by Ami Rao
‘However,’ he continued, in that typically sheepish manner that English people seemed to have about them when delivering unwelcome news, ‘in my position, I am forced, you see, to draw a line between the goodness of defending one’s politics and having it, so to speak, dominate every minute of one’s university life. Which, I’m afraid, is exactly what is happening with Kareem. He’s so busy organising rallies, he has no time to turn up to class. Here is, as it were, a record of his attendance this term. You can see, of course, for yourself that…’
So preoccupied was Yusuf by this retelling of his son’s latest antics that he barely registered when directly in front of him, out of nowhere, some traffic lights appeared and – a kind of double whammy – they were coloured red. Triple whammy then, when a car magicked itself out of an invisible cross road and turned right. Right, that is, onto their path.
Yusuf missed him by a whisker.
After that, everything seemed to happen very quickly. A flash of blue steel from the corner of his eye. The beep of a car horn. The screech of tyres. An invasion of the senses. Yusuf blinked.
Then he noticed the blue steel – goodness! It was a car! – pulling out in front of them, blocking their way, forcing them to veer off the road, onto the curb, and stop.
‘Shit,’ Kareem said, ‘shit, shit, shit.’
‘Oh,’ Yusuf added, squinting at his son sitting next to him.
One hand, he kept on the wheel. With his free hand, he grasped at the space between them, searching for something: courage, his driver’s licence, a breath-saving mint, legitimacy, the Koran, Zoya’s hand, or heart, or his own. Finally, he settled for the parking brake, pulled it up with visible effort, then sighed.
Slowly, he got out from his side, shut the car door behind him carefully and walked to the front of the car. Rapidly, Kareem got out from his side, slammed his door and ran to the front of the car, so father and son arrived clockwise and anticlockwise respectively, to stand side by side. A stocky man with the body of a boxer and the face of a particularly pugnacious pug emerged from the blue steel.
‘I didn’t hit you, did I?’ Yusuf asked anxiously.
‘No…’ began the man.
Yusuf let out a loud sigh of relief.
‘But…’
‘But what?’ Kareem said.
‘You…’
‘You what?’ Kareem said.
‘Could’ve,’ the man finished smugly.
‘Oh, for FUCK—’ Kareem rolled his eyes and his entire head with it.
‘Yes, yes,’ Yusuf interjected before Kareem could get any more in. ‘I am very sorry. I should not have taken that light. Very sorry.’
‘Then it’s only my quick reflexes that saved the day, yeah?’ the man said belligerently.
You couldn’t save your cock from your fly, mate, Kareem thought.
‘Lucky for all of us then, innit,’ Kareem said sarcastically, ‘your quick reflexes? Now, seeing as my dad’s apologised already and if there’s no harm done, maybe we can all just get on our way.’
The man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘…’Ang on a forking minute, did you two swap places? Wuz that your son that wuz doing the driving?’
‘Sorry?’ Yusuf blinked for a second time, genuinely baffled by this Holmesian turn of events.
‘Wuz that your son that wuz doing the forking driving, I said,’ the man repeated, slowly and loudly like one would address a particularly obtuse child.
‘Was my son…? No. Certainly not. Why would you think my son was driving?’
‘Fork I know, gov? Maybe you wuz trying to protect ’im? Thinking maybe I’d take pity on you, being as you are, a man of some years, and let the two’ve you go, wiv no trouble from the coppers.’
‘Pity? Trouble? Sir, I really don’t understand. It was myself driving, I assure you.’
‘Why the fork did you both get outta the car then?’
‘Are you fucking kidd—’ Kareem started to say.
Yusuf touched his son’s shoulder to stop him and addressed the man directly. ‘I am sorry, but I don’t know what explanation I can provide for that. But what, please, would be the connec—’
‘Ah-hah! No explanation. I knew it! When someone does sommink with no explanation, it’s fishy, I say.’ He looked at Kareem carefully. ‘All you young Pakis are all the same. Fundamental, that’s what you are. Radical. I mean no tits and no drink’ll do that to anyone, really. But forkit, least you can do is show some forking respect for the rules and regulations of the country that’s bin generous enough to take you in, yeah?’
‘Areyoufuckingkiddingme?’ Kareem said in one breath, his only chance, he knew, of ever finishing the sentence.
‘Kareem,’ Yusuf said firmly, ‘I will handle this please.’ He turned to the man. ‘I think you will agree, sir, that all this profanity, including from my son’ – at this point Yusuf looked sharply at Kareem – ‘seems quite unnecessary. The car is not damaged, it has not even been touched.’
‘But it could’ve bin? Yeah? Yeah? It could’ve, yeah?’
Yusuf sighed. ‘Once again,’ he said in a voice that sounded very exhausted, ‘I am very sorry for the inconvenience I have caused your good self, but I assure you, it was not my son driving, but myself. Now, given it is quite late in the day and my son and I are delayed for our evening prayers, we will take our leave. I wish you a pleasant evening.’
Without waiting for a response, Yusuf turned round slowly and got into the car. Kareem reluctantly followed.
‘Effing racist cunt,’ Kareem said promptly as he watched the pug-faced man get into his own car – with equal reluctance it seemed – and slowly drive off.
‘Kareem,’ Yusuf said sternly, ‘you will watch your tongue please. I am still your father.’
‘My tongue? Watch my tongue?’ Kareem said, yanking at his seatbelt and scowling. ‘Abba, he insulted you! He accused us both of lying! He called me a terrorist! And best of all, nothing happened to his car!’
Yusuf sank deeper into the driver’s seat gratefully, allowing his body to go completely limp. At least his seat was dependable, he thought, offering the resistance he expected, unlike everything else that seemed to be crumbling away beneath him. He stole a glance at his son, at the young, handsome face, the aquiline nose, the determined jaw that was clenched at the moment. Sometimes he wondered if Kareem wished for a different father. Someone unyielding and indestructible. Someone he could one day hope to become. A hero, basically.
But it was different, Yusuf knew, their specific situation. How to explain? His responsibilities were different. He had chosen this life; Kareem had simply been born into it. Two completely different things, those.
Not everyone has the luxury to don a cape. Some of us need to keep our feet planted firmly on earth so others can fly.
To that end, he said: ‘I know, Kareem, but the fault was mine, and in situations like this, it’s best to dissipate the situation, not aggravate it.’
Kareem still held the unfastened seatbelt in his hands. This he now let go and it whooshed back into place with a loud snap. He rotated his body so that he was now leaning against the car door, looking directly at his father with complete derision.
‘In situations like this? Where we are accused of crimes we didn’t commit because we happen to be brown and breathing?’ he said.
Yusuf sighed. ‘It is more complicated than that Kareem, you know that very well. Anyway, he didn’t call you a terrorist.’
Kareem shook his head, a tiny movement. He spoke slowly and although his tone was measured, Yusuf realised, with some pain, that there could not have been a more scathing indictment of him than the words that came next.
‘If it’s complicated, Abba, it’s because people like you don’t stand up to people like them.’
There was a moment’s pause, heavy, saturated with unspoken fears.
&nbs
p; Yusuf felt disoriented, like he was losing the basic sense of his own self, like every rational mechanism in his brain had ground to a halt. Because the way in which he tried to fit into the world, the only way he had ever known, had finally been exposed – just in those words uttered by his only son – for the colossal fraud that it was.
He felt a sudden constriction in his chest.
Was this what they called a panic attack?
Then Kareem said, ‘And why were you calling him sir?’
‘It was the polite thing to do,’ Yusuf said almost inaudibly.
‘Sir? Seriously, sir? Saala behnchod, that’s what he was. If this happened in Pakistan, they would have lynched him.’
As if to put force behind his words, Kareem slapped the dashboard violently with his right hand, causing his father’s body to involuntarily jump. Both the action and the reaction seemed to provide a kind of release to the compressed tension inside the car.
Something in Yusuf’s mind snapped back into place. He sat up straight and adjusted his rear-view mirror. He had allowed the situation to slip, but he was still the driver. He put his hands firmly on the wheel.
‘But this is not Pakistan, Kareem. This is England,’ he explained with a kind of simple finality. ‘You were born here. Right here, in Manchester, not in Lahore. You are as English as that man was. Just a better breed of English, I hope.’
He turned on the ignition then, very slowly, as much for signalling an end to the conversation as for getting out of there.
Kareem turned back round to face the road. Calmly and carefully, he put his seatbelt on and straightened his long legs out in front of him. There was something frightening about the extreme calmness of the gesture.
‘I am Pakistani, Dad,’ he said quietly. ‘And unlike you, I am not ashamed to say it.’
On that same Wednesday, at approximately 6.30pm, a scene was unfolding in a little neighbourhood Vietnamese in New York City:
‘I need this today,’ Ameena was saying to David, about the glass of Merlot in her hands. ‘I feel spent. Something weird happened at work this morning.’
‘Oh yeah, tell me?’
‘I will, but you said you wanted to tell me something about your day. You go first.’
‘Oh, that.’ David smiled. ‘It’s nothing exciting, just that Hershel saw your picture on my desk and asked if you were a Bollywood actress.’
‘You have a picture of me on your desk?’
‘Yeah. Why? Is that a bit creepy?’
‘No, no, it’s sweet… it’s just… I mean I don’t have a picture of you on my desk… Bollywood actress, my God, I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult!’
David laughed. ‘I think he was just trying to say he thought you were attractive. In a typically Hershel way, I mean.’
Ameena picked up the restaurant menu and started to study it intently. ‘Well, I hope you corrected him,’ she said, and then tapped the cover of the menu with her fingernail. ‘This thing is like ten pages long, it’s a book.’
‘Of course, I said you’re a Pakistani writer.’
‘Oh,’ she said, without looking up.
‘And artist.’
‘Oh,’ she repeated blankly.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, closing the menu shut.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Too many options on this thing, it’s exhausting.’
‘Uh-oh, have I upset you? You weren’t actually a Bollywood actress, were you?’
‘No.’
‘But as a little girl, you dreamed of being one!’
‘No! Shut up!’
‘Okay, okay, I was just kidding. So, what happened at work?’
‘Never mind, it’s boring, can you order please? Just order whatever, I’m ravenous.’
On that same Wednesday, at approximately 8pm, a scene was unfolding in the split-level flat on Chapel Road:
In a rare moment of restfulness, Zoya was sitting by the window, waiting for Yusuf and Kareem to return.
She was looking at the moon.
It was full and round that night, sitting high in the night sky like a king on his throne, casting his silver light over his land, spilling into the room, illuminating suddenly, in the deepest recesses of Zoya’s mind, a certain truth.
How – this was the truth – could two children from the same parents, who shared the same blood, who grew up beneath the same roof, under the same circumstances, subjected to the same influences, turn out to be so different!
So different, in fact, that they had decided, almost as a laugh, to be everything that the other was not. One had picked one extreme, the other had picked another, and in doing so, both had demonstrated a failure to embrace what she and Yusuf had hoped to give them – a kind of middle way. This was a failure, surely, was it not? Or was it a failure on her part – and on Yusuf’s, mustn’t forget Yusuf’s role here – to expect this of them in the first place, this kind of duality?
For a fleeting moment, Zoya empathised with her British-Pakistani children. Or was it her Pakistani-British children?
How can you be two things, when the two things you’re meant to be are so far apart? Impossible! Unnatural!
No wonder they had rebelled. And in opposite ways.
Which one would the world prove wrong? Zoya wondered, for the world, she knew, is very quick to prove people wrong. Which one would win? And if one of her children won, would it mean that the other would lose?
Then a thought came to her, and a tiny ripple of fear travelled up her spine, stopping at the atlas of her neck.
But what happens, she thought, if they both lose? What will happen then?
improvising with love
Basically, and from time immemorial, we are accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
2.1
The next day, the rain came.
The city blackened and groaned, and the lightning split the sky above it into blocks, like giant pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that shifted and moved and joined back together again.
There was a strange faltering lightness to the darkness, a kind of suffused glow, but people still turned on their lamps and apartment windows shone like they would at night-time, even in the middle of a Saturday morning.
Ameena sat in her bedroom with the lights on and watched the rain fall, beating down steadily on the flat, tarmacked rooftops of the buildings outside. Below her at street level, the glare of headlights, the impatient blaring of horns as the traffic slowed and stalled.
How strange all the people looked, she thought as she peered down from her window, beneath the multicoloured tops of open umbrellas that obscured faces, bodies, revealing only legs, feet, so many sets of feet hopping over puddles, dancing a jig.
And then she thought how strange the rain was in this busy, impatient city, how something so basic and natural seemed to bring everything to a standstill. And how strange that at home, where it rained all the time, rain was just rain, a kind of way of life, and nobody stopped doing things because of the rain. ‘Unless you’re made of ice, you don’t have to worry,’ her father would tell them when she and Kareem would moan about the rain. ‘Go out and do what you need to, you won’t melt!’
And then when she thought of her father, she thought how strange it was that neither he nor her mother nor her brother ever called or wrote to ask how she was, but then, she had to admit, neither did she, only very rarely, and on the few occasions that she did write, she would get a polite reply, usually very promptly, more often than not from her brother, saying that everyone at home was okay and everyone at home hoped she was too, and she would hear it in his tone, inside the neutral typeface of the email message, all that buried hurt and bitterness, as if the
y were still unable to understand why she had left, and had still not forgiven her for leaving and, as if in the very act of leaving, she had betrayed not only them, but something bigger that they stood for.
And then she thought of David and how strange it was that his parents were both dead, buried somewhere under the earth of Rhode Island, side by side, their headstones turned towards the sea, and how he couldn’t speak to them even if he wanted to.
And how strange that he had no idea where his brother was – how could you not know where your own brother is? How strange, she thought, that you could play together as children, as best friends, under the same roof, and then become strangers.
And how strange that all these situations that seemed to jar so strongly, that seemed to sit beside each other with such unease, could become at the same time so normalised.
And David, she thought with a faint touch of anxiety, her and David – how strange that they had only just met and yet already, even in this short time, she couldn’t imagine him not being in her life. Not ‘couldn’t’. That was melodramatic. ‘Didn’t like to’ – better. She didn’t like to imagine him not being in her life. But how? How does that even happen? How does someone just cross your path one minute and become almost indispensable the next? And he? Did he feel the same way? The truth was that Ameena had never thought of herself as particularly clever or talented, or even pretty… while David…
She sighed to herself. David received a lot of female attention, she knew that. She could see it at the jazz clubs after he had finished playing, the groups of giggling girls falling over themselves to speak to him. ‘Ooooh that was soooo gooood,’ they’d say, making pouty lips and swooning eyes, ‘I just love your music.’ She’d asked one time, randomly, about exes, the women in his life. It was a list. He’d been honest, something he neither hid nor bragged about. She’d listened with a polite smile, pretending not to care. But she never asked again.
Now she wondered if she was on the list. Woman number whatever. ‘Friend’, he’d said when he had introduced her to his fellow musicians that night. Not ‘girlfriend’. Just ‘friend’. Funny, she hadn’t thought twice about it then; now his use of this non-possessive common noun grated on her. Was she just another woman in his life? Was she the only woman in his life? Were they lovers? Did he consider them to be lovers? She thought so, but then again, you never really know what someone else is thinking.