Such behaviour seemed tolerated; a form of ‘cruel to be kind’, so Madeeha and people like her could assimilate into a British way of life faster. It would be good for her. Why else bother arriving in a country if it weren’t to embrace all of it? Every part of it. Did that include the suspicion too, she wondered. No matter. She had heard it all before: your people are terrorists, you fuck Bin Laden, go home, paki, go home. For only that week a man on the 135 had looked at her and in a sing-song voice chanted, ‘Kill them all. Kill them all. I don’t give a fuck, kill them all.’
‘Are we all responsible?’ she had asked her husband. ‘All billion of us? Is it my fault there’s terror in this world? Did Muslims introduce terror to these people, like they had never acted in it before? Is it my fault, or is it yours?’ For once something was not her husband’s fault. And had he chosen to answer her he would have pointed it out with pleasure. But he hadn’t responded. What could he say? This man who had worked in a butcher’s for 18 years, who had missed family weddings and funerals, unable to pay for a flight, who now remembered more of Poplar than where he had once been born.
‘They want us to apologise,’ he said eventually, words mumbled between mouthfuls of bread.
‘For what? Did I orchestrate the killings? Or think they are good? Innocent until proven guilty. Unless you are Muslim and they forget which order the saying goes.’
With bags of shopping in her hands, Madeeha was guilty until proven innocent: she hated British people and cheered the deaths of western journalists and soldiers. She had information on future acts of terror and could conceal a weapon beneath her garments. Truth was irrelevant, even proof wasn’t required. This backwards, barbaric society she belonged to, for didn’t they treat their women appallingly? And yet the man in the grey suit gripped the back of her arm.
‘Don’t.’ she said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Please don’t.’
The man with the tie grabbed his belt buckle and she pushed the thought away. ‘Please.’
‘Why you even here? Terrorist bitch,’ he shook her arm. The carrier bag split wider, a lemon fell from it and rolled into the road, ‘fuck off back home and stop killing us.’
Us. She had heard this word so much. ‘Us’ did not come alone. ‘Us’ was paired with ‘They’. They are uncivilised. They are brutal. They are savage. ‘They’ had accomplices: ‘Them’ and ‘Those’. What did I tell you about those people? You know you can’t trust them. This wasn’t racism. No, it was self-preservation. No one was going to die because political correctness had spiralled into madness and if that meant hurting someone’s feelings in order to be vigilant at an airport, or train station, supermarket, or road, then so be it.
‘Please.’
The open palm pushed into her back. She caught her breath, the bags dropped spinning into traffic. On her knees she felt the grit rub against her skin. It stung. ‘Fuck jihad. Islam is a cancer.’
Brown Oxford shoes stepped past, heels clicked against pavement, hands in pockets that searched for warmth.
Madeeha collected what she could: fruit, butter, meat that hadn’t travelled far. She walked slowly. Yes, she was fine she insisted to passersby. She closed her front door and locked it. Spent a moment longer than she was used to with her back against it. Shireen was home. Music on, her daughter’s voice became louder as she sang along. ‘Mum? Is that you?’ Us and Them. She thought on these words. Her daughter was both, but that wouldn’t matter to them. That word again. Us and Them. Peace and Terror. Right and Wrong. Questions philosophers had centuries over been unable to answer and yet now everyone seemed to be so sure they knew. ‘I am sorry.’ She said these words into the house. Allowed them to find corners of cabinets to rest on; the photo frames; let them slow a moment over the cushions and the toaster and the rug. I am sorry. I am sorry for keeping you here. I am sorry you are not safe. ‘Mu-uuum?’ This is what it was to be afraid. ‘I’m coming, my child.’
Aliyah Hasinah Holder
Sentence
Sentence
Chapter 1 – Mother
We lost you,
to roundabouts of social expectations
broken window experiments
and racist qualifications.
Lost you to fixed cycles. Rinsing at 90.
Thought you had to earn your stripes,
fit the mould of mass production,
bar-coded & branded.
Our sons checked in and out of our communities
like British weather.
An assimilation assembly line.
We lost you,
while we worked day and night
like stand upright,
don’t argue. Don’t fight.
Like eat the materialism you’re fed, but avoid possession cuz
it’ll offend
like black policemen get pulled over too
and we lost pieces of them to truncheons and boots.
Chapter 2 – Childhood friend
We’re here again,
Hesitating by solid gates saying ‘it don’t matter it was gonna happen anyway’
Men cling to confines mentally
women manhandled into the cells of their chromosomal
prophecy –
because diagnosis never leads to rehabilitation properly.
The 44% penned up before prescriptive security
We watched
like profit wouldn’t make bricks of our backs again,
like please allow the Americanisation,
like do you really think the arrow has changed direction?
Chapter 3 – Pause
It’s as if we live life in blindfolds gliding on paths towards man-made destruction.
Gave us the dream pre-packaged in violence
allowed us to commodify our self-hate in words and creams
let it manifest surrounded by broken windows, empty plates & superficial dreams.
Cracked systems, gauzed in supremacy, served us 38% more
JSA slips
and told us the issue was immigrants.
Chapter 4 – Girlfriend
And we lost you
to false masculinity fried into our plantain
we watched our black boys fly
only to have their feathers falter in a chemtrailed sky.
We lost love.
Somewhere between the failed GCSEs that were never
constructed with you in mind
and the arduous penalties for these petty crimes...
We lost you in legal fees and media perversion.
The lawyer assured us that justice would prevail
said bar the racial disparity
bar the profitable complexities
bar the background, the history, the psychology.
But we lost
gradually.
Chapter 5 – Inside
It was pennies for the pudding served on this tray.
But it was loaded cheques from Tony’s Exchequer that made
G4S pay.
Now we see factories of punishment commodifying these black lives.
Kept quiet. This hidden strife.
You don’t change people through power.
You cannot beat obedience into our tired flesh.
Faux masculinity beating your chest, is the system flawed?
Is it Rehabilitative or Morally inept?
Chapter 6 – Sister
... there are 25 more stories balancing duty with expectation
in his corridor.
They grew to men too early
grasping juice cartons and part-time jobs.
Said our mum deserved better,
he’d shower her with precious rocks.
We rolled dice in summer’s height once before,
we tried to fry eggs on Winson Green’s tarmac floors,
scrambling it with plastic forks.
We lost brothers who traded innocence for scores.
Extended Edition. First commissioned by Channel 4 Ra
ndom Acts.
New Blood
It’s almost lunchtime, year 8 and I’m the new kid. All fresh off the hanger Blazer and pristinely oversised jumper. This one classroom holds the whole year and needs more maintenance than a crack whore. The roof is crying flakes of paint again. It smells of bubblegum lipgloss, PE kits, Impulse Musk and warm packed lunches.
Girls in sandpaper headscarfs sing out of tune.
Taylor Swift, our new Ustadha. She’s teaching overactive hormones about love, the classist kind, in Restoration dresses with white boys who can only be described as wet. Every word out of tune makes our hearts feel a little more homeless.
Zaynah’s chipping varnish off her nails again to avoid detention, its remnants under her nails taste of Palestine. Taste of dates, blood, rubble and hope. We dance in the corner, long skirts and scarves covering the bodies we’ve yet to discover. Hurriedly taped traffic cones stand guard by our sides, patronising in their warning to avoid the ceiling’s depression. Buckets lap up the roof’s disapproval. The music fluctuates.
We tap the volume on our phones to make sure Ustadha Saeda can’t hear. She sent Latifah to scrub sin from her fingertips and temptation from her lashes. The books in her office threaten multiple lashes. She never hits us though. Muslims don’t hit one another. We all wear transparent mascara now, think we’ve found routes to avoid uniform inspections. Our silent and invisible rebellion, our little slice of St Trinian’s … And the twins are eating fried onion sandwiches at the back of the room again. Telling us it’s haram to comment on food.
Dancing. Haram – only allowed on eid, weddings and special occasions.
Music. Haram – especially Taylor Swift.
Hair peeking through headscarf because of dancing and listening to music – definitely haram.
Then the popular girl, with her Taylor Swift CD and every teen Vogue copy, comments on how our dreams are the cuttings of glossed sheets. Says that the chips of our identity are new clothes and make up. She whips out notes in the canteen, she’s an only child, apparently. Fiddles with silver strung wrist candy and waits for a full plate.
We were all Tyseley locomotive and floor-length black skirt. We were Paul’s Boutique bags. We were weak chains of narration. We were condoms full of her dowry thrown by park trees before iftar. We were minds manufacturing A*s.
I was a third of the Caribbean plate in the year. Simran said I could call her a ‘Paki’ if I let her call me ‘her Nigger’.
I did not.
We became brandy bottles staining warped window sills. We internalised the vitrole of vengeance, the direct path to Winson Green’s private grimace, the broken feet of economics, the multi-lingual pots of bleach and caste. Wanting to trade slurs for street cred. We internalised it all. Prayed that all we’d fundraised, all the zakat we’d given, wasn’t for posh desks and charity execs in the City – whose unsustainably shit models echoed the seats we sat in from 8am-4pm.
Too close to home. But our footsteps will testify. Walking home, I pass pussies pissing puddles on dead wasps. My security in the bullet holes of Aston’s walls. Lost lottery tickets and crushed KA cartons made sure I remembered the route.
Mama made sure we were shipped out of the hood for school whilst Dad paid £6,000 a year to guarantee it. But we don’t talk about how we can’t afford it.
Latifah got caught smoking in the schoolyard again. Says she hopes Allah, but mainly the headmaster, will forgive her. In science I got a B+ for being a cheese sandwich. The journey down the trachea was the most eventful.
At least our history lessons make sense. Iraq War. Oil. Saddam. Hide. Al-Qaeda. Oil. Never sympathise in the exam. It’s almost hometime, year 8 and I’m still the new kid.
This jumper keeps getting itchier.
Commissioned by Ten Letters theatre production.
Kamila Shamsie
The Girl Next Door
Noor was always the first to arrive.
The private guards at the gate waved her in without asking to see her security pass, and inside the main compound the young guard at the car-barrier - a long pole, lifted and lowered by means of a rope - pretended he was about to release the barrier to send it flying up between her legs as she stepped over it. She didn’t mind, but the henna-bearded ‘controller of drivers’ looked up from the clipboard on which he was making complex charts of his drivers’ schedules for the day and barked out a reprimand to the young guard. Noor liked the controller for never commenting on the obvious insincerity of her objection to the oft-repeated show of cheekiness. He was both the oldest and the most pious among the guards and drivers; his attitude acted as deterrent to any remarks from the others accusing her of immodesty.
The guard at the front door propped his rifle against the wall as he saw her approach, and extracted his keychain from his pocket, his fingers rather than his eyes allowing him to isolate the correct key – with large, wide-gapped teeth – in the pre-dawn gloom. That particular morning she was feeling bolder than usual, so she picked up his Kalashnikov by the barrel and swung it like a pendulum for a moment or two, until the weight of it made her drop it with an ‘Uff!’
‘A cotton bud has more strength’ the guard laughed, holding the door open for her.
She knew she would go home and tell her sisters that the Pathan guard with the green eyes had called her ‘cotton bud.’ How they’d shriek!
Noor switched on lights as she made her way from the reception room through the open plan newsroom where dozens of sleeping computers hummed, and into the makeup studio. Her domain. Every other part of this two-yearold office was glass and chrome and shininess, but in this windowless cubbyhole there was another atmosphere - not of newness and technology, but of yearning. They all came through here, all Kyoon TV’s guests and regulars - politicians, newscasters, comedians, cricketers, chefs, journalists, lawyers, maulanas, actresses, models, singers, artists, CEOs, VJs, everyone who was anyone, wannabes and coulda-beens, retired this and re-instated that. And in the end, whatever their different talents and opinions, they all wanted the same thing: to hide their blemishes from the world. That was where the yearning came from - it wasn’t that they yearned to be liked or admired; they knew from the start that a portion of the viewers would automatically take against them based on whether they appeared ‘too fundo’ or ‘too western’, ‘pro-army’ or ‘pro-sleazy-politicians’, ‘naive’ or ‘conspiracy-theorist’, ‘typical Muhajir’ or ‘typical Punjabi’. . . no, likability was not an option. But looking better on television than in real life, beaming out an image of themselves to the world which was preferable to the image which stared back at them from the mirror at the start and end of every day – that path remained.
And who did they rely on to put them on that path? Her – Noor, the girl with nothing more than a matric pass, though both her sisters were nurses at the grandest of Karachi’s hospitals, the one where all the out-of-power politicians convicted of corruption went into private wards with airconditioners when their doctors insisted they were too unwell to be kept in prison and had to be moved to a medical facility. Such celebrations went on inside those rooms, at all hours! -giant vats of biryani arriving daily to feed the party-faithful who stretched visiting hours in this direction and that. And one of her sisters had once been offered an entire month’s payment if she would just lend her nurse’s uniform and pass for one night to a woman who was obviously that sort. Though her sister was quick to add, she wasn’t a cheap version of that sort but a very high-class one, and she’d chosen Noor’s sister because she said the photograph on the i.d looked similar to her without make-up. Of course, her sister said, she hadn’t taken the money – but she never explained how she was able to buy the new flatscreen TV for the family the following month.
Noor filled the electric kettle with mineral water – at home boiled water would do, but here only one brand of mineral water was acceptable – and went about the rest of her morning routine: switching on the lights which framed the mirrors above the two make-up tables,
unlocking the drawer which contained her large cosmetics-case and hairbrushes, pulling out the strands of hair caught in the bristles and rolling them into a ball which she dropped into the trash can (really just an empty tin of cooking oil), switching on the wall-mounted television to MTV Pakistan, and finally settling down on one of the two cracked-vinyl swivel chairs with her cup of tea (with tea bag left inside to steep, so that by the final sips it would have reached optimum strength).
This was the best half hour of the day. Watching music videos, sipping hot tea, and anticipating which celebrities might come through the door that day. Most of all, it was the quiet she enjoyed. No eyes on her, no one looking and judging, no need to appear this way or that way. But by the time 5.30am came round, and she heard the sound of footsteps walking towards the make-up room, she was almost always ready to return to her true self, which was a creature of bustle over silence.
Some days were better than others. One day it could be all handsome actors and cricketers and a fashion designer commenting on the diamond-cut of her sleeves - and the next day nothing but newsreaders who had just left their villages two months ago and were now complaining about their blowdries, followed by sudden pile-ups of six people who all needed to be made up in the next five minutes.
Today was middling all through the morning. But near 3pm when she thought the only thing standing between her and the end of her shift was one of her untroublesome regulars the door opened and Miss London-Return walked in.
She hadn’t always been Miss London-Return. When Noor was growing up she was just Bina and lived in the same block of flats as Noor – but while Noor’s family’s flat looked onto the garden Bina’s family’s flat looked onto the empty plot of land which was used as a rubbish dump. But then one day Bina announced her family was moving to London where all her uncles and cousins were already living so that her parents could help out with the family business. Family business? They were all dhobis, washing underwear for the English who only used paper and not water when cleaning themselves. Everyone in the block of flats – even those like Noor who hadn’t been born at the time – knew that when Bina’s uncles had first started their ‘laundrette’ in London Bina’s father had proudly borrowed a VCR from one of his officer workers and set up a television in the window of the ground floor flat so that everyone could gather in the garden and watch a movie about Pakistanis going to London and prospering in the same business. To this day no one had told Bina exactly what the movie was all about but every so often the older ones in the building would mention it and everyone would say ’Tauba tauba’, and touch their ears but they’d also start laughing immediately afterwards.
The Things I Would Tell You Page 4