A Fistful of Dust

by Nasser Hashmi

  For three further days, I taught the boys how to bowl, bat and field properly. It wasn’t easy because an American soldier and Iraqi guard moved us on because of ‘security reasons’ but that was the beauty of this type of cricket gear: it could be placed any time, any place and anywhere; bad light permitting, of course. There was also the slight problem of the boys wanting to finish their game of football first so I had to wait until they’d had their fill and then turn to the real business in hand. But once they were ready I pounced and showed them how to score runs, how to get batsman out and how matches were won and lost. On the second of these days, I had to admit I got lost getting back to Bilu’s – I ended up in a crowded but ghoulish area of town which had a few too many flattened buildings and donkeys for comfort but a bored street trader eventually came to my aid and set me back in the right direction. I only had to say ‘Bilu’ and he knew instantly who I was talking about. I had asked four people before him, as well as three Iraqi soldiers in floppy sun hats, but they must have thought I was mad because by, that time, I could only mumble because my throat was so dry. The only downside to the street trader’s assistance was that he wanted me to take his slippers back to Bilu’s to get them fixed. I had no choice but to grant his request.

  But that was the only blip in an amazing period when I thought I was walking on air and had been gifted a new set of lungs. In the evenings, Bilu would get his spindly fingers working on my body to propel me forward to the next day where I could use the renewed energy and vitality to give the boys detailed knowledge about the game as well as scamper the odd run. It didn’t stop all my symptoms but I could walk a bit faster, speak more fluently and communicate with more authority (that was important when I was trying to tell the boys about silly mid off and short leg). They did look extremely bored, at times, with their shoulders slumped and arms folded but they needed to know that fielding was one of the most important disciplines in the game. We began to attract a crowd too. On day three, a cloudier afternoon with a touch of drizzle, there must have been at least 30 people watching including a sizeable niqab brigade who were either fascinated by the game or simply ensuring their sons weren’t up to mischief. It didn’t give me pleasure to look at these black–uniformed women but only because it reminded me that the players they were looking at weren’t in all white as they should have been. My jumper was scant compensation.

  That day was so enjoyable that we went on until the sun went down. Catching practice had created the exuberance and joy I’d dreamed about and it was wonderful to see the children trying to catch the ball with all the skill of Edward Scissorhands. Rishi and another boy called Kazim were the best catchers but the others were just as enthusiastic and that was the most important thing. At the end of play, I expected them to get into their huddle and then trail off as usual but Rishi stayed behind and watched me as I put the bat and wickets back in the bag. I wondered what was on his mind. I knew he was a talented boy but he’d never said much in previous days. He was wearing a white Real Madrid shirt today and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d had all their shirts for the last 10 years. He walked up to me and handed me the tennis ball. I put that in the bag too. He handed me a sweet in a green wrapper. I put it in my pocket and said I’d eat it later.

  ‘I see you cough?’ he said, putting a sweet in his mouth. ‘You can’t hide it.’ He hesitated and kicked away a stone with his foot. ‘My father is not normal too.’

  Charming, I thought, but at least he’s communicating. He briskly went on tell me he was 11–years–old and his father had fought in the war against Iran at the age of 15. He subsequently had mental health problems and didn’t even know about the US–led invasion in 2003. Rishi desperately wanted his dad to come home but on the previous occasion he’d been allowed out of the hospital, he left his bedroom in the middle of the night and headed out to attack Iraqi soldiers. He wounded one of them at a checkpoint and had to be admitted again. Rishi said he wanted to tell me all this because I was a ‘Britisher who likes sport’. Well, yes, but I didn’t want to tell him how much I hated football. He then took out a tatty pack of cigarettes which had the initials ‘DJ’ on them. I knew what he was about to do but it still shocked me. He pulled one out and put it into his mouth.

  ‘Can I take the bat home?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but the cigarettes have to go. Don’t put your tender lungs in danger.’

  He looked at me and put the cigarette back in the packet. ‘Only for now,’ he said. ‘The bat, can I take it?’

  I sighed as I watched him put the cigarettes away. I unzipped the bag and took out the bat. I handed it to him and he smiled. He ran his palm down the blue blade and then gripped the handle tightly in both hands. I put my bag over my shoulder and couldn’t help but think about Wasim.

  My immensely satisfying work with the children gave me a lift and I was looking forward to finally meeting Wasim who was scheduled to come back. But Bilu’s simple shake of the head, when I asked him about Wasim, tempered my euphoria. Bilu was haggling with a short, stocky customer at the time who was smacking the sole of the shoe against the stall to test its strength. I almost wanted to get it off him and smack it even harder so it was destroyed. Where the hell was my grandson? Why hadn’t he arrived yet? The four days were almost up and there was nothing to indicate that I’d see him soon. Had I been naïve? Was I an old buffoon out of his depth? Yes, and rightly so. I was here to do good things and if I ever got my hands on him I’d show him what life was really about.

  Bilu’s shake of the head sent an immediate bullet of depression into my brain. I could never sustain joy, exhilaration or satisfaction because even the most mundane of news had a way of seeping through my defences and altering my mood. It swung from euphoric to passive in an instant. But as I lay on the mattress and looked up at the ceiling, I decided not to care any more. So what if he didn’t turn up? He messed up the lives of people while I improved them. Who had done the better job? It wasn’t hard to deduce.

  Bilu came upstairs after half an hour with some pancakes, dates and milk but I wasn’t hungry. I felt sick and had difficulty in moving my neck to the right. It had been clicking for a few years but now it was hardly going past 45 degrees because it hurt too much. The sound of four rapid but distant explosions didn’t help either. Each time my neck jolted a little and the flimsy pivot it rested on was loosened once more. Bilu got to work on it and did improve it a little but the rest of my body was too rigid and stiff to be wholly responsive. As Bilu varied his neck–pressing techniques, I asked him if he knew why Wasim hadn’t turned up yet. He instantly stopped what he was doing, got off the mattress and left the room. I hoped I hadn’t insulted him, I thought, because he was crucial to my wellbeing. In fact, my strategy was to get to know Bilu better that evening; I ached for some communication about his background, family and circumstances. But what had I said to him that sent him away in such a huff? Was it the explosions? I shouldn’t have worried because he returned within a couple of minutes carrying a white shoebox. A shoebox? I thought he didn’t have any. The shoebox rattled as he walked towards me on the mattress and rested it by my side. There were three mobile phones in it and Bilu picked one of them up. I instantly recognised one of them as Wasim’s – a Sony Ericsson which was distinctive because I remember Wasim turning it on its side and taking a picture, something which I thought was revolutionary – but that wasn’t the one Bilu decided to pick up. Instead, he flicked open a Motorola and started pressing a few buttons. He then handed me the phone and I looked the display screen. It was a picture of Wasim lying on the green grass of Rochdale’s Lenny Barn on a sunny afternoon with a football placed under his head like a pillow. He had his eyes closed, his hands crossed on his chest and trainers off. It was a beautiful but unsettling picture. There was almost no life in it apart from the bright colours of the sky and the grass. It wasn’t the cold and crowded Lenny Barn that I knew. I looked up at Bilu and wondered why he was showing me these pictures. Did he think I was missing Wasi
m so much that all these pictures would cheer me up? If he was, then they hadn’t done the trick. Further, it was a surprise to me that Bilu had these mobiles at all. How did he get them? Had Wasim left them here? I pressed the ‘next’ button on the mobile because I was intrigued by the first image: it was a part of Wasim I hadn’t seen before. The second picture was similar: lying down, eyes closed, hands crossed but this time he was in front of Silver Street Chapel, only yards away from the family home. And on it went as I scrolled through the other pictures. The same pose was seen in the school yard of Spotland School, outside The Kut Hut, near Rochdale Football ground, outside the Carter’s Rest and, most surprisingly, inside the Golden Mosque. I reached the 12th image but they started to give me a headache so I handed the phone back to Bilu. I needed to lie down straight away. My chest felt prickly and uncomfortable. I lay back on the mattress and tried to get the images out of my head. Did Wasim have a death wish? Was he suicidal or spiritual? I wasn’t sure about anything apart from my wickets and bat. But the most uncomfortable question was practical: was he actually alive?

  6.

  I tossed and turned all night and finally got to sleep deep into the early hours. But that’s when I felt the draught tingle my ankles. It was a creeping, cunning waft of air that I first dismissed as another symptom but when it continued for about half a minute, I knew it was something else. It had to be the door. I sat up instantly and looked up: the door was ajar and someone was standing there. I bit my tongue and my chin began to shake. How long had he been there? Why hadn’t he spoken yet? It was still dark but the shape of his head and shoulders were familiar. I thought I knew who it was but when he didn’t move forward and stayed silent I wasn’t so sure. I pulled away the bed cover and prepared to get off the mattress, concentrating harder than usual because toppling over after a long sleep was always a big risk. I got onto my feet but then heard a shuffling movement and the door suddenly clamped shut. What kind of man was that, I thought? Peeping at me while I slept and then running away when he was rumbled. I awkwardly rushed to the door and opened it. The shaft of light hurt my eyes; it was closer to morning than I thought. I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down and could see the back of a man with a traditional red and white keffiyah scarf over his shoulders, a shaved head and a running style that I knew all too well. It hadn’t changed since he was eight–years–old when I saw him chasing an ice–cream van on Molyneux Street with David Tanner and his frightful dog Wilbutts: his hands were up near his shoulders then and they were the same now. I ran down the steps as fast as I could but the more I pushed the more the legs turned into matchsticks, with no power in them. I got to the bottom and walked down the back alley. The muggy, early morning air wasn’t helping me breath and though I was encouraged by the sound of items being unloaded onto a stall (because it could have meant someone had seen Wasim), I thought he’d probably be long gone by now. I walked to the end of the alley and looked out. A couple of yards away, near the stall, I saw Bilu standing with Wasim. My grandson had his arms folded and was looking at the ground. I took a deep breath and walked towards him. I hesitated and looked up into his eyes. He was bigger and better–built than I remembered him. His face had filled out and his lack of hair gave him a certain kind of authority. The transformation took a few seconds longer to digest. I raised my trembling hand and placed it on his shoulder.

  ‘Have you no manners?’ I asked.

  ‘You shocked the hell out of us,’ he said, rubbing the craters on his right cheek. ‘What are you doing here, anyhow? I were just reading Fajr prayers and came back down here, as I usually do, and there you were like some fuckin’ ghost from another world. I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you carry on running?’

  He looked at Bilu. ‘I did but…he stopped us. He smacked us on the head with a couple of shoes. It made us think a bit.’

  Bilu handed me one of the offending shoes and demonstrated how I should whack my grandson again if he stepped out of line. I politely declined because I would have no need for it; I would use my own techniques to get through to him.

  ‘Come upstairs, so we can talk further,’ I said.

  ‘Look, nana jee whatever you’ve got in mind, it ain’t gonna happen. I know why I’m here and what I’ve got to do. I’m happy you’re here and all that – and that you’re safe – but I’ve got a lot of things to take care of. Allah–thallah won’t forgive me otherwise.’

  ‘And I won’t forgive you, if you don’t listen to me or your parents.’ I turned and started to walk off. ‘So are you coming or not?’

  I didn’t look over my shoulder but after a few seconds I heard footsteps.

  ‘Just remember, I listen to no man, only Allah…’

  Bilu had made us two cups of tea but Wasim didn’t want his. He said he was fasting and was still making up for the days he missed earlier in the year. It didn’t come as a total surprise but I did wonder how far he’d gone in his religious rebirth. If he was making up for all the fasts he’d missed or broken, then he had a long way to go because I remembered him breaking a fast only a couple years ago when I saw him tucking into a kebab at lunchtime outside the Eastern Kebab House on Spotland Road after I’d visited Nadia. That was the only one I saw – I’m sure there were many others – but add those wayward moments to the 30–a–year–standard fasts and they’d pile up until you might end up fasting for half a year.

  After I’d finished my tea, I lay down on the mattress while Wasim continued to sit on the shoe rack and look down on the stony floor. He hadn’t said anything apart from the fasting explanation so I tried to soften him up a little by telling him about my journey and how I’d got here. I figured the three–part journey taking in Manchester, Vienna and Erbil would get him thinking about the type of sacrifice I’d made. I figured wrong and he continued to lower his head and examine the floor as though there was a map of hidden treasure by his feet. So it was time to change tack.

  ‘I’m booking the flight tomorrow. You’re coming home.’

  Finally, I got a reaction. He sniggered and got up from the shoe rack. He walked over to the TV by the sink and picked up the DVD on top of it. He examined the DVD and then put it down. ‘I see Bilu’s got you into the Hollywood shite. It’s polluting everyone’s brain…’

  ‘How many Laurence Fishburne films did you watch? Nadia lost count.’

  ‘Mum exaggerates a lot…’ He sighed and walked over to me on the mattress. He sat down on the edge but still had his back to me. After a few moments, he turned and grabbed hold of my right hand. ‘Look, I know you’re not well but with Allah–thallah’s help you’ll get better. I’m also grateful that you’ve come all this way just to see me…’ He softly let go of my hand and looked away. ‘But there’s no way I’m coming home yet. I’ve still got so many things to take care of over here. I have work to do and people to help. There’s so much to put right here that if I leave now it will all go to pot again. I can’t allow that to happen.’

  ‘How did you know I was ill?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No–one. I just thought after nani jee died, you got ill and haven’t really got better yet.’

  I had forgotten how insensitive Wasim was but I suppose his age was some sort of mitigation. He obviously didn’t know about the Turner Brothers episode and, at this stage, I felt it was better to keep it that way. I didn’t want to show him that I was even more vulnerable than he thought I was.

  I slowly sat up on the mattress. Wasim got his arms round me and helped me up but it was a symbolic gesture rather than a practical one; I could still manage on my own. I awkwardly swung round so my feet were on the floor like his. I felt better that I was on his level now.

  ‘Do you know how much your parents miss you?’ I asked, putting my hand on his knee.

  ‘Yeah, but there’s a bigger picture, nana jee, you don’t understand. It’s about the rotten, black heart of the world which needs putting straight. There’s so
much blood being spilled and so many lives being lost that we can’t just sit on the sidelines and watch, we’ve got to do something. The Ummah’s taking a stand and I’m going to stand with it. I’m not going to let these bastards win.’

  ‘And who are these bastards?’

  He looked at me as if he was a pitcher at the Yankee Stadium and I’d walked out with pads and a cricket bat. He shook his head and got up. He walked towards the door and turned around. ‘The kufr, the unbelievers, the corporations, the government, all of the thieving, money–grabbing liars that are here right now, raping and pillaging this country so they can get creamed…’ He stopped and put both hands on the side of his head. ‘…I go ape just thinking about it.’

  I had been naïve. I thought Wasim would listen to me, particularly because of the state I was in, and also because he was missing his friends and his life, if not his family. But I was wrong. I had misjudged him. He obviously wasn’t as weak and flaky as I thought. I wanted to respond to his propaganda barrage but there was no point because I’d heard it all before. He might have thought I was shocked but Liam Sharples used to say worse about the British government when I was at Turners. He wanted to assassinate Ted Heath personally and used to tell me about it when we walked home on snowy, brutal evenings drinking weak tea from our flasks. He may have thought, as an immigrant, that I’d give him a sympathetic ear but most of the time, I couldn’t understand him: I had the dissolution of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh on my mind at the time. That war was extremely painful but I later understood I didn’t live there any more and it wasn’t for me to take part or decide something that I hadn’t had a stake in for a number of years; I was not part of that country’s problems. Wasim needed to think the same way. His religious justification was a cop–out because most or all Islamic countries had some sort or turmoil since their inception and that would mean never–ending war. To perish in those circumstances would be truly horrific. I wasn’t going to let that happen.