It was an appealing thought, despite my inability to grapple with numbers at any level beyond the most basic. If you asked me which historical figure had the grandest death, I’d skip over martyrs and lovers and warriors, and settle on Archimedes, who was so engrossed in making diagrams in the sand one day that he rebuked a Roman soldier who came up to him. Don’t disturb my diagrams, were the last words he ever spoke, so legend has it. Not that Archimedes was a man of pure mathematics alone; among his many inventions was a weapon of great power — a magnifying glass which could be used to direct the sun’s rays to set the enemy’s boots on fire. If all wars were fought using giant magnifying glasses as the only weapons, perhaps we’d have seen long ago the absurdity of armed combat as a means of resolving disputes. Oh, the tragedy of boots lost to friendly fire!
‘What are you so amused by?’ Rabia said. The idea of you as a mathematician? Believe me, Smaani, when we were growing up that would have seemed a lot more plausible than the notion of you as some low-level researcher for a quiz show which blatantly steals its format from foreign TV.’
Clearly, my sister’s delight at my departure from the corporate world had given way to her customary stance of disapproval, which had followed me through the years as I taught at a school for the educationally disinclined children of the elite, edited a monthly cricket magazine, translated the Urdu diaries of a nineteenth-century, narrow-minded, petty bureaucrat from an Indian princely state for an Anglophone historian, and finally landed up in human resources at the oil company. ‘I’m not low-level,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m the only level.’
Rabia placed one finger against my shoulder-blade and pressed down — her childhood gesture of ensuring you were paying her attention. ‘It’s such a powerful medium, television. Think of all you could do.’
‘What could I do?’
‘Influence people’s thinking.’
‘Ah.’ I lay back, fingers interlaced in a cradle for my head, which rested on the bean bag. ‘How can you be so certain of your own certainties, Rabia, knowing that if you trace back belief far enough it always leads to mist?’
‘What mist?’
‘Mists, really. There are so many. The mist of received wisdom, the mist which confuses subjective experience with truth, the mist that is afraid of believing otherwise, the mist which acts as panacea.’
She nodded, her large eyes fixed on me. ‘Tell me just one thing, Aasmaani. Is it that you don’t want to be your mother, or that you’re afraid you’ll fail so dismally to live up to her that you won’t even try?’
I sat back up and bowed my head before her, my hand twirling away from my body in a gesture of submission inspired by the shadow-leaves. ‘Either way, you’ve proved my point. All that I am, all that I believe or try not to believe, it’s got nothing to do with larger truths, and everything to do with being the daughter of Samina Akram.’
Rabia sighed, and shook her head.
I leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘And besides, the quiz show isn’t all I’m doing at STD.’
After I’d written my plot suggestions for Boond, that first day in my cubicle, I had folded up the paper and put it in my desk drawer. Writing it had helped fill up the time I waited for someone from personnel to appear and, as far as I was concerned, that was the extent of its usefulness. But a few days ago, in the STD kitchenette, I had run into the harried scriptwriter again — by now Ed had told me she was Kiran Hilal, one of the most respected figures in the industry — and as we waited together for the kettle to boil she said she was going insane. She’d been working with her story-development team round the clock, but all they’d concluded was that the entire script would have to be reworked to accommodate Shehnaz Saeed. They’d torn up almost everything they’d already written, and been compelled to tell the director that she’d have to scrap most of the footage she’d already shot of the opening episodes (filming had ceased when the bougainvillea-phobic actress quit). And the show was to premiere in less than five weeks. It was all a disaster, a total disaster.
The real worry, she admitted, was that Shehnaz Saeed wouldn’t approve of the role created for her, and back out at the last minute. Her contract had an escape clause which she could invoke if the show didn’t meet ‘certain creative standards’. Meanwhile, the hype about her return to the screen had got so out of hand that if she withdrew STD might never recover. When Kiran said that I thought it was wild exaggeration, but then she told me how much money advertisers had paid to secure spots for their products during Boond’s run — with the caveat that they would withdraw from their contracts if Shehnaz Saeed wasn’t in the show — and I almost dropped my cup of tea. (Later that day, the hoopla around Shehnaz Saeed’s unretirement reached another level: as talks between the various political groups entered one more round in their attempts to form a coalition government, nearly a month after the elections, a leading politician was quoted in the evening papers as saying, ‘Of course a powerful central government is possible under the circumstances. Shehnaz Saeed is acting again — doesn’t that tell you all hope is possible?’)
‘Got any ideas?’ Kiran Hilal said to me, as the kettle whistled and two jets of steam came shooting out of the holes in the spout. She meant it rhetorically, but I found myself repeating back to her everything I had written down that first day in the office about Shehnaz Saeed’s return to the screen. She thanked me, spooned a staggering quantity of sugar into her tea and went away, leaving me feeling foolish. But the next day — that is, two days ago — she’d asked me if I would sit in on the next meeting of her team and pitch my idea.
‘Seriously?’ Rabia said. ‘You’ll be working on the Shehnaz Saeed show? Why didn’t you tell me?’ High political ideals did nothing to stand in the way of my sister’s love of celebrity.
‘Let’s not get carried away. I’m sitting in on one meeting with Kiran’s team. That’s what she calls it — her team. I’m like the outside coach who’s called in to help correct a particular bowling action, and then sent away again.’
‘Yeah, but maybe when they see your own bowling action, they’ll want you to be a part of the team, too.’
There she was again, in front of my eyes, walking from tarmac to terminal. ‘I don’t want to be part of the team.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s complicated.’
My sister put her arm around my neck. ‘Once in a while, you need to let things be complicated.’
I stood up, aware of Rabia watching me closely as I walked towards the screen door, pulled it open and stepped on to the balcony. There was a mingled scent of sewerage and sea in the air which I should have found a great deal more unpleasant than I did. It was only at these early-morning hours that it was quiet enough to hear the waves, and then I loved this place despite how quickly window grilles and outdoor antennae turned to rust and how rapidly the paint on the façade faded. This proximity to the sea, I knew, might have as much to do with the mermaid dream — which had come back again last night — as the wall paintings did, but it was easier to blame the paintings since they weren’t anything I loved.
The Poet used to say we all have a particular topography in which we feel ourselves at home, though not all of us are fortunate enough to find the landscape which makes us so aware of that thing called ‘the soul’. It is mountains for some, deserts for others, wide open plains for the most obvious in our midst. But you and I, Aasmaani, he’d tell me, we are creatures of water.
I heard Rabia get up and walk back to her flat.
In a few minutes she returned, carrying a file full of news cuttings that I hadn’t seen in many years, though it didn’t surprise me that she still had it.