Poor, enviable fools.
I looked around for something that wasn’t younger and more stylish than me, and found a painting of a line of Arabic on the wall behind me.
Which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?
When my mother — in one of her attempts to give me career advice — told me that I should learn Arabic in order to translate the Qur’ān into both English and Urdu, in versions free from patriarchal interpretations, the Poet said, ‘And translate Surah al-Rahman especially for me.’
‘Because you want to know all about the virginal houris who await the faithful in heaven?’ my mother teased. ‘You want to know what you’ll be missing?’
The Poet shook his head. ‘Not that part. “He created man and taught him articulate speech. The sun and the moon pursue their ordered course. The plants and the trees bow down in adoration.” I want to see how Aasmaani tops that with her translation.’
‘It is beautiful,’ my mother acknowledged. ‘But don’t forget the warnings of the Day of Judgment that follow. It’s not all order and adoration.’
The Poet held his hands in front of him as he always did when quoting words that moved him, as though weighing them in his palms. ‘“When the sky splits asunder, and reddens like a rose or stained leather — which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?”’
The sky as stained leather. It was almost enough to make you desire the end of the world.
A middle-aged woman with a nose which changed character halfway down its length walked out of one of the offices and smiled at me. ‘Are you here for Boond?’
I shook my head, more than a little regretfully.
Boond was a much-hyped, multi-part television drama which had fallen into a deep crisis the previous week when one of the lead actresses was fired, six weeks before the show’s premiere, because her newfound antipathy to bougainvillea made filming outdoor sequences impossible. There was talk that the whole show would need to be cancelled, and speculation about how much of a financial setback STD would suffer, and then, in a stunning coup, one of the STD newsreaders had announced, in the headlines of the 9 o’clock news, that Shehnaz Saeed was going to take on the role of the lead actress.
I was listening to the news when the announcement was made and, I swear, I gasped out loud when I heard it. Shehnaz Saeed! If I’d heard that the ghost of Marlene Dietrich was taking on the role I suppose I would have been a little more surprised, but only because Dietrich didn’t speak Urdu.
Shehnaz Saeed had been the darling of the theatre and the small screen, an actress of amazing range who had retired at the peak of her career fifteen years earlier in order to devote time to ‘preparing for and raising’ the children she was planning to have with the man she had recently married. Her son from her first marriage was raising hell at university by then, telling anyone who would listen that all mothers should stay at home with their children, otherwise the children would grow up like him. I had never met the first-born son, but I disliked him intensely for being the person who convinced Shehnaz Saeed there was a choice to be made between acting and motherhood. I had seen her on-stage for the first time when I was about eleven, in an Urdu translation of Macbeth—it was the Poet’s translation — and I swear there was not a man, woman or child in that audience who would not have plunged a dagger into a king’s heart for her. She never actually had any children with the second husband — the gossipmongers said he always timed his frequent business trips abroad so that he would be away while she was ovulating — but though rumours surfaced intermittently that she was considering an end to retirement, she hadn’t so much as made a cameo appearance since her swansong — a one-woman show in which she played six different roles; it had been a one-night-only performance, sold out before the box office even opened (the leading newspapers ran editorials of protest).
It was to confirm that the newsreader wasn’t on drugs that Beema rang an old schoolfriend of hers, whose brother-in-law was the CEO of STD (that he was a noted philanderer made the title hilarious to both Rabia and me); at the end of the call she didn’t just have confirmation of the news, she’d also set up a job interview for me at STD. I had just quit working at the oil company and was having trouble figuring out, what next? So I thought I might as well go along with Beema’s plans.
The woman with the extraordinary nose turned away from me to flag down a man with gelled-back hair. ‘It’s all a disaster,’ she said. ‘We have to rewrite the entire role.’
‘Everyone is doing too much drama,’ he said. ‘She’s just a has-been actress.’
The woman jerked her head in disgust, and turned to me. ‘You. Tell me something. You planning to watch Boond?’
‘Isn’t everyone?’
‘OK, so here’s the thing. This role — this role Shehnaz Saeed is doing — she plays the ex-wife of a wealthy industrialist. They’ve been divorced for years. Now he’s getting remarried. The drama starts with the proposal scene. His new wife, much younger, is completely and without reason insecure about the ex-wife. OK? So, the thing is this. The ex-wife becomes important eventually but she’s supposed to play a totally minor role in the first episode. How do you feel about Shehnaz Saeed returning to the screen in a minor role? Don’t answer! Your face has answered.’ She turned to the gelled man. ‘Look at that! Look at her expression.’ I ran my palms along my mouth and forehead to see if my facial muscles were doing something of which I was unaware, but they seemed to be utterly in repose. ‘I don’t know if I can do it. Every idea I have for that first moment she steps on to the screen is inadequate. A nation’s expectations are sitting on my bony little shoulders.’
The woman stopped speaking and turned sharply towards me.
‘I just realized who you are,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if…?’ Before I could say anything, she stepped forward and held up her hand to cover the lower half of my face, so all she could see were my eyes — grey with a starburst of green in the centre — and my high forehead and straight, black hair.
‘Amazing,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
What was amazing was the way women in Pakistan took one look at me and assumed they were entitled to instant familiarity — as though I were the one who had sat in jail cells with them or knelt beside them in cramped railway carriages writing slogans on banners.
An office door a few feet away opened and a man in his mid-thirties stepped out. He saw me, and his face became bloodless. I stepped away from the woman, revealing my long nose and sharply angled jaw, and the man blinked, put his hand up to his eyes and rocked back on his heels.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman was saying. ‘That was presumptuous.’
But I wasn’t paying much attention to her any more. I knew the man, just as he knew me. Even if Beema hadn’t said he was working here and was the reason Shehnaz Saeed had agreed to do the show, I think I would have recognized him immediately. Those curved eyes straight out of a Mughal miniature, that sensuous mouth. How strange that they should be so masculine on his face, even while marking him clearly as the son of the most beautiful woman in the country. In sober tie and an obviously expensive shirt he looked nothing like the imagined hooligan in my mind who had forced his mother into retirement fifteen years ago.
He saw that I realized who he was and a look came upon his face which I recognized — a mixture of panic and self-deprecation allied to an acknowledgement of failure.