The Pakistani code of social precedence had followed its sons to their new home and few questioned its demands. Social rank derived from age, wealth, influence and the position a man occupied in a family. The system of castes and clans seemed mysterious to outsiders, but those who belonged to it understood every nuance. Families were assigned their place on the scale according to the history they brought with them, the land they owned or the connections they had with the dynasties of Pakistani politics. Kabir was venerated as the patriarch who had brought the Kahin Nahi boys to Britain and the father who replaced their fathers. He demanded and received money and deference; even when he was wrong he was right. They may have resented having to pay homage, having to assuage Kabir’s vanity and rapaciousness, but they did it because that was how things worked.
The same relationship of entitlement and debt ran right down the social ladder. Each man knew to whom he owed respect and from whom he could command it. Even those at the bottom, the poor, the progeny of insignificant families and despised castes, accepted their fate as the immovable equation of life. It had been thus since time began, and there was little chance of it changing.
But for all its feudal stability, the system imposed demands. For individuals and families to preserve their place in the pecking order they had to be constantly on guard to defend it. Maintaining respect and protecting honour were paramount requirements; losing face, allowing oneself to be disrespected was fatal. If a family let an insult go it could be shamed and ridiculed, its authority gone.
The result was that insults, real or imagined, were answered with shattering force. Implacable violence was the response to loss of face; those who didn’t avenge a slur were weaklings and cowards. And slurs were everywhere, from disparaging remarks to insufficient toadying, the failure to pay bribes, the refusal of a wedding proposal or a marriage that went wrong. A girl could dishonour her father by declining an arranged marriage or falling for the wrong boy. A boy could dishonour his parents-in-law by abandoning or divorcing their daughter. All these offences demanded immediate, manifest retribution.
Young Ibrahim did not question the ways of his homeland. He was obligated to his older brother because Ahmed had brought him to England, acted as his sponsor and taught him the customs of English life. Ahmed was owed respect and Ibrahim gave it.
Ibrahim’s footloose years came to an end in 1974. He was twenty-one and it was time to marry. From Kahin Nahi Hassan wrote to say that the family had found him a bride; Asma was seventeen and Ibrahim’s first cousin. They had met as children when they helped to harvest the crops on the Rahman estate, but they hadn’t seen each other for years. Hassan enclosed a photograph so Ibrahim could picture his future partner. As both families had agreed on the match, Ibrahim knew there was no point arguing; he wrote to say he would be pleased to marry Asma.
In the early summer he flew to Karachi and took the bus down rutted roads to Kahin Nahi. He was back for the first time in five years and the place struck him as primitive. The countryside he had loved when he walked out as a child with Hassan seemed arid now, the animals malnourished, the villages impoverished.
But Ibrahim found Asma a willing and grateful bride; she was pretty and personable and her family had provided a generous dowry. For them, Ibrahim was a catch. Marrying ‘an Englishman’ was a sign of status. It meant their daughter could bank on an invitation to join her husband in Britain; there were bureaucratic hurdles to leap, but their grandchildren would be British.
The wedding was low-key. Ibrahim had told his foreman that he was getting married, but a week off work was the best he could negotiate. When he returned to Burnley he was joshed by his housemates. They quizzed him on his wedding night performance and asked if the beautiful Asma had appreciated his virility. Ibrahim smiled and took it in good spirits. When the letter came three months later telling him that Asma was pregnant, he showed it to his friends and they slapped him on the back.
Ibrahim was growing up. A married man had responsibilities and he lived up to them. Every month he sent a portion of his salary by Western Union transfer to Asma’s father in Kahin Nahi. Every month Asma’s father wrote to thank him and to explain why Ibrahim would need to increase the amount of money he was sending. Urgent repairs were needed to the family home, an unexpected tax bill had come in, a member of the extended family had had another baby. The flow of money from Pakistani men in the new world to families in the old was a fact of life. Some of Ibrahim’s mates grumbled about the feckless folk back home and their insatiable demands for cash. But Ibrahim shrugged and sent them what they asked for.
Ibrahim worked hard because he owed it to his future family and because he was a young man who liked to please. When the foreman offered him overtime he did it; when they told him to sign a dodgy worksheet he signed it. Ibrahim liked Burnley life and Burnley liked him. His old girlfriends stayed friends; some would have liked to stay more, but Ibrahim thought of Asma back in Kahin Nahi and told them he was spoken for. On his birthday they helped his Pakistani housemates stage a party, first at Uncle Kabir’s and then at the pub on the corner. Several of the English girls were married or going steady and they brought their partners. Young working-class white men, they were suspicious of the Pakistani boys but drink and jollity helped bridge the divide.
The following weekend some of them invited Ibrahim and Ahmed to Turf Moor. Burnley had just been promoted from the second division of the Football League and were storming up the table in the top flight. Their opponents were West Ham United, the stadium was packed and the fiesta was on. No one noticed two non-white faces among the 18,216 who passed through the turnstiles; Ibrahim and Ahmed were part of the crowd and part of the fun. When the white boys chanted ‘Up the Clarets!’ and ‘Super Dobbo!’ they did the same. They barely understood the rules of the game, but it was exhilarating to sing and shout, to share in something that Englishmen felt passionately about. When Geoff Nulty put Burnley ahead with a rasping volley into the top of the net, their white friends included them in the communal embraces. They bought them pork pies at half-time and didn’t notice when the brothers slipped them uneaten into their pockets. In the second half West Ham’s Graham Paddon equalised with a scuffed shot that crept over the line to silence the home fans. Ibrahim sensed the change that swept over the terraces and motioned Ahmed to stop shouting. The rest of the game was played in a mood of frustration; there was discontented muttering as the crowd streamed out of the ground. Ibrahim and Ahmed said goodbye to their friends and set off down Brunshaw Road to walk home. At the corner of Irene Street a gang of youths set on them, attacking them with bottles and sticks, kicking them as they lay on the ground, shouting, ‘Kill the Pakis! Up with Enoch! Send the bastards home!’
The doctor in A&E told Ahmed that he had two broken ribs and Ibrahim that he was lucky not to lose his sight. Some of the boys at Uncle Kabir’s nodded sagely in an ‘I told you so’ way. Abdul the chapatti maker produced a leaflet he’d found lying on the ground in the Open Market and everyone gathered round the curry pot while the English speakers translated it out loud. It was from an organisation called the National Front and it carried extracts from a speech by an MP called Enoch Powell:
In fifteen or twenty years there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. Whole areas and towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant population. We must be mad, literally mad, to permit the annual inflow of some 50,000 immigrant dependants. It is like watching a nation heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry.
The reference to fraudulent entry provoked a little nervous laughter. Most of those present had bent the rules in one way or another, and all of them had fiancées in Pakistan waiting to become part of Powell’s statistics. The MP went on:
The native English
population find themselves made strangers in their own country. They find their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they find that employers hesitate to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and integrity required of the native-born worker; they begin to hear more and more voices telling them that they are now the unwanted.
There was some tittering at the mention of corrupt work standards, but the mood was edgy.
The idea that immigrants can be integrated into our population is a dangerous delusion [the leaflet concluded]. We are seeing the growth of vested interests in sharpening racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of domination over the native population. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the ancient Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with blood.
At the end of the reading there was silence. One of the younger boys asked if this meant ‘the English are going to send us all back home’. But Uncle Kabir, who had sat immobile throughout, stood up slowly then loudly and deliberately farted. As the room collapsed into laughter, he folded the leaflet three times and lit it on the gas jet under the curry pot before dropping the burning ashes into the bin.
Ahmed and Ibrahim’s injuries were slow to heal, but they couldn’t afford to miss work. When they turned up at the mill their fellow workers averted their eyes, thinking how easily they could have suffered the same fate. Racism was rising as the British economy slumped.
Ahmed and Ibrahim didn’t speak about the attack or the effect it had had on them, but Ibrahim sensed that his brother blamed him. Ahmed made disapproving references to Ibrahim’s ‘so-called white friends’ who had taken them to the football game then left them to fend for themselves. Ibrahim tried to explain. ‘I think those miscreants must have been West Hammers people,’ he said. ‘Because Burnley people love us.’ Ahmed snorted and walked away.
At the next kitchen gathering, Ahmed spoke about the danger Pakistani people faced in Britain and how they must band together to protect themselves. Several of the men agreed; the only way to be safe was to build strong communities and keep the whites out. Ibrahim spoke, too, but with an apologetic smile. ‘The whites aren’t all racists,’ he said. ‘The people I know are ordinary folk like us. We don’t want to cut ourselves off from everyone, do we?’ The reaction from the rest of the room took him aback. A welter of voices damned the English and warned about the dangers of trusting any of them. Ibrahim tried to object, but Ahmed waved him to be quiet. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I am your senior. You owe me respect and I order you to stop seeing your whites. They have brought shame upon us and pain. I will not permit you to expose us to such hostility.’
Ibrahim bowed his head and sat down. Ahmed was his older brother; to argue with him in public would be an affront to his dignity that neither of them would be able to live with. But the following day on the way to the mill, Ibrahim reopened the discussion. ‘I’m not arguing with you, Ahmed. Of course you’re right about the racists. But the way to deal with them isn’t to retreat into ourselves. We’ll end up living in ghettoes. Why don’t you try and learn English, brother? You’ll get on much better in this country. You could be a part of things.’
Ahmed laughed. ‘You saw what the National Front wrote, didn’t you? They don’t want integration – they say it will never work. So why should we even try? They don’t want us, ’Brahim, so why should we want them? This is our country too, you know. We need to get whatever we can out of it.’
A month later a letter came from Kahin Nahi informing Ibrahim that he was a father. Asma had gone into labour unexpectedly. She had endured the ride along bumpy roads to the hospital. She hadn’t complained about the heat and the flies, the primitive maternity unit and the lack of hygiene during the birth. But she cried when the doctor told her it was a girl. By the time the letter arrived in Burnley, Ibrahim’s daughter was already three weeks old.
‘And that baby was me.’ Ayesha sat up on the couch and looked in my direction. ‘Apparently my dad read the letter out to his mates and said something like, “I’d rather have had a boy, but never mind.” I think he was just playing it cool, though, because that night he went out to the pub and bought drinks for the whole bar. He was only twenty-two, so at that age you don’t want to be too sentimental, do you?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said. ‘But can I ask you something? You said this all happened in 1975, right? So doesn’t that make you nearly forty? I thought you told me you were thirty-four . . .’
Ayesha grinned. She had a luminous smile that I hadn’t noticed when I first met her; she could probably convince people she was whatever age she told them she was. ‘In my business, you need to be young and bright. Let’s say thirty-four is my professional age. How old are you?’
‘Almost old enough to be your father . . .’ I stopped myself. ‘I’m sorry. That’s not a very sensitive thing to say under the circumstances.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ayesha said. ‘I don’t find it offensive. There’s something I quite like about it . . . Can I ask you something? Why are you here? Is this just an opportunity for a book for you?’
‘It’s partly that.’
‘And what’s the other part?’
‘I suppose I’m interested in you.’
‘As a person? Or as a character?’
We laughed.
‘Both . . . I’m interested in you and in writing your story. I don’t want you to pay me a fee, though.’
‘Yes, you said that. Why not?’
‘Because if you’re paying me, you’d think you had the right to tell me what to write. It’s to do with integrity and telling the truth.’
‘Really? So you’d be telling the truth, would you? You wouldn’t be changing and embellishing things to make the drama better? Are you sure about that? And how could I be sure you wouldn’t write something I don’t like?’
‘You’d have to trust me. Not everything can be guaranteed by money, Ayesha. Sometimes you have to put your faith in someone.’
CHAPTER 4
I woke to the phone ringing. The clock said 5.30am.
‘Martin, are you awake?’
I recognised her voice.
‘It’s 5.30, Ayesha. What’s the matter?’
‘My detective in Pakistan says he’s got news. I want you to hear it.’
‘You want me to hear . . .? You mean we are going to write this? I thought you . . .’
‘Of course we’re going to write it! Can you be here by seven? I’ve set up a call.’
An hour or so later the door to Ayesha’s flat was open so I walked in. She was haranguing a telephone operator somewhere in Pakistan and gestured for me to fetch coffee from the kitchen. When I came back she had Masood Jilani on the speakerphone.
‘Listen, Masood,’ she was saying, ‘I’ve got someone with me whose Urdu is even worse than mine – he doesn’t have any. You’re going to have to speak English. And this line is terrible, so you’ll need to speak very clearly, okay?’
‘Wilco, Miss Rahman. All understood.’ Masood Jilani’s voice carried the 4,000 miles from Karachi with military precision. He hadn’t spent twenty years in the Pakistani police for nothing. ‘Report in hand. Awaiting your go-ahead.’
Ayesha glanced at me with a mixture of amusement and pride. It hadn’t been easy finding the best private detective in Kahin Nahi, but by luck or judgment she’d got him.
‘Thank you, Masood. Please go ahead.’
In English garnished by archaisms that persist in the subcontinent decades after being ditched in the motherland, Masood Jilani outlined the results of his investigations in the weeks since Ayesha had left Pakistan.
‘Miss Rahman, I beg leave to report. Despite negative machinations from the competent authorities, I have complied with your instructions and secured an independent autopsy on the subject Ibrahim Rahman. Hold-ups were encountered because the police opposed exhumation then refused to make available testing facilities. But my colleague Nazir
, working in the coroner’s department, ensured the post mortem was carried out to the highest standards. The results confirm beyond doubting that your father was murdered in most brutal fashion, viz. blows to the head with blunt instrument at a time when the victim was bound hand and foot and a ligature noose pulled around his neck. Cause of death was either asphyxiation from said ligature or catastrophic trauma from repeated blows. The forensic technician who attended the autopsy says he has rarely seen such damage to a human cranium. In his opinion it was caused by sledgehammer blows wielded onto the rear of skull while the victim was being pinned down on a concrete floor. In light of ligature marks on wrists and ankles, it is unlikely that Mr Rahman would have been able to defend himself.’
I saw Ayesha’s face fall and her lip tremble. She struggled with the horror but refused to surrender to it.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That confirms what I have believed to be the case since I saw my father’s body. I have not been imagining things. And now we have a clear picture of what we are dealing with. But, Masood, can you tell me who could have done this? Who could have murdered my father in such a brutal way?’
Masood Jilani was reluctant to speculate. ‘I am not in a position to answer this question at the moment. My inquiries are at an early stage. But I must inform you that such crimes are not uncommon in Pakistan. There are dangerous men here who control many things and do not fear retribution for their actions. Organised criminals traffic in alcohol, in land, in drugs, in people and they do not care whom they murder to protect these interests. It could have been any of these, any one of them who had a score to settle with your father.’
Ayesha's Gift Page 4