For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the home secretary, who took a step back. As if that were the only thing the entire spectacle had been designed to achieve, the wind dropped as suddenly as buildings collapse in 3-D models, and the girl stopped her noise, unlaced her fingers. The cameras panned, then zoomed. In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy.
“Impressive,” said the home secretary.
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The girl licked her thumb, ran it over her mouth, painting lips onto the dust mask. Then she looked directly at the home secretary and spoke:
“In the stories of wicked tyrants, men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families—their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the prime minister: Let me take my brother home.”
Karamat spun the paperweight on the desk, watched the lion and unicorn animate, smiled. After all the noise and spectacle, she was just a silly girl.
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Prime Minister’s Questions was usually an embarrassment. Childish jeering and taunts, the PM parading his ability at that facile talent, the put-down, the chancellor—or “chancer,” as Karamat preferred to think of him—sitting beside him with an expression both obsequious and smug close up but that managed to look just the right degree of supportive on camera. Parliament reduced to a playground. Karamat had been particularly dreading today—the first PMQs since the Pasha affair began. The PM, who had been abroad and out of touch the last few days, had been worryingly quiet on the whole matter, and any withholding of support from his home secretary would be a victory for the chancer and his leadership bid. But then the girl had opened her mouth.
“Heads impaled on spikes. Bodies thrown into unmarked graves. There are people who follow these practices. Her brother left Britain to join them.”
The PM rose above party politics; the leader of the opposition rose to join him. There were “hear, hears” on either side of the aisle. The home secretary was lauded for the difficult decisions he had to make and the personal trials he’d undergone that had in no way affected his judgment or commitment to doing the right thing. Even the chancer had to lean across the space vacated by the PM as he stood at the dispatch box and pat Karamat appreciatively on the shoulder, a tiny nerve pulsing near his eye, which he saw Karamat recognize as defeat.
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James was waiting for him in his room behind the Speaker’s Chair, mimicking some awful footballer’s goal celebrations as he entered, the right mix of genuine and ironic. Not for the first time, Karamat wished his daughter and James would get together. But that set him off thinking about his children and their choice of partners—you could see Aneeka Pasha was the kind of girl who would do anything. A girl who looked like that and was willing to do anything. His poor boy never stood a chance. He sat down heavily in his chair, missed his wife—not in the ways he used to miss her when he was Eamonn’s age but in the way that only one parent can miss another, when their child is in pain.
He nodded at James to make the required call, and chose to speak in Urdu when his assistant handed him the phone, purely because he knew that puffer fish in human form who was the Pakistan high commissioner would assume it meant the home secretary believed his English was inadequate.
“What mischief are you people up to now?” Karamat asked.
“That’s a strange way to start off an apology,” the HC replied, in English.
“I’m not the one who has to apologize. That body would never have made it to the park if your government hadn’t agreed to it. Or engineered it.”
“Come, come,” the HC said, unconvincingly. “The closest living relative asked for the body to be brought to a particular spot—on what grounds should the driver have refused? As for my government, it has bigger things to worry about than the logistics of a corpse.”
“I assume someone is going to remove the body from the park. On the grounds of hygiene, if nothing else.”
“I’m my nation’s representative to the Court of St. James’s. Do you think I go around talking to municipal councils in Karachi? But maybe things are different in Britain, in which case please tell my bin man not to make such a clanging noise when he comes round in the morning.”
“How’s your son’s student visa application coming along?”
“Actually, he’s decided to go with Harvard rather than Oxford. The girl made some interesting points, don’t you think?”
It was beginning to stop being enjoyable, so he switched to English. “Fine, I spoke out of turn. Pakistan’s judiciary is a credit to your nation.”
“Bunch of bastards,” the high commissioner said unexpectedly. And then he was the one to switch languages—not to Urdu but Punjabi. “Listen, I’m a father too. I would want her off the news as well.”
“It’s not that.”
“Oh shut up, friend, I’m being sympathetic.” Punjabi allowed this breach of etiquette, and Karamat felt something in his whole body shift, become looser. He tightened his shoulders against it. “The issue is, my government has no reason to intervene.”
“Intervene on decency’s behalf. What kind of madness makes someone leave a corpse out in the heat to putrefy?”
“The madness of love. Remember your Laila-Majnu, Karamat? The lover so grief-stricken at the loss of the beautiful beloved that he wanders, in madness, in the desert. This beautiful girl in a dust storm has managed to become Laila and Majnu combined in the nation’s consciousness. Or Sassi and Punnu in parts of the nation—same story, except it’s the girl who runs grief-crazed through the desert in search of her love.”
“This nation, which has decided to cast her as a romantic heroine, is the same one that wants her flogged?”
“Oh, people are already saying your government made up the whole story about her relationship with your son to discredit her, though opinion is divided whether it was you or one of your enemies who was behind it. Either way, for us to act against her now is difficult.”
“For god’s sake, man, do you really expect me to believe your government makes decisions based on a combination of folktales and conspiracy theories?”
“You really are as British as they say you are. Let me put it in language you’ll understand: The people, and several opposition parties, have decided to embrace a woman who has stood up to a powerful government, and not just any powerful government but one that has very bad PR in the matter of Muslims and as recently as yesterday insulted us directly. So, now it’s political suicide for my government to get involved. I hope we’ll see you at our Eid reception. Until then, Allah hafiz.”
The door swung open. The expected supporters, and some unexpected ones too, entered, bowing and throwing imaginary hats in the air. Karamat rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth, tasting dust.
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He was in a coffin made of slabs of ice, a prince in a fairy tale. The owner of the city’s largest ice factory said he would supply his product free of charge, a truck driver said he would transport it as a religious duty. Everyone who had gathered in the park took turns unloading the ice slabs and passing them along a conveyer belt of human hands to the white sheet, now soaked through. When the ice left their hands they touched their red palms to their faces, the burn of cold against the burn of heat. Those nearest the corpse wrapped their faces in cloth. The translucency of the ice made it possible for the news channels to continue their live coverage without worrying about meetin
g broadcast standards: the corpse was little more than a blurry outline. The girl didn’t assist with the continual rebuilding of the melting ice coffin, nor did she stop it. Her only insistence was that his face should remain uncovered. Now, as sunset bruised the sky, she stood with her back pressed against the banyan tree, her eyes never moving from that face.
“Is This the Face of Evil?” a tabloid asked, illustrating the question with a picture of the girl howling as dust flew around her. “Slag,” “terrorist spawn,” “enemy of Britain.” Those were the words being used to describe her, the paper reported, placing inverted commas around the words as proof. Would the home secretary strip her of her citizenship for acting against the vital interests of the UK, as surely she had done by giving ammunition to the enemies of Britain?
The home secretary set the paper aside with a sound of irritation and resumed looking at Aneeka Pasha. Even when there was nothing new to report there was always someone new to interview, and so the TV journalists were thrusting microphones into the faces of the “representatives of civil society” who had shown up in support of the bereaved girl and were now starting to light candles in the deepening twilight.
There was no need to do anything so dramatic as strip her of her citizenship, a move that could be traced back to personal motivations. She couldn’t return to the UK on her Pakistani passport without applying for a visa, which she was certainly welcome to do if she wanted to waste her time and money. As for her British passport, which had been confiscated by the security services when she tried to join her brother in Istanbul, it was neither lost nor stolen nor expired and therefore there were no grounds for her to apply for a new one. Let her continue to be British; but let her be British outside Britain.
The candles threw their reflections onto the ice coffin. Flames trembled along its length, creating the impression of something stirring inside. Karamat walked over to the blinds, opened them to let in the afternoon sunlight, and looked down at the familiar scene of Marsham Street, suddenly so moving in all its quotidian details, cars parked in parking spots, a woman walking by with shopping bags braided around her wrists, trees with thin trunks standing side by side. His London, everyone’s London, everyone except those who wanted to harm it. He touched a vein in his neck, felt the reassuring warmth of his own blood.
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He returned home to Holland Park after Newsnight, a tough interview as expected, but he’d maintained his calm, clarified that he had never made a decision about a corpse—his decision had been about a living “enemy of Britain” (he used the expression three times, which seemed just right, though he might have been able to get away with a fourth). The very word “repatriation,” which is what the girl wanted for her brother’s corpse, rested on a fact of citizenship that had ceased to exist the day he, Karamat Lone, took office and sent an unequivocal message to those who treated the privilege of British citizenship as something that could be betrayed without consequences. No, he didn’t think it was harsh to send that message even to the girls who went as so-called jihadi brides. It was well past the point when anyone could pretend they didn’t know exactly what kind of death cult they were joining. The British people supported him, and that included the majority of British Muslims. The news anchor had raised his eyebrows at that.
Are you sure? he’d said. There seems to be a common view, repeated on this program just yesterday by a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain, that you hate Muslims.
I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims, he’d replied quietly.
Up the stairs he went to the bedroom he’d been exiled from. Terry would have been watching, and she’d know how much that question wounded him. He was aware she would still be angry about what she saw as his failure to protect Eamonn, but even so, she would have softened toward him. All he asked for was to be allowed to lie down next to her, not quite touching—unforgiven but not unwanted. At some point in the night she’d touch her foot to his—the once involved rituals of making up pared down to this single gesture over their more than three decades together. Our love is almost middle-aged now, she’d said to him a few weeks earlier, at the anniversary of their first meeting, trying to hide how much she minded that he’d returned home very late from Marsham Street having forgotten the date they always celebrated privately, unlike the wedding anniversary, which was generally a family, or more widely social, affair. His memory lapse was particularly blundering given that it came just months after she’d moved herself to a ceremonial role in her business, something she’d often talked about but that he didn’t think she’d ever do. One of us has to be a fixed point in the universe, otherwise we’ll keep missing each other, she’d said when she announced the decision, the only indication that she’d done it because his promotion to home secretary was imminent. The least he could have done in exchange was to remember the damn anniversary. He was generally a man to acknowledge a mistake the moment it was made, correct it (he had brought her breakfast in bed the next morning, and before leaving for work was attentive in other ways that pleased her), and never think of it again—this raking over a past failure was disquieting, adding to the wrongness of every part of the day, from Suarez’s jumpiness to the conversation with his son to the question about hating Muslims to the girl, that fucking girl.
“No,” Terry said when he pushed the door open. “No. Out.”
“I’ll sit there,” he said, pointing to the stool next to her dressing table.
“I spoke to our son. He told me what you said. About the blow job. Are you an expert on the better ones out there?”
“Whatever my failings are you know that isn’t one of them,” he said, loosening his tie, kicking off his shoes.
“Karamat, I mean it. Out.”
There was no arguing with her in this mood. Unbelievable that his son should have repeated that part of the conversation to his mother—did he know nothing about the rules between men? Down the stairs he went again to the consolations of a laughably expensive bottle of red wine, a gift that Terry had been saving for a special occasion. The ground floor was the place for formal entertaining, the basement the space in which he shut himself away from his family—each as alienating as the other, in the circumstances. He took the wine outside to the patio, where the moving shadows made him drop into a squat to offer as small a target as possible before he realized they were there for his protection. He finally ended up in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, swinging his legs as his children used to do when he would prepare breakfast for them while his wife was on a business trip somewhere. The kitchen table had long since been removed and a gleaming chrome island was in its place to allow more space for cheese boards, platters of canapés, glasses—sorry, children, “flutes”—of champagne. He rolled up his sleeves, picked up the wineglass. The first Indian cricketer to be loved by the English, Ranjitsinhji, always wore his sleeves buttoned at the wrist to hide his dark skin—something about holding an expensive glass of wine made Karamat understand how he’d felt. He let the wine sit in his mouth before it slid down with all the languor of the overpriced.
There was a gentle knock on the door leading outside, and a moment later Suarez entered.
“You’re supposed to be off duty.”
“My men called. There’s someone who’s been walking repeatedly up and down the street. Jones finally asked her what she wanted and she said she knew you lived on this street but didn’t know which house, and thought if she loitered long enough your security detail would identify themselves.”
Karamat grunted in amusement. “Who is she?”
“Isma Pasha. The sister—”
“I know who that is. Bring her in.”
“In here, sir?”
“My mother didn’t raise me to turn women out onto the street at midnight. And Suarez, there are only male officers tonight, aren’t there? Keep the pat-down minimal.”
“Too late for that, sir. Your
security comes first.”
When she entered her eyes scanned the dimensions of the kitchen and Karamat could already feel a judgment being passed. He poured wine into a second glass and slid it across the chrome island toward her.
“No thank you,” she said, instead of the expected purse-lipped I don’t drink. She looked nothing like the girl—not just a matter of coloring and features but also the way she was holding in her body, as if aware enough to understand she was in the presence of a man who had all the power and might just choose to exercise it. Probably a virgin, he thought, and wondered when he’d become the kind of man who reacted in this way to the sight of a woman with a covered head who made no effort to look anything but plain.
“It may just be worth going to hell for,” he said, taking a long sip.
She picked up the glass with both hands and sniffed its contents. “Smells like petrol.”
There had been a moment, experienced in the pit of his stomach, in which he’d thought she was going to take a sip because she believed he was demanding it as the price of listening to whatever she had to say. “What do you want?” he said, the tone of his voice making Suarez step forward from his post near the door to see what the girl had done.
“I want to fly to Karachi in the morning without anyone at the airport stopping me from going.”
He took her glass and poured it into his. “Your statement to the press was exactly as it should have been. It made me think you were reasonable.”
“She’s my sister. Almost my child.”
“She doesn’t show much concern for you, though, does she?”
“Do you love your children based on how much concern they show for you?”
“Watch yourself.” Not a girl, this one. An adult, far more dangerous than that banshee in the dust.
“Eamonn worships you. And you’ve allowed the world to think he’s a fool.”
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