‘My heart…’ she said dramatically, placing her hand over the organ in question as though to reassure herself it hadn’t been left behind in a theatre somewhere. ‘My heart is a spoilt child, demanding all the attention, insisting it remain central to all decisions. Isn’t it time to attend to other, more neglected organs?’
I was sufficiently overwhelmed by my proximity to greatness to nod knowingly at that bit of absurdity.
She laughed — not the tinkling laughter that had punctuated her Tales of Before but a deep, rolling laughter. ‘Oh, Aasmaani, your mother would have tossed that chicken carcass at me for such a statement. And look at you, so earnest, trying valiantly to take me seriously. You’ve been doing it all through lunch.’
For a moment all I could do was stare at her. Despite my earlier self-vaunting about knowing a thing or two about women who were legends, I had walked in here with exactly the kind of attitude I had seen so many women adopt when they first met my mother — a determination to see some mythic being, a determination so strong that my mother occasionally found herself behaving in ways entirely alien to her personality just because it seemed impolite to shatter the illusions others had about her. So, for their benefit she’d turn into a woman with no time for trivialities, no concern except Justice with a capital J. And I, who had rolled my eyes at all those people, had come in here wanting — so desperately wanting — to have lunch with a star that I even interpreted the way her door was left ajar as a sign of theatricality. And Shehnaz Saeed had seen it right away, the way my mother sometimes saw it instantly in certain people. They-who-would-feel-betrayed-if-they-knew-I-love-disco, is how my mother referred to the mythologizers.
I hadn’t thought about that side of her in a long time — but all at once she was before my eyes, laughing, ‘Oh for endless summer days! Donna Summer days!’ as she danced around her living room in outrageous gold heels, taking my hand and pulling me into the dance with her.
I picked up a chicken bone, and pretended to aim it at Shehnaz Saeed’s head. ‘You’ve been playing me this whole time!’
‘That’s better,’ she said, and patted my hand, suddenly maternal in a way that made my throat clench. ‘Now I’ll answer you truthfully about my return to acting. It’s quite obvious by now that I’m past any possibility of child-bearing, so that puts aside my initial reason for giving up the acting life. And while we’re on the subject, I’ll confirm the rumours for you — my husband really is my husband in name only.’
I looked down at my plate, discomfited. ‘You don’t have to tell me that.’
‘Oh, it’s hardly a secret. I find it so irritating when I meet new people and they pretend not to know, and there’s all this tiptoeing around things. And with you it would be particularly silly. I mean, it’s not as though I’m unaware my personal life is a topic of gossip in the gonorrhoea office.’ We laughed together at that and I thought, yes, I can believe you were my mother’s friend before her gold heels gathered dust and cobwebs. But did she ever laugh with you in those final two years before she disappeared?
‘To return once more to your question,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. I was irritated to find myself noticing that the laughter had produced a single tear-drop which shimmered in the corner of her eye. ‘Quite simply, I want to act again. But I’m more than a little frightened. So I need the safety nets that an ensemble piece on television, with all its possibilities of retakes and editing, can provide. When that’s done, you’re right, I’ll go back to the stage. Lady Macbeth again, I think. I don’t really have the heart to play Laila once more, even if it were a plausible role at my age.’ She rolled her eyes just slightly at the last three words, and then smiled self-deprecatingly when she saw I had noticed. ‘Think of it as a retired Olympic-gold diver walking to the edge of a low diving-board and jumping feet first into the water. It’s obvious to everyone you’re just limbering up, remembering how to use those old muscles. Maybe some people will wonder why you need to do that, but no one’s going to criticize you for being something less than extraordinary in the way you perform the leap. But it gets you back at the pool. And you carry on doing those little boring jumps for a while until people get used to seeing you there, by the water’s edge. They stop looking at you in that greedy expectant way. Then, no fuss, you get out of the pool, walk up the stairs to the high board, and execute a perfect jack-knife, the barest ripple as your body breaks through the surface.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Now that makes sense. Though Kiran Hilal will not be pleased to have her baby compared to a foot-first leap from a low diving-board.’
She smiled. ‘Dear Kiran. You know, I acted in the first play she ever wrote for television. If she could forgive my retirement — which she did, but it took a while — she can forgive my analogies.’
‘And then there’s that other reason you have for going back to work.’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘Your son.’
‘Oh, yes. Ed.’ She pulled the rose out from behind her ear and ran her fingers over the petals. ‘How are the two of you getting on?’
‘I have no idea.’
She seemed unsurprised. ‘He’s not always the easiest man in the world to be around, I know. But he does like you. A great deal.’
‘Oh? What has he said about me?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t even know you were working together until Kiran told me. He’s furious that I’ve invited you over for lunch.’
‘And this means he likes me?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled in a way that told me she wasn’t going to say anything further on the subject. ‘You know, your mother and I were once talking about the two of you. She’d just had an argument with you, I’d just had a shouting match with Ed, and we both wondered — what would our children say about us if we put them in a room together?’
I nodded, wanting her to go on speaking of Mama, but not wanting to have to add anything to the conversation.
‘God, but we need her these days,’ Shehnaz Saeed said, and in the shift of her tone I could tell that the ‘her’ she was speaking of wasn’t the private Samina any more, but the Samina Akram of blazing eyes and fiery rhetoric who had crowds chanting her name as though she were a religion. ‘It’s already started. The assemblies haven’t even convened yet and already the mullahs in the Frontier are saying, “Of course women can work, but only according to the guidelines of Islam.” What guidelines? There are no such guidelines! Maybe that’s another reason for coming out of retirement. I don’t want to be one of those women the beards approve of, the ones who sit at home and cook dinner.’
I dipped my fingers into a handbowl with a bougainvillea flower floating in it. ‘I hardly think you’d be their poster girl under any circumstance.’
‘Regardless. We desperately need your mother now.’
‘Well, then, perhaps she’ll reappear. The nation needs her to be a heroine — how could she resist?’ Early in October, the night the election results came in, I couldn’t stop myself from sitting with Rabia and Shakeel, watching the news reporters trying to look unsurprised as they announced the gains of the religious alliance whom most political pundits had written off when they failed to muster any compelling street-power for all their anti-government rallies a year earlier. When the votes were counted and the newly united religious bloc emerged as the third-largest party, with forty-five seats, Rabia raged up and down the room, cursing anyone she could blame for the debacle — the Americans, the President, Al-Qaeda, the other political parties, the Americans again, everyone but the 11 per cent of the electorate who voted for the beards. But through all my own disgust at the situation, there was an undercurrent of hope. Now she’d come back. Back to her old self, and then back to us. She couldn’t fail to come back, not with all that was at stake.