I smiled. ‘It was the first detail you got wrong, as far as I know. I would have realized it if I’d had time to think it over. He didn’t write when she slept. He wrote in the mornings after they’d had breakfast together.’ I said that, and then I saw Omi, bent over his desk. I saw him, because I was in the room with him. I was the only person in the world he allowed into his study when he wrote. I’d sit there, and read one of the books from his library — Elizabeth Bishop and Mir were two of our joint favourites — learning to love their word combinations before I really understood what they meant.
I pulled my hand out of Ed’s grasp.
All the while he’d been talking, I had followed along his story, Ed the conflicted hero at the heart of it. It was his story I was listening to and concentrating on, the camera was on him alone. How could it have taken so long to think what I should have thought instantly?
‘Omi died sixteen years ago.’ I stepped away from him.
‘Aasmaani?’
A hammer smashed down, all the weight of a grown man’s body behind it. A bone split in two. Omi called out, ‘Samina!’ The hammer lifted again, smashed down again. Another bone split. They pulled his teeth out, one by one. Took the hammer to his bones again. His body becoming pulp. ‘Samina. Samina.’ My mother every day after his death had to imagine this. Every single day she could not help but imagine this. They cut out his tongue. He continued to mouth her name. Samina. Their fists on his face, his nose, his cheekbones. Bruises spreading across his face like rivers melting through ice, crawling together into a mass of blue. The only thing recognizable in him any more the shape his mouth kept forming. Samina. My love. Samina.
I was down on my knees. Ed was crouching next to me, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him through the screams. And then the door was flung open, and Beema ran to me, Rabia and Shakeel and Shehnaz Saeed behind her. Beema put her arms around me, pulling me close to her, never letting go until there was no voice left in me and then Shakeel lifted me in his arms, and they thought I had stopped screaming as he carried me down the stairs and into the car, but I hadn’t. I didn’t stop screaming for a very long time.
XXIV
They have it easy, the ones who can mourn the dead.
I sat hunched over in bed, in the spare bedroom of Dad and Beema’s Islamabad house, staring into the red bars of the electric heater. If I looked long enough that image would sear itself on to my retina and when I shut my eyes those bars would be all I’d see. Not Omi, not rivers melting through ice, not my mother drowning in the thought of those rivers.
I had never properly mourned Omi. I realized as much the day Beema packed my clothes and took me away from Karachi and Ed and Shehnaz Saeed, into the green, unreal calm of Islamabad. That he had left my life, yes, I mourned that, but never the manner of his dying. And now that I tried to complete the process of grief, the man I mourned was the Omi of the encrypted pages. The man who shouted, ‘Frass! Frass!’ to the Minions, who wanted to grow maudlin in the moonlight with Shehnaz Saeed discussing the woman they both loved, who spoke of my mother’s ‘peachjuicemouth’, who wondered if I had overshadowed him yet. I mourned him and, while mourning, remembered that the man I was crying for had never even existed, and I had no language then to articulate my loss.
And Ed. I tried to tell myself that the Ed I loved had never really existed either, but I knew that wasn’t true. I had loved Ed most for the pain he carried around, and the secrets which he revealed that night in his room did nothing to lessen the pain — quite the contrary. And also, that voice in the pages, the voice I thought was Omi’s, the voice I had loved, that was Ed’s voice, too.
A shadow fell across the red bars. I looked up and saw Beema standing in the doorway.
‘Do you ever sleep?’ she said.
‘I suppose I must. There are lost hours of almost every day, these days. Do you?’
She partway lifted her shoulders, and then dropped them before the gesture could become a shrug. The doctors had said there was nothing more they could do for Beema’s mother, so we’d brought her home to die. Beema spent hours at a stretch sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand, moving only when someone opened the door to let in a draught — then she’d smooth down the goosebumps that appeared on her mother’s skin, though the old lady was well past being aware of such things. Watching her, I sometimes felt envy.
She moved towards the heater, and held her hands inches from the red bars, her back towards me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t give up on yourself. You shouldn’t just decide you’ll never be OK again.’
I didn’t respond and a little while later she said, ‘What he did to you was unspeakable, and if I ever see him again I’ll probably draw blood. But there’s a part of me that’s almost grateful to him.’
‘To Ed?’
‘You’d been slipping, Aasmaani, away from us and from yourself for so long now. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t worried about you. And you’d just say, I’m fine, I’m fine.’
‘So now I know I’m not fine, and how does that help me?’
She straightened up and turned towards me. ‘Fight for yourself. My God, child, what you’ve been through, from such a young age. It’s a wonder you’re still standing. My guess is, you’re stronger than all of us.’
Strong? I could barely get out of bed any more.
It might have been two minutes or two hours later that Beema left the room. I heard her whispering something to someone outside, and then my father’s voice, carrying clearly through the night’s silence, said, ‘You have to allow her this.’
‘That’s what we said about Samina.’ Beema’s voice was fierce with anger. ‘For God’s sake do something. I don’t know if I can bear this any longer.’ And then I heard something from her that I hadn’t heard in all the hours I watched her sit by her mother — weeping. I tried to feel some sympathy, some shame, but there was nothing in me to give, however hard I tried to locate it.
I suppose I slept at some point that night. It was something my body did while my mind proceeded relentlessly with its continuous feed of images — hammers and rivers and a thread of blood on Omi’s tongue as the razor cut through it. Or maybe I didn’t sleep. Maybe I just closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them there was daylight and my father stood beside my bed with a book in his hands.
‘This was your mother’s,’ he said, and placed the book beside me before leaving the room.
It was the Poet’s collected works. The book that lay on her bedside in the years after his death, which I was unable to pick up without picking up her grief along with it. Or my own grief, perhaps.
I opened the front cover. Turned to the table of contents. Turned past that. Kept going.
And there he was, rising out of the pages.
So many of the poems carried memories of Omi reciting them, Omi listening to my mother sing them, Omi talking about them. Here he was bawdy, here funny, here tender, here impassioned. In some places he sounded exactly like the man who had written about frass and minions, and in other places he sounded like someone else entirely, a voice that could never be imitated. It was mostly in his poems about my mother that I heard that inimitable voice. What struck me most about his poems — what I had quite forgotten — was not his mastery of form, or the complexity and concision of his thinking, or even his extraordinary sensitivity to the sound of each syllable. What struck me most was, simply, the greatness of his heart. Here was a man who faced exile, imprisonment, betrayal and deprivation without losing his sense of wonder. In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.