I made my way up the stairs — leaving the groups below to argue about whether Pakistan’s nuclear capability made America more or less likely to attack — and almost collided with Ed, on his way down.
We both moved away from each other, further than was necessary — him up two steps, and me down two steps — so the distance between us didn’t imply the civility of two people making room for the other to pass but instead implied a mutual feeling of contamination.
The only way past this moment was brazenness, so I took two steps in one stride — at the exact moment that he came to the same decision — and then we really did collide, his foot stepping on mine, my forehead bumping against his nose.
We both cried out, extricated ourselves from the tangle of our bodies, and sat down, side by side, to nurse our injuries. And then, looking sideways at each other — him with a hand over his nose, me with my palm pressing down on my foot — we laughed.
Ed leaned sideways on his elbow and looked at me appraisingly. ‘You’re impossible to figure out, aren’t you?’ That struck me as particularly funny, coming from him. ‘I just spoke to my mother. She said the gift she sent you was that strange nonsensical bit of writing she’d received some weeks ago. Why did you tell me she sent you calligraphy? I thought you meant she’d lifted her Sadequain painting off the wall and had it delivered to you.’
When he put it that way, I couldn’t imagine why I’d said such a thing. I fanned my fingers in front of me, hoping that would convey some sort of adequately inadequate response. ‘You did seem rather upset about it.’ I was embarrassed to remember that it had crossed my mind at some point during the morning that his response had been an admission of complicity — in what, I hadn’t worked out. That search for conspiracies hadn’t entirely died.
‘I have to admit I was a little concerned,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re quite lovely despite all your considerable strangeness, but Sadequain is Sadequain. I’ve loved that bit of calligraphy hanging in my mother’s bedroom since I was a child.’
Lovely. When was the last time it had occurred to anyone to think of me as lovely?
I looked at him, and that thing happened between us. That fizz. Something electric. Our bodies reduced to single nerve cells and the space between us a synapse, pulsing an impulse back and forth.
It doesn’t mean anything, ultimately — I’ve had some of the most unsatisfying encounters of my life with men in whom I’ve mistaken the fizz for potential of one sort or the other. And I’ve had entirely satiating flings with men who’ve made me feel every pleasurable physical sensation — except the fizz. Thus, I know, it doesn’t mean anything. But in the moment you feel it, you forget that.
So who knows what would have happened right then with Ed and me, both our offices just steps away, if Kiran Hilal hadn’t rounded into view with her team behind her, and said, Aasmaani, there you are. The meeting’s in the conference room. What are you doing just sitting there?’
We stood up, and as Ed moved aside to let Kiran pass through, it was gone. The fizz — it had just disappeared, leaving me feeling as though I had indulged in someone else’s fantasy, entirely in opposition to my own tastes. I didn’t even look at him, or say anything in farewell, as I followed Kiran up the stairs and along the corridor to the conference room.
‘We’ve just got a couple of things to wrap up from our previous meeting before we get to you,’ she said, opening the door to the conference room. The room had the twin comforts of an air-conditioner and leather chairs but managed to retain STD’s general air of dishevelment thanks to the scratched surface of the long table which dominated the room and the faded posters on the walls of temples and beaches and city skylines, all advertising an airline which had been out of business for years.
The Boond team — two men and two women in addition to Kiran — settled round the table and launched instantly into a discussion about fine-tuning a particular storyline after seeing the unexpected nuance brought to it by one of the actors before filming had stopped.
As the chatter around me dissolved from words into sound, I ran through the cast list in my head and kept myself entertained inventing monikers for all the actors who were involved in the drama.
In addition to Shehnaz Saeed (enough of a star that her name was a moniker unto itself), there was The Mistress’s Issue (daughter of the ‘hand-job’ lady), Once-Leading, Now-Trailing Man (who had catapulated to fame when he had played Macbeth to Shehnaz Saeed’s Lady), Hero Number Zero (a former cricketer who played brilliantly in a single one-day tournament, was reported for suspect bowling action, and found himself in need of a new career at twenty-one), God of Small Things (a remarkable, beautiful actor endowed with all that is pleasing in a man except — if persistent rumour was to be believed — for one tiny, very, very, tragically, tiny detail), Battle-Axe and Couple Who’ll Get Written Out Soon.
But when I was done with the naming, the chatter about reshaping Hero Number Zero’s role still continued around me, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t help but think back to that cryptic note Shehnaz Saeed had received, and those even more cryptic encrypted lines. Even presuming the lines had been written years ago, by either my mother or the Poet attempting some elaborate script, why? And who had possession of it, and why had he — or she — sent it to Shehnaz Saeed? And now that she was acting again, would more encrypted pages follow?
None of it made any more sense than any of the senselessness I’d latched on to at various points over the years.
My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.
Aasmaani, put it from your mind.
The Minions came again today.
Aasmaani, stop it!
Ffhaffon, hiku ni!
Stop!
Hiku!
I closed my eyes and started to run through the multiplication tables, starting with multiples of thirteen, just to keep things interesting. Somewhere in the multiples of sixteen I lost my way, but even though I realized that sixteen times seven could not be one hundred and twenty I kept going— sixteen eights are one thirty-six, sixteen nines are one fifty-two — until Kiran turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t you tell everyone your idea for Shehnaz’s entrance, Aasmaani?’
So I did. When I finished there was neither the approbation for which I had hoped, nor the derision which I had feared — who was I to walk in with no idea of plot and suggest an opening that would overturn so much the people in this room had worked to create? — but instead a slight pause and then a cascade of questions.
‘But where has she been all these years?’
‘And why is she coming back now?’
‘And what’s she like? I mean, the ex-wife as written for Bougainvillea was all about “must protect my daughter” and this one clearly is not.’
‘Yeah, this is my big problem with it. We want her to be a sympathetic character, right, for later if that black magic internet story is going to stay the way it is, which I’ll admit I’m willing to fight for, because that’s my baby. But now suddenly we’ve got this woman who just left her young daughter and took off. How are we going to make her anything but a monster? Ow! What?’
The woman next to the man who’d been speaking tried to lean her head in my direction with some subtlety.
‘OK, how’s this,’ said the second man in the room, raising his bony fingers for attention. ‘The mother left because of her daughter. She left because something happens which makes it necessary for her to leave, and stay away, in order to protect her daughter. Except, of course, the daughter doesn’t know this.’
The man willing to fight for the internet black magic story looked sceptical, but another woman — one of the twenty-somethings I’d seen on my first day — was nodding her head vigorously. ‘So now that the daughter is a little bit grown up, she’s decided to find out what happened to her mother. And somehow her mother comes to know of this, and that’s why she returns. Because now the only way for her to protect the daughter is by returning and keeping her daughter from uncovering the secret.’