My mother suffered from profound clinical depression. She lived with it for over two years until, unable to believe in the possibility of recovery, she killed herself.
I said the words to myself, silently and then aloud. They didn’t seem to mean anything.
So I got out of bed and went into the lounge, where Dad was cutting an apple carefully into eighths and reading a book which I recognized from the package Shehnaz Saeed had couriered over to me last week.
‘Mama killed herself because she was depressed and didn’t think she could get better,’ I said.
Dad took off his glasses, put the book to one side and looked up at me. ‘Yes.’
I sat down beside him on the sofa. He picked an unbruised apple slice off his plate and handed it to me. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something more but I was overtaken by a curious sensation of flatness, as though all metaphors had fled and what remained was irreducible, irrefutable fact.
‘Why weren’t you able to accept it all this while?’ he said finally and not without hesitation. ‘Did you think if you had to face her death you’d react the way she reacted to the Poet’s death?’
I shook my head slowly.
All those things my mother had done in the first fifteen years of my life which outsiders saw as signs she wasn’t a good mother — every time she left, every occasion she followed the Poet to another city or another country, every school play she missed because she was in prison or at a rally — I had, at the time, forgiven, understood, even been proud of. All those things could be understood as signs of her strength — strength of love, strength of purpose, strength of belief in my ability to understand why she couldn’t be ordinary. I forgave her all her strengths. But I couldn’t see her collapse for what it was because that, to me, would have been a sign of weakness — and I would have regarded that as betrayal.
‘I wasn’t willing to accept that she was human, Dad. I wasn’t willing to accept she could be broken.’
And that was it — so small a thing, and yet it had defined every aspect of my life. It was the conclusion with which I had started when I tried to understand her disappearance — and I had worked backward from it, interpreting and reinterpreting my notions of the world to make the conclusion seem plausible. I didn’t stop and see the idiocy of what I was doing even when the only way to retain the myth I had created was to jettison the things she held so dear — her faith in activism and her love for me.
‘Do you see her suicide as desertion?’ He held my hand as he said it.
I shook my head again. I had played myself as victim of my mother’s lack of love for too long, had wrung myself out thinking it. It would be easy enough to go on, step from one narrative of desertion into another — but when I closed my eyes to allow in that old familiar, almost comforting, story I saw Ed scribbling an encrypted note to his mother to make her believe the woman she loved was still alive; the intended cruelty there double-edged, shredding his own heart as he watched it shred hers.
‘I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.
‘You know what?’ Dad said. ‘She really was the bravest woman — the bravest human being — I ever knew.’
I smiled at him for that. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ He tapped the spine of the book he’d been reading. ‘I’ve been rethinking her, too. And I’m sorrier than I can say that I didn’t try to understand earlier.’
I gripped his hand tighter. ‘I would have liked to have known her.’ Then, feeling so self-conscious I had to rush the words out, I said: ‘I’d like to know you.’
Dad put his arm around my shoulder, with only a slight trace of tentativeness. ‘Let’s start with this. Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.’
I rested my head against his chest. ‘I miss her,’ I said, and at last I cried for her death.
Maybe a bird didn’t start to sing outside the window in notes of heartbreaking beauty. But when I recall that moment, that’s how I remember it.
XXV
That was January. Now it’s April. I’m back in Karachi, and yesterday I saw Ed.
It was at the café at which I’d met Mirza, the café to which Ed had invited me for coffee that day in the office when he decided to tell me the truth, though I don’t think even he knew if he really would have done that when the moment came.
I was driving near the café when I saw Ed’s car parked outside, and knew I would have to stop.
‘You look terrible,’ I said, when I entered and saw him sitting alone, though that was a lie.
His frame seemed to shrink at the sound of my voice. He looked up from his coffee-cup. ‘You don’t.’
‘I just want you to know, Ed, in case there’s any confusion about this, that what you did to me was unforgivable.’
He blinked in weary agreement. ‘But you’ve survived it, as you survive everything, Aasmaani. Whereas I, well, I’ve lost the only two people who have ever mattered to me. You and my mother. She doesn’t want anything to do with me either, it appears. Let that give you some pleasure.’
I felt achingly sorry for him, despite everything. I remembered lying in his arms, and the abandon of believing we had a future together, and it would be a lie to say I didn’t regret most bitterly that things hadn’t worked out the way I had wanted them to in those few moments when Ed and I found each other and found completion.
‘I owe you a great deal,’ I said.
He looked up with a twisted smile, as though waiting for the punchline.
‘I mean it. What you did really was unforgivable—’
‘I think you’ve made that point.’
‘But it made me look at all those other things I’ve thought of as unforgivable in my life. And it made me look at all the reasons I have to ask for people’s forgiveness. You’re among those people, you know.’
For a moment, the corners of his mouth started to lift up. And then he said, ‘But you can’t forgive me.’
‘I can’t trust you. However much I may continue to love you.’
He opened his mouth, but I shook my head and he smiled a little sadly and looked down into his coffee-cup. There was nothing more we had to say to each other, and we both knew it.
I walk along the beach. I walk slowly. The sand is shot through with silver and I have to dodge the clumps of dried seaweed. There’s a tear in the sand. I lift it up, careful not to squash it. A tentacle emerges, translucent. It straightens and then curls, seeking something that will help it sustain life. I carry it to the water which abandoned it on shore and place it in the waves.
A boy on the rocks at one end of the beach is shouting something, his voice lost in the wind. He raises two pieces of wood, held together in a manner that suggests a gun, and pumps invisible bullets into the sea. He is a boy enraptured by the glamour of certainty: you can read it in his face.