Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie

Author:Kamila Shamsie
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2000-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The next morning, reclining on the sofa in Mariam Apa’s old room, I thought that the only thing shocking about the Starched Aunts’ version of Mariam’s life was that it took them four years to come up with it. Still, after four years you’d expect them to do better than the psychobabble of ‘she imagined she was the one choosing to leave and he was the one writing the letter’. Not to mention ‘she knew if she developed one eccentric trait it would shield her’. Honestly. That made about as much sense as the theory my cousin, Usman, had propounded when he was little more than a toddler: ‘Maybe she doesn’t know any words that aren’t about food.’

It wasn’t just toddlers, of course. Virtually everyone in the family had a favourite theory about Mariam’s silence, long before she became our official black sheep. My father’s theory was among the most succinct. ‘She’s taking the notion of a woman’s traditional role a little too literally,’ he had said after one of his attempts to get her to talk about her early life. Mariam Apa had smiled and walked towards the kitchen, from where I heard ‘biryani’ just before the door swung closed.

But my mother had laughed at my father’s explanation, and reminded me of Mariam Apa’s encounter with Dr Tahir.

I was very young when that happened. It was winter, and Karachi’s social elite were feverishly getting married and throwing parties before the hot weather and riots and curfew returned and impeded social activity. (Mariam Apa was, incidentally, extremely popular in the social milieu, praised for being discreet, a good listener and never interrupting anyone’s flow of loquaciousness.)

My parents and Mariam Apa were at a party, the last of their social stops for the evening. Mariam Apa was draped in a sari that was covered in intricate sequinned designs. As she and my mother wandered to the buffet table, a liveried bearer tripped on the uneven ground and sent a dozen glasses of pomegranate juice crashing to the floor, splattering Mariam Apa’s sari with red blots.

‘Oh, too bad,’ a male voice exclaimed, and she turned to see Dr Tahir – the man infamous for diagnosing mosquito bites as measles bumps – standing behind her. ‘Well, you’ll never wear that again,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s the problem with these fancy sequinned clothes. Can’t wash them. I always say that if you want proof that men are more practical than women you should go compare their clothes.’

Mariam Apa did not sleep that night. She sat in the TV room and unstitched every single sequin in the area around the stained section of the sari. When I woke up to get ready for school she was in the bathroom handwashing the sari. And when I returned home that afternoon she had just finished stitching back every sequin in its original place. That night she did the unthinkable and rewore the sari to a dinner where she knew she would see Dr Tahir.

‘So you see,’

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