I turned off my lights and ignition and watched him. The last time I had seen him he had been a man who wore creased kurta-shalwars and an air of glamorous dissipation. Long before heroin chic, Mirza had a startling beauty that was all about emaciation. Whether he picked up a book of poems or reached out to touch the Poet’s shoulder, he treated his body as something that might just fall apart, and yet it was abundantly clear — even to me when I should have been too young to understand these things — that he subjected his flesh to all manner of torments, and that it wasn’t glass but wire of which his bones were fashioned.
I never really had a personal relationship with him, the way I did with many of Omi and my mother’s friends who teased me and spoilt me and asked me for my opinions on adult matters like politics and religion and books. But he was around so often that I knew quite intimately his face, his particular gestures, the cadences of his voice. And I knew he looked at me in a way that made me ashamed to like it. Many people thought he was just another one of the Acolytes — that group of men who I always believed were the main reason my mother and Omi lived in separate homes. She had no time for them — the vaunting egos, the self-absorption, the lachrymose intoxication. ‘I loved him least after two a.m.,’ she once said of Omi, who was always early to bed except when the Acolytes came over and kept him up until dawn with whisky, poetry and hashish. But though Mirza the Snake was always part of those late-night gatherings he wasn’t really an Acolyte. He didn’t ultimately defer to Omi the way the others did, nor preface every criticism with lavish praise. In many ways, Omi regarded him as an equal because he knew more about mystic poetry from a myriad traditions around the world than anyone else. An atheist obsessed with God, that’s how my mother described him. Burdened with that love which was always just beyond reach because he didn’t believe in the Beloved.
After we all thought Omi was dead, Mirza the Snake became the most persistent of his circle who tried to share my mother’s grief with her. I remember him best from this period. One night, he walked up the driveway while my mother and I were sitting in Dad’s garden. She had been avoiding him — and everyone — for weeks.
He ambled up to her and said, ‘Push everyone else away, Samina — they’re fools for thinking they understand what you’ve lost — but this is me, Mirza. You’re the only person whose company I can bear right now and I suspect that’s not a one-way street.’ He held out his hand. ‘Let’s be each other’s companions in grief.’
I was terrified when he said that. Terrified she’d agree. This must have been soon enough after the news of the Poet’s death for me to believe I would have her to myself when the edge of grieving wore off. Before I knew that his death was the one thing with which I would never be able to compete.
But she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Let’s not pretend to be friends, Mirza. He loved me, and that’s one thing you can’t forgive me.’
He reached out his long fingers, took the cigarette from her hand and held it to his lips. ‘You burnt the only copies of his last poems,’ he said, and turned and walked out, listing slightly with the breeze.
Sixteen years later, the walk had changed. It was the walk now of a portly man able to bear all manner of buffeting. The kurta-shalwar was made of richer fabric now, the kind that didn’t wrinkle. And his features appeared to have had blotting paper held over them for a decade or more.
The Fata Morgana in the backseat of my car was gesturing for me to drive away. Mirza’s real talent, my mother used to say, was for finding a wound and driving a nail through it.
I gestured impatiently at the backseat, got out of the car and walked up to the café. Pushing open the wooden doors, I looked around the cosy space with its five tables of varying sizes, of which only the long table had customers seated at it. There was no sign of Mirza, but one of the waiters, seeing my eyes scan the room, pointed up the stairs. I climbed the steps set alongside a long window which had a tree outside festooned in twinkling fairy lights and it was with a mixture of satisfaction and panic that I saw Mirza was the only person in the small upstairs section, his girth almost spilling off the cushion of the wrought-iron chair.
XV
Mirza stood up when he saw me.
‘Aasmaani Inqalab, all grown up,’ he said. He moved forward, caught me by both shoulders and pressed his lips against my cheek. ‘Chand Raat Mubarak,’ he whispered, his mouth close to my ear, somehow managing to transform the greeting into something verging between intimacy and obscenity.
I pulled away and he smiled. ‘I see I still make you nervous.’ He sat down and gestured to the chair opposite him at the table which seemed incredibly small. Leaning forward, he almost entirely swallowed up the space between himself and the empty chair. ‘Have a seat. And don’t look so suspicious. You’re the one who proposed this rendezvous.’
I pulled the chair away from the table and sat down, legs crossed, one arm crooked on the back. ‘Sorry about the answering-machine message. I was researching something for STD — I work there now — and I had a pressing question I thought you could answer. I’m usually quite adept at hanging up before I start swearing.’
He reached into a bowl on the table and popped a pickled green chilli into his mouth. ‘What was the question?’
I waved my hand dismissively. ‘Something about the history of the ghazal. A minor matter really, for a five-minute segment of a show that never got made in the end — but the producer likes turning a feather into a flock of crows, so there are no minor matters, only minor pay-offs.’ I was moving unthinkingly between English and Urdu, as was he, and though that was common enough, it had been a while since my Urdu vocabulary and syntax heightened into that old, now-vanishing courtly Urdu in which Mirza and the Poet always spoke to each other. I have Omi’s voice in my mouth, I thought.
‘But here we are after all these years. Hardly a minor payoff I’d say.’
He was smiling pleasantly but even so I found myself looking down at my menu and pretending to read it intently just so that he wouldn’t see my unease. Somewhere beneath that mountain of flesh was the first man who had made me wish I wasn’t just a child. I used to fantasize about kissing him when I was too young to fantasize about anything beyond a kiss.
I felt slightly sick at the memory.
‘So,’ Mirza said, after the waiter had taken our orders — coffee for me, grilled chops for him—‘You’re a dogsbody at STD. Is that your Raisin of Death?’
It was an expression the Poet used to use. His version of raison d’être.
‘Is sycophancy your Raisin of Death, Mirza?’ His sporty car and expensive kurta-shalwar confirmed the truth of the rumours I’d been hearing for the last decade: soon after democracy returned to Pakistan in 1988, five months after my mother’s disappearance, Mirza became the unofficial Poet Laureate of Pakistan’s politicos. On birthdays, anniversaries, in the run-up to elections, on the passage of new constitutional amendments, Mirza produced verses to fit the occasion for anyone willing to pay the price, regardless of their political affiliation. When the military had returned to power in 1999 the demand for his sycophantic poetry had only increased among his former patrons; politicians, it seemed, had a greater need for adulation when power was far from their grasp than when they were occupying high office. And with the recent return to pseudo-democracy, he was probably up to his eyeballs in rhymes about both the victors and those who were cheated of their rightful victories.