The Study Circle

by Haroun Khan

  ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.’

  ‘I think it’s all made up,’ repeated the doctor.

  Ishaq was exhausted. His brain felt muddled. The constant fluctuation between the compulsions of fight and flight, assessing friend or foe, was depleting. Conversations like this exacted a toll. Each time, the intrusion took a chunk, a slight bite, of you. And it didn’t matter what the issue was, it was always somebody else’s fault. The whole world thought themselves innocent, everyone thought they were doing their best while impotent in the face of the bigger picture, yet people still did bad things. Shit was still happening yet no one was to blame. How does any of it happen, if no one is ever to blame? No one was ever in error. Everyone was human. Everyone had flaws. Were we supposed to just give shrugs of the shoulder, be decent and accept that we were powerless, and get on with scratching along, fumbling in the dark, sitting, chatting and bemoaning, stewing in uncertainty, and be intimidated by complexity. And who did that leave? The only people who could rise above and break outside were kooks and extremists. People with surety and visions so clarifying, so dazzling, that they bleached out those things of the most importance: other people. It was not acceptable.

  Ishaq took another look at himself in the mirror. He saw someone weak and subdued. A boy in a stupor. He decided to take charge of his features: rearrange them so that he had control.

  Ishaq said, ‘The thing is, we do have dodgy people among us. The thing with these conspiracies is that you can’t prove them, one way or another.’

  The doctor stopped and responded as if Ishaq had just made an accusation. ‘I’m not into conspiracies. I’m a realist. I don’t trust anything. You can’t keep on denying all conspiracy theories, as so many are true. Just look on the Internet.’

  Great. That wonderful invention, the Internet. Where every issue seemed so serious that in the end nothing was. Where spreading falsehood and abuse felt as substantial as throwing air.

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘If you send an email, or say certain words on the phone, do they track you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Birmingham, did someone write a fake letter about Muslim schools, and did they once put traffic cameras around the whole community to check who was coming in and out?’

  ‘Yea..’

  ‘So what do we do when all the conspiracies are true?’

  Ishaq shook his head. The doctor sounded like a more educated form of Mujahid. Even among men like this conspiracies spread. And he was right, what do you say when so many conspiracies are true? When paranoia is a sensible awareness?

  Ishaq looked at the doctor and the room around him. Doctors and teachers were once the last position of trust in society. Now, it wasn’t uncommon to hear about a doctor trying to bomb an airport. Now, it wasn’t uncommon for academics in their ivory towers to debate torture. One Harvard law professor pontificated on how one could cause excruciating pain without lasting damage; he surmised that it was ok for sterile needles to be pushed under nails with agonizing force. Needles like the one the doctor had used, on people like Ishaq and everyone he loved. Now it was ok for your own university to spy on you.

  ‘It’s all a mess…but still…you have to try and live a life, right?’

  ‘Maybe.’ The doctor nodded, and seemed to take in and accept it. Ishaq was relieved. The doctor checked the cut a final time and, happy, he placed a bandage on it and then some padding, and covered it with a white dressing. Smiling, he handed Ishaq a leaflet. ‘This will tell you how to look after the stitches and wound. Make sure they are clean and you don’t get them wet. No scratching, as the irritation will make it worse. You can go to your GP and get the stitches taken out in a few days. Please keep out of trouble.’

  He took off his latex gloves and shook Ishaq’s hand. Ishaq walked to the seat where his shirt lay, now stiffened by flakes of blood. He put it back on, hoping Marwane had gone and fetched some new clothing. He gave one last look to the doctor, who was still speaking ‘….but these boys making that stuff and then storing it in that garage, I still think the police could have used a computer to change the image of their faces.’

  Ishaq stared blankly at him in disbelief…and then it popped into his head, diverting his train of thought: the Z: the only people he could remember joking about it were Marwane…and Shams.

  18.

  As Shams climbed the stairs he passed an Arab couple. Immigrants. The man always had the saddest smile. Their English was halting, and sometimes they gave an obligating look as if wanting something more. They shared a faith but how could he explain his life to newcomers who were just grateful to be here. Even before they arrived his father’s status had already been as a British Overseas citizen, one of the Empire’s favoured.

  On the balcony Shams looked down, checking which flats had doormats as he walked. When his mother was alive she used to say that you could tell the civilised peoples from this. Having somewhere to wipe away the dirt of the world. He made it home, dragging chained feet, his pinched back aching. He opened the door and entered the front room. As usual his father was sitting in his beaten leather Chesterfield, with the television on full blast. The neighbours never complained. They were too fearful of confrontation.

  He differed from Father, he liked turning the volume right down. He enjoyed seeing them mute, the roll-call of reporters, experts, and politicians. To see them miming like comics, as they tried to explain concepts, peoples, and struggles. To see them profess and feign influence. With the sound absent the pretence disappeared and it was the images that showed the stark truth of the matter, not the court scribes and actors. People who shouted too loud in outrage, when they were hated not for their freedom but that their freedom came at the expense of others, and they dare not acknowledge it.

  ‘Where have you been?’ His father stared straight into the blaring pictures.

  Shams sat on the two-seater beside him.’Just to see friends.’

  ‘Friends.’ Shams’ father articulated the word with contempt. ‘The same friends who got you into trouble the other day.’

  Shams looked at his dad, still looking ahead, acknowledging great problems but never him. ‘There was a mix up with the police and I was taken in.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me? I had to hear this at the mosque from others. How embarrassing for me, your father.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it was nothing.’

  ‘Nothing.’ Shams’ father reached over for the remote and changed the channel. On one a debate on segregation, on another the war in Syria, and on another the results of a drone strike on a wedding party in Pakistan. His father dropped the control, his limp hand releasing it and letting it fall.

  Shams rubbed his forehead, trying to bring some life back and ease an oncoming headache. ‘I don’t want to discuss this again and again. Nothing happened.’

  ‘You’re nothing but trouble. Of course your sister, Shazia, was the good one, and she left.’

  ‘Yea, so good that she never calls. I don’t see her looking after you. What would you do if I wasn’t here?’ Shams raised his voice and was rewarded with a look from his father.

  ‘That is up to God.’

  ‘I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.’

  Shams’s father attempted a stern face, but that papyrus face looked weaker each day, dragged down, with sagging cabled wrinkles that had given up any pretence of support. ‘You and those bloody boys. You call yourself Muslims. All you do is bring calamity.’

  ‘Baba, they didn’t do anything. It was all a mix up.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. We came to this country, worked hard, and your generation has wasted it, flushed it all down the toilet.’

  ‘And don’t I work hard? Don’t I try to work hard? What do you want me to do? You want me to look after all of the family but then create my own life…I can’t do both.’

  Shams’ father bent over in his chair to pick up the remote control. His arid skin agitating as he reached out slowly. Shams got up, picked u
p the control and handed it over. All the years had caught up with him. Where once he had been the giant of his childhood, Shams now saw a withered, scared old man.

  At night his father would wake, dazed, in fear of the dark, and he would call. He would call out the names of his wife, his parents, and then his ancestors until, unheeded, he made a final mournful plea for Shams. He complained of dark spirits clawing at him, snatching at his feet, trying to drag him away. He heard windy howls of lament for lost civilisations. He saw hundreds and thousands of twisted limbs, shattered faces, flaking skin, chipped bone. He made choking gasps, talked of suffocating dreams of blood, bile, and phlegm. He feared his slumber as it no longer provided rest. Shams had sometimes taken to sleeping just outside in case he needed a glass of water, occasionally woken by a frozen cheek on a numbing door.

  ‘We sacrificed everything for you. We hoped that you would have better lives than us, and your children even better. It breaks my heart…my head…Muslim countries a mess, here a mess. I’d like to turn on the television and ,when I see a bombing or shooting, I would like my first thought to be about the poor people and the suffering. But no it isn’t. Instead…instead I’m thinking, “Please don’t be a Muslim.”’

  His father pointed to the television, that showed fighting and explosions against some sweeping desert scene. ‘Look here…every side fighting each other. All have beards and call on Allah. Just like you and your friends. This is the mess.’

  Shams watched on as his father sat in that hateful chair day after day, shrivelling away. His father was a pious man who nearly lived in the mosque after retirement but had started attending prayers less and less. He saw as his father stayed lashed to the television, transfixed by the news. Syria, the West Bank, Kashmir, back home, here, everywhere, there was a tumescent chaos. Libya, Egypt, Iraq. Violence so overwhelming that it consumed even the passive onlooker. Each bombing, each bit of inter-fighting, every upheaval, chipped-away at his father’s belief in his religion, his belief in people, and his belief in living. A porcelain soul fractured into pieces. Each time it took Shams all of his effort to gather his father. Each time he would display more cracks. The bloodshed and sheer brutality robbed him of all illusion, because it was people, that looked like him, harming others, who looked like him. He recognised their hearts and tongue. No imperial force, no oppressing power. And there was no safe place; the baying of the outside world had collapsed the walls between public and private. Everything living outside, lived within. He was forced to live all those distant battles within his own being. A never-ending punch in the gut.

  ‘Muslim, muslim, muslim , I’m fed up of the word,’ Shams’ father muttered, as if to himself, tasting the syllables. Shams also rolled the word round in his mind to the point of semantic saturation. Picking at and kneading it until it lost any form, and lost any meaning, just a combination of ejected sounds.

  Shams’ father reproached him further, ‘You people had everything. Peace…education…So much more than we had, and you’ve done nothing with it. We came here so you could have a better life, not wrap your head around with politics. This country has opportunity. Don’t blame the country for a lack of opportunity.’

  ‘It had opportunity. Now it’s just decaying and drying up. All that humiliation, all that you and your friends put up with, and for what?’

  Shams, tired and wrought, could not bite his tongue any more. ‘Dad, the fact is that you came here for money. For cash. You left your parents, and brothers and sisters, and yet you ask of me what you never did. To look after you. And I do it. Out of duty. I can’t do any more…’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk back to me in that way. I’m your father.’ His father held a walking stick aloft; vibrations in the air followed the tremor in its guiding hand. They both knew it was an empty gesture and his father halted, lowering it. ‘It was all for you children.’

  ‘For us? So that we have bigger problems, that you did nothing to prepare us for.’

  ‘So you blame me?’

  ‘No, I don’t blame anyone. It’s no ones fault. Not you, not me. It’s just the way it is. Coming here, you just saw the money and power, and were made small by it. You didn’t grow here, you don’t know the ins and outs of it like we do.’ Shams’ hands were apart, with the palms up, as if he were pleading. ‘But it would be nice if you tried to understand…whatever I do, I can never please you. I’ve never been involved in crime. I’ve never taken drugs…been on benefits…I got as much education as I could and I’m stuck here. And it’s still that’s not enough.’

  ‘You could have worked harder, got better grades like your friends. Like your sister.’

  ‘That’s all a lie, too. Even if you get the grades they look at the colour of your skin, or your funny name, or that you don’t talk like them at their dinner party. Working your way up is a big fat lie. Overcoming adversity is a fairytale that you all believed. Like a story on that dumb TV you watch all day. It doesn’t exist. The reality is that struggle is a constant. There’s this background pressure day after day…It ain’t gonna change, and that’s what we need to deal with. You don’t understand…’

  Posh people loved stories of people facing adversity. Of overcoming it all. Of beating the most difficult obstacles that they never themselves faced. They loved how there could be a message in suffering, that it was a vessel for building character, that it could be beautiful. It made them feel good. It said the world was fairer than it really was, and they found that reassuring. But really it was a sinister judgement upon life, because its natural logical conclusion was that if you do not overcome outrageous odds then it’s your fault. You just aren’t trying hard enough. Ishaq and his dad were like those posh people.

  Shams looked at the rolling news again. His father could not comprehend. Even if we say it’s not us, the outside world did not believe. Shams refused to have them affect him like they affected the old man. They didn’t feel that way, so why should he. Recently there had been a spate of lone wolf attacks on soldiers. Shams saw whole societies panic. How their leaders would eulogise and make gloried pronouncements invoking their highest ideals, all the while displaying shock at how this could happen. He watched their rituals, full pomp and ceremony, bathed in military regalia and drowning in flags. They would seek safety in simplicity and, in fright, hide from complexity. But their claim of innocence, that mantle of virtue, was poached from others. Their claims were offensive, their shock obnoxious. America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. The myth of virgin lands, stolen, like jewels in the crown. They only showed bravery in surrendering the rights of others.

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t understand. I don’t understand this,’ his father jutted his chin towards the television, ‘I don’t understand your friends. I don’t understand you.’

  And I don’t understand what’s happened to you, Shams thought. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, half in the hope of seeing something different when they reopened. Father and son sat in communed silence transfixed by the screen, watching on as a thousand years of trust and civilisation was destroyed in savage convulsions. Slaughter, beheadings, executions and mass murder. All their good was being lost in a mountain of violence, it could no longer be seen through the fog of capricious men. They were bombing people out of the religion, refuting people into not caring, desensitising them so that they ended-up turning within and looking after only themselves. You didn’t know what to think, what to feel. It was hard to keep up with who was killing who and for what. Children of a cultural revolution, they were destroying what we were and glorying in it, readying themselves for a phantom future.

  ‘Shams, a lot of the time, strength is saying no to violence. Saying no, and getting on with your life.’

  ‘But people think you are saying no because you are weak. You have to show your power first, so that saying no is seen as strength. It’s the rule of the street. Of everywhere.’

  ‘That’s the rules of animals…the rules of the jungle.’

  ‘There are no rules fo
r people like me, Baba. We are learning from scratch. Security and getting on…all an illusion…it’s all a lie, and you just believed it. How about if I want it to be different– to make my own way?’

  Shams’ father’s hand massaged the crook of his walking stick. ‘We had such high-hopes, Shams, such high hopes…’

  ‘So did I Father…so did I.’

  His father repeated himself, muttering. ‘I wanted the best for you. For the family. I came here for a better life for you…better than we had…’

  ‘It didn’t happen.’

  The old man took the stick, tried to lift himself and put his weight on it. Shams stood and helped his father up, guiding him. Once his father gathered momentum he pushed Shams’ hand away. Shams watched as his father shuffled up the stairs. His father disappeared, ascending out of view, but Shams could hear the creaks as he climbed, and listened-on as the pulsing beats of steps came to a still with the shutting of a door.

  19.

  Shams spent day and night in a floating daze, his body held aloft on currents, his mind anaesthetised. He picked up his father’s effects from the hospital, obtained his body’s release, then a trip to Wandsworth Town Hall to get the death certificate, and at the same time called Muslim cemeteries to procure a burial place.

  Traditional Muslim funerals take place as soon as possible and are a simple affair. A wash of the body, the saying of prayers by the community, a journey to the graveyard, and then a quick burial without complicated ceremony. The priority was for the arrangement to be a mercy to the soul of the departed, to ease and quicken their journey forward. Rather that than the burden of a busy speech-filled event, that was meant more for the catharsis of those that had been left behind.

  The mosque’s morgue had been been created from a small adjunct to the main building. It kept a few basic cold chambers for temporary storage and a sizeable basin, but the room was dominated by the steel washing table. Shams breathed in the dulling smell of unknown chemicals, closing his mouth to avoid taking in too much. He felt the walls pinch his ribs, and the low ceiling close in on his head. As he moved round the room he put a supporting hand on the table, drawing its clinical coolness to keep him alert.