by Monica Ali
Karim and the Questioner stood for Chairman. It was close. Nine votes for the Questioner and ten for Karim. I have given him victory, thought Nazneen. She felt it a momentous thing. By raising her hand, or not raising it, she could alter the course of events, of affairs in the world of which she knew nothing.
The Questioner went to the front and got up on the stage. He shook Karim's hand with great energy, and they slapped each other on the back. Nazneen understood that they hated each other. Then he proposed himself as Treasurer and the position was quickly secured.
In the hall, the air vibrated to the tune of a meeting about to break up. Dozens of tiny adjustments, and the anticipation of a greater movement. The Secretary waved his pad. 'Wait. Wait. One more election. Spiritual Leader.' He jumped off the stage, dragged an old man from his seat and pushed him onto the platform. Nazneen saw that the old man was wearing flat, open-toe sandals with a white plastic flower on the heel strap: women's shoes. And she knew that the imam had only recently been imported. He kept wetting his lips and smiling. He had not the slightest idea what was going on. He was duly elected.
Karim came with his bundles of jeans and unlined dresses slung over his shoulder. He sat on the arm of the sofa and talked. When his phone rang he no longer took it out into the hallway. Sometimes he spoke into the phone about leaflets and print runs, meetings and donations. Sometimes his voice was soft and slid away from him, and he closed the phone and said briskly, 'Worry and nerves. That's what you get.'
He began to talk to her about the world. She encouraged him. 'Is it?' she said.
His knowledge shamed her. She learned about her Muslim brothers and sisters. She learned how many they were, how scattered, and how tortured. She discovered Bosnia. 'When that was?' she said. He could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen at the time. He shamed her. And he excited her.
In a place called Chechnya, there was at this time jihad. He read from his magazine. 'Allah willing – the Mujahideen will see you in the heart of your Mother Russia – not just Chechnya. Allah willing – we will inherit your land.' He held up the flimsy pages, offering her proof. 'It's a world-wide struggle, man. Everywhere they are trying to do us down. We have to fight back. It's time to fight back.'
Holding up the magazine with English words on the front, he said, 'Can you read this?'
She inclined her head, side to side. 'Amar ingreji poda oti shamanyo.' In English, I can read only a little bit.
He left Bengali newsletters for her. One was called The Light; another was simply titled Ummah. Chanu had never given her anything to read. And what good were his books anyway? All that ancient history.
She put the newsletters on the table for her husband to see. You are not the only one who knows things. But when she heard him coming she hid them. Those next few days reading became a sweet and melancholy secret, caressing the phrases with her eyes, feeling Karim floating there, just beyond the words.
One thing she could not grasp: the martyrs.
'But Allah does not allow it.'
'It's not suicide, yeah. It's war.'
She knew about Palestine. He told her, 'They go to the streets protesting a child has been killed. They go home carrying the body of another.'
It gave her pain. Now when she walked the anxious tightrope between the children and their father, when she was disquieted by her undisciplined mind or worried about her sister – now she felt the smallness of it all. So she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow, and she read in the night of occupiers and orphans, of Intifada and Hamas.
And he prayed in her home several more times. As he took the mat from her, the tips of their fingers found each other and she smelled the crisp smell of his shirt.
The smell of limes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dr Azad had the misfortune of youthful hair. It was hard not to smile at his thick and shiny pelt, especially as the years had not bypassed his face. They had, in fact, trampled it. His cheeks hung slack as ancient breasts. His nose, once so neatly upturned, appeared to crumble at the end. And the puffy skin around his eyes was fit to burst.
He sat up straight, as if his entire body was in splints, and he drank two glasses of water.
'Next time,' said Chanu, 'you must bring your wife.'
'Of course,' said the doctor.
'She is well? I hope she is very well. Such a superb hostess – to produce a meal like that, even without a moment's notice. We must have her to dinner. I tell my wife, let us return hospitality to Mrs Azad.'
They had never, in all these years, been invited back. And we were never invited in the first place, Nazneen reminded herself.
Chanu hunched to his food to abbreviate the journey between plate and mouth. There was a fleck of dal in his eyebrows. Dr Azad barely inclined his head to eat. His elbows never strayed far from his ribcage.
'It is good of you to remember,' said the doctor. 'After more than a decade many people would begin to forget.'
'Daughter too. She is well?'
Dr Azad pronounced his daughter healthy. He took advantage of Charm's overstuffed mouth to launch his own line of enquiry, his own method of point scoring. It was the usual. 'I've been meaning to ask, how many signatures have you succeeded in amassing now? Are we far from the new dawn of a mobile library?'
Chanu leaned his wrists on the edge of the table. He pressed down the tip of one finger after another, all on the left hand and two on the right. 'Only seven this week.' He squeezed a bit of lemon and appeared saddened by his calculation.
The doctor's wife and daughter were steadfastly healthy. There was nothing to report except the inevitable absence of the wife on visits to the daughter (married now with children of her own) or to other relatives. Chanu's petition gathered new names without ever leaving the drawer. It no longer amazed Nazneen that these fictions should be so elaborately maintained. What worried her now was the possibility of their collapse. The fence that they formed, though rotten, was better than nothing.
The girls came in to say goodnight. Chanu held his arm out. 'Come on. Come, I'll feed you from my plate.'
Shahana flinched, sucking in her cheeks. Chanu glanced at Dr Azad. He smiled and his arm became more expansive still. 'Come, don't be shy.'
Bibi went to him and he pulled her onto his lap. 'Prawn and marrow. Delicious.' He fed her, as promised, from his plate and patted her gingerly on the back, as if she were an unknown dog and might bite his fingers.
Bibi got down and stood next to Shahana.
'Very good girls,' said Chanu. He looked around the room, seeking proof. It came to him. 'Shahana, what is the name of our national poet?'
She felt the carpet with her toes. The smile died on Chanu's face although the corners of his mouth held their position. 'Tagore,' she said.
'Not your favourite poet, Shahana. National poet. Quick.'
She swayed slightly. Her face was blank, as if she had entered a trance.
Nazneen chewed her tongue. She watched Chanu. His face began to twitch.
'Kazi Nazrul Islam,' said Bibi. Her face popped with tension, as though a weight had been placed across her windpipe.
'Shahana, would you like to recite something by your favourite poet for our guest?'
Nazneen stood up. She would say it was too late. She would go with the girls and help them get ready for bed.
'Another time, perhaps,' said Dr Azad. The girls are tired after their homework.'
'Yes, yes.' Chanu waggled his head. 'Studying, studying all the time. Very good girls. Come now and kiss Abba before you go to bed.'
Bibi went first and Shahana followed. She squashed her lips inside her mouth before brushing it briefly against her father's cheek. But Chanu was satisfied. When the girls had gone he appeared exhausted but relieved, as if a tornado had spun him once or twice around the city and deposited him by some miracle in his chair.
Chanu and the doctor began their main business of the evening. They did what friends do, talked. From time to time the
ir conversational paths intersected. More frequently, they walked around each other.
'It's really quite alarming,' said the doctor, 'that the rate of increase of heroin abuse in our community should have exploded, and yet the elders are giving no leadership. And the funding for counsellors and outreach workers and so forth is totally inadequate.'
'This is the tragedy. When you expect to be so-called integrated. But you will never get the same treatment. Never.'
'I am making quite a study of the situation, preparing a paper for publication. You could call it an epidemic. Even a few girls are getting hooked.'
Chanu's left hand was busy beneath his shirt, massaging his meal into place. 'You see, I myself have struggled for a long time. But now I am simply taking money out. "Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India." That is how I am playing them at their own game now.'
'If we get funding we will set up a specialist clinic. But the main thing is education. The parents are so ashamed they don't know what to do. Sometimes they send the child back home, where the heroin is really cheap.' The doctor's neck had grown thin. It failed to fill his spotless collar. His lustrous black hair, cut still in the same sharp flat fringe, refused to accord him the dignity of age. It looked like a mockery, like a wig. Nazneen felt for him. It would, she thought, be troublesome to be set upon all day by this reminder of a youth long gone.
Chanu sighed. He cleared his throat. 'Educate the parents and they must educate the children. I myself am teaching the children, many things about history and politics and art.'
'It is absolutely and fundamentally the key,' said the doctor, and Nazneen marvelled at the way this all worked so smoothly: how these two men could find themselves in vehement agreement over their separate topics. 'Teach them to spot the signs in their own children. Tiny pupils, shallow breathing, constipation, constant need for money, becoming withdrawn, secretive. Sometimes I wonder how the parents fail to see it.'
Nazneen opened her mouth and sucked breath. She thought of Razia's son. Every time Razia mentioned Tariq, she talked about money. The men looked at her. She began to clear some plates.
'The parents can become preoccupied,' said Chanu, who had known no other state. 'But we must think of our children first. God knows what they are teaching them in these English schools.'
'Do you know, some of my patients have never so much as smoked a cigarette, and heroin is the first drug they touch.'
'In all my life, I feel this is the best decision I have made – to take my daughters back home. I am preparing them. You see, to go forward you must first look back. We are taking some stock of the glorious British Empire. When I was in school, do you know what we learned? The English gave us the railways. As if we should get down on our knees for this.' He appealed now to his public. 'Do you think they would have brought the railway if they did not want to sell their steel or their locomotives? Do you think that they brought us railways from the goodness of their hearts? We needed irrigation systems, not trains.'
'Good, good,' said Dr Azad. Chanu had strayed too far from the point of their intersection. The rules of the conversation, to the doctor's mind, had been breached. He fingered the sacs beneath his eyes.
Chanu was oblivious. Nazneen reached across him for a dish but he picked it up before she could get it. They rose: Chanu, the bowl, his voice. 'They bequeathed us law and democracy. That's what they think. And never a word of the truth – that they beggared us, that they brought Bengal to its knees, that. . .' The speech left him at a dead end. 'Here,' he said to Nazneen, and held out the dish. 'Do you want this?'
'It was bad enough when it was alcohol,' said the doctor. 'Now I wish it was only alcohol. We need two things. More drugs counsellors and more jobs for the young people.'
'They will never make jobs for us,' said Chanu, sitting down again. 'Look to history. When the English went into Bengal. . .'
'I have read the literature.' Dr Azad checked his watch and stood up. 'How is your . . . job? I forget which one.'
Chanu blew hard. 'Driving job. Doesn't matter how it is. I just take the money, that's all. How is your son-in-law? All this time, and we still have not met him. You must bring him around here. Next time you come.'
'Of course,' said Dr Azad, and though he gave his peculiar smile and took care to walk with energy and not let his shoulders hang, Nazneen could see that it was her husband who had made the final score.
Shahana heard the letterbox and went to the hallway. She sat on the edge of the coffee table and read the leaflet.
'How many times do I tell you not to sit on there?' said Chanu. He sat in front of the showcase on the red and orange rug. His stomach appeared to be balanced on a mound of books.
Shahana slid off the table. She turned the leaflet over.
'What is that?'
Shahana held it up. 'It's a leaflet.'
Chanu stirred. His stomach toppled the books. 'Don't be clever,' he shouted. 'Give it to me.'
She made an issue out of getting up, but eventually she took it to her father.
'Multicultural Murder,' he read in English. 'Where did you get this?'
'The hallway.'
'You are not too clever to be thrashed,' said Chanu, but his heart was not in it. He was busy with the leaflet. He read both sides then turned it over and read it again. Shahana practised lowering her eyelids in the manner best calculated to invoke fury. He did not notice. He turned the piece of paper around and around.
'These bloody bastards. Next time they come, I'll cut off their testicles.'
At the word testicles, Shahana smiled.
'You think it's funny?' He got quickly to his feet and his lungi slipped. He paused to retie it and Shahana went to stand behind Nazneen at her sewing machine.
'Come on,' said Chanu, and his voice shook. He gave himself a few moments of throat clearing. 'Come on, let's all have some fun. Bibi!' She ran in and stumbled over some files. 'Give this to your sister. She is going to read it for us.'
The leaflet was returned to Shahana.
'Multicultural Murder,' she read.
'Notice,' said Chanu, holding up a hand, 'notice how the thought of violence is introduced right away. In the very first words.' He lowered his hand.
'In our schools,' continued Shahana, 'it's multicultural murder. Do you know what they are teaching your children today? In domestic science your daughter will learn how to make a kebab, or fry a bhaji. For his history lesson your son will be studying Africa or India or some other dark and distant land. English people, he will learn, are Wicked Colonialists.'
'See how they do that?' Chanu tried to pace, but he was trapped by his books. He stood still and waved his arms instead. 'Putting Africa with India, all dark together. Read the other side.'
Shahana turned it over. 'And in Religious Instruction, what will your child be taught? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? No. Krishna, Abraham and Muhammad.
'Christianity is being gently slaughtered. It is "only one" of the world's "great religions". Indeed, in our local schools you could be forgiven for thinking that Islam is the official religion.'
Chanu rushed over and grabbed the leaflet. 'This is where they get down to it. This is what it's all about.' Nazneen noticed the hole in his vest, the curling grey hairs at the hollow of his throat. Chanu read, 'Should we be forced to put up with this? When the truth is that it is a religion of hate and intolerance. When Muslim extremists are planning to turn Britain into an Islamic Republic, using a combination of immigration, high birth rates and conversion. On and on, this rubbish.' He crushed the leaflet in his fist.
Bibi leaned on Nazneen's shoulder and chewed on the ends of her plaits. Nazneen looked at Shahana, who was adjusting the straps of her first bra. She willed her to speak to her father, to say the right thing. Shahana put out her bottom lip and blew up at her fringe.
Chanu sat down in the armchair. 'Shahana, go and put on some decent clothes.'
She looked down at her uniform.
'Go and
put some trousers on.'
Nazneen said, 'Bibi, you go as well.'
Chanu smoothed the leaflet out. 'We urge you to write to your Head Teacher and withdraw your child from Religious Instruction. This is your right as a parent under Section 25 of the 1944 Education Act.'
He breathed hard. His tongue probed his cheeks, like a small rodent snouting blindly beneath a thick blanket. 'From now on,' he said, 'all the money goes to the Home Fund. All of it.'
That night, for the first time since they were married, Nazneen watched him take down the Qur'an. He sat on the floor and he stayed with the Book for the rest of the evening.
Nazneen walked a step behind her husband down Brick Lane. The bright green and red pendants that fluttered from the lamp-posts advertised the Bangla colours and basmati rice. In the restaurant windows were clippings from newspapers and magazines with the name of the restaurant highlighted in yellow or pink. There were smart places with starched white tablecloths and multitudes of shining silver cutlery. In these places the newspaper clippings were framed. The tables were far apart and there was an absence of decoration that Nazneen knew to be a style. In the other restaurants the greeters and waiters wore white, oil-marked shirts. But in the smart ones they wore black. A very large potted fern or a blue and white mosaic at the entrance indicated ultra-smart.
'You see,' said Chanu. 'All this money, money everywhere. Ten years ago there was no money here.'
In between the Bangladeshi restaurants were little shops that sold clothes and bags and trinkets. Their customers were young men in sawn-off trousers and sandals and girls in T-shirts that strained across their chests and exposed their belly buttons. Chanu stopped and looked in a shop window. 'Seventy-five pounds for that little bag. You couldn't fit even one book in it.'
Outside a cafe he paused again. 'Two pounds ninety for large coffee with whipped cream.'
A girl at a wooden table on the pavement bent the screen of a laptop computer back and forth to angle it away from the sun. Nazneen thought of Chanu's computer, gathering dust. A spider's web shivered between keyboard and monitor.