I headed towards the lounge, towards the encrypted pages, but Ed saw the kitchen, sauntered into it and came out with a corkscrew and two tumblers. I surprised myself by thinking that there was something in the way he entered my kitchen that I liked; not proprietary, not like so many men in Karachi who assumed they could walk into your home and act as though they owned it, but more familiar, as though we were past the need to be formal with each other. Then he held out a glass to me, and in that instant when it passed from his hand to mine I remembered the distaste with which he had thrown the envelope at my feet.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My mother sent the letter for you. None of it was my business. It’s just…’
‘Yes?’ When he was speaking, my mind could latch on to his words. Words which made sense, each letter slotting neatly into its place, all the letters together forming words and sentences with spaces between them, the spaces acting as transmitters of meaning and not as gulfs which kept each word, each sentence, separate and unbridgeable.
‘You were treating me like some no-account delivery boy. My ego objected.’
‘It wasn’t about you, Ed.’ I sat down on the sofa and glanced over to the papers on the low table.
‘That’s what my ego objected to.’ He looked into his wine glass and then up at me again. ‘You want to hear the amusing anecdote?’ The sunset had been swallowed up in darkness and now a single beam of light from an unknown source came through the balcony window and lit up the wine in his glass to ruby, everything else in the flat existing in muted shades at the midpoint of colour and shadow.
‘No. Do you want to know what was in the envelope your mother sent me?’
He had brought the rim of the glass up to his face again but the question made him forget to tilt the wine into his mouth, so he just stood there, his lower lip adhered to the glass, looking like a man who has seen a gorgon at a cocktail party.
Then he blinked, sipped, and put the glass down on the coffee table. ‘I know it was more… what did you call it… calligraphy, if that’s what you’re going to tell me. I opened the envelope and looked inside before I brought it to you.’
‘Your mother didn’t show it to you?’
For a moment he was silent as though trying to decide what exactly to tell me. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly pleased with my mother for giving you the first piece of calligraphy. So when that second one arrived during lunch she sneaked off without showing it to me and asked her driver to deliver it to you at STD. Fortunately the driver is a lazy bastard and decided just to wait until I was returning to the office and hand it over to me instead.’
‘Does she know…?’
‘That I’m aware of her deception? No.’
‘So it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to say you have a somewhat strained relationship with your mother, Mir Adnan Akbar Khan.’
He smiled and looked just a little embarrassed. ‘I love her, I really do. And I’m close to her, more than most men and their mothers. But that’s why it just drives me crazy when she acts like we’re in some soap opera in which every tiny moment has to have secrecy and suspense added to it. Really.’ He was laughing now as though it had just occurred to him that he’d been living in a joke. ‘The cook comes in with some thing that’s been delivered in the letterbox. My mother sees the familiar handwriting on the envelope. She leaps up from her chair and darts to get it. The unsuspecting son asks her what it is. She says, nothing important. She is clearly lying. Then she says she just remembered she needs the driver to run an errand for her. She rushes out. When she comes back, she is clearly flustered. Exclamation exclamation.’ He smiled again and rolled his eyes. ‘It gets a bit exhausting.’
She had seemed so utterly different to me — too ironic about her profession to become the stereotype of the actress who cannot separate reality from drama. But I only said, ‘Mothers can be that way.’
He came to sit next to me on the sofa and touched the back of my hand, very lightly. ‘She told me about that code your mother and the Poet used. She told me she thought those garbled lines might be written in code. That’s why I was angry with her for sending it to you. I thought she wasn’t taking into account how you might feel about getting something you couldn’t read and then wondering if it was your mother and the Poet’s code. That’s why, even with the second set of pages, I didn’t know whether to give them to you or not. I was, I’ll be honest, I was on my way to shred them when I heard a sound from your office and I went in to see if you were OK. I didn’t intend for you to get those pages. I don’t…’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘Look, my mother told me you still think your mother is alive and,’ he held up his hands before I could react, as though anticipating a blow, ‘I’m not saying she isn’t. I don’t know, I… that’s your thing, your situation… I’m just… I don’t think getting pages of weird writing you can’t read but which you imagine is written by her will help anything. I saw that covering letter. It’s obviously some crazy fan of my mother’s. They send her all kinds of oddball stuff, just to get her attention.’
‘Ed, I can read it.’
‘Oh.’ He leaned back against the sofa cushions. ‘Oh. Oh, God. I really was going to shred it.’
I hadn’t known until then if I was going to read the pages to him. I had no reason to trust him, to believe anything he might say about them. But right then it was clear — I needed to read them simply to give him a reason not to shred the next set of pages that might arrive at his house. With that clarity came such relief, as though all I had really wanted all along was a reason to have someone else share the burden of so inexplicable a secret. From the papers I had been holding, I pulled out the decrypted version of the coded pages and started reading out loud. He didn’t say anything all the way through, just sat there sipping wine, first from his glass and then from mine.
When I finished reading, Ed said, ‘Lordalmighty.’
That seems as good a response as any I can think of. Did you follow all of it?’
‘All?’ He put a hand to his head. ‘I don’t follow any of it. It’s not…’ He frowned. ‘Did you read that it’s been sixteen years the writer of that has been trying to figure out who his captor is?’ I nodded. ‘And how long has it been…?’
‘Since the Poet died? Sixteen years.’
‘But you can’t really… I mean, it can’t…’ Those were the words, the ones I had wanted him to say and suddenly, passionately — I had to turn away so he wouldn’t know — hated him for saying. Then he said, ‘Can it?’
There was a single drop of wine on the bottom of my tumbler. I tilted the glass, reached in and held my finger lightly against its surface. When I moved my finger away, the drop came with it.
Ed stood up. ‘There were all those rumours, weren’t there? That he hadn’t really died.’
‘Yes.’ I didn’t know any more what I wanted of him.
‘But your mother must have seen the body. Right? And she’d know if it was his body.’ He turned red. ‘I don’t mean that in any vulgar way.’
It was the oddest moment of propriety. ‘She never saw the body.’
‘But…’
‘But, it’s still absurd. I know. And impossible.’ There, I had said it, and as soon as I said it I saw it must be true. The flaw was not in his style, his voice, his anecdotes. The flaw was simply in the situation, so utterly ridiculous that no one could actually intend the whole fabrication to be taken seriously. ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake. How can someone be kept prisoner for sixteen years, with shifting sets of lackeys looking in on him, without anyone else finding out about it? You’re right, it’s absurd.’ I stood up, feeling nothing but embarrassed for having revealed too much of my own weaknesses to him. ‘I’m sorry for having taken up so much of your time.’ I didn’t mean for my voice to sound so distant, so formal. ‘I see that it’s absurd.’