In Book VIII of The Odyssey a bard at the court of King Alcinous entertains the assembly with tales of the crafty Odysseus, hero of the Trojan war, beloved of the grey-eyed goddess, wanderer in search of a way home. Before the bard has finished his tale a stranger weeps and is asked to identify himself. He says, ‘Behold Odysseus!’
Imagine how the bard must have felt to see before him that legendary figure whose name was more familiar on his tongue than the names of his own children. Imagine that, and you might begin to understand how I felt when I saw Sulaiman. I had always assumed that he was, like Taimur and Akbar, a man from another age, mythical, our lives not destined to overlap. His presence, just feet from me, had to be a trick or an apparition. How could he be alive when his brothers had been dead so long?
‘Look at you.’ His voice was strangely familiar; I had heard something like it many times when Aba imitated his own father’s voice with all its velvety softness. He propped his cane against a chair and sat down on Dadi’s bed. ‘Look at you. I thought I never would.’
Dadi’s hands trembled across his face. She touched a white scar at the corner of his mouth. That was where Akbar had punched him so many years ago. She clenched her hands and sat back. ‘Why now?’
‘Because we’re dying. We can’t rely on tomorrows.’
Dadi patted her hair. ‘You could have waited for one more tomorrow. I look quite good for my age, you know, when I have a little time to get dressed and put on some make-up.’
Sulaiman laughed. I liked his laugh; it hinted at a vast capacity for delight. ‘The vanity of Abida. Still unchecked.’
‘The same can’t be said of the Naz of Abida.’
‘No one has ever had more right to Naz than you.’
Dadi patted his hands. ‘Where shall we begin? Not with apologies.’
‘No, never with that. With an answer to your question. Why now? Because I was just in London, where my charming great-niece, Rehana, introduced me to my even more charming great-niece, Samia, and both of them then proceeded to give me an absolute earful for my stubbornness, called up a travel agent, and gave me your address. They had everything organized, from connections at the visa office to a car driven by Meher’s grandson waiting for me at Karachi airport. Poor Mohommed nearly fainted when he saw me.’
Dadi waved her hands. ‘Those details can wait. Tell me about you, Sulaiman. Tell me about, oh, everything. You have children? Grandchildren?’
Sulaiman touched her knee. ‘Abida, did he hate me to the end?’
‘So you know he died.’
‘Yes. I heard about it just weeks after it happened. Someone who knew someone who knew someone in Karachi told me. Tried to find Taimur after that, but nothing. Then I heard that his daughter was here and that Taimur, too, was dead.’
‘Sulaiman, that someone in Karachi was me. I saw to it that you were notified. I was sure you would come. I was sure at the very least you would write.’
‘I was sure you would write. Besides, it was nineteen seventy-one. There was a war on. And after that, as I said, you keep waiting for tomorrow. Did Akbar hate me to the end?’
‘Your name, and Taimur’s, were the last words on his lips.’
I think he knew she was lying. He looked at her as if to say that Akbar’s last words couldn’t possibly have been about anyone other than her.
‘Abida, there’s something I should have told you long ago. Something about Taimur.’
What he told her was this: when Abida and Meher’s parents returned to Dard-e-Dil in 1938, after a year of living in Delhi, Akbar and Taimur and Sulaiman took one look at their childhood playmate, the erstwhile tomboy Abida, and did a triple take. The other girl-cousins had become women at the ages of fifteen or sixteen (in Baji’s case, closer to fourteen), but Abida had bided her time, waiting for a moment when her transformation could be extraordinary. And it was. The wonder of it, Sulaiman said, was not that Taimur and Akbar had fallen in love with her, but that he hadn’t. Perhaps, he said, he had, but he kept it buried because right from the start he saw that if she were to make a choice between the three of them she’d have no difficulty in reducing the list to two.
(‘You always had that edge of insecurity,’ Dadi said, when he mentioned that. ‘You were the one who held yourself away, starting the day we got back from Delhi. I wasn’t even sure you liked me any more.’)
That Taimur was in love with Abida was easy for anyone to see. He turned cartwheels in the garden, sang ghazals of longing, offered to be twelfth man in cricket matches so that he could sit beside her among the spectators. But Akbar’s love was a more brooding thing, though that may simply have been because, except on that day he hit Sulaiman and then hit him again, he could always foresee consequences.
Sulaiman came upon Akbar one day, slumped at the wheel of their father’s Daimler, on the road between Dadi’s house and the palace. Sulaiman dismounted his horse and got into the passenger seat.
‘Rotten luck,’ Akbar said. ‘I suppose I should be happy for him.’ He handed Sulaiman a piece of paper. ‘Found this on the path. Abida’s handwriting.’
She’d written Taimur’s name all across the page, in Urdu.
‘So that’s that,’ Akbar said. ‘Oh, well. Better this way. No long drawn-out rivalry. Not as though this is a surprise. How could anyone choose anyone over that brother of ours?’
‘Sorry,’ was all Sulaiman could think of to say.
Akbar closed his eyes and leant back in the seat. ‘Abida.’
Sulaiman got out, walked around to the driver’s side, pushed his brother over to the passenger seat, and drove him home, the horse cantering after them.
The next day he saw Taimur, sitting on an old garden swing, looking forlorn.
‘What?’ Sulaiman said.
Taimur looked up. ‘I overheard Meher talking to HH.’
‘Oh, yes? Hard to imagine Meher and Binky having anything to say to each other. Were they discussing affairs of state?’
‘Affairs of the heart. She thinks Akbar’s so down today because he’s in love. With Abida. Is he?’
Taimur’s obliviousness to his brother’s feelings shocked Sulaiman. ‘What if he is?’
Taimur kicked the ground. ‘If he is and I haven’t seen it then maybe there are other things I haven’t seen. Maybe she’s in love with him.’
Sulaiman knew right then that the whole matter had to be straightened out as quickly as possible. ‘She’s not. She is in love, but not with Akbar. And Akbar knows it. She’s in love with someone else. Wait here, I’ll bring you written proof. In her own hand.’ And off he went to find the paper which Akbar had crumpled up and tossed in the back of the car the day before.
It was Sulaiman’s need for the dramatic gesture which did it. He couldn’t just say, ‘She loves you, Taimur.’ He had to go and find the paper, had to give Taimur those moments of suspense, had to see Taimur’s face when the suspense was over. But how can we blame Sulaiman for not anticipating what would happen next? Who could have? Taimur saw Sulaiman rush off, saw him run into Abida on his way to the car, saw her put an arm on Sulaiman’s sleeve, and leapt to a conclusion: Abida had written Sulaiman a love letter.
‘That’s why he left,’ Sulaiman told Dadi as the moon angled its rays on to her bed, creating the illusion that she and Sulaiman were still young and raven-haired, the moonlight alone responsible for the silvered quality of their manes. ‘He was gone before I returned. He thought you loved me.’
‘But, the other woman?’ Dadi gasped.
‘What other woman?’
‘The one he took the ring for. The one who was the reason for that letter he wrote when he left. There had to be truth in the letter, there had to.’