‘What?’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Product placement, baby,’ he said, closing the office door behind him and picking up a box of A-TISHOO tissues from his desk. He twirled the box on the tip of his fingers. ‘The day after Boond aired I got a call from an old classmate of mine who works in marketing at the company that produces these luxurious, two-ply wisps of heaven.’ He pulled one tissue after another out of the box and threw them in the air. ‘And my friend said, “Ed, yaar, remember how you asked me if we wanted to buy spots to advertise our wares during Boond and I said no? Well, mea mucho culpa. Is it too late? Can we still get in there? We’ll pay double the rates.” And I said, “Ali, yaar, I don’t think so.”’
‘Punchline, please.’
‘Punchline is this. Last night, after reading the decrypted pages, I thought — product placement. Why not? Instead of giving A-TISHOO a spot during the ad breaks, why not have their product placed in every home and every office and every back seat of every car in the Boond universe? And make the folks at A-TISHOO pay through their running noses for it.’
‘You read Omi’s pages and it made you think of how to generate revenue for STD?’
He threw the last of the tissues at me. ‘Don’t be silly. Look, watch this. It’s the last scene of episode two, to be aired in four days. Obviously, we can’t reshoot the whole episode to include tissue boxes in every scene. But we can make a start.’ As he was speaking he ushered me into his desk chair and pressed some combination of keys on his computer keyboard.
An interior shot appeared on the computer screen. Some generic living room, so tastefully decorated it was entirely without personality. The only sign that it wasn’t just a show-room in a furniture store was a newspaper carelessly tossed on the coffee table. There was the sound of a door opening. Then someone — the camera didn’t show us who — walked into the room and placed something on the coffee table. The figure turned and walked out. The camera panned back to the table. There, lying on top of the newspaper, was a faded picture of Shehnaz Saeed, her on-screen ex-husband and their infant daughter — Shehnaz’s eyes had been poked out.
Ed pressed another key and the picture stilled.
‘The black magic storyline?’ I said.
‘Forget the storyline. This is the last shot of the episode. This is the shot on which the episode “freezes” as the credits roll. Don’t you see? It would take very little effort to reshoot the scene. They’re still using those interiors for the new episodes. They can reshoot the scene, with a tissue box placed on the coffee table, and have it ready in time for the second episode to be aired.’
‘Thrilling. A tissue box in episode two!’
‘The thrill isn’t in the tissue box. It’s in the fact that we reshoot the scene. We reshoot the final shot which has a newspaper in it.’
I took a closer look at the newspaper. It was open on the LOCAL NEWS page, which was largely dominated by a photograph of a burst sewer.
Aasmaani, you’re being uncharacteristically slow here. They won’t still have that old newspaper lying around. And even if they do, I’m going to go over while they’re reshooting — under the excuse that I want to make sure the tissue box is properly placed with its logo and brand name clearly showing — and pay whoever is in charge of set design or props or whatever the hell it is to place today’s newspaper in the scene instead.’ He picked up the morning paper from his desk and folded it to isolate the crossword. ‘Like that.’ I made a gesture of appeal, and he sighed and spoke very slowly. ‘Episode two will end with a shot that has the crossword clearly showing. The crossword grid will not be empty. Some clues will be filled in with bright red pen that draws your eye to it. Do. You. Understand?’
I looked from him to the crossword to the red pen he was holding out to me. I understood.
I took the pen from him.
‘Something simple,’ he said.
I tapped the pen on the back of my hand, its nib emerging and retracting. Something simple. In two of the across clues I wrote: JAZZ and FUGUES. Then I used the first letter of FUGUES to write FRASS vertically.
‘What are jazz fugues?’ Ed asked, watching over my shoulder.
‘He’ll know. Omi will know,’ I said, going over the letters one more time with the pen to ensure they’d stand out. I closed my eyes and leaned back. All I could hear was the twittering of a sparrow outside and my own heart. Omi would know, Omi would understand. And when he realized his words weren’t merely echoing into silence, he would start to write differently. He’d write clues to where he was. Sixteen years of being in a place, you must pick up some clues. A man as smart, as observant, as Omi, he couldn’t fail to pick up clues. He’d tell me how to find him, and then I’d bring him home.
I’d bring him home. He’d be home. Aged, yes. Frail, perhaps. Unaccustomed to the din of city life, no doubt. But his first day back, I would take him to the sea. Just Omi and me, walking through the sand towards the surf, taking turns to lead, taking turns to plant our feet into the other one’s footprints as we had been doing since the days when he had to stand on the tips of his toes in order not to stamp out my prints. He’d wade into the water, trailing his fingers — now swollen and misshapen from all the times the Minions had broken them — just below the surface, and he’d beckon me to come alongside him. As the first wave loomed ahead of us, we’d shout out together, leap up into its maw, bodies colliding with water, and in that sting, that slap, that wheeling over and floundering, we’d know ourselves to be alive again.
I stood up and put my arms around Ed’s neck. He lifted me off the ground and swung me around.
‘I’m going to speak to him, Ed. I’m going to speak to Omi. My Omi.’
‘Can we not talk about him all the time, please?’
I unlooped one arm from his neck and tweaked his ear. ‘Why, Mr Ed, are you jealous of a seventy-year-old man?’
Ed let go of me and I slipped to the ground, yanking his ear as I did so. We both cried out and glared at each other.
‘What?’ I said.
He picked up the crossword. ‘I’m going to go and find the director and get this taken care of.’
I caught hold of his sleeve as he started to walk away. ‘What? What is it?’
He looked at me and shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A tiny little thing, Aasmaani. You’ll never love me as long as you’re obsessed with the two of them.’
I loved him a little, right then.
‘Sometimes I want to burn them,’ he said. ‘When I have the envelopes in my hand, before I give them to you, sometimes I want to burn them.’
‘You can’t, you know you can’t. Ed, promise me.’
‘You don’t need a promise. You know I won’t. I can’t.’ He said that as though pronouncing a sentence on himself. Then he looking accusingly at me. ‘Even though you won’t tell me what “jazz fugues” means, I won’t burn them.’
I let go of his sleeve. ‘It’s the key to the code. It’s two words from the key. You want me to explain the whole thing to you?’
In response, he kissed me, holding my face between his hands, and everything else in the world ceased. When he finally pulled away his smile had nothing boyish about it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I just needed you to make the offer.’
Then he left with the crossword to find the director again.
When he was gone, I drew a long breath. Everything was falling into place, everything was falling. I made my way to my office, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as I walked. Suddenly it all seemed so precarious, no room for any mistakes. Is this how they felt — explorers in search of lost treasures when they saw the spot indicated by ‘X’ on the map and knew, finally, there was no stepping back? Were they surprised to find the exhilaration they expected replaced by dread?