‘Sit,’ she commanded, when I returned to the lounge. When I failed to comply, she clicked her tongue — there were moments when it was frighteningly easy to see what she’d be like as a grandmother — and flipped through the various cuttings until she came to the one she wanted. ‘Read it,’ she said, and retreated to her flat again.
I ignored it for almost an hour, and contented myself with surfing the internet for further information about Archimedes’ magnifying glass and checking e-mail. Just three new messages. One from my father, commenting on the latest news from the world of cricket and suggesting we switch our sporting allegiances to the game of curling. One from an ex-colleague at the multinational corporation, giving me an update on office politics and saying we must get together one of these days. I wondered if she was at all surprised to find how easily I had slipped out of her life, just as I had slipped out of the lives of everyone with whom I had ever worked. The third e-mail was a petition to ban some sport of which I had never heard, because it was endangering a species of animal for which I had no regard in a country that couldn’t care less what I thought of its laws. I forwarded it to Rabia with the message: ‘The modern woman’s preferred method of political engagement.’
Finally I logged out, and hefted the green ring-binder file on to my lap. Its contents had increased quite considerably since I last saw it, which came as something of a revelation.
The article Rabia had left the file open on was an interview with Shehnaz Saeed, conducted in 1982 when she was touring festivals around the world with Macbeth. It had been published in Italian, and someone in Milan had mailed the article to my mother’s Karachi address. Mama was having one of her bouts of self-imposed exile at the time, so I was the one who found the letter when I went with Beema on our monthly inspection of my mother’s house. Attracted by the foreign stamps, I had opened the envelope and, finding the contents indecipherable, I had made Beema drive me to the Italian consulate, where a young official with the bluest eyes had taken pity on me and translated the article. Those were the days when you could just walk into a European consulate without encountering road blocks and several layers of security guards and the need for appointments. Those were also the days when it was me, not my half-sister, who maintained this file about my mother with a near-religious zeal. I shook my head to clear away the memory, and read the translation, which I had glued next to the cutting:
Q: Watching your performance of Lady Macbeth at the festival, even though I couldn’t understand the Urdu, there was an Italian word which came to mind: sprezzatura. The illusion of ease with which the most gifted artistes imbue their most complex performances. Are you familiar with this word?
A (laughing): Yes, I am. Thank you. I’m very… thank you.
Q: If you had to name a performer who embodies sprezzatura, who would it be?
A: I can think of a number of actors. But, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s an Italian word which is applied to performances which are a level above mere sprezzatura.
Q: You mean grazia. I have to say, I’m impressed.
A: Yes, grazia. Divine grace. The feeling that something almost out of this world is happening through the performer. You can admire sprezzatura, but in the presence of grazia you feel actually honoured, you feel you’ve changed. You’ve glimpsed something of the immortal mysteries. I’ve only witnessed grazia once — and it wasn’t while watching a play. The feminist icon Samina Akram, I heard her address a crowd in Karachi once. In the interaction between her and the audience and some ineffable presence, grazia happened. I was in that audience — and I know without doubt that my most important performance was that, just being one of the crowd of several hundred people who created that atmosphere which allowed her to be so fully herself. I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything like it again.
That was my mother’s greatest cruelty. She allowed you enough time to luxuriate in her grazia, and then she went away, taking it with her, leaving you with the knowledge that you would never feel anything like it again and you would certainly never produce it yourself. Small wonder my father was never able to look squarely at her after their divorce — in all my memories of the two of them sharing the same space he is always distracted by something on her periphery: a sunset, a fleck of paint, an ant. I used to think it was because he hated her too much to look at her, but it was only after she left that final time that I thought to wonder if he was afraid of glimpsing grazia in her again. They were married for eleven months; she left him after four months, but agreed to delay the divorce until after I was born.
‘Which did you resent more,’ I had asked Dad in one of the rare moments in which either of us mentioned my mother to the other, ‘that she left you or that she married you to begin with?’
He said, ‘If she hadn’t married me, I wouldn’t have you. If she hadn’t left me, I wouldn’t have Rabia.’
He was right to evade the question, I suppose. Even before my mother left, she was an unspoken presence standing between Dad and me. His disapproval of her, and my disapproval of his disapproval, made silence the only possibility between us in regard to her.
I ran my fingers over the plastic sheet which covered the newspaper clipping and held it in place. What did Rabia think she’d achieve by reminding me of this article? More reason not to have even the slightest involvement with Boond, that’s all it was. And yet. I knew Shehnaz Saeed had really been a friend of my mother — and not just in the way of all those people who claimed to have been her friends but had really only fallen under the spell she could cast so quickly, so pervasively, over almost anyone she met. In those last two years before she disappeared, I would sometimes pick up the phone to make a call, only to hear my mother on the extension speaking to a voice I knew so well from all those hours of listening to it on the stage and TV. Mama would always hear the click of the receiver when I picked up and say, ‘Who is it?’ so I’d have to hang up, but even though I never heard their conversations, the mere fact that Mama was talking to Shehnaz Saeed in those years when she barely talked at all said volumes about their closeness during that period.
I had never met Shehnaz Saeed — this struck me as odd for the first time — though I knew that Mama went to visit her during those two years — sometimes several times a week, sometimes not for weeks at a stretch. After Mama disappeared, I sometimes thought of calling Shehnaz, but I never knew what it was I wanted to say to her.
But now Shehnaz Saeed herself had handed me a reason to call her. I walked over to the oversized handbag I had carried to work that day, and took out the envelope addressed to me that had been lying there, unopened, since the morning. It was from Shehnaz Saeed: ‘Thank you for helping with my character’ was scribbled on the envelope. One of the twenty-somethings at STD who’d been in reception when the package arrived had almost fainted at this evidence of Shehnaz Saeed’s unstarlike attitude to ‘underlings’. I hadn’t been so convinced. I knew a thing or two about women who were legends. I knew how desperately they wanted to be treated as though they weren’t legends — but only by people whom they deemed worthy of such impertinence. I was worthy, in Shehnaz Saeed’s eyes. It didn’t matter that we’d never met.