‘What? Why are you asking me that, Aasmaani?’
‘I saw the word somewhere. In a book at the school library,’ I lied.
‘Oh. Well, to start with it’s not fug-you. That could sound rude.’ She pulled me down into her lap and put her arms around me, her chin resting on the top of my head. ‘The more conventional meaning has to do with music. A sort of call and response. Two or more musicians responding to one another’s music. The second meaning is much more interesting. It means deliberate amnesia. You know what amnesia is, sweetheart?’
‘Mama! Of course. But that’s so silly. Why would you deliberately forget something?’
The following day, I handed my mother a card which said:
AFAF, N GKZC BKP.
When I first handed it to her, she thought it was nonsense words. I dug my hands in my pocket and rocked on the balls of my feet as the Poet did when he was offended by someone’s misreading of his work. ‘It says “Mama, I love you”.’ That’s when she shook me, made me promise to forget about it, made me swear never to mention it to anyone. Then she tore out the pages of my notebook which contained evidence of the code — and though I wept to save the jellyfish which I had laboured over drawing on the reverse side of the page which contained the jazz fugues sentence, she shook her head firmly, told me there were consequences for taking people’s secrets, and burnt the pages.
But she couldn’t burn my memory. When the Poet was released from prison, and she followed him to Colombia, I wrote the sentence down again. Each time I started to think about her I would turn my mind to translating sentences into code instead, until I was so adept at it I sometimes had to concentrate hard in school in order to avoid filling exam papers with clumps of words unintelligible to everyone except me. I never broke my promise to her. I never told anyone else about it.
No one except her, years later, after the Poet’s death. She had only a dim memory of the card I had written for her, and thought I was joking when I told her that there was still a muscle in my brain which knew how to read and write in code.
Can it be you, out there, reading these words?
I pushed my chair back and stood up. Maybe, just maybe.
Why would anyone send that encrypted page to Shehnaz Saeed? Because my mother wrote it. Whoever wrote that covering letter knew of the strength of my mother’s friendship with Shehnaz Saeed in those two years before she left. It is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want… I know you know the person who rote them.
Oh, surely it was the only explanation that made sense?
A hoax. It could — think, Aaasmaani! — be a hoax. Someone else could have written it, pretending to be my mother. But then why write it in code, when Shehnaz might not understand it or know where it came from? Why not sign it, at least? Why send someone a forgery while making it as difficult as possible for them to guess whose words were being forged?
My mother had written those pages to me. That was it.
After she disappeared. She had written those words since her disappearance, knowing I was the only person who would understand it. But somehow, it never reached me. It fell into the hands of someone else who sent it to Shehnaz Saeed and, by some miracle — no, by chance, nothing more — the page had come to me weeks, months, maybe years after it was first written.
But why write something so mystifying? Why? And why, again, in code?
Because she was in danger. That had to be it. They only used the code when there was danger of the words being intercepted. But what was there in those words that she didn’t want intercepted?
There are more. I will send you more if you act again.
I sat down, trying to breathe slowly, trying to control the rush of blood to my head.
What situation could make it necessary for her to send encrypted messages? The Minions came again today. If that wasn’t a line of fiction, what could it mean?
‘Mama!’ I called out, without understanding why.
The door was pushed open. There was Ed, with the curious faces of three of our first-floor colleagues behind him. He took one look at me and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him.
‘Get out,’ I said.
He made no move either to come closer or leave. Instead, he looked around the room, searching out clues. His eyes came to rest on the letter and encrypted page on my desk.
‘Get out,’ I said again, more softly, through clenched teeth. And then I saw the envelope in his hand addressed in childish block letters.
Not daring to speak, I pointed to it.
Ed glanced down and looked surprised, as though he’d forgotten he was holding it.
I lifted myself out of the chair, walked over to him, and caught hold of the envelope. Though it was mid-afternoon, a hint of aftershave still clung to Ed. It had the scent of a citrus tree growing by the sea. I leaned forward, very slightly, and then pulled away, only to find Ed was still holding on to the envelope. For an instant I thought he was gripping it so tightly in order to keep me near him, and then I realized that he had no intention of relinquishing the envelope to me.
He said, ‘What’s going on?’
‘That’s mine. You have no right to it.’ I continued to cling on to one end of the envelope.
‘No, it’s my mother’s.’
‘She sent it here for me, didn’t she? Didn’t she?’
He closed his eyes and lowered his head. Not looking at me, he said, ‘Don’t.’
‘What?’
But he only shook his head, and still held on to the envelope.
‘Don’t think I won’t break your fingers to get it, Ed.’ My voice had a degree of calm which only came when I was sliding into hysteria.
He looked up then. ‘Don’t think I won’t pick you up and throw you out of the nearest window if you try that.’ His voice was equally calm, though I had no way of knowing what that denoted. For a moment neither of us said anything more, and then his mouth shaped itself into a sneer and he dropped the envelope on the floor and left the room.
I crouched down, knees touching the ground, and picked it up. The postmark said Quetta. I turned the envelope round to open the flap and saw a scribbled note: This arrived during lunch. From Quetta? Tell me if it makes any sense. Shehnaz.
I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of encrypted, calligraphed pages.
I put the pages in my handbag, and exited the office, stopping only to mumble some explanation to the CEO about feeling unwell — he was on his way to the golf course and I’m sure it was impatience rather than concern that made him wave me out towards the door, towards my car, towards home as fast as the potholed streets would allow.
But once home, I climbed slowly, almost hesitatingly, up the steps to my third-floor flat. My life may be about to change, I thought. I became starkly aware of everything around me — the speckled pattern on the stairs; the mangy cat slouching through the driveway beneath; the multitude of potted plants in front of the doorway of one of the two first-floor flats accessible via this stairway; the tink-tink-tink sound from a nearby plot of land where someone repeatedly drove a hammer against nails, eliciting a rhythmic, near-musical sound; the rush of heat from a kitchen window; the glimpse, over at the horizon, of white-blue waves which might appear a mirage to an untutored eye seeing them, as I now did, through a wave of smoke from a fire in an empty plot; the fire itself, an even orange colour which made it possible to wonder if it, too, were a trick of the eye, really just a ragged piece of bright chiffon flapping back and forth in the breeze. And most of all, most of all I was aware of the papers clutched tight in my hand.