Broken Verses (2 page)

The Poet held his hands in front of him as he always did when quoting words that moved him, as though weighing them in his palms. ‘“When the sky splits asunder, and reddens like a rose or stained leather—which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?”'

The sky as stained leather. It was almost enough to make you desire the end of the world.

A middle-aged woman with a nose which changed character halfway down its length walked out of one of the offices and smiled at me. ‘Are you here for
Boond?
'

I shook my head, more than a little regretfully.

Boond
was a much-hyped, multi-part television drama which had fallen into a deep crisis the previous week when one of the lead actresses was fired, six weeks before the show's premiere, because her newfound antipathy to bougainvillea made filming outdoor sequences impossible. There was talk that the whole show would need to be cancelled, and speculation about how much of a financial setback STD would suffer, and then, in a stunning coup, one of the STD newsreaders had announced, in the headlines of the 9 o'clock news, that Shehnaz Saeed was going to take on the role of the lead actress.

I was listening to the news when the announcement was made and, I swear, I gasped out loud when I heard it. Shehnaz Saeed! If I'd heard that the ghost of Marlene Dietrich was taking on the role I suppose I would have been a little more surprised, but only because Dietrich didn't speak Urdu.

Shehnaz Saeed had been the darling of the theatre and the small screen, an actress of amazing range who had retired at the peak of her career fifteen years earlier in order to devote time to ‘preparing for and raising' the children she was planning to have with the man she had recently married. Her son from her first marriage was raising hell at university by then, telling anyone who would listen that all mothers should stay at home with their children, otherwise the children would grow up like him. I had never met the first-born son, but I disliked him intensely for being the person who convinced Shehnaz Saeed there was a choice to be made between acting and motherhood. I had seen her on-stage for the first time when I was about eleven, in an Urdu translation of
Macbeth
—it was the Poet's translation—and I swear there was not a man, woman or child in that audience who would not have plunged a dagger into a king's heart for her. She never actually had any children with the second husband—the gossipmongers said he always timed his frequent business trips abroad so that he would be away while she was ovulating—but though rumours surfaced intermittently that she was considering an end to retirement, she hadn't so much as made a cameo appearance since her swansong—a one-woman show in which she played six different roles; it had been a one-night-only performance, sold out before the box office even opened (the leading newspapers ran editorials of protest).

It was to confirm that the newsreader wasn't on drugs that Beema rang an old schoolfriend of hers, whose brother-in-law was the CEO of STD (that he was a noted philanderer made the title hilarious to both Rabia and me); at the end of the call she didn't just have confirmation of the news, she'd also set up a job interview for me at STD. I had just quit working at the oil company and was having trouble figuring out, what next? So I thought I might as well go along with Beema's plans.

The woman with the extraordinary nose turned away from me to flag down a man with gelled-back hair. ‘It's all a disaster,' she said. ‘We have to rewrite the entire role.'

‘Everyone is doing too much drama,' he said. ‘She's just a has-been actress.'

The woman jerked her head in disgust, and turned to me. ‘You. Tell me something. You planning to watch
Boond?
'

‘Isn't everyone?'

‘OK, so here's the thing. This role—this role Shehnaz Saeed is doing—she plays the ex-wife of a wealthy industrialist. They've been divorced for years. Now he's getting remarried. The drama starts with the proposal scene. His new wife, much younger, is completely and without reason insecure about the ex-wife. OK? So, the thing is this. The ex-wife becomes important eventually but she's supposed to play a totally minor role in the first episode. How do you feel about Shehnaz Saeed returning to the screen in a minor role? Don't answer! Your face has answered.' She turned to the gelled man. ‘Look at that! Look at her expression.' I ran my palms along my mouth and forehead to see if my facial muscles were doing something of which I was unaware, but they seemed to be utterly in repose. ‘I don't know if I can do it. Every idea I have for that first moment she steps on to the screen is inadequate. A nation's expectations are sitting on my bony little shoulders.'

The woman stopped speaking and turned sharply towards me.

‘I just realized who you are,' she said. ‘Do you mind if...?' Before I could say anything, she stepped forward and held up her hand to cover the lower half of my face, so all she could see were my eyes—grey with a starburst of green in the centre—and my high forehead and straight, black hair.

‘Amazing,' she said. ‘Isn't that amazing?'

What was amazing was the way women in Pakistan took one look at me and assumed they were entitled to instant familiarity—as though I were the one who had sat in jail cells with them or knelt beside them in cramped railway carriages writing slogans on banners.

An office door a few feet away opened and a man in his mid-thirties stepped out. He saw me, and his face became bloodless. I stepped away from the woman, revealing my long nose and sharply angled jaw, and the man blinked, put his hand up to his eyes and rocked back on his heels.

‘I'm sorry,' the woman was saying. ‘That was presumptuous.'

But I wasn't paying much attention to her any more. I knew the man, just as he knew me. Even if Beema hadn't said he was working here and was the reason Shehnaz Saeed had agreed to do the show, I think I would have recognized him immediately. Those curved eyes straight out of a Mughal miniature, that sensuous mouth. How strange that they should be so masculine on his face, even while marking him clearly as the son of the most beautiful woman in the country. In sober tie and an obviously expensive shirt he looked nothing like the imagined hooligan in my mind who had forced his mother into retirement fifteen years ago.

He saw that I realized who he was and a look came upon his face which I recognized—a mixture of panic and self-deprecation allied to an acknowledgement of failure.

He stepped forward and held out a hand. ‘Mir Adnan Akbar Khan,' he said, in mock-grandiose tones. ‘But my friends call me Ed.'

‘Nicknames and friendship rarely go together,' I said, taking his hand, and trying not to show how startled I was to have found a stranger wearing an expression I thought of as mine alone. He seemed to have no desire to let go of my hand, and as I pulled my fingers out of his grasp I wasn't sure if that was flattering or sleazy. He was one of those men who straddled the line between dazzlingly sexy and somewhat repulsive. All due to the heavy hoods of those Mughal eyes. ‘My name is Aasmaani Inqalab. My friends call me Arse-Many Inflagrante.'

He laughed—dazzlingly—and beckoned me towards the office out of which he'd just walked. ‘You're expected.'

Inside the office, a portly man sat behind a large, cluttered desk. He nodded as I walked in, placed both hands on the arms of his chair and pressed down with them, leaning forward at the same time. It was clearly his way of expressing that while he would like to rise and greet me, the effort was overwhelming—so I did what was expected of me, and said, ‘No, please,' while patting down the air with both my hands to indicate he should stay seated.

‘So,' he said, after we'd finished the formalities of whether I wanted tea or coffee, and how exactly I knew his sister-in-law, and why it had been necessary to move the interview up by a few hours, ‘so you're looking for employment.'

‘Yes—' and then I realized how unprepared I was for this meeting. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't bring a CV or references.'

He waved his hand in dismissal. ‘If you want a job here, that's all the reference you need. We're in no position to be fussy. And as for a CV,' he smiled and picked at his teeth with the corner of an envelope, ‘your background is CV enough.' He leaned forward again with that anticipation I knew so well, and said, We're starting up a political talk show. Hard-hitting stuff, one-on-one interviews with our newly elected ministers. You could be ideal to host. If you have even a fraction of your mother's fire, the camera will just lick you up.'

‘I'm entirely anti-flammable, I'm afraid. And I'd like to stay unlicked while at work if that's OK.' The CEO of STD held up his hands as though warding off an accusation. ‘Is there anything off-camera I could do? And nothing about politics, please. It's not really something I'm interested in.'

He looked offended, as though I had made my way into his office under false pretences. ‘I suppose you're not interested in poetry either.' Then he turned red, as strangers often did when they alluded to the Poet's position in my life.

I shrugged. ‘I occasionally write haiku. Munchkin verse is how I think of the form, ergo I'm working on a
Wizard of Oz
series.'

So this is who I was planning to be in my media incarnation. A woman who penned constipated verse and who could use the word ‘ergo' before her morning cup of coffee. This could be the most insufferable version of me yet.

The CEO's face brightened—not from any poetic feelings, I was sure, but merely because he was grateful to be past the awkward moment. He made a clumsy gesture of appeal, and my mind worked furiously, counting syllables and reaching for the most obvious way out.

‘Follow the yellow/Brick road, follow the yellow/Brick road. Follow it.'

From behind his desk, he looked uncertainly at me, obviously unable to decide whether this was humour or an appalling lack of talent.

Someone behind me cleared his throat. I turned, and it was Mir Adnan Akbar Khan, known to his friends as Ed, standing in the doorway.

‘There is wit in straw/Courage in fear. Love echoes/In vast tin caverns.'

He had his eyes fixed on me as he spoke. I kept my hands hidden beneath the desk as I counted syllables on my fingertips, unaccountably hoping that he'd got it wrong.

The man behind the desk had lost all interest in poetry—and me—by now, and indicated this by hiring me on the spot. ‘Ed will show you your office. Wait in there until someone comes to talk to you about a contract and then you can leave. Or stay. Whichever suits you.' He raised his bulk out of his chair.

‘But what's my job description?' I asked.

‘Bit of this and bit of that. Same as most people here. You do actually want to work, don't you?'

‘Sorry?'

‘You're not one of the eye-liner girls? The ones who come here to find husbands.'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Because if you are, I've got this nephew...'

Mir Adnan Akbar Khan cleared his throat again. ‘Do you have any particular talents or abilities we should be taking advantage of?' he asked.

‘Not really. Except, facts. I have many of them in my head. About all sorts of things. I don't know if that's at all useful. I take some pride in it not being useful, actually.'

‘That's perfect,' the CEO said, smiling a gold-capped smile. ‘We need a research assistant for our new quiz show. You have to come up with questions in different categories, and list four possible answers. Quiz show researcher. That's your official designation, but you'll soon find everyone here does a little bit of everything.' He addressed himself to the man behind me. ‘I'll be at the golf course, Ed. Deal with anything that needs dealing with. That includes finding someone to read the five o'clock news. Amina has to leave at four—there's a tea at her place and her mother needs her to hand out pakoras. You, haiku girl, how do you feel about cockroaches?'

‘The sight of their antennae makes me sneeze.'

‘Well, then you can't be our newsreader,' he said, and waved me away.

I followed Mir Adnan Akbar Khan out of the office and up the staircase at the end of the hall. The ground floor's buzz of activity fell away as we stepped on to the landing which led into a lemon-yellow hallway with a window at the far end, framing a bough clustered with pink blossoms set against the pale sky. ‘The creatives are on the ground floor,' Mir Adnan Akbar Khan said. ‘Along with the CEO, of course, but only because he's too lazy to walk up stairs. The studio is in the basement. There's a lone cockroach living there at the moment, resisting all attempts to take him dead or alive—we call him Osama Bin Roach. He makes some of our live shows far more interesting than they would otherwise be. And up on this floor you've got producers, researchers, analysts and other people who prefer quiet. My office is down the end. This is yours—' He pointed to a door halfway down the hallway.

I pushed open the door and entered. A glass-topped desk and computer took up the bulk of space in the tiny room. It was hard to imagine being able to move in there without bumping into something—the desk, a computer peripheral, your own ribs. There was no window, only four blue walls and a duct for central air-conditioning, which didn't seem to be turned on.

‘A room with a vent. How charming.'

‘If it's luxury you're looking for, you're in the wrong place.' Mir Adnan Akbar Khan squeezed in past me, and reached under the desk for a pedestal fan, which he deposited on the desk. He reached down again, and pulled out a pile of books. He stacked the books vertically against the wall, and put the fan on top. The blades were rimmed with blackness. He turned to face me, amused. ‘Think you can handle it?'

I walked around the other side of the desk, and sat down in the worn, leather chair, elbows propped on the armrests. My mother would tell me to count myself fortunate. She'd work out how many political prisoners could be squeezed, like pomfiret, into prison cells this size. She'd refuse to say, ‘Like sardines,' because sardines are a colonial residue.