Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  He stopped the recording, took off his headphones, scribbled in his notepad. It might be nice to leave in that Where are you these days between 20:13 and 20:14. Aneeka’s was the only human voice scattered through his audio files of Preston Road Station Heard from the Garden Shed.

  “I’m here. You’re the one who’s hardly around.”

  “I meant where are you here?” She reached out to tap his head. “And here.” She rested her hand on his wrist, at his pulse point, in the old childish way, but he didn’t reciprocate. “Is this about moving to Aunty Naseem’s? I know you’re upset about losing this spot, but at least we’ll still be in the neighborhood.”

  We, she said, but he wondered how often she’d be around. There was hardly a week when she didn’t spend at least one night at Gita’s. He knew Aneeka well enough to recognize she was laying the groundwork for staying out more and more often—and it wouldn’t always be with Gita either.

  “This is our home,” he said.

  She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Always so senti. You should join me in convincing Isma we should sell. You could afford to go to uni with the money we’d get. That’d make up for the loss of More of the Same Heard from the Garden Shed, wouldn’t it?”

  “They only gave you a scholarship because you tick their ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ boxes,” he said, wounded enough to vocalize a sentiment Farooq had recently dredged out of his unconscious.

  “Since when are you so white?” She flicked his earlobe with her thumb and forefinger.

  “Muslim women, particularly the beautiful ones, need to be saved from Muslim men. Muslim men need to be detained, harassed, pressed against the ground with a heel on our throat.”

  “None of these things has ever happened to you.”

  “How many times have I been stopped and searched by police? Compared to you?”

  “Twice. Only twice, P. And you said yourself it was no big deal either time, so stop whining about it after the fact.” She jumped down from the ladder, with that physical confidence that always made his breath stop in terror for her safety. “Isma’s right, you know. It’s time for you to grow up.”

  Previously he would have gone after her and turned it into a shouting match that would continue until they’d exhausted themselves into reconciliation. But now he remained where he was, watching all the lives within their narrow frames slide past on the tracks in the darkness, allowing the wound to fester so that tomorrow he could tell Farooq about it and receive the antiseptic of his new friend’s indignation.

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  Farooq sent a text asking him to come to the flat in Wembley where he lived with two of his cousins, though not the one who had mugged Parvaiz. It felt momentous enough for Parvaiz to go home from the greengrocer’s, scrub the dirt out from beneath his fingernails, and put on a fresh shirt.

  When he pushed open the unlocked door at Farooq’s address he smelled chicken grease from the fast-food joint downstairs, and familiar cologne. A window was rattling in its frame, not because of any breeze but as a consequence of the traffic on the street below. Farooq’s baritone voice told him to stop waiting for a gold-plated invitation and come in.

  The furnishings consisted of three mattresses piled on top of one another and pushed against a wall and two green plastic chairs, which faced a flat-screen TV hooked up to a video game console. The kitchen area had a microwave and an electric kettle, the open door of a cabinet offering a glimpse of rolled black T-shirts and black socks. A punching bag hung from a thick bolt in the ceiling, a slight creaking as it oscillated almost imperceptibly. There was a bolt in the floor, similar to the one in the ceiling, that didn’t seem to serve any purpose. He remembered Farooq’s texts—the ones he didn’t know how to respond to—about wanting to chain up women from the American reality TV show, and looked away. An ironing board served as makeshift table for a lamp and a pair of boxing gloves. On the floor beside it, an iron rested on a base the size of a bread box.

  “It’s the Ferrari of irons,” Farooq said, proudly, seeing Parvaiz looking at the appliance. “Only one setting so you never burn your clothes. You ever want to iron something, bring it here. Sit, sit, make yourself at home. You are at home. No, on the chair, on the chair.”

  Parvaiz sat down, tried to smooth the creases of his shirt. Farooq smiled, cuffed him on the side of the head, and handed him a mug of tea.

  “Wait for me. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and walked out.

  Parvaiz sipped the tea—too weak—and looked around the flat, trying to find any further clues to his yaar’s life. The Urdu word came closer than “friend” to explaining how he thought of Farooq. Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.

  A photograph was taped to the wall just above the ironing board. Three men with their arms around one another’s shoulders under a DEPARTURES sign at an airport—Adil Pasha; Ahmed from the fabric shop, who had convinced Parvaiz’s father to come with him to Bosnia in 1995; and a stocky third man. That must be Farooq’s father. The man who fought for less than a week in Bosnia before running back home, a broken creature with night terrors who embarrassed his young son. Farooq had revealed all this only a few days ago—Ahmed from the fabric shop would come to visit, and every time he brought more and more stories of the heroism of the man who had become Abu Parvaiz, which my father never wanted to hear, but I did. Ahmed had moved away a few years ago—Parvaiz knew him only as the man his mother crossed the street to avoid.

  He reached out to touch his father’s arm in the photo, searched his face for signs of similarity. But he and Aneeka took after their mother’s family; it was Isma, unfairly, who had their father’s wider face, thinner lips. He leaned in closer to the photograph, the only one he’d ever seen of his father at the moment he set off on the path that would become his life. He looked excited. It was the first time in years Parvaiz had seen a photograph of his father that he hadn’t already committed to memory. He found himself staring at the paler band of skin on his father’s wrist. Where was his watch? Had he taken it off to go through the metal detector and failed to put it back on? Did they have metal detectors at airports back then? Perhaps at the moment the picture was taken he hadn’t yet realized that he’d left his watch in the security screening area. Once he realized, he would have gone back, perhaps with the slightly anxious expression Parvaiz knew from an Eid photograph, in which he looked off to the side, away from the camera. He thought of all the photographs of his father, the ones before Bosnia, and the very few ones after. Yes, he still had the watch with the silver band afterward. It was a triumph to remember this, to piece together this tiny truth.

  It felt neither and both a long and a short time that he stood there, memorizing his father’s image, before the door opened and two strangers entered, one of them bearing enough resemblance to Farooq for Parvaiz to work out that they were the cousins he lived with.

  His words of greeting went unanswered. Instead the cousins walked over to the bolt in the floor and looped a chain through it.

  “Come on,” one of them said impatiently. Parvaiz approached them, uncertain what it was they needed his help with.

  Then he was on the ground, one cousin straddling his legs, the other his chest. The one on his legs tied the chain around his ankles, the one on his chest slapped him to stop him from struggling, and then both of them maneuvered him into a squatting position and used the chain to shackle his wrists to his ankles. When he called out Farooq’s name they laughed in a way that made him stop.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “We’ve done it already,” one of the cousins replied.

  They both stood up, walked over to the TV, and started to play a video game, the volume turned so high that even if he shouted again no one would hear. It didn’t take long to understand
what the cousin meant. The chain so short that it was impossible either to straighten up or topple over entirely, and he could only remain hunched in a squatting position, the pressure on his back increasing by the minute. What started as discomfort eventually became pain, shooting from his back down through his legs. When he tried to move—tried to find a way to roll onto his side—the chains cut into his flesh. Layered into the pain was the torment of not understanding why he deserved it and what he could do to make it stop. He heard his voice begging to be set free, but the two men didn’t even look in his direction. The video game sound designer hadn’t accounted for cheap speakers, and the crackling and distortion were more intolerable than the gunfire and death screams. He tried prayer but it did nothing.

  Sunshine left the room. Clouds or evening, he couldn’t tell. Even the relief of unconsciousness eluded him. Scorpions of fire were under his skin, frantic to escape—they raced from his shoulders to his calves, their stingers whiplike. Every crackle from the speakers was magnified until it became a physical force attacking his ears. He was screaming in pain, had been screaming in pain for a long time.

  One of the cousins pressed pause.

  The sounds of the everyday rushed to embrace him—rattling windows, traffic, his breath. The two men walked over, unshackled him. For a moment there was release, his body collapsing onto the ground, but then they picked him up, carried him to the kitchen sink, which was filled with water, and dunked his head in.

  So, he was going to die. Here, above a chicken shop, just a mile or so from home. How would his sisters bear it, after all they’d lost? The men pulled his head out, he breathed in a lungful of air, they dunked him again. This went on. He told himself he wouldn’t breathe in next time, but his body wanted to live. They pulled him out; the air had an increased concentration of Farooq’s cologne in it; he braced himself for the next immersion, but instead they carried him over to the pile of mattresses and threw him facedown on it.

  A hand touched his head, tenderly. “Now you begin to see,” Farooq’s voice said, full of sorrow.

  The only response Parvaiz had was tears, and Farooq turned him over so that Parvaiz could see that the older man was crying too.

  “They did this to your father for months,” Farooq said.

  The cousins had left the flat. There was only Farooq, stroking Parvaiz’s arm, helping him into a sitting position. When Farooq stood up, Parvaiz reached out and held his leg.

  “No, I won’t leave you again,” Farooq said. “I’m just getting something from the kitchen.”

  If he turned his head he’d be able to see what Farooq was doing, but all he could do was stay as he was, breathing in and out, feeling the stabbing, shooting pain move from back to lungs to legs. Farooq returned, held a hot water bottle to his back, handed him an ice cream stick wrapped in a chocolate shell. He bit down into it, felt sweetness spread through his mouth, remembered pleasure.

  When he’d finished, licking every clinging bit of ice cream off the stick, Farooq took the photograph off the wall and placed it into his hands.

  “How much do you know about what they did to prisoners in Bagram?”

  Parvaiz shook his head. It was all he was capable of doing.

  “You’ve never tried to find out?”

  A shorter shake of the head, ashamed now. It had always been there just out of the corner of his eye, the knowledge of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but he had never looked closely. Because he didn’t want anyone to ask why he was so interested. That was the reason he’d always given himself.

  Farooq rested a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. You were a child, alone. You weren’t ready for it. But that’s changed now, hasn’t it?”

  A child, alone. He’d never been alone. There had always been Aneeka. Even when she was different, she was still there. He looked at the iron bolt in the floor, thought of Aneeka saying they should sell the house. She was unlinking the chains that held them together, casting him into darkness without the accompanying sound of her heartbeat for the first time since his heart had clenched in terror to find itself dividing into chambers, becoming an organ with the capacity to feel, then relaxed, knowing there was another heart experiencing every moment of fear, every second of wonder alongside it.

  Legs still wobbly, he stood up. “I have to go.”

  Farooq stood with him and drew him into an embrace. “You’re strong enough to bear this. You’re his son, after all.”

  Parvaiz pulled away, walked out without saying anything. Please come home, he texted his twin while going down the stairs.

  He was on the 79 bus home, just a few minutes later, when she texted back. Urgent? Class ends in 20.

  He rested his temple against the window of the bus and watched the familiar world pass by. “Sicko,” “creep”—those would be the words she’d use about Farooq, and she’d make him swear on their mother’s grave never to see the man again. But the farther the bus took him from Farooq’s flat the more he felt he was in the wrong place. The ache in his back had begun to recede and he remembered how, before the pain had become too unbearable for any thought beyond his own suffering, he had turned his head toward the wall, toward the photograph of his father, and there was this understanding, I am you, for the first time.

  He texted back: Haha just testing your devotion. Don’t make me have another night of takeaway and Isma.

  Idiot, you worried me, she responded. Paper due tomorrow so working late in the library. Will stay at Gita’s tonight.

  He slid the phone into his pocket. Near the front of the bus a man was tapping his wedding ring against a yellow handrail. The sound, metal on metal, was chains unlinking.

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  Parvaiz sat down on the stool near the till in the greengrocer’s, wiping the back of his hand against his mouth, surrounded by a lie. Asparagus and plantains and okra and Scotch bonnet peppers and bird’s-eye chilis and samphire and cabbage and bitter gourd. Nat, the greengrocer, said the world was divided into two kinds of people: those who regularly ate fresh food, and those who didn’t. With each new influx of migrants to the neighborhood, he’d ask, What do they eat? and add to his stock accordingly. Pakistanis, West Indians, Albanians—they were all fine by Nat. His shelves bursting with freshness and color, the promise of family meals and welcoming neighbors.

  Parvaiz set Nat’s phone down on the weighing scale, surprised by how light it was. In his hands it had felt like an iron bar. He’d taken it out of the pocket of Nat’s winter coat, which hung in the back room, when Nat went to the café next door for his morning toast and tea. He’d switched the browser into private mode and typed “Bagram abuse” into the search bar. Then he’d read, and looked at images, until he’d had to run outside and throw up in an empty crate that smelled of cabbage.

  He’d always told himself a story, which came from nowhere he could now recall, that said Guantánamo was the place where really bad things happened, and at least his father had been spared that. Such a clever little lie, neat as the piles of fruit and vegetables he’d so carefully arranged this morning, as if the placement of a pear were something that mattered.

  Nat returned, took one look at him, and said, “What’s happened?”

  Parvaiz stood up. “Not feeling well. Can I go?”

  “Of course. Should I call Isma? You need something from the pharmacy?”

  He shook his head, unable to bear Nat’s kindness.

  A short while later he was at Farooq’s flat. He walked over to the shackles, lifted their weight in his hand. The cool steel harmless in his palm, link clinking against link.

  “Tie me again. I want to feel my father’s pain.”

  “My brave warrior,” Farooq said, as Parvaiz knelt down and waited for the agony to resume.

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  “Are you finally ready to tell me about her?” Aneeka said, perched on the arm of the sofa
, her foot tapping against Parvaiz’s ankle inquiringly as he lay prone beneath his favorite blue blanket, a hot water bottle against his back.

  “Her who?”

  “Really? You going to tell me you aren’t lying here looking so wounded because of whoever you’ve been going off to meet every afternoon and texting deep into the night for—what—a couple of weeks now? Longer? Who is she? Why all the secrecy?”

  “Why the law?”

  “What?”

  “Why is that what you’ve decided to do with your life? What does the law count for? How did the law help our father?”

  She raised her eyebrows at him, unbothered. “You could just say you aren’t ready to tell me who she is. Is she married? Oh god, she’s not from one of those crazy honor-killing type families, is she?”

  “Why are you pretending I’m not asking you a valid question?”

  “Well, you aren’t, really. What has Adil Pasha ever had to do with our lives?”

  He turned away from her, his face pressed against the sofa cushions. “You’re just a girl. You don’t understand.”

  She held his foot in her hands, pressing her thumbs into his sole. “Don’t get your heart broken.”

  “Shut up. Leave me alone. You don’t know anything.”

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  A few days later there was a fund-raiser for the library campaign. Parvaiz had been involved with the campaign through his adolescence, ever since the council had announced that the local library, to which his mother had taken him and Aneeka after school at least once a week, would have to close. He’d handed out leaflets, written letters to the local newspaper, attended meetings with Gladys where strategies were discussed; when it became clear the council was going to go ahead with the closure he’d seamlessly moved into the next stage of the campaign, to set up and keep going a volunteer-run library. He’d sung carols outside the tube station to raise money, helped transport books local residents donated, volunteered at the library every Sunday. But as the day of the fund-raiser drew closer, he became increasingly worried that one of the Us Thugz boys might see him at the cake stall with Gladys, selling Aneeka’s chocolate brownies, Aunty Naseem’s Victoria sponge, and Nat’s apple pie, and report back to Farooq that with the world ablaze with injustice Parvaiz Pasha thought the cause to which he should devote his time was a local library. The only way to limit the damage was to break the news himself.