He gulped down the coffee, felt it burn its way pleasingly through him while he continued to look at the Palace of Westminster and its watery reflection, the yellow stone pink-gold in the interlude of sunrise. The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change. Here Britain whittled down the powers of the monarchy, here Britain agreed to leave its empire, here Britain instituted universal suffrage, here Britain would see the grandson of the colonized take his place as prime minister. The most constant criticism against Karamat Lone was that his positions flip-flopped between traditionalist and reformer—but the critics learned nothing from their own inability to know which was which. Take, for instance, his intention to expand the home secretary’s power to revoke British citizenship so that it applied to British-born single passport holders. It was, clearly, the sensible fulfillment of a law that was so far only half made. You had to determine someone’s fitness for citizenship based on actions, not accidents of birth. An increase in draconian powers! said one set of his opponents on the left; a renewed assault on true Englishmen and -women by Britain’s migrant population, said another set on the far right. Both sets probably drank coffee out of insulated mugs.
You’re doing the contemptuous thing again, Terry would say.
It was one of his wife’s few remaining misconceptions about him. Contempt, disdain, scorn: these emotions were stops along a closed loop that originated and terminated in a sense of superiority. In their preservation of the status quo they were of no use to Karamat Lone. A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place. He’d thought he had mastered the art of directing the fire, but yesterday, with TV cameras on him, he’d heard the girl’s one-line explanation for leaving England and hadn’t been able to stop himself from responding: “She’s going to look for justice in Pakistan?” That final word spoken with all the disgust of a child of migrants who understands how much his parents gave up—family, context, language, familiarity—because the nation to which they first belonged had proven itself inadequate to the task of allowing them to live with dignity. At some point, he’d have to respond to the foreign secretary’s irate message about his comment. Or not, if the PM kept up his silence—a silence Karamat worried had less to do with favoring his home secretary than with the PM’s irritation at how Pakistan’s prime minister was trying to make political capital of the situation. He’d sanctimoniously explained that Pakistan, as a matter of state policy, shouldered the cost of repatriating its citizens while the UK government expected the bereaved to pay thousands of pounds to have the remains of their loved ones returned to them.
A Lycra-covered runner approached, swerved skin-scrapingly close to the Thames path barrier as soon as he was close enough to recognize the home secretary, and held up a hand to the officers to indicate he wasn’t a threat. Brown skinned. Karamat clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He twisted off the thermos cap again, shook the container gently, considered the liquid swishing around the glass-lined interior. He didn’t seem to need it despite his total lack of sleep the previous night. The wonders of adrenaline—it had been a long time since he’d stayed up all night wondering what his opponent was going to do. People were usually so predictable.
“Sir,” cautioned Suarez behind him.
“That one too Muslim for comfort?”
“That one was Latino.”
“You always insist the good-looking ones are your cousins rather than mine.”
“We really should go, sir.”
Karamat turned to look at the head of his security detail. From the start, Suarez had understood the home secretary’s insistence that he didn’t want to know anything at all about the threats against him; You do your job and let me do mine, Karamat had said. Of course when they cut down trees in his garden and put officers in their place it was obvious there’d been some “development,” but Suarez maintained an air of calm through everything. Today, though, he was visibly anxious, and although Karamat had managed to insist on this riverside coffee, a post-sleepless-night tradition stretching back to his earliest days as a backbencher, it was clear that he wouldn’t win the argument twice.
He was about to stand up when his phone rang, and the screen told him it was his son. He cradled the phone in his hands for a moment, found the old empty habits forming the word “Bismillah” before he answered.
“Hi, Dad. Thought you’d be up.” Eamonn’s voice was calm, affectionate, nothing like that of the crazed thing who’d had to be physically restrained from returning to the arms of that manipulative whore. Well, “arms” wasn’t really the bit of her he wanted to return to, was it? Though Karamat probably shouldn’t have said so at the time.
“You okay?” He hadn’t spoken to Eamonn since Terry had arranged for Max and Alice to take him away to one of Alice’s family estates after he’d moved from hysteria to a listless resignation—the press assumed the estate was the one in Norfolk, though it could just as well be Normandy. Karamat hadn’t asked Terry not to tell him where their son was, but she knew well enough that it was information better kept from him in case someone asked him a direct question, which he’d have to answer honestly. His wife had always had a perfectly judged sense of who he was, who he had to be, as a public figure, which made it all the more mystifying when she packed up a segment of his wardrobe and moved it down to the basement bedroom in response to his office’s breaking the story of Eamonn’s involvement with the girl. You could have protected him, she’d said, as if her husband were the kind of man either stupid or unethical enough to try to organize a cover-up. She hadn’t relented when most of the newspapers correctly portrayed Eamonn as a dupe, and some even managed to suggest he’d turned on the girl as soon as he’d realized what she wanted.
“Yes. I’m sorry how I behaved the other day.”
Karamat crossed a foot over his knee, considered the open-mouthed sturgeons with bulging eyes and entwined tails at the base of the nearby lamppost. Usually grotesque, they now appeared winningly comical to his benevolent gaze. “I’m sorry you’re going to have a rough ride for a bit. Perhaps that move to New York your sister suggested might not be the worst idea.”
“I worry about you more than me.”
Karamat stood up and walked to the lamppost, leaned against it, and turned away from his security detail. “That’s nice to hear, but unnecessary.”
“It’s just that from where you’re sitting it may not be clear how this looks. A government that sends its citizens to some other country when they act in ways we don’t like. Doesn’t that say we can’t deal with our own problems? And stopping a family from burying its own—that never looks good. That’s what people are beginning to say around me. If your advisers won’t tell you this, your son will.”
“My son, schooling me in politics from his vantage point among the landed gentry,” he said, pressing his knuckles into the bulging eyes of the fish.
“I’m saying this because your reputation matters to me. More than you know.”
“She told you to say all this, didn’t she?”
“I haven’t heard from her. You know that. I’ve done what you asked. I haven’t called or texted. You said if I agreed, you would help her. How have you helped her?”
“She’s had police protection stationed outside her house. I haven’t let the world see the kinds of videos her beloved brother worked on. She hasn’t been locked up in an interrogation room for fourteen days without charge, not even after admitting that she seduced my son in order to help a terrorist. You saw that transcript, didn’t you? She admitted it.”
“Of course she said that once she thought I’d abandoned her.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you hear yourself? You think you’re doing someone a favor by not locking them up for
fourteen days without reason?”
“Please don’t try to develop a spine. You weren’t built for it. Did she give you your first really great blow job, Eamonn? Is that what this is about? Because trust me, there are better ones out there.”
A pause, and then his son’s voice at its most cuttingly posh: “I think we’re done here, Father.”
The call went dead and Karamat turned around, crumpling the empty paper cup in his fist. Suarez stepped forward and extended his palm to take the cup, teeth marks visible on his thumb. He saw Karamat’s eyes on the indentations and folded his thumb over his palm to hide the visual reminder of Eamonn kicking wildly at the air, teeth clamped on Suarez’s gag-hand.
Pivoting away from Suarez, he sent the paper cup flying in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the rim, bounced up, plummeted into the receptacle.
Take out the trash. Keep Britain clean.
||||||||||||||||||
Mid-morning in London, mid-afternoon Karachi, someone called @CricketBoyzzzz uploaded pictures of a woman in the white of mourning, sitting cross-legged on a white sheet covered in rose petals. The sun-singed grass and the patches of damp on her kameez conveyed an extraordinary heat despite the banyan tree under whose spreading branches and beardlike aerial roots she’d arranged herself. #Knickers #FoundHer
All the press assigned to the Pasha story, scattered among upscale hotels and graveyards and family homes and airport terminals, descended on the park, only to be met by the blank stare and silence of a girl whom Karamat was beginning to suspect of being as unhinged as she was manipulative.
“Find out where the body is,” Karamat instructed his assistant, James, eyes moving between the two TV screens in his Marsham Street office, one tuned to a Pakistani news channel, the other to an international one.
The Pakistani channel had a split screen. One side showed scenes from the park, as increasing numbers of onlookers arrived to cluster around the girl, as if she were the site of an accident; the other showed a studio in which the urbane host of a religious discussion program explained what Shariah law had to say about the Pasha case. The man had slicked-back hair and a black mark on his forehead—the latter a sign of piety, helped along by banging one’s head against a stone or rough surface during the daily prostration of prayer. Karamat picked up a lion-and-unicorn paperweight, pressed it to his forehead. First, said the man, the boy had joined those modern-day Khajarites who were a greater enemy of Islam than even America or Israel, and so he should never be described as a “jihadi.” Second, he should have been buried before sunset on the day he died, no matter how far from home he was, and anything else was un-Islamic. Third, by her own admission to the UK police, the girl was a sinner, a fornicator, and should be flogged.
Karamat made a note of the man’s name and turned his attention to the international channel, where the anchor had pulled up a digital 3-D map of the area surrounding the park and was describing the location as “significant” as red circles appeared on the map identifying the gas station next to the park, the convent school and Italian consulate across the street, and the busy roundabout a stone’s throw away. The 3-D models of buildings and trees collapsed into the ground as if from a powerful detonation, and what remained was the figure of a girl facing the British Deputy High Commission.
Karamat pressed the mute button and watched the doe-eyed girl in white, head covered, surrounded by bloodred rose petals, the park railings looking like a backdrop of prison bars in close-up shots of her. Nothing accidental in any of it, but what was all the iconography of suffering meant to achieve?
James returned to say the Turkish embassy could confirm only that the body had arrived in Islamabad, but had no details of how or when it would be transported to Karachi, and the Pakistan High Commission had made it clear they expected an apology from the home secretary before they would reveal any information about their citizens to him. Karamat handed him the piece of paper with the urbane host’s name and said, “If he has a UK visa, find a reason to cancel it.”
“There are some people who think you’re wanting a reason to strip her of her citizenship too,” James said, indicating the girl on the screen, his accent turning more pronouncedly Scottish and working-class, as it always did when he thought he might be about to enter into a disagreement with Karamat. It was a tic James was almost certainly unaware of, but Karamat had always found it winning that the young man’s unconscious played his outsider status up rather than down when he challenged the home secretary.
“And what do you think of that?”
“I think it’s a terrible idea. Everyone will think it’s because of Eamonn.”
“Everyone should know better,” Karamat said. He stood up and approached the split screen. “Damned if I know what she’s planning next. Would you be standing as near her as all those people in the park?”
“You think she’s wearing a suicide vest under those clothes?”
“No, I think she turns everything around her toxic. Look, it’s all gone a bit yellow around her, hasn’t it?”
“Must be something wrong with the camera lens. I’m sorry, sir, about the suicide vest comment.”
“Don’t be silly, James. These are the times we live in.”
The girl stood up fluidly from her cross-legged posture and stepped off the sheet. A single rose petal adhered to the top of her slim, bare foot. He imagined his son’s mouth pressed where the petal was, made a flicking-away motion with his hand. Both TV channels were showing the same scene, from slightly different angles, the air clearly yellow with an impending dust storm. The park—no more than twice the size of the Lone family garden—was bound in by railings and banyan trees, with an open gate toward which she was walking. A van had pulled up outside—an ambulance.
“No. Oh, come on, no.”
The driver of the ambulance opened the back doors, called out for some of the onlookers to help him. Far more men than was necessary lifted out the unadorned casket and carried it on their shoulders behind the girl, who, pale but composed, led them back to the white sheet and rose petals—the scene of martyrdom now complete. The men laid the casket down, but the girl wanted something more from them. She spoke to the man who had driven the ambulance; he shook his head vigorously, pointed to the hazy sky—indicating either the Almighty or the afternoon sun. She knelt beside the casket, placed the palms of her hands, one on top of the other, against the lid, near the corner, and pressed down with all her weight, her knees lifting off the ground with the effort.
“Move the cameras away,” he heard himself say.
The wood buckled, splintered.
“Jesus,” James said. “Jesus, no.”
The dupatta had fallen from her head, long hair whipping across her face as the wind picked up. The casket revealed its flimsy construction, nails ripping out of wood as the girl set to dismantling it with her bare hands. One by one she collapsed the sides until what remained was a shape sandwiched between the coffin’s base and a top layer of plywood. The girl sat back on her heels, as if only now, at this moment, had she stopped to consider what she was asking her own eyes to look at. Or maybe she was waiting for what happened next: the yellow-brown wind picked up the plywood and flung it into the air with a whipping sound.
The girl lowered herself to her knees, placed her hands on the ground on either side of her, and leaned forward, as a child might examine some unknown animal found in the garden. Her brother, embalmed, looked not right. How else to say it? Dead.
She lifted a hand, looked at it as if she wasn’t sure what it was about to do, and watched as her palm came to rest on the forehead of what had once been her twin. The hand jerked away, settled back down, slid along his skin toward his temple. Karamat and the cameras saw the stitches before she felt them, the place where death entered him. Her expression when she touched the thread was irritated, as if objecting to the untidiness, nothing more. The hand lifted again, mov
ed down to the corpse’s wrist, two fingers pressed against what would have been a pulse point. Her mouth opened and a small word or sound may have come out, nothing the mics could pick up.
James said the words “broadcast regulations” with nothing around them. Every phone in the room was ringing. Someone was knocking on the door. “Shut up,” Karamat shouted, to everything.
The dust storm that had sent its advance guard now arrived in a hurtling, pelting wind. The white sheet flew up at its corners, tossing aside the rectangles of wood that had weighed it down; rose petals pitched up into the air, came down muddied; leaves were ripped from the banyan trees; the world tilted this way and that; the women wound their dupattas around their faces, the men made themselves small. One camera recorded only the flattened grass through a cracked lens. The other, moving closer to the girl, showed her dupatta fly toward it, a close-up of the tiny embroidered flowers on the white cloth, and then a battering darkness.
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