He doesn’t mention you. Doesn’t that prove something?
No. Nothing.
But one of them could have told someone else about the conversation.
Gue.
Yes. I thought of that. Gue.
He loved finding oddball definitions in dictionaries. One day he called me up from Colombia, sat by the phone for hours waiting for the trunk call to be put through, so he could say, ‘Look up “gue” in the dictionary, Aasmaani.’ He and I had the same dictionary; he gave it to me as a present precisely so we could play this game. Gue is ‘a kind of rude violin’. He loved that. He would love Frass. It is exactly the sort of thing he would love.
But it’s impossible.
It’s extremely improbable.
You can’t allow yourself to start believing this.
But no matter how hard I looked for a sign that would prove, incontrovertibly, that is wasn’t him, I couldn’t find it. Hours went by, in which I first read and reread the pages, then wrote them out in plain English, just to have some different way of approaching them. When that proved fruitless I tried to impose order: start with paragraph one, I told myself, reread it and consider what it means. Why would someone put down that information rather than any other? Find the mind behind the words. But the only mind I encountered was the Poet’s.
I heard Rabia come home. I wanted to call out to her, but then I imagined her look of panic if I told her what had happened, imagined her tearing up the pages, saying, someone’s just playing a sick game with you, I’m calling Beema and Dad. And if I showed anything but utter willingness to agree with her and accept it as a hoax then it would all return to the days just after Mama left when I used to ask operators to trace calls, and searched everywhere for clues and conspiracies. In those days, Dad, Beema and Rabia were constantly accumulating and weighing evidence about whether I was getting better or not, watching me at all times, suggesting we ‘talk’ about ‘feelings’, forcing me to lie more and more convincingly just so that they would stop watching, stop gathering evidence, think I was improving. Sometimes I managed to fool Dad and Rabia, but never Beema. But now Beema had a dying mother, and the least I could do for her was allow that to be the centre of her world.
I heard Rabia and Shakeel go out. They knocked on the connecting door first but I stayed utterly still and didn’t answer. It was only when they were gone that I wanted to take the letters to Rabia and tell her what they said.
Peaches. Broken fingers. My mother’s kisses. Hikmet. The Poet alive. Someone trying to convince me — no, Shehnaz Saeed — that the Poet was alive. Why Shehnaz? The words were not my mother’s. This wasn’t the sign from her I’d been waiting for. I was no closer. And yet, the Poet alive. Not true. Domesticity or a dildo. Larvae. Her unforgivable pregnancy. I couldn’t piece any of it together, couldn’t hold on to one thought long enough to produce a reaction before another thought barrelled around the corner and derailed the first one.
At length, I stopped trying. I lay on my sofa, looking at the sun setting fiercely into the sea, individual words and phrases littered round my head like crumbs that can never be reconstituted into a slice of sense.
There was a cobweb in a corner of the room, so delicate my breath could send each thread spiralling into the darkness. Prufrock. Intrinsicate. Left to right. Right to left. Frass, Shakespeare, the grey shawl, no mention of me.
A shadow of an explanation swerved into my mind, and then swerved away again. I almost had it. A way out of here. That missing piece which would reveal the face of the mystery. But I would never have that missing piece — that was the torture of this near-delirium of overwrought thinking. I would only repeat the leaps from one thought to the other, each leap pushing the words further away from meaning. But I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t do anything but leap.
Someone was ringing the door-bell. Door-bells don’t ring for ever. You just need the patience to wait them out. But this one kept on, an insistently merry ‘ding’ that soon grew frenzied, its cheer transmuting into increasing hysteria the longer I ignored it. Then the phone started ringing. At the same moment, my mobile beeped to announce a text message. The mobile was next to me. I raised a hand, pressed down on the keypad. Whose number was that? I pressed again and a message appeared: PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR. ED
Ed. Go away.
But then I sat up. He would prove it to me. I would read him the decrypted message, and he would tell me that it was impossible. He would tell me why it was impossible. My mind was too desperate for hope. I must be missing something, something obvious. But Ed would see it. Ed was smart. Ed would release me from this.
I was on my feet, running to the door. I opened it, and there he stood, holding up a brown bag moulded in the shape of a bottle, in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty.
‘I’ve brought a bottle of wine and an amusing anecdote as peace offerings.’
‘Wine here tastes like vinegar.’ I turned to walk back into the flat. There was a slight pause, and then I heard him following me in.
I headed towards the lounge, towards the encrypted pages, but Ed saw the kitchen, sauntered into it and came out with a corkscrew and two tumblers. I surprised myself by thinking that there was something in the way he entered my kitchen that I liked; not proprietary, not like so many men in Karachi who assumed they could walk into your home and act as though they owned it, but more familiar, as though we were past the need to be formal with each other. Then he held out a glass to me, and in that instant when it passed from his hand to mine I remembered the distaste with which he had thrown the envelope at my feet.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My mother sent the letter for you. None of it was my business. It’s just…’
‘Yes?’ When he was speaking, my mind could latch on to his words. Words which made sense, each letter slotting neatly into its place, all the letters together forming words and sentences with spaces between them, the spaces acting as transmitters of meaning and not as gulfs which kept each word, each sentence, separate and unbridgeable.
‘You were treating me like some no-account delivery boy. My ego objected.’
‘It wasn’t about you, Ed.’ I sat down on the sofa and glanced over to the papers on the low table.
‘That’s what my ego objected to.’ He looked into his wine glass and then up at me again. ‘You want to hear the amusing anecdote?’ The sunset had been swallowed up in darkness and now a single beam of light from an unknown source came through the balcony window and lit up the wine in his glass to ruby, everything else in the flat existing in muted shades at the midpoint of colour and shadow.
‘No. Do you want to know what was in the envelope your mother sent me?’
He had brought the rim of the glass up to his face again but the question made him forget to tilt the wine into his mouth, so he just stood there, his lower lip adhered to the glass, looking like a man who has seen a gorgon at a cocktail party.
Then he blinked, sipped, and put the glass down on the coffee table. ‘I know it was more… what did you call it… calligraphy, if that’s what you’re going to tell me. I opened the envelope and looked inside before I brought it to you.’
‘Your mother didn’t show it to you?’
For a moment he was silent as though trying to decide what exactly to tell me. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly pleased with my mother for giving you the first piece of calligraphy. So when that second one arrived during lunch she sneaked off without showing it to me and asked her driver to deliver it to you at STD. Fortunately the driver is a lazy bastard and decided just to wait until I was returning to the office and hand it over to me instead.’