Radius Islamicus

by Julian Samuel

  Anver responds to the voiced diary notes on our possible past. “But you’re making it up as you go along. We did a triangle pop pop pop in Toronto during the eighties. You’re forgetting and you’re dry-cleaning our past.”

  “Dry-cleaning? What do you mean dry-cleaning our past?”

  “I am having fun listening to your doctoring of what happened.”

  The real trick is to get all three at peak acceleration, Herr Doppler tighter and tighter frequencies hissing to high heaven. A chap called Javid Goonda Atta, who studied Penrose tiles, gave us two timings: we should be stepping on the train just before the driver sticks his head out to see if all is clear for departure. Catch the train closest to 08:27.

  We practice many times and compare the timings. Say goodbye as you hit peak speed. Say goodbye? But none of us became chutney with the bang. We placed. We got off at the next stop. The Runnymede rucksack should leave as close to 08:13. Setting off the device at peak speed is important. It’s pointless and boring to hit during deceleration or when one is stationary. After the 08:13s have happened, they will shut down the subway, but not before 08:13. We dump our jackets before we get on the actual train so we are just in Elvis T-shirts. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) might wait until 08:31 to close the entire system. A Sussex dropout, yet Trent university graduate, Sabe Zameenpargira, gave us all the numbers. The TTC will know by 08:13 that there is no absolute innocence, only degrees of innocence. Entangled innocence if you add the human tissues that are liberated during the blast.

  Russell Square . . . Piccadilly Line, Heathrow Terminal H, Air Canada to Pearson International Airport, switch to TTC bus, board the Bloor line at Kipling; twenty minutes to pick up the knapsack at Islington, to be left on the train at Dundas West, or if one were feeling like it, not to leave — ha, that is what the journalists think. Perhaps we’ll hit Anchorage or an iceberg. Anver asks: “John, what’s the point of hitting an iceberg? Sure, of course, I understand the berg part of the operation but what’s the point? The thing will just turn to water. You want to kill them with flooding?”

  Many wonderful and funny things happened during our training. Many in the outside world thought we didn’t have any ideology behind us except Islam.

  We did more than ten physicalist operations with the Filipino communists under their command but under the firm mental influence of LTM (Lahore Teaching Madrassa). CNN liked to portray it all as Islamic doom, Purda, Islamic boom, Islamic gloom and blood blooming rancid honour killings of our daughters because they took white sperm in the mouth in the school yard, destroying Flintstone-y idolatry-loaded statues of Buddhas at Bamiyan, slitting sheep throats, right before Christmas, and right in the middle of Edgeware Road — this is all far from the truth. We have communist sympathies, but we couldn’t blend Mao into Mohammad (PBUH); we couldn’t polycreate Maohammad. Mao was far too rational, reasonable and systematic for us. Too many five-year plans and sequential commitments. And non-Islamic chinks are without poetry. With Islamic goofs we, at least, had some poetry. And any Fanonist will understand why our colleagues in Afghanistan had to blast away the Buddhists in stone. Save them for some slanty-eyed Jap-Chinks to photograph? To photograph stones while the locals don’t have much at all: there has to be a limit.

  The food that the communists ate in the Philippines didn’t impress us at all but that’s not the point. We went to help them with the hope of bringing capitalism to its knees, not to have a nice evening daavat beside a blue river. Admittedly, we did place the bang machine.

  Yes. Yes, we wanted to hit innocent upper-class types. The commie intellectuals didn’t want to splatter the rich, rather they wanted to build consensus across all vegetarian groups and actually not hurt nor want to hurt the ruling class oppressors. Obviously, we had difficulty with their attitude, but we never resisted or caused any leadership problems due to this disagreement. We did what they wanted. We knew some maths and engineering that would go into their particular kinds of needs. They were less educated but had a vision and weren’t benumbed by a vast spectrum of capitalist responses to resistance.

  We didn’t have a Sri Lankan bang signature because we simply didn’t have the quantity. Lankan bangs were super-loaded with Soviet stuff. I like super-loaded jobs. If those chaps needed two units of bang to do a one unit operation, they would use fifteen or twenty bang units just to impress the followers with what a splendiferous job they could do. The amount they used would literally cut a 747 clean in two, one side flying off to Calgary, the other to Philadelphia. We Islamics were impressed but thought that 20 units was too showoffy, which is not permitted (PBUH). We mentioned these details to a Filipina commander — and yes, they were mostly women — who was not impressed, but found us perfectly reliable.

  No one’s saying that the end results were funny. Except to us. When we’d get the visuals + sound afterward from our almost-Chinawoman-camerawoman, Anver would laugh at some upper-middle-class label-wearing rich bitch howling in pain just because her leg was 1432 centimetres from the rest of her, and her new $400 jeans were ruined. Where’s my leg? What happened to my shopping trip? Where’s my driver? My shoes need a stain-remover. Why does my hair look tousled? Anver would say something like: look, we accidently blew the kaffer’s leg off and there is a city of blood coming from the ruptured arteries. Khoonsher. Tisk tisk. The communists would not laugh at all. They just “analyzed” the footage thinking of how they could produce fewer not more injuries. Here, Maoism seemed irrational to us. We just kept quiet when they went into serious aftermath mode. Why go through all the calculations, staking, and planting when the results could not be treated as fun? At LTM we were taught not only chemistry but also how to have fun learning new things. Nobody used suicide bangs. The western world does have a good hearty Christian laugh when they pop us, and yes we had laughs also.

  Kala Mukudma, a fellow student from West Yorkshire, now with us at the Lahore Terrorist Madrassa, pondered: “Suicide bombings are good for the circulation of the blood, good too for high cholesterol, a solution for root-canal work, haemorrhoids, anal fissures, bladder cancer and lower back pain — all could now be solved in a flash. But how do we get, or rather make a product that would get rid of back pain pronto, and to put it all on TV? I mean it couldn’t be a pill or a computer programme — it would have to be something you’d eat on a regular basis like Kellogg’s Buds with psyllium, something you could advertise. I say I have a massive toothache. The only way out is to remove myself — but should I remove myself with Islamo-toothpaste? Why not take a few corrupt cunt politicians also? I mean, like fuck ‘em.” Safade Jamun Samoondar, my dear Safade, has a Scottish accent when he speaks Punjabi. He made good Pushto which is a way of cooking lamb in Sumarkand. And the bit about getting virgins in paradise is pure CNN Israeli horseshit. What about the Japanese during world war two? Does anyone ask them if they were offered environmentally friendly Toyotas in the afterlife?

  Anyway, we’re thinking of calculating the Moscow Metro due to their actions in Pomegranate Land, but Dimitri said not to even think about it — he told us that Mohammad would not like us anymore if we even once thought about it. And besides, we were having a time pronouncing names such as: Sokolnicheskaya, Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya, and Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya. Therefore, we went without telling Mohammad: we went, we saw, we didn’t knap. Lucky Russians, unlucky Chechens.

  I said, you should stop making jokes about such serious radii. Javid Chambers, a member of our headless group, replied: “Mullah X said wear your education lightly — why use the plural for radius when you don’t really have to?”

  We leave downtown Toronto, Union Station a little after sunset. We have surfaced into a treeless Christian suburb where many Chinese Buddhists live. The Chinese always vote for the extreme right. We’ll fix them like we fixed the Spaniards who, after the European bombing, voted for a left-wing homosexual who brought the Spanish troops home from Pomegranate Land.

  There are so many of us in Toronto, we’d blend in.
And before the hicks could say diddly squat, we’d be back in Brick Lane eating suicide kebabs. The CCTV ratio between London and Toronto is 34:1. Surveillance makes us smarter.

  The Montreal metro cars are light blue with grey seats, much narrower than the wide-bodied trains in Toronto. We found the names pleasant to our ears but the Arabs who worked with us didn’t. For fun, we’d call our Arab colleagues A-rabs; they’d laugh when we’d say that A-rabs are as naive as sardines.

  Mont Royal, Sherbooke, Berri-UQAM, Camp-de-Mars, Place-D’Armes, Square-Victoria, Bonaventure, Lucien-L’Allier, George Vanier, and Lionel-Groulx (who was a deep jew-hater). These goofy French-Canadians actually named a stop after a Nazi sympathizer: Lionel-Groulx. Groulx was an aunty-Semite. We are not anti-Semitic. We are pro-Semitic-Semtex. These names aren’t worth bombing. We sent Israelipegs to Mullah X-37 in Lahore via three Hotmail accounts; he sent them on to Mullah Ghandmukin in Waziristan: no dice. He didn’t think that Montreal was worth it. Actually, we didn’t have to send the jpegs. We had a messenger tell him the usernames and passwords and all he did was check our draft box.

  But in mysterious ways the British army helped us all along. We knew we had a counter-mole in our group — he must have told them, but they let it all happen. Admittedly, it is a baroque theory but there you have it. This is the reason why the British didn’t do any autopsies on the bodies — they knew that they would find U.K. home office explosive traces, placed right there by Mrs. El Moneypenny.

  Mullah X37 — a graduate of both Saint Martin’s and The School of Wog Studies in Bloomsbury — thought the photos weren’t detailed enough. He did, however, say that Islamic activists who are imprisoned in western jails or in the prisons of Arab uncle toms are literally gold in the Bank of Allah. That they are in prison makes our hearts beat and make us bomb those towering glass cities.

  An Oriental woman with high heels is sitting beside me; she’s reading the same article in The National Post as I am. It’s about Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who is flamboyant and talks in racist riddles about Jews. She notices me noticing her; we both look up and smile. I ask her about the names of the subway stops. She says: “Well they don’t reflect Toronto anymore.”

  “Why?” I ask. She replies: “Our tax money should reflect the new Canada not the Canada of Bathurst, Saint Patrick, College, Wellesley, Cunt’s Park.”

  I must have mis-heard what she said, but I leave nothing to the imagination.

  “What names do you want to see?” I ask.

  “Chun Lai should replace Eglinton. We pay taxes. The city should reflect us. And if they don’t change the names, then I agree with your bombing project of Toronto’s Subway.”

  Well that 905 chink was very supportive, most of them just think about money, and they never inter-marry with A-rabs, who they claim always want to conduct sodomy — just ask the girls in Tokyo or Shanghai. A-rab boyfriend means no pregnancies.

  Two homosexuals get on at Coxwell: therefore, Carlton should be renamed Yasser Arafat. Kennedy should be renamed or co-named, Fidel Castro to make the Canadians of Cuban origin feel nicely integrated — just like in Miami. On the north-south line, the colourless North York Centre should blur into Sparrow to keep Black Canadians integrated despite their patties. St. Clair West becomes Tintoretto. St. Andrew should be sandblasted off for Indira Gandhi. Names like Elephant and Castle or Seven Sisters are so strange even to us who were born here, that we feel, well, we don’t know what we feel.

  Poetic sounding names, such as Elephant and Castle, Shepherd’s Bush, Seven Sisters should not be changed for South Asian poets such as Mirza Galib or Faiz Ahamd Faiz because they are good the way they are — the South Asian Lesbians Association of Toronto of course wants to rename the subway stops after Bengali sisters. I am sure not even a cheap copycat knapper would knapsack stops with Moslem names. Imagine Javid Chambers or Anver Ahmad knapping a metro stop with a name such as Hussain Hussaine. The current Prime Minister is thinking of changing Russell Square to Mohammad Ali Jinnah just for this reason. It’s the only choice he has. We didn’t like the sound of Victoria, Vauxhall, Arsenal, Russell Square, Oval and White City; so here are some new names or bomb’s your chacha: Ishhai Panne, Mohammad Cubed, Goora Walid Shab East, Goora Walid Shab West and the like.

  10

  Bernadette Aodhfionn

  The home is quiet. Usha was what we called her but she was Bernadette Aodhfionn, woman with dark hair and an olive, nearly northern wogland complexion. She and I are talking at the end of a hallway that overlooks the water. She’s telling me about her childhood. A group of students were walking home from school on a September afternoon somewhere in County Tyrone, Usha tells me. She says her sister was among this group of friends. Pigtails and skipping home in the autumn air. They were tossing ink projectiles made of tissue paper, splattering on laughing faces.

  A car painted flat green that looks like a small tank with large tires pulls over and the soldiers question some of the small children. Usha’s sister, who wasn’t twelve yet, has been questioned by one of the men in uniform. Had she seen the man in this photo? Had he used this road? How’re we supposed to know, Mr. British soldier? Then he offers her his hand to shake, he does not let go and slowly breaks her index finger with a snap. “That’s for Ireland. I’m from Hackney,” the soldier states. Her sister’s open mouth corrupts uglily, her springtime laughter ruptures in a puppy squeal. Tears run down her cheeks. The soldier laughs. The other soldier reprimands: “We’ll get shit for this. You shouldn’t have done it. She’s only a little kid. Only a kid.” They drive off in their green car. Usha’s career against the British begins. This memory looms large inside her. Where did it all get her? She’s here in the home now — memory not fading, however. Alzheimer’s year one, or is it two? She has forgotten what a toothbrush is for. She came to us as an explosives expert and now she asks if we can put 365 days in a toothbrush.

  Many years later, after the many things we did together, at home, abroad and here on the silly mainland—she means England — after much reading and training, this twiggy wound of childhood is still a treasure she carries around today, draped in a clear understanding of what has to be done. She’s now Usha, but not from South Asia at all. It’s just a code name because somehow she had, for an Irish woman, darker than usual skin, and dark hair. The name protects her from the machinery of wrongful imprisonment.

  An internship from Terror Central helped her to change her accent to an object of great military value. Yes, accents are of military value. Visitors would come infrequently, but they would come: intelligent men who worked against the castle. She was on the Islamic payroll now, if that’s what you can call it and, far be it for her to complain but the international trips had been reduced, and she needed a break from it all to study, and it was going to be very difficult to break suddenly without looking as though she’d crossed over to the other side. Nobody would have believed she would. Would the smart directors of operations look the other way, while she spent more time with her books, did a bit of travelling? Daily, these thoughts echo in her mind. But the breaking of twigs in the middle of night re-commits her to her role as someone who wanted to do something, not just safe and sentimental protests in the streets. Usha, an ordinary, obsequious student of their classics, but an extraordinary student of James Connolly and Ali Shari’ati.

  In my room in the home, abruptly, the phone rings. Our conversation stops. I look at the floor; she winks at me, and touches my hand as if to say that the call will be over soon. She has a fatal disease called old age. I absorb the trans-Atlantic call in bits and pieces. I read an article in The Economist about scientists still attempting cold fusion. Who’s on the phone? It must be her son. She looks at me with her green eyes. “Miracles under the microscope,” about how medical science is defeating the science of miracles. Lourdes, the Virgin Mary, the Christian miracles committee of slightly learned men were getting fucked by science.

  Her life flows tensely in and out of a small elegan
t flat in upper middle class London. This particular operation means a long wait after another long wait until the moment when our planning pays off. The programme of activities has gone on for months; she is bored stiff. She occasionally stares at the phone, admiring its uncrackable privacy options. The radio in her kitchen bleats familiar stories that haven’t changed since the Persian Wars: it’s about maintaining the status quo and securing an internal arrangement. It’s about putting in place a unionist dominated Assembly. Till kingdom come.

  Her bosses have forbidden any casual English contacts, and other things that soothe the loneliness of the watcher. Better to die fighting than a wretched gulam. Islam helped these poor Catholics. She has not had one failure in four years of operations. Sometimes, months go by and nothing happens. In these periods she imagines what a certain operation will achieve, what the risks are, could it backfire in the media? What are the long-term goals of these things that we do?

  This month, a phone call must arrive. It must indicate that a settlement has been reached. All of the planning is successful if the bits in the phone chip are excited and make the required sounds. Then home forever among the green fields. Perhaps she’ll set up a business importing espresso machines to all of Northern Ireland, or become a school teacher and have children.