As I read I found with surprise how many of the poems were still stored in my brain, allowing me to anticipate the line ahead when I paused to turn a page. I found the girl I had once promised to be within the pages of that collection. The girl who knew his poems, who listened to him argue God with Mirza, poetry with my mother, political responsibility with Rafael. The girl who believed without question — I owed this to both him and my mother — that some things in the world you fight for, regardless of the cost to yourself, because the cost of not fighting is much higher. The girl he would have fought for, the girl my mother would have fought for. The girl I had to fight for.
I didn’t move from my bed all day as I made my way through those 312 poems, and as I read the last line of the final poem and turned to the end-page I saw, tucked into the inside flap of the back cover, a sheet of thin blue paper.
I think I knew what it was even before I unfolded it and saw the encrypted writing, with a date on top—28 April 1979—which told me this was composed just days after General Zia had Omi imprisoned.
I read the first three words of that letter, and for a moment it was Ed writing to me. And then I continued through the sentence, and it was no one but Omi speaking to Mama.
Forgive me, beloved, but your last letter was a thing of such absurdity I had to tear a corner off it and place it beneath my tongue as I slept, knowing it would fill my dreams with barking cats, suns that revolve around the planets in zigzag courses, and Siamese twins on stilts trying to tie each other’s shoelaces.
You can’t help worry, you wrote, about my imprisonment.
O my beautiful jailer, why would you wish upon me the indifference of freedom? These bars, those walls, the guards who shoot at unauthorized shadows which slide towards me in the prison yard — do you think I haven’t yet recognized them for what they are? Do you think I don’t know you’re responsible? You have always been so literal about the metaphorical, and I can’t deny that there are moments these days — particularly around meal times — when I wish it were otherwise. I know all the things I’ve said to you — I’m held captive by your heart, imprisoned in your grey-green eyes, and if you hold out the key of freedom to me it will melt with desire the instant my fingers touch yours to take possession of it.
That, Samina, was figurative language.
So I really didn’t expect to wake up within this cell, and at first, I’ll admit, I was a little irritated. But now that I’ve learnt to look more closely at the metaphor — did it turn concrete or have I become an abstraction? — I can’t help but applaud what you’ve done. In here, I am nothing but the man who loves you. All else is stripped away. Love and separation and longing — those are the stages of my day. The sun rises in one and sets in the other and darkness embraces me in the third.
1 think of Qais in exile, so consumed with the rapture of his love for Laila that love becomes entirely self-obsessed, unwilling to drag its gaze away from itself long enough to recognize the object of that love walk across the surrounding wasteland. The object of my love, Qais thinks, would make the ground grow verdant at the touch of her feet, not like this sensibly shod woman who creates only shadows as she walks, her clothes sweat-stained from travel. And as I recall Qais I begin to fear — for how can the woman in my head really exist, how can such a love bear reality? That is the only fear I have in here. The only thing they could do to hurt me, Samina, is to make you other than the woman I believe — no, I know — you really are.
I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.
Give Aasmaani the largest possible embrace from me. Ask her to explain metaphors to you if you find yourself struggling with your tendency towards the literal — she understands these things better than either of us could imagine.
Forever and always yours, entirely.
Aashiq
Aashiq.
The name he was given at birth, which no one but my mother used once his childhood had passed. ‘It’s not a name, it’s what I am to Samina,’ Omi used to say. ‘No one else can use that word for me. I’m her Aashiq, her Beloved.’
I turned my head away from the page so that my tears wouldn’t smudge the already smudged words. Only now did I have the answer to the question I’d been unable to stop turning around in my mind: how had Ed done it? Even given his obsessive mind, his intelligence, his copies of all those letters to Rafael, how had he been able to re-create Omi on the page, having never known the man at all? And now I knew: he hadn’t.
If I had put the letters to any kind of serious scrutiny — if I had really looked at the conditions under which the Poet was allegedly writing and considered the things he chose to write, or rather the glaring omissions from the letters — I would have known instantly. How many times in all those weeks after getting the first letter had I thought of Laila and Qais, Iblis and Allah, the Sufis and their interpretation of Hell? And yet it had never crossed my mind. Even when I read those lines in which he declares Merlin and Nimue to be his favourite love story — those lines I read the very day I met Mirza and remembered how the Poet loved Iblis aur Aadam, recalled him saying, ‘This is the first and final love story, the one in which we all live’—even then I didn’t allow myself to see that I was reading lies.
In all his poems, that is the one trope he always returns to: The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love.
Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her — half-teasing, half-tender — of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. That great heart of his — it would never have written of broken fingers or of love slipping away, not even if there seemed only the remotest possibility she would ever see the words.
How had I been so blind?
Ed had known. Ed had known that the greatest assistance to his deception didn’t come from the poet’s letters to Rafael or his memories of my mother’s stories. It came from my desire to believe. Why had I so suddenly convinced myself that the letters were genuine? In what moment had that decision taken hold? I leaned forward, so that my forehead touched the back cover of the Poet’s collection as though it were a prayer mat. It was in the Archivist’s room, with news cuttings in front of me telling me how Omi had died. Face this, the news cuttings told me, or else convince yourself it wasn’t him who died. And I had taken the latter option. I chose to believe an impossible life over an unbearable death.
Just as I had done with Mama.
I raised my head and closed the book.