Salt and Saffron (3 page)

‘Everything changed four years ago. Everything.'

Samia put her arms around me and pulled me close, my
head resting against her chest. ‘Wasn't there something about Zeus's rape, seduction,
jo bhi,
of Leda that had something to do with twins?'

‘You're right! Leda had sex with her husband, Tyndareus, on the same day that Zeus did what Zeus did. And nine months later Leda laid twin eggs. From one came Helen and Pollux, children of Zeus, and from the other came Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Tyndareus. Talk about not-quite-twins!'

‘Arré
, maybe we're descended from Leda.'

‘It's mythology, cuz. And from a cultural tradition not our own.'

‘Actually, Point A, ancient Greek texts were kept alive through Arab translations, which were translated from Arabic back into European languages when Europe was ready to stop being barbaric and have a cultured moment. My grandmother in her little house on the Mediterranean is very adamant about this matter. And, Point B, it doesn't sound a whole cartload more mythical than some of the stuff that's gone on in our clan. Speaking of which, did you hear about Sameer's lizard experience? In the loo. The bloody
chhipkali
practically attacked him. It was the same colour as the floor and it moved with speed.'

And then she was off, recounting a tale worthy of a place beside all the best lizard stories of our family. The one about Samia and Sameer's grandmother ripping off her sari at a state dinner because she thought she felt a lizard run down her spine; the one about Dadi's grandmother, who saw a lizard nestling between the pillows by her foot and reacted by leaping off her palanquin, thus showing her face to men who were neither eunuchs nor close relatives; and the one about the lizard, red and large-throated, which
clambered on the grilles outside our cousin Usman's window, prompting screams that turned into full-blown hysteria seconds later when Usman's mother uttered the four most terrifying words imaginable: It's in the house.

At college I was famous for my storytelling abilities, but I never told anyone that my stories were mere repetition, my abilities those of a parrot. Oh, they are a talking people, my relatives, and I have breathed in that chatter, storing it in those parts of my lungs (the alveoli, the bronchi) whose names suggest a mystery beyond breath and blood. And yes, when the need arises I can exhale those words and perpetuate the myth that is nothing more than myth because it forgets Mariam Apa; the myth, that is, of my family's across-the-board, no-exceptions, one-hundred-percent-all-the-way garrulousness. But when I am my only audience, the wit and the one-liners, the retorts and the rebukes are just so much noise and I crave something silent as a wisp of smoke.

I can think of no one who knows me who would believe any of that. Maybe not even me. Maybe.

‘But Aliya,' Samia said. ‘A squirrel?'

‘So, please now, while I have your attention undivided and can threaten to withhold lunch until you answer, explain to me why, I mean why, are you planning to return to the Blighted Estates of America to get a Master's in Education?' Samia rolled up her sleeves as she spoke.

‘What, are you planning to punch me?'

‘No,' she said, taking my mug. ‘I'm immersing dishes in soap suds. Come to the kitchen and answer my
savaal.'

‘Decisions,' I said, hoisting myself on to the kitchen counter. ‘Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.'

Samia pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, which made me think irrationally that she really had grown up entirely. I wondered if the same could be said of me, even though I was quite liable to scald my hands while attempting to wash the dishes and I didn't care what the washing liquid did to my nail polish. Samia pointed a yellow finger at me. ‘My quesh is, Education, colon, why?'

‘Oh, the postcolonial why!' I shrugged. ‘A friend of mine had application forms to various Schools of Ed.'

Samia threw a dish towel at me. ‘What happened to studying history?'

‘You're the historian in the family.'

‘Aloo, when I was eighteen you knew as much about history as I did. And you were fourteen.' Samia could deliver the simplest comments in tones of high outrage.

‘I knew more. But my first week at college I got a letter from Dadi.'

I would like to be proud of you again one day. But you can only make me proud if you first understand what pride means. Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is
Fakhr
and
Nazish -
both names that you can find more than once on our family tree. You must go back to those names, those people, in order to understand who I am and who you are. This is why it is good you are in America, where there are so many books. Study history, my darling Aliya, but not the history of the Mughals or the British in India, although our stories intersect theirs in so many ways. Study the Dard-e-Dil family. I know you don't trust the history that comes from my mouth, so go to that continent which denies its own history, and when you find yourself mocking its arrogance and lies, go to the libraries and search among the cobwebbed books for the story of your own past. And when you do that, and you see in print the old tales that thrilled you to sleep at night, I defy you to feel no stirrings of
Fakhr
and
Nazish.

‘Aliya? You got a letter saying what?'

‘Saying she wanted me to study history. So I didn't.'

I opened the fridge and crouched down beside it. My cousin Samia had become a sandwich eater. Bread, mayonnaise,
mustard, salami, sliced roast beef, lettuce, tomatoes, gherkins, tuna salad. Good God, how dreary.

Behind the loaf of bread was a sauce boat, not dissimilar in size and shape to Aladdin's lamp. I lifted it out of the fridge with both hands and held it to my face. Tamarind!

‘What's in there?' Samia held out her hand for the sauce boat.
‘Imli?'

‘Friday nights.'

Fridays used to be Masood's day off. He'd cycle out at sunrise and be gone all day, leaving Ami, Aba, Mariam Apa and me to lay tables, wash dishes, heat up frozen food. More often than not, at lunchtime, Mariam Apa would end up eating last night's leftovers and Aba would drive me to the bazaar where we'd buy
aloo puri
with carrot pickles, and
halva
on the side to sweeten our mouths. Masood would return well after sunset, clothes wet, hair smelling of salt, sand glistening silver against his skin. He'd hold up two clenched fists like a boxer ready to jab, and when I tapped one he would twist his wrist, unfurl his fingers, and reveal a tamarind-based sweet wrapped in clear plastic. For a while, not so long ago, I had lost these memories of Masood; I'd like to say it was the better angels of my nature which restored the memories to me, but really it was embarrassment at the way my reaction towards him mirrored that of so many of my family members. Embarrassment, and also the visceral tug of food smells. When the taste of chillies sometimes brought tears to my eyes it was not because my palate was overwhelmed by the heat.

I held the sauce boat up to my nose again. Tamarind. It was only at college, when the racks of spices and international foods at Stop ‘n' Shop forced me to confront the inadequacy of my culinary English, that I ran for my Urdu-English dictionary and discovered that
imli
was tamarind. It
was several days later that I thought, Sounds a little like
Taimur Hind.

Taimur Hind.
To explain what that name means to me I must return to the triplets, those not-quite-twins. Their father, my great-grandfather, was so terrified to hear the circumstances of their births that he put yaks and their milk out of his mind and concentrated on averting disaster. He was well intentioned, of course, but in my family that's just a euphemism for stupid. He said, ‘We'll call them Sulaiman, Taimur and Akbar.' He thought bearing the names of great kings would enable his sons to face up to any crisis, but he never paused to think what would have happened if their namesakes – Sulaiman the Magnificent, Akbar the Great, and Taimur, sometimes called Taimur Lang or Tamburlaine, but so unimpeded by his lameness that no one ever pictures him crippled – had been born brothers. Romulus and Remus, Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh, Richard the Lionheart and King John would seem, by comparison, merely to bicker affectionately. (Though in the case of John and Richard it seems that their legendary disharmony may have been exaggerated by the Robin Hood tales, and incidentally I've never had much sympathy for the Crusaders.)

Of the triplets, Taimur was the one born on the cusp. His brothers adored him and were always arguing over which one of them shared the same birthday as Taimur. Are you born at the moment your head emerges into the light, as my grandfather, Akbar, claimed, or at the moment when every last inch of you is caressed by air, as Sulaiman insisted.

Taimur, when asked his date of birth, said, ‘I was born between my brothers.' And when he grew older he added, ‘There is nothing more arbitrary than the chime separating one day from the next.'

Things I know about Taimur: he was the most beautiful of the brothers, while Akbar was the most dashing and Sulaiman the most charming; when he was four he bit the nose off Dadi's stuffed reindeer and Dadi, in retaliation, bit his index finger; he was the sweetest timer of the cricket ball that you could hope to see, but at boarding school in England his run average remained lower than Akbar's because he so often forgot to ground his bat after completing a run; he loved the poems of Emily Dickinson; before he left for boarding school he had an English governess who called him Percy (Sulaiman was Alfred and Akbar was Gordie); he played the sitar; also, the harpsichord; it was he who persuaded his brothers to join him in leaping off a second-floor balcony in the Dard-e-Dil palace when home for the holidays at the age of sixteen, their broken legs and the intercession of the Nawab on their behalf finally convincing their father to allow them to finish their secondary education in Dard-e-Dil with their cousins, under the guidance of the private tutors at the palace; he despised politicians before it was fashionable to do so, but his most prized possession was a cane belonging to Liaquat, which he either stole or received as a gift from Liaquat after mockpretending to steal it (the stories here vary, but I prefer the latter version); he could devour pounds of fried okra at a single sitting, though his appetite was otherwise unremarkable; in 1938, shortly before the brothers were due to leave for Oxford, he disappeared.

He disappeared and remained that way. For two weeks his family was made efficient by terror, until the arrival of an envelope with an indistinct postal stamp and Taimur's looping Ds made the postmaster spill his morning cup of tea and sent him pedalling frantically to my family's home.

Dadi was with her cousins, Akbar and Sulaiman, when the letter arrived and, though she swears she read it only once, she can still recite the letter from memory, her fingers tracing Ds in the air as she speaks:

My brothers, we were born the year after the Jalianwalla massacre. Think of this when you are strolling down paths in Oxford, studying how to be Englishmen and do well in the world. I lack your gift for erasing, nay! evading history. The writing of this letter is the last thing I do before entering into the employ of an English army officer, as a valet. I have accepted my historical role, and when you return from Oxford and take your positions in the ICS or in English-run companies the only real difference between us will be that I am required to wear a grander uniform. You will not hear from me again for I am repudiating English and, alas! those years of English schooling have robbed me of the ability to write Urdu. From the time of our births we have been curses waiting to happen, but now the suspense is over. This is our curse: Akbar, Sulaiman, we are kites that have had their strings snipped. We went to school in a place without sun, and believed this meant we had no need of our shadows. I am not an Englishman, nor are you. Nor can we ever be, regardless of our foxtrots, our straight bats, our Jolly Goods and I Says.

No more the Anglicized Percy, I.

I am now
Taimur Hind.

Dadi always ends her recitations with a final flourish of D. And always, always she says, ‘We thought it was a joke. How could it not be a joke? He wrote, Nay! He never said, Nay! except when he was mimicking our uncle, Ashraf.'

‘What would you have done,' I once had the courage to ask Dadi, ‘if you had been at an Englishman's house and saw a valet with your tooth mark on his index finger?'

If she had cried then, as I thought she was going to, our relationship might have survived what was yet to come. But, instead, she threw back her head and said, ‘Family retainers were one thing, but what reason had I to look at other people's servants?'

Unconsciously I had dipped my fingers in the tamarind. ‘You know the real reason they thought Taimur's letter was a joke?' I said to Samia, putting the sauce boat down. ‘They couldn't believe that a Dard-e-Dil could possibly become a servant.'

Samia shook her head at me. ‘Who says your version of events is less clouded than anyone else's? When I'm reading old historical accounts I like to find out as much as I can about each contributor.'

‘Oh, no. You've become one of those deadly types like Sara Smith in my Intro Shakespeare class, who said it would be like, really, like, helpful, if we knew more about Shakespeare's relationship with his daughters, because then we'd, like, understand
King Lear,
like, better.'

‘Shut up, shorty.'

‘Take off those block-heels and try saying that.'

That kept her quiet for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘They're here.'

‘You do enigma so well.'

‘Our Indian relatives. Some of them are here. I've accepted an invitation to their place for elevenses today. What do you say? Will you come?'