Her voice was flat, and for a moment I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. Then she smiled, exhaled, and rested her head against the headboard. ‘I loved Taimur. I’ve never said that aloud before. I loved Taimur.’ She started to giggle, but stopped to shake her head in wonder. ‘We were eighteen. So young. What does anyone know at eighteen? But I loved him all the same.’
I didn’t know what to say. I felt … What did I feel? Something similar to the feeling you get at the end of a movie when you can’t quite believe the final twist but, as soon as it happens, you can’t imagine any other ending. The difference was, when you watch a movie, no matter how good it is, you’re never sure if it’ll stay with you for ever.
I needed to say something, so I said, ‘Why him?’
‘Because him. Oh, Aliya.’
What had I said to make her look at me with such sorrow?
‘What was he like, Dadi?’
‘Like nothing else. Like my soul. Like his daughter.’
My spine prickled. I had never heard her speak in this voice before. I had a fleeting image of Taimur leaving Dard-e-Dil with this voice of Abida’s nestled in his breast pocket. ‘So did you … I mean, what did you … What happened?’
‘He didn’t love me.’ She picked up the photograph by her bedside and looked at it closely. ‘He didn’t love me. I’ve never said that aloud either. I didn’t think saying it would give me this urge to cry.’
‘He said he didn’t love you?’ My eyes darted to the photograph of Dadi and the triplets. How could you, Taimur?
‘Aliya, he left. Just weeks after this picture was taken, he left.’ I took the photograph from her. When I first saw the picture on Baji’s wall I looked at the girl’s smile and thought, Was Dadi ever that young? Now I thought, Was I ever that young? Will I ever be that young?
‘And before that, Dods?’
‘Before that? I misread his affection, his generous compliments. I thought there was an unspoken understanding that we’d wait for him to come back from Oxford. The unspoken is a dangerous thing to rely on, my darling. Do you know the meaning of Naz?’
‘Pride, or something like that. Having airs.’
‘That misses the essence of it. Naz is the pride, the assurance, that arises from knowing you are loved. From knowing that no matter what you do you will always be loved. In this picture there is such Naz written across my face.’
But you were right to have such Naz. How could anyone not love you when you smiled like this? I wanted to say that, but didn’t know how to. ‘Why did he leave?’
‘There was another woman.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. No one from our social set, or we would have known. Must have been someone in town. That’s what brought on that smokescreen letter of his with its talk of becoming a servant. She was probably of that class, which is why he thought of it. Some truth always seeps into the most elaborate lies.’
‘No, wait. If you don’t know who she was, how do you know that she was?’
‘There was a ring.’ Dadi directed me to look closely at the oil-painting of my great-grandparents, the yak enthusiast and his wife. He was dapper in his three-piece suit, holding a walking cane; she, rather more demure in her beautifully brocaded gharara, her hand weighed down by a ring so large I was sure if she ever took it off, her finger would remain angled down.
‘That’s not jade set in zircons, is it?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Emerald in diamonds. Her father-in-law gave it to her on her wedding day, saying she must not get too attached to it because when her eldest son married it would have to be passed down to his wife. That was before the days of high divorce rates — nowadays I’m sure people wait for their grandchildren to be born before handing down the most precious family jewels.’
‘So why don’t you have the ring? Akbar was the oldest of the triplets.’
‘Well, of course, no one really knows that. Taj was the only one who was really sure of the birth order, and she disappeared without passing on the information. I think my mother-in-law just guessed that Akbar was the eldest. So, acknowledging the fact that any of the three boys could be the eldest, their grandfather decided that the ring should go to the bride of whichever brother married first. When Taimur left, he took the ring with him.’
No wonder she used to look at Mariam so strangely sometimes when she thought no one else was watching. She was searching for clues to the identity of that other woman. But Mariam looked so much like Taimur you’d almost believe she was Athena to his Zeus, springing fully formed from his forehead with no one around to whom she could attach the title of ‘mother’.
‘So you never loved Akbar?’ I felt a sudden surge of protectiveness towards my grandfather.
‘Of course I loved Akbar. What questions you ask. And you should refer to him as “Dada”.’
I was silent, waiting for more.
‘When Akbar came back from Oxford, and I heard his parents were arriving at my house with a rishtah, I was thrilled. Told my parents to accept the proposal with alacrity, and damn etiquette.’ She lay back, smiling wistfully. I waited for her to continue, but she was in a long-ago world.
‘And all this is related to the monsoons how?’ I demanded.
‘Taimur left during the first of the monsoon rains. All through our married lives, Akbar and I barely spoke to each other when the rains began. Not through anger. We just knew each other’s need to grieve and remember. Yes, Akbar knew I loved Taimur first. Maybe we should have grieved together, but we didn’t.
‘Then Akbar had his stroke, and before the ambulance arrived we heard the crack of thunder and the rain poured down. That, too, was the first of the monsoon showers. His last words were, “Oh, Abida, what a wretched time for me to leave you.” Except his words were slurred and at first I thought he had said, “What a wretched time for me to love you.” I’ve avoided the monsoons since. Because I don’t want to know the hierarchy of my love. When the rains begin I don’t want to know which of those two brothers I’ll weep for first.’
When she said that she did start to weep, for both of them I think; and I wept also, at my own stupidity. For four years I’d thought it was pure snobbery that had made Dadi say, ‘That whore!’ For four years I’d nurtured an image of Dadi based on that notion of her overriding snobbery, and now, with Dadi so old (suddenly she looked so old), I saw that I had lost four years of her life because there had been such snobbery in my reaction to that elopement. I had recoiled with such horror to think that my cousin had run away with the cook, that I hadn’t considered that anyone else could be better than me. I saw now that Dadi’s reaction to Mariam’s elopement was directed not at Mariam, but at her mother — that near-mythical woman who had known what it was to be loved by Taimur. Dadi’s reaction had arisen from love, but I had wanted so desperately to be the self-righteous one that I forgot everything Mariam Apa ever taught me about listening to the silences that bracket every utterance.
‘Dadi, I’m sorry.’ I rested my head against her shoulder, and when we’d both finally stopped crying I brushed tear tracks off both our faces and said, ‘Salt.’
‘What?’
I shook my head. ‘Just thinking of something Masood said.’
‘You might want to think of calling him Masood Bhai. He is family now, after all.’
I laughed aloud at her ability to surprise me, and then I thanked God for giving me the chance to know her again. Again? No, for the first time. ‘We can talk about Mariam Apa. If you want to. Whenever you want to.’
Dadi smiled. ‘Talk? That’s not always necessary, you know.’ She pushed my hair off my face. ‘Let it go, my darling. Some people leave our lives; it happens. People leave. Let it go.’