Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  On the rare occasions he remembered his father’s family it was only to recall the feelings of estrangement that visits to them brought up, but spending time with Isma had reminded him that there were other, more familial feelings. She evoked in particular his father’s youngest cousin, the one who once affixed a Band-Aid and a healing kiss on his elbow when he took a tumble in the garden, gashing open his skin. He wondered if, in turn, he reminded Isma of Parvaiz, the younger brother to whom she referred only in passing, twin to the beautiful woman in the photograph.

  He was walking past curving side streets that he seemed to know had been laid directly over country roads more recently than a person might assume. The distance between his father’s life and his own revealed itself here more acutely than in West London. This was the London of Karamat Lone’s childhood, these were the homes of the affluent relatives whose lives his father had aspired to when he sat up all night in his cramped flat in Bradford, studying for exams. Late at night was the only time he could spread his books onto the surface that was kitchen counter, dining table, and workspace for his seamstress mother. On the wall across from him a large poster of the Ka’aba, the faithful prostrating themselves around it. Eamonn knew this from a photograph, one of the few his father had from his childhood, about which he had always been too embarrassed to ask.

  Finally, he approached the street on which Isma had grown up, just off a commercial stretch of Preston Road. Now that he was here he felt awkward about not simply posting the package, and he walked up Preston Road for a while—past a Jewish bakery beside an Islamic bookshop beside a Romanian butcher—before turning back toward Isma’s street again. He was unable to let go of the feeling that behind these doors existed a piece of his childhood—of his father—that he’d been too ready to forget. He knocked on the door of a pebble-dash house and an elderly woman made small by age answered, wearing a shalwar kameez with a thick cardigan that signaled her internal thermometer was still set to another country. This must be the old friend and neighbor, Aunty Naseem, in whose house Isma’s sister was living while studying law at LSE. He said he had brought something for her from Isma, which made her open the door wide and reach up to place the palm of her hand against his cheek before turning to walk back inside with the words “Come, have some tea.”

  The Arabic calligraphy on the wall, the carpeted stairs, the plastic flowers in a vase, the scent of spices in the kitchen despite there being nothing on the stove: all brought back his great-uncle’s home, and with it the shameful memory of his own embarrassment about it.

  He took Isma’s envelope out of his satchel and handed it to the old lady, who laughed in delight when she shook it, guessing the contents. “Such a thoughtful girl, that girl. Tea—with sugar?” At his response she said, “You British, never any sugar in your tea. My grandchildren are all the same. My daughters, half-and-half—one yes, one no. How did you meet Isma? What do you do for a living?”

  She was amused by the story of the man who needed rescuing from an unmanned coffee counter but made a disapproving face at “taking a year off,” which made him say “probably return to consultancy but perhaps a more boutique firm.” “One of those personal shoppers?” she asked, and it took him a moment of placing together “consultancy” and “boutique” to understand how she’d reached that conclusion. When he explained, she laughed, slapping his hand in a show of mirth, and he laughed too, wishing he’d known a paternal grandmother—a dadi. His had died the year before he was born, and her husband—a newspaper-kiosk vendor—had followed soon after, “dead of helplessness,” as Eamonn’s father explained.

  Soon she was frying samosas for him, as though determined to inhabit a stereotype, while, as instructed, he licked the end of a thread and guided it through the eye of a needle. She had moved to London from Gujranwala in the fifties, she said; his grandparents had come then from Sialkot, he said. No, he didn’t speak Punjabi. No, not Urdu either. “Only English?” Some French. She said, “My father fought in the British Indian army during World War One. He was in France for a while, billeted with a family there—the sons and husband were soldiers, so it was just the women he lived with. Je t’adore, he used to say to his children years later. After he died, I wondered who had taught him those words. Here, hold out your arm.”

  The threaded needle was for him, it turned out. She had noticed the loose button on his sleeve, and he found himself looking at the parting of her dyed black hair as she bent down to set it right, still talking away. “Shukriya,” he said, the Urdu word clumsy on his tongue, and after a moment’s pause in which something else seemed necessary he added “Aunty,” and was rewarded by another pat on his cheek. He assumed all this affection and the generosity of her welcome was just the famed Pakistani hospitality his father sometimes sighingly spoke of when regretting how “English” his children’s lives had turned out (to which Eamonn’s mother would reply, “It’s wonderful in the abstract but when you actually encounter it you call it intrusive and overbearing”); but then she said, “So, Isma sent you to meet us.”

  He set down the samosa, which, it was suddenly clear, had been given to him under a false assumption. “Not exactly. In fact, no. I told her I would post the package, but it was such a nice day I thought I would take a long walk and drop it off.”

  “You walked here? All the way from Notting Hill, to see us.”

  “It’s a nice walk. I like discovering new bits of London—in this case, the canal,” he said, which seemed an effective way of dispelling her misconception without either of them actually mentioning it.

  “Oh, she told you how much she loves walking along the canal.” He picked up the samosa and bit into it. Isma could set her straight when they spoke—he didn’t doubt Aunty Naseem would be on the phone to her as soon as he left. “You know, I’ve known her since the day she was born. Her grandmother was my first friend—we were living off the High Road, nothing like today. There were no other Asians at all. And then one day, across the street I saw a woman in a shalwar kameez. I ran across, in the middle of traffic, and caught her by the arm, and we stayed there talking for so long my husband came out looking for me. When we moved to this street, we said to them, Come on, we can’t separate. So they came. And here Isma was born, and grew up. So much sadness in her life, looking after the twins from such a young age. It’s time someone looked after her.”

  He was spared the further embarrassment of this conversation by the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “We have a guest. A very nice young man. Isma sent him.” The footsteps retreated up the stairs and the old woman’s voice dropped. “Aneeka. She’ll come down again once she’s fixed herself up. In my days either you were the kind of girl who covered your head or you were the kind who wore makeup. Now everyone is everything at the same time.”

  He had been about to leave, but instead he reached for another samosa. A few minutes later, the footsteps approached again. The woman who walked in was smaller than he’d expected from the picture—petite, really, and without any of the sense of mischief he’d seen in the photograph—but just as beautiful. Eamonn stood up, conscious of his greasy fingers and of the question of how he might use them to unpin the white hijab that framed her face. She greeted him with a puzzled look, which confirmed how unlikely it was for Isma to have sent someone like him to meet her family. The old lady introduced him by his first name—which was all he had given her—and Aneeka’s expression didn’t so much change as ossify.

  “That’s spelled with an e, not an a, Aunty. Eamonn Lone, isn’t it?”

  “Isma told you about me?”

  “What do you want here? Why do you know my sister?”

  “He met Isma in Northampton. At a café,” the old woman said, coming to stand next to Eamonn and place a hand on his arm, looking at him apologetically, not only for the girl’s behavior but for her own “oh” of disappointment when the girl mentioned his surname. “He walked all the way f
rom Notting Hill to bring me M&M’s from Isma. Along the canal.”

  The beautiful girl looked at the envelope with Isma’s handwriting on it and then at him, her face confused.

  “It’s a lovely walk. The canal flows above the North Circular, along an aqueduct. I never knew that. The IRA tried to bomb it in 1939. It would have flooded all of Wembley.” He had no idea if this last detail was actually true, but he wanted to say something interesting so the girl would see that he might be the kind of person her sister would choose to have coffee with, not just the posh toff who seemed so out of place in this kitchen and in Isma’s life. “You can see news footage about it. Just search for ‘north circular canal bomb’ or something like that and it’ll come up.”

  “Right—because that’s a good idea if you’re GWM, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Googling While Muslim. Aunty, did Isma tell you anything about this person?”

  “Why don’t we all call her now?” Aunty Naseem said brightly, and the girl—who made less sense with every second—said, “Please stop trying to make me speak to her. Anyway, I have to go out now. And Mr. Lone, since you’ve delivered the M&M’s you can leave with me.”

  Despite Aunty’s noises of protest, he followed the girl out. She didn’t say anything until they were at the end of the street, and then she turned sharply on her heels to face him.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I really don’t know what you mean,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was just delivering a package for Isma. As your . . . aunty said, we met in a café. In Massachusetts. Became friends, sort of. Two-Brits-abroad kind of thing.”

  A man in a bright red suit that appeared not to have been washed in several years stopped next to Aneeka and held out a filthy square of fur. “Have you met my cat?”

  Before Eamonn could chivalrously interpose himself, Aneeka was reaching out to stroke the matted fur as if it were the smoothest mink. “Of course I’ve met Mog, Charlie. She and I are old friends.” The man made happy noises, tucked the fur into his jacket against his heart, and carried on.

  After that moment of gentleness, the harshness of her voice when she turned her attention back to him was particularly unsettling. “That doesn’t explain why she asked you to come here.”

  “She didn’t. I offered to post it.” He couldn’t imagine articulating to this woman his curiosity about a lost piece of his father, so instead he said, “Okay, this is embarrassing, but I saw a photograph of Isma’s sister, and wanted to know if anyone could really look that beautiful in person.”

  She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.

  |||||||||

  The train pulled out of Preston Road station, and he turned in his seat to look out at the houses alongside the tracks. Beyond the back wall and garden sheds of one property a girl flew up, hovered for a moment, fell, flew up again. A trampoline. She made her body a starfish, and though he knew she couldn’t see him, he raised his own hands to mirror hers. He continued to look through the window after the train picked up speed and left Preston Road behind.

  When he finally turned to face forward, a woman standing farther along the mostly empty carriage came over and sat next to him.

  “Do you live alone?” Aneeka said.

  “Yes.”

  “Take me there.”

  ||||||||||||||||||

  After the boldness of that line, she barely spoke all the way from Preston Road to Notting Hill. At first he tried to fill the silence with conversation about Isma, but her response made it clear theirs was not the relationship of closeness Isma had portrayed. “Did she tell you—” he started to say, and she replied, “I’m discovering the list of things Isma hasn’t told me is far longer than I would have believed,” which made any further conversation along that line impossible.

  On the walk from the tube station to his home she looked around like a tourist, and he was embarrassed by the affluence of the neighborhood he lived in while unemployed. It was an embarrassment not aided by entering his flat, which was paid for and decorated by his mother, with its central open-plan space that combined kitchen, living room, and dining area in an expanse that could double as a playing field and provoked Aneeka to say, “You really live here alone?”

  He nodded, offered her tea or coffee. She asked for coffee, before turning to walk the length of his flat, looking at the framed photographs on his shelves—family picture, graduation picture, his friends Max and Alice’s engagement-party picture.

  “One of these your girlfriend?” she asked, looking up from the last photograph.

  He was all the way at the other end of the flat, by the coffee machine, but his emphatic “No, I’m single” would have carried down a room twice as long. He waited for her to return to the kitchen end and slide onto a high stool at the counter before asking, “And you? Boyfriend?”

  She shook her head, dipped a finger into the coffee foam, checking its depth, didn’t meet his eye. Why are you here? didn’t seem like a question he could ask, and might make her leave, which he didn’t think he wanted, although it was hard to know what to want of a silent, beautiful woman in a hijab sipping coffee in your flat.

  “Isma prefers turbans,” he said, to say something, indicating her head covering.

  She unpinned the hijab, folded it carefully, and placed it between the two of them on the counter, then pulled off the tight-fitting cap beneath it. She shook her head slightly and her hair, long and dark, fell about her shoulders like something out of a shampoo advertisement. She looked at him, expectant.

  Eamonn knew what to do when a woman asked to come home with him and began to undress. It was not a situation he was unfamiliar with. But he didn’t know if this was that situation. Though what was it, if not that?

  He leaned forward, placed one elbow on the counter, and extended the rest of his arm across the glass-topped distance between them, palm up, resting it close enough to her hand to be an invitation, but distant enough to be ignored without too much awkwardness. She downed the rest of the coffee in a gulp, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, which slightly smeared her lipstick, and placed the hand on his wrist. Coffee foam and lipstick on her skin. He was conscious of the hammering of his heart, the pulse leaping out at her. She smiled then, finally. Taking his other hand, she placed it on her breast but over her shirt. That too was confusing until he realized, no, not her breast, she had placed his hand on her heart, which was beating frantically too.

  “We match,” she said, and the promise of her voice made the situation familiar, and thrillingly new.

  ||||||||||||||||||

  The next morning, he is pressing his nose against the sofa, breathing in the smell of her. All these surfaces of his home—walls, bed, sofa—marked with her scent. He walks from one surface to the next, his senses still filled with her.

  He glances around the room. How is it possible that it appears exactly the same as yesterday? It should look as though a storm has been through. There should be broken vases, torn blinds, upturned furniture. Something to mirror this feeling of turmoil, of everything having changed. He stands in front of the mirror, touches the scratch on his shoulder as though it’s a holy relic. At least there’s this. Cups his hands and lifts them to his face, breathing in. His personal act of prayer.

  To start with she’d been hesitant, tentative. During their first kiss, she’d broken away and started to put her hijab back on, before his entreaties convinced her to stay. Then things swung the other way, and she seemed to think she had to prove to him that she really wanted to stay, in the way of a certain kind of adolescent girl who had always made him uncomfortable in his teenage years—the ones who thought they were required to give to the older boys without anything in return. So he stopped her, showed that wasn’t how this would work, and she said, “You’re ni
ce,” as if that was a surprise, and they set about discovering each other in that slow-quick way of new lovers—testing, exploring, building on what each was learning about the other.

  At daybreak he woke to discover she’d risen from the bed, to which they’d finally made their way. Hearing the sound of the shower, so early, he thought she was planning to leave without saying good-bye. But when she left the bathroom her footsteps didn’t move in the direction of the door. Eventually he swung himself out of bed and walked into the living room to find her praying, a towel as her prayer mat, the hijab nothing more alien than a scarf loosely covering her head without the elaborate pinning or the tightly fitted cap beneath. She made no sign of being aware of him except a slight adjustment of her shoulders, angling away from his naked form. He should have left immediately, but he couldn’t help watching this woman, this stranger, prostrating herself to God in the room where she’d been down on her knees for a very different purpose just hours earlier. Finally, the depth of her immersion in a world other than that of bodies and senses made him go back to the bed, wondering if she’d return.

  “What were you praying for?” he asked when she came back in and started to unbutton her long-sleeved shirt, starting at the base of her neck.

  “Prayer isn’t about transaction, Mr. Capitalist. It’s about starting the day right.”

  “You had to put on a bra for God?” he said, as she unbuttoned further, needing her to laugh with him about it. “Did you think He might get distracted by your . . . distractions?”

  “You do other things better than you do talk.”

  That burned in ways both good and bad. He held back from mentioning that he could say the same for her. When openings for conversation had arisen she preferred to pillow her head in her arms and look up at the ceiling, or doze with her back to him, the soles of her feet pressed against his legs, combining rejection and intimacy. He watched as she continued to undress until there was nothing left but the white scarf covering her head, one end of the soft fabric falling just below her breast, the other thrown over her shoulder.