“It’s not an uncommon Pakistani surname.” An evasion rather than a lie, she told herself.
“I know. Anyway, I’m glad I can finally tell you. Also, this is why I haven’t been able to answer your question of how long I’m staying. I hate all the old muck they scrape up about him every time he’s in the headlines, and this time it’ll be worse. I came to avoid it. He’s good at dealing with it; I’m not. So if you see me obsessing over stuff they’re saying online, take my phone away from me, would you?” He tapped her fingers with his as he spoke to emphasize the final point.
All the old muck. He meant the picture of Karamat Lone entering a mosque that had been in the news for its “hate preacher.” LONE WOLF’S PACK REVEALED, the headlines screamed when a tabloid got hold of it, near the end of his first term as an MP. The Lone Wolf’s response had been to point out that the picture was several years old, he had been there only for his uncle’s funeral prayers and would otherwise never enter a gender-segregated space. This was followed by pictures of him and his wife walking hand in hand into a church. His Muslim-majority constituency voted him out in the elections that took place just a few weeks later, but he was quickly back in Parliament via a by-election, in a safe seat with a largely white constituency, and the tabloids that had attacked him now championed him as a LONE CRUSADER taking on the backwardness of British Muslims. Isma doubted very much that “the old muck” would rise again—oh, unless he meant the opposing side of that story: all the accusations she’d heard, and that seemed entirely accurate, that Karamat Lone had precisely calculated the short-term losses and long-term gains of showing such contempt for the conventions of a mosque. Sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor.
“You’re close to him, aren’t you?”
“You know what fathers and sons are like.”
“Not really, no.”
“They’re our guides into manhood, for starters.”
She’d never understood this, though she’d heard and seen enough anecdotally and academically to know there was something to it. For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition. He must have seen her look of incomprehension, because he tried again.
“We want to be like them, we want to be better than them. We want to be the only people in the world who are allowed to be better than them.” He gestured at himself and around the café with a shrug that encompassed the mediocrity of everything. “Obviously, I worked out long ago that such an attempt would be futile.”
“That’s not true. You’re a much better person than he is.”
“What do you know about it?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t know how to, and he said, “Why were you acting so furtive when I came in?”
She hesitated, turned her laptop around so it faced him, and opened the lid.
“You were reading about him. Isma, did you already know he was my father?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you lie about it?”
She clasped her hands together, looked down at the interlacing of her fingers, which he’d touched so familiarly just a few moments ago.
“You’re one of them? The Muslims who say those ugly things about him?”
“Yes.”
He waited, but there was nothing more she could say.
“I see. Well, I’m very sorry to hear it.” She heard the scraping of the chair and looked up as he stood. “I suppose one day I’ll see the irony in running here to try and escape certain attitudes only to find myself having coffee with their embodiment.” Gone was the friendly, considerate boy, and in his place a man carrying all the wounds his father was almost certainly too thick-skinned to feel as anything more than pinpricks. When he said good-bye there was no mistaking the finality of his tone.
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The wind had dropped, and the snow drifted down in large flakes that retained their shape for a moment on her sleeve before melting into the fabric. Isma walked the short distance home, but as she approached her front door the thought of her studio with its clanging pipes was intolerable. She carried on down to the tree-lined graveyard at the end of the street, unexpectedly positioned beside a nursery school, across the road from a baseball diamond. In the summer it must be a place of shade, in autumn a feast of color; but she had known it only as the white of snow, the gray of stone.
She started on a cleared pathway before cutting across a snowdrift that came halfway up her knee-high boots, and pulled herself onto a nineteenth-century gravestone, feet dangling. Sometimes the dead were a friendly presence, but today they were only dead, and every chiseled slab was a marker of someone’s sorrow. She kicked her heels against the gravestone. “Stupid,” she said.
That was the only word for this sense of enormous loss where there had been so very little to lose.
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“You don’t have to decide that’s the end of it,” Hira Shah said that evening, when they sat down together for a typically elaborate meal. A single woman in her mid-fifties who had never had to cook on a regular basis for anyone, Hira retained the idea that company for dinner must be occasion for pyrotechnics in the kitchen, no matter how frequently company was over—or perhaps she did that only when her company hadn’t had anyone to mother her in a long time. “You should at least try explaining why you feel the way you do. What is there to lose?”
“What is there to gain? He’ll be going back to London soon in any case.”
Hira looked at her over a forkful of rogan josh. “Do you know when you were at LSE I thought you found me offensive?”
“That’s ridiculous. Oh, you mean that first term. When I rolled my eyes at you?”
It overturned seven hundred ninety years of precedent in British law, the Kashmiri lecturer had been saying during an impassioned presentation on control orders and their impact on civil liberties when Hira saw the quiet girl in the third row roll her eyes. Would you like to say something, Ms. Pasha? Yes, Dr. Shah, if you look at colonial laws you’ll see plenty of precedent for depriving people of their rights; the only difference is this time it’s applied to British citizens, and even that’s not as much of a change as you might think, because they’re rhetorically being made un-British. Say more. The 7/7 terrorists were never described by the media as “British terrorists.” Even when the word “British” was used, it was always “British of Pakistani descent” or “British Muslim” or, my favorite, “British passport holders,” always something interposed between their Britishness and terrorism. Well, you have quite a voice when you decide to use it.
Isma had gone home that evening and stood in front of the mirror, pressing down on her larynx, and felt the slight tremor of something on the cusp of waking. And wake it had—her suppressed anger distilled and abstracted into essays about the sociological impact of the War on Terror. Then Isma’s mother died, and that voice was lost—until now. Dr. Shah was coaxing it back with the shared paper they were working on—“The Insecurity State: Britain and the Instrumentalization of Fear”—which took Isma’s experience in the interrogation room and made it research.
“No, not then. All the way through until you graduated. I thought you disliked something in me personally, and that’s why you acted so distant when I tried to talk about anything other than work. It was only after your mother died and you told me everything that you made sense.”
How she’d wept that day in Hira Shah’s office. For her mother, for the grandmother who had predeceased her daughter-in-law by less than a year, for her father, for the orphaned twins who had never really known their mother before bitterness and stress ate away the laughing, affectionate woman she’d once been—and, most of all, for herself.
“I don’t want Eamonn’s pity, if that’s what you’re driving at here.”
“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they undere
stimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”
“So—what? I should just call him up—” She held the saltshaker to her ear, miming a phone. “Eamonn, here’s a funny story about my father.”
“Maybe without the word ‘funny.’”
“And then? Do I follow up with the even funnier story of my brother? To the son of the new home secretary?”
“Mmm. Maybe start with your father, and see how it goes from there. And one other piece of advice. Reconsider the hijab.” She pointed at the turban that Isma had left near the door along with her shoes, the latter out of consideration for Hira’s hardwood floors and Persian carpets, the former out of consideration for her sensibility.
“Don’t miss an opportunity with that one, do you, Dr. Shah?”
“It might be keeping your young man at a distance. He’ll read things into what it means.”
“He’s not my young man and his reading won’t be so wrong. And when did I say I wanted anything from him in that way?” It had been so long since anything approaching “that way” that she didn’t know if she knew how to want it anymore. Mo at university had been the last and—barring some forgettable fumbling—the first man with whom she’d known any physical intimacy. Perhaps if they’d gone further than they had she’d have a sense of missing something, but Mo worried about their eternal damnation and Isma thought you should at least be able to imagine marrying someone before doing something so significant with them. In retrospect, it was a mystery they’d stayed together almost their entire second year of university.
“You know the Quran tells us to enjoy sex as one of God’s blessings?” Hira said.
“Within marriage!”
“We all have our versions of selective reading when it comes to the Holy Book.”
Isma laughed and stood to clear the plates. From her greathearted vantage point Hira Shah saw Isma clearly—so careworn, so blemished by all the circumstances of her life that certain options had simply crossed their arms and turned away from her. But when a boy stepped into Isma’s path, his laughter trailing a promise that life could be joyful if you stayed near enough to him, Hira turned her attention to a piece of fabric and said, There, that and an untold story are the only obstacles between you and him.
For a moment Isma stood in the kitchen, with its familiar scents and the warm glow of its lamps, and allowed herself to believe it.There was perfectly good cappuccino near his grandparents’ house; he didn’t have to drive twenty-five minutes every morning to the same café. She caught her reflection in the window. She had no idea where he went in the evenings, where he spent his nights. Where he was right now.
“Stupid,” she said, and turned her attention to loading the dishwasher.
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Eamonn opened his mouth and the sound that came out was that of a grasshopper. Say something, she said. Chirp. Isma opened her eyes from one darkness into another that was interrupted by a rectangle of light. It was 2:17 a.m. Why was Aneeka calling at this hour? No, no, no, no, no. Her baby, her brother, the child she’d raised. She grabbed at the phone—images in her mind of his death, violent, unbearable—and pressed the answer button. Aneeka’s face a death mask.
“It was you,” her sister said.
“Parvaiz?” her own voice strange with sleep and fear.
“You were the one who told the police what he’d done.”
One kind of panic ending, another beginning. “Who told you that?”
“Aunty Naseem is on the phone talking to Razia Apa about it. So you admit it?”
“They would have found out anyway.”
“You don’t know that.” Her sister’s voice all hurt and confusion. “They might not have. And then he could have come home. He could just have turned around the moment he knew he’d made a mistake and come home. You’ve made him not able to come home.” She cried out, as if she’d only just then felt the wound that had been delivered to her. “Isma, you’ve made our brother not able to come home.”
Isma touched her sister’s face on the screen, felt the cold glass. “Shh, listen to me. People in the neighborhood knew. The police would have found out. There was nothing I could do for him, so I did what I could for you, for us.”
“For me?”
“We’re in no position to let the state question our loyalties. Don’t you understand that? If you cooperate, it makes a difference. I wasn’t going to let him make you suffer for the choices he’d made.”
“Is this me not suffering? Parvaiz is gone.”
“He did that, not me. When they treat us this way the only thing we can do for our own sanity is let them go.”
“Parvaiz is not our father. He’s my twin. He’s me. But you, you’re not our sister anymore.”
“Aneeka . . .”
“I mean it. You betrayed us, both of us. And then you tried to hide it from me. Don’t call, don’t text, don’t send me pictures, don’t fly across the ocean and expect me to ever agree to see your face again. We have no sister.”
One moment her face was there, enraged, and then it was replaced by Isma’s phone’s wallpaper: yellow and green leaves floating on the surface of the Grand Union Canal. Isma tried FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, and even the expense of an international phone call, not with any hope of Aneeka answering but to let her sister know how desperately she wanted to communicate.
Finally, when the sound of ringing became more than she could bear, she lay back in bed, wrapping the duvet tightly around her. The stars were cold above her head. A verse from the Quran came to mind: By the sky and the night visitor! / And what is the night visitor? / A piercingly bright star. She got up, pulled the prayer rug out from under her bed, and knelt down on it. “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.” The Arabic words her companions since childhood, passed on to her within her grandmother’s embrace when no one thought she was old enough to learn them. In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. This rocking motion that accompanied her prayers was her grandmother rocking her to sleep, whispering these verses to protect her. At first the words were just a language she didn’t know, but as she continued, closing her eyes to shut out the world, they burrowed inside her, flared into light, dispelled the darkness. And then the light softened, diffused, enveloping her in the peace that comes from knowing your own powerlessness.
At least, that’s how it usually worked. But today she couldn’t make them anything other than words in a foreign language, spoken out loud in a room that didn’t anticipate anyone’s being out from under covers at this hour, and so was too cold. She returned to bed, hugged a pillow close to her chest, placed another against her back. She had only been fooling herself that night when she thought she still knew how to calm the frantic pacing of her sister’s heart. Aneeka’s had learned to beat in the company of her twin brother, in the world of their mother’s womb. As children the twins would lie in the garden, fingers on each other’s pulses, listening to the trains go by on the tracks behind their house. Waiting for those moments when their hearts were synchronized, first with each other and then with the sound of the train pulling out of Preston Road station.
Please call me please call me please call me she Skyped, WhatsApped, texted her sister.
Aunty Naseem called, horrified at her own role in what had happened. She and her daughter Razia had been discussing something in the news and she had said what a good thing it was, in this climate, that Isma had reported what Parvaiz had done. She hadn’t heard Aneeka come in the night before and assumed she was miles away, at Gita’s. “She was rude to me,” Aunty Naseem said, the sentence conveying a whole universe and its behavior patterns upturned.
So then Isma had to convince her that it was a mistake easily made, and that there was nothing to forgive, and Aneeka would come around eventually, when really she wanted to shout into the phone How could you have been so careless! When the call finally ended
she felt as tired as she’d ever been. She leaned into the pillow against her back, Eamonn holding her tight. “Oh,” she said, surprised and not. This wasn’t the first time she’d found him there, but she’d always banished him before. Now she pressed herself closer, taking the comfort it was suddenly obvious only he could give. At first, and for a long time, it was warmth that spread through her limbs, then, eventually, heat. She turned toward him in the darkness. By the time the first light appeared in the sky she felt herself transformed by the desire to be known, completely. Before the day and its realities could dispel this headiness, she reached for the phone and sent Eamonn a text: I’m sorry. I envy you your father. Mine died while being taken to Guantánamo. I want to explain it all to you.
He answered, earlier than she imagined he would be awake: Tell me where to meet you.
From Aneeka, no word. FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, phone call. Nothing.
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Isma looked at her reflection in the mirror, hair “texturized” into “beachy waves,” as Mona of Persepolis Hair in Wembley had promised when she recommended a product that could counter frizzy, flyaway hair without attaining the miracle of straightening it. Her hair said “playful” and “surprising.” Or it would if it didn’t come attached to her face. She opened the drawer in which she kept her turbans and headscarves, closed it, looked in the mirror once more, opened it again.
A diffidence of knuckles on her door. She had expected him to call when downstairs, but one of her neighbors must have left the front door open, and now he was here, sooner than she’d anticipated, and she was still in her bathrobe. “Wait,” she called out, and grabbed the nearest clothes at hand. Jeans, bra discolored in the wash—for heaven’s sake, what difference did that make?—and fleece-lined sweatshirt.
She opened the door, a little breathless, as self-conscious as on the day she’d offered to walk him upstairs to the coffee counter. There was a slight, spiced scent of aftershave coming off him. Specially for this meeting, or did she usually not see him until late enough in the day that it had worn off?
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