Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie Read Free Book Online

she could cast so quickly, so pervasively, over almost anyone she met. In those last two years before she disappeared, I would sometimes pick up the phone to make a call, only to hear my mother on the extension speaking to a voice I knew so well from all those hours of listening to it on the stage and TV. Mama would always hear the click of the receiver when I picked up and say, ‘Who is it?’ so I’d have to hang up, but even though I never heard their conversations, the mere fact that Mama was talking to Shehnaz Saeed in those years when she barely talked at all said volumes about their closeness during that period.
    I had never met Shehnaz Saeed—this struck me as odd for the first time—though I knew that Mama went to visit her during those two years—sometimes several times a week, sometimes not for weeks at a stretch. After Mama disappeared, I sometimes thought of calling Shehnaz, but I never knew what it was I wanted to say to her.
    But now Shehnaz Saeed herself had handed me a reason to call her. I walked over to the oversized handbag I had carried to work that day, and took out the envelope addressed to me that had been lying there, unopened, since the morning. It was from Shehnaz Saeed: ‘Thank you for helping with my character’ was scribbled on the envelope. One of the twenty-somethings at STD who’d been in reception when the package arrived had almost fainted at this evidence of Shehnaz Saeed’s unstarlike attitude to ‘underlings’. I hadn’t been so convinced. I knew a thing or two about women who were legends. I knew how desperately they wanted to be treated as though they weren’t legends—but only by people whom they deemed worthy of such impertinence. I was worthy, in Shehnaz Saeed’s eyes. It didn’t matter that we’d never met.
    Despite the twentysomething’s entreaties, I hadn’t opened the envelope; doing so seemed to constitute an agreement—to
something
—so I’d kept curiosity at bay all these hours.
    But now I prised open the flap and pulled out the contents—a piece of paper, neatly folded up, with a yellow post-it note stuck on top. I peeled off the note and read: ‘I would love to meet you. Please call me. In the meantime, does the enclosed bit of writing mean anything to you?—Shehnaz.’
    I unfolded the paper, laid it on the table, and smoothed the creases with the palm of my hand. An unintelligible series of letters, beautifully calligraphed, filled the top of the page.
    Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.
    That was the first line. The rest of the writing didn’t make any more sense.
    Why would someone I had never met put this in a box and imagine it might mean something to me?
    I looked at the page one more time, then pushed it aside. Some foreign language, no doubt. Live in a port city all your life and you get used to finding pieces of paper with indecipherable scripts formed into paper cones for roasted pine-nuts, or just drifting along on the breeze in empty lots used as garbage dumps. Did Shehnaz Saeed think I was a linguist?
    I walked away from the page, and was all the way to my bedroom before dormant neurons in my brain fired themselves awake.
    My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark
.
    I turned. My feet were heavy lifting themselves off the bare floor and my body sluggish in response.
    I reached the paper, lifted it up.
    Ijc Anonkoh efac fyfno ikrfb.
    The letters stepped out of their disguises—haltingly at first, but then all in a rush and swirl of abandon—and transformed into words:
    The Minions came again today.

IV
    The edge of the low table bit into my skin, just inches below my elbow. I raised my arm, and looked at the diagonal indentation. Close up and out of context, this groove running through a square of skin could as easily be a dried river-bed in a desert as a thread of sap on the vein of a