‘Your Omi’s dead,’ she said. ‘Jaan, I’m so sorry.’
My Omi.
It was the first time I learned about the body’s ability to react to news which our minds haven’t yet registered. I started crying right away, leaning against a wall, weeping, with my head in my hands. We never know the structure of grief until it comes to us, each time differently. Those of us who imagine a loss are always wrong in our predictions of how it will feel to find ourselves struggling to imagine emptiness in the shape of a loved body. I wasn’t prepared for how unmoored grief could be; for days after, I was all tears, but not — as I had imagined — because of memory triggers, mention of his name, phrases of his poetry. It was just tears because there were tears and, within, not so much a desolation or sense of loss as a heaviness.
At some point in the hours just after I heard the news I locked myself in my bedroom to hide from my mother’s blank gaze and the peculiar shuddering of her hands, and for want of something else to do, I scanned, without concentration, a newspaper. My eyes were arrested by an article with the heading: EVE TEASERS GO ON RAMPAGE: Modest Women Afraid to Leave Home.
And that’s the first time I knew what it meant to be without him, because at that moment I wanted only to call him up and say, ‘Have you seen the paper, Omi?’
I gripped the folder with both hands, and forced myself to start reading. The first clipping concerned itself mainly with extolling the Poet’s genius, and lamenting the nation’s loss. The only details about his death were that the body had been found ‘with marks of violence’ in the late morning the previous day, in an empty plot of land in Nazimabad. (Was the location mere coincidence? Omi used to love the fact that Karachi had a part of town called Nazimabad — Dwelling of Poets, he’d say, would you find such a locality in any of the so-called civilized parts of the world?) The Poet’s wallet was found in the corpse’s pocket, and Dr Basheer Riaz, who had been the Poet’s doctor for years, was called in by the police to confirm that the body was the Poet’s. A full investigation was underway. Nothing there that I didn’t know.
But the next clipping was from one of the sensationalist Urdu tabloids. Here were details, graphic details, of the broken bones, the features smashed beyond recognition, the purple bruise that his face had become.
No teeth remained inside his mouth.
His tongue was a stump of muscle.
I dropped the folder. Pushed the window open and leaned out. Omi. Oh God, Omi.
They had protected me from this knowledge, all of them, everyone. I knew there had been torture, I knew there were marks of violence, but my father, my matter-of-fact father who never exaggerated or cloaked a detail in metaphor, was the one to tell me, ‘He had the face of a man who was indestructible. So when he died, his face changed. It lost that indestructible quality and became unrecognizable. That’s why they needed a doctor to confirm who it was. That’s why a simple identification wasn’t possible.’ I knew they were keeping something from me, but I chose not to look any further for the details.
How could anyone do that to Omi? Why would anyone do that to Omi?
Smashed beyond recognition.
Beyond recognition.
I stood up.
Sometimes we find ourselves in a moment which feels like a pause; a suspension between the present and the possible. A moment in which our lives prepare to turn.
I bent down and sheafed together all the pages of the folder which had fanned out as they fell. My hands were utterly steady. I flipped through the cuttings — the tributes, the eulogies, the mention of the fire on the day after his death which destroyed all his papers, including the new collection he’d been working on — until I came to clippings from several weeks later, reporting the death of the Poet’s doctor, Basheer Riaz. The one man who’d had the absolute proof, certain as dental records, undeniable as blood. The newspaper reports shed little light on the traffic accident which killed him — though almost all the reports, tellingly, mentioned that he had been the only person who was called in to identify the Poet’s body. But there was also something that the Poet never had — a funeral notice. At the bottom left-hand side of the notice: MOURNER: Nasreen Riaz (sister). At the bottom right-hand side, a phone number.
It was a six-digit number, which started in 5–3.
I took my mobile phone out of my bag, and now my hands weren’t quite so steady any more. Changing the 3 to an 8–5, I dialled the number. An automated voice told me the number didn’t exist. I tried changing the 3 to an 8–3 and this time a woman’s voice, elderly, answered.
‘Nasreen Riaz?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
I reached out of the window and gripped the thin trunk of a bougainvillea vine that climbed along the wall. Purple, papery flowers twirled and drifted on to the concrete below.
‘I’m a television researcher,’ I said, and then, ‘No, no. I mean, I am. But that’s not why I’m calling. My name is Aasmaani. My mother… my mother’s name might be familiar to you. Samina Akram.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ Her voice was both curious and hesitant.
‘I’m sorry to intrude like this, but I’m calling about your brother.’
‘You’re not another one of those conspiracy nuts, are you?’
I gripped the vine tighter. ‘If you don’t mind, I just wanted to know. I’m sorry if this sounds strange or callous. But were you close to your brother?’
There was the sound of something crashing to the floor. And then her voice came at me, furious. ‘To hell with you. That’s all anyone wanted to know. How close I was to my brother. Not because he was my brother and he was dead, but just because they wanted to know what he might have told me. His death was part of some grand plot, the tying up of loose ends. That’s what everyone thought. He was not a loose end. He was my brother. Do you understand that?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…’
‘No one ever does. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Listen to me. He died in a car accident. He had bad night vision, he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. But there was an emergency at the hospital and his driver was off sick that day. That’s the story. That’s all there is to it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘How is anyone ever sure of anything?’ she said, her voice weary. ‘You want to know if he was involved in a cover-up around the Poet’s death, don’t you? Well, I never asked him. It would have been a stupid question. But I know it was the Poet. I know it because my brother was an honourable man.’
‘That’s your proof?’
‘That’s my proof. I knew my brother. That’s my proof.’ She slammed down the phone.
The purples and reds of the bougainvillea flowers were sparks of a fire, burning his last poems.
I drew in a long breath. What sort of proof would be enough for me? His body was smashed beyond recognition. Even Mirza couldn’t give me the proof I needed. No, the proof I needed could only come in the form of an exhumation of a grave in a distant village. I turned away from the thought. What would be in a grave seventeen years later? Nothing I wanted to see. And nothing that would be of any help, either, since he had no close surviving relatives that I knew of, except some branch of his father’s family who never acknowledged him, and whom he never acknowledged, and who would only throw me out of their grand houses if I burst in babbling about DNA and opening graves and wild conspiracy stories. And in any case, I would never get permission for an exhumation, and I would never bring myself to ask for it either.
So there could be no proof.
Except his voice. His voice coming through to me in those pages, so utterly him, so utterly unlike any other voice I’d ever known. I knew my brother. That’s my proof, she had said, and there was no way of arguing with that. But I knew my Poet.