I opened my mouth to correct his misconception, and then closed it without speaking.
‘- so I had all these interviews of him, all his poems, all his letters to Rafael Gonzales which were published when Gonzales got the Nobel. And I had stories about him, stories your mother would tell us over dinner. About riding the Hurdy-Gurdy with you and how he ended up in hospital with the peach allergy. I could write in his voice, I knew I could.’
‘No. No, that’s impossible. Why are you lying to me, Ed?’
‘For the first time, Aasmaani, I’m not.’
‘I know his voice. I know it. No one else has a voice like that. No one else writes such sentences.’
There was unbearable pity in his eyes. ‘That’s what made it easy.’ He lifted a book off his desk. The Letters of Rafael Gonzales. ‘Read this?’ I shook my head. Beema had given me a copy, but I’d known it would bring me nothing but pain. There was a 150-page section of letters between Omi and Rafael — lovely, shaggy-haired Rafael who was the only one of Omi’s friends whom Mama didn’t turn away from in the last years of her life; Rafael who was on his way to Karachi to see Mama, months before she disappeared, when he had the stroke which left him incapacitated for the last ten years of his life.
‘The Poet wrote to him about everything. Poetry, politics, food, childhood, your mother — always your mother. It was one of those friendships you almost never see between men.’ Ed opened the book to a bookmarked page and held it out to me. ‘Every sentence construction, every literary allusion, every shift in tone that you read in those encrypted letters is in here. I took the content of one sentence, forced it into the structure of another. Took a story your mother told me, transposed it onto the stories he told Rafael. Look, look at this.’ My eyes couldn’t help following his finger as it moved across the page. Mirza appeared, a spark against the ashen-brained surroundings.
‘Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings,’ I said, that line from the second set of encrypted pages falling instantly off my tongue.
‘Yes. You see? All I did was imitate him. The distinctiveness of his voice was what made it easy. That, and your desire to believe.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, again.
‘I know.’ We were both leaning against the desk with our hands clasped together, not making eye contact, not daring to touch. ‘I just wanted you to wake up. No, no, that’s not true. When you looked through me, Aasmaani, you made me feel powerless, and worthless. It set off, I think, a little madness in my brain. You will not ignore me, you will not treat me like scum, I thought. I will make myself important in your life.’ He unclasped his hands and looked at his palms as though trying to find, in their intersecting and dividing lines, an explanation. ‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly.’
‘Keep going.’
‘And so I wrote another message. Oh, here—’ He pulled open a desk drawer and I saw an inkpad and stamps from different postal districts in Pakistan rattling around. ‘When I moved into my office, the CEO handed over boxes of supplies and it included all these postmark stamps. I don’t know what he used them for. Something shady, I imagine. But anyway, I dropped the second envelope into the letter slot at home. When my mother saw it she told her driver to give it to you — and the idiot handed it to me instead. I took it to the office, unsure what to do. Finally I realized I was acting crazy. I took the envelope and I was heading towards the shredder downstairs. But I stopped in your office on the way, and you saw the envelope.’
‘And made you give it to me.’
‘Yes. I was sick with guilt, again. That’s why I went over to your place that evening. To tell you. To explain. And then I got there, and I just couldn’t. Because it would have meant saying goodbye to you.’
We were both silent, thinking back to that evening.
‘I couldn’t tell you the truth. I couldn’t even tell you it was impossible that he was writing the pages. I just couldn’t. It just kept going from there.’
‘Things keep on and keep on.’
‘Yes.’
‘For how long were you planning to keep it going, Ed?’
‘Today’s was to be the last. I thought maybe — I hadn’t thought it through properly — but maybe I’d send you a final letter from one of the Minions to say the Poet had died peacefully in his sleep.’
‘You were going to make me lose him again?’
‘I would have helped you get through it. I’m sorry, Aasmaani. It got beyond my control. I couldn’t continue lying to you any more than I could tell you the truth.’
‘One letter from the Minions and it would have been over? You really believed that?’
He lifted his hand in a gesture of futility. ‘I knew I had to find a way to make it stop. I just didn’t quite know how.’
‘The crosswords. Why, Ed? Why intensify the fantasy by making me believe I could speak to him?’
‘I had to. For your sake. How else could I keep you from continuing your public enquiries about what happened to him? God, you terrified me when you said you were doing that.’ He took my hand, finally. ‘I loved you almost from the first moment we met. I knew instantly that something was happening between us, something that I couldn’t control or stop. You knew my heart, Aasmaani. You had my heart, it was beating in your chest, my damaged, obsessive heart.’
I gripped his hand more tightly. I wanted to kiss him quiet, kiss him wordless, but he was looking at me so intensely that I couldn’t move.
‘And those letters, they were the only way you’d let me into your life. As the delivery boy.’
‘You didn’t have to be the delivery boy. You were you, that’s enough. You don’t have to jump off a tree and break your leg to make someone stay with you, don’t you know that?’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I had become so adept at walking away from people. Ed was here with me now because he’d found the one chink, the one part of me which was wound instead of armour.
‘Let’s be honest. The only way I could get into your life was as Merlin, possessing the information you needed. I’m sorry about that letter — the one about your mother’s perversions. I was so angry when I wrote that one. But all the others, all the others, Aasmaani, they weren’t cruel, were they? When I saw all that unhappiness in your life, I knew I could use the letters to make it better. I only wanted to make you happy in the end. I couldn’t do it on my own. But in the Poet’s voice, I could. This one today, it was to be the final letter. The one you could go back to and know that he and your mother had something together which no one could take away from them. I didn’t know that myself until I met you. Isn’t that strange? Between you and the letters, you rewrote me. Turned me into someone who could understand love, and what a blessing it is. Two nights ago after we saw Boond together, when you fell asleep in my arms, I knew I couldn’t continue the deception any longer. I had to put an end to it. I realized that as you slept. I started working out the contents of that letter in my head as you slept — your breath my only metronome.’