He was looking at me as if everything depended on my response to that.
‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘Conventional mothers are overrated.’
He nodded. ‘Well, I wish I could share your attitude, I really do. When she said no, again, all those years later, with me back in Karachi, working for a TV studio, I thought, if she were here, if Samina were here and she told you to act again, you’d do it in a second. It became important for me to prove that to myself, to have that evidence against her, that proof of how little she loved me in comparison. So I mentioned the code in passing to her one day, just casually, “Oh, remember that night when Samina told us…” and then a couple of weeks later I sent her the message in code. You know, to make it more authentic. Just four lines, with an absurd covering note saying, “Act again and I’ll send you more.”’
‘And so she agreed to do Boond?’
‘No. She thought it was a deranged fan and ignored it. She couldn’t read the code, she didn’t believe your mother was still alive. And I felt stupid for having sent it to her.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It should all have ended there. A few weeks went by and that actress dropped out of Boond and Kiran Hilal came to me and said, I think your mother should do it. Let’s all gang up on her. So a whole group of them came to dinner — Kiran, the director, her former co-stars, the costume designer, the sound guy. A whole bunch of people she’d worked with before, and they all said, come on, Shehnaz, take the plunge. And she said no and no and no and maybe and perhaps and then, at about four a.m., she said, OK, I’ll do it. OK.’
‘But she kept the encrypted letter.’
‘Yes, she kept it. And when she heard you were at STD she must have had a moment of wondering, what if it is that code of Samina and the Poet’s? So she sent it to you. And when you told me you needed to speak to her because she’d sent you some calligraphy I realized what she’d done, and suspected you were able to read it. And then everything became about you.’
He walked over to the desk I was leaning on and switched on a lamp. It had the effect of making it more difficult to see him, the dull yellow light shining at the periphery of my vision and Ed directly behind it, so that to look at him I had to see almost straight into the light. I swung my hand and the lamp fell to the floor, the bulb shattering. Ed barely moved, though there was glass around his feet.
‘It was the most extraordinary thing. There you were, walking around the office, bantering, joking, being witty and poised, and yet it was there. That same vacancy I used to see in your mother’s eyes. It was there, always. I started to ask people questions about you and they all said, Whatever you do, don’t try talking about Samina to her. Do you know the reputation you have around town for becoming ice-cold when anyone mentions her?’
‘It appears there’s a lot I don’t know.’
‘Stop it, stop it. Be angry, but not this.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do. Keep talking.’
‘I tried to get you to talk to me, just to talk, about anything. There was so much we had in common, so much we could discuss. But you just treated me like I was nothing. My God, you made me angry. I thought, watch it, girl, I’ll get a reaction out of you.’ He finally lifted his feet, shook the glass off almost daintily, and stepped away from the shards. ‘And instead, I went and fell in love with you.’
I had got so used to touching him. Even before tonight. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I would reach out for him, even if it was just to rest my fingers on his wrist or playfully slap his shoulder. I had to keep my arms hugging my chest because otherwise I didn’t know what to do with them. I suspected I would hit him, just for some physical contact. His hands were balled into fists, perhaps for the same reason.
‘When my mother said you’d asked her to send any more messages I felt sick. And then we bumped into each other on the stairs in STD and we were laughing together and something happened…’
That spark, that fizz.
‘I was going to tell you the truth. That I wrote it for my mother, that I was sorry if it had upset you. I practised a little speech, trying to explain it, and I came to your office to ask you out for coffee, so I could tell you. But you just pushed me away, with that vacant look again. You made it so clear that what had happened on the stair, that connection I had felt, meant nothing to you. You were so lost, you looked so lost. And I just wanted to do something that you couldn’t turn away from with that blank look, that look which told me I was nothing. So I thought, I’ll write another message. But I couldn’t write in your mother’s voice. I couldn’t put Samina’s voice on paper, couldn’t capture it at all. But the Poet was a different matter. I had been weirdly fascinated with him since I first found out about your mother and mine—’
I opened my mouth to correct his misconception, and then closed it without speaking.
‘- so I had all these interviews of him, all his poems, all his letters to Rafael Gonzales which were published when Gonzales got the Nobel. And I had stories about him, stories your mother would tell us over dinner. About riding the Hurdy-Gurdy with you and how he ended up in hospital with the peach allergy. I could write in his voice, I knew I could.’
‘No. No, that’s impossible. Why are you lying to me, Ed?’
‘For the first time, Aasmaani, I’m not.’
‘I know his voice. I know it. No one else has a voice like that. No one else writes such sentences.’
There was unbearable pity in his eyes. ‘That’s what made it easy.’ He lifted a book off his desk. The Letters of Rafael Gonzales. ‘Read this?’ I shook my head. Beema had given me a copy, but I’d known it would bring me nothing but pain. There was a 150-page section of letters between Omi and Rafael — lovely, shaggy-haired Rafael who was the only one of Omi’s friends whom Mama didn’t turn away from in the last years of her life; Rafael who was on his way to Karachi to see Mama, months before she disappeared, when he had the stroke which left him incapacitated for the last ten years of his life.
‘The Poet wrote to him about everything. Poetry, politics, food, childhood, your mother — always your mother. It was one of those friendships you almost never see between men.’ Ed opened the book to a bookmarked page and held it out to me. ‘Every sentence construction, every literary allusion, every shift in tone that you read in those encrypted letters is in here. I took the content of one sentence, forced it into the structure of another. Took a story your mother told me, transposed it onto the stories he told Rafael. Look, look at this.’ My eyes couldn’t help following his finger as it moved across the page. Mirza appeared, a spark against the ashen-brained surroundings.
‘Words appeared, bright against their dust-covered surroundings,’ I said, that line from the second set of encrypted pages falling instantly off my tongue.
‘Yes. You see? All I did was imitate him. The distinctiveness of his voice was what made it easy. That, and your desire to believe.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, again.
‘I know.’ We were both leaning against the desk with our hands clasped together, not making eye contact, not daring to touch. ‘I just wanted you to wake up. No, no, that’s not true. When you looked through me, Aasmaani, you made me feel powerless, and worthless. It set off, I think, a little madness in my brain. You will not ignore me, you will not treat me like scum, I thought. I will make myself important in your life.’ He unclasped his hands and looked at his palms as though trying to find, in their intersecting and dividing lines, an explanation. ‘I wasn’t thinking very clearly.’
‘Keep going.’
‘And so I wrote another message. Oh, here—’ He pulled open a desk drawer and I saw an inkpad and stamps from different postal districts in Pakistan rattling around. ‘When I moved into my office, the CEO handed over boxes of supplies and it included all these postmark stamps. I don’t know what he used them for. Something shady, I imagine. But anyway, I dropped the second envelope into the letter slot at home. When my mother saw it she told her driver to give it to you — and the idiot handed it to me instead. I took it to the office, unsure what to do. Finally I realized I was acting crazy. I took the envelope and I was heading towards the shredder downstairs. But I stopped in your office on the way, and you saw the envelope.’