Farhana’s husband, Michel, a retired critic and journalist, was, as always at that time of the morning, reading in his study on what she called his charpoy — his day-bed — supported by oriental tasselled cushions. He hadn’t seen his wife the previous night, and now he didn’t get up to greet or kiss her, as if it would take too much physical effort. He didn’t say he was glad to have her home. But he did wave, lean forward a little, and say, ‘You are back early. What happened to your lip?’
‘I’ll tell you, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’
He did say he was keen to hear her story. Not that she knew how to tell it. It would have to come out as it came.
In the late 90s, Farhana’s first husband, an army general who had been educated in America, had been publicly beheaded by the Taliban at the behest of his military colleagues, who thought he had become too pro-American. They believed, in fact, that he was betraying the complicity of the army with the Taliban to their mutual enemy, the Americans. For this reason he was captured and driven to the mountains. After she had been sent a photograph of a hand holding up his head, with a large crowd of cheering local villagers in the background, she had fled. Yasin had refused to join her, but remained on the family’s country estate, keeping out of politics.
Farhana went to Paris to stay with a wealthy friend, who advised her never to go home. It would also be a good idea to find a steady man to look after her. Paris was ideal for exiles; once, it had welcomed the stateless. But Farhana would have little money and no status, and the French were notoriously racist, only liking people of colour if they were artists or could play the trumpet. What if they mistook her for an Algerian?
Farhana didn’t seem concerned, and went along with others’ wishes as if she only wanted a quiet life. Now, looking back, she guessed she had been traumatised, and probably still was.
The good friend did a good thing and found the widower Michel, who was ten years older than her. Now in his mid-seventies, he had retired from regular writing in order to read Balzac, study Trollope in English, and become properly familiar with the history of poetry. He had stuck to his word: he was a reader. His chosen destiny made him happy.
At the time he was seen as a tremendous catch, an opportunity not to be missed. He was widowed, well off, cultured, well connected, with numerous books to his name and a lovely flat off the Rue du Bac, on the Left Bank, full of pictures and theatre memorabilia. Farhana, from a distinguished family, was unused to telling anyone who she was. Now she was often informed that she was lucky. Many Parisian women would have wanted this dry old stick. But it was she, a frightened, declining Pakistani woman then in her mid-fifties, who had grabbed the prize. How? She guessed that because she said so little to him, she seemed more demure and mysterious than the others. She certainly had had no idea what she was doing. Perhaps he had pitied her.
It was indeed the case that Michel knew actors, writers and directors. Many of them were distinguished or even world famous in their own world, and they came for dinner once a month and drank a lot. The talk was always of the latest films and books, of what Sarkozy was, or wasn’t, doing. If Farhana wondered what Michel wanted from her, there really was no obscurity. They had never been moved by one another. It was companionship: he liked someone to be there while he talked — an urgent and more or less continuous monologue concerning what was in the newspapers. He liked having someone arrange the film screenings he went to, and the plays he attended, often with her. He liked her to sit with him when he listened to entire symphonies by Brahms or Beethoven, nodding at her instructively during the finer parts. She loved this, as it was an opportunity for her to think about important things.
The friend who arranged the marriage included a warning. ‘Until the age of sixty a woman still needs passion. But I suspect, dear girl, that your man will make love like a critic.’
‘Without asking for it, one day I ran to the airport and found myself dumped in a completely new life, as a middle-aged immigrant,’ said Farhana. ‘How would I know how a critic makes love?’
‘Watch out,’ said her friend. ‘Fastidious.’
Farhana and Michel had sex twice: once before the marriage, and once after, which was more than enough for him. The first time he ejaculated immediately, and the second he suffered cramp and howled awfully, followed by a coughing fit which he thought was a heart attack. Farhana suspected the catastrophe might have been caused by her removing his tie. She had never seen him during the day without a tie, and she only saw him at night, wrapped in a dressing gown, if they both had insomnia. She had bought him a cashmere polo-neck one Christmas, but Michel felt his being was an obscenity without a tie, and he never wore casual clothes.
Farhana thought she was done with her homeland; she had been ripped from the past, and the future was comfortable but null. Then, one afternoon, Yasin’s wife Nasira, who had escaped him at last to London, insisted on coming to Paris to talk. Now working for a travel agent in Cricklewood, North London, Nasira came from a famous family, and had been a Cleopatra, one of the most striking women of Karachi, who wore the most glamorous saris and shimmering shalwar kameez, with solid gold bangles. Many men had been wild about her, which was, Yasin insisted, part of the problem. Now, in jeans and sweater, she was — apart from the Rolex — as diminished and plain as Farhana realised that she herself was. But these two women, both escapees, liked one another, and had much in common.
Farhana put her fingers under Nasira’s chin and raised her face. ‘Why have you come to see me here?’
‘I must warn you,’ Nasira said. Farhana’s wild-tempered son, never the most stable of people, was developing into a madman. Out on his country estate in Sind, where he was a feudal landlord, Yasin was, apparently, playing polo aggressively, drinking whisky, copulating brutally, and shooting his many guns at anything alive. And because of the kidnappings, he was trying to import a brand-new armoured BMW with blacked-out windows into the country. His wife believed that, although this tank was extremely heavy and therefore somewhat slow, the ‘local Mr Toad’, as she called her husband, would smoke a joint, turn up his favourite Punjabi bhangra music, and soon embrace a tree with the vehicle. Although she despised him, she didn’t think another violent death in the family would be good for Farhana.
‘What can I do about it?’ Farhana asked. ‘Are you saying I must go there? I’m too weak now: I can’t face it.’
‘You can only feel you have done your duty,’ her daughter-in-law replied. ‘And then live your life — which is what I am doing at last.’
Haltingly, Farhana asked Michel if he would be interested in accompanying her, but he wondered whether it would be dusty, or inconvenient for his stomach. That was the least of it. Still, she made sure to take her first husband’s gold watch, cufflinks and fountain pens, which she would deliver to Yasin at last.
On her first afternoon in Paris after the trip, her husband asked her to walk with him. That day there was a wind, and he had his waistcoat on. As always, his hands were behind his back. Leaning forward, he barely lifted his feet from the ground, for fear of falling. ‘An old man can come to believe that he could easily be knocked down,’ he said. ‘If he takes a step—’
Farhana interrupted to say, ‘When you return to a country after a terrible shock, and more than a decade away, you will know that the roads will have got wider and the skyscrapers higher. There will be more apartment blocks, more people on the street, new immigrants and tourists coming to see the sights. Michel, I must be ageing because I remember when Karachi was a pleasant post-colonial city.’