“You don’t love either justice or our brother if you can say that.”
“Well, I love you too much to see anything else right now.”
“Your love is useless to me if you won’t help.”
“Your love is useless to him now he’s dead.”
“Get off his shed. Your voice doesn’t belong here.”
“Aneeka. I need my sister—how can either of us bear this alone?”
Isma’s hand stroking her hair, trying to take her away from Parvaiz.
“Go.”
x.
“SHATTERED AND HORRIFIED”: SISTER OF PARVAIZ PASHA SPEAKS
Early this morning, Isma Pasha, the 28-year-old sister of London-born terrorist Parvaiz Pasha, who was killed in Istanbul on Monday, read a statement to journalists outside her family home in Wembley. She said, “My sister and I were shattered and horrified last year when we heard that our brother, Parvaiz, had gone to join people we regard as the enemies of both Britain and Islam. We informed Counter Terrorism Command immediately, as Commissioner Janet Stephens has already said. We wish to thank the Pakistan High Commission in Turkey for the efforts they’re making to have our brother’s body sent to Pakistan, where relatives will make plans for his burial, as an act of remembrance to our late mother. My sister and I have no plans to travel to Pakistan for the funeral.”
Pasha’s local mosque has also issued a statement to clarify it does not intend to hold funeral prayers for the dead man, and condemned rumors to the contrary as “part of a campaign of hatred against law-abiding British Muslims.”
Pasha’s body is in a mortuary in Istanbul, and sources say it could be several days before it is released for repatriation to Pakistan.
Istanbul police have said the dead man was not carrying any weapons at the time of his death. His reasons for approaching the British consulate when he was killed remain unknown, as does the identity of his killer—described by eye witnesses as an Asian male in his 30s. Commissioner Janet Stephens has said Pasha was working with the media wing of ISIS, which is responsible for the recruitment of fighters and of so-called “jihadi brides.” Tower Hamlets resident Mobashir Hoque, whose daughter, Romana, left for Syria in January to marry an ISIS fighter, told reporters, “My daughter was tricked into going by the lies and propaganda of men such as Parvaiz Pasha. My only disagreement with the Home Secretary’s decision is that it deprives me of the chance to spit on the terrorist’s grave.”
Sources in the Home Office say the Immigration Bill due to go before Parliament in the next session will introduce a clause to make it possible to strip any British passport holders of their citizenship in cases where they have acted against the vital interests of the UK. Under present rules only dual nationals or naturalized citizens with a claim to another nationality can have their citizenship revoked. The Home Secretary has repeatedly expanded on his predecessor’s claim that “citizenship is a privilege not a right” to say “citizenship is a privilege not a right or birthright.” The human rights campaign group Liberty issued a statement to say: “Removing the right to have rights is a new low. Washing our hands of potential terrorists is dangerously shortsighted and statelessness is a tool of despots not democrats.”
xi.
Woke up to rain gusting in through the windows broken by rocks. Isma had said at least it meant they spared Aunty Naseem’s house. Isma, shattered and horrified, playing the good citizen even now, dragging her sister’s name into that shameful act. Isma, traitor, betrayer.
Alone now in the house they’d grown up in, empty, the Migrants gone with all their furniture, only a mattress for furnishing, which Kaleem Bhai and Isma dragged across the street, since you insist on sleeping here, a double mattress for both sisters but this house was for the twins only now. Made Isma leave with a shrieking flapping of arms madwoman behavior that finally drove her away. Downstairs a pounding sound, what? Someone trying to break in, to break the house from inside for the crime of having been a roof over the terrorist’s head. Picked up the electric kettle with four heat settings the closest thing to a weapon that remained. Opened the door to David Beckham, the Queen, Zayn Malik boarding up the broken windows. Beckham almost hammered his thumb in surprise. “Didn’t think anyone was here,” he said from behind the mask with the voice of Abdul.
“Better go inside there may still be journos lurking,” said Zayn Malik, who was really David Beckham’s father.
“Cuppa would be lovely, though,” said the Queen aka Nat the greengrocer, jerking her tiaraed head toward the kettle.
xii.
Countless hours of recording, and never his own voice. As though he’d started to practice disappearing long ago. Now he wouldn’t even enter her dreams. Too angry.
xiii.
HOW MANY PARVAIZ PASHAS WILL IT TAKE FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO WAKE UP?
The revelation that Adil Pasha, the father of recently dead terrorist Parvaiz Pasha, abandoned his family in order to take up jihad has not entirely come as a surprise to one former classmate of the Preston Road resident.
“There was a rumor that his father had been a jihadi in Afghanistan who died in Guantánamo,” said the classmate, who wished to remain unnamed. “His sisters always denied it and said he’d died of malaria while abroad, but Parvaiz never did. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back it’s obvious he thought jihad was something to boast about when he was still just a little kid.”
Sources at the Met say Adil Pasha fought with jihadi groups in Bosnia and Chechnya in the ’90s, and traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 to fight with the Taliban. He is believed to have died soon after. “We have no idea if he was killed in a battle or died of malaria or from other causes. But if he’d ever been in Guantánamo there would have been records, and there simply aren’t,” said a retired Special Branch officer who interviewed the Pasha family in 2002. “I remember the son, Parvaiz. He was very young but was already being allowed to idolize the father who fought with Britain’s enemies. I took away the photograph album he had with pictures of his dad holding a Kalashnikov, and an inscription saying ‘One day you’ll join me in jihad.’ I recommended CPS keep a close eye on him, but unfortunately this recommendation was never taken up.”
It’s a cause of profound concern that the children of jihadis, many of them British-born, are not closely watched by the state. How many more Parvaiz Pashas will it take for things to change?
xiv.
He’d returned from the Pakistan High Commission that day to say he didn’t have to pay the exorbitant visa fees for British nationals or go through bureaucratic processes in order to work in Karachi because turns out he had something called a NICOP.
“Oh yes,” Isma said, “I got them for all of us when I was planning that trip to Pakistan which never happened, remember?”
Up to the attic Parvaiz went, and down he came triumphant. One for you and one for me, he said, handing Aneeka the laminated card with NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD FOR OVERSEAS PAKISTANI printed on it. She glanced at the picture, remembered then how sullenly she had accompanied her sister to the High Commission to have the card issued, hating the idea of missing a summer in London, to spend it in a country teeming with relatives who thought blood ties gave them the right to interrogate and lecture and point to the sisters’ hijabs as proof that British Pakistanis were “caught in the past” then point to their jeans to prove they were “mixed up.” It didn’t improve her mood to see that the card insisted on listing NAME OF FATHER. In the end, though, something in the phone conversations with the rich relatives who had promised to fund the trip had gotten Isma’s back up, and the cards were dispatched to the filing cabinet in the attic along with birth certificates and NHS cards and X-rays of broken bones.
“What is an Overseas Pakistani, exactly?” she asked.
Parvaiz shrugged. “Think it just means your family’s from there so you’re exempt from visas. Anyway, that’s the only part that’s relevant
to me.”
“To us,” she said. “I’ll need it when I come to visit you. Put it in my purse, would you? I don’t want to have to go up to the spidery attic to find it when you’re gone.” She had no memory of his expression as he did as she asked.
Now the laminated card with her sullen fourteen-year-old self sat on the desk at the High Commission while the man with the plastic comb in his pocket looked sadly down on it.
“You should do what your older sister says, and stay away,” he said. “Ladies don’t go for the burial anyway, so you would only be praying at home, which you can do just as well in London as in Karachi—Allah would hear even a prayer whispered by a mute from the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean.”
“Am I or am I not entitled to a Pakistani passport?”
“Yes.”
“I have a bank draft for the urgent-processing fee. Please tell me who I should give it to.”
xv.
HO-JABI! PERVY PASHA’S TWIN SISTER ENGINEERED SEX TRYSTS WITH HOME SECRETARY’S SON
Aneeka “Knickers” Pasha, the 19-year-old twin sister of Muslim fanatic Parvaiz “Pervy” Pasha has been revealed as her brother’s accomplice. She hunted down the Home Secretary’s son, Eamonn, 24, and used sex to try and brainwash him into convincing his father to allow her terrorist brother back into England.
“Knickers” kept her true identity hidden from her lover until hours before her twin brother was fortunately killed while trying to enter the British consulate in Istanbul. Eamonn Lone quickly informed the Home Secretary that the woman he had allowed into his bed wanted him to use his influence with his father to bring her evil brother back into Britain. Karamat Lone immediately contacted the security services, but before any actions could be taken Pervy Pasha was killed.
The brave Home Secretary, who has taken a strong stand against extremists at risk to his own life, had kept quiet while a police investigation was taking place. This morning his office issued a short statement revealing the sordid affair and promised “full transparency.” Although the terrorist’s Twisted Sister cannot be proved to have broken any laws, she has been told to keep her distance from the Home Secretary’s son, who is understood to be staying with friends in Norfolk. “She was barking up the wrong tree. The Home Secretary would never compromise this nation’s security for any reason,” say sources close to the Lone family.
INSIDE: DAUGHTER AND SISTER OF MUSLIM TERRORISTS, WITH HISTORY OF SECRET SEX LIFE—THE EXCLUSIVE STORY OF “KNICKERS” PASHA
xvi.
He looked like a taunt
tasted like a world apart
felt like barriers dissolving
He looked like opportunity
tasted like hope
felt like love
He looked like a miracle
tasted like a miracle
felt like a miracle
A real
actual
straight from God
prostrate yourself in prayer
as you hadn’t done since your brother left
miracle.
xvii.
Packed a suitcase, wheeled it outside, the first time leaving the house in days, cameras, microphones, police holding them back. Isma rushing out from Aunty Naseem’s house across the road “where are you going.” Isma not someone she ever had to answer to again.
Kept walking, police flanking her “miss please go back inside” stepped into the waiting car, Dame Edna this time aka Abdul who had become chief protector, ally, jumping garden walls to enter her house unseen by the press outside. Abdul, who had taken her token and picked up the passport, booked her ticket, paid for it so that Isma wouldn’t receive an alert from the credit card company.
Joined quickly by a police escort, TV vans following, never mind, nothing to hide, better this way.
“Why are you helping me, Abdul?”
“Something about me you don’t know.”
“I’ve known you’re gay since before you did, probably.”
“Not that but thank you for never mentioning. I told that Farooq’s cousin who Parvaiz was, the rumors about your father, I mean. I think that’s why Farooq came for him.”
“It’s not your fault he went.”
“Why did he go?”
“I don’t know exactly. I stopped asking it. He wanted to return home, that’s what mattered.”
“If he comes back, Farooq, I’ll kill him.”
“No, don’t kill him. Take his skin off with the world’s smallest scalpel, remove his eyes with an ice cream scoop, drip slow-working acid on his tongue.”
“You’ve thought about this, I guess.”
“It’s one of the few things I can concentrate on.”
“I don’t think I could do any of that.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“One other thing you don’t know.”
“What’s that?”
“Really fancied your brother.” Said in a Dame Edna voice.
“Thank you, Abdul. I’d forgotten what it felt like to smile.”
At the airport she expected the interrogation room again, but the man at the security checkpoint looked over her shoulder at the police, then down at her new passport and the boarding card to Karachi, and nodded her through.
“Why are you going?” one of the journalists called out from across the barrier, just before she walked into the departure lounge.
“For justice,” she said.
xviii.
Karachi: colorful buses, colorless buildings, graffitied walls, billboards advertising cell phones and soft drinks and ice cream, birds circling in the white-hot sky. Parvaiz would have wanted the windows down to listen to every new sound, but she sat back in the car in silence disrupted only by the rattling vents of the air conditioner, a silence not of her own devising but of her cousin’s, the guitarist, who refused to explain why she had been escorted off the plane by airport officials who drove her to the cargo terminal where he was waiting to pick her up in a beige car with a sticker on its windscreen announcing its membership to a golf club; it looked more suited to a businessman than a musician.
“Take off the hijab and put these on,” was the only thing he’d said, passing her a pair of oversize glasses. She refused, but eventually the sun’s glare made her change her mind about the glasses.
The silence continued until he turned into the driveway of a tall white hotel, cleared an ineffectual security check, and pulled over, waving away the valet who came around to take his keys.
“You can get out here,” he said.
“For what?”
“Entrance to the hotel is through there. I’ve checked you in for three days. Under the name Mrs. Gul Khan. His body arrives tomorrow, he’ll be buried by the evening. We’ve arranged a funeral plot, I’ll send a car to take you there the next morning. Nine a.m. You can pray over the grave, and leave. Okay? Do not call me. Do not call my mother. You understand?”
“You’re the one who needs to understand. He isn’t going to be buried. I’ve come to take him home.”
The cousin held his hands up. “I don’t want to know. Crazy girl. I don’t want to know anything. My sister lives in America, she’s about to have a child there—did you or your bhenchod brother stop to think about those of us with passports that look like toilet paper to the rest of the world who spend our whole lives being so careful we don’t give anyone a reason to reject our visa applications? Don’t stand next to this guy, don’t follow that guy on Twitter, don’t download that Noam Chomsky book. And then first your brother uses us as a cover to join some psycho killers, and then your government thinks this country can be a dumping ground for its unwanted corpses and your family just expects us to jump up and organize a funeral for this week’s face of terrorism. And now you’ve come along, Miss Hojabi Knickers, and I have to pull strings I don’t want to pull to get you out of the a
irport without the whole world’s press seeing you, and it turns out you’re here to try some stunt I don’t even know what but my family will have nothing to do with it, nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t want you or your family to have anything to do with it. Just tell me what time tomorrow he’s arriving, and who to speak to about where to bring him.”
“What do you mean, where to bring him? You planning on checking a corpse into your hotel room?”
“You really want to know?”
“No. Get out.”
“Who do I speak to about where to bring him?”
He reached into his wallet, pulled out a business card, and threw it at her.
“Thank you. By the way, how far are we from the British Deputy High Commission?”
“Look at a map,” he said, leaning across to open her door.
xix.
The British Deputy High Commission compound was surrounded by barbed wire, vans bristling with guns, and roadblocks to prevent any stranger’s approach. But just a few minutes’ walk away there was a park lined with banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.
Here she would sit with her brother until the world changed or both of them crumbled into the soil around them.
Karamat
8
KARAMAT LONE IGNORED the unusual twitchiness of the shadow stretched out alongside his on the Thames path and poured a second shot of coffee from the thermos into a paper cup. On two separate occasions Eamonn had given him one of those insulated mugs as a birthday present, well intentioned but oblivious to the mug’s inability to keep a man’s hands warm while doing the same for the coffee. When it came to his son, Karamat had always treated “well intentioned” as good enough. With his daughter, the only other possible candidate for such preferential treatment, there’d never been any need. Poor fellow, he used to think, considering the gap in abilities and achievements between Eamonn and his younger sister. It had never occurred to him that Eamonn alone was blind to his own—the word hurt in relation to a man’s only son, but nothing else would do—inadequacy. All the good cheer Karamat had admired as a front became an embarrassment when revealed to be a genuine attitude. She loves me! he had continued to insist in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Why is that so impossible to believe? A question Karamat had hated answering. He held the paper cup to his face, allowing the steam to enter his nostrils, warm his cheeks. There was a precise calibration to how long you could do this before the coffee dipped below optimum drinking temperature.
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