The quiz show host stretched his mouth into the smile with which he once recommended a brand of tea in a popular ad from my childhood. ‘Well, we can’t possibly have that question, then. No Christian who wins Jerusalem from the Muslims, in any manner, can be deemed civilized by us without causing all kinds of problems.’ He licked his fingertip and used it to smooth down his eyebrows. ‘You know, the opening still exists for the host of the political chat show. I know the Big Man offered it to you. You might want to give it some thought.’
By now I had been at STD long enough to recognize that the CEO’s offer hadn’t been a sign of any incipient potential he saw in me, but just an indicator of his desperation to find presenters for the STD shows. All that would change soon — already it seemed that everyone I met between the age of sixteen and twenty-two had the word ‘media’ on their lips when asked about their future — but for the moment those of us who were ‘reasonable enough’ (i.e. reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent, reasonably articulate) had a world of on-air opportunities to pick from. ‘If it’s a groundbreaking chat show, involving a’séance, which allows me to interview Frederick II, then sure. Otherwise, I’ll stick to being the brains behind your beauty.’
The quiz show host smiled — he was well aware of both his intelligence and his good looks — and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Suits me fine.’
When he left my office, I checked my watch. It was approximately twenty-two hours since I had left Shehnaz Saeed’s house. Twenty-two hours since she had given me the letter which had accompanied the encrypted page. In those twenty-two hours I had managed to restrain myself from reading the covering letter even once. Now there was a clear sign I was so much better than before — it wasn’t that many years ago that every time I answered the phone and there was silence on the other end it was enough to make me call the telephone exchange and demand they trace the call. It was tempting now to phone Beema and tell her, you see, you see, all those attempts on your part to get me to ‘talk to someone’ weren’t necessary. I’m doing this on my own, I’m getting there.
Fourteen years later, and as far as I’d got was being able to avoid reading a letter for twenty-two hours.
I knew exactly what that ‘someone’ to whom Beema wanted me to talk would say. She’d say, it’s been fourteen years, Aasmaani. That’s twice the length of time a person has to be gone before they’re legally declared dead. You need to let go.
Let go. As though I were holding on to something outside myself; as though conclusions were ropes that could hang you. And whatever I tried to say, however much I tried to explain that my mother really was capable of vanishing, that she’d been practising it for two years before she actually left, that she had been practising shedding the skin that was her character and assuming another identity, right there, under our noses without any of us understanding what was happening — however much I tried to explain all this, and tried to explain, also, that there had been simply no reason for her to stay within her old identity, they would tell me I had created a story to avoid facing the painful truth. That they, too, were creating a story would not occur to them — if enough people believe a thing, belief becomes indistinguishable from truth, and they cannot see how anyone with the same facts as they possess could ever reach a different conclusion except through stubbornness, denial or a wilful misreading of the situation.
I opened the desk drawer which contained the cover letter and encrypted page, and then closed it again. I would give myself another two hours before looking at it. Self-imposed restrictions are absurd but not without effect; if you can’t rid yourself of obsessions you can at least wean yourself off the number of hours you waste on them to the exclusion of everything else.
I forced my hands off the drawer-handle and on to my keyboard. But there really wasn’t any work demanding my immediate attention. It was a particularly slow day at STD — the only event of note had been the firing of a pregnant TV presenter, whose energetic and efficient hosting of a current affairs programme had been brought to an end at the insistence of the show’s primary advertisers who claimed that their product could not be associated with a pregnant woman without ‘adverse effects’. The primary advertiser was a bank — and already the STD kitchenette was rife with ribaldry about ‘direct deposits’ and ‘early withdrawals’.
Somehow my hand was on the drawer-handle again. I moved it over to the telephone and phoned Shehnaz Saeed to thank her for lunch.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘My pleasure entirely. I don’t know why we haven’t been in touch all these years. You know, I was just going to call you myself to ask if you’d made any sense of that page of garbled letters.’
‘No, sorry. Haven’t had time to really look at it. But as a matter of interest, do you remember the postmark on the envelope?’
‘I did check,’ she said. ‘But some of the letters were smudged so I only know it started with “M” and ended with “AN”. Either Multan or Mardan, I suppose. The stamp was local.’
That really didn’t help, but it wasn’t as though I could think of any postmark that would have furnished a helpful clue about the origin of the letter.
I was going to end the call, but she said, ‘Aasmaani, can I ask you a personal question?’ Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow. But I merely made a noise of acquiescence, and Shehnaz Saeed asked, ‘Is there some kind of problem with you and Ed?’
I had heard his distinctive gait — one stride followed by three short steps — outside my office several times today. Each time he passed I thought of opening my door and calling out to him, but I remained unsettled about how my feelings towards him could swing so quickly and so arbitrarily from irritation to camaraderie to desire to disdain, and not knowing what I wanted from him made it impossible to know what to say to him.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I mentioned your name during dinner last night and he reacted strangely. Surly, in a way that was almost adolescent. And I’m not sure if it’s because of your name or because I’m mentioning it, if you see what I mean.’
‘Not really.’
‘No. No, I suppose you don’t. It’s just that — I’m going to be very frank now — I think he likes you. A lot. And he’s not going to want me befriending you, because then, you see, you’ll be my person and not his. That’s how he’ll think of it. It’s not easy, I suppose, having a mother like me.’
For a woman who had managed to maintain an air of secrecy around her private life for so long, she was surprisingly voluble.
‘You’re wondering why I’m telling you this?’ she said, and I couldn’t help laughing in embarrassment at being caught out. ‘It’s just that, my dear, when we were growing up no one taught us how to be mothers and something else at the same time. Motherhood was an all-or-nothing business. You can tell me, if anyone can, how should I be his mother and be famous? He’s thirty-five years old, Aasmaani, and I still don’t know what he wants me to be. When I acted, he hated that it took me away from him. When I stopped acting, he hated that I’d given up that part of myself. He kept hounding me to act again, and now that I’ve said yes, he’s even more moody than before.’