He found Farooq ironing in his underpants, the windows of the flat thrown open to allow in the sunshine of the unseasonably warm day and the chicken-grease-scented air. A pile of freshly laundered clothes lay in a basket near his feet. Squares of sunlight fell like epaulets on his chiseled shoulders. He was in a boisterous mood, instructing Parvaiz how to roll up the ironed clothes, asking him if he knew that was the best way to keep them from creasing, and deriding the “idiots” who chose to fold instead. Parvaiz found himself imagining Farooq working with Isma at the dry-cleaning store, swapping tips about stain removal.
Tentatively, Parvaiz mentioned the library campaign, which he described as a “habit” carried over from adolescence. Farooq upended the iron and pointed to a spot in the center of the ironing board.
“Put your hand there. Palm up. I’m going to press this iron on it.”
Parvaiz looked from the hissing iron to Farooq’s face, but there was no hint of a joke. Just a watchfulness, a judgment waiting to be made. He stepped forward, placed both palms on the ironing board, forced himself into stillness as Farooq lifted the iron, feinted, smiled when Parvaiz didn’t flinch, then lightly touched the wedge-shaped weapon to Parvaiz’s palms. It was hot but not unbearable.
“Uses steam pressure more than heat. It won’t burn even the flimsiest silk,” Farooq said, with the air of a salesman. He caught Parvaiz by the back of the neck and kissed his forehead. “My faithful warrior.” He resumed his ironing, and Parvaiz jammed his hands into his pockets.
“The library,” Farooq said. “Of course it matters. Same as what they’re doing to the NHS, welfare benefits, all the rest of it. You know this country used to be great.”
“When was that?”
“Not so long ago. When it understood that a welfare state was something you built up instead of tearing down, when it saw migrants as people to be welcomed not turned away. Imagine what it would be like to live in such a nation. No, don’t just smile. I’m asking you to do something: imagine it.”
Parvaiz shook his head uncertainly, not sure what he was being asked.
“There is a place like that we can go to now. A place where migrants coming in to join are treated like kings, given more in benefits than the locals to acknowledge all they’ve given up to reach there. A place where skin color doesn’t matter. Where schools and hospitals are free, and rich and poor have the same facilities. Where men are men. Where no one has to enter haram gambling shops to earn a living, but can provide for his family with dignity. Where someone like you would find himself working in a state-of-the-art studio, living like a prince. Your own villa, your own car. Where you could speak openly about your father, with pride, not shame.”
Parvaiz laughed. He’d never seen Farooq so light, so playful. “So what are we still doing here? Let’s follow the yellow brick road, or is it the White Rabbit who takes us there?”
“What rabbit? What are you talking about rabbits for when I’m trying to tell you something serious.”
“Sorry. You’re talking about a real place?”
“You know where I’m talking about. The caliphate.”
Parvaiz raised his hands defensively. “Come on, boss. Don’t mess with me.”
Farooq switched off the iron, stepped into cargo pants, pulled on his T-shirt. “I’ve been there. I’d just come back from there when we met. Who are you going to believe about what it’s really like? The same people who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the ones who tortured your father in the name of freedom, or me?”
Parvaiz’s heart seemed to have taken up his entire chest cavity, hammering so furiously he was surprised his shirt wasn’t moving. Farooq’s expression became gentle.
“Believe the evidence of your eyes. Wait.” He went into the kitchen area and came out a little while later with a tablet. “Don’t worry, no one will know you’re looking at this—it’s all offline. I’m going to finish ironing. You have any questions, ask.”
Parvaiz sat down on the piled-up mattresses, rested the tablet on his knee. Farooq had pulled up the photo browser to show him the image of the black-and-white flag he’d first seen only a few months ago and that he’d learned to glance quickly away from in newspapers on the tube so no one would think the Muslim boy looked too interested. He looked up at Farooq, who made a swiping gesture with his finger. Parvaiz flicked forward through the images. Men fishing together against the backdrop of a beautiful sunrise; children on swings in a playground; a man riding through a city on the back of a beautiful stallion, carts of fresh vegetables lining the street; an elderly but powerful-looking man beneath a canopy of green grapes, reaching up to pluck a bunch; young men of different ethnicities sitting together on a carpet laid out in a field; standing men pointing their guns at the heads of kneeling men; an aerial nighttime view of a street thrumming with life, car headlamps and electric lights blazing; men and boys in a large swimming pool; boys and girls lined up outside a bouncy castle at an amusement park; a blood-donation clinic; smiling men sweeping an already clean street; a bird sanctuary; the bloodied corpse of a child.
Parvaiz didn’t know he’d said anything in response to the last, but he must have, because Farooq asked, “What?” and came to see what he was looking at. “The Kurds, those heroes of the West, did that. Her name was Laila, three years old.”
“And the men about to be executed in the other picture?”
“The men who did that to her, or those just like them.”
“These other images, are they real?”
“Of course they’re real. Look!” He cycled back to the fishing image, and Parvaiz saw that one of the men—the one whose large muscles were straining with the weight of the catch he was trying to reel in—was Farooq.
“Okay, there’s a little bit of a lie in there. That giant fish you think I’ve hooked—it was a waterlogged jacket. This is the Euphrates we’re fishing in. You want to come and fish in the Euphrates with me? And with your other brothers? That’s Abu Omar, that’s Ilyas al-Russ, and this one is my sweet Abu Bakr, who was martyred by the FSA.”
“So it’s not true then? About all the violence? Only if they’re enemy soldiers, is that what you’re saying?”
Farooq sighed heavily and sat down beside him, hooking his arm around Parvaiz’s neck. “What do they teach you in history?”
The French Revolution. That was Farooq’s lesson of the day. The cradle, the bedrock, the foundation of enlightenment and liberalism and democracy and all the things that make the West so smugly superior to the rest of the world. Let us agree to accept for a moment that the ideals that came from it were good. Liberty, equality, fraternity—who could argue against that? Well, Farooq could, but that was another day’s lesson. For the moment, accept those ideals as ideal. But where would those ideals be without the Reign of Terror that nurtured and protected them with blood, eliminating all enemies, internal and external, that threatened the new utopia, and did so in full view of the public? It might have been regrettable—a man would rather fish with his friends than cut off the heads of his enemies—but it was necessary. Eventually the terror ends, having served its purpose of protecting a new—revolutionary—state of affairs that is besieged by enemies who are terrified of its moral power.
“So the question for you is this: Will you protect the new revolution? Will you do the work your father would have done if he’d lived?”
Parvaiz looked from Farooq back to the screen, flicking through the remaining images. A land of order and beauty and life and youth. A Kalashnikov resting on one shoulder, a brother’s arm around the other. It was another planet, one on which he’d always be the boy from Earth whose lungs don’t know how to breathe this wondrous, terrifying atmosphere.
||||||||||||||||||
But increasingly, his lungs didn’t know how to breathe the air of London. MI5 officers were present at Bagram, Farooq told him, and showed him evidence to corroborate that. You
r government, the one that took taxes from your family and claimed to represent the people, knew what was going on. How can you live in this place, accepting, after all that you now know? How can you live in this mirage of democracy and freedom? What kind of man are you, what kind of son are you?
The questions followed him through his days now. Everywhere he saw evidence of rot and corruption, lies and cover-ups. His two sisters had allowed themselves to become part of it too: one preparing to go to America, the nation that had killed their father and hundreds of thousands of other Muslim fathers; the other propping up the lie that theirs was a country where citizens had rights and courts of appeal.
At night, via the proxy servers Farooq said he could rely on, he went deeper and deeper into the Web, to stories of dogs raping prisoners at Bagram, pictures of tortured bodies, medical accounts of what the different forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques” could do to a body and mind. One night he lay in bed with his desk lamp directed straight at his eyes, his most powerful headphones blasting heavy metal into his ears—he managed for no more than twenty minutes before, whimpering, pathetic, he had to restore his room to darkness and silence. Increasingly, during the day he would stop in the middle of the smallest action—handing a bag of celery to a customer, waiting for a bus, raising a cup of tea to his mouth—and feel the wrongness of it all, the falseness of his life.
“You need to break up with her, she’s no good for you,” Aneeka kept saying, unable to imagine any pain in the world larger than a bad love affair. More than once he found her trying out different password combinations on his phone—he’d changed it from their joint birthday to the day he first met Farooq.
One day Farooq showed him a photograph that he recognized. A white man kneeling in the sand just prior to his execution, an image that encapsulated for the world the barbarity of the caliphate. When he’d first seen it he’d felt sorrow for the man with the courage to try to look brave with a blade at his throat, whose only crime was the nation he’d been born into. But this time what struck him most powerfully were the man’s clothes, the same shade of orange as the prison jumpsuit in which his father had died. His vision expanded; he saw beyond the expression of the individual kneeling in the desert to the message the caliphate sent with his death: What you do to ours we will do to yours.
So this was how it felt to have a nation that wielded its sword on your behalf and told you acquiescence wasn’t the only option. Dear God, the vein-flooding pleasure of it.
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And then he found himself preparing to leave.
How exactly it happened he couldn’t have said. He had been too busy changing to stop and chart the change. It had been a long time since he and Farooq had discussed football, reality shows, life at the greengrocer’s. There was only one subject, and eventually he understood that the subject was a destination.
“You’re sure I can come back if I don’t like it?”
“Of course you can. I’m back here, aren’t I?”
“You’ve never said why.”
“Had to deal with family stuff. Then you happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Should have left weeks ago. But thought if I waited, maybe you’d come too.”
“You stayed for me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll really help me find people there who knew my father?”
“I really will.”
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“I’m your brother.”
“Yes. I know. Thank you.”
He called his cousin, the guitarist in Karachi—the one he’d hated because on the only occasion they’d met the other boy had said, “I’m a Pakistani and you’re a Paki”—and said he was going to take up the offer, proffered by the guitarist’s mother, to spend some months in Karachi working on a popular music show to build up his professional credentials. He sorted out his paperwork, one half of his brain believing he really would end up in Karachi, and booked a flight with a connection in Istanbul that would arrive in the old Ottoman capital soon after Farooq’s flight. When Aneeka talked about meeting him in Karachi over Easter he enjoyed making travel plans with her, their heads bent together over maps of Pakistan. Badshahi Mosque and Kim’s Gun, the ruins of Taxila, the Peshawar Museum, with the world’s largest Gandhara collection, and in Karachi the studio of the music show they’d been listening to since its inception a few years ago, where Parvaiz would soon be working.
“If I like it there, maybe I’ll stay awhile and you can visit too,” he said to Isma the December night before he was due to leave, the statement brought on by the smell of the masala omelet she was cooking for his final dinner at home.
The first weekend after their mother died, Parvaiz had stopped eating. He was unable to explain to himself why he was rejecting every item of food Aunty Naseem and her daughters and Aneeka offered him, and even Aneeka was at a loss to understand it. It was Isma, who disliked cooking above all other domestic chores, who had come into his room with a masala omelet such as their mother used to make for breakfast every Saturday. She had cut it into pieces and fed it to him, forkful by forkful.
Now she looked up in surprise and smiled in a way usually reserved for Aneeka. “I’d like that,” she said.
Her smile sent him out the door into the cold December night, head tipped back to count the stars and keep the tears from falling. It was there that Aneeka found him a short while later.
“You’re going to have to get rid of that growth on your face,” she said, maybe or maybe not noticing the hand he quickly rubbed across his eyes at her approach. “The Heathrow officials might mistake what is fashionista for fundo and decide not to let you board the plane to Pakistan. Particularly if you’re flying through Istanbul. Jihadi alert!”
He laughed too loudly, and his twin touched his arm. “You sure you want to go? You know I’m only allowing you to do it because you obviously have to get away from her. Will you never tell me who she is? I promise I won’t beat her up too badly.”
“I’m going in order to improve my career prospects for that Asian marriage site. Though the bio should still start Handsome Londoner who loves his sister.”
She stepped forward until there was almost no space between them, butted her head against his shoulder. “Both you and Isma leaving. What will I do all alone?”
He held her earlobe between thumb and finger. He knew she had wanted to say this since he first announced he was going. There was no living person for whom he’d leave her just weeks before she had to say good-bye to the older sister who had raised her—raised them both—as much as their mother ever had. But the dead made their own demands, impossible to refuse.
||||||||||||||||||
While the plane was taxiing he ignored the instructions to turn off his phone and listened, instead, to the audio track “Twin Heard from the Garden Shed.”
These were the things her voice said:
It’s getting late; even the birds have gone home.
Oh god, I’m interrupting you again.
Couldn’t you have found a less solitary obsession?
Where are you these days?
Regardless, dinner’s ready. Might as well come in.
The wheels left tarmac. He uploaded the track to her account on the Cloud and deleted her from his phone.
6
PARVAIZ PAID THE MAN in the electronics store with the Turkish liras he was carrying in his knapsack, and then asked, as if it were an afterthought, if he sold phones with SIM cards that allowed international calls.
“The new arrivals will have to call home, and there’s always one who weeps into the phone and covers it with snot. So they’re not getting my phone again,” he said.
“I don’t need to know your business,” said the shopkeeper, moving over to the glass-topped display case housing cell phones. �
��Here.” He pulled out a bricklike handset that belonged to a time when calls and texts were all anyone expected from a phone, and that continued to exist, Parvaiz was sure, only because people in high-crime areas liked to carry around a decoy phone to hand over to muggers. “No charge,” the man said expansively, as he slipped the SIM card into its compartment.
“Jazakallah khayr,” Parvaiz said, scooping up the pile of boxed equipment for which he’d just paid a small fortune. “Do you have a back door? My car’s parked behind your shop.”
“Can you carry all that? Do you want to call your friend to help you? I would, but my back . . .”
“This is nothing after what they made us do in military training,” he said.
“You’re a fighter? I thought you were with Abu Raees in the studio.”
“I am. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t teach me how to fight in the way of Allah in preparation for a time when I can be more useful that way. Why is it, my friend, that you’re still living in Turkey?”
The man blanched. “I do my part from here. The back door—through there. I’ll open it for you.”
Parvaiz stepped out into the sunlight and started to walk toward the row of parked cars until he heard the door close. He turned, made sure the man had gone back inside, then set the pile of boxes down on the side of the road, placed his traceable smartphone on top of the pile, and began to run.
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