VII
Far enough into the darkness, I ceased to exist. I was a body, yes, but a body freed of everything that is other than corporeal. Sometimes the only way to be is to remove yourself from yourself. It cannot be done, of course. But illusions — no, delusions — are so much more effective than people give them credit for. I could live for longer than anyone imagined in the delusion that I was just the body of Aasmaani, with nothing within it.
There was an art to this, of course, a patiently learnt art. Or perhaps a talent. It bore some relationship to sitting in a classroom, with a look that signified attentiveness while the mind skated through every topic except precisely that with which it was supposed to be concerned. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to enter the darkness without my face transforming into blankness, alerting all those around me to what was going on. But now, now I could smile and nod my head, follow key phrases in conversations, occasionally add necessary interjections, while all along I wasn’t really there.
I was, instead, in that blank space where nothing could touch me. For hours, sometimes, blessed hours of silence.
And here was the CEO stepping into my office, a female co-worker I recognized but didn’t know behind him.
‘Got any gum?’ he said.
I automatically reached into my handbag and passed him a mint. ‘That’ll do,’ he said. He sat down across from me and pulled the telephone closer to him.
‘Phones downstairs aren’t working,’ the woman explained to me, as though it were necessary.
The CEO punched in some numbers and sat with the phone to his ear. The woman compressed her features — lips squished together, eyebrows drawing close, nostrils constricted — as though putting on a battle-mask. The CEO turned towards me and raised his eyebrows in mock-alarm. I managed an upward flicker of my lips in response.
‘My only point,’ the woman said, ‘is that a medical show should cover important medical issues.’ And now the tiny part of my brain which continued to concern itself with such things recognized her as the presenter of one of the more boring of STD’s educational programmes.
‘BHS is not a medical condition,’ the CEO said, before barking into the phone: ‘Get Tahir.’
‘BHS? No, I’m talking about depression.’
‘Bored Housewife Syndrome,’ the CEO said. His lips were startlingly red.
The woman put her hands on her hips. ‘Seven out of ten people in Pakistan suffer some form of depressive disorder in their lifetime. In six per cent it’s serious enough to…’
‘Well, all the more reason to shut up about it. If they don’t know they’re sick they won’t expect to be treated like they’re sick. Too much damn whining in this country as it is. Tahir, round of golf?…I’m leaving now.’
He hung up and pushed himself out of the chair with no inconsiderable effort.
Leave. Go.
But in the doorway he turned back to me. ‘You, what’s the story with you and the Poet?’
I blinked. Two times, three, and then I was in my skin again. ‘I’m sorry? What do you mean?’
‘It’s his seventieth birthday next year. We’re going to do some grand programme about it.’
Seventy!
‘Tributes, readings, homages, bla bla. It’s going up on our website as a coming attraction for the new year. Someone somewhere in this building thinks it’s a good idea to have a link on the website to a bio of him. And we’ve found one, a bio, on some other website which we’re going to shamelessly steal, just tweak a sentence here and there. But maybe we should check the facts because who knows where that other website gets its information. Last time we stole information off a site without checking it we ended up informing people that the game of cricket got its name because the sound of ball on willow was like the death-cry of the insect of that name. And you know, you’re the research girl so we might as well give you some work. But if you’ve got some trauma associated with him, I’ll tell someone else. Otherwise I’ll be accused of causing depression in my employees, and you’ll take medical leave.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I can check facts.’
‘I knew your mother,’ the woman said, stepping forward. ‘We marched together against the Hudood Ordinances.’
Great.
‘Twenty years ago. Can you believe it? Next year it’ll be twenty years.’
I looked at the CEO. ‘Can you send me the bio?’
He nodded and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Come on. Out.’
‘She was a great lady,’ the woman said, her eyebrows emoting, before the CEO pulled her out and closed the door behind him.
Seventy. He would have been seventy.
He once joked that in his old age he’d become respectable — a revered, toothless icon, sufficiently domesticated for governments to trot him out on state occasions so that he could snore his way through ceremonies and receive standing ovations for mumbling, inaudible couplets.
‘No, you won’t. I’d kill you first,’ my mother cheerfully promised.
‘Now, there’s devotion for you,’ he laughed, taking her hand and kissing it.
Against my will I found myself trying to age both their features in my mind, picture her as she might look and him as he would have looked. It was a mental exercise I occasionally applied to Mama’s features, so that I would not fail to recognize her if somehow our paths crossed again.
There was an officious rapping on the door. When I made a sound of enquiry one of the CEO’s underlings shuffled in, so apologetic in his mien that I couldn’t help looking over his shoulder to see if someone else had boldly applied knuckles to door. He handed me a page which consisted of a single paragraph, printed in large bold font.
I scanned the sentences as the man shuffled out again.
How could anyone reduce that man’s life to this?
HE WAS BORN IN A FAR-FLUNG VILLAGE IN PUNJAB AND MOVED TO KARACHI AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN.
That was the opening. Inaccurate, already. He moved to Karachi at the age of thirteen, in 1945, the year my mother was born there. They liked to say, later, that there was an element of fate in that. (And I could hear his voice: Far-flung? Far-flung? Far from where and flung by whom?)
FROM THERE HE WENT TO PUNJAB UNIVERSITY TO GET AN MA IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND BECAME WELL KNOWN IN LAHORE’S MUSHAIRAS (POETRY RECITALS).
‘Well known’ didn’t begin to describe the reception his poetry received, right from the beginning. His ghazals, in particular, drove the crowd to raptures — not just through the power of his imagery and his ability to mine a word for all its layers of meaning, but also for his capacity to surprise; he would start reciting a couplet, and after a line and a half the crowd would think they knew exactly what rhyme he was leading up to, and they waited with a keen anticipation for him to say it out loud, but suddenly, with just a few syllables to spare before the rhyme and refrain he’d turn it around completely, take it in an entirely different, and quite brilliant, direction. The crowd — often numbering in the thousands — would roar with delight and repeat the rhyme and refrain back to him, shaking the edifices of buildings around them with the sounds of poetry.
DURING THIS TIME HE TOOK THE PEN-NAME ‘NAZIM’ BECAUSE IT MEANT ‘POET’.
He took the pen-name Nazim because he adored Nazim Hikmet’s poetry.
HALFWAY THROUGH HIS UNIVERSITY STINT HE UNFORTUNATELY ABANDONED THE GHAZAL TO EXPERIMENT WITH WESTERN IDEAS OF POETRY.
He wrote sonnets, pantoums, villanelles, canzones. For those who had loved his ghazals this was a profound betrayal, particularly in light of the nationalistic, anti-colonial feeling that ran high among young Pakistanis in the early 1950s, and they mockingly took to calling him ‘The Poet’ rather than ‘Nazim’.