‘More truth than we cared to acknowledge. He wrote that because he was angry with Akbar and me. With me because he thought you loved me. With Akbar because Akbar loved you but seemed to have found a way to live without being loved by you, a thing Taimur knew he couldn’t do. So he wrote in anger, but also in truth. There was truth to what he said about Akbar and me. And also — Abida, he was eighteen — he knew that letter was the one way of angering the whole family sufficiently to keep us from searching for him.’
‘But Sulaiman, the ring.’
Sulaiman reached into his pocket. ‘I went to London thinking I’d sell this.’ I knew what was in that little velvet box even before he opened it. Dadi sighed, a woman past surprises now that this had happened. She touched the tip of a finger to the emerald. ‘Explain this to me, Sulaiman.’
Taimur took the ring with him because he was eighteen and broken-hearted, and that combination often leads to a desire for symbolic gestures. He took the ring so that Sulaiman would never place it on Abida’s finger. Sulaiman knew all this because Taimur had told him so.
‘So he really did come back?’ Dadi said. I had pressed myself against the wall by now, each muscle constricted into a mass of tension. Each muscle, especially the heart.
Sulaiman pressed her hand in apology and nodded. It was just after Abida and Akbar were married. Sulaiman was in his mother’s room, watching her sleep, trying not to notice how like a claw her hand had become, and Taimur opened the window and hopped in. Even in the dark Sulaiman knew it was him. He was taller and broader and the English suits he had favoured were replaced by a long achkan over churidar pyjamas, but his smile was still pure Taimur.
‘It’s your idiot brother, Sully,’ he said. He said it in English.
Sulaiman held him and thought, Everything will be all right now.
‘Can’t let a girl get between us, can we?’ Taimur said, when he finally pulled away.
Sulaiman had long ago guessed why Taimur had left; for a moment he hesitated, and then he told Taimur the truth. Taimur tried to shrug, opened his mouth, closed it again. ‘She loved me?’ he said at length. Sulaiman nodded. ‘Does she still?’
‘She married Akbar.’
‘Oh,’ Taimur said. ‘I see.’
He went over to his sleeping mother and held her hand. A long time went by.
Summer had ended and the breeze was cool enough for some members of the family to sleep with their windows closed. Sulaiman was about to shut the window which Taimur had flung open, when he heard the window in the room next door creak open.
‘Look at that moon, Akbar,’ Abida exulted.
Taimur got up and walked over to the window. If he leant out, just a little, she would see him. He didn’t lean out. He pushed the window closed and rested his head against the wall. ‘God help me,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay. I thought I could. But I can’t.’
‘Taimur?’ It was their mother waking up.
He stayed by her side all night, telling her all the memories he had of her from his childhood. She seemed to derive greater comfort from that than from any of the medicines, or prayers, or tales of miracle cures with which she’d been regaled in the preceding months. But he barely looked at his brother, and Sulaiman knew that as Taimur sat there his rage was mounting against his brother for allowing him to misinterpret his words so completely. At one point Sulaiman tried to leave, but Taimur was up and barring his way to the door before he was halfway across the room. ‘If you leave to call Akbar I’ll be gone before you knock on his door.’
But in the early morning, when their mother finally fell asleep, Taimur turned to Sulaiman with an expression of sorrow. ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ he said. ‘And Akbar’s a far finer chap than I. Don’t tell him I was here; it’ll break his heart. And never a word to Abida about any of this.’
‘Where will you go? Where have you been?’
‘Far away. It doesn’t matter. I’m well, that’s all you need to know. Goodbye, Sully.’
Sulaiman would have done anything to make Taimur stay, so he tried the most unforgivable thing he could think of. ‘She might still love you,’ he said.
Taimur smiled. ‘Yes, I think she might. Maybe I’d stay if we weren’t not-quites; maybe if we hadn’t grown up believing ourselves capable of bringing about something terrible. Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Because I, and you, and she, we all love Akbar. Here.’ He pressed a velvet box into Sulaiman’s hands. ‘I have no right to this. One day you might even know what to do with it. I certainly don’t. Tell Mama I love her.’
‘You already did that.’
Smiling, Taimur left.
When Sulaiman finished talking I was close to tears, but Dadi did something entirely unexpected. She laughed.
‘Sulaiman, that’s sheer melodrama. My life! Such passion, such tragic miscommunication, such revelations in the aftermath of the main action. It’s too absurd.’ She took the ring from Sulaiman and weighed it in her hand. ‘It would have broken my finger.’
‘No regrets?’
‘To be loved by two such brothers. That’s a rare gift. You’ve given me back my Naz.’
‘Make that three such brothers,’ Sulaiman said, and kissed her hand. ‘Just to increase the melodrama.’
Dadi laughed again, and then she turned to me. ‘Aliya, did the thought that flashed through my mind flash through yours?’
‘Which thought is that?’ I felt strangely shy in the presence of my great-uncle, who had only just seen me.
‘Mariam’s mother might well have been high-born.’
‘No, Dadi. I didn’t think that at all.’
‘Good. That’s a start.’
Sulaiman stood up. ‘I wonder who she was. The wife. Whoever she was, she was much later. Samia told me Taimur’s daughter — Mariam — is much younger than your children and mine. He must have waited a long time before he was ready to love someone else.’
‘Or maybe he and his wife were so happy together, just the two of them, that it was many years before they felt they could allow anyone else into their lives. Why not that, Sulaiman? Let’s love Taimur enough to believe that. Aliya, look!’
I turned to look out of the window, but the thudding sound against the glass had already told me what she was staring at.
‘Take me to the balcony, Sully.’ He lifted her up in his arms, that man nearing eighty, and I opened the glass door to let them out. The sound of the rain beating down was almost deafening, but though I couldn’t hear I could see her telling him to put her down.
Sulaiman slid the door between us closed so that the rain wouldn’t whip into the room, and then it really was as though they were two characters in a movie and I was watching them with the sound turned off. What an evening, what an evening! Taimur left because he loved Abida, and stayed away because he loved Akbar. He went to Turkey. Yes, he did. He went to Turkey and looked up his uncle’s Turkish friend — the Dard-e-Dil uncle who went to Turkey talked often of his Turkish friends. Through these friends he found employment, occupation. Perhaps he taught Urdu somewhere. Or English. Or Persian. Then he met the mechanic from Dard-e-Dil, and together they talked of their ancestral home. One day the mechanic told him that Meher was in Greece, and Taimur knew at last he had found a way to receive word of all the Dard-e-Dils without any of them receiving word of him. And how did Mariam and Masood’s story fit into this? And how did mine?
I looked out on to the balcony again. She’d waited almost sixty years for this story, Dadi had. How different would her life have been if she had heard it earlier? These stories, this salt … How could we ever exert ourselves to the simplest physical action when all our lives were so dependent on this seemingly passive act of listening?