They have said nothing on the subject since and will not be drawn into any discussion of you.
My love, I think I could have borne your death with some courage. I think I would have wept with grief and then with gratitude for every second I had with you. But this not knowing. This inability to discern if he had been speaking the truth or just playing tricks with me. They do that sometimes — play tricks. They told me once that India and Pakistan had tested nuclear devices; they told me once that the Berlin Wall had fallen; they told me once that Atlantis had been discovered; they told me once that a sheep had been cloned, and named Dolly (it was the absurdity of that name which revealed the lie immediately); they told me once that brain transplants are now possible, and would I like to sign a donor card so that my thoughts could live on after my death?; they told me once that Mandela had been freed and after twenty-nine years of becoming a legend behind bars he emerged into freedom and did not disappoint the world. Ha! Can you imagine trying that one on me?
They told me all these things, and more; and some they retracted, some re-retracted, some refused to discuss any more.
Let anything happen in the world outside, I don’t care. But tell me if I should mourn for you or not. I said earlier that it didn’t matter if you were alive or dead since I’ll never see you again.
It matters, my love. It matters.
If you are dead, I’ll take kidney beans by the handful and whisper a prayer over each one before dropping it on a white sheet. I’ll knot up the beans in the sheet and tell the Minions to take it to a mosque. In this, I know they’ll oblige me. They are men who respect rituals. Then I’ll walk out into the garden which they now allow me to tend, and I’ll dig up a handful of mud to fill my nostrils with the smell of earth. I’ll close my eyes, lie upon the ground and imagine every detail of your funeral. Who was there, who helped me carry your body — or no, though others might carry you to the gravesite I would insist at the very last on taking you in my arms and lowering you into the grave. Then I’ll place the handful of mud back in the ground, pat it down, and drop a flower on it. Every day for forty days I’ll step out to this spot, and lay a fresh flower. And when the mourning period is over, I’ll know that there’ll never again be an 8 October when I’ll wake to feel you pressed against me, and in that knowledge I will find peace.
It’s so lonely here without you. But it’s lonelier when you flit in and then leave, and I don’t know if it was my imagination or a ghost.
XIX
The intersecting ropes of the charpai tickled my ankle as I pulled myself into a cross-legged position, feet tucked under thighs to escape the attention of the mosquitoes. Across the splintering table Ed was bent over his plate, his fingers hovering over the mounds of haandi chicken, chapli kabab, daal and raita as he contemplated which combination to pick up with his na’an. Above us, there were more stars than you could ever see in any of the hearts of Karachi. From the other side of the restaurant’s low boundary wall came the sound of trucks traversing the highway. A group of men and women walked in through the gate and were directed towards the ‘family section’ where Ed and I were, thus far, the only patrons.
It was two days after Eid. It was a few minutes after I had decided I did believe in miracles.
I looked back down at the encrypted pages in my lap and then at the decrypted version I had just finished writing out on the back of five menu-cards. This set of pages had arrived earlier in the day, in an envelope with no stamp. Hand-delivered, Ed supposed, though no one on his street had seen it pushed through the letter slot in the gate. He had asked, yes, repeatedly. There was a tyre mark on the envelope, proof of nothing. He’d driven over it without noticing it when he came home from the gym. Then he’d got out of the car, seen tyre marks on a white rectangle, gone closer, recognized the handwriting on the envelope. He got back in the car and drove straight to my flat, the letter in his glove compartment. We made the long drive out to the restaurant without him telling me it was there.
We didn’t speak of mothers or codes or Boond during that ride. Instead we talked of the ordinary things of our lives. We talked of music and movies, school days, university years, the different jobs we’d held, the people we discovered we knew in common. He told me why he’d rather watch basketball than cricket. I told him he was a fool. He described waking up in New York one Thanksgiving and opening his window to see the air full of feathers — an event that remained unexplained. I told him about finding a dying dolphin on Karachi’s beach, its dark skin like rubber, its large eyes more gentle than any human eyes. Only when we pulled up outside the restaurant had he opened the glove compartment and handed me the envelope.
‘I wanted to be with you while you read it. Do you mind?’
I found I didn’t mind at all. ‘You’ll have to shut up while I decrypt it; can you do that?’
He’d done it with an astonishing degree of patience, not even asking questions when I said, ‘It can’t be. It can’t be,’ as the series of letters became words and the words became sense which I was so afraid of misinterpreting that I had to read it over and over, once I’d written out the decrypted version, until I was finally able to accept it.
I placed the menu cards on the table between us. ‘He saw the first episode of Boond.’
‘Wh—?’ His mouth was full as he spoke, but the question mark at the end of that garbled sound was unmistakable.
I pointed to the menu cards. ‘Read it. Read it, Ed.’
While he was reading it, I rocked back on the charpai, pulling my shawl close around me. Ed pushed the plate of kababs closer to me as he read, but I couldn’t think of eating.
There was so much else to think of. That he had watched the episode and would be watching more, yes, that seemed important. That was more important than I fully realized, I guessed. But my mind kept moving on from that to other things. How reading my name had almost made my stomach flip over, much as it did when I rode the Hurdy-Gurdy with him. He always stepped off that ride slightly nauseous. And that part about Charlie’s Angels. Love and laughter and desire sparkling in the air between Mama and Omi, restoring to me my memories of them which had been more shaken than I had admitted to myself by the previous set of pages with its accusations of perversion.
I closed my eyes and my mind skimmed over those moments. But where it settled was nearer the end of the pages, the moment which had made my breath catch.
It’s lonelier when you flit in and then leave, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or a ghost.
I knew that loneliness, the exact and exacting desolation of it. Made lonelier by my aloneness in it; everyone else had given up on her years ago. I had never realized how much I wanted a companion for my grief until, coming to the end of the Poet’s missive, I had heard, for the first time, a voice which understood my dreams. The dream of a mermaid, particularly. The dream of a burial without a body, and the anticipated release of a ritual of farewell.
I opened my eyes. The sky was almost too beautiful to bear. And it was only then that I finally asked myself the question I had failed to ask all this while: whose corpse had been found in the empty plot of land, nearly seventeen years ago? Who was the man disfigured beyond recognition for the simple crime of having the same build as the Poet? Someone inconsequential, that’s who his captor, or captors, would have chosen. Someone whose disappearance wouldn’t make newspaper headlines, whose relatives couldn’t afford to push for an extensive investigation. In all the years since, had some woman been waiting for her husband to come home, had some child grown up wondering if he’d been abandoned by his father? And if I could discover the identity of the corpse, would it be an act of benevolence or brutality to seek out his relatives and say, he’s not coming back, and this is how he died?