And bless you, you laugh with me.
‘Both,’ you say, and I know you are mine for ever.
This is why it’s best not to write. Not even English. It jolts the memory. I had to put aside this page for days after writing that previous paragraph. I’ll talk now only of my time in here, the years without you.
One day I just decided to stop. Stop trying to find ways to write in secret, stop writing in my head, stop remembering how it felt in those sweet moments when language obliterated me. You were so entwined in every word I wrote that I had to banish you too, though you did nothing to make that easy for me.
Then one day the Minions arrived with a book. A book! Not just any book, my love, but Shakespeare. The Complete Works of. That memory I wrote of earlier, the one from 1971, even that turns pale compared to this one. I kept thinking it meant they were going to kill me. Shakespeare as last meal. I didn’t care. I held that book to my heart — black binding, faded gold lettering — and I wept. Huge great sobs from a place so far inside I didn’t know it existed.
What I remembered then was Orwell. In 1984, two years before they brought me here. Winston sometimes dreams of a world beyond the world of grey order, a world of green fields in which a woman takes her clothes off in a careless gesture that defies all authority. Without understanding why, Winston wakes up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.
I told you once I would rather have written in English, despite its absence of curves. It was my politics that made me choose Urdu, more accessible to the public, less colonized. You rolled your eyes at me, but I was speaking the truth. I would rather have written English, purely because of Shakespeare. My first — and, it appears, most enduring — love. Another lie. The first love was Rashida, the schoolmaster’s daughter, who was the only reason I went to his house for extra classes after school. Her hips, even at thirteen! And while I’m confessing lies, let me admit the choice of Urdu had nothing to do with public accessibility and everything to do with the fact that the grandeur of Shakespeare’s language has gone out of English — it’s a language that learned to use a knife and fork, though once it ripped chickens apart with its bare hands. Urdu still allows for lushness.
My favourite word in the English language: intrinsicate.
Shakespeare uses it to describe the bond between Antony and Cleopatra. The knot intrinsicate. He had the advantage, had Will, of living before dictionaries. He could do what he wanted with words and no one would use the awful phrase ‘experimental’, with all its connotations of impending failure. Intrinsicate. Both intricate and intrinsic.
My favourite definition in the English language: frass. It means ‘excrement of boring larvae’. I choose to read ‘boring’ as a comment on personality. Is there any greater insult that you can think of? You frass! Not just excrement, not just excrement of larvae, but excrement of boring larvae. I yell it at the Minions sometimes. Frass! Frass! They continue to look impassive.
Did I always ramble this much?
They didn’t kill me. (The Minions, I mean — keep up! — when they gave me Shakespeare.) They might even have looked amused. Since then, from time to time, they’ve added on to my library. I have to commend them on their tastes. Or on their knowledge of my tastes, perhaps. Or no, they are merely the delivery boys. For whom? There is the question to which I have no answer, though I’ve given it more than a little thought these last sixteen years.
Oh, and there you were, just as I wrote that last line, your eyebrows rising to impossible heights and your voice that extraordinary mix of sarcasm and tenderness: ‘You always have an answer, sweetheart. It’s just not always the right one.’
I’m beginning to miss you now, and I can’t allow that to happen.
IX
It had to be a hoax. It could only be a hoax.
Yes, a hoax. That’s what it was. The Poet was dead.
But even if it was a hoax — no ‘even if’, Aasmaani, it is a hoax — who could have written it?
I thought I was the only person left in the world who knew it, but it seems there are two of us now.
My mother had said that the day I told her I still knew the code. If she was right, the only person who could have forged that communication and pretended it came from the Poet was her. Could my mother have tried to become the Poet just as Laila became Qais? I could feel myself falling into the strangeness of that thought, began picturing my mother running into barbed wire, and then I pulled my mind sharply out. It was an absurd idea, both too far-fetched and too neatly symmetrical — life never imitated art in quite that way — to be anything but false.
But if only three people ever knew the code and I could rule out my mother and myself as writers of that piece, what conclusion was left?
Someone else had to have known the code.
And yet it sounded so much like him.
Too much like him. It sounded too much like him. No, that wasn’t true. There was a resignation to that tone which was never part of his voice.
So then it’s proof he didn’t write it.
But in sixteen years of course he would have changed.
He’s dead, Aasmaani.
Yes, of course he’s dead, but all I’m saying is…
Is what?
That it sounds so much like the way it would sound if it were true.
All right. List them. List the ways in which it sounds like him, and the ways it doesn’t, and in those lists you’ll find the flaw, the lie which will blow down that elaborate edifice.
And if I don’t find the flaw?
You’ll find it.
But if I don’t?
Make the lists!
All right. All right.
The ways it doesn’t sound like him: Resignation. Giving up poetry and my mother. (But he explains that. And the explanation makes sense. And he doesn’t really give her up, does he, because he’s writing to her.) Becoming an enthusiastic cook. The story of the courgette. There — that’s the lie. That isn’t how it happened.
See, I told you.
But…
What?
If it had happened that way, Mama would never have told me. We’re talking about the moment she left my father. How could she tell me such a line as ‘Domesticity or a dildo’? No, she would not tell me that. But I could imagine him — the Poet — I could imagine him saying it. There was that bawdy streak in him, and she loved it, though she pretended not to.
Keep going, then. Keep going with the list of all the ways it doesn’t sound like the Poet.
That’s it. That’s the list. He’s learnt resignation, he’s given up poetry and he’s become an enthusiastic cook.
So then, it isn’t him.
But I’ve done all those things in the last sixteen years, though it seemed inconceivable when I was fourteen and he was alive.
The other list, then. All the ways in which it sounds like him.
Everything. The voice. What should I tell you now, you who will never receive this? That was a sentence structure he liked to use. What will you become, you with the eclectic mind? He wrote that on a card for me, on my thirteenth birthday. You were silent, then more silent. That’s an echo of something he said when he described to me the first time he saw my mother. She was beautiful, then more beautiful.
But he’s a poet. Of course he has a distinctive voice. It only means it’s more easily imitated.
In Urdu. It’s easily imitated in Urdu, not in English. Urdu was his public language. And then, there are all those detáils. The peach allergy. The schoolmaster’s daughter and her hips. The grey shawl. Shakespeare. Yes, that particularly. I was there when he told my mother he would rather have written in English. That entire conversation. It was him and me and her. I was studying Julius Caesar for an exam. That’s what started it. Just weeks before he died. There was no one there but the three of us.