‘Does she know…?’
‘That I’m aware of her deception? No.’
‘So it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to say you have a somewhat strained relationship with your mother, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan.’
He smiled and looked just a little embarrassed. ‘I love her, I really do. And I’m close to her, more than most men and their mothers. But that’s why it just drives me crazy when she acts like we’re in some soap opera in which every tiny moment has to have secrecy and suspense added to it. Really.’ He was laughing now as though it had just occurred to him that he’d been living in a joke. ‘The cook comes in with some thing that’s been delivered in the letterbox. My mother sees the familiar handwriting on the envelope. She leaps up from her chair and darts to get it. The unsuspecting son asks her what it is. She says, nothing important. She is clearly lying. Then she says she just remembered she needs the driver to run an errand for her. She rushes out. When she comes back, she is clearly flustered. Exclamation exclamation.’ He smiled again and rolled his eyes. ‘It gets a bit exhausting.’
She had seemed so utterly different to me — too ironic about her profession to become the stereotype of the actress who cannot separate reality from drama. But I only said, ‘Mothers can be that way.’
He came to sit next to me on the sofa and touched the back of my hand, very lightly. ‘She told me about that code your mother and the Poet used. She told me she thought those garbled lines might be written in code. That’s why I was angry with her for sending it to you. I thought she wasn’t taking into account how you might feel about getting something you couldn’t read and then wondering if it was your mother and the Poet’s code. That’s why, even with the second set of pages, I didn’t know whether to give them to you or not. I was, I’ll be honest, I was on my way to shred them when I heard a sound from your office and I went in to see if you were OK. I didn’t intend for you to get those pages. I don’t…’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘Look, my mother told me you still think your mother is alive and,’ he held up his hands before I could react, as though anticipating a blow, ‘I’m not saying she isn’t. I don’t know, I… that’s your thing, your situation… I’m just… I don’t think getting pages of weird writing you can’t read but which you imagine is written by her will help anything. I saw that covering letter. It’s obviously some crazy fan of my mother’s. They send her all kinds of oddball stuff, just to get her attention.’
‘Ed, I can read it.’
‘Oh.’ He leaned back against the sofa cushions. ‘Oh. Oh, God. I really was going to shred it.’
I hadn’t known until then if I was going to read the pages to him. I had no reason to trust him, to believe anything he might say about them. But right then it was clear — I needed to read them simply to give him a reason not to shred the next set of pages that might arrive at his house. With that clarity came such relief, as though all I had really wanted all along was a reason to have someone else share the burden of so inexplicable a secret. From the papers I had been holding, I pulled out the decrypted version of the coded pages and started reading out loud. He didn’t say anything all the way through, just sat there sipping wine, first from his glass and then from mine.
When I finished reading, Ed said, ‘Lordalmighty.’
That seems as good a response as any I can think of. Did you follow all of it?’
‘All?’ He put a hand to his head. ‘I don’t follow any of it. It’s not…’ He frowned. ‘Did you read that it’s been sixteen years the writer of that has been trying to figure out who his captor is?’ I nodded. ‘And how long has it been…?’
‘Since the Poet died? Sixteen years.’
‘But you can’t really… I mean, it can’t…’ Those were the words, the ones I had wanted him to say and suddenly, passionately — I had to turn away so he wouldn’t know — hated him for saying. Then he said, ‘Can it?’
There was a single drop of wine on the bottom of my tumbler. I tilted the glass, reached in and held my finger lightly against its surface. When I moved my finger away, the drop came with it.
Ed stood up. ‘There were all those rumours, weren’t there? That he hadn’t really died.’
‘Yes.’ I didn’t know any more what I wanted of him.
‘But your mother must have seen the body. Right? And she’d know if it was his body.’ He turned red. ‘I don’t mean that in any vulgar way.’
It was the oddest moment of propriety. ‘She never saw the body.’
‘But…’
‘But, it’s still absurd. I know. And impossible.’ There, I had said it, and as soon as I said it I saw it must be true. The flaw was not in his style, his voice, his anecdotes. The flaw was simply in the situation, so utterly ridiculous that no one could actually intend the whole fabrication to be taken seriously. ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake. How can someone be kept prisoner for sixteen years, with shifting sets of lackeys looking in on him, without anyone else finding out about it? You’re right, it’s absurd.’ I stood up, feeling nothing but embarrassed for having revealed too much of my own weaknesses to him. ‘I’m sorry for having taken up so much of your time.’ I didn’t mean for my voice to sound so distant, so formal. ‘I see that it’s absurd.’
He nodded, and stood up. I held out my hand to him, unable to move out of formality or to find some way to ask him to stay and talk to me of other things. He took my hand. Outside there was gunfire, rapid bursts of it into the sky. His fingers pressed down on mine in surprise and I remembered that he’d been away for years.
‘It’s just celebration,’ I said. ‘The Ruhat-e-Hilal committee must have seen the new moon. Ramzan starts tomorrow.’
‘Of course,’ he said, still holding my hand.
‘I suppose that means you’ll be heading off to film that Ramzan special. Guess I’ll see you in another month. Hope it goes well.’
I tried to pull my hand out of his but he held on, rotated his wrist so that his hand was covering mine, clasping it. ‘What would it mean to you?’ he said. ‘If I said, no, it’s not absurd. Believing those pages might be genuine. It’s not necessarily absurd.’
‘How can it not be absurd?’ My voice a whisper.
He smiled. ‘Oh, you urban girl in your modern world. Have you no idea of the kinds of things that go on in secret, for generation after generation, in parts of the country that exist outside the reach of the law? When people have power, land, opportunity and no one to say no to them, the only limits on what they can do is the limit of their own imaginations. Years of secret imprisonment may be absurd, but it’s possible.’
‘Sixteen years, Ed!’ I pulled my hand out of his.
‘Sixteen days, sixteen years. What difference does it make? Ask this question—’ All at once he was fired up. ‘Why would someone imprison a man, and make his family believe he was dead?’
I stepped back and crossed my arms. It was as though we were in the office, talking about storylines for a proposed drama. ‘You make them believe he’s dead so no one comes looking for him. That’s easy. You imprison him, I don’t know. For hatred, fear, vengeance. Any unpleasant motive will do.’
‘And how many people had cause to hate him, to fear him!’ Ed said. ‘Think about that. God, he spat on the powerful with impunity. He was fearless, utterly.’