Salt and Saffron (4 page)

I had met one of the Indian relatives, years before, in Karachi. On that day, I remember, I was wearing the T-shirt with a bullet hole in it. As far as I was concerned, the fact that I wasn't actually wearing the shirt at the time the bullet hole made its appearance had done nothing to detract from the glamour of the ravaged cloth. Our dhobi had been carting my family's freshly laundered clothes towards our house when someone shot at his donkey-cart. No one was ever able to determine whether the motives were sectarian (our dhobi was a Shi'a) or more literally asinine (the donkey was a champion racer whose three successive victories had reputedly angered a Mr Billo, who was missing a finger and was, therefore, dangerous). The donkey lost the tip of an ear, my shirt lost the embossed letter B and henceforth warned DON'T UG ME!, but the donkey only became more aerodynamic and I briefly acquired the nickname Ug, which I secretly loved.

Samia's brother, Sameer, once said, ‘There is no digression, only added detail.'

So, as I was saying, I was seven or eight and a school friend was dropping me home from someone's birthday
party, except I was in no mood to go home so I directed her driver to Sameer and Samia's house instead.

No one saw me enter my cousins' drawing room, where a large crowd of my relatives was gathered around. All attention was focussed, instead, on a silver-haired woman in a sari who lit a cigarette and said, ‘Cigarettes are to me what coffee spoons were to Prufrock.' I pictured this Prue Frock: a tall, thin redhead in a dress. I thought she must have been an Englishwoman from the Raj days of this stranger's youth, and I imagined her lifting the stem of a spoon to her mouth and exhaling silver smoke. I remember wanting to impress the stranger – except I didn't think of her as a stranger. There was something familiar … Is this memory or hindsight? But I did want to impress her, I know, so I fingered the bullet hole, hoping to draw her attention to it, to me. Instead, Sameer's mother – my aunt, Zainab – appeared in the doorway behind me and sent me home with her driver.

‘One of Zaheer's relatives was over for tea,' Zainab Phupi explained to my mother later. ‘And as luck would have it a whole
pultan
of my relatives landed up as well, so I was going crazy and one more child in the house to keep an eye on was not what I needed.'

To try and distract attention from my disgrace I asked my father, ‘Who is Prue and what does she have to do with cigarettes and coffee spoons?'

He could offer no explanation, but the next day when he repeated this remark to Dadi I thought she was going to die. She put a hand over her heart and with the other hand caught me by the shoulder, her fingers digging into my flesh.

‘Zaheer Phupa's relative,' I said, and repeated the silver-haired woman's remark. ‘Dadi, what's wrong?'

Dadi pushed me aside and reached for the phone, her ring-laden fingers trembling as they dialed the six digits of her niece's number. ‘Zainab, where is she?' Dadi demanded into the receiver. ‘I know she's there. I'm coming over.'

I was close enough to the phone to hear Zainab Phupi say, ‘She was only here for the day. She's on her way to England.'

Dadi's eyes closed and her head swayed from side to side. I don't remember any sound escaping her, but it must have because Zainab Phupi said, ‘We were all so sure you didn't want to see her. You've always said—'

‘Always! What do you know about always? We were girls together.' That word – ‘girls'; she said it as a deposed monarch might say ‘king'. ‘More than thirty-five years I haven't seen her and you just assumed you understood my always. Blood is thicker than time, blood is thicker.' And she sat on the cold marble floor and wept.

It must be an instance of imagination plugging up a hole in my memory, but I could almost swear I remember Mariam Apa wrapping her arms around Dadi and rocking her into silence.

Samia nudged me and I raised my head away from its resting position against the smudged window of the Tube. ‘Jet lag. Our stop already?'

The train was hurtling on, so Samia didn't even bother to answer. ‘Racy
desi
viciously and vigorously checking you out. Sitting next to purple-haired woman.'

I casually flicked my hair aside, shifting the angle of my head as I did so. ‘Where?' I said.

‘He's on the move,' Samia whispered.

I looked up at the man walking towards me and felt a
terrible urge to stand up as well, meet him halfway between purple-haired woman and Samia and wrap my arms around him.

‘Hi, Aliya,' he said, sitting down opposite me. ‘Remember me?' He crossed one foot over his knee and rested his hand on his sneaker. His hand span extended comfortably from the toe of his shoe to his ankle bone.

‘The aeroplane,' I said, as casually as possible. ‘Aisle seat. And you handed me my suitcase.'

He extended his hand. ‘Cal,' he said.

‘You don't look like a Caleb,' Samia said, taking his hand before I could. ‘I'm the older cousin.'

‘Hi, the older cousin. Actually, I'm a Khaleel. But when you live in the Western world, and your last name is Butt and you're born in a town spelt A-T-H-O-L, pronounced “Athole”, things are bad enough already. You don't want to add to the humiliation by admitting to a name that sounds to certain ears like you're expectorating. That “kh” you know.'

‘Could be worse,' Samia grinned. ‘You could be a Fakhr.'

‘That's my older brother.'

‘Liar,' I said.

He turned to look at me again. ‘Maybe. But a good storyteller never tells.'

‘All the way from Boston to London I could see your fingers tapping on your sneakers,' I said. ‘That's some hand span.' On occasion, evil demons take hold of my voice box and force out remarks like that one. I reached across and held my hand against Khaleel's, palm to palm. His fingers bent forward at the topmost joint, pushing down against the tips of my nails, and his thumb rested lightly against the
mole on my index finger. I thought of mosques and churches and prayer mats. Hands clasped together; one hand resting atop the other; fingers interlocked to mime a steeple. What sacred power is invested in hands?

This is not to say I was having pious thoughts.

I pulled my hand away.

‘So it's safe to say your family didn't arrive in Amreeks via the
Mayflower.'
Samia has the Pakistani knack of finding out all she deems it necessary to know about someone's background within the first five minutes of conversation.

‘PIA, actually. No, my parents are like Aliya. And like you, I guess. Karachiites. I've never been there, but there's a chance I might, really soon.'

‘Are you related to Bunty and Yousuf Butt?' Samia's foot was pressing against mine as she spoke, signalling He's Gorgeous But Okay You Saw Him First.

‘Bunty Butt! I don't think so. No bells ringing. But I wish I were. Aunty Bunty Butt.'

The train squealed to a stop at Green Park. ‘Isn't this our stop?' I said.

Samia shook her head. ‘So where'll you stay? If you come to Karoo?'

‘With relatives. Place called Liaquatabad. What's that like?'

Samia jumped up, pulling me along with her. ‘Aliya! It's our stop. Hold the doors please. Cal, nice meeting …' And we were out, watching the train pull away.

‘I cannot believe you …' I closed my eyes and the world rocked around me.

‘Sorry, Aloo.
Arré,
hold on.'

I pushed past Samia and ran, and kept on running until I was above ground, cars whizzing everywhere, and across
the street the PIA office with a cardboard cut-out flight attendant smiling at me from the window. I was horribly jet-lagged, and as London jostled around me I thought, I want to be five again and willing to lie down in the middle of a busy London street to declare I'm tired; willing to weep that I want to go home to Mariam Apa; willing to talk to anyone who seems nice, regardless of where they come from and where their families live.

‘Listen to me.' Samia put her arm around my neck in a gesture that was both affectionate and immobilizing. ‘Have you ever, in all your days, in all your meanderings when Sameer first learnt to drive and you
chuker maroed
the city for the best bun kebabs, have you ever been to Liaquatabad? If I asked you how to get there would you have the faintest?'

‘Go away.'

‘Not an option. Oh,
ehmuk,
he's an American. Green card and all that. If he really is planning a trip to Karachi his whole extended family is probably lining up its daughters as prospective brides.'

‘Uff! The stereotypes …'

‘What's stereotyped about thinking people want to get their children to safety? You know what most of Karachi calls our part of town? Disneyland.'

‘Your point?'

‘The poor live in Liaquatabad. The poor, the lower classes, the not-us. How else do you want me to put this? There's no one we know who would have exchanged Karachi phone numbers with him, Aloo. No one. And, do I have to say this, you especially …' She turned away in irritation, or perhaps it was frustration.

‘Finish that sentence.'

‘Try this sentence instead: after everything that happened four years ago no one, not even you, will ever trust any feelings you have for him. You can hit me,
Thaassh! Dhuzh! Dharam!
if it'll make you feel better.'

I might well have taken her up on that, had a man, stooped and rheumy-eyed, not twitched my sleeve and said, ‘If I had amnesia and I saw you I'd pray you played a part in my life.'

‘Perhaps you do,' I said. ‘Perhaps I do.'

Tears came to his eyes. ‘Our lives await memories. That's all.' He kissed my hand and walked away.

Samia knew well enough not to say anything. She started walking down the street, a few paces ahead of me, but aware enough of my footfall to look back when I stopped to scrape a bit of banana off the sole of my shoe. I refused to catch her eye. How could she just pull me off the train like that? How could she? Could she? Could she do such a thing if I were not willing? Could she have done it if in that split second between Khaleel saying ‘Liaquatabad' and Samia's hand reaching out to grab mine I hadn't already thought of escaping? If I had amnesia, would I have stayed on that train? Imagine that. To be freed of remembered biases. To have nothing to consider but the moment itself; nothing but the moment and the touch of his fingers.

Our lives don't await memories, I decided; they are crippled by memories. Oh, I knew exactly which memories crippled me, crippled me into running away from him. (Mixing metaphors was the least of my problems.) But I've accepted what happened four years ago! I wanted to shout out. I've deconstructed it, analysed it, and I have refused to take on the attitude of my relatives with their centuries of
inbred snobbery. Why can't my heart be as evolved as my mind? Why did ‘Liaquatabad' hit me so bruisingly in the solar plexus?

Perhaps there's no escape from wounding memories. Time was, I thought time was all it took to move on. But how could I be a part of my family and believe that? We are all the walking wounded. Take this relative we were about to meet: Baji. Fifty years on from Partition, and according to Samia she still couldn't talk about those who left for Pakistan without rancour. That whole generation of my relatives mystified me. How had they sustained, for so long, the bitterness brought on by the events of 1947? I could believe it of one person, or two, but good God! our family was huge and yet there was never any word of reconciliation across the borders of India and Pakistan. They grew up together: Dadi and Baji and the triplets and scores of other cousins. They were to each other what Samia and Sameer were to me, and I to them. They were to each other what Mariam Apa … Oh, Lord. How do you stop missing the people you loved before you could say ‘love'? If I had the option of inheriting that ability, would I take it?

Change the subject, I told myself. Think of reasons to stop being angry at Samia.

‘So, listen,' Samia said when I caught up with her minutes later, having finally convinced myself that exiting the Tube when we did was regrettable in the abstract but, practically speaking, had forestalled later embarrassment. ‘Just don't say anything that could start a conversation about Partition. And do not even begin to start to think about somehow indirectly referring to your grandparents. She blames them more than anyone else for the split in the
family. Your Dadi, especially; she's liable to start ranting at the mention of her name. I haven't dared to ask why.'

‘You might want to tell me how exactly we're related to this Baji person.'

‘Our grandmothers are her second cousins.'

‘Well, bless my beehives. That's the least complicated explanation I've ever heard.'

‘I haven't finished, of course. Your grandfather – Akbar—'

‘I know who my grandfather was, thank you.'

‘Shut up. And this isn't America, you need to look right, not left, to check for oncoming traffic. Akbar and Baji – her name is Farahnaz but everyone calls her Baji – were first cousins. Akbar's father—'

‘The yak man.'

‘Yes, the yak man had a half-brother named Abdul, and this is Abdul's daughter.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Her mother had tantalizing elbows.'

‘Oh.'

The presence of ‘people without family' on my family tree was always explained away in the following manner: she was walking this way, he was walking that way, she had tantalizing elbows, nine months later this one was born. I had heard a great deal about those women who had elbowed their way, so to speak, on to the family tree, but this would be my first time meeting the progeny of such a woman.

(By the way, Taj's mother did not have tantalizing elbows – perhaps that's why, unlike all those other women of low birth, she did not marry the father of her child and take her place in the zenana where the women schemed,
plotted, forged alliances, jostled for favour, laughed, befriended each other, complained about men, teased the eunuchs, and conducted grand affairs with each other. This last detail was not part of the oral history of our family but Samia had once declared that it was absurd to assume otherwise and Dadi's response – disapproval but not denial – convinced Sameer and me that Samia must be on to something.)