Shehnaz Saeed looked at me, shock on her features, and I felt instantly ashamed. Whatever Mama’s failings, her activism was never about personal glory. I owed her that acknowledgement, if nothing else. And then I saw Shehnaz Saeed’s expression soften into pity.
‘She’ll come back? Aasmaani—’
‘This is not a conversation I want to have.’
She looked hurt then, and I was sorry.
‘How did you first get to know her?’
She pulled petals off the rose in her hand and scattered them on the white tablecloth between us. ‘Well, that story takes us back a bit. I married at seventeen, did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘I read any interview of yours I could get my hands on around the time you did Lady Macbeth.’
She seemed to find that genuinely surprising. ‘Your mother never told me.’
‘I don’t think she knew. She wasn’t around in those days. Political exile is more glamorous than a daughter entering adolescence.’ Stop it, Aasmaani. Stop now.
‘Oh, I see.’ She laid her hand flat, palm down, and started putting petals over her unpainted nails. ‘I don’t think I ever revealed in those interviews the extent of my misery. It was an arranged marriage, but it’s not as though I put up any kind of resistance. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do after school that seemed at all plausible. I mean, I wanted to go to London and join RADA. That was it. The only dream I could think of. But everyone convinced me, places like that they don’t even consider Pakistanis. You won’t look right for any of the parts in their plays, they told me.’ Her voice became shrill, as though she were moving her lips in time to the performance of a twisted ventriloquist. ‘Look in the mirror. Are you Juliet, are you Blanche Dubois, are you anyone except the foreign one with the funny accent? And I believed them so completely that I even believed there would be no place for me on a Pakistani stage. And, anyway, I was scared to do anything to risk my parents’ anger, and what respectable family in those days would want to admit their daughter was an actress? So I tried my first major performance: I convinced myself I wanted to be a wife and mother and daughter-in-law and high-society hostess. It was my worst performance ever.’ She scored rose petals with her thumbnail. ‘Every day, every single day, I wanted to be on a stage, speaking lines that could wrap themselves around your chest and squeeze until your rib-cage cracked open and your heart lay exposed.’
She spoke about language the way the Poet and his friends used to — as a living, dangerous entity — and listening to her I felt the blood move quick through my veins and knew she — and they — were right.
Her eyes were bright with memory. ‘I wanted to be Sarah Bernhardt at the end of her days — a seventysomething, one-legged woman playing Portia in scenes from The Merchant of Venice, reclining on a couch the whole time to hide her disability and, in so doing, making the character so coiled with languid power that any standing-up version of her seems feeble by comparison. And then, taking seven curtain calls when it finished.’
‘So when exactly did you see my mother speak in front of a crowd and fill the air with grazia! I’ve read the Italian interview. Don’t tell me her performance before the adoring masses is what convinced you to leave your husband.’
‘No, actually my husband left me. I bored him, he said. Seven years of marriage, one son, and he wakes up one morning, says to me, “You bore me,” and leaves. I was terrified for weeks that he’d come back. And when it was obvious he wouldn’t, I was so lost, Aasmaani. Twenty-four and clueless. Mother of a six-year-old son. Soon after that I went to hear Samina speak. She had a remarkable capacity to make people imagine change. That’s something we certainly need now, when the zealots are the only ones who appear to have that gift.’ She picked up a rose petal between thumb and forefinger and traced circles in its velvet smoothness. ‘The next day I got back in touch with a schoolfriend whose brother was a director, and before I knew quite what was happening I was Laila. I met Samina just a few days into the rehearsals.’ She spread her hands as if to say, ‘the rest was inevitable’ and I acknowledged the gesture with a nod. ‘But I was just starting out, and she and the Poet were in trouble with the government and both of them told me I shouldn’t risk being associated with them or I’d never get any roles on television. I needed to work, Aasmaani, I needed money. So I kept it discreet, my friendship with both of them.’ She touched my shoulder. ‘I miss her terribly.’
We walked down the stairs in silence. When we reached the ground floor, I turned to her again. ‘The gift you sent me. Tell me about it.’
‘It meant something to you.’ She caught my shoulder. ‘What?’
‘First you tell me.’
‘Well, I don’t know really. It came a couple of months ago. There was a covering letter — wait.’ She walked into the room which I had glimpsed on my way in and came out with a piece of paper, filled with childish block letters. A clue or a conspiracy? She handed it to me, and I read:
Dear Madame. I have bin a fan for many yers. I am sending this too you, though it could be dangarous for me, because perhaps it is the only thangs I have to give you that you might want. I do not undastand them but maybe you will. I know you know the person who rote them. There are more. I will send you more if you act again. Please act again.
I offered the letter back to Shehnaz Saeed, and she gestured to me to keep it. ‘It seemed like lunatic ravings when I first read it. I was about to throw the whole thing away — I’ve received some peculiar fan mail over the years, believe me, though I’ll admit it had been a while since the last one. But it was intriguing enough that I kept it. I don’t know, maybe this letter is what planted in me the idea of acting again, and made me more receptive to the idea of Boond. I don’t know. We never really know how our brains work, do we? Anyway, I knew your mother and the Poet had some code they wrote to each other in and when I heard you were involved with Boond I thought, maybe, just maybe. That’s why I sent it to you. Can you read it?’
Some old instinct of secrecy in all matters related to my mother caught hold of me. I found myself saying, ‘No. I don’t know the code. But it does look like some sort of code, and so, like you, when I saw it I thought it might be their code. But I don’t know. Do you have more? If you have more, maybe if I look at them long enough I’ll be able to think of a way to crack the code.’
I sounded entirely unconvincing to my own ears, but she merely nodded. ‘That’s all I have. But who knows, now that I really am acting again maybe whoever wrote the note will send more. If he does, I’ll give them to you.’
She kissed me goodbye at the door, and just before I got into my car she called out into the driveway, ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s probably just some deranged fan.’
‘Yes, of course. I know that.’
I was turning the key in the ignition when she came running down the steps and touched my shoulder through the open car window. ‘But you will tell me, won’t you? If it means anything to you.’
‘Of course I will,’ I lied.
VI
That suggestion of winter which had coursed past me on the roof of Shehnaz Saeed’s house was nowhere in evidence when I drove out of her gate. Heat rose off the streets, creating mirages — thin, shimmering bands of water. The mind would have to be fevered to believe they were anything other than an illusion — in this heat any puddle would evaporate in seconds, or act as beacon for the thirsty pye-dogs who roamed the streets.