The Lost Pearl (2012) (19 page)

I offered to pick Sara up from school, and on the way she asked me what was wrong with me. I told her I had not slept well and had a headache as a result.

After lunch we all busied ourselves with packing and organizing. “Are you OK, dear?” my mother asked perceptively.

Even though we had lived apart, she knew me inside out, and it was impossible to hide my misery from her.

“Why are you limping?” she asked, observing my foot.

“I sprained my ankle, so it hurts to put weight on it.” She immediately applied some nonsteroidal cream and bandaged it.

“How did you sprain it? Were you running after people to beg them for interviews? You should be careful. Anyway I don’t like the idea of your going to strange parts of town by yourself.”

“Don’t worry about me so much. I have other crew members with me when we are shooting. You know how passionate I am about this project.”

“I know how passionate you are but don’t expect me not to worry.”

“Thank you, that feels good, Ammi,” I said, as I put my bandaged foot up on the couch.

“Please don’t thank me, Sana. You will never know how I felt whenever you got sick and I was so far away. When you had the chicken pox, when you had fevers, when you went to the dentist—it was so hard not to be there for you during those times to hold your hand and tell you that everything will be fine.” She suddenly appeared overcome with emotion and said, “You even have a mark of a cut on the sole of your foot, that I didn’t even know about.”

“Yeah, I stepped on broken glass two years ago. It was a small cut, really.”

“You seemed so happy and you told me about some good news to wait for, and now your face is swollen like you have been crying a lot. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll be all right, Ammi, There is something I need to tell you, but I don’t know where to start.”

“I think you can start with the ring on your dresser, that I just saw this morning. What is the meaning of that? Are you engaged?”

“Come on, Ammi. If I was, I would have told you.”

“Then what is a gold ring doing on your dresser? It’s a very traditional ring, made many years ago, I’m sure. And I have never seen you buy jewelry for yourself.”

“I was going to be engaged. That’s why the ring is there. There would have been an engagement only after a formal proposal, and I would have accepted it if it had been OK with you and your husband and Phuppo and Phuppa.”

“So when do we get to see him?” Her face had a hint of a smile at the thought that her daughter was grown up enough to step into matrimony, blended in with a disappointment that it might not be with Zain.

“It’s all over, Ammi. There won’t be an engagement. I will explain everything, but there is something more important—”

“I never wanted you to get hurt, Sana. That’s how boys are these days. They are not sincere, and when you are so young and in love, you do not understand those things. I didn’t want to put restrictions on you because I felt I didn’t have the right, and now your heart is broken.”

“No, Ammi, it’s not at all what you think. He didn’t break my heart. He has already asked me to marry him. I am the one to blame. He is a wonderful person. He is the one who made me realize the value of my family. The girl he marries will be lucky to have him. But it can never be me, and it’s all my fault.” I felt tears well up in my eyes once again and struggled to hold them back.

“Sana, if you tell me, maybe I can help you. If you don’t feel comfortable talking to me, perhaps you can call Phuppo; I’m sure she will give you some good advice, and this can all be sorted out.”

“Ammi, please let’s work on some boxes and clear some shelves. It’s over for good.” I wanted to tell her about Shehryar Khan. It would take courage for me to bring up what had been buried for so many years, but I was desperate to unburden myself, yet I could tell her only if she dropped the subject of my engagement.

“Then promise me you will think about Zain. I have to give his mother an answer soon.”

I could not believe my mother was bringing another man’s name into the conversation when she could see that I was in the middle of an emotional crisis. But in the back of my mind, I was already thinking that marriage would be the best way to bid farewell to Ahmer for good. If I married someone else, Ahmer, the honorable person that he was, would leave me alone. It might make it easier for him to forget me if he could despise me. But could I betray him? Could I betray myself? Was it fair to the person I would marry to profess my love and devotion to him when I had already promised my heart to another? Yes, of course it was. Wasn’t all fair in love and war?

“I don’t need to think about it. You can say yes to Zain’s mother,” I said rather sharply.

“I have wanted to hear a yes from you, Sana, but not like this. I wanted to hear a happy yes, not a yes as a rebound from whatever it is you are rebounding from.”

“How can I give a happy yes for a person I haven’t met in my life? Things happen, Ammi. When you married Papa, you never imagined you would be married to someone else. But you are, aren’t you? All love stories are not meant to be forever.”

My bottled up frustration about having to hold on to my secret had angered me, and I had ended up upsetting my mother
as well as myself to a point that discussing Shehryar Khan at that moment had become impossible.

“Please don’t bring me into this. We are talking about you. I am just saying that if things haven’t worked out with the person you chose then let them work out with the person we have chosen for you. Young people only see love; older people can see beyond that blinding shield. Even if love is true and it is reciprocated, it isn’t enough. There is a lot more that a marriage needs for nourishment. If love were enough, there wouldn’t be any divorces in the western world.”

My mother and I reached an agreement that this was not the most opportune time to discuss this issue and agreed to revisit it at a later time. As for the truth about Ahmer’s father, I promised myself that another sun would not set with this secret unshared. We started clearing the storeroom of things that had remained unused for too long. Hours went by, and several stacks of giveaways and innumerable bags of trash emerged. I found some memorabilia that I started placing in a box. My childhood clothes, Sahir’s first pair of shoes, and the yellow Winnie-The-Pooh blanket we had brought him home in were among the valuables that had been collected over the years. Sahir wanted to keep one of his old toys, my mother said, pointing to the red fire truck with firemen and a yellow ladder. I remembered it vividly as being the one my father had brought him from his trip to London. I was both surprised and touched that my brother had cherished what little he remembered of Papa.

We proceeded to sort through a boxful of Sara’s school projects, from painted handprints she had made in kindergarten to her high school painting of the city life of Karachi, which had won her a national prize. Sara still had so many dolls, and motherly as she was, she could not part with all of them. We could give away her childhood fairy tale books, if nothing else, although I wanted to preserve
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
.

“What should we do with all these cassettes? I don’t even have a cassette player anymore. Everything is on CD now,” I said, fondly remembering how Sahir would find a cassette, pull out the tape, and get it all tangled up and how Papa would fix it with a pencil.

“We still have a cassette player and it works, so we should keep them. There are many good oldies that are not on CDs yet,” my mother said, so I put them carefully in a box and labeled it before putting it away.

Next, I proceeded to the bookshelf, which I had volunteered to take care of, mainly for selfish reasons. I picked up a few Agatha Christie novels and a handful of Daphne du Maurier books, setting them aside for myself. I pulled out some books by Jane Austen so I could wrap myself in literature. It would be the ideal escape from thoughts of my broken engagement, an impending marriage, an innocent man’s incarceration, and my worst enemy’s freedom.

“If you are done with the books, I need some help with these albums on the top shelf; they are too high for me to reach,” my mother said.

I stretched my arms to reach the top shelf and coughed a little as I inhaled some dust particles. I retrieved a cleaning cloth and as I wiped away what seemed like several layers of grime, many beautiful albums emerged. “These look ancient,” I remarked, curious to know if they had any of my father’s photographs.

“They are all mixed up, but many of them have old pictures. After we clear some of this mess we can probably take a break and look at these; we can reminisce about old times over some five o’clock tea,” my mother suggested.

I welcomed the idea. “I didn’t know you still had any pictures of Papa,” I said, my voice low.

My mother appeared somewhat defensive. “Of course I do. They are just not on the wall. He will always be part of my life.
I am happily married now but I will never forget your father. He was a great husband and a great father.”

This was the first time in so many years that I had heard my mother say anything about him. She was so much more open when my stepfather was not around. I wished she had said these things sixteen years earlier.

Over a cup of hot, flavorful tea, we became engrossed in admiring childhood pictures and talking about the good old days. We dipped our Nice Biscuits in the tea, staying true to tradition. Soon I came across a really old album with my father’s pictures from his early days; it had been my grandfather’s album. “This must be Phuppo,” I said, looking fondly at a childhood picture of my father with his younger sister. They were both sitting in the garden, and Papa was looking at her with admiration. They were eating mangoes, their faces covered in juice and yellow pulp.

“Can I have it?” I said.

“Of course, my dear,” Ammi said. “Everything here is yours. You can take whatever you want.”

Years ago, seeing my father’s photographs had always saddened me. But after Ahmer’s influence, I had learned to celebrate my father’s life and was able to look at such pictures with a sense of happiness and pride.

We continued to chat about family and life while perusing the albums. Suddenly, as I was casually flipping through the thick pages, sticky at the corners with old glue, observing the bell-bottom style pants and the long side burns of the sixties, a wave of recognition suddenly swept over me. There it was, clearer than my own name: the face of the man I had promised to remember and promised to hate. It was undoubtedly the face of my sworn enemy. It was from his younger days, but I nearly jumped out of my seat as I saw the prominent diagonal scar on his forehead and the unforgettable eyes. The unmistakable emerald eyes of my father’s killer were staring back at me from a yellowing page of a forgotten album.

I had to find out who he was. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was a picture of my father’s assassin.

“Who is this?” I blurted out, attempting to conceal the hurricane of emotions within me.

“It’s Amjad Bhai, your uncle. He’s your dad’s half brother.”

“How come I never knew of his existence? Where is he? So did Dada [grandpa] have two wives?”

“Yes. Your grandmother was his second wife. It was not uncommon in those days and in this culture to have two wives, one in the village and one in the city. Your father did not like to talk about it much, because the families were not on good terms with one another. There was a rift over land and who should get what after your grandfather’s passing. It was so petty that your father did not want to discuss it, and he wanted you and Sahir to be kept as far away from it as possible. There was a time when he tried on his own to patch things up, but his brother did not want to maintain any relationship.”

“Where is he now?” I asked, surprised at how the missing pieces of this puzzle seemed to be coming together in such an unexpected fashion.

“I was in touch with him periodically due to property matters, so I know where he lives, but I don’t maintain any contact now. There was some controversy about that piece of land—whether you and Sahir would inherit it or Amjad Bhai was entitled to receive it—but I was depressed and under so much stress that I didn’t want to take on the additional burden of going to the
courts and fighting over it. I thought we already had plenty anyway, and they had probably been deprived, so I let it go.”

“So you are saying I would have never known this if I hadn’t come across this album?”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“I can’t believe that Phuppo didn’t mention anything for all these years either. She often talked about her childhood and Papa and her parents. I can’t believe I didn’t know such an important fact.”

“Well, you know now,” said Ammi, not realizing the impact of this revelation on my psyche.

“I need his address.”

“Why, Sana? Please don’t. I know you want to hold on in any way possible to whatever was connected to your father, but this is different. They did not care for your father at all. He made your dad’s life very difficult.”

“I have my reasons, Ammi. “I need the address. This, too, I will explain later.”