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Aashiq

Aashiq.

The name he was given at birth, which no one but my mother used once his childhood had passed. ‘It’s not a name, it’s what I am to Samina,’ Omi used to say. ‘No one else can use that word for me. I’m her Aashiq, her Beloved.’

I turned my head away from the page so that my tears wouldn’t smudge the already smudged words. Only now did I have the answer to the question I’d been unable to stop turning around in my mind: how had Ed done it? Even given his obsessive mind, his intelligence, his copies of all those letters to Rafael, how had he been able to re-create Omi on the page, having never known the man at all? And now I knew: he hadn’t.

If I had put the letters to any kind of serious scrutiny — if I had really looked at the conditions under which the Poet was allegedly writing and considered the things he chose to write, or rather the glaring omissions from the letters — I would have known instantly. How many times in all those weeks after getting the first letter had I thought of Laila and Qais, Iblis and Allah, the Sufis and their interpretation of Hell? And yet it had never crossed my mind. Even when I read those lines in which he declares Merlin and Nimue to be his favourite love story — those lines I read the very day I met Mirza and remembered how the Poet loved Iblis aur Aadam, recalled him saying, ‘This is the first and final love story, the one in which we all live’—even then I didn’t allow myself to see that I was reading lies.

In all his poems, that is the one trope he always returns to: The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love.

Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her — half-teasing, half-tender — of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. That great heart of his — it would never have written of broken fingers or of love slipping away, not even if there seemed only the remotest possibility she would ever see the words.

How had I been so blind?

Ed had known. Ed had known that the greatest assistance to his deception didn’t come from the poet’s letters to Rafael or his memories of my mother’s stories. It came from my desire to believe. Why had I so suddenly convinced myself that the letters were genuine? In what moment had that decision taken hold? I leaned forward, so that my forehead touched the back cover of the Poet’s collection as though it were a prayer mat. It was in the Archivist’s room, with news cuttings in front of me telling me how Omi had died. Face this, the news cuttings told me, or else convince yourself it wasn’t him who died. And I had taken the latter option. I chose to believe an impossible life over an unbearable death.

Just as I had done with Mama.

I raised my head and closed the book.

My mother suffered from profound clinical depression. She lived with it for over two years until, unable to believe in the possibility of recovery, she killed herself.

I said the words to myself, silently and then aloud. They didn’t seem to mean anything.

So I got out of bed and went into the lounge, where Dad was cutting an apple carefully into eighths and reading a book which I recognized from the package Shehnaz Saeed had couriered over to me last week.

‘Mama killed herself because she was depressed and didn’t think she could get better,’ I said.

Dad took off his glasses, put the book to one side and looked up at me. ‘Yes.’

I sat down beside him on the sofa. He picked an unbruised apple slice off his plate and handed it to me. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something more but I was overtaken by a curious sensation of flatness, as though all metaphors had fled and what remained was irreducible, irrefutable fact.

‘Why weren’t you able to accept it all this while?’ he said finally and not without hesitation. ‘Did you think if you had to face her death you’d react the way she reacted to the Poet’s death?’

I shook my head slowly.

All those things my mother had done in the first fifteen years of my life which outsiders saw as signs she wasn’t a good mother — every time she left, every occasion she followed the Poet to another city or another country, every school play she missed because she was in prison or at a rally — I had, at the time, forgiven, understood, even been proud of. All those things could be understood as signs of her strength — strength of love, strength of purpose, strength of belief in my ability to understand why she couldn’t be ordinary. I forgave her all her strengths. But I couldn’t see her collapse for what it was because that, to me, would have been a sign of weakness — and I would have regarded that as betrayal.

‘I wasn’t willing to accept that she was human, Dad. I wasn’t willing to accept she could be broken.’

And that was it — so small a thing, and yet it had defined every aspect of my life. It was the conclusion with which I had started when I tried to understand her disappearance — and I had worked backward from it, interpreting and reinterpreting my notions of the world to make the conclusion seem plausible. I didn’t stop and see the idiocy of what I was doing even when the only way to retain the myth I had created was to jettison the things she held so dear — her faith in activism and her love for me.

‘Do you see her suicide as desertion?’ He held my hand as he said it.

I shook my head again. I had played myself as victim of my mother’s lack of love for too long, had wrung myself out thinking it. It would be easy enough to go on, step from one narrative of desertion into another — but when I closed my eyes to allow in that old familiar, almost comforting, story I saw Ed scribbling an encrypted note to his mother to make her believe the woman she loved was still alive; the intended cruelty there double-edged, shredding his own heart as he watched it shred hers.

‘I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.

‘You know what?’ Dad said. ‘She really was the bravest woman — the bravest human being — I ever knew.’

I smiled at him for that. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’ He tapped the spine of the book he’d been reading. ‘I’ve been rethinking her, too. And I’m sorrier than I can say that I didn’t try to understand earlier.’

I gripped his hand tighter. ‘I would have liked to have known her.’ Then, feeling so self-conscious I had to rush the words out, I said: ‘I’d like to know you.’

Dad put his arm around my shoulder, with only a slight trace of tentativeness. ‘Let’s start with this. Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.’