Salt and Saffron (2 page)

I have the unfortunate habit of looking very focussed when I am in fact distracted; a tendency that is a great asset in most classrooms, but has often landed me in trouble elsewhere. I suppose while my mind wandered down ancestral paths my eyes must have been fixed on some aspect of the flat's new decor, because Samia said, ‘Look, Aloo, I know this has always been your home away from, so it must be just a little bizarre to think I've taken it over, but really, truly, I'm only here doing research for a few months.'

‘Oh, please, Samia, you're such a moron sometimes. It's family property.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘Please,' I said. ‘Can we avoid the tangle of family rights and privileges for just a few more seconds?'

Samia grinned. ‘Yes. Good. Top Ten remark. I was just leading up to telling you that you're stuck in the spare bedroom.'

‘No hass. It's where I always sleep when I stay here with my parents.'

‘Yes, but there are new tenants next door, and their bedroom shares a wall with yours. They're newly-weds. The walls might shake a little. Speaking of which …'

‘Yes?'

Samia raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I just thought I'd generously provide you with a lead-in to any goosy jossip in your life,' she said.

‘I think you're confusing my life with yours.'

‘No goose?'

‘Well, maybe a gander or two. Nothing worth mentioning.' What a thing to say about all the boys at college I had liked enough to consider liking even more. They were all
brimming with rage against the world's injustices, those boys. All of them. So how could I tell them the story I would have to tell them if there was to be anything approaching intimacy between us? I learnt many things at college, but the only art I perfected was the art of stepping away with a shrug.

‘Hunh.' Samia fiddled with the heart-shaped pendant around her neck, but I wasn't about to sit through an exhaustive – or should I say, exhausting – account of her romantic entanglements, so I just sipped my tea and frowned at the calcium spot on my thumb nail.

‘Oh, well. Good flight?'

I shrugged. ‘I kept the galleries entertained with stories about the family.'

Samia rolled her tongue under her upper lip. With relatives, even those you haven't seen for many years, as I hadn't seen Samia since I was seventeen and she twenty-one, you can recognize what their expressions hide because someone you know well – in this case, my father – has exactly the same manner of concealment.

‘No,' I said, skimming my palm on the underside of the mug before setting it down, and then wiping my palm vigorously on my jeans. ‘Not that story. I take it you've heard some melodramatic family version of how I reacted to all that stuff four years ago.'

Samia tugged my earlobe. ‘I wanted to come back home, you know. Mainly because of you. But between summer jobs and research and other stuff …'

‘Like Jack, short for John.'

‘Yeah, that loser.' We fell silent for a moment and then Samia said, ‘Have you ever asked yourself why you don't tell that story?'

‘Uf tobah!
You're a historian not a psychologist, Samo.' I stood up and dragged my suitcase into the spare bedroom, pushing away my cousin's hand when she tried to help me. It was happening already. Five minutes with a relative and I was becoming a moody cow. Moo-dy cow. Well, that's all right. Still a shred of humour remaining.

‘So, how long before you head off to the homeland?' Samia asked, following me into the bathroom.

‘Tomorrow morning. You didn't read the e-mail I sent, did you?' I yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it at Samia.

‘Not with any kind of obsessive attention to detail.'

I turned on the shower. The rest of Samia's reply was punctured by the needles of water that tattooed my body, so her words became indistinct and all that remained was the lilt and tempo of her voice, which could have been the lilt and tempo of any of my female relatives except one. I was not showering, I was carrying out a ritual, a ritual of arrival in London, and part of the ritual was to miss Mariam Apa, which I did, but the other part of the ritual was to imagine what she was doing, right now, and that I couldn't do. My imagination could accommodate aliens and miracles and the taste of certain men's sweat, but not that.

I turned off the shower and said, ‘I don't tell that story, because it still doesn't have an ending.'

‘Is yaks' milk really green?' I asked Samia, settling down to my second mug of tea.

She shrugged and pulled my wet hair to check that it squeaked. ‘That's really so not important.'

Which is the closest she's ever come to conceding ignorance. Fact is, I'm sure no one in the family knows any more than she or I do on the subject. But we all know that my great-grandfather's declaration, on 28 February 1920, that he had just heard yaks' milk was green and, therefore, he felt impelled to inform his cousin, the Nawab, he was giving up his courtier's life in order to become a scientist and study yak milk production, was what jolted my great-grandmother into premature labour.

Taj, the midwife, was summoned. A woman whose veins stood up a centimetre from the backs of her hands, Taj had delivered every member of my family born in Dard-e-Dil since 1872. By the time my great-grandfather was envisioning all the honours he would receive for investigating lactose colouration Taj was so shrunken and wrinkled that rumour had it she was regressing into babyhood and was
only awaiting a suitable womb into which she could tunnel and complete the circle of her life.

When she entered my great-grandmother's bedroom, dressed as always in a
gharara
and looking like a deep-fried shrimp with wide, embroidered cotton trousers in place of a tail, all the hovering women, relatives and servants alike, scurried out. Only the Begum of Dard-e-Dil attempted to stay with her kinswoman and childhood friend through the birth, but Taj raised an eyebrow at her and, though the Begum may not have scurried, she did leave with a haste that was less than regal. It was all very well to have titles, and sufficient gold to cover all the streets and fields of Dard-e-Dil and still have enough to gild all the mango trees, but that didn't allow you to stand up to Taj, who had the family's umbilical cords. I kid you not. She never left a delivery room without one.

(Trace back the origins of the Urdu expression of disdain – ‘Who do you think you are? Was your umbilical cord buried here?' – and you might just find it was first used to insult a member of the Dard-e-Dil family born between 1872 and 1920.)

Where, if at all, did Taj bury those Dard-e-Dil umbilical cords? No one knows. In 1890, immediately after my great-grandfather's cousin, the Nawab of Dard-e-Dil (Binky to his intimates), was born, his father, the hairless Nawab, told one of his courtiers to follow Taj when she left the palace and find out what she did with the umbilical cord. (The fear of not-quite-twins had been with the Dard-e-Dil family for over three and a half centuries at this point, and a miasma had arisen out of history to waft over any irregularity related to childbirth.) The courtier was discovered, two days later, in a neighbouring state, stealing pork from
the kitchen of the British Residency. He could offer no explanation for this act. After that, no one tried following Taj again. The hairless Nawab earned a reputation for his strong sense of justice by deciding that an umbilical cord, even a royal one, was not worth forfeiting a True Believer's place in heaven. It was pork, you understand, not theft, that marked the courtier for hell.

But I doubt any of this was on my great-grandmother's mind as she pushed and pushed and pushed and Taj held up first one and then another and then another baby boy, and said, ‘Did you hear the midnight chimes?'

The quality of my great-grandmother's shrieks was different enough from her labour cries to bring the women of the family rushing back into the room. Taj handed the triplets to the Begum, who was the first through the door, and then disappeared out of the room, out of the palace, out of my family's life, three twined and bloodied umbilical cords in her hand.

So, three sons. One born just before midnight, on 28 February. One born just after midnight, on 29 February. One born at midnight, on the cusp of the leap year, his head emerging on 28 February, the rest of his body following the next day. My great-grandmother couldn't have been more successful in birthing not-quite-twins if she'd planned it. Though I don't suppose you can plan a thing like that. Of course, everyone still blamed Taj for the whole thing, quite overlooking her previous forty-eight years of midwifery, during which there were no not-quites and only three stillbirths.

‘As a feminist I feel I should object to the Taj story.' I was lying flat on the floor so that Samia could pound airport tension out of my spine, my voice rising and falling with
every thump. ‘I mean look, it's got two of the archetypal female elements. The crone and the mother. The only thing it needs to fulfil all stereotypes is the virgin.'

‘Well, don't look at me.' Samia practised dance steps along my back.

‘I think you've just paralysed me.'

‘Such gratitude!' Samia lay down and rested her head against my back. More than anything else, more than mangoes,
gol guppas, nihari
and
naans,
more than cricket mania, more than monsoon rains, more than crabbing beneath a star-clustered sky, what I missed about Karachi was the intimacy of bodies.

‘Besides,' Samia said, ‘aren't crones full of … What's that term? You know, like Ego in
Oh Hello?'

‘Iago in
Othello.
I hope you're just trying to be funny.' I traced the lozenge-shaped pattern on the rug with my forefinger and remembered playing a strange form of hopscotch in my grandmother's bedroom, along with Samia and her brother Sameer, with the geometrical designs on Dadi's carpet standing in as hopscotch squares.

‘Motiveless malignancy, that's it. Can't get into Crone School without it. But Taj had a reason the size of Everest to hate the family.'

‘If you're willing to consider the possibility that Iago is in love with Othello, then—'

‘Oh, shut up. Who cares?' Samia rolled over, propped her head on her hand and looked at me. ‘But listen, is it true that you once asked your Dadi if Taj's name appears on our family tree?'

‘No.' Until Samia asked that question it hadn't really occurred to me that, yes, Taj was family too. God, it was even larger than I had thought, this pool of my relatives out
in the world, generations of people with Samia's hair, my father's eyes, Mariam Apa's smile, and if I saw one of those cousins on a street would I recognize something in them, would I say, We've never met but I know the jut of your clavicle, the curve of it. And what if, what if, in addition to the hair, the smile, the collarbone straining against the skin, what if there were also veins rising a centimetre above the backs of the hands?

‘Really?' The disappointed voice of someone who's just had a family myth shattered. ‘You never said anything like that at all?'

‘Nuh-uh. Though there was that time I got frightened by a squirrel and Dadi just looked at me in such disgust and said something like, “And to think you are descended from the Nawab who killed a tiger with his bare hands.” And I—'

‘Did you just say, a squirrel?'

‘It was a big squirrel. And I said to Dadi, “That paragon of bravery you just mentioned – isn't he the same guy who raped Taj's mother?”'

‘No, wait!' Samia held up her hand for silence. ‘Let me guess. She said, of course it wasn't rape. He was a Nawab.'

‘Worse. She recited “Leda and the Swan”.'

Samia fell forward, laughing. ‘Abida Nani! Always full of surprises.'

If you're trying to understand how exactly Samia and I are related you might suppose from Samia's words that my Dadi is her Nani, which means my father and Samia's mother are siblings and, therefore, Samia and I are first cousins. It's never that simple. Dadi is my father's mother; she is not, however, Samia's mother's mother as Samia's use of the term ‘Nani' implies, but rather Samia's mother's mother's sister, and so Samia and I are second cousins.
While I'm climbing up the family tree let me add that my grandparents, Dadi and Dada, or Abida and Akbar if you prefer the familiarity of first names, were also second cousins, and Dada was one of those three sons, the not-quite-twins, who brought such heartache to the family. But that comes later. Of course, it really came earlier.

‘You can laugh,' I said, looking up at the painting of an emperor and his courtiers on a hunt, which has hung in the flat as long as I can remember. The emperor on a horse, surrounded by armed men on foot. What courtier would ever allow a ruler to get within wrestling distance of a tiger? ‘But it really sums up Dadi's view of royalty. The Nawab as Zeus; I mean, consider the implications. She thinks he was a god. And he wasn't even a Nawab when he raped Taj's mother. He was still just heir apparent. Not that I'm saying the title or lack thereof makes the slightest difference.'

Samia stood up, pulled an anthology of poetry off the shelf, and thumbed through the pages. ‘Suno,' she said. ‘“How can those terrified vague fingers push/ The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” Give your dadi a
qatra
more credit. The poem is about the seductiveness of power, right? Was it rape or seduction? The question is there. The fingers are terrified, the thighs loosen. Both things go on. We're too modern to appreciate the aura of kings-to-be. And of gods disguised as swans. And, hang on just a … Now that I think of it, in what rash of clairvoyance do we presume Taj's mother was unwilling?'

I turned away. ‘Dadi doesn't understand complexity.'

‘Your view of her has changed one hundred and twenty-three degrees since we last met.'