability made America more or less likely to attack — and almost collided with Ed, on his way down.
We both moved away from each other, further than was necessary — him up two steps, and me down two steps — so the distance between us didn’t imply the civility of two people making room for the other to pass but instead implied a mutual feeling of contamination.
The only way past this moment was brazenness, so I took two steps in one stride — at the exact moment that he came to the same decision — and then we really did collide, his foot stepping on mine, my forehead bumping against his nose.
We both cried out, extricated ourselves from the tangle of our bodies, and sat down, side by side, to nurse our injuries. And then, looking sideways at each other — him with a hand over his nose, me with my palm pressing down on my foot — we laughed.
Ed leaned sideways on his elbow and looked at me appraisingly. ‘You’re impossible to figure out, aren’t you?’ That struck me as particularly funny, coming from him. ‘I just spoke to my mother. She said the gift she sent you was that strange nonsensical bit of writing she’d received some weeks ago. Why did you tell me she sent you calligraphy? I thought you meant she’d lifted her Sadequain painting off the wall and had it delivered to you.’
When he put it that way, I couldn’t imagine why I’d said such a thing. I fanned my fingers in front of me, hoping that would convey some sort of adequately inadequate response. ‘You did seem rather upset about it.’ I was embarrassed to remember that it had crossed my mind at some point during the morning that his response had been an admission of complicity — in what, I hadn’t worked out. That search for conspiracies hadn’t entirely died.
‘I have to admit I was a little concerned,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re quite lovely despite all your considerable strangeness, but Sadequain is Sadequain. I’ve loved that bit of calligraphy hanging in my mother’s bedroom since I was a child.’
Lovely. When was the last time it had occurred to anyone to think of me as lovely?
I looked at him, and that thing happened between us. That fizz. Something electric. Our bodies reduced to single nerve cells and the space between us a synapse, pulsing an impulse back and forth.
It doesn’t mean anything, ultimately — I’ve had some of the most unsatisfying encounters of my life with men in whom I’ve mistaken the fizz for potential of one sort or the other. And I’ve had entirely satiating flings with men who’ve made me feel every pleasurable physical sensation — except the fizz. Thus, I know, it doesn’t mean anything. But in the moment you feel it, you forget that.
So who knows what would have happened right then with Ed and me, both our offices just steps away, if Kiran Hilal hadn’t rounded into view with her team behind her, and said, Aasmaani, there you are. The meeting’s in the conference room. What are you doing just sitting there?’
We stood up, and as Ed moved aside to let Kiran pass through, it was gone. The fizz — it had just disappeared, leaving me feeling as though I had indulged in someone else’s fantasy, entirely in opposition to my own tastes. I didn’t even look at him, or say anything in farewell, as I followed Kiran up the stairs and along the corridor to the conference room.
‘We’ve just got a couple of things to wrap up from our previous meeting before we get to you,’ she said, opening the door to the conference room. The room had the twin comforts of an air-conditioner and leather chairs but managed to retain STD’s general air of dishevelment thanks to the scratched surface of the long table which dominated the room and the faded posters on the walls of temples and beaches and city skylines, all advertising an airline which had been out of business for years.
The Boond team — two men and two women in addition to Kiran — settled round the table and launched instantly into a discussion about fine-tuning a particular storyline after seeing the unexpected nuance brought to it by one of the actors before filming had stopped.