‘Why don’t you tell me some more about your father, Ayesha? I need to know about him if we’re going to do something about it.’
It worked. Ayesha slipped off her shoes and leaned back on the couch. When she began talking again the warmth had returned.
Ibrahim Rahman was born in Kahin Nahi, then a rural community on the outskirts of Karachi, in 1953. The Rahmans were landowners and conscious of their status. They belonged to one of the higher castes, living off the revenues from their land, farming some of it themselves and leasing the rest to other families. Ibrahim’s father, Hassan, had fought in the war, serving in an Indian regiment alongside British units in the Far East. He had returned to Kahin Nahi in 1945 and married a cousin. They had had three girls and, despairing of having a son, had adopted the orphaned son of a second cousin. Two years later, Ibrahim was born.
The years following the war had been difficult. As head of the family, Hassan had the responsibility of preserving the Rahman land in a period of turmoil. The 1947 partition of India triggered mass migrations as Muslims flocked to the newly created Pakistan and Hindus fled in the opposite direction. The new arrivals needed somewhere to live and Pakistan was riven by clashes over property ownership. Hassan fought for the family’s territory, but it wasn’t easy. Land rights had long been contentious in the subcontinent, with disputes kindling vendettas that flamed into violence and murder. The British had set up a land registry in the late nineteenth century, but corruption and inefficiency meant that it remained an approximate business. Local officials known as patwaris were put in charge of the written records. Personal greed, bribes and threats could persuade them to falsify ownership documents in favour of their friends or themselves.
Hassan had to be careful. He paid money and homage to the patwari, knew whom to flatter, whom to court and whom to cajole. He was a local man, adept at intrigue. By the time Ibrahim was born, the family’s prospects seemed secure. Hassan ran the land and oversaw the farming, leaving his wife to manage affairs at the house.
Ibrahim’s earliest memories were happy ones. From the moment he could walk he spent his days with his father, tramping the fields, inspecting the cattle. At harvest time, he and his cousins would meet to gather the crops in a round of festive activity that united the family. Ibrahim learned the ways of the Pakistani countryside, absorbed its sights and sounds and smells and saw the way its character changed with the seasons. He soaked up the heat of the summer and drank in the rains that slaked the land in spring. Autumn beguiled him with its imperceptible progression, turning the world from green to brown; the crisp winter nights sent him huddling under his eiderdown.
A joyful childhood left Ibrahim with a love of his native land. In later years with Ayesha on his knee he embellished its charms. She grew up with an image of her father as a latter-day Mowgli living wild in nature’s realm, never knowing when he would encounter charging elephants or be forced to run in panic from man-eating tigers.
Ibrahim’s tales of the adventures he shared with his father endeared him to her. She loved this man who seized her by the waist and threw her dizzyingly, thrillingly high. She screamed for mercy, but knew he would not let her down; she learned the feel of him, the contours of his shoulders that she clung to in exhilarated terror, the warmth of his chest as he hugged her to him. She imbibed the smells of his body, the acrid fragrance of his sweat, the sweetness of his aftershave, the half-life of the spices he’d consumed the night before, the shiny Brylcreem that he plastered on his hair.
When Ibrahim recounted his life, his daughter heard it change and expand from one telling to the next, full of colourful variations that she later recognised as the bountiful fantasies of a happy imagination. When, older, she realised that Daddy had never slain leopards or fought off bandits and dacoits, she loved him all the more for it. He had cherished her so much that his fondest wish was to impress her with his valour, to convince her that he was the greatest, loveliest daddy who had ever lived. For Ayesha, he was.
In some of his childhood tales, Ibrahim spoke of his sisters and brother. In Pakistan, he told her, a family would educate only one of its sons while the other children would remain at home to help with the family’s business. Ahmed was the elder, so he got the education. Ibrahim had no problem with that; the sons would inherit equally, and he had no interest in going to school. He was happy to wave Ahmed off to the madrasa and stay behind with Hassan to roam the land. The girls got no schooling because they were girls so it would have been a waste. When Ayesha interrupted to protest, ‘But Daddy, I’m a girl!’ Ibrahim would laugh and say, ‘Things are different now, Ish. You’ll get whatever you want. You know Daddy can’t refuse you anything . . .’
For the young Ibrahim, the Pakistan of his childhood was open spaces and nature’s bounty. But the legacy of Britain’s presence in the country remained strong. The Asian homeland and the British motherland were divided by geography, culture and religion; after 1947 statues of Queen Victoria were pulled down and smashed, some of them replaced by bronze replicas of the Qur’an. But when things were hard at home, when monsoon rains washed away the crop, when violence and dissension threatened the family or the nation, the people looked to Britain. Britain held their dreams and their ambitions. They learned about it in books and films, in school and in the flighty comedies that came through their radios and TVs. A world where naughty vicars chased scantily clad women, where men dressed up in frocks and everyone saluted a matriarch in a gold coach carried ineffable fascination. It was a place the young wanted to experience and the old dreamed of, a distant paradise where life’s troubles would be soothed by contented prosperity. ‘To London!’ was their equivalent of the Jews’ ‘Next year in Jerusalem . . .’ Even the fulminations of the baleful Enoch Powell, the man who had lived in and known the subcontinent but took delight in demonising its people, failed to dampen the enthusiasm for migration to the foggy nirvana.
In 1965 Ahmed went. He had done well at school and completed his studies. Hassan respected his adopted son; he took pride in his achievements, but he never had the same affection for him as he did for Ibrahim, his youngest child and dutiful companion in the rural life he loved. Seeing Ahmed off on the boat to Southampton was not such a wrench in Hassan’s heart. He gave him his grandfather’s amulet for guidance in the new world and whispered words of advice in his ear. He told him to work hard, keep out of trouble and write as often as he could. But he didn’t shed a tear as the boat left the quay.
Ahmed’s passage had taken some manoeuvring. Uncle Kabir, a relative by marriage to Hassan’s cousin, was already living in Lancashire and had agreed to be Ahmed’s sponsor. That satisfied England’s demand for financial guarantees from its new residents. But the British consul in Karachi was a stickler, renowned for his obdurate questioning and citing of rules. So Hassan and his wife decided to play safe. When they filled in the forms they wrote that Ahmed was Kabir’s son, automatically entitled to join his father in the UK. At the visa interview the consul looked suspicious. But records of births, marriages and deaths in Pakistan are flexible things that can be moulded to suit many purposes. Members of a family marry their first and second cousins with bewildering regularity and the system of given and family names is so unregulated that Pakistanis themselves barely understand it. A harassed, red-faced foreigner is very unlikely to get to the bottom of things, and the consul didn’t. He huffed and puffed then applied his stamp to the triplicated forms that would send Ahmed on his way.
In the week before Ahmed was due to sail, he drew Ibrahim into an adventure much darker than any he’d had before. It started as a joke. The boys in the village knew Amir and they knew his boasting. They were teenagers and most of them rubbed along together. But Amir was always talking about how rich his family was, how they had a car while others had to travel on foot, how his father could spend more in a day than the other boys’ parents did in a year. Ibrahim, who was young, would listen and smile. Ahmed, older, got angry.
Ibrahim smiled when Amir
said he was going to see Nour. Nour was a girl with long plaits and a slightly scared manner. She was pretty; the boys admired her from afar. When Amir boasted that he would do more, Ibrahim didn’t really understand. Ahmed listened to Amir’s prattle and kept his counsel.
When Amir disappeared from the village and Nour disappeared shortly afterwards, Ahmed went to see the girl’s father. He told him he had overheard the young lovers’ conversations and knew their plans. Nour’s father, humiliated by his daughter’s betrayal, thanked Ahmed and asked him to come with him; he wanted the young man’s help to locate the lovers’ refuge. Ahmed agreed and told Ibrahim to jump into the four-wheel drive with him. Was he looking for safety in numbers? Did he want a twelve-year-old to witness the wages of dishonour? Or did Ahmed know that what was about to happen would shock and scar his brother for ever? However much he thought about it in the years that followed, Ibrahim could not find the answer.
Both boys saw what happens to a daughter who betrays her family’s honour. Ahmed and Ibrahim saw Amir being hanged. And they saw Nour buried alive. They saw her trying to clamber out of the pit, catching their eye in a desperate, imploring panic that Ibrahim never forgot. Angered by her struggling, Nour’s father smacked her head with the spade he had used to dig her grave and she fell back in. The men took it in turns to shovel the earth onto her quivering body.
When Ahmed sailed for England, Ibrahim was left with the memory of Nour’s last moments. It kept him awake then soured his dreams when he slept. Ahmed had shrugged and mocked him. ‘These things happen. It’s the will of Allah. Get used to it.’
Ibrahim tried to harden his soul, tried to tell himself he must accept the absence of kindness and mercy in the world. But it wasn’t easy. He wondered what he would do if ever he were to have a daughter who betrayed him in the way that Nour had done. Would he too enforce the just retribution that the code of honour demands?
With Ahmed gone, Ibrahim blossomed. He was his own man now. He went into the world, met new people and learned from them. He was no longer the simple country boy at home only in the fields. He frequented the town, learned the ways of commerce and saw what sort of thing makes money and what is merely a waste of time. Unlike Ahmed, Ibrahim was sociable and open. He had a frankness about him that endeared him to people. He could talk to anyone, from a chai wallah to a professor.
Ibrahim’s ambitions grew with his confidence. The life of a backwater like Kahin Nahi was no longer enough. He asked his father if he too could make the trip to England, but Hassan was reluctant. Ibrahim was his favourite, destined to take over the stewardship of the family’s lands as the baton passed between generations. Ibrahim persisted. Hassan tried to be firm, but he loved his son and wanted him to be happy. Soon after his sixteenth birthday, Ibrahim followed in his brother’s footsteps.
Ahmed had been working in England for four years and had saved enough to buy his brother an air ticket from Karachi to London. To satisfy the British authorities he acted as Ibrahim’s sponsor and financial guarantor, and on an October morning in 1969 the two were reunited in the terminal of Gatwick airport. Ahmed had borrowed a car from a Pakistani friend who ran a cab firm in Burnley and driven down before dawn. As they headed north the brothers drank tea from Ahmed’s Thermos flask and ate cold samosas out of a Tupperware box. Ibrahim marvelled at the roads, the cars, the houses and the newness of everything. Ahmed, sophisticated cosmopolitan, mocked his bumpkin brother and boasted of the life he had been living in Albion’s bright delights.
When Ahmed said they were approaching Burnley, Ibrahim’s stomach tightened. This was home now. He felt the thrill of anticipation, the dread of the unknown. As they drove by the terraced houses he pictured the lives of those who resided behind the lace curtains and pot plants. His heart filled with hope. Britain was the land of opportunity.
Kabir’s house looked like all the others. The paint was peeling and the windows were dirty, but when they dragged Ibrahim’s suitcases into the hallway the smell of curry that leached from the carpets, the ceilings and the bright patterned wallpaper was comfortingly familiar. Two Pakistani men ran down the stairs and out of the front door with a cheery as salaam alaikum in the characteristic burr of Kahin Nahi.
Ahmed saw Ibrahim’s look of surprise. ‘It’s not just you and me who live with Uncle Kabir, ’Brahim. There’s a dozen of us. Don’t worry – we’re all from Kahin Nahi. There are no outsiders.’
‘But Ahmed,’ Ibrahim said, wide-eyed. ‘How can everyone fit in? Where does everyone sleep?’
‘All in good time, brother,’ Ahmed said. ‘You’ll get used to things. It’s different from at home, but we manage.’
Ahmed told Ibrahim to put his bags in the back bedroom. There were two rooms upstairs and each had four beds. All but two of them were occupied by sleeping men huddled under blankets.
‘We sleep in relays,’ Ahmed said. ‘It’s not a problem, because we all work at the mill and we all do different shifts. Different shifts at work . . . different shifts in bed! Come on, I’ll show you the kitchen.’
In a room downstairs an iron pot was bubbling on the stove. ‘We keep the curry cooking round the clock,’ Ahmed said. ‘There’s always someone who needs a meal, so we just add more ingredients as the day goes on. On Sunday afternoons everyone sits around the pot and we eat and smoke and talk, just like at home. Abdul’s in charge of the cooking; he makes the curry and the chapattis and we all chip in to the cost. Life is sweet, little brother.’
On Monday morning, Ahmed took him to the mill. It was bigger than anything Ibrahim had seen, a looming hulk of blackened brick towering over the terraced streets, shading out the light. Inside, the noise engulfed him; the air shuddered with the moto perpetuo of machinery, cogwheels spinning, shuttles flying in the complex cross rhythms of the industrial dance. Men hurried back and forth with hammers and oil and bobbins, midgets beside the dark machines. Wisps of cotton hung in the air like clouds of icing sugar dusting the rumbling lathes.
The foreman weighed Ibrahim up. The man was a north Punjabi and Ibrahim struggled with his accent. In his eagerness to please he heard himself gabbling obsequiously in reply to the fellow’s questions. ‘Where are you from? Are you legal over here? What experience do you have? How will you show your gratitude if I take you on?’ Ahmed had told Ibrahim what to expect. He would receive no pay for the first month and the foreman would take a cut of his wages for the next six. After that the arrangement would be reviewed, with the level of future contributions dependent on Ibrahim’s work rate and on his participation in the complex scams that the foreman outlined to him.
The mills were owned by white bosses, but the workforce was almost exclusively Pakistani and Pakistani work practices had taken root. The foreman and the shift masters demanded a sliding scale of bribes in return for getting or keeping a job, for promotions and for the right to take holidays. The workers got their pay in cash every two weeks and there was no point in complaining if some of it was missing. Phantom employees were put on the payroll, clocked on, clocked off and paid at the going rate with their wages shared among those in charge according to the level of respect their position commanded. The bookkeepers were Pakistani, too, so the bosses never learned of the money that percolated out of their accounts.
Pakistani communities in Britain bring with them the customs of their homeland, and Pakistan does not work in the same way that Europe does. Formal law, formal justice and formal policing are not the order of the day; society runs along other lines, with patronage, respect and honour taking the place of codified rules. Law is clan-based, family and tribal, administered by powerful men whose rulings are imposed by force. And when Pakistani tribes settle in Britain, they settle together. The population of east Bradford hails from one region of Pakistan, that of north Rochdale from another. Clan structures, practices and accents are all preserved.
The area of Burnley where Uncle Kabir had settled was a mini Kahin Nahi. The men who passed through his house, staying for a week, a month or a year
as they strove to establish themselves in Britain, were from the same suburb of western Karachi. They shared a common background and common tales of life back home. In the evenings they returned from the mill, ate their curry and chapattis, smoked their cigarettes and reminisced about the past. When things were going well they would talk about their women, their ambitions and their plans for the future. Then it was time to wake the others who were on night shift and take their place in bed.
The camaraderie, the shared memories and the familiar codes of conduct made it easy for Ibrahim to settle. He was a young man and the future was his. England delighted and surprised him. Shortly after his arrival he came out from his shift in the factory to find the world magically transformed. The grimy buildings and litter-strewn streets had vanished and in their place a pristine veil of white had made the universe anew. Ibrahim marvelled at the miracle, ran to tell his housemates and slid headlong on the icy pavement.
There were things that were less easy to accommodate. In his first months in Britain he found the country’s easy-going ways and lax morality disconcerting. After Pakistan’s fierce insistence on the dictates of honour and religious observance, the Britishers’ addiction to drink, their love of gambling and their displays of sexual depravity shocked him. But Ibrahim acclimatised. He was a nice-looking boy, tall and gangly with a shock of thick black hair and a winning smile. The 1970s were dawning and he looked good in flared jeans and denim waistcoats; he grew a moustache that gave him the air of a young Omar Sharif. Pakistani boys were still not that common in Lancashire and Ibrahim discovered that he held a fascination for English girls who didn’t mind cocking a snook at their fuddy-duddy parents. For three liberating years, he went out, forced himself to drink shandy and improved his English with the help of crackly LPs by David Bowie and Herman’s Hermits.
For all his accreted Britishness, Ibrahim’s heart remained Pakistani. Unlike some of his friends he didn’t pine for the old country, but he kept in touch with his family, writing letters that took a fortnight to arrive and eagerly awaiting replies that took even longer. He attended the mosque on Fridays and tried to pray five times a day, Salat al-fajr at dawn, Salat al-zuhr at midday, Salat al-'asr in the afternoon, Salat al-maghrib at sunset and Salat al-'isha at midnight. When he forgot, he reasoned that he was young and Allah would probably understand.
Ayesha's Gift Page 3