‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’
She waved me quiet. ‘Oh, I’m only this upset because I feel bad about leaving here. You said it yourself. I raised these children.’
Something she had said earlier had caught my attention. ‘You said stepfather? What happened to Khadija’s first husband? Divorce?’
‘Two years ago it happened. No one told you? He was killed in police custody. Where he used to live — it’s a poor part of town, not like this — at least one person per family is killed in police custody. Allah, take pity on us.’
‘On all of us,’ I said. On my way to school, during my A levels, I used to see Khadija’s husband playing cricket on the streets. He’d raise his bat in greeting as my car went by. When my American friends said arranged marriages were a horrific notion I always thought of the way Khadija leant against her young husband’s shoulder when I saw them together visiting her mother at Younger Starch’s. He was, he would have been, Sameer’s age.
I felt too sick to ask Hibiscus-Eating Ayah anything else. What could she tell me, in any case? ‘I have to go. Come and visit me. The Shaikhs don’t live so far away.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s been a long time since there was a reason to stay away from your house.’
She looked squarely at me and I saw I was not the only one with questions.
‘We haven’t heard from either of them since they left.’
She nodded. ‘I didn’t think she’d ever do it. That’s what made me angry all those years ago. Not that he stopped noticing me as soon as she walked into the kitchen, but that she knew it and yet she wasn’t willing to stop walking in or to tell him to stop looking. The third thing, the thing she finally did, that I didn’t think she’d ever do. But, after the shock when I first heard of it, I wasn’t that surprised. The way Masood had of looking at her … How could you ever give up being looked at like that?’
Why did none of us see what Hibiscus-Eating Ayah saw? The question nagged me for days. And then Meher Dadi dropped a chance remark to Sameer, about ghosts. ‘I’ve seen them. Of course I’ve seen them. Not often, but every now and then. You say that, because I believe they exist, I allow my mind to play tricks and create them, but, dear boy, perhaps you don’t see them because you’re unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that they might exist.’
Of course.
But what made Mariam Apa so different? What made her able to acknowledge possibilities more unlikely than ghosts? Did Taimur really become a servant — while we’re admitting possibilities, why not admit that? Was Mariam’s mother far beneath the Dard-e-Dils on the social ladder, as Dadi believed? Or might there be a possibility unrelated to her parents?
The only clue we had to Mariam Apa’s life before Karachi was the letter which had arrived at our house, twenty-two years ago, just minutes before she did. If only Ami had saved the envelope we might have known where it came from. I only want to say take care of her because even though she may come back here if you don’t and that will make me happy I do not want her to be sad and so please make her happy. And also this way I can dream but when she is here I can only wait for what is never.
Someone had loved Mariam Apa before Karachi. Someone who might not have been literate — the letter, Aba insisted, sounded like an oral message transcribed. But Mariam Apa had not loved this man, had not even allowed him to think that maybe one day she would. What made him so convinced that he was waiting ‘for what is never’? Who was this man? He was from Dard-e-Dil or the regions around it, else why would he have started the letter with the formal greeting and respectful address: Huzoor! Aadaab! Unless Taimur taught him that …
Perhaps he was Taimur’s servant.
‘Servant?’ Sameer said, when I propounded this theory to him a few evenings later. He had picked me up on his way home from the bank and we’d driven the five minutes from my house to Clifton beach to sit on the sea wall and eat roasted corn sprinkled with red-chilli powder and lemon juice, and to watch the grey, wind-whipped waves of the monsoon season leap at the seagulls in the distance. ‘Look around you.’ Sameer pointed to the crowds around the sea wall. A large section of Karachi had been hit by a power failure and the beach was the best place to escape from the heat. Whole families were out; vans that should have held no more than nine people were disgorging groups of fifteen or sixteen on to the cement pavement where, in addition to the bhutawallah whom Sameer and I had come to patronize, there were cold-drink sellers and chaatwallahs and a man with a tray of sweets hanging around his neck, who chanted, ‘Cheeng-gum, chaaklait, bubbly-gum.’ Other than the families, there were men strolling hand in hand, young couples sitting close together but not touching, and a woman in sneakers and a shalwar-kameez, walking at a great pace which she broke off every couple of minutes to untangle the wires of her Walkman’s headset. Between my jeans and the black burkha of the woman climbing gingerly down the rocks to the sand beneath, between Sameer’s pin-striped shirt with French cuffs and the bright pink kameez of the man selling kites, there was a whole range of styles and colours and materials.
‘You need to join the working world. Escape from your cocoon of Us and Them and the gaping hole between. How do you know he was a servant? He could have been a clerk. A tailor. A shopkeeper. An anything.’
‘But not a social equal.’ I took the letter out of my back pocket and passed it to Sameer.
He read it and handed it back. ‘No, not a social equal. What great conclusion have you reached from that?’
A young boy came round selling plastic combs and spools of elastic. Sameer said we wanted neither but he’d give the boy ten rupees for getting us Cokes from the drinkwallah. I changed the order to one Coke and one Apple Sidra.
‘We know this man was in love with Mariam. We know, we can at least surmise, she gave him no encouragement.’
‘So far you’re on solid ground, but I sense a swamp approaching.’
‘What if it was his social status that stood in the way? What if, because of his social status, Mariam never even considered him a possibility?’
‘Possible. Shaabaash, chotoo.’ Sameer took the drinks from the young boy and handed him a ten-rupee note. A beggar saw Sameer’s wallet and came over to us, palm outstretched. Sameer waved him away.
‘But then, as she was planning to leave for Karachi, the fact that she was leaving allowed this man to say something to her. Maybe something said in hope. Maybe something said as a reprimand. At any rate, it was something that made Mariam see—’
‘Allah bless your union,’ the beggar said, circling back after an unsuccessful foray to the group beside us.
‘Something that made Mariam see everything she had never seen, every possibility she had never even considered considering.’
‘I’ll pray that you pass your exams,’ the beggar said.
‘And so she arrived in Karachi ready to consider the possibility of loving a cook?’ Sameer said.
‘More than ready. Determined to prove that she was capable of doing so. She always had the strangest stubborn streak. Remember Dr Tahir and the sari?’