Remember that photograph of Bahadur Shah which you mentioned to Khaleel (Samia and I ran into him when we were having tea together at a café round the corner from your flat. Samia introduced us and then had to take off, so Khaleel and I had a very pleasant time talking about how we both know you so little and yet think of you so much and also think so much of you. He’s really quite delicious. I’ve invited him over to meet Baji. Samia will be there, too — I’m sure she’ll report all).
Write to me.
Love,
Rehana Apa.
P.S. The photograph is from Baji. As a token of apology, though she won’t admit that.
I looked at the postmark on the letter. Only four days ago. Why didn’t she say if Khaleel was planning to come to Karachi? The café round the corner. That had to be the one we’d been to together. Surely it wasn’t just coincidence that had brought him there again. Liaquatabad had to be a lie. He’d said it just to test me. He’d talk to Baji and Samia for just a few minutes before they’d ferret out names of his relatives who were known to our family, either pre- or post-Partition. Maybe it would turn out he was somehow distantly related to us.
Damn.
I looked at the letter again, the flat of my hand hovering slightly above the paper to block out that part which referred to him without running the risk of smudging his name.
‘Remember Zain and Ibrahim,’ Rehana Apa had written. Zain and Ibrahim? Dadi had a cousin called Zain, but as far as I could remember the only thing noteworthy about him was the absence of his left eyebrow. And who was Ibrahim? I picked up the phone and dialled Dadi’s number. I had never got out of the practice of dialling Dadi’s number. In the past, whenever I was home for the summer, I would dial that familiar configuration of digits, just to allow myself to believe that she would answer the phone and everything would be as it used to be.
This time, for the first time in four years, she did answer. ‘I had a feeling it was you,’ she said. ‘Are you calling about Usman’s piece?’
I picked up the newspaper, which was lying unread beside me. My cousin, Usman, was interning at the newspaper office, and every day the whole family would scan the papers for his name and call each other up to discuss his journalistic strengths and weaknesses. ‘No, which page?’
‘Two,’ Dadi said. ‘So why are you calling?’
I turned to page two. OFFICIAL FLAYS FLIGHT FAILURE, ran the headline. The story below read:
Saboteurs are responsible for sabotaging the runway controls which caused chaos at Karachi airport yesterday, says an airline official. Further details will be unveiled when an enquiry has uncovered further details. Other sources say shady people were seen lurking near the control tower. When questioned by airport police they claimed they were not lurking but loitering. When this reporter asked the airline official if miscreants were involved, the official responded, ‘We have not yet looked into the creant factor.’
‘Little Usman!’ I said. ‘Never realized he had the Dard-e-Dil humour gene.’ Dadi’s earlier remark struck me for the first time. ‘Did you say, “So why are you calling?” Can’t I call you on a whim?’
‘Well, we haven’t really clarified that, have we? Or should I say, you haven’t decided whether we’re friends again yet.’
‘I love you Dods.’ I’d been wanting to say that ever since I heard her footsteps in the hall, the morning after I had returned home.
‘That’s not quite the same thing.’
‘We’re friends, so long as we don’t talk about Mariam Apa.’
‘A strange kind of friendship.’
‘We’re a strange kind of family.’
She laughed. ‘All right. For the moment, all right. So you’re really just calling on a whim?’
‘Well, no.’ I felt light-headed with relief that we’d got that conversation so painlessly out of the way. ‘Who are Zain and Ibrahim?’
She made a noise of exasperation. ‘Have you forgotten everything? Ibrahim and Zain …’
‘Oh, Ibrahim and Zain! Now I remember. Thanks Dadi. I have to go. There’s a letter I’m trying to understand. I’ll come over this evening, is that okay?’
‘Yes, fine. There are still lemon tarts left over. I’ll see you at five.’
Ibrahim and Zain. Of course I remembered them. They were one of the not-quite pairs. Their father, Nawab Assadullah, had two wives. One was high-born; the other was the Nawab’s favourite. But he couldn’t have been entirely discriminatory in his treatment of his wives because they were both found to be pregnant within days of each other. For months the court was gripped by rumour and speculation, and a lot of heavy gambling. Which of the wives would bear a son? If both, which would bear a son first?
Cliques formed around each wife, praying, fasting, bringing unguents and holy water from distant lands (those were less prejudiced times — distant lands were trusted). Mid-wives were consulted. What was the earliest a child could be induced without greatly reducing chances of survival?
Sometime around the seventh month of the pregnancies, the high-born wife’s father, cousin and Vizir to Assadullah, could take the anxiety no longer. He swallowed a diamond and waited for the sharp edges to lacerate his insides and catapult him into the embrace of an afterlife without intrigue. It didn’t work. After a few minutes of lying in bed feeling mildly uncomfortable, the Vizir got up, drank a glass of water, and realized that his father — a man who lost all sense of judgement at the mere sight of a pack of cards — had gambled away the family jewels, cunningly replacing them with fakes so as to avoid detection by his wife. With his fortunes lost and the future holding a fifty percent possibility of bleakness for his family, there remained only one course of action for the Vizir.
That afternoon, a midwife, her pockets heavy with diamonds and pearls, entered into the presence of the high-born wife. Within minutes the word went round the palace: she was in labour.
Another midwife was summoned to a different part of the palace, and for the rest of the night the courtiers couldn’t move anywhere without tripping over someone prostrate on a prayer mat. At dawn, at opposite ends of the palace, two umbilical cords were snipped; two premature sons were born. One must have been born first, if only by seconds, but no one was ever to know which. Two sons. Brothers. Princes. Twins? Well, no. But sort of.
Nawab Assadullah declared that Zain, the son of the favourite, was his heir, and Ibrahim, the other son, was not. But he showered the Vizir with money and jewels all the same, and when the old man tried diamond suicide again he died smiling.
So where’s the calamity?
Assadullah died in 1525. Zain ascended the throne. The next year was 1526. The year of the Battle of Paniput and the beginning of Mughal rule in India. Zain, sent his envoys to Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, shortly after the battle. The envoys found a man who spoke not of wars or empires, but of melons. Read Babur’s memoirs if you want confirmation. To him, India was an ‘unpleasant and unharmonious’ place, a second-best territory he’d settled for when it seemed clear he would never again rule over his ancestral home and one-time kingdom, Samarkand. He was, in modern parlance, homesick. This homesickness manifested itself primarily in his yearning for the honey-sweet melons of Central Asia. (A great deal of attention is paid to fruit in the Baburnama and, by and large, India failed to impress Babur in that all-important regard. While he appreciated the mango he thought it unworthy to be considered, among all fruit, second only to the melon. Still, at least the mango fared better than the jackfruit — which, he wrote, ‘Looks exactly like sheep intestines turned inside out’ — and the fruit of the clustered fig — ‘an oddly insipid fruit’.)