It took only a few seconds to get to Ed’s, and it wasn’t until the chowkidar opened the gate for me and Shakeel drove away that I realized Shehnaz Saeed might be home, and if so, there could be no avoiding her any longer.
She had called me the day after.we’d watched that first episode of Boond, and I had seen her number flash up on my caller ID screen and let my answering machine pick it up. Her message had been brief. Just, ‘Please call me.’ I hadn’t — and when I mentioned it to Ed he said, ‘It’s between you and her. If you don’t want to talk to her, don’t.’ I didn’t know if she’d tried calling in the last few days. I had pulled my phone out of its socket several nights ago when the crank calling had become intolerable.
If I was lucky, I thought, pushing open the front door, I would make it up the stairs to Ed’s section of the house without bumping into her.
But the sort of luck I needed wasn’t possible in a house with a yapping chihuahua. I was only a few feet down the entrance hall when the creature heard me and launched into what sounded like a demented version of ‘O Sole Mio’.
‘Who’s there?’ I heard Shehnaz Saeed call out, and then I had no option but to walk into that elegant room from which I had so dramatically departed nine days ago.
‘Ed’s not home,’ were her first words.
‘I know. He’s on his way.’ I was sufficiently ill at ease that I was grateful to have the canine falsetto twirling at my feet, giving me an excuse to bend down and fuss over her. I thought that would pass the conversational ball into Shehnaz Saeed’s court but she didn’t say anything, and when I couldn’t bear having my hand licked any more I stood up and said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. Things have been very busy. My father was in town, and work’s a little crazy.’
‘Aasmaani, you don’t have to lie. I understand that you’re angry. Ed’s told me you have no desire to hear my excuses. And I’m sorry for that, I really am.’
‘I never said that to Ed.’ The chihuahua’s front paws were scrabbling at my shins. ‘Director, basket!’ I ordered and the animal darted out of the door.
‘Your mother never liked chihuahuas either,’ Shehnaz said.
And once again, in her presence, it was impossible to feel anything but utterly at ease. I walked over to the sofa and sat down across from her. ‘So why did you do it? Imitate my mother?’
‘Why do you imitate your mother?’
‘When?’
‘All the time. You have all these gestures. Like now. The way you’re sitting. The way your arm is crooked on the back of the sofa and your head is resting on your hand. That. Right there.’
I moved my arm down to my side. ‘I’m not…’
‘No, of course not. You’re not imitating her. You’re just sitting. That’s how you sit. You may have learnt it from her. You may have copied her at one point in time, but now that’s just the way you sit.’
‘I don’t understand your point.’
‘Look, my character in Boond, she smokes. It’s a big plot point. She smokes a very particular imported brand of cigarette from Guatemala or Ecuador or some other place that exports bananas. She has always smoked that brand, ever since she was a college student. In episode three, someone she’s trying to hide from will know that she’s been in his office because he’ll find a stub of her cigarette in his waste-paper basket. So, she’s a smoker, always has been. When we were filming that flashback pregnancy scene, the director said, OK, no smoking in this scene because she’s pregnant. She said, Shehnaz, do that air cigarette thing you did in Nashaa to show us she’s trying to quit. Did you ever see Nashaa, Aasmaani?’
‘Yes.’ It was the last telefilm she acted in before she retired.
‘Yes. Here.’ She uncurled herself from the sofa and put a tape in the VCR. ‘I was thinking of sending this to you with my driver but I didn’t know if it would make things worse.’ She pressed ‘PLAY’, and there, on-screen, was a young Shehnaz Saeed smoking air cigarettes as my mother used to.
‘I got it from her, from Samina. When I did Nashaa, early on when I was still finding my way into the character’s skin, I was having dinner with Samina and she’d run out of cigarettes so she started air smoking. And I said, can I borrow that mannerism? Take it, she said, and continued to demonstrate it for me so that I’d get it right. But once I got it right it became mine. That’s how I smoke cigarettes that aren’t really there. I don’t think of it in terms of your mother any more than you think of her when you rest your arm on the back of a sofa. I learned gestures and expression from her, Aasmaani, turns of phrase and a way of squaring my shoulders when I don’t want to show that I’m intimidated. All these things and more, I learned from your mother. But in time you internalize all that you learn, and it becomes yours. I wasn’t imitating your mother in Boond.’ She gestured to the screen once more. ‘I was imitating myself imitating her all those years ago. I’m sorry that I didn’t stop to think that it would upset you. Believe me, that possibility didn’t even cross my mind.’
‘I see.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘You said, I have all these gestures which are hers.’
‘Gestures, cadences, entire sentences of speech.’
‘Like what? Tell me.’
‘It’ll only make you self-conscious. You are your own woman, Aasmaani. But it does make my breath stop sometimes, the way Samina peeps out from behind your eyes.’
There was something in her voice as she said my mother’s name for which I couldn’t quite find a word.
‘You should come for dinner next week,’ she said, her tone changing into briskness. ‘My husband will be back from Rome for a few days. I think you’d like him. Although, no, actually, let me retract that invitation until I check with Ed. The two of them alternate between being civil and pretending the other one doesn’t exist.’
I’d almost forgotten there was a husband. ‘Why does he spend so much time in Rome?’
‘His boyfriend lives there.’ ‘Oh.’
She cracked a peanut shell open with her teeth and looked remarkably pleased with herself. ‘That was almost exactly your mother’s reaction all those years ago. Don’t start giving me those pitying looks, darling. He’s a lovely man and he’s given me both unstinting friendship and stability.’ She gestured around the opulent room. ‘In exchange I’ve given him the freedom to be with the love of his life, his university sweetheart, who, being Jewish and male — a terrible combination, in these parts — was entirely unacceptable to his family, who threatened to disinherit him. Also, his mother kept having a stroke each time he said he would rather live without money than live a lie, and he’s a real mother’s boy. So, he married me. Made Mummy happy — and convinced her that homosexuality is cured with just a little bit of parental firmness and a friendly doctor who’s happy to misdiagnose heartburn. And after that, he could spend as much time as he wanted in Rome on “business trips” with David. Close your mouth, Aasmaani, you look undignified.’
‘But…’ I looked at her curled on the couch, unsure if she was playing another game with me as she had that first time we met. ‘But you’re Shehnaz Saeed. You could have found plenty of men who would have given you financial stability and also…’
‘Sex?’
‘In a nutshell.’
‘Yes, well, there’s the rub.’ She squared her shoulders.
And just like that, it was clear. The Others, Ed had called her various lovers, and it hadn’t occurred to me to think about the absence of gender in that term.
‘You and Mama. You were in love with her.’
She looked steadily at me. ‘Yes.’