‘Mohtarma, a second ago we were sitting here in Karachi talking about women’s religious obligations and suddenly you’re taking us all on a world tour.’ (He got his laughs, too.) ‘Please don’t stray from the subject.’
‘The subject is your obligations to the ummah. You take a territorial issue in Afghanistan and you make it into a matter of religious duty — you and your unlikely bedfellows in the West — and you spout phrases like “the unity of the ummah” as you hand those boys — those young, idealistic, confused, angry, devout, ready-to-be-brainwashed boys — the most sophisticated weapons and the best combat training in the world and tell them to get the infidel Soviets off Muslim soil. Soil has no religion, Maulana. If you had left those boys without that call to unity, they would be separate, untrained, spread all across the world. Some would have picked up guns, yes, and some would have lectured their sisters on how to dress. But some would have turned to local politics, or maybe even to writing bad, impassioned poetry. Or maybe, Maulana, maybe even very good, impassioned poetry.’
‘You are, of course, the expert on impassioned poetry.’ (There was no laughter now. Even through the computer’s speakers I could hear tension crackle through the room.)
‘What happens after Afghanistan, have you considered that? Where do they go next, those global guerrillas with their allegiance to a common cause and their belief in violence as the most effective way to take on the enemy? Do you and your American friends ever sit down to talk about that?’
The sound file ended.
Mama, could you have known that as your voice took on a power that left us all speechless, and brought tears to Omi’s eyes — as it brings tears now to mine and not just for reasons of hindsight — you were singing your swansong?
It was only five days later that she was told Omi had died, and that version of her — that Activist and Icon and woman of grazia—we never saw again.
I left the office and drove down to the sea, my windows open to the cool winter breeze. I drove past the lingering Eid revellers, past the theylawallas selling juice and chaat and roasted corn, past the camels with mirror-worked cloth spread over their humps who bowed each time they sat or stood. Finally, in a spot of relative isolation in front of the sea-wall, I parked the car and breathed in the scent of brine.
Omi and I used to come walking here some evenings. He told me, on one of those walks, about the first time he came to Karachi. After his mother’s death, when the rich landlord who was his father continued refusing to acknowledge Omi as his illegitimate son, the schoolmaster in the village took him under his wing and sent him to the city to live with his brother and enrol in the school at which the brother taught. Still mourning for his mother, Omi was desperately miserable the first days in the home of the schoolmaster’s brother, despite all the kindness everyone in the household lavished on him. The schoolmaster’s nephew, three years older than Omi, was the only one who didn’t fuss over him and try a little too hard to make him feel welcome. Instead, he left him alone for two days and on the third day told Omi to climb on to the back of his father’s Vespa, and drove recklessly through Karachi’s dusty streets all the way to Clifton beach — clear blue waters and fine sand, before the waste of cargo ships slicked down its wild beauty.
That was as far as Omi took the story, but it was enough. He stopped walking, looked out towards the water, scanning the horizon from right to left, and I knew that in some way he pitied me for having grown up so near the sea that I couldn’t help but take it for granted.
Is this really the most we can ask from them, the ones who have raised us? That they leave us with memories we can cherish?
My mother won that round with the maulana, no one could deny it. But to what end? She was the safety-valve who allowed us all to release some of our frustrations as we cheered her on and said that she, too, was a voice of the nation, a voice that would make itself heard. But what came of it except a lesson to all the daughters in the audience, learnt slowly over the years, that voices such as hers could be ignored or stifled or extinguished completely? My mother’s life as an activist, brave as it had been, was a lesson in futility — and in the end, she knew it.
So I had been telling myself for a long time now. But now I had her voice echoing in my ear, the laughter of the women in the audience echoing with it. And then all the sound of the world fell away and I was left in that silence — that almost holy silence — which had grown up around her, sentence by sentence, as she so artfully moved the debate to the exact space in which she had all along intended it to exist — that accountable space. How could I call that nothing? And the thrum of my own blood as I heard her speak, how could I repudiate that?
Why is it so necessary for you to believe the version of her which you cling on to so desperately, Rabia had asked me.
Because. I looked out at the water. Sunlight cut a path through the sea.
Because. Just because.
XXI
It had been forty-six hours and seventeen minutes since the second episode of Boond ended with a shot of the crossword grid, perfectly in focus. Forty-six hours and seventeen minutes, and no word from Omi. Forty-six hours and eighteen minutes now, and I was lost in a vision of dark blues and reds and jagged lines.
‘What are you thinking?’
I turned my attention away from the ceiling of the Sadequain gallery and towards my brother-in-law, who was gesturing around the large room as though he were a game-show host and this was the grand prize. Less than fifteen minutes ago he had received a phone call offering him a solo exhibition at the gallery, and he’d run into my flat and insisted that I had to accompany him to the gallery so that I could watch him leap with joy around it and then describe it all to Rabia when she got back from her weekend trip to Islamabad.
‘Don’t you mind having that as competition?’ I said, pointing my thumb at the gloriously worked ceiling.
‘Silly girl. Sadequain’s not competition. He’s the giant whose shoulders are imprinted with my feet. He’s the guy who made me stand open-mouthed in front of a painting at the age of twelve and think, my God, this is possible. You can be just human, and do this.’
‘He died a poor, depressed alcoholic, didn’t he?’
Shakeel rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Yeah. But that doesn’t erase a single line he drew.’
As we were walking down the stairs — after Shakeel had, quite literally, leapt with joy around the gallery — my phone rang.
‘Where are you?’ Ed said. ‘I’m standing outside your flat ringing your door-bell. I’m paying you a surprise visit.’
‘Well, we’re a bad O’Hara story, then. I’m around the corner from your place contemplating dropping in on you.’
‘I’m turning around. I’m walking towards the stairs. I’m almost tripping over a cat. I’ll see you at mine in a few minutes.’
Shakeel was smirking at me when I hung up. ‘We’re a bad O’Hara story,’ he said in a high-pitched voice, batting his eyelids. I slapped the back of his head and he put an arm around me. ‘When do we meet this guy? I want to see the man whose name need only be mentioned to send my sister-in-law into a paroxysm of blushes. Let me demonstrate: Ed. There you go. Beetroot Inqalab!’
‘Oh, shut up and drop me at his house. And no, you can’t come in and wait for him.’