The first stab of tiredness cuts into me. I open the car window and switch on the radio. It crackles and hisses, the reception blocked by the hills. I turn it off again. Tomorrow, I think, I will phone Shameena. Let her know the arrangements for Friday. Maybe I’ll tell her where I am. Maybe not. I love Shameena but right now I am in a world that is shrinking. There is only me and Da, and a shadow of mother standing behind us. And Tariq, of course. Tariq is always on my shoulder.
It is time to talk about Tariq. It will not surprise me if you find what I say childish. I don’t expect anyone to understand. I don’t really care if you do or you don’t. You may think it was unimportant because I was only sixteen. But you would be wrong. Tariq is ageless, timeless. He simply is.
It was those boys spitting at Khadim on the bus that led me to Tariq, albeit in a very indirect kind of way. The next evening, Da came home from day shift and said we had been invited to Khadim’s house for a meal. Sarah and I looked at one another in surprise. We never went to anyone’s house. Da was friendly to people but he kept his distance; he wasn’t a sociable man. He never went to parties, or to the pub, or even out to the pictures, though Peggy and Charlie would have looked after us any time he wanted.
I screwed up my face.
“Do we have to?” I said. I was fifteen and didn’t want to go anywhere that involved adults.
“Of course we have to,” said Da. “We’ve been invited.”
“Why?”
Da shrugged.
“He wanted to say thank you. About what happened on the bus yesterday.”
“What happened?” said Sarah.
“Couldn’t he just say it?” I asked.
Da sighed.
“Couldn’t you just go without having to have your tuppence-worth all the time?”
“Excuse me for living.”
“Is nobody going to tell me?” demanded Sarah.
“What’s your problem anyway, Rebecca?” said Da, dishing out shepherd’s pie onto three plates. “Get the cutlery, will you?”
“It will be embarrassing,” I said, sighing heavily and throwing open the drawer. I brought the cutlery over to the table where Da was trying to shake off a wedge of grey, lumpy mashed potato from a spoon. “Still,” I muttered, watching it fall like a rock down a hillside, “at least we’ll eat.”
Da had few alternatives when it came to cooking and most of them involved mince. Sarah and I took a culinary interest at a remarkably young age. Sarah even took cookery books out of the library and we’d drool over the pictures and then leave them lying around the sitting room, open at the pages of some dish or other we fancied most. Da never took the hint. So Sarah and I started cooking. It wasn’t so much interest as self preservation.
“I mean, I like Khadim, but we don’t know his family, do we?” I said as we sat down.
“Well, we won’t if we don’t go,” said Sarah.
“Oh shut up, Sarah!” I banged a knife and fork down in her place.
“Rebecca!” said Da sharply. “Don’t talk like that.” Da found my teenage years the most trying. The moods and the stroppiness. He got Peggy to do all the women’s stuff, of course. The day he arranged for our little “chat”, he could hardly look me in the eye.
“As far as you are concerned everything’s embarrassing,” Da continued crossly. “Even going to Peggy’s is embarrassing. Being asked to go the corner shop is embarrassing. Being picked up from parties is embarrassing.”
“Well it is,” I said. “My friends all get the bus home.”
Da shoved a plate across to me. “We’re going.”
“When?”
“Friday.”
“Amy said I could maybe go to hers on Friday.”
“Too bad.”
I scowled and took a mouthful of shepherd’s pie, crunching into a half-cooked carrot.
“Any pickle?”
“Khadim has a girl about your age,” said Da, opening the fridge door. “And a boy a year older. Doesn’t keep too well.” He handed me a jar of Branston with a gummed-up lid and dried pickle down the side.
“Who?”
“The boy.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Heart trouble.”
Shit, I thought. A Friday night stuck with a girl I’ve never met and her sickly brother.
“This pickle bottle’s disgusting,” I complained. “It’s all sticky.”
Shameena and I hit it off immediately. She was a stroppy cow, like me. She had been made to dress up in her best clothes and she sat mutinously on the sofa when we arrived, kicking her heels against her seat.
“Hi,” she said, scarcely looking up when we were introduced.
“Shameena!” said Khadim sharply, and Shameena struggled to her feet to shake hands with Da and Sarah and me.
I thought she looked like a bit of a goddess actually. A glorious, sulky goddess. She had on a bright red salwar kameez and a scarf edged in gold that hung down over her plump, golden arms. Her eyes were outlined with thick, jet-black kohl and two huge gold earrings dangled from her lobes. Best of all was the diamond stud through her nose.
“Like your stud,” I said, and she suddenly grinned.
Khadim’s wife Nazima inclined her head in welcome and avoided looking us directly in the eye. She was like a tiny, colourful bird in her blue salwar kameez, with sharp, precise little movements as she turned this way and that. Her dark, expressive eyes stole glances in the way a bird steals crumbs and darts away with them again. Khadim looked like a giant next to her. Nazima communicated in smiles so that she didn’t have to talk. She had a few words of English but Khadim had to keep translating into Urdu for her.
“She’s never bothered learning English,” Shameena explained to me. “Twenty years here and she can scarcely speak a word. She understands quite a lot though.”
I felt a bit honoured. Didn’t look like they had many white visitors. Nazima’s life was her family: her husband and son and daughter; the cousins who lived nearby; and Khadim’s brother who lived in Edinburgh. She didn’t go out to work and I could see why she had so little English.
We were only in a few minutes when Nazima called Shameena and the two of them disappeared into the kitchen before reappearing with bowl after colourful bowl of food, enough for a maharaja’s feast. Pakoras and samosas and bowls of rich, dark, curry. Indian vegetables and naan breads and popadums. Brightly coloured sweets, rolled in coconut and coloured yellow and pink and green like the tail feathers of an exotic bird.
Nazima motioned us with swift little hand movements and smiled into the carpet. Her son, Tariq, had been delayed and we would start the meal without him. This could be tricky. Da was a stew and mince and tatties man. But he surprised me the way he not only ate, but enjoyed, the feast that was put before us. Da always did like colour. He loved the richness of the clothes Nazima and Shameena wore, the intensity of the colours and the sparkling threads of gold and silver that ran through them. He loved the exotic sweetness of the sliced mango on the table, and what, to him, was the fire of the curries. Specially mild dishes, Khadim said, for his new friend Joseph. I felt a bit touched by that; I had never known Da to have a friend.
Da laughed and said he’d never tasted anything as delicious as this Kashmiri chicken with its mouth-watering mixture of spices and bananas and pineapples. He was in such good humour that night. Halfway through eating, Tariq arrived home. When the door opened and he walked in, I nearly dropped my fork. Sarah was sitting opposite me with her back to the door and she clocked my stare before she turned to see who had come in. When she turned back to the table she gave me a little grin of amusement, and I flushed with annoyance and glared at her, kicking her lightly under the table.
He was gorgeous. Tariq would have been about eighteen or nineteen then. His eyes drew me, great dark pools that seemed older, deeper, wiser, than the rest of him. He wasn’t that much older than me and Shameena really, but there was something about his eyes that put him in a different league from us
and the spotty youths we hung around with. Despite his slenderness, Tariq seemed like a man rather than a boy, and that was irresistible to an almost-sixteen-year-old girl.
I found him deeply attractive but underneath the warm, golden tones of his skin it was obvious that he was not well. He moved slowly and seemed breathless with the least exertion. Nazima fussed the minute he came through the door, and sat him down and laid bowls before him like he was an honoured guest, and he smiled a slow, warm smile at her and told her not to fuss. He sat next to me and turned those huge dark eyes on me and nodded.
Tariq had been born with a congenital heart defect. Doctors told Khadim and Nazima that he would be in a wheelchair when he was a teenager, but see, they said, he was not in a wheelchair. Allah was good. They thought he got better all the time. But he needed an operation soon. They prayed all the time for their son, said Khadim, and Nazima closed her eyes and clasped her hands as if in prayer.
“They’re not kidding either,” said Shameena, under her breath to me. “All the bloody time.”
Tariq heard her and grinned lazily at his sister. I glanced up quickly to see if Khadim had heard too, but he was too busy encouraging Nazima to spoon more Kashmiri chicken onto Da’s plate.
“We go to church every week too,” I said.
“Just once? You’re lucky. We pray five times a day and go to the mosque at least once a week.”
“God!” I said
“No, Allah,” grinned Shameena and we both giggled. “The only time I don’t have to go is you know… that time of the month,” she whispered to me behind her hand, so that nobody else could hear.
“What?”
She shrugged.
“That’s the custom. Don’t ask me. I don’t complain. I had two last month.”
I laughed, choking on a chunk of naan bread.
“Pass Rebecca some water, Shameena,” called Khadim from the other end of the table, and then turned back to some involved conversation with Da.
“Didn’t they notice?” I asked.
She shook her head, pouring water from a jug into my glass.
“Mum did, but she just went along with it because she didn’t want any more arguments. Me and Dad are always fighting.”
After dinner Shameena and I went up to her room, though to be honest, I was a bit reluctant to take my eyes off Tariq for one second more than I had to. Entering Shameena’s room was like walking into the very core of a jewel and being enveloped by the colour of it, the sparkle of it. It was warm and rich and intense, the walls a deep terracotta red, the bedspread purple with terracotta elephants marching round the edge. On the walls were gilt-framed pictures: a family photograph; an illustrated verse from the Koran… and a picture of Johnny Depp. Long gold chains and jewelled necklaces hung over the mirror on her dressing table. A purple salwar kameez etched with silver flowers hung on the outside door of the wardrobe, half-covering the mirror, and on the floor below, a discarded pair of Levi’s lay in a heap.
It was the mix of cultures that made the room so exotic, though it didn’t occur to me at the time that Shameena’s life might be a clash rather than a fusion of influences. It took time for me to understand how difficult things were for her, how much of an outsider she was too. I do remember a glimpse of it that night as I rifled through her music collection and stared in amazement at the amount of opera in it. It was then Shameena first confided her dreams of being a singer. She wanted to audition for the opera school in London but Khadim wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted her to be a lawyer or a doctor. Or an accountant like Tariq.
“He says it’s just a silly dream,” she said, and something in her voice upset me. Even back then I knew that dreams weren’t silly. Perhaps especially back then.
“I don’t suppose there are many Pakistani opera singers…” I said hesitantly. How did a Pakistani girl get to like opera? But of course she wasn’t a Pakistani girl. She was as Glaswegian as me. There wasn’t any reason why she shouldn’t like opera as much as me. Except I hated it. All that bloody fa la la stuff.
“There was this woman, right,” said Shameena, rolling onto her stomach and facing me, her feet banging off her headboard, “called Noor Jehan and she was a Pakistani singer and she was so good they called her the Melody Queen. That’s what I want to be. The new Melody Queen.”
“What happened to her?”
“She made all these films but in her very first film the young director fell madly in love with her and they eloped.”
“Did they live happily ever after?”
“Nah. They did what everyone who gets married does. Made each other miserable.”
We both laughed, and Shameena jumped off the bed then and took the purple salwar kameez off the back of the door and told me to just shove it on over my jeans and top. I was so skinny I’d need some bulk anyway, she said. She took out a kohl pencil and outlined my eyes carefully.
“You suit that,” she said, and then picked up the purple scarf that had slipped onto the floor from the hanger. “The dopatta,” she said, and threw it round my shoulders. Da was always asking why I didn’t wear dresses more, but this felt amazing. I felt regal and mysterious and exotic.
“I feel like an Indian queen,” I told Shameena.
“Aye right,” she said. “A Pakistani queen, if you don’t mind.”
The purple was so intense that I felt richer and more alive, as if life had a colour switch like a television and someone had just turned it up full. I swivelled and twirled in front of the mirror and laughed self-consciously, and just then we heard Tariq calling us through the door to come for some tea.
“Tariq,” called Shameena through the closed door. “Come here a minute!”
“No!” I whispered vehemently, but the door opened and Tariq stood there in the doorway, slightly breathless just with the effort of walking up the hallway.
“What do you think?” said Shameena, gesturing to me with a malicious little grin, and I later wondered how she had known so quickly, and if it was me or Tariq who gave it away. Tariq’s eyes flickered briefly with surprise when he glanced at me, then quickly the veil came down on them again. But he smiled, that sweet, slow smile that has never left me.
“Nice,” he said, and softly closed the door.
CHAPTER TWO
The memories kept me awake on the long road, as the dark shadows loomed towards me then disappeared into the rear view mirror. I turned the memories over in my mind, like the pages of a photograph album. The forgotten images. The treasured ones you turn back to again and again. Da and Sarah and Charlie and Peggy. Shameena. Tariq. Nazima and Khadim. Our lives all touching and intertwining.
At first, Da thought it was Shameena who made me so keen to visit Khadim’s house again after that first visit. And partly it was. But it was Tariq too. It was so hard to talk to him because we were never alone. The first time was a night in August, a perfect night when we all sat out in their postage-stamp garden till nearly ten o’clock, Da and Khadim and Nazima on chairs at the back door, me and Sarah and Shameena and Tariq further up on the grass.
Shameena knew, though we never spoke about it. This night, we were all talking amongst ourselves, the adults and the young ones, and then Shameena winked at me and said to Sarah to come into her room and she’d show her these new earrings she’d bought. And dumb Sarah said, “Coming, Rebecca?” I wanted to hit her. But Shameena said, “Oh, Rebecca’s seen them; we’ll only be a minute.” She was at least twenty. I glanced up at her window while Tariq and I were talking and saw her looking out. She gave me a furtive thumbs-up sign.
Tariq was still in his first year of accountancy at university then. His health hadn’t yet deteriorated so badly that he had to give up. But he did have a date for his next operation, a month down the line.
“Do you mind hospital?” I asked him, picking the daisies round me carelessly and throwing them into a pile. I used my thumbnail to slice through a stem, feeling the juice on my finger, then threaded another flower through to make the beginni
ngs of a chain. My self-consciousness around Tariq made me need something to focus on. He made me feel clumsy, ungainly.
Tariq shrugged at the question and plucked at a blade of grass. “I’m used to it. My whole life has been spent in and out of hospital.”
“Must have been hard watching your friends do things you couldn’t do.”
“I had to find quiet things to interest me. Music. Reading. Computers.”
The daisies were becoming limp and difficult to thread. It was getting late.
“Did you want to be like the others?” I asked.
“Of course I did. Every kid wants to be like the others. I wanted football boots. I wanted my dad to watch me play for the school team. I wanted to join in on the school sponsored walk and run at sports day. I wanted to be free. And I wasn’t free.”
“Maybe this operation will make you free.”
He shook his head. “Nothing can do that. It might buy me more time, that’s all. I’ll need a transplant to be free, and even then I would need medication for the rest of my life. I’ll never be free, not like you are.”
“That would be weird, having someone else’s heart,” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“Yeah.” He rolled onto his front and looked at me. “People are funny about the heart, like it’s more than just a heart. Like it’s the core of you.”
“I know. You know the composer, Chopin? Da says he died in Paris, but though his body was buried there, he asked for his heart to be taken back to Warsaw, where he was born.”
“Really?” said Tariq. The evening sun was casting shadows on his face as he looked at me. “I don’t know why there’s so much romance about the heart. People seem to think if you get someone else’s heart, you kind of… I don’t know, become them or something. But my specialist says it’s just a pump. A mechanical pump.”
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