Insomnia by Aamer Hussein

Author:Aamer Hussein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846591297
Publisher: Saqi

5

How could we know that summer day in ’86 that Armaan was dead? Aliza, though they’d been living apart for months, was in tears as she broke the news to us on the bad international line two days later. It was an accident, she said. Neither suicide nor an assassination (as some commentators implied). He was driving up a mountain path to Nathiagalli. A lorry drove his car off the road.

Some said he’d been drinking whiskey till late at a friend’s house with a group of writers and poets.

In a covering note to the manuscript that arrived he said that after a writing block he’d written seventeen new poems in as many days. Those were the exquisite prose pieces I later shaped into the bilingual volume Hibiscus Days, love poems to a single woman and to the maternal body and the children of an entire country, poems that bring something vital, sour-sweet with the flavour of street talk, to our literature. It’s a cult book. Strange that he wrote Hibiscus Days while he was breaking up with Aliza and producing those depressing verses about dying birds. Strange that Samar left me for a job in Canada while I was translating and shaping Hibiscus Days into a book. (‘Stay with me,’ he says, the night before Samar leaves Karachi: ‘I need you, don’t go back to London yet.’ Typically, he isn’t thinking about Aliza. He isn’t thinking about me. Samar didn’t talk to me about their days and nights together. I read his version in Hibiscus Days.)

Samar still works in Vancouver. (She didn’t come back, though I said I was prepared to forgive, if not forget.) Aliza, who never again left Karachi for more than nine months, runs an NGO, a feminist publishing company – she publishes art books, tracts and the occasional novel, rarely poetry. In spite of their rivalry, she brought out Samar’s second book. She never remarried. We’ve become close friends. We don’t talk about Samar and Armaan.

And me – I didn’t write the poems I wanted to. There are so many stories – about us all, and our hibiscus days – we have yet to tell. I spend most winters in Karachi. I’m done with what I have to say about the man who took away my dreams and my lover; he’s dead, she’s made another life. But I’m still translating and talking about the poet Armaan. Making a mission of keeping his words alive. And sometimes when I wake up in the morning I look in the mirror and I see, instead of my reflection, his face.

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