I unlocked my front door, walked through the balcony and then through the second set of doors, locked the connecting door to Rabia’s flat and, with a muttered prayer (‘Silently,’ I heard Beema tell me. ‘Silently. Prayer is as quiet and as resonant as a single raindrop falling on a desert’), I sat down with the sheaf of papers in my hand.
The first line told me the Poet had written it.
I wonder if I’m still allergic to peaches.
It would be too absurd to bear if age and solitude worked their way through my body and mind erasing all defining characteristics, until nothing remained recognizable of the man I once was except my need to break out into gasps and hives each time I encounter that fruit.
I have a rash, therefore I am.
Sounds about right.
The Minions brought a bagful of peaches for me yesterday. My last experience with peaches was three decades ago, when you bit into a peach and then kissed me. Those were early days, before you learned I never did anything by half-measures; not love, not poetry, not allergies. I think of that experience now as a cautionary tale that stays my hand from the inviting plumpness of the fruit before me — remember how my tongue swelled up and nearly cut off all breath? I also have some memory of the momentarily overwhelming pleasure of your peachjuicemouth, but that is just background. And I remember what you said in the hospital room when we had ascertained I would live: even your allergies have to be poetic. Do you dare, Alfred Prufrock, do you dare?
That pleased me more than I ever told you.
If someone is reading this, it must be you, so you must still be alive despite claims to the contrary. I’m sorry I can’t appear to care more about this. I’ll never see you again, so how can it matter? Still, now that they have allowed me to write at last, I’m writing to you. That must mean something.
I’m not really writing to you. How will this ever reach you, even if you are alive?
But why am I writing in our code, if not to write to you?
There is nothing like solitary confinement to make you lose any interest you ever had in self-analysis. Self-analysis! It’s self-narrative, that’s what it is. Create a story about yourself, and shape everything to fit that story. In my story I was always the one driven mad by love for you, even before I met you. I don’t know how to interpret my actions now that I’m falling into an entirely different sort of insanity — the insanity of a twilight life, in which there is no distinction to be made between real and fictional worlds. Sometimes Rustum and Sohrab visit me in here, reliving over and over the battle in which father struck down son, until the room is so filled with recrimination and guilt that I have to banish them. The next day it’s Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and the next thing you know she’s rearranging your syntax as though it were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some foreign dignitary who disdains your nation’s table manners.
If I am no longer the man mad with love for you, does it mean I’m not me any more?
How tedious I’ve grown.
What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this?
Should I tell you I can’t write poetry any more. Poetry? I can’t write Urdu. My hand moves left to right across the page. There is a tide in the handwriting of men and I must flow with it. The first year they brought me here…
Why go back to that?
The first year they brought me here was the worst for many reasons but among those reasons was this: I had to break my addiction to writing. There was no paper anywhere. They kept me confined to the house — it was a room then; the Minions have added on over the years. Oh, the joy when they finally completed the kitchen! What a gourmet cook I’ve become, able to use anything they bring me. Sometimes they bring the strangest vegetables, things for which I have no vocabulary. I almost wonder if it’s become a contest among them to try to produce something I cannot use.
Being confined to my one room meant I couldn’t even walk out and pluck leaves from trees to serve as paper. And no watchband to write on either, as Hikmet did in his prison days. You know how fastidious I’ve always been, but enough days of remembering ‘Make dust our parchment and with rainy eyes pour sorrow on the bosom of the earth’ and I put aside the cleaning rags they had given me and let all surfaces around me become dulled. Then, a fingertip touched in saliva, and I was off! Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings. I who had always scribbled endlessly, covering page after page with doodles and letters and words that I merely liked to look at (you’ve noticed already the elaborate hand with which I’ve written this. I cannot bear the absence of physical beauty in the lines of the English alphabet. English has lines; Urdu has curves. Perhaps my use of English is mere sign of a dead libido. It’s the sort of statement my critics would make. But no, look, haven’t I restored splendour to this language with my near calligraphic flourishes?), I learned to hone phrases in my mind, and only write what I was sure of. The physical act of writing required me to suck dust off my fingers after every few characters. That made me think of you.
The Minions came in and found my words, remarkable words, the best I ever wrote, on every surface of the room. They filled buckets and drowned each image. Then they broke all my fingers, and left. This sort of thing went on for a while, though the first stands out in my memory most clearly.
Those were the early Minions. They’ve become more civilized since. Or perhaps I’m just too neutered to pose a threat.
You must have aged. In all the time I knew you, you only grew more beautiful.
Here is a memory of you that always makes me laugh:
It is 1971. I wrap around my shoulders that grey shawl you love. I haven’t seen you in nearly four months, not since just before your wedding, haven’t spoken to you since the day of the nikah when I phoned you to say I wasn’t going to be dramatic and whisk you away on my white charger just seconds before you inked your contract and joined yourself in legitimate union to that weedy man, so you’d have to get out of the wedding on your own if you had the intelligence and courage to do it. I knew that would make you go through with the wedding which otherwise (I’m sure, though you always denied it) you were going to back out of at the last minute. I thought that was the surest way to win you back. I thought you’d last three days and then appear on my doorstep, humbled.
I underestimated your stubbornness.
In the end I had to make all the moves. I wrote Laila for you. Not the most conventional wooing poem ever written, but you knew it meant I was going insane with missing you. I alluded to you in an interview for a magazine to which I knew you subscribed. I flaunted my affairs in public, all with women you knew were not in any way to my taste. None of this was enough for you. You were silent, then more silent, and then, as though it were nothing, you announced to your friends who were also my friends that you were pregnant.
I still haven’t entirely forgiven you for that.
So I wrap the grey shawl around my shoulders, let myself in through your gate and ring your door-bell. The Weed answers, and I think he or I would have put a knife through the other’s heart if you hadn’t been standing behind him asking who it was. He steps aside, and then I see you: your pregnancy still invisible to everyone including him, but to someone who knows your body as well as I do it is instantly obvious. You are holding a cookbook in one hand, a courgette in the other. I laugh so hard I have to lean against the door frame for support. ‘Is that domesticity or a dildo?’ I ask. ‘Which of the two has this man driven you to?’