‘So you want to talk about it?’ my father said.
‘Talk about what? The fact that I miss Mama? There — I miss her. We’ve talked about it.’
‘Hmm.’ He tilted a spoonful of sugar so that it fell a few granules at a time into his cup.
‘You mind, don’t you? That I miss her. That I love her as much as I do. You think she never deserved that.’
‘Don’t you think I understand anything about loving your mother? She broke my heart when she left me. And if she’d been even slightly less brutal about the way she did it, I expect I would have gone on loving her and missing her through all eternity.’
‘Domesticity or a dildo.’
His hand jerked, spilling tea on to the tablecloth. ‘She told you about that?’
‘No. I… overheard it. Once when the Poet was speaking to her.’
He nodded, took off his glasses and wiped them absent-mindedly on a tissue he’d taken out of its box to sop up the tea.
‘Dad, I’m sorry. That was cruel of them. You’ve never done anything to deserve such unkindness.’
He put his glasses back on and pressed the tissue against the tea stain. ‘It was for the best. Someone leaves you like that, you don’t waste time harbouring thoughts of reconciliation. Anyway. It was a long time ago. All I’m saying is, I didn’t love her without reason. There was always all the reason in the world to love Samina. So how can I mind that you loved her? How can I mind that you loved your own mother?’
‘Tell me about you and her. How it really was.’
‘It was great. It was perfect.’ He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘When we were seventeen. It was the best thing in the world during those few months we were together before university split us apart. You know, first love and all that. We’d talk on the phone for hours every night. About everything, everything. And we used to play an idiotic form of “chicken” in which I’d drive through Karachi with her hands covering my eyes, trusting her to tell me when to brake and go. We drove all the way from KDA to Clifton like that once. She told me afterwards she made me run three red lights along the way. We never played that game again.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t really believe he was talking about himself.
‘So what happened? How did first love go bad?’
‘She went to Cambridge. I stayed in Karachi. She wrote to me to say it was great, now it’s over. That was the gist of it, though she phrased it more kindly. By the time she finished university and came back to Karachi, she was someone else, and then I met your stepmother, and she and I were at that point of silent acknowledgement that something was about to happen between us. And that should have been it. But then one day Samina just bursts into my office, eyes sparkling, and I haven’t seen her in months, haven’t had any conversation with her in years, and she says, “Well, are you going to ask me to marry you or not?”’ He laughed, chin resting on his hand, and I saw the young, infatuated boy he had been. ‘I knew about her and the Poet. Who didn’t? But she looked… luminescent. And I was chafing at the person I was turning into — this responsible, practical banker who would never play “chicken” for even five seconds, let alone from KDA to Clifton — and she was my way out of that. So.’
‘So you just dumped Beema?’
He looked away guiltily. ‘I hadn’t exactly, you know, picked her up at that point.’
‘I’m amazed she ever spoke to you or Mama after that.’
‘Well, that’s your Beema for you. After Samina left me, she was so incredibly kind. I found I was only going out to social gatherings if I thought I’d run into her. And then Samina called me one day — she was about eight months pregnant by then — and said, “Get a move on. She’s not going to wait around for ever for you.” I said, “What business is it of yours?” and she said, “You’re still technically my husband. I’m allowed to interfere in your life. Besides, she’d make a wonderful mother to our child.” It was all weird and so utterly right.’ He put his hand on mine. ‘Sometimes there’s so much of her in you. Your voice, your eyes, your quickness with language. And it reminds me of the Samina I loved, that girl who stole my heart. So for the last time — I have never minded or been even slightly surprised by your love for her.’ He moved his hand away, wrapped it around his cup again. ‘But if there’s something I mind about you… well, not even mind. It’s just something I think about from time to time. Not that there’s anything to be done about it, or… it’s just that, of your four parents, I’m the one you’ve always loved least effusively, and sometimes I’ve wished that wasn’t so.’
I touched the back of his hand with the tips of my fingers. ‘Sorry.’ And I was. Sorry and profoundly ashamed.
He shook his head to indicate there was nothing to apologize for.
‘I don’t know about the four parents bit, though. I don’t think the Poet was ever a second father to me.’ What I meant by that was that I could see no correlation between Dad’s and Omi’s positions in my life. Fathers were efficient in matters of finance, and rewiring. They didn’t lack emotion, they simply didn’t express it except in tiny bursts. And they were always there. That was their most abiding quality — their thereness. That was Dad, that was fathers. Omi was nothing like that.
But my father didn’t understand the meaning behind my words. He looped his finger into the handle of the tea-cup and spun it in slowly oscillating half-circles. ‘It’s childish and immature and my wife would be horrified to hear me say this, but: good.’
I looked at his neck, the one part of him which belonged on a much older man, and for the first time his mortality became real to me. ‘You hated him, huh?’
My father nodded, still watching the tea-cup.
‘Because you lost her to him?’
‘I suppose that would have to be the core of it. But, even apart from that, I just disapproved of everything he stood for.’
‘Poetry? Resistance?’
‘Debauchery. Selfishness.’
‘Debauchery?’
‘All those nights he stayed up with his artsy friends, imbibing whisky and God-knows-what-else until dawn, laughing at those of us who had to go to work for a living. Vertical readers, he used to call us. Because we’d spend our days poring over numbers in columns instead of words written across a page.’ My father waved his hand through the air to indicate lines of print and the tea-cup went crashing on to the floor. His face was red as he bent to pick up the pieces.
‘How do you know?’ How have you managed to keep from making me feel I’m betraying you every time I spoke his name with affection?
‘Because one night you were spending the night at your mother’s house and I came to pick you up for school on my way to work. As I drew up, the gate next door opened and those friends of his stumbled out, eyes red and puffy, slurring goodbyes to each other. He was there, seeing them out, and when he saw me he said, “It’s a vertical reader.” You know, it’s just as well your mother didn’t marry him. I don’t think I would have allowed you to stay overnight in a house with all that going on.’
‘Just as well she didn’t marry him?’ I couldn’t believe he’d said that. ‘After everything she went through after he died because she wasn’t his wife, you can say it was just as well she didn’t marry him?’
‘You know I didn’t mean it that way. You know that. Dammit, Aasmaani, why must you always make me feel as though I’m failing you?’