Salt and Saffron (12 page)

I rested my hand on the wall behind the divan. This used to be the wall behind Mariam Apa's bed. It was also – though I hadn't realized it until last year – a wall partially shared by Masood's quarters. I knocked on the wall, put my ear against it. Solid. When my parents designed this house, almost fifteen years ago, they envisaged this as my room
and, thinking ahead to my teenage years and the inevitable blare of music that would accompany them, they made certain the walls were soundproof. How I ended up in the room next door no one remembers.

I stepped out on to the terrace. Not long ago I'd woken up in the middle of the night at college, imagining Mariam Apa easing open the French doors, walking out into the garden in her nightdress, and turning the corner to Masood's quarters. But there was a wall at that end of the garden, separating the grass from the concrete paving outside the kitchen and the servants' quarters, and a large, spreading
falsa
tree grew in front of the wall. With such relief I had curled around my pillow, remembering that wall and remembering, in particular, the outdoor lizards –
girgits
– that skittered along the
falsa
tree, keeping away everyone in my family. I told Celeste about the dream, and when she said, ‘Oh, come on. A celibate love affair for possibly eighteen years?' I stubbornly replied, ‘Pakistan isn't as obvious as America. Our love stories are all about pining and separation and tiny gestures assuming grand significance.' But Celeste rolled her eyes. ‘Hormones are hormones,' she said.

Khaleel. Khaleel. Khaleel.

I traced his name on my wrist, in Urdu. Wrote the letters separately
and thought, Too curvy, then put them together
and traced the word over and over. In the earliest days of Islam the drawing of portraits was forbidden. I'd always heard that ban was meant to discourage the semi-idolatry that might arise if people made pictoral depictions of Allah, or of the Prophet. But was it possible that the ban also recognized that words have a power that remains untapped? When artists turned from portraiture to
calligraphy the dazzle of their art restored to words the power to make our eyes burn with tears and longing.

The ringing phone startled me out of my reverie.

‘Awake?' Aba said, when I finally found the phone, hidden behind a pile of books, and answered it. ‘A miracle!'

‘How's the driveway?'

‘With my usual brilliance I've convinced the illustrious minister that the driveway should stay as is.'

‘How did you achieve that?'

‘Well, I told him that instead of doubling the length of the driveway he should double the intensity of the redness of the carpet.'

‘And this was seen as an acceptable solution?'

‘Why not? There's no originality in a long driveway. But to have the reddest carpet in the country, that's something. Only problem is, now your mother and I have to find the carpet.'

‘I sometimes forget how amusing you are.'

‘You sometimes forget a lot. Your dadi's on her way to see you.'

‘Now?'

‘Now. I told her your mother and I were at home. I lied.'

‘Why?'

‘I love you. ‘Bye.'

I stood with the receiver beeping in my hand. Impossible now to skip over, avoid, forget, the first thought of the morning.

Dadi.

She'd always been strange about Mariam Apa.

At the time of my birth and Mariam's arrival Dadi had been staying with my uncle in Paris. She had started that holiday tradition the summer after my grandfather, Akbar, had died much too young. His hair had begun to silver and his eyes no longer had their hawk-like vision, but Dadi's sister, Meher, doesn't mention that when she recounts her last glimpse of him, the evening before his stroke. Just arrived in Karachi from Greece, she had driven over to my grandparents' house and pulled into their driveway in the failing light. Among a group of cricketers in the garden she saw a man silhouetted against the sun, bat in hand. The delivery was short of a length. The batsman danced out of his crease, went down on one knee, and swept the ball to the boundary with the grace of … ‘With the grace of the triplets in their youth,' Meher Dadi said, the first time she mentioned it to me. ‘Taimur, Akbar, Sulaiman. He could have been any one of them, young and gorgeous with the world at his … at their feet. It was the first time in a long while that I'd thought of what he'd had to learn to live without. Aliya, I backed out and drove away. I didn't want
to wait for the light to change, didn't want him to step forward and become the gruff man I'd known for so long that I'd forgotten that other Akbar.' She closed her eyes and I knew she was imagining that other Akbar, and in her imaginings he stood with his brothers.

Dadi was inconsolable after his death, though it always seemed to me that whenever any of my older relatives mentioned this fact it was with an element of surprise. So when my uncle, Ali, suggested she come to visit him in Paris the whole family agreed she needed a break. Before the summer was over, Ali Chacha and his wife had convinced her that the trip should become an annual ritual. The only time she even considered changing her mind about that was when Ami was pregnant. Dadi offered to stay, but Ami told her, ‘No. Just come back sooner rather than later.' She did, and on her return Aba greeted her at our front door with, ‘Guess what, Mama! I've kept a secret from you. There isn't just one new addition to our family, there are two.'

‘Twins?' Dadi gasped.

‘No, no,' Aba said. ‘Taimur's daughter, Mariam, has come to stay.'

Ami was standing behind Dadi, arms braced, and caught her as she swooned. ‘Honestly, Nasser,' Ami said.

I'm on my father's side. Dadi's reaction seems a bit extreme. But I suppose, even given how long it had been since she'd seen him, it wasn't extreme that she cried and cried when Aba told her Taimur was dead. She wanted to know how and when and where had he been and what had he been doing, but when Mariam Apa walked into the room with me in her arms, and Dadi asked all these questions, Mariam just offered me to Dadi to hold. Dadi
kept repeating the questions, ignoring me entirely, so Ami took me from Mariam Apa, who still did not answer or even attempt to. Dadi said, ‘Who was your mother?' Then Mariam Apa's expression changed to something like pity. She put her hand on Dadi's arm. Dadi shrugged her off. ‘Some upstart, no doubt, who raised her daughter without manners.'

I'll admit that, when I was old enough to understand the story, it annoyed me that Dadi was too concerned about Taimur, whom she hadn't seen in decades, to coo and fuss over her first grandchild. But, looking around the room that used to belong to Mariam, I tried to imagine decades passing by with no sign of Mariam Apa, until one day a young girl purporting to be her daughter appeared. And if this girl refused to tell me anything of Mariam's life? I'd shake that girl, yell at her, curse and cajole. No baby would detract me from my purpose.

‘So that's why,' I said out loud. That's why Dadi was always so cold towards Mariam.

Cold didn't entirely cover it, of course. That's what made me even angrier at Dadi than I might have been had their relationship consisted of nothing but animosity. But there was more to it than that. I know. I was there when they laughed together at the sight of me parading around in Dadi's old wigs; I was there when Dadi described to Mariam Apa meals at the Dard-e-Dil palace; I was there when Mariam Apa told Masood to make the lightest soup in the world for Dadi when she was too sick to keep anything down, and I was there when Mariam Apa fed Dadi that soup herself.

But none of this seemed to matter when Dadi learnt that Mariam had run away with Masood. Just seconds after Aba
had told us what had transpired on the farm, while I was still too stunned to feel anything, Dadi walked into the house. Aba told her, simply, in one sentence, ‘Mariam has eloped with Masood.' Despite my shock I remembered the story of Dadi's reaction to Mariam's arrival, and I moved to catch her if she should fall. She did not fall. She stood up straight and said with icy regality, ‘That whore!'

Then she staggered and almost fell.

Because I slapped her.

She left early for Paris that year. Packed her bags and was gone within forty-eight hours of that echoing slap which I can still hear, along with my words: ‘I hate you. I hate this whole bloody clan.' I would not apologize, would not say goodbye, though everyone in the family – even Sameer – said I must. I had not seen her since.

Oh, they had tried, of course; everyone in the family, I mean. Letters, phone calls, lectures, I got them all from three generations of relatives in the year just after the slap. Sameer and I'd had our only serious fight, ever, over the matter of my refusal to apologize.

‘What's the point of an apology if there's no forgiveness?' I said to him, the first time he called me at college to say Dadi had just got back from Paris, and it really would be a good idea for me to call her.

‘I think she will forgive, Aliya.'

‘Who's talking about her?'

That's when he called me obstinate, stubborn, and even stupid. He'd called me these things before, and I'd returned the compliments, so I wasn't too ruffled by any of it. And then he said, ‘Look at it from her point of view.'

‘Sameer,' I said. ‘Even you?'

Within minutes we were yelling. I was the first to slam
down the phone, and then he called back so that he could do the same. If it hadn't been for Samia making a three-way call and telling us both off so thoroughly that we had no recourse but to band together and gang up against her, who knows how long our stand-off would have continued.

Sameer never mentioned the matter to me again, except through oblique hints which I ignored, and after my first summer home no one else brought the matter up either. I think my parents must have told everyone that Dadi and I would just have to work it out on our own. They only said that, of course, because they'd spent that whole summer doing everything they could to make me pick up the phone and call her but I'd been intractable. It was the worst summer of my life; worse even than the summer before, when we were all in too much pain about Mariam Apa's departure to talk about it, or about my fight with Dadi, in anything except quick exchanges which rapidly became silence.

But now, unmistakably, those were Dadi's footsteps progressing down the hall. I could drum out the beat of those steps, with their pauses in between one footfall and the next, which had always suggested to me that someone had told her, when she was just past crawling, never to drag her feet while walking. She lifted each foot up, entirely off the ground, and then placed it down, firmly, without any slipping or sliding. I caught myself praying that she hadn't aged.

Wasim opened the door. ‘Bari Begum Sahib,' he announced, and fled.

I stayed seated on the divan and stared down at her feet and the hem of her sari. I wanted to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around her calves as I had done more than
once in my childhood when she was leaving for the airport. If we'd been in any other room in the house, I probably would have. But instead I waited for her move and, after a long pause, her move was laughter.