‘You’re the one who just said you want to know me.’

‘No, I didn’t. I said I want you to stop being Mr Creepy-Many-Personalities.’

‘Look, I’m sorry.’ He seemed anything but sorry. ‘I know I’m not entitled to anything. But we have this connection, you know, and it’s stupid to just ignore it.’

‘What connection?’

He lifted up the magazine and waved the cover at me. ‘Larger-than-life mothers.’

‘Oh, come on. You really think we’re going to bond over swapping notes about that? You can complain about your mother going on location for weeks on end, and I’ll reciprocate with tales of my mother exiling herself for three bloody years.’ I crossed my arms, pressing them against my chest. ‘Is that what that whole line about getting to New York to escape being your mother’s son was all about? You thought I would embrace you to my bosom as soon as I realized the strong parallels between us? Admit it, Ed — if you so wanted to escape being your mother’s son you wouldn’t have returned to work at a television studio.’

‘Are you done?’

‘Almost. I just need your mother’s phone number.’

‘For what?’

‘She sent me some calligraphy. I want to call and thank her. She’s not anything like you, is she?’

‘What do you mean, she sent you some calligraphy?’

He looked so startled that for the first time I knew I had the upper hand. ‘Well, I guess Mummy’s keeping secrets from you,’ I said, and turned to walk out.

I felt so triumphant about my exit that it wasn’t until I was back in my office that I realized what he’d done. He’d got past the façade. And worse than that, much worse — I knew he realized it, too.

V

The month my parents married, the Poet wrote his most famous narrative poem, Laila. Reconfiguring the Laila-Majnu story, the poem centres on Laila, bereft after Qais has been banished from her presence. Unable to endure the thought of a life without him, she seeks out his likeness everywhere — in other men (she is soon regarded as the town whore], in nature (sometimes the wind brushing her neck reminds her of his touch), in art (she risks her life to steal a painting, because a man at the edge of its crowd scene leans forward in a manner suggestive of the angle of Qais’s back the first time he bent to embrace her). But all her attempts to find her Beloved’s exact copy lead only to frustration, so she starts to adopt his manner of speech, his gait, his dress, his expressions in order to keep his characteristics alive. She becomes an outcast, shunned by all for her madness and, driven out of town, she makes her way into the forest where Qais has been living — and walks past without seeing him. He watches her go and senses something familiar in her, but is too distracted by composing love poems about Laila to give the matter much thought. Years go by and one day, wandering through the forest, she meets a young man who greets her by the name ‘Qais’. She realizes she has finally succeeded in becoming her Beloved and need never be without him again. In that moment of triumph she looks into the forest pool and sees Qais’s face where her reflection should have been, and remembers: the one thing Qais could not live without is Laila.

I couldn’t help thinking of that poem as I drove over Lily Bridge and headed toward Shehnaz Saeed’s house in the colonial part of town. Kiran Hilal had given me her number and when I had called she didn’t wait beyond the moment when I identified myself to invite me over for lunch that afternoon. I said I wasn’t sure I could get away from work for an extended period of time, and she laughed, and said, ‘We’ll call it a professional meeting, then.’

What kind of meeting it really would be, I couldn’t say. Even though we’d never met, she had been part of my memory since I was three years old. It was 1974 then, and one of the Poet’s acolytes had adapted Laila for the theatre, with the Poet himself in the role of Qais and Shehnaz Saeed as Laila. Though the poem was less than four years old at the time it had already attained the status of a national classic, and though no one objected to the Poet playing the part of the impassioned young Qais, even though his age (forty-two), physical appearance (underwhelming, at best) and previous theatrical experience (none) all marked him as being wholly unsuited to the role, there was more than a little grumbling about an unknown actress taking on the role of Laila. An estranged relative of the play’s director had spread the rumour that my mother was to play Laila, and Shehnaz Saeed had to bear Karachi’s collective disappointment when it transpired that there was no truth to that story. ‘The unbarked sapling whose pretty foliage will scatter before the cold blast of expectation, leaving only denuded branches, scabbed with the blight of inexperience and folly’ is how one theatre critic famously described Shehnaz Saeed on the morning of the press preview.

The following day he was singing a different tune, with the rest of Karachi’s critics acting as chorus. In the wake of the announcement that Shehnaz Saeed was to return to acting, one of the newspapers had reprinted the volte-face review from all those years ago.

The script is appalling, the costume and set design absurd, and someone should tell the greatest of our poets that it is an embarrassment to watch a man whom we hold in such high esteem brought so low by his own insufficiencies. He cannot act. But despite all this, Laila is without doubt the greatest thing to have ever happened on the Pakistani stage. Can I write the words without swooning? Let me try: Shehnaz Saeed.

As the young, infatuated Laila of the opening scenes she is sublime. But as the play progresses and she becomes the mad Laila who metaphorically casts off her own living tissue to knit Qais’s flesh on to her bones, she exceeds all adjectives. The play’s greatest failure is to dim the stage lights as Laila looks into the pool and to bring them up again to reveal Qais standing where she had been a second before. After the brilliance of Shehnaz Saeed’s performance, even the original Qais seems an inadequate impersonator of himself.

If I ever saw a performance — or even part of a rehearsal — of Laila I had no memory of it. But I did recall sitting at my mother’s dining table, colouring in a poster advertising the play. I was young enough to regard the alphabet in terms of shape rather than sound, and I loved the way my hand curved into the bends of ‘S’ that appeared not just once but twice in Shehnaz Saeed’s name. I made a mess of the poster, of course, but the Poet merely said, ‘This one’s too special to hang up for the crows to shit on. We’ll frame it and put it in my study.’ I knew he was saying it wasn’t good enough for public display, but I loved him for the way he chose to say it, and for his free use of ‘shit’ in my presence, and when he actually did frame and hang it between the paintings of two of Pakistan’s finest artists, with the words, ‘I think you’re a perfect bridge between their contrasting styles, Aasmaani,’ then I loved him most. The poster stayed there until I took it down and tore it up, years later, in adolescent embarrassment at proof of my childhood. It was one of the few times he was ever really angry with me.

I drew up to Shehnaz Saeed’s house, and when the chowkidar opened the gate I drove up the long driveway and parked just near the front door of the double-storeyed, yellowstone house.

There were three steps leading to the carved wood door and potted plants all around the alcove within which it was set — some hanging from the ceiling, some not. Lilies, orchids, spider-plants. I rang the door-bell. An old woman opened the door, looked startled to see me, and then laughed without evident humour and pointed at my eyes. ‘Descended from one of Sikandar’s soldiers, I always used to tell her,’ she said, and turned and walked away, gesturing for me to follow her.