No. If he was fearless, he wouldn’t have left all those times, taking my mother with him.
She left. She chose to go. He didn’t force her, he never once forced her.
‘Once you imprison him and make the world believe he’s dead, then what? You can’t just let him go when you’ve had fun with the game. If you let him go, there’ll be an investigation, there could be complications. He’s too famous for there not to be complications. And really, why should you want to let him go? Once you’ve set everything up — set up the place you keep him, set up the loyal or terrified underlings who attend to him — you can just leave him there to rot. Leave him there, hidden away somewhere in your vast land holdings, until he dies.’
‘So you think it’s a landowner who’s behind all this?’ I couldn’t stop myself.
Ed held up his palms to the ceiling in a gesture that encompassed all the strangeness of the universe. ‘It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s possible. Stranger things go on around here every day. There are vast parts of this country, Aasmaani, which are still mediaeval in both their mindsets and their rules. And if these pages aren’t some kind of forgery or game, well then, his jailer could be anyone, really, with enough money to pull it off. Can you pinpoint a location it’s coming from? Postmarks?’
‘The first from Multan or Mardan. The second from Quetta. And, anyway, the cover letter, I don’t know, it…’
‘Seems false. Yes. And why would someone send all that to my mother in the first place?’ He looked suddenly unconvinced.
‘I don’t know. But there are things in there which sound so much like him, Ed, that it would be uncanny for someone to have made it up.’
There was a moment of silence in which we simply looked at each other.
‘Aasmaani, do you really think it’s him?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s too often, Ed, I’ve slipped into believing things only to find they weren’t true. I can’t keep doing it. And yet. If it is true…’ I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall.
I felt his hand brush my cheek. ‘What can I do?’
I shook my head, my eyes still closed. ‘Will you be offended if I ask you to leave?’
‘Don’t be silly. How could I be offended at anything you might choose to say right now?’ My eyes were still closed, and I felt his breath on my mouth before his lips followed. I put my arm around his neck, and for a few seconds we stayed like that, our lips just resting on each other, the only movement my fingers stroking the nape of his neck.
When we moved apart, he said, ‘I don’t have to leave until tomorrow afternoon. So I’ll see you in the morning, OK? Come and find me when you get to work.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘I’ll let myself out.’
As soon as I heard the door close behind him, my body slid down to the ground. I pulled my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
The Poet — my almost-stepfather — was being imprisoned somewhere by an unknown captor. He had been there sixteen, nearly seventeen, years. Sixteen years during which he’d had no human contact except for his captor’s lackeys who broke his fingers and erased his poems. He’d been told my mother was dead. He’d lost the ability to write Urdu. But he was alive. Omi was alive.
For a moment I felt something surge up inside and I had to clasp my hands against my chest as though that could push it down. I would not do this again. I would not move back into that seductive place which promised answers, that place which could only lead to despair each time an expected resolution revealed itself to only be a mirage. The Poet was dead. Omi was dead. Somewhere in the world there was proof. Where? Who knew the details of his death, who could give me the proof I had never before felt the need to search out?
Mirza the Snake. He went to the morgue and then to the funeral. He would have seen the body. Yes, he had the proof. Mirza had the proof. Whoever was playing this sick game with Shehnaz Saeed, and for whatever purpose, it had nothing to do with me.
I carried the pages to the bookshelf, paying no attention to the Fata Morgana shaking its head behind me as I placed them between the covers of War and Peace, two-thirds of the way through the book, and knelt on the ground to push the tome into an empty space on the bottom shelf.
X
When the phone rang at five the following morning and woke me out of a dream about dreaming I thought it could only mean someone must have died.
‘Are you coming over for sehri, or what?’ Rabia said when I answered, panicked.
‘Oh, bugger.’
Rabia laughed. ‘It’s the Holy Month. Be good. No abuse.’
I rolled out of bed and when my feet hit the bare ground in the space between my bed and the rug there was a thrilling sensation of cold. That promised winter had arrived, though it would probably be gone by dawn. I pulled on my dressing-gown, opened the window and leaned out. Over the loudspeaker of the nearby mosque came the impassioned chanting of Arabic. I felt a moment of irritation on behalf of the non-fasters who would have to put up with a sustained guilt trip for the next four weeks. Ramzan was a month when the holier-than-thous were in their element. We used to have one of them as a neighbour, and every year she’d make a list of people who weren’t fasting, and every day of the month before daybreak she’d call someone on the list and recite Qur’ānic verses down the phone, hoping to affect a change of heart. She made the mistake of calling the Poet once and, with his limited knowledge of Arabic, he realized she was reading, at random, a verse about inheritance laws: being well aware of both the woman’s identity and her family scandals, he responded by pointing out that under the God-ordained laws she had just read out she and her husband had cheated her sister-in-law of her rightful share of the family fortune.
Omi, if I could only believe you were still alive.
I made my way into Rabia’s flat and found her arm-wrestling her husband on the living-room floor. I stopped a moment, unnoticed, to watch them. They made an incongruous couple — Rabia, petite and full of energy, and Shakeel, tall and languid. They had met at his first solo exhibition — Rabia didn’t know who he was, just saw a skinny man with long eyelashes who seemed to be the only person not oohing and aahing over the paintings, and went over to him. Her opening remark to Shakeel was, ‘So this guy claims he’s not interested in being an artist for high-society ladies to collect and then he goes and paints such massive canvases that only really rich people with huge rooms will be able to hang up any of his paintings.’ They were married within a year.
Rabia, yelling in frustration, had Shakeel’s hand caught between both her hands. Shakeel was looking at her in adoration and making no attempt to win the struggle. Hearing me laugh, Shakeel looked up, and Rabia took that moment of distraction to slam his hand on to the floor and let out a cry of victory.
‘Well, so much for being the brawn,’ Shakeel said, standing up. He walked up to me and whispered, ‘Who was the gentleman caller I saw leaving your flat as we were returning last night, young lady?’
I slapped him lightly on the shoulder. Shakeel liked to make much of the three-week age gap between us. He and I had a relationship in which frivolous conversation combined with deep affection in a way that meant I would never tell him any of my secrets or worries but was always perfectly content for him to be in the room on those rare occasions when I talked to Rabia about the things that were on my mind.
‘If he turns out to be significant, I’ll let you know.’
Shakeel laughed as he walked towards his studio — for him Ramzan was an opportunity to start work early. ‘He walked down the stairs like a man who thinks he is significant.’