Salt and Saffron

Kamila Shamsie

Salt and Saffron

For Victoria Hobbs and Alexandra Pringle

THE HOUSE OF DARD-E-DIL

(showing those characters who appear in this story)

*Great-Aunt One-Liner, Booby, Usman related to Aliya through this line

†Starched Aunts, Mousy Cousin, Bachelor Uncle related to Aliya through this line

~ ~ ~

All right, don’t scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.

Of course, reduce all stories to their basic elements and you’ll see all families are possessed of prejudice — that alternative name for ‘fear’. The only thing that makes us stand apart is our particular choice of … I want to say ‘bugaboo’. I often want to say ‘bugaboo’. It’s a word that demands to be said out loud, particularly among bilingual Pakistanis who recognize its resemblance to ‘baghal boo’ or ‘armpit odour’, but its meaning ‘object of baseless terror’ makes it misleading in this conversation. Nothing baseless in our terror; we have five hundred years of empirical evidence on which to base our fear of not-quite-twins. Ours has always been a scientific family, that way. So I suppose we are unusual. Because, though we are like all families in the almost religious fervour of our prejudices, all the other families we know can point to nothing but stereotype, ignorance and jealousy of their own privilege as a basis for those prejudices and, I’ll admit, our contrasting historicity has always made us feel superior.

One of my earliest memories is of Dadi cackling when she heard the news of Hussain Asif’s marriage to Natasha Shah. ‘Shia Muhajir marries Su

Confused? Would you rather I changed the topic to yak milk production?

Chapter One

Yak’s milk is green. But, of course, I never got round to telling my fellow passengers that choice tidbit. It takes more than a Nepalese ox to distract attention away from my family. And the occupant of the aisle seat across from me was so grateful for my high-volume chatter — which replaced the usual boredom and non-recycled air of the transatlantic economy-class cabin with murder, war, jealousy, and rapidly reversing fortune — that he pulled my luggage off the conveyor belt at Heathrow while I was still stuck in the immigration line, waiting for a turbaned Sikh who dropped his aitches to finish scrutinizing my Pakistani passport.

‘Here,’ aisle seat said in an American accent, when I finally zigzagged my way to the conveyor belt through luggage trolleys, unknown languages and a hysterical Nordic man who had just been informed that his baggage had been mysteriously rerouted to Nicaragua. ‘I figured this was yours. Any others?’

I wanted to say, Where are you from? You look Pakistani now that you’ve removed your baseball cap, though on the plane I assumed you were a ta

I smiled. ‘A good storyteller never tells.’

I walked a few steps away and then turned back. My body had just begun to register the feel of his arms around me. What would my grandmother say if she knew I’d been hugging strange men in airports? He was facing away from me, staring at the leather flaps at the end of the conveyor belt through which the luggage emerged, so I could continue to look at him and regret that I’d spent so much time on the plane chattering to anyone who cared to listen (two girls had even sat cross-legged in the aisle, listening to my stories until the flight attendant shooed them away and then hung around herself, a pot of coffee cooling in her hand). If I’d been a little less intent on entertaining everyone maybe I would have leant over the aisle and talked, actually talked, to him. He knew all my family stories — all, except the most important one — and I didn’t even know his name. I moved towards him, then felt absurd and walked away.

I stepped out into London. Filled my lungs with the 6 a.m. air of summer and slowly, in the lingering ma

‘Where are you coming from?’ the cabbie asked, after we had been driving in silence long enough for me to adjust the ‘cultural expectations’ knob in my brain from ‘America: chatty’ to ‘England: not’.

‘America,’ I replied.

‘But you’re not American,’ he said, in a tone which seemed to imply that I might not be aware of this fact.

‘No, I’m Pakistani.’

‘Ball tamperers,’ he muttered. Even if he was merely talking about the not-so-long-ago cricket controversy between our two countries, that wasn’t polite. I responded with silence. Not the kind of silence with which my cousin, Mariam, filled her days, but rather the silence of my grandmother, which was meant to inform those who received it of the lowliness of their stature. Dadi always accompanied those silences with an upward tilt of her head, as though she were posing for the head of a coin. Strange how, in remove, single gestures can be all that remain to us of people who once inhabited the daily tos-and-fros of our lives. In Massachusetts it was the memory of that tilted head which kept me from writing to Dadi. I suppose the tilt encapsulated for me the way Dadi behaved about Mariam Apa.

The cabbie pulled up to my St. John’s Wood destination — after what seemed an u