by Haroun Khan
Ishaq felt his cheeks go warm, and struggled to push out his words ‘Re… requests for information? What does that mean? By whom ?’
‘Well, to be frank, there are not many openly observant muslims on the social sciences courses here. There was a Home Office liaison unit that wanted to gather intelligence from lecturers here on Muslim students…’
Ishaq cut the professor off. His voice raised slightly, ‘So in plain English, that means you were asked to spy on me. Is this what this is all really about?’
Harrel’s voice declined to nearly a whisper as he took an obvious gulp. ‘In plain English, yes. We were asked to…report on people fitting your profile. Although we didn’t comply. They are interested in quiet or isolated students. People who may be vulnerable.’
Ishaq stared at the man in front of him, somehow looking smaller, diminished. ‘I’m starting to feel this conversation is really inappropriate. I don’t want to be rude. But this is bollocks. What does that mean, “quiet or isolated”? I don’t drink, so avoid those circles. I also have like-minded friends like anywhere…just like anyone. “Quiet or isolated” from the perspective of who? People like you judging people like me?’ Ishaq’s tone had raised and he rose from his seat.
‘I understand, but you must admit that you’re not very active in extra-curricular matters around the department. You just turn up and go.’
Ishaq berated himself at being surprised. He should have expected it. He knew idle gossip could destroy. It was everywhere. Fear or maliciousness, it didn’ matter. Fake letters produced Trojan hoaxes. Inadequate men looked for fifth columnists under their Sunday papers and cereal. On campus, they were supposedly the best and brightest in English society, yet upon hearing of his background he had actually been asked for drugs once. During terrorist scares, he caught students’ double-takes of him and his backpack, saw their dread as they jumped out a lift. Ishaq’s response was a quiet compliance. Just endure. All these incidents; it was draining to start a long, detailed conversation every time you were at odds. There were some arguments, once even a brawl that Ishaq had felt rueful about afterwards. The other boy would not meet people like him on many occasions, so he had probably solidified a lifetime view. That kid could plead temporary dickheadedness, he did not share the burden of being emblematic of a people. No, it was best to avoid, rather than spend all your time being in discomfort or in confrontation.
‘You or most of the researchers in the department don’t take part much, either. You’re too busy with your own work. I don’t see you or them under investigation. Look, what’s the Phd got to do with all of this? The offer sounds shady now.’
Professor Harrell looked downwards and his fidgeting increased. Ishaq was placated by the man’s show of nervousness and timidity. ‘Genuinely…please…it’s got nothing to do with the other matter. Naturally, I expected you to be slightly perturbed by this all but it is an honest offer, however strange it may seem. In fact we’re telling you the whole story, because if you decide to stay, we don’t want you to find out through campus gossip. As you well know, this type of activity on the part of government has been raised higher up within the university, and by the Student Union. Please. Take some time. Think about it.’
Ishaq settled back in his seat, closed his eyes, and tried to generate some anger. That seemed to be most appropriate. That which was expected of him, right? That would be normal? In truth he didn’t feel anything. Taste, touch, feel, was numb. He was not distressed or frightened. He did not feel upset or nervous. It was this resignation that saddened him. The professor was right: he had heard the stories on campus, read the national newspapers, so in the back of his mind he had known. He had a limp acceptance of it and it had been that way for a long time.
‘They did also ask that if you knew of any vulnerable people, or people of concern, then would you come forward…’ said the professor, who looked at Ishaq expectantly.
Ishaq, his tone deadpan, said, ‘Well if I find someone making a suicide belt to blow themselves up during rag-week then I’ll be sure to dial 999. If they want to gather people who are concerned about Muslims issues, in other words concerned about their lives, then they can round-up hundreds of random students themselves. In fact why not just report anyone who wears a keffiyeh, except of course the rich white students, because they look cool right?’
‘No, no, it’s exactly what we don’t want. That’s why we’re pushing back. But we’re a university, we don’t exist in a vacuum. We can only do our best.’ The professor slumped into his chair.
‘I appreciate your candour, but being frank and honest like you have, academia is for the rich, and theory is for bystanders. I’m neither. I hope that you’ll understand that for people like me, I need to get that piece of paper, hopefully with a First, and start earning some cash. That’s my reality. Look, I am really tempted but I don’t think it’s realistic.’
‘As I said, there is some funding available. You won’t be amazingly comfortable but you will not be in penury. You can still go for a job with a more lucrative salary, and armed with another qualification. Entering the world of economic meltdown and armageddon can wait another three years for you, Mr Tabrizi.’ He was wringing his hands again, looking to Ishaq like a moth-eaten Pontius Pilate seeking absolution.
‘Ok. Thank you, I’ll have a think about it…thank you for telling me about this.’
‘Please take your time. Please think long and hard about it.’
The professor extended his hand. Ishaq looked at it and gave it it a cautious shake. As he left the office, a conciliatory Professor Harrell said, ‘Interesting times, aren’t they?’
Ishaq gave a reply devoid of feeling. ‘Yes, just like the Chinese say.’ He opened the door, paused before stepping through and then twisted back, contorting himself to interact with his lecturer. ‘By the way. I lied.’
In the middle of gathering some papers, the professor’s body stiffened, and after some time he asked the question, ‘About what?’
‘Catcher in the Rye. I hated it. I hate that book.’
Ishaq left the building, hunched, gears of his mind in steady rotation. He had taken care when interacting with students. Obviously not enough. There had been stories of the security services hiring other students to befriend suspects. He had met one post-grad who insisted on coming to talks and fasting with them during Ramadan, yet was insistent that he was not interested in converting. The boy said he was simply practising empathy. Something that horrified Ishaq. Empathy? In London? Maybe this was a middle-class thing, that he didn’t understand. The guy had also said that, in private, he sometimes cried at the pain and suffering of the world, which wound-up Ishaq even more. He later turned out to be part of some radical Christian sect proseltysing in Egypt.
One well-to-do white girl on his course had been approached by MI5 to apply for their graduate training program. Told to tell no one, she immediately brought in the prospectus, and a group of them had a great laugh at the pictures of actual MI5 graduates. Stills of them in awkward poses where they were facing a wall, or their head was lost in a file, or so close together in discussion that their faces were never revealed. Their security upheld in a kind of photographic niqab.
He had tried the political and international organisations but found too many people who thought they were the next Gordon Gekko or Mother Teresa. Ishaq could only share details on how his summer was spent stacking shelves in the local supermarket, trying to pay his tuition fees. Others bonded over building homes in South America, or teaching English in some ramshackle Nepalese town. About villages like his parents’. How hard it was to shit in a hole while squatting, haha. Or wide eyed as they talked about how spoilt they were with their western comforts. Oh, the colour, oh the vibrancy. How poignant it was to see locals be hospitable in the most impoverished of circumstances. It was like an amazing revelation, some truth had been endowed on them.
Ishaq would sit there, astonished when they had the audacity and impudence to lecture him on the r
ealties of those other worlds. Even if they were nice, he could not shake-off the feeling that the world was just an exotic backdrop to their own self-realisation. Their story. Hobbyists who could dip in and out. They could safely play, import the struggle of the other without real peril.
His one outlet was sports. He actually made the first/second team squads for the football team. A darting and crafty winger with a wicked right foot, he played a couple of games pretty successfully, but soon enough both sides came to realise his face just didn’t fit. A coach ride, back from a game, where a lot of the players proceeded to get drunk and strip naked, was the first sign. Then a WhatsApp trail where everyone took a picture of their penis and provided full and hilarious commentary. On excursions to nightclubs, those boys played ‘Pull a minger’ and ‘Ride a beast’. His refusal to join in the ‘banter’ and compulsory nights-out drinking meant being frozen out, until he inevitably quit. Ishaq didn’t find this behaviour shocking. He had seen and been inured by far worse on the estate. He didn’t openly show any disdain or contempt. He just found them incomprehensible. Their interaction was so foreign it was like looking at hieroglyphs without the Rosetta stone.
But there were others. Starting at university had also been, in many ways, a massive shock . The first time that he had met relatively intelligent English teenagers who could hold a conversation. During his first year he couldn’t help stare at them. Exotic creatures from houses in the countryside somewhere outside of London, whose parents somehow earned enough money to send them to schools where you had to pay. From places where they trusted the police, who you weren’t afraid of if you called. He knew that for most them this was a period of unalloyed freedom, that could be looked back on as the best years of their lives. A time to explore, a finishing school for the scions of the well-to-do.
Even now he didn’t really understand them. He could understand working class types like him who wanted to get on, and strangely he had no problem understanding the really posh ones who generally acted like they didn’t give a crap and were killing time. It was the ones in the middle that perplexed. Like black boxes, and he could only guess at what drove or motivated them to do anything. So different from what he knew, where everyone flailed with little control and direction. Ishaq recalled that he used to wonder about this, when a child. Like children that had headaches spending hours thinking about a universe without-end, or the concept of nothingness before the big bang, or even the possibility and existence of an all-powerful deity, the twelve-year old Ishaq struggled during countless hours with how the English could have possibly procured such a gargantuan empire once upon a time. How was it possible that these people, from this small, unruly island had claimed the world as their own? He thought that his own ancestors must have been truly pathetic, if they had been conquered or subjugated by the English as represented by the crowd from his estate. At school he did study Shakespeare, poetry from the First World War, the Elizabethans, and the Victorians, so he knew there must have been capable people here at some point.
But that history was not so much of a foreign country, but of a people so alien, to the point that sometimes the young Ishaq thought it had to have been made up. Maybe it was ‘Once Upon a Time’. He would ask his white mates anything of this history and they would shrug their shoulders, or say they weren’t a swot. All the intelligent kids at school were brown. Now, those same white mates were starting to be deadened by alcohol, or drugs , or petty crime, some blaming their plight on people like Ishaq usurping them. Ishaq thought it iniquitous that he was surrounded by students who also indulged, yet somehow they made it through unscathed. These students took for granted the support networks and role models of friends and family, the fuel-of-ambition and career-hopes of which his estate mates had none. They could make assumptions of the future, were not left to be condemned by the age of sixteen for not taking chances they never had.
But he had been given a chance now. He had never considered staying on, past graduation, but now that the opportunity had been dangled in front of him, he was nearly sold. He knew that he would really miss the clarity he felt here. He had always thought of university as just a means to an end, living at home and never far away from the early responsibilities he saw closing in.
Ishaq stood in front of the neo-classical building, under its colonnade, taking sanctuary. As he edged towards the threshold, he gazed upwards at the heavens being drained. When still a child, he thought he could push rainy skies away with his mind, and now he raised a hand as if trying to nudge those heavens away. He felt a vitalising tickle of water travel down his arm and took a ponderous step outwards onto the quadrangle that was thronging with students. People without a care in the world, or at least only caring about themselves. People who, in a deluge, would have him tiptoe between raindrops and blame him if he got wet.
Many, with their self-ordained sophistication and enlightenment, merely saw the universe in ceaseless entropy; that humanity was just a chain of chemical reactions that were indifferent to right and wrong, good or bad. Ishaq could see their listless ennui as how pointless it all was and how they busied themselves trying to forget its crushing banality. And he didn’t believe this came from godlessness or a lack or faith. It came from comfort – ease. Everything had been done in their society. All the big battles had been fought, all their needs for shelter and safety sated. There was nothing left. The only challenge they could conjure was their success as an individual, their success as a lonely entity.
Maybe he was being harsh but, even though they traced the same footprints and shared the same spaces, they lived separate human realities, a vibration of different frequencies existing in the gaps of each other’s oscillations. Standing here alone as estranged crowds buffeted him, swirling and dancing, he thought of those who told him that he needed to try and fit in more. He thought of the professor’s words. He thought that he expended enough energy just to hold ground and stand still. They can’t ask anything more. He had done enough.
5.
The rain dwindled to wadding spits, Ishaq trudged his way to the bike racks in the front quad, head down, grazing shoulders when passing others. By the bicycles he saw a rake-like figure, lounging in box fresh hi-tops, shaking off droplets from a fuzzy ball of hair. Marwane. Languid and laconic, the boy who never seemed to take anything too seriously. One of his closest childhood friends and also an estate lad, Marwane was studying Computer Science at another uni nearby. Ishaq always admired how it all rolled effortlessly off his back.
Marwane saw Ishaq, straightened and mock saluted him, ‘Assalamu alaikum, bruv, why didn’t you call me back? I gave you a missed call.’
‘Why didn’t you leave a message?’
Marwane looked at Ishaq as if he were simple. ‘I never leave messages, you don’t know who is listening in, right?’
Ishaq looked over his friend’s face, uncertain, searching for the source of such a sinister query. It could be a knowing taunt, or some test, but all he saw was a smile and that glib innocence. His own dependable Shaggy.
‘What was so important?’
‘I was going to ask what you wanted for lunch? Chicken or a shwarma?’
Ishaq shook his head. ‘Don’t care. We can eat at the prayer room or the Student Union. Don’t mind.’
‘You look happy as usual. Droopy dog ain’t got nothing on you,’ Marwane said, clocking Ishaq’s sullen look. ‘Ok, let’s do the Union, we can pray afterwards.’
They started walking, the rain now a drizzle but the gloom not lifting. Marwane rushed to fill the silence. ‘I really hate this crappy weather, it’s not one thing or another. Sometimes I wish we had been colonised by the Spanish or Italians and ended up there.’
‘But you’re Algerian. Your parents should have ended up in France, not here.’
Marwane let out a sly whistle as his body, all large jutting bone and sinew, danced side-on to Ishaq’s shorter athletic marching.
‘Man, that was a missed bullet. At least the English were just honest and
just after cash. The French want to colonise your mind, bruv. Proper messed up. Look at how angry Algerian bros are.’ Marwane tapped the side of his head to emphasis the point.
Within sight of the Union building, Ishaq noticed a crowd around the entrance to the canteen. This was pretty usual. Placards brandished like an army’s herald, beseeching all to heed their proclamations. The Union building was a lightning rod for the pet concerns of protest groups, or for people with too much time on their hands. One woman held a sign saying ‘NO TO ANIMAL CRUELTY. SAY NO TO ALL RELIGIOUS SLAUGHTER’. Dour faced, she was jostling for position with an older man, trying to grab his sign that said ‘HALAL MEAT TODAY, SHARIA LAW TOMORROW’.
Ishaq caught Marwane rolling his eyes, as they came closer and saw that one group consisted of animal rights activists. To their obvious discomfort they were backed by conservative groups, and those even further to the right, whose cluster of signs indicated that they saw the issue as a threat to British identity. Divided by ascending Union steps, the other side saw some of his co-religionists, aided and abetted by picketers from the Socialist Workers lot. Whether this was bridge-building or just unholy alliances, it looked to Ishaq that here was his own cognitive dissonance manifest, anthropomorphised, made into human form.
‘Man, more protests, Pakistanis love it, don’t they? Even the ones here. I wonder if they have an effigy? I’ve always wondered at how quick they manage to bring one out. Someone’s got an effigy factory as a good sideline, bruv,’ said Marwane.
‘Yea whatever, just like Arabs somehow always have a spare American or Israeli flag to burn. Your lot’s banners are even more psycho by the way. Like I saw one with a knife stuck into Masjid al-Aqsa and blood gushing out. How mental is that?’ replied Ishaq.
‘Ah, so Droopy lives. Well he can shut it. Anyway, you want to get out of here, this is busted,’ Marwane said, as he took in the rest of the jumbled scene.