Wasim opened the door. ‘Bari Begum Sahib,’ he announced, and fled.
I stayed seated on the divan and stared down at her feet and the hem of her sari. I wanted to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her calves as I had done more than once in my childhood when she was leaving for the airport. If we’d been in any other room in the house, I probably would have. But instead I waited for her move and, after a long pause, her move was laughter.
‘And you’re still so young,’ she said.
I flushed and looked up. She wasn’t more wrinkled or stooped or sagging, and I could have kicked myself for having come back now, before June, because I was afraid she would die and I’d be left with nothing but guilt and anger to remember her by. To hell with guilt.
‘Better young than old,’ I said.
‘Oh, Aliya.’ She sat down and shook her head at me. ‘I wasn’t insulting you.’
‘No?’
‘No. The last time we saw each other —’ her hand went to her cheek in a gesture that was supposed to look unconscious — ‘just after that, when I was on the plane to Paris, I realized how young eighteen is. So young. How can you hold people responsible for things they did at eighteen? How can you go on clinging to something from that stage in your life?’
‘You want me to forget Mariam Apa existed?’
‘Aliya, I’m not talking about you. Now stand up and greet me properly.’
I stood up, performed an aadaab and bent lower to kiss her cheek. Her arms wrapped around me for a moment, then disengaged before I could respond.
‘Aba and Ami aren’t home yet.’
‘Yes, I know. Your father isn’t always clever.’ She reached into her handbag and pulled out a mobile phone. ‘He said he was calling from the house, but the display showed his office number.’
‘You have a mobile phone?’
‘I’m an uppie. A yuppie no longer young. Sameer suggested prefixing “geriatric” but I will not be a guppie.’
I wouldn’t allow myself to laugh, so instead I said archly, ‘Nothing less than smoked salmon for Dadi.’
‘I was thinking along the lines of a swordfísh.’
Had she always possessed this virtue of self-parody? Yes. That’s partly why I’d loved her so much. Why had all those relatives wasted so much time in talking about rapprochement? If they’d only thought, instead, of a way of bringing us together, physically together, so that I could see her ear lobes. Yes, I said ear lobes. As a child I was always fascinated by their softness; I would grip a lobe between thumb and finger and fall asleep, and nothing on earth would persuade Dadi to move while I still had her in my grip. When I’d wake up and say, ‘Dadi, you could have pushed me away,’ she’d reply, ‘My darling, one day you’ll push yourself away. I’m making the most of this while I can.’ I swore that would never happen.
I looked at her ears and felt an overwhelming anger towards myself. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you.’
‘No shit, Sherlock, as your Americans would say.’
‘Dadi!’
She leant back and looked at me, amused. ‘English is capable of such vulgarity. But sometimes that’s good. When you live in euphemism you can’t speak to people who are accustomed to direct speech.’
‘Is this a euphemistic jab at me? What haven’t I understood?’
‘Love, Aliya. You never understood love.’
What I had never understood, I now saw quite clearly, was her. I had left at an age when understanding had only just become possible, and I’d spent the intervening years reducing her to a tilted head and a cheek that provoked slapping. How had I let myself do that? How could one remark undo eighteen years of love? Because hating Dadi was easier than facing the truth. I thought that, but then I didn’t know what it meant. What truth?
‘Sameer says you met Baji?’
I hadn’t been at all sure how to bring this up. But she seemed only curious; perhaps even relieved. ‘Yes.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘The first not-quites. Kulsoom and Shahrukh. A story I’d never heard before.’
‘If you’d been around at all over the last few years I’m sure I would have told it to you by now.’ Her tone was entirely matter of fact. My anger caught me off guard. This time the anger was all outward. I really did hate her for the pretence that nothing had ever been wrong; the pretence that my absence meant nothing more than a few missed opportunities to tell family stories. I had felt, just seconds earlier, the urge to cry for having stayed away from her for so long, and she couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge that there were moments when she had missed me.
‘Touché,’ I said, matching her tone of indifference. ‘I don’t believe you, but touché.’
Dadi raised her eyebrow just enough to let me know that I had come perilously close to accusing her of lying. ‘Did Baji mention me?’ And now I saw that she was, unmistakably, hungry for news of her family. My God, I thought, it’s only pride that’s kept her from writing a letter, making a phone call, doing something, anything, to get in touch with the family on ‘the other side’. Pride, and the fear of being rebuffed. Were those absurd reasons partly to blame for my decision not to call Dadi or write her a letter these past years? What else? What were my other reasons?
‘She asked how you were,’ I said. ‘Then she said she saw you in me.’
‘What did you do to deserve that?’ Dadi smiled sadly, and I thought back to that laughing girl framed in Baji’s apartment. No trace remained. ‘I always liked her, though I don’t think she knew that. I told you that once. Remember?’
I couldn’t say I did. Dadi persisted, ‘When you were studying twentieth-century thought at school. Condensed in one chapter of seven pages. The green history book. Remember?’
Yes, I remembered. Remembered that I had fallen asleep with the history book on my lap, and when I awoke Dadi was sitting beside me. She started talking about a cousin of hers whose mother had tantalizing elbows. She asked me two questions: ‘How does royalty treat a washerwoman? How does a daughter treat a mother?’ Before I could answer Dadi said, ‘What do you do when the two questions are really just one question?’ That was Baji’s story — convinced her father’s relatives considered her their inferior; equally convinced that her mother’s relatives should treat her as their superior. Dadi pointed at the bearded man on the open page of my text book. ‘Although she couldn’t demonstrate any sympathy for the lower classes herself, it was Baji who made a Marxist of me.’
A decade later, recalling that remark, I found it even more absurd than I had at the age of twelve. ‘Baji made a Marxist of you?’ I said to Dadi.
‘You’re thinking, If she’s a Marxist, I’m an eland,’ Dadi said. ‘But I was. So was Taimur. We were both so young.’
Elands. Yaks. We couldn’t be common and deal in dogs and goats. ‘And Akbar?’ I asked. ‘Did the two of you fall in love over shared political views?’
‘Akbar? He said the difference between a royal who inherits power and a plebian who achieves it —’ she used the word ‘plebian’ without a grain of self-consciousness — ‘is that the royal is tutored in the arts, in social graces, in subtlety. So his misuse of privilege is blanketed in ghazals and aadabs. The plebian, unused to power, hungry for it, desperate to grab it while it lasts, does not bother with niceties. And niceties, Akbar said, cannot be undervalued.’