Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie Read Free Book Online Page B

twin, in political and aesthetic temperament. It’s a good thing he writes poetry because if he ever turned his hand to the novel he would write my books faster than I myself write them.’ Has fiction ever lured you?
A: I’m lured frequently and indiscriminately. But in my life allure is always fleeting. Well, always except twice. The first, the allure of poetry. The second I’m too gallant to mention. Or perhaps, also, too cowardly. Newly-wed husbands can be violent in their jealousies. But, to answer your question more directly, Rafael and I have often played games of diving into each other’s skin. I send him a fragment of a story in English, our mutual language, and in response he sends me a dramatic monologue, also in English. I tell him, that’s cheating. You’ve written me a short story with line breaks! Then he sends me a perfect couplet, and I’m filled with envy. Yes, yes, for Rafael I have written prose. And sometimes I just do it to restore suppleness to my wrist which is locked in place from agonizing for days over a single word of poetry. It’s interesting ... always English, my prose. I suppose it’s just habit now.
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    In all the interviews published during his lifetime, this is his sole reference to my mother as something other than his first reader and only editor. What had Mama felt when she first read it, just weeks into her marriage? And my father, how must he have reacted? That was easier to answer: with silent anger, directed less at the Poet’s continued feelings for my mother than at the publicizing of those feelings. Omi must have known that, of course. Must have known how much my father would have hated to have himself referred to in print, in a discussion of something so tawdry as jealousy.
    That might have been the moment you lost her, Dad.
    But I didn’t really believe it. That they had ever been together was not a mystery, just an aberration.
    Regardless. For today, the interview told me all I really needed to know. The Poet wrote prose. Sometimes for Rafael Gonzales and sometimes just as an exercise. So, those cryptic lines were nothing more than some old writing exercise of his, written in code.
    All that was out of my life now, and that at least was something for which I should be grateful. The need for codes and secrets, the conspiracies and cover-ups, the weightiness of History pressing down on people who insisted that it was their burden to bear though it showed nothing but disdain for them. All that was over. All that madness. All that life.
    I touched my fingers to the calligraphed words. ‘Omi.’
    I walked to the balcony, and leaned out into the smell of the waves.
    I am so young I count my age in quarter years. In my mother’s house, I turn circles in the master bedroom with arms spread wide. I turn circles and make it look like joy so the whole room joins in and turns with me. We are spinning, the room and I, turning into blurs. If we keep it up we’ll spin right out of this world into some Oz—we can spin ourselves into cyclonic speeds. But I hear voices coming up the stairs, and leaving isn’t so tempting any more, so I stop spinning. But the room doesn’t. I must grope my way to the bed to sit down, my hands clutching
on to the frame to make it stop. What urill my mother say if she enters to find her bed has gone to Oz? She walks in, the Poet behind her, and her face is instant concern
.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ she says. ‘Are you sick?’
    â€˜I’m diggy,’ I reply, trying to bring her face into focus. She looks as though she’s partway to Oz herself
.
    â€˜Giddy,’ says the Poet. ‘The word is “giddy”.’
    Everything has righted itself by now, the bed, my mother, the walls. It seems terrible to be wrong. So I say, ‘No, it’s diggy. That’s when you’re so giddy even the letters in giddy turn topsy-turvy.’ I can’t believe