Ed stood up from his desk chair and walked towards me. ‘Have you finished?’ he said.
Love deeply and passionately. Love foolishly.
I held out a hand to him, and when he took it I pulled him down into a deep kiss. Everything else could wait.
‘Aasmaani.’ His face, when I touched it, was hot. ‘If what you’re feeling right now is because of what you’ve just read, then I can’t. I can’t take advantage of that.’
‘Of course you can’t, Ed. You can’t take advantage when you’re the one being seduced.’
He laughed and lay down, his arms around me. ‘You can’t seduce someone who wants you so desperately.’
I sat up and pulled off my kameez. ‘We could argue definitions all night, or we could think of some other way to pass the time.’
‘OK. What’s Ginkgo Biloba?’
I lay down on top of him and it was with a satisfaction that came from far within that I felt his fingers move up my spine. ‘A character from Lord of the Rings?’
I didn’t feel the earth move that night. I didn’t feel the boundaries of the universe dissolve. I didn’t feel a single cliché. What I felt was abandon. Not sexual abandon — we played it safe, too aware of the specificities of each body’s desire and too aware also of how our bodies were all but strangers to each other; in those moments when we allowed our past lovers’ proclivities to guide us what ensued was disaster saved only by humour. (‘I’m sure your intentions are good, Ed, but avoid doing that again,’ I had to say at one point.) But in the end, we got it right, and though the earth didn’t move, no part of the universe dissolved, I was moved, I dissolved, and, immediately after, I found myself thinking, love is a fugue, the call and response of it, the improvisations; it was the first time that I understood it wasn’t a misleading euphemism to refer to sex as the act of love.
And that was the abandon — I abandoned myself to imagining, as I lay in Ed’s arms, a future. I abandoned myself to anticipating, with pleasure, how we’d grow to know each other — each muscle, each nerve ending, each scar, each kind of scar, even the kinds we couldn’t see for ourselves and needed someone else to point out to us. It was not a process to be hurried, there was no need for hurry, let each new discovery be a source of pleasure. But one day, eventually, I’d find I had no secrets from him. In all my past relationships I had never once thought the man I was with would ever know everything there was to know.
Our sweat cooled, turned chilly, forced us to huddle closer under his duvet. His fingers were tangled in my hair and his breathing changed to the deep rhythms of sleep. I wanted to stay in his arms, to fall asleep there.
All those years, when I stayed with my mother, she made the Poet sleep next door. Even when they were in Colombia and Egypt he’d have his own room. Such strange nods to social convention. As if I would have cared. I thought it was a tiny thing, for them to sleep apart. But now, as Ed shifted and his mouth touched my shoulder, I thought, Omi, I’m sorry. Mama, you didn’t need to.
I looked at my watch. Rabia would have flown back from Islamabad by now and it was well past the hour when I usually called to tell her not to worry if I was staying out late. The trappings of family. I eased myself out of Ed’s arms, dressed, and picked his cordless phone off the receiver. I’d left my mobile in Shakeel’s car. Another reason for Rabia to worry. I stepped outside into the hallway. It was eerily quiet. The window shutters threw shadows in front of me. If I stepped into the shadows I would be caught between slats.
I dialled Rabia’s mobile, and she answered on the first ring.
Aasmaani, where are you?’
‘Sorry. Just lost track of time. I’m at Ed’s.’
There was silence on the other end, and then Rabia pushed aside whatever questions came to mind and said, ‘Are you going to be there much longer?’
For a moment I wanted to laugh. Shehnaz Saeed may have told me she’d been in love with my mother, but she would still consider it a terrible breach of etiquette if I came down for breakfast with Ed in the morning. I’d probably be too embarrassed to speak myself.
‘I don’t have a car here.’
‘You wouldn’t be driving alone at this hour in any case,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that Ed of yours going to drop you home?’
‘He’s sleeping.’
There was another pause. Then she said, ‘OK, we’re on our way home from the airport.’ Now I could make out the intermittent sound of late-night traffic in the background. ‘We’re coming to get you. Should I call this number when we get there?’
‘You’ll wake up the whole house. Tell me how long it’ll take you to get here and I’ll come down.’
She told me three minutes. I ended the call and went back into the bedroom.
‘Ginkgo Biloba,’ I whispered next to Ed’s ear as I bent down to kiss his neck.
I looked around for a pen to write him a note and found, instead, his laptop on the desk at the far end of his room. I lifted the lid, pressed the space bar, and the computer hummed to life. He’d been using the word processor and hadn’t exited the program, so as soon as the computer retreated out of its hibernation a blue screen appeared, awaiting white letters to fill it up.
I turned to look at Ed, my fingers moving across the keyboard as I watched him sleep.
Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?
Pithy, but to the point.
I looked back at the screen.
It said: Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?
XXIII
Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?
Cr, N gkzc bkp, nho’i ijfi xpoob?
Ed, I love you, isn’t that funny?
I kept looking at the sentence, my brain too attuned to decrypting the code to doubt what I was reading, yet knowing that it was impossible, what I thought I was seeing was impossible.
Mama, I wrote.
Afaf, the word appeared.
The Minions came again today, I wrote.
Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb, the screen spat back at me.
My ex calls
Ab ed efggh
I jerked my hands off the keyboard. Now it was only my own breath I could hear, ragged.
The light from the street lamps outside made everything around me part visible. I looked at the bookshelf along the wall, and certain books seemed to draw my eyes to them. Morte d’Arthur. Urdu Poetry: A Study. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—gold letters, black binding.
My hands were poised in the air, halfway between the keyboard and my eyes. I brought them down — this required great concentration — on to the desk, one on either side of the laptop. My index finger touched a pen, half-hidden under a piece of paper. I lifted it up, unscrewed the top. A calligraphy pen. I remembered the scrawl of Omi’s handwriting in that postcard he’d sent my mother from Colombia. No curves, no loops. For him the aesthetic of language was in its sound, not its visual appearance.
‘I don’t understand,’ I whispered.
In the quiet of the room, the words carried. Ed shifted. I turned to look at him. He reached out for me, found I wasn’t next to him, and sat up in bed.
‘Oh,’ he said, smiling a beautiful half-asleep smile. ‘There you are.’
‘I was going to tell you something, Ed, but I think you already know.’
He smiled again, lay down and closed his eyes. ‘I love you too, Aasmaani.’
‘I was going to tell you, Ed, that my ex calls the ochre winter autumn as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.’
For a moment he didn’t move and then he was throwing the covers off, running across the room, absurdly naked, his hand reaching out for the laptop and slamming the lid shut.