The door opened, and Ed walked in. He saw me, smiled, and held out an envelope.
. .
Samina, if we turn away hope when it flies down on to our shoulders and offers its wings to those of our limbs which have long been accustomed to stooping, then how shall we be forgiven?
That’s a metaphor I could once have turned with precision in Urdu. Stooping limbs makes no sense. Can arms stoop? You would not let me get away with such slippages of language. A bird must be a bird before it can be hope, you would remind me, and rightly so. And so, you’d continue, what kind of bird are we talking about here? The shambling vulture with its own stoop or a drillbeaked woodpecker, destroying your antique furniture? A nightingale! I’d say. Oh please, God, not that cliché again; you’d roll your eyes.
I sit here in the fading light, and remember the pleasure of writing while you slept, your breath my only metronome.
For today, for this moment, I can banish the thought that you weren’t speaking to me through the crossword (how did my words about Frass get to you? Is it the sympathetic Minion who takes away everything I write? The first time he did that, it upset me, but then I began to see it as an act of charity. If everything I wrote remained on my desk, I’d know you’d never read it. By taking it away he created the illusion that perhaps, somehow, my words would reach you. It was never an illusion I really dared to believe.) For today, I can banish the thought that it wasn’t you speaking (it can be no one else. No one else knew of the jazz fugues).
But for today, I must also think of all those words I’ve written to you these last weeks. All the words which might have reached you. There was some cruelty in there. If I had the chance I would take those pages back and swallow them, letter by letter. Since that is beyond me, let me say this instead—
Through me, Samina, you found love. If you were to be faithful to me in all my years of absence, you’d be unfaithful to love. I am embalmed memory to you now, and love is not a cucumber — it gains little from being pickled. (That’s a joke — my metaphors haven’t degenerated to that extent.) If the Minions were female, or if my desires were differently constructed, perhaps one of them would have found a place in my heart and my body and my mind.
So, love. Love deeply and passionately. Love foolishly.
If you can.
If you can’t, remember what I now remember, what I have remembered so often all my time in here: Samina, we lived.
We were the Phoenix and the fire, the flight to the sun and the radiance at the end of it. Even when thorns pierced us, they were plucked from Yggdrasil.
Only the language of legend can suffice for our lives.
If I am to remain in here for the rest of my days, if they take all my books from me, take away pen and paper, they will not take away those years I had with you. You, and Aasmaani.
My God, Aasmaani.
She must be a woman now.
Has she eclipsed us already, that brilliant, brilliant child?
JAZZ FUGUES. FRASS. Such simple messages can change our lives. You may never find me, Samina. I have no way of knowing where I am. But don’t let that cause you pain. Your words have reached out to me, all these years later. The worst I feared was that you had ceased to love me. I know now that isn’t true. That’s enough. There’s very little life left in me now, but you’ve given me enough to carry me in joy through all the days that remain.
So don’t spend the life that remains to you in a search for me. I can see too easily how you would do that, destroying your own chance at happiness. Put this paper down, and step out to embrace someone near enough to embrace.
Let it be whoever it is, I will accept it. Let it be Shehnaz.
They were right all along, the poets who redefined the Raqeeb. Not just a rival in love but, as a consequence of being a rival in love, also a twin soul, an alter ego, the only one who understands what it means to be afflicted with love for the Beloved.
I used to see the way she looked at you, all those years, and I knew exactly what it meant because wasn’t it how I looked at you, too?
That first time you met her, during the rehearsals of Laila, you said: I hear you do a remarkable imitation of him.
Yes, she said, and she took a strand of your hair between her finger and thumb just as I had done a few minutes earlier. Your two pairs of eyes locked and just before you laughed and turned away, there was an instant when I saw a possibility occur to you which had never occurred to you before.
How well she must know you, how intimately, to have captured you so perfectly on-screen in those heart-stopping moments. And now here she is helping you to send messages to me, though it must kill her to imagine my return.
Am I right about this?
I suspect I am. The surprise of it all is that I feel no jealousy, only a great tenderness for Shehnaz, a desire to sit and talk with her, to grow maudlin in the moonlight discussing your charms. You would not stay for such a conversation, you would not countenance such sentimentality. But Shehnaz would revel in it. Yes, if there must be a Raqeeb then let it be Shehnaz.
Oh, love, I am awash with tenderness now.
Your eyes, your mouth, the taste of you.
Samina, how lucky we have been.
XXII
Ed’s bedroom window looked down on the garden. Bougainvillea grew along the boundary wall, though not to such a height that it could obscure the palm trees next door. A boy climbed one of the trees, barefoot, his shalwar rolled above his knee. I watched him until he disappeared into the leaves and darkness. Seconds elapsed, and a green coconut dropped down into — I knew though I couldn’t see it — a pair of hands waiting below.
Coconut thieves. Some crimes have such charm attached to them.
I lifted the pages and read the last sentence as though it were a prayer.
Hfanof, jkm gpesb mc jfzc tcco.
Samina, how lucky we have been.
He had written her name in ash before my eyes. Everything I write can be reduced to one word. And what was that one word to him? It was language become music. Samina. In it, the timbres of love, jealousy, rage, friendship, admiration, passion, hurt and adoration came together in a single pitch. These qualities didn’t exist side by side, didn’t vie for supremacy, didn’t form separate narratives which confounded his attempt to settle on a single definition of her. He knew better than to make such an attempt.
Omi. My Raqeeb, my rival, my father, my twin.
She loved you, always. You’re right about that.
And me, what about me?
Then, this memory:
I have my arms around my mother. It’s just after I’ve been screaming at her for not going to the rally in Lahore. My screams have exhausted into tears. She strokes my hair.
‘Don’t think I don’t know the horrors of adolescence, Aasmaani. One day we’ll raise a glass, you and I, to having survived these concurrent, awful periods in our lives. ‘
A glass of what, Mama?
A glass of air, sweetheart. We’ll drink buoyancy.