Rabia rested her chin on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my waist. ‘I think the flowerpot is turning him down.’
‘Just as well. He was only after her money-plant.’ I leaned back into her, feeling rather than hearing laughter ripple out from her body.
Rabia was really my half-sister, four years younger than me, married to an artist, and employed by an NGO. Her features were all soft curves to my sharp angles, and her sense of humour stemmed from joy rather than irony. The only thing we had in common was our father’s gene pool — clearly filled with recessive genes since there was nothing of him apparent in either of us — and our overly protective attitudes towards each other.
‘Make sure you look after each other while we’re away,’ my father said, and I couldn’t help smiling at the unexpected — and rare — confluence of our thinking. Dad walked over to the two of us. ‘And come and visit, often.’ The air ducts had given his hair a windswept look and, seeing it, Rabia laughed again and combed it back into place with her fingers before leaving the room to find Beema — last seen with the customs official downstairs, deep in conversation about Shehnaz Saeed’s return to acting.
‘You’re sure you’ll be OK, living alone?’
‘Dad, I’m thirty-one.’
‘Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Linearity?’ I suggested. His face had that slightly bemused expression I had seen at various points in my life when I announced my age to him, as though he couldn’t quite believe the gap between my conception and the present moment.
‘It’s not too late to decide you want to come with us, you know.’
I threw him an exasperated look. ‘Welcome to the third millennium, Dad. Single women in Karachi do occasionally live alone without the world coming to an end. Besides,’ I jerked my thumb towards the lounge, ‘there’s the connecting door to Rabia and Shakeel’s flat. I’m not exactly camping out in the wilderness. Subject closed.’
He nodded and ran his fingers over the network of hairline cracks in the paint which gave the turtle on the wall a wrinkled brow.
‘I could go out and get some paint, and help you slap on a coat before our flight out,’ my father said. ‘Unless the marine life is growing on you.’
‘Now there’s a pleasant image. Barnacles on my skin, seaweed draped around my neck. It’s fine, Dad. I can take care of it. You know, you don’t have to be so useful all the time.’
He smiled and scratched his chin, as he always did when he wasn’t quite sure what to say. The chin was growing more prominent as the passage of time carved itself into his frame, gradually removing all excesses of flesh. Old age would happen to his face suddenly, and soon, I realized, but for the moment, with his trim physique and thick grey hair, he looked better than he had since the days of his boyhood, just past adolescence — a time in which, if photographs were to be believed, there was a promise of extraordinary beauty in each angle of his face.
‘What should I be if not useful?’ he said, spreading his arms as if indicating a willingness to take on any possibility.
‘It’s a moot point. All you can be is yourself. Consistency, thy name is Dad.’
‘You have this way, darling, of paying compliments that sound so very much like insults.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I will miss you, you know.’
‘You say it as though it just occurred to you for the first time. Please, don’t respond to that.’
It was my turn then to smile and not know what to say. So finally I said, ‘What are you going to do in Islamabad? Couldn’t the bank just have transferred you to their branch there instead of giving you time off?’
‘They could have. They offered to. I said no. I thought my wife might have need… well, that she wouldn’t regard it as unwelcome if I were with her during the day instead of behind some desk. The financial world won’t be too disturbed by my absence, I expect.’
‘Because we’re only irreplaceable to those who love us? That’s the subtle point you’re trying to make here, right? Let’s concentrate on the domestic and leave the world to take care of itself. Thank God Louis Pasteur didn’t take that view. We’d all be out milking cows every morning for our daily cups of tea.’
He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘The subtle point I’m making is that I’m not a very good banker. And anyway, someone else would have figured out pasteurization eventually — there’d just be a different word for it.’
‘And if Shakespeare had stayed in Stratford with Anne Hathaway and the kids, someone else would have written Hamlet eventually, too.’
He half-shrugged, summing up his view of both Hamlet and this oft-repeated dance around our differences, and there was something approaching relief on his face as we heard the sounds of Rabia and Beema’s footsteps and rushed voices headed towards the bedroom.
‘Such excitement,’ Beema declared, walking into the room, Rabia behind her. When my stepmother and half-sister stood next to each other, it was remarkable to notice the resemblance between them which had nothing to do with features replicating themselves from one generation to the next, and everything to do with the way personality can be a physical presence, particularly around the eyes and mouth. ‘About Shehnaz Saeed’s return. I was talking to the customs guy about it and next thing I knew I was in the centre of a throng, buzzing away about the Great Comeback.’
‘I told you it would happen eventually,’ my father said drily. ‘Some people just need their spotlight.’
‘Be fair to her.’ There was a hint of rebuke in Beema’s voice. ‘It’s been fifteen years, and why shouldn’t she have her spotlight?’
‘I never said she shouldn’t have it. I’m entirely unconcerned with whether she has it or not. I’m just saying what I’ve always said. People don’t change.’
‘People change entirely,’ I said. ‘Look at Narcissus. Became a flower. I call that a change.’
‘A metamorphosis, even,’ Rabia added. ‘Ma, you knew Shehnaz Saeed, didn’t you?’
‘A little.’ Beema put a hand on my wrist. ‘She was a friend of your mother, remember?’
My father made a noise in his throat, muttered something about something that needed fixing, and left the room. It was his standard operating procedure where anything to do with my mother was concerned.
‘Oh, everyone who was ever within ten paces of Mama claims to have been a friend of hers at some point,’ I said as airily as I could manage, though I knew it had been a different story with Shehnaz Saeed. ‘No wonder she had to leave all the time. So many friends, so many birthday presents to buy.’ I thought of Ed’s initial reaction to me, that moment when he stepped back as though seeing something impossible, and it struck me forcibly that he must have known my mother when she was in Karachi — not just through pictures in the paper or from the viewpoint of audience, but actually known her.