The Cloud Messenger E-Book

Aamer Hussein

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 178

Beschreibung

"A thing of beauty. . . . You must read it."—Nadeem Aslam "A shower of pleasures."—Julia O'Faolain "Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and seductive, the novel engages mind and senses alike."—André Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary Supplement Like his parents, he too spent many hours sending cloud messages to other places, messages of longing for something that he knew existed otherwhere. London, that distant rainy place his father lived in once, is where Mehran finds himself after leaving Karachi in his teens. And it is there that his adult life unfolds: he discovers the joys of poetry, faces the trials of love and work, and spends his dreaming hours "sending cloud messages to other places," hoping, one day, to tell his own story. A feeling of not quite belonging anywhere pursues Mehran as he travels to Italy, India, and Pakistan. But the relationships he forms—with wounded, passionate Marvi, volatile Marco, and the enigmatic Riccarda—and his power of recollection finally bring him some sense, however fleeting, of home. Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and moved to London in his teens. He lectures at the University of Southampton and the Institute of English Studies and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His novella Another Gulmohar Tree was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Europe and South Asia 2010.

Leseprobe

The Cloud Messenger

Aamer Hussein

TELEGRAM

eISBN: 978-1-84659-103-7

Copyright © Aamer Hussein 2011

This E-book edition published in 2011 by Telegram

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

1   A Flute Died

2   Rain Songs

3   A Painted Happiness

4   Love Poison

5   Dye my Scarf Green

6   Berries and Fruits of the Land

My beloved puts on a garment of clouds today …

From the Sur Sarang (Rain Song)of Shah Abdul Latif

I

A Flute Died

I heard two gulls cry at dawn today.

Why do they come to town in summer, so far from their body of water? I asked you that day when they circled over our heads as we drank coffee on the cobbled pavement by the canal. Remember? It’s a sign of coming rain, you said. They fly inland when it rains. But only a few days later somebody told me they weren’t seabirds at all: just scavengers that visited cities in search of refuse from dustbins.

The day I heard the gulls cry my friend broke her flute in the place that once was rainless. The flute had been her companion, her voice when she couldn’t speak. The flute had travelled with her across two oceans. For hours she tried to fix it, but she’d forgotten how. She wept for a day. It had rained all day and night for a week before the flute died, and often there was no light.

The cut-off flute laments and the wounded woman wails, Latif of Bhit said. That one remembers being one with the tree, this one longs for her beloved.

One day, when we loved each other, you said a falcon flew out of a book and perched on your shoulder. You couldn’t keep her. You let her fly away. The perfect falcon from a poem by Rumi.

In the rainless place, the clouds before sunset took on the shapes of birds. Remembering them now, I can see the falcons. The flight of swans. And the gulls.

When my friend mourned her flute I told her how, just a few weeks before, I’d complained to you about a recalcitrant and loving heart. It’s a wild, wild dog that feeds on us from the inside, I’d said: it won’t be tamed.

My friend said: Sometimes I feel you write my words. As if you’ve stolen them from me.

That afternoon, sitting again on that cobbled pavement by the canal, I asked a poet if he would call the heart a beast or a falcon.

The swan dives into limpid water to seek pearls. Cranes and gulls are content with dirty water. Latif says, look just once at the swans: you’ll never be friends again with the cranes.

Why did your perfect falcon fly? Why is my shoulder empty?

The rain came down hard. We took shelter under a tree.

My friend said, I want you to write a story that’s rain-coloured: rain-grey, rain-blue.

You walk away in the rain. You say someone is waiting. I won’t call out your name. Won’t see you turn, look back. They say you shouldn’t stop someone who’s leaving. And never call out to them from behind.

When my friend’s flute died she laid it to rest in its black silk case but didn’t bury it. It gave you its voice, I told her. The clouds carried my messages to her, from the city of my present to the place where her flute died.

As grass and straw, being cut, complain, Latif says, suddenly comes the beloved’s sigh of pain.

I want to write my story. With the sound of the rain in it. The sound of rain on leaves and grass. And the flute’s lament.

My friend said: Sometimes I feel you write my words. As if you stole them from me. Or you took them from the sea or the city of our birth.

And I tell you then: The heart’s a bird. Or a cloud in the shape of a bird. An unwritten letter in its cry. It’s not a perfect falcon. Nor even a swan diving for pearls. No. It’s a gull, in search of sustenance. Or rain.

II

Rain Songs

What is a cloud, after all, but smoke, air and water?

What are my messages, to be silenced by the vanity of sending them by cloud?

I am a passionate lover, eager to reach my beloved.

From the Meghaduta of Kalidasa

1

Father and daughter shared memories of a distant place they had lived in once. They would talk for hours about Hyde Park and Stanmore, Selfridges, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men and Noddy, crumpets and strawberries with cream. It was, to Mehran and his younger sister Sara, insufferably exotic (though they didn’t know the word yet). At the same time, Mehran and Sara felt excluded by their tales, and even provincial. Mehran was the second child, the only boy in a family of three. They lived in Karachi, a hot city, where they ate oranges, bananas, mangoes, papaya and custard apples, knew only the desert and the sea, couldn’t imagine what strawberries or crumpets tasted like; milk and cream made them sick. And if their mother decided to join her husband and her oldest daughter Sabah in remembering that winter day when she would walk on a pond sheathed in thin ice and fallen in, Mehran would feel even more excluded. Since his only picture of snow was what he saw on Christmas cards, in a place that hardly knew rain, snow was as strange to him as chimneys and Santa Claus.

Mehran’s father received the gauzy sheets of The Times every two or three days, and he would discuss ballets and pantomimes with Sabah: one of their most vivid recollections was of being taken to see Russian dancers perform Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House. (For Mehran, entertainment, in those times without television, meant films, puppet shows, amateur dramatics, fancy dress parties and fairs.) Father also had letters from abroad with pictures of the queen on their stamps.

They saw the queen in 1960. She wore a yellow-petalled hat and waved to hundreds of bystanders from a car. Sabah was taken to meet her; Sara and Mehran weren’t, too little as they were at four and five.

‘Does she rule over us, then?’ Mehran wanted to know.

‘No,’ his mother said.

‘Why’, he asked, ‘do we call her a queen?’

‘She’s the Queen of England,’ he was told.

Was England in London? Was London in Pakistan, or in India? Mehran knew India was far away, because getting there required a drive to the airport, a wait in a lounge, a trip on a noisy plane, and a long, long drive into town once they reached Bombay.

‘No, it isn’t, it’s much further than India, very far away.’

On that, at least, they could agree.

In England, Mehran’s mother had been asked if she was a princess (which she was, in a way, though she didn’t like to be called that) or a movie star. (One day, she came across Louis Jourdan shooting for a film with Leslie Caron. She asked them for an autograph; they took out their pens and asked for hers.) At home, she seemed quite normal, though she was different from most people’s mothers. People often gasped at her beauty when they saw her; she sang very well, and frequently drove her little car up one-way streets.

Sabah had every Enid Blyton book that had ever been published, and inevitably Mehran read them as he made the transition from picture books to more grown-up tales of adventure. But though he couldn’t understand the food they talked about – marmite and potted shrimps – the Famous Five and their picnics seemed very adventurous in comparison with the sedate family outings he knew, where adults and children drove off together to the seaside or some green place. The thrill of the Five’s midnight feasts was something he couldn’t replicate, as getting up to raid the fridge after midnight seemed an exceedingly tame act when the fridge was stocked especially for the children with apples and pears, and chocolate and cheese, and some hapless servant might rise and rush to ask Mehran and Sara what they needed, thinking they had been underfed at dinner.

Reading about England made Mehran no more curious than he was about China or Estonia. (The first foreign city he visited, at Christmas, when he was nearly eleven, was Rome, which he had wanted to see: when the chance came at the end of that Italian trip to visit London or Beirut, he preferred to go to Beirut because it was on the way home and he had heard London was freezing.) But Andersen and the Brothers Grimm and the narratives in the Old Testament and the Qur’an he loved, up to and beyond graduating to The Iliad, The Odyssey and the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Without knowing the word, Mehran knew when he was about five that his father was a permanent expatriate. Born in Karachi, Mehran’s father had grown up in many other places. As a teenager he had been sent off alone in a ship to England, where he studied for several years until, in 1939, his own father’s anxieties about the war took him away. He had, when independence diminished his family’s lands and fortunes, become the director of a company that sold many fine varieties of rice to Middle Eastern countries, and other commodities to other places. He travelled so frequently that the family joke was to define his destinations by days of the week: Monday was Beirut, and Sunday – the day of rest – was, of course, reserved for London, which remained his favourite holiday destination. And though he was very much a part of Karachi – it was hard to imagine the city without him – when he was with them he was always dreaming of other places.

Mehran’s mother was more immersed in the life of her husband’s native city than he ever seemed to be. Apart from getting the children to school on time, often driving or collecting them herself, then overseeing their homework, there were charities, art exhibitions, fashion shows, diplomatic receptions and concerts. At home, the music lessons twice a week, or the occasional article she was bullied into writing by hand, and dictating over the phone, by an aunt or some importunate friend who worked for Dawn or The Morning News, kept her busy from morning till, at times, after midnight. Then there were the huge family gatherings they hosted occasionally on Sundays, when Mehran’s uncles and aunts and their offspring turned up for enormous meals.

Their mother’s expatriation was of another sort. Mehran knew she had moved here as a bride in 1948, from Indore, her birthplace, and gone with his father and Sabah, their infant daughter, to London, two years after; back in Karachi a couple of years before Mehran was born, she had made every effort to recreate, in her gardens, a semblance of the landscape she had left behind in Indore. Mehran had an early memory of the first house they moved to in the late fifties: a truck arriving to plant grass in the barren yard. He could have been inventing it, but he was sure his parents had chosen the house because it was on a hill full of hedges and wild flowering bushes, with soil more fertile than the sand and rock that seemed to make up most of Karachi. And when he said, one day, that he remembered the garden growing green and grassy overnight, his father laughed. (‘You weren’t far from wrong,’ his mother told him many years later. ‘The grass was imported from New Zealand; it was the fast-growing kind.’)

Try as she might, their mother’s Karachi gardens could only create illusions of her native place: the air and the water were different. She had grown up in a region where vegetation was lush, trees very tall, and there were wells and running water at every corner. The gardens she made combined natural resources – bougainvillea, cacti, frangipani, guava – with imported orchids and roses. The search for home was a question of green motifs: grassy beds and shadowy places. When Mehran was six she moved them higher up the hill, to a house where another expatriate had made a garden with terraces, arbours and bowers, and almonds and stunted orange trees in great coral-coloured pots, which probably evoked the greener places she’d left behind.

Mehran’s mother was a singer who never made her art into a profession, though she sang for large gatherings of acquaintances and dignitaries. Her teacher, a maestro of the Delhi school, taught her haunting ragas which the children learned from her without great effort as she rehearsed her difficult melodic ornamentations. Some of her songs were poems she had set to music herself; poems by Faiz or Ghalib, or the heart-wrenching lyrics of separation Rani Roopmati had sung for her husband, Baz Bahadur. Other songs were about the rain, as were her stories. She would tell them of the exiled man who asked a cloud to carry messages to his beloved in the city he had left behind, describing the route and the cities over which the cloud would travel. And in Mehran’s mind, those cities were always in his mother’s native Malwa.

Under the almond tree, playing the tanpura, she would sing the words of Amir Khusro, the Songbird of Delhi, words that seemed to echo Kalidasa from another, later age:

Abr o baran o man o yar satadah ba vida

Man juda girya konam abr juda yar juda

Sabza naukhez o gul o bostan sar sabz

Bul bul e ru-e-siyah manda be gulzar juda

The cloud and the rain and my friend and I about to say goodbye,

I weep apart, my friend apart, the cloud apart, The verdant grass, the rose in bloom, the garden green.

The dark-faced nightingale from the flower apart.

And in that garden, by another tree – a frangipani – Sara and Mehran read The Lady of the Lotus, a big and beautifully bound blue volume illustrated with miniatures in delicate colours, which told the story of Roopmati, who poisoned herself for love of Baz Bahadur when predatory Adham Khan came to claim her favours. Set in Mandu, only a few miles away from their mother’s native place, it reminded them of Indore and the rainy season.

Sabah, with all the English ways she had acquired as a little girl in the London she had loved, reached her teens in the new house in 1962, and studied in the international milieu of the Convent of Jesus and Mary, where Sara and Mehran were later sent at the ages of seven and eight. Two or three times a year Sabah would have parties in the garden, to which all her school friends, foreign or local, came dressed and made up like Hollywood actresses, and danced till their cars came to take them home at the Cinderella hour. These girls inhabited some private city within the city, their own particular teenage fairground.

But to Mehran’s mother the topography of sandy, stony Karachi, with its tall palm trees and stunted cacti, felt foreign. And all her children longed for rain as if they were born into intimacy with the rainy season, though they had grown up in this place where the rain was so rare: many of their games involved sprinklers, fountains, tubs and ponds to create illusions of the monsoon.

Of her three children, Mehran at least inherited something of her estrangement from the city’s climate. Once when he was three or four there was a three-day downpour and the watermelon patch filled up like a pool, and they bathed with their mother in its tea-coloured water. It must have been May. Sometimes, though, on summer days when the heat was overpowering or dust storms forced the city to shut down for the space of an afternoon, or clouds promised rain for three days at a time and never delivered a drop, their mother would admit she was missing her childhood home. Then Mehran and his sisters would plead with her to make plans for their next journey.

2

It was rare for their mother to leave Karachi without her children in tow. She took them to places they could share with her: unlike London, these were cities Mehran knew well, the only otherwhere he had, and more exciting to him than unknown England or Enid Blyton. There was Bombay, that big, messy city which, like theirs, was by the sea, but in other ways was very different; it grew upwards, and was hemmed in by its waters, whereas in Karachi houses were houses, smallish and detached and enclosed in walled gardens, and the sea that bordered the city was miles and miles away from where they lived. In Bombay they could see the sea from every window in the house.

Mehran had cousins in Bombay, and friends. There were cinemas a few moments’ walk or drive away from where they stayed, and a club by a nearby beach. In Karachi they lived a half-hour’s drive away from the centre of town; getting to the cinema or the seaside was a long-haul plan, and there was only a little market, called the Nursery, a short walk away from them at the foot of the hill, where everything from marzipan cakes to paperback novels, sanitary towels to sticky toffees, and sharpeners with wiggly 3D figures on them could be had. There was an ice cream parlour called The Dew Drop Inn frequented by the more louche teenagers of the area in their skin-tight clothes, who were known as Teddies; Mehran and his sisters could only drop in if they were in adult company, otherwise they would have to send the driver in to buy them strawberry ice cream cones. No such strictures in Bombay, where cones could be had on every corner. It was as if they had strayed from a still and enclosed world into movement and expansion. Bombay people were louder and freer than they were, but also – at least in comparison with the privileged class – spoke less elegant English, watched Hollywood movies and listened to British pop (the Beatles, the Stones and Sandy Shaw were more in vogue with them in the mid-sixties than American singers) later than Mehran and his friends did; they were still wearing drainpipes when Mehran had migrated to flares.

His mother was always impatient to move on from Bombay to the place she missed most of all: Indore, her home town, which Mehran always mentioned last because it remained, to him, at least, if not to all of his siblings, the most important. There, the passage to another time was complete, but this, rather than calendar time, was the time of fiction, though Mehran only recognised this in his thirties when he became a voracious reader of classic Urdu novels. To them as children, it was a story that they were living rather than reading, but also writing to read later, as if it were a diary, when they were back at home.

Their grandparents’ two-storey house, with its red-tiled porch and terraced roof, and its inner courtyard which was the centre of much of their activity, stood in a vast garden of mango, guava and lime trees. There was a well by the outer wall, shadowed by the tallest tree Mehran had ever seen – a eucalyptus. (His mother remembered his grandmother strolling there, telling her beads by the jasmine bushes.)

Mehran’s grandfather, the patriarch, had his domain on the ground floor, which was at once drawing room, study and library, where books from east and west sat side by side: Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana next to Hawthorne, Fitzgerald’s Khayyam elbowing Plutarch and an Urdu translation of Firdausi. He also had a room upstairs, overlooking the garden, in which he spent time until an operation left him – that man who had walked several miles a day – unable to walk without great effort. His den was the central room in the front wing of the ground floor, which led into the garden.