Salt and Saffron (27 page)

‘You already did that.'

Smiling, Taimur left.

When Sulaiman finished talking I was close to tears, but Dadi did something entirely unexpected. She laughed.

‘Sulaiman, that's sheer melodrama. My life! Such passion, such tragic miscommunication, such revelations in the aftermath of the main action. It's too absurd.' She took the ring from Sulaiman and weighed it in her hand. ‘It would have broken my finger.'

‘No regrets?'

‘To be loved by two such brothers. That's a rare gift. You've given me back my
Naz.'

‘Make that three such brothers,' Sulaiman said, and kissed her hand. ‘Just to increase the melodrama.'

Dadi laughed again, and then she turned to me. ‘Aliya, did the thought that flashed through my mind flash through yours?'

‘Which thought is that?' I felt strangely shy in the presence of my great-uncle, who had only just seen me.

‘Mariam's mother might well have been high-born.'

‘No, Dadi. I didn't think that at all.'

‘Good. That's a start.'

Sulaiman stood up. ‘I wonder who she was. The wife. Whoever she was, she was much later. Samia told me Taimur's daughter – Mariam – is much younger than your children and mine. He must have waited a long time before he was ready to love someone else.'

‘Or maybe he and his wife were so happy together, just the two of them, that it was many years before they felt they could allow anyone else into their lives. Why not that, Sulaiman? Let's love Taimur enough to believe that. Aliya, look!'

I turned to look out of the window, but the thudding sound against the glass had already told me what she was staring at.

‘Take me to the balcony, Sully.' He lifted her up in his arms, that man nearing eighty, and I opened the glass door to let them out. The sound of the rain beating down was almost deafening, but though I couldn't hear I could see her telling him to put her down.

Sulaiman slid the door between us closed so that the rain wouldn't whip into the room, and then it really was as though they were two characters in a movie and I was watching them with the sound turned off. What an evening, what an evening! Taimur left because he loved Abida, and stayed away because he loved Akbar. He went to Turkey. Yes, he did. He went to Turkey and looked up his uncle's Turkish friend – the Dard-e-Dil uncle who went to Turkey talked often of his Turkish friends. Through these friends he found employment, occupation. Perhaps he taught Urdu somewhere. Or English. Or Persian. Then he met the mechanic from Dard-e-Dil, and together they talked of their ancestral home. One day the mechanic told him that Meher was in Greece, and Taimur knew at last he had found a way to receive word of all the Dard-e-Dils without any of them receiving word of him. And how did Mariam and Masood's story fit into this? And how did mine?

I looked out on to the balcony again. She'd waited almost sixty years for this story, Dadi had. How different would her life have been if she had heard it earlier? These stories, this salt … How could we ever exert ourselves to the simplest physical action when all our lives were so dependent on this seemingly passive act of listening?

I stepped out on to the balcony. Dadi raised her hands to the skies, her nightgown clinging to her frame, and inhaled the heady scent of parched mud gulping water. As I watched her I knew that the monsoon rains would wash away streets, blow down electricity wires, create stagnant pools of water prime for mosquito orgies, but for those few minutes there seemed no price too high for the sight of rainwater eddying bougainvillea flowers around Abida's bare feet.

‘Sulaiman!' she cried out above the noise. ‘I'm so glad I've had my life.'

Of course I was happy that Sulaiman was in Karachi. To watch him with Dadi and Meher was like watching a dance in which a group of three would become two against one, and then three again, and then a different two against one, but always back to three again. Sulaiman and Abida teased Meher about being the youngest, the one who always wanted to act older than her age (‘What on earth were you doing talking to Binky about Akbar's broken heart?' Dadi said, but she laughed as she said it); Sulaiman and Meher teased Abida about her regal airs (‘Remember when Abida got stuck up that tree with the cradling branches, and instead of admitting she was stuck she said, “I am not in the habit of descending.” How old were you, Abbie? Eight?'); and Meher and Abida teased Sulaiman about the folly of men (‘Well, of course that ended in divorce. You only married her because she did that thing with her lips, Sulaiman. That sensuous, snarling thing. Remember when Ama, with an air of pious innocence, asked her whether her mouth had those muscle spasms often?').

How could I not be happy?

But every day that he was there I'd hear some mention of
Taimur and remember: I had understood Taimur's story, but I was no closer to understanding Mariam's. Perhaps all the explanations I had thought of were true. Perhaps none of them were. But if I were to retell her story, with what would I fill the gaps between all I knew and all there was to know?

That may have been what I was thinking about that July evening when I lay in my garden, mosquito coils around me, watching a candle flame bobbing past the windows of the house as Ami searched frantically for something – Ami always seemed to feel the need to search frantically for something when we were swallowed up by the darkness brought on by a power failure.

‘I've brought you a surprise,' Sameer said, turning the corner of the garden and coming into view. ‘I think I should start a limo service between the airport and town.' So saying, he disappeared into Mariam's old room through the French doors and promptly tripped over something. I heard the thud as he fell. Ami came running. ‘Oh good, you've found the box. But why are you lying down, Sammy?'

In that moment a bunch of thin, green, stringlike things came flying towards me and fell, several feet from where I lay. I rolled over to them.

Stems.

‘Khaleel?'

He stepped forward into the garden. ‘If the mountain won't go to Liaquatabad,' he said, and squatted beside me.

I turned on to my side to look at him and he lowered his knees to the ground. ‘Hey,' he said, and I wanted to cup my hand against his larynx and feel the muscles move beneath my palm as he spoke.

‘Hey yourself.' There was a tiny cut at the base of his
index finger, giving me all the excuse I needed to touch. You know what it felt like, the touch. Don't you? At the very least you've imagined it.

‘I have something for you in Sameer's car.' I wanted to tell him it could wait, whatever it was. But he was gone already.

I touched the grass on which he'd been sitting. He was here. He was actually here and there was no doubt in my mind now … no, not my mind … there was no doubt now in any part of me that he could break my heart. What a blessing. All the active-passive listening I'd ever done in my life had brought me to this moment, to this darkness in which I awaited light, knowing it was time for me to don my costume, make my entrance and speak the words. Which words I didn't yet know, but they were, they would become, part of someone else's story, one generation, or two, or three down the line.

The lights flared back on and I went inside. Sameer was in my parents' room, the door ajar.

‘But do we know anything about him? What's his family?'

Sameer ignored Aba's second question. ‘We know Samia likes him. And Rehana Apa, whose opinion you'd trust completely if you knew her. He's been to Baji's for tea. She invited him to return. What more do you need to know?'

I entered the room. ‘He's staying with his family in Liaquatabad.'

Aba's eyes rose sharply at this, and even Ami looked unhappy.

‘And he's brought over dinner, so you can't say I have to whisk him away before we've eaten,' Sameer added.

‘Dinner? Why? Does he think we're not capable of feeding our guests?'

‘Nasser, now stop being annoying. It's a thoughtful gesture, although, of course, he could just be trying to get into our good books. I didn't really mean that, Aliya. Where is he?'

‘Gone to get something from the car.'

‘Probably the food,' Sameer said. ‘I'll help him. Can I just microwave it and tell Wasim we're eating right away? I'm starving.'

Sameer was so good with exits.

‘This is the boy from the plane, is it?' Ami asked.

‘What boy from the plane?' Aba looked wounded.

‘Girltalk, Nasser. You didn't mention the Liaquatabad part, Aliya. Why not?'

‘Why do you think?' I blew out the candle which was flickering, forgotten, in the blaze of the lamplight around the room. We had reached an impasse.

Or perhaps not. ‘You know you're in Karachi now.' That was Aba, of course. It had taken him several seconds to think up this line. ‘There are certain rules you have to live by. Just as a mark of respect to others.'

I knew that. I knew that I had never admired people who claimed to be non-conformist but were really just self-absorbed. I knew that it was all I could do at that moment to stay in my parents' company with Khaleel at a short sprint's distance.

‘I hope he hasn't brought burgers for dinner.' Ami didn't meet my eye as she said this.

‘Food's on,' Sameer said, poking his head in. ‘And this is Khaleel.' Khaleel shook hands with my father, nodded at Ami, smiled. I could see them thinking it was clear that I'd fallen for his good looks alone.

‘Are you having power failures in Liaquatabad, too?'

‘I don't know, sir. I came straight from the air—' He bit off the last syllable and looked at me to see if he'd committed a faux pas.

Why hadn't Sameer just picked me up and driven us to a restaurant?

‘That smell,' Ami said.

Now what? Don't tell me he wasn't using deodorant.

‘Good God!' Aba said.

I stepped out into the dining area, and then it hit me, too.

A smell that was not so much a smell as a miracle. Different strands of smells coming together like an orchestral symphony. Aba moved to one side, and my eyes helped my nose to pick up each nuance of detail. There on the table:
biryani, timatar cut, bihari kebabs, aloo panjabi, raita.
But these names don't tell you enough. They need a prefix: Masoodian.

I grabbed on to Khaleel's arm.

‘Quite a journey your cousins sent me on. Said they'd arrange my ticket, and next thing I knew I was travelling via Istanbul. Some guy met me at the airport – said he knew your great-aunt – and handed me this package of food. If Sameer hadn't come to the airport in Karachi, with a list of his connections poised to leap off his tongue in a swallow dive, those customs guys would have confiscated the package for sure. You could see their mouths watering at the thought of it.'

‘Do you know …' I could barely form the words. ‘Where it came from?'

‘A restaurant. Your great-aunt's friend translated the name for me. The Garrulous Gourmet.'

Somehow we made it to the table, and sat down. What can I say about the food? That nothing had ever tasted
better. That words reveal their inadequacy every time I try to describe it. That sometimes it seemed we were all eating faster than was possible and other times so slowly it defied all the laws of motion. That the grains of rice in the
biryani
were swollen but separate; that the saffron had been sprinkled with a hand that knew the thin line between stinting and showing-off; that the chicken was so succulent you had to cry out loud. I could tell you about the
aloo panjabi
with its potatoes that reminded us why a nation could live on potatoes and die without them; I could mention its spices, so perfectly balanced you could almost see the mustard seed leaning on the fenugreek, the cumin poised on the dried chillies. If that's not enough let me try to evoke the
bihari kebabs,
the meat so tender it defied all attempts to make it linger in our mouths, and yet it lingered on our tastebuds before graciously making way for all the other tastes worthy of attention. And, while I can still think of it without falling to my knees in thanks, allow me to mention the
timatar cut,
which takes the familiar tomato and transports it into a world inhabited by ginger, garlic, chillies, green and red,
karri pattas,
and the sourness of tamarind. To eat that meal was to eat centuries of artistry, refined in kitchens across the subcontinent. The flavours we tasted were not just the flavours in the food, but also the flavours the food reminded us of and the flavours the food remembered.

But saying all of this is not enough. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam in a kitchen, a vast glorious kitchen, brushing saffron off her husband's neck and dusting it on to her own lips. I saw Mariam listing names of vegetables –
mooli, loki, bhindi, shaljam, gajjar, mattar, phool gobi
– as though the list were a
ghazal,
while Masood kneaded
mangos to pulp in a bowl which suddenly had four hands, not two, intertwining and pressing. When I tasted that food I saw Mariam older and happy.

Khaleel said something to make Aba laugh and I saw Ami lean forward to Khaleel and speak, speak without stopping until she had to stop because Aba threatened to eat the last piece of chicken on her plate since she didn't seem interested in it. Khaleel looked at me and I wanted everyone else to disappear. But in some sense they had disappeared while he was looking at me in that way he had of looking at me.

When the meal was finally over – the plates not licked clean, not entirely, because that would have meant that the cook miscalculated quantities, but nearly so, so very nearly so – Khaleel picked up the last grain of rice on his plate and, with everyone else distracted by satiation, he placed the wonder of it all on my tongue.

‘I'm stopping in Istanbul again on my way back to America,' he said softly. ‘Right before the semester begins. You're flying out around that time, too, aren't you?'