On screen, she was remarkable. She turned away from Once-Leading and held her face up to the breeze, and in her expression she told us everything about her desire to feel the clichéd happiness that this scene demanded and her inability to stop yearning for something beyond this moment. And Once-Leading, who had been moving through his lines like a man weary of wasting his talents, suddenly started to act. He was madly in love, hopelessly daring to dream that she was in love with him too. An echo of their long-ago performance as the Macbeths flickered through them, not enough to be distracting but enough to make us feel that anything could happen from here — regicide, insanity, love, hauntings.
The sub-plot of Once-Leading’s fiancée worrying that he was still in love with his ex — a sub-plot which I’d taken to indicate terrible insecurity on the part of the fiancée — reshaped itself as I watched that scene. The fiancée is right, I thought, watching the man rest his hand on his wife’s head to prevent her hair from blowing into her eyes as a gust of wind raced in from the sea.
How could he not be blindly and — in some way — eternally in love with her? Even her Lady Macbeth hadn’t moved me so profoundly, and yet she had done little except walk across the sand, miming the actions of a smoker because although her pregnancy demanded she give up the habit her hand stayed addicted to the motion of lifting a cigarette to her lips and…
I pulled myself upright. ‘What are you doing?’ I said to the Shehnaz Saeed sitting just feet away from me.
She had been looking at her hands instead of the screen, and now she looked up at me. ‘I don’t like watching myself.’
‘No.’ I pulled myself off the sofa and pointed at the screen. ‘There. What are you doing there?’ In soft focus, she repeated the gesture. She brought her index and middle fingers to her lips, held them there for two long beats, her eyes closed, their lids tremoring lightly. Then she turned her head to one side and let her hand move away to the other side, slowly, as she exhaled from between barely parted lips. As she exhaled, her fingers curled back into a fist.
‘That’s my mother.’ I was aware of the curious flatness of my voice. ‘You’ve turned that character into my mother.’
‘What? No.’ She looked up at the screen, and the denial caught in her throat.
Beside me, Ed had covered his face with his hand, muffling whatever words were coming out of his mouth.
I knew what would come next. Shehnaz Saeed’s character would return. Back to Karachi, back to her daughter, back from all those years of disappearance. She’d speak in a smoky voice with a lisp so buried you wouldn’t notice it unless you’d grown up with it, heard it every time she spoke your name. Every time she said Aasmaani. Every time she said sweetheart.
I stood up. I couldn’t quite feel my limbs but I managed to stand up and move towards the door. Shehnaz Saeed was saying something, and Ed, too, but all I was aware of was the Fata Morgana’s hand pressed against the small of my back, keeping my shoulders straight as I departed without looking back.
XVIII
My father sat across from me at the dining table, warming his hands around a cup of tea. It wasn’t particularly cold — not in this sunlit spot around my dining table, in mid-afternoon — and it occurred to me that this way of holding a cup was a habit he’d picked up in the colder climes of Islamabad. Was that all that had changed in his life since he’d been gone? His way of holding a tea-cup?
He was here because Rabia had told him I needed some talking to. I knew this even though no one had told me so. This morning, when I woke up at dawn, having slept only a very few hours, I heard Rabia’s phone ringing. I thought she’d still be asleep. She had been up until late, holding me as I wept after returning from Shehnaz Saeed’s. When she had asked me what was wrong, her question had set off such a bout of inexplicable, painful crying, the sort that seems to pull the flesh from your ribs, that she had fallen silent. She was still holding me when I finally fell asleep, exhausted and aching from the physical toll of weeping, and only after that did she leave my room to return to her flat. So when I woke up in the morning and heard the phone, I went through the connecting door to answer it and allow her and Shakeel a little more rest.
But just as I walked through the door I heard her pick up the extension in her bedroom. ‘Why didn’t you call back last night?’ she said, and from her tone of voice with its echoes of adolescence, I knew she was talking to Beema. ‘Oh… oh… when are you bringing her home?…Oh. Ma, I know you have enough going on but seriously it’s bad here… Yes. Yes. I don’t know… I don’t know; I’m telling you, I don’t know. She doesn’t talk to me. It’s worse than ever before. Can’t you leave Nani for just a day and fly down? Just a few hours even… Send Dad?’ Rabia’s voice was incredulous. ‘What can he do with her?’
But here he was, holding on to his cup of tea for dear life as though it was a lifebuoy that would save him from drowning in this attempt to converse with his first-born. No newspaper, television, fused light-bulb, broken door hinge, Beema, or Rabia between or beside us to obscure the fact that my father and I had nothing significant to say to each other, never had. When I had become a cricket fan at the age of thirteen, Dad — who had always disdained sport — decided it was time to give himself over to the national passion too, just so that he and I could have something in common. It sometimes seemed to me that the only reason I kept up with cricket as avidly as I did, despite my growing disgust at the state of the national team, was to fill the silence between us. I suspected he felt the same.
He cleared his throat. ‘Your mother sends her love,’ he said. Then he gripped the cup more tightly. ‘I mean, Beema.’
‘I didn’t think you meant anyone else.’
‘No, of course you didn’t.’ He peered down into his tea. ‘I saw that television show which you helped out with. There was some interesting…’ If the sentence had an ending, it got lost in the tea-cup as he brought it to his lips.
Had he, too, recognized Mama on the screen? And if so, did he think the actor opposite her was him? Once-Leading Man. Did he think that character was based on him? After my one meeting with the Boond team I had told Beema I had helped with the Shehnaz Saeed storyline, and she would doubtless have passed that information on to him. Did he believe I had helped turn his marriage with my mother into material for a television series that would have all of Karachi whispering and bringing up the past once more?
‘I only saw the first few minutes of it,’ I said. ‘At Shehnaz Saeed’s. Then I left.’
He nodded his head slowly. ‘It was the damndest thing, wasn’t it? I had forgotten she used to do that.’
‘Was there more? After that first scene?’
‘More?’
‘Did she go on playing that character like it was Mama?’
‘Oh God, no. No. Just that one mannerism. So that is what made you cry so much. I thought it might have been.’
I didn’t know where to take the conversation from there. We never talked about my mother, except obliquely. In the two years after Omi’s death when they lived under the same roof I never saw them being anything but utterly polite to each other. He never ventured upstairs, to the best of my memory, in all that time, and she largely stayed confined to her room and to Rabia and my communal play area. When she did come downstairs — to have a meal in the dining room instead of eating from a tray upstairs — it was always for lunch, and always when he was at work. The rare exceptions to that rule, in the early days, were such strained occasions — with neither of my parents able to simulate ease in each other’s presence — that I think everyone in the household was relieved when they ceased altogether.