‘Karachi may not be New York but there are things to love around here as well.’
‘People to love, certainly,’ he said, looking up at me and then down at the photographs and then off to one side. Before I could think of something to say to that he was looking up again, smiling. ‘I never did tell you the funny anecdote I promised yesterday. I was driving home from STD a couple of days ago — and you know I have to go past the police checkpoint near the US Consul General’s house, right? So, as per usual, the police pull me over, write down my licence number and ask for my name—’
‘You’re right. That’s a funny story.’
‘I haven’t got to the punchline.’
‘Of course you have. You left your great life in New York because you disliked all the suspicion and prejudice, and you return to Karachi only to find that on a daily basis you get pulled over by the police who want to make sure you aren’t endangering the safety of the US Consul General. How is that anything but the punchline?’
‘I see your point. Thanks, you just killed my joke.’
‘Oh, go on. What’s your version of the punchline?’
‘The police pulled me over, asked my name, and I thought, why do I always give them my real name? Let me lie. Let that be my attempt at resisting this nonsense. So I said, “Agamemnon.” And the first policeman looked at me as though he was about to take me in for questioning but the second one said to him, “Write it down. Hurry up. Agha Memon.”’
I laughed. He leaned further forward and rested his hand on mine.
And it was back again. The fizz. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘it’s Ramzan. We’re supposed to keep our thoughts pure until sunset. And while we’re on the subject, don’t stick bottles of wine on my office door.’
He lifted my hand and touched his lips to my knuckles.
I had almost forgotten how this felt; this anticipation, this drowning.
At length, he let go of my hand, stood up and walked towards the window. He jiggled the strings that controlled the workings of the blinds and held his palm against the windowpane as though to absorb its heat though it was far from cold in his office. Looking out at the garden with its pink-blossomed trees he said, ‘Aasmaani, I don’t believe the Poet wrote those pages. I think it’s all some kind of hoax.’
‘I think so, too.’
He turned to face me. ‘Oh, thank God. I was afraid you’d actually started to believe…’
‘No, no.’ I could feel embarrassment spread across my cheeks.
‘It’s just, you know, it’s so obviously, well, ridiculous, to start with. But also, everything you read to me. It’s exactly what someone would write if it were a hoax, isn’t it? I mean, if someone was trying to convince you that it was all real that’s just how they’d do it. Drop in references to the peach allergy, dredge up a few old memories, throw in some clues about his present situation, do a quick summary of some aspect of all the intervening years. It’s all too neat.’
‘You knew he had a peach allergy?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The way you said “the peach allergy” as though it was something you know about.’
‘Well, yeah.’ He came closer to me. ‘Once when your mother was over at my mother’s place for dinner, there were peaches in the fruit-bowl. And Samina said that when the Poet was alive she never bought peaches. She said, “Now I can buy all the peaches I want, but as silver linings go that’s pewter.”’
I could hear her voice saying it. Her voice as it became when the Poet died — all hesitancy and brittleness.
Ed sat down on the edge of the desk, his shadow falling on me. ‘Do you mind if I talk about her?’
I shook my head.
‘Samina,’ he said again, as though he hadn’t said her name aloud in a long time and was surprised by the sound of it. ‘She always insisted I call her that instead of “Aunty”. I used to see her and the Poet, now and then, when I was growing up. Not often. Maybe a handful of times. But after the Poet died, she and my mother…’ He stopped, unbuttoned and rebuttoned the cuff of his sleeve. ‘She moves in and out of your features, you know? It’s uncanny.’
‘She and your mother.’
‘What?’
‘You were saying: after the Poet died…’
‘Right. She and my mother became close, so she’d come by quite often. I used to drop in sometimes to see my mother and find her there. I wasn’t living at home then — was at IBA, sharing a flat with a couple of guys near the campus.’
‘Your delinquent university years. I remember hearing about them.’
‘From your mother?’
‘No. Just generally. When your mother quit acting.’
He stood up, rocking the desk. ‘You mean when they all said she gave up the great passion of her life because of me. Because I was such a disaster she wanted to make sure she didn’t make the same mistakes with the children from her second marriage.’
‘Ed.’ I touched his sleeve. ‘I know how people in this town talk.’
‘Yes. Of course you do.’ He sat down again, closer this time. ‘It was so unfair the way people treated your mother. All those years, she was only ever with the Poet. But because they didn’t get married, and because they never really tried to hide the nature of their relationship, people thought they could say terrible things about her, and turn their backs on her when the Poet died.’ He shook his head. ‘All those people, married people, having their affairs, and no one says anything or treats them any differently as long as they keep it secret. As though there’s some virtue in that. As though discretion and lies are the same thing. Your mother and the Poet, they were discreet. If you saw them in public and you wanted to believe they were just close friends and neighbours, hell, you could believe that.’
‘Close friends and neighbours don’t follow one another into exile.’
He waved his hand. ‘There was just something so honest about their relationship. That’s all I’m saying. They didn’t flaunt it, but they didn’t lie and sneak around either. They didn’t deceive anyone. And you’re the proof of that. You, growing up here, where everything goes on behind closed doors and yet everyone acts outraged about the tiniest suggestion of impropriety. You’re not embarrassed or angry that your mother was involved with a man she never married. You don’t hold it against her.’
‘I loved him before I knew the meaning of the term “social convention”, Ed. It’s just that simple.’
‘You never had to find out she was lying to you. It’s that simple.’
Shehnaz Saeed had always confounded the purveyors of gossip by keeping her private life utterly private. Through all the years she was in the public eye there was never even a whiff of scandal attached to her. So, when she married her second husband, everyone was startled. He had been part of her wide social circle, but no one imagined he was anything more than that. Not even Ed?
‘I remember the first time I saw your mother after the Poet died,’ he said. ‘At a supermarket — Paradise, maybe. Somewhere near Bath Island, at any rate.’
She never got used to thinking of the neighbourhood around my father’s house as her neighbourhood. On those rare occasions when she did go out to shop it would always be back to her old haunts, the places where she looked on in exasperation as Omi took more time than seemed possible choosing the perfect watermelon, the ideal selection of green chillies. Even when it came to toothpaste and shampoo and soap, Omi would regard all the possible options as though being asked to locate a talisman, never choosing the same brand twice in a row.