Salt and Saffron (13 page)

‘And you're still so young,' she said.

I flushed and looked up. She wasn't more wrinkled or stooped or sagging, and I could have kicked myself for having come back now, before June, because I was afraid she would die and I'd be left with nothing but guilt and anger to remember her by. To hell with guilt.

‘Better young than old,' I said.

‘Oh, Aliya.' She sat down and shook her head at me. ‘I wasn't insulting you.'

‘No?'

‘No. The last time we saw each other –' her hand went to her cheek in a gesture that was supposed to look unconscious – ‘just after that, when I was on the plane to Paris, I realized how young eighteen is. So young. How can you hold people responsible for things they did at eighteen? How can you go on clinging to something from that stage in your life?'

‘You want me to forget Mariam Apa existed?'

‘Aliya, I'm not talking about you. Now stand up and greet me properly.'

I stood up, performed an
aadaab
and bent lower to kiss her cheek. Her arms wrapped around me for a moment, then disengaged before I could respond.

‘Aba and Ami aren't home yet.'

‘Yes, I know. Your father isn't always clever.' She reached into her handbag and pulled out a mobile phone. ‘He said he was calling from the house, but the display showed his office number.'

‘You have a mobile phone?'

‘I'm an uppie. A yuppie no longer young. Sameer suggested prefixing “geriatric” but I will not be a guppie.'

I wouldn't allow myself to laugh, so instead I said archly, ‘Nothing less than smoked salmon for Dadi.'

‘I was thinking along the lines of a swordfísh.'

Had she always possessed this virtue of self-parody? Yes. That's partly why I'd loved her so much. Why had all those relatives wasted so much time in
talking
about rapprochement? If they'd only thought, instead, of a way of bringing us together, physically together, so that I could see her ear lobes. Yes, I said ear lobes. As a child I was always fascinated by their softness; I would grip a lobe between thumb and finger and fall asleep, and nothing on earth would persuade Dadi to move while I still had her in my grip. When I'd wake up and say, ‘Dadi, you could have pushed me away,' she'd reply, ‘My darling, one day you'll push yourself away. I'm making the most of this while I can.' I swore that would never happen.

I looked at her ears and felt an overwhelming anger towards myself. ‘I shouldn't have slapped you.'

‘No shit, Sherlock, as your Americans would say.'

‘Dadi!'

She leant back and looked at me, amused. ‘English is capable of such vulgarity. But sometimes that's good. When you live in euphemism you can't speak to people who are accustomed to direct speech.'

‘Is this a euphemistic jab at me? What haven't I understood?'

‘Love, Aliya. You never understood love.'

What I had never understood, I now saw quite clearly, was her. I had left at an age when understanding had only
just become possible, and I'd spent the intervening years reducing her to a tilted head and a cheek that provoked slapping. How had I let myself do that? How could one remark undo eighteen years of love? Because hating Dadi was easier than facing the truth. I thought that, but then I didn't know what it meant. What truth?

‘Sameer says you met Baji?'

I hadn't been at all sure how to bring this up. But she seemed only curious; perhaps even relieved. ‘Yes.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘The first not-quites. Kulsoom and Shahrukh. A story I'd never heard before.'

‘If you'd been around at all over the last few years I'm sure I would have told it to you by now.' Her tone was entirely matter of fact. My anger caught me off guard. This time the anger was all outward. I really did hate her for the pretence that nothing had ever been wrong; the pretence that my absence meant nothing more than a few missed opportunities to tell family stories. I had felt, just seconds earlier, the urge to cry for having stayed away from her for so long, and she couldn't even bring herself to acknowledge that there were moments when she had missed me.

‘Touché,' I said, matching her tone of indifference. ‘I don't believe you, but touché.'

Dadi raised her eyebrow just enough to let me know that I had come perilously close to accusing her of lying. ‘Did Baji mention me?' And now I saw that she was, unmistakably, hungry for news of her family. My God, I thought, it's only pride that's kept her from writing a letter, making a phone call, doing something, anything, to get in touch with the family on ‘the other side'. Pride, and the fear of being rebuffed. Were those absurd reasons partly to blame for
my
decision not to call Dadi or write her a letter these past years? What else? What were my other reasons?

‘She asked how you were,' I said. ‘Then she said she saw you in me.'

‘What did you do to deserve that?' Dadi smiled sadly, and I thought back to that laughing girl framed in Baji's apartment. No trace remained. ‘I always liked her, though I don't think she knew that. I told you that once. Remember?'

I couldn't say I did. Dadi persisted, ‘When you were studying twentieth-century thought at school. Condensed in one chapter of seven pages. The green history book. Remember?'

Yes, I remembered. Remembered that I had fallen asleep with the history book on my lap, and when I awoke Dadi was sitting beside me. She started talking about a cousin of hers whose mother had tantalizing elbows. She asked me two questions: ‘How does royalty treat a washerwoman? How does a daughter treat a mother?' Before I could answer Dadi said, ‘What do you do when the two questions are really just one question?' That was Baji's story – convinced her father's relatives considered her their inferior; equally convinced that her mother's relatives should treat her as their superior. Dadi pointed at the bearded man on the open page of my text book. ‘Although she couldn't demonstrate any sympathy for the lower classes herself, it was Baji who made a Marxist of me.'

A decade later, recalling that remark, I found it even more absurd than I had at the age of twelve. ‘Baji made a Marxist of you?' I said to Dadi.

‘You're thinking, If she's a Marxist, I'm an eland,' Dadi said. ‘But I was. So was Taimur. We were both so young.'

Elands. Yaks. We couldn't be common and deal in dogs
and goats. ‘And Akbar?' I asked. ‘Did the two of you fall in love over shared political views?'

‘Akbar? He said the difference between a royal who inherits power and a plebian who achieves it –' she used the word ‘plebian' without a grain of self-consciousness – ‘is that the royal is tutored in the arts, in social graces, in subtlety. So his misuse of privilege is blanketed in
ghazals
and
aadabs.
The plebian, unused to power, hungry for it, desperate to grab it while it lasts, does not bother with niceties. And niceties, Akbar said, cannot be undervalued.'

‘You disagreed with this?'

Dadi shrugged. ‘Yes, but politely.'

‘With subtlety and art.'

‘Precisely.'

I didn't know what to do with the silence that followed, so I picked up the morning newspaper and looked at the front page. ‘Who's flaying who?' Dadi asked.

There is no institution in the world which uses the word ‘flay' as wantonly as the Karachi morning papers.
Government flays opposition. Opposition flays PM. Politician flays bureaucracy. Journalists flay censorship. Batsmen flay bowlers. Hygienist flays fleas. Foreign Minister flays Foreign Hand.
The other wantonly used word is ‘miscreant'. Whenever anything untoward happens – be it the spread of vulgar graffiti or the detonation of a bomb – miscreants are blamed. No one seems to realize that the seriousness of the crime is undermined by the use of the word ‘miscreant', which conjures up an image of little gnomes scampering around with flaming torches in their hands. When the papers are feeling particularly reckless they'll print a headline which announces that someone has flayed a miscreant.

‘I'll say this for Akbar Dada's theory.' I tossed the paper
aside. ‘If a politician flayed someone in verse, he'd get my vote.'

‘My darling, relative to the times, you're a bigger snob than I was at your age.'

‘It's intellectual snobbery.'

Dadi laughed. ‘Around here who but the privileged have the luxury to commit poems to memory?'

‘Your butcher, for one.' Dadi's butcher had his shop miles away from where she lived, but she wouldn't hear of patronizing anyone else in the meat trade, because no other butcher could quote poetry so beautifully while slicing through hunks of flesh. ‘I wouldn't vote for your butcher if he took to politics. I can't dissociate him from the image of a cleaver.'

‘Advancement without bloodshed.' Dadi polished her solitaire ring with the
puloo
of her sari. ‘Unheard of at one time.'

‘Well, yes.' I sat up. ‘At some point, when whatshis-name, the founder of Dard-e-Dil, swept down into India with his forces … Dadi, we were the nouveau riche.'

‘The word then was “marauders”. Actually, whatshis-name was a Timurid from Samarkand, so you're wrong about him.' Her tone suggested reproach, but this time I didn't mind. She was reproaching me for having forgotten, if only for a minute, the stories of our family that she had so often told me, and in that reproach was an acknowledgement of all the hours we'd spent together. Dadi held her ring up to the sunlight and checked for smudges, then slipped it back on and tried to smooth out the wrinkles on her fingers. She grimaced, then smiled in resignation. ‘But go back far enough and, of course, we were all swinging from trees.'

‘So, we've had our turn. Power, wealth, the whole
tamasha.
Too bad we were born during the downward swing.'

‘That is our chief blessing. Now we can fade with dignity.'

‘A moment ago we were monkeys. Now we're cloth.
Milao
-ing your metaphors, Dods.'

It was the old nickname that did it. She put her hand on mine, and absently scratched away the curve of nail polish that my swab with the polish-remover had missed. ‘Akbar knew my Marxist ideals – unformed and uninformed as they were – were based on a world that did not exist. In this world, the one we must live in, Baji will never fully belong to either side of her family. And if Mariam has a daughter, as beautiful and intelligent as Baji was when I knew her, you'll never be able to forget that her father was a servant.'

I'd been wondering how I'd feel when she first mentioned Mariam Apa's name. Sorrow, and an overwhelming physical exhaustion. And somewhere deep down, somewhere horrible, the nausea of knowing I agreed with her. It came to me then – that truth about why I'd tried so hard to hate her: when I told the story of Mariam's departure … No, when I told
my
story of Mariam's departure, I could allow myself to figure as the heroine. Here was the story as I'd told it to myself over and over and over: Mariam eloped with Masood and I was shocked to hear about it, but then Dadi walked in and called her a whore so I slapped Dadi because whoever Mariam might have married she was still Mariam and I would defend her against all those who couldn't see beyond their own class prejudices.

Bravo, Aliya.

But I
had
felt something other than shock. When Aba told me she'd eloped I felt humiliation. Also, anger. Worse,
I felt disgust.
She's having sex with a servant.
Those words exactly flashed through my mind. Not Masood; just, a servant. How could I possibly have acknowledged that reaction as my own? So much easier to remember, instead, that I championed Mariam, seconds later. So much easier to say that in slapping Dadi I proved I did not think like her.

I felt a terrible emotion, too complicated for a monosyllable, well up inside me. I cried out, ‘But Dadi, at the end of the day can't we at least hope to be better than ourselves!'

‘What we are, we are.'

I had planned to tell Dadi and my parents about Baji's copy of the family tree over lunch, but just as we sat down at the table Sameer sauntered in.

‘Aadaab.
Hello. Hi,' he said, pushing me over so that he could sit on the edge of my chair. He raised an eyebrow, silently enquiring about my meeting with Dadi, and I rolled my eyes slightly and smiled. He seemed to understand what I was trying to say. I hadn't forgiven and forgotten what she'd said four years ago; but I had remembered why, prior to her terrible words about Mariam Apa, I had adored her so completely. Of course, I now adored myself a lot less completely than I had a few hours earlier … but no, that wasn't quite true either. At least now I could put my finger on why it was I had so often felt the urge to smash my fist through my reflection in the mirror in the weeks after Mariam left. But how much had I changed in the last four years? That really was the question. I had learnt to reclaim my old affection for Masood, and it had been a long time since I felt anger at Mariam Apa. But there was still that matter of Liaquatabad.

Sameer touched my ankle with his foot, to let me know
how glad he was that things were approaching normality between me and Dadi, and he and my parents exchanged looks of relief. He raised my glass as in a toast, then thought better of it and turned to Dadi. ‘Abida Nani, Mummy was about to call but I volunteered to deliver the news, person-to-person. Some relative just had an ultrasound.'

‘Mini,' said Dadi. ‘Booby's daughter. Everything's okay, I hope.'

Sameer spooned
haleem
on to my plate and sprinkled green chillis and ginger over it. ‘Twenty fingers and twenty toes.'

Aba rolled his eyes. ‘More twins.'

There had been much holding of breath a couple of summers ago when some random cousin whose existence I was only dimly aware of had an ultrasound which detected twins. I was back at college by the time the twins were born and Aba left a two-word message on my answering machine to announce the event: ‘They're quite.'