Read Online Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie - Free Book Online

it.’
    Extraordinary, that someone who’d grown up in Pakistan could say a thing like that, utterly straight-faced, as though history hadn’t been breathing down our necks all our lives. You weren’t looking, that was all, I wanted to tell him. When history seemed to touch your life less obviously, when it happened somewhere out of sight, when seeds were being sown and there was time yet for things to work out differently, you weren’t looking. When my mother warned you, you weren’t listening.
    He would hardly have been more than a boy when she left, I had to remind myself. He wasn’t responsible for making her words worthless.
    â€˜It wasn’t anything specific that made me decide to leave,’ he continued, rinsing out his coffee-mug. He was too involved in his own story to see I wasn’t keeping pace with him any more. ‘It was just everything, everything over the last year.’ He wiped his hands on his sleeves, dragging his fingers across the blue cotton and leaving wet imprints that looked like the shadows of elongated fingers clutching at his arms. And then he started off. The INS. Guantanamo Bay. The unrandom random security check in airports. The visit from the FBI.
    â€˜Look, you don’t have to do this.’ I cut him off just as he finished saying ‘The Patriot Act’. ‘It’s OK to tell me you were laid off.’ It was the ‘it wasn’t anything specific’ line that gave him away. It was always something specific; there was always that precise moment when you felt everything inside you break.
    The anger on his face then was of a particularly male variety, one passed through the generations, which must have had its origin the first time a cavewoman told a caveman she knew the reason he was vegetarian was his inability to use a spear.
    â€˜I was laid off because I’m Muslim.’
    There was something in his tone that said, ‘You can’t possibly be expected to understand anything outside your little world,’ and it was that, more than the unjustified nature of his anger, that made me react as I did. In my most condescending tone I said, ‘Yes, it is comforting to blame our failures on the bigotry of others, isn’t it?’
So you gave up your Eggs Scandinave, whatever they might be, and moved back into the cushy life of the Karachi elite. And you think this is being caught up in history?
    For a moment his entire face changed, something hard and cold settling on it, and then he was smiling and leaning back on one elbow, saying, ‘Are you always this unpleasant in the morning or is it just the instant coffee? Will our relationship undergo a remarkable upswing if we meet around a percolator from now on? I’m prepared to carry one on my person at all times when you’re in the vicinity.’
    There was an instant in which I thought he knew in practice what I only understood in theory: the falseness of character, the malleability of it. With that knowledge he could step from light to dark, from joker to knave in a heartbeat. But then I understood he was only playing with masks. Screwball comic hero, devoted son, angry young man, condescending jerk. ‘Will the real Eddy please stand up?’
    He pulled himself upright, and stepped closer to me. ‘He will, if you will.’
    â€˜We’re back to that again, are we? Look, you’re not entitled to get to know me. OK? That’s not a right you have which I’m depriving you of. That’s not how it works down here on Planet Earth.’
    â€˜You’re the one who just said you want to know me.’
    â€˜No, I didn’t. I said I want you to stop being Mr Creepy-Many-Personalities.’
    â€˜Look, I’m sorry.’ He seemed anything but sorry. ‘I know I’m not entitled to anything. But we have this connection, you know, and it’s stupid to just ignore it.’
    â€˜What connection?’
    He lifted up the