by Monica Ali
They walked to a grocer's shop at the corner of one of the side streets. Nazneen waited outside. She walked a little way down the side street. Three-storey houses, old houses but the bricks had been newly cleaned and the woodwork painted. There were wooden shutters in dark creams, pale greys and dusty blues. The doors were large and important. The window boxes matched the shutters. Inside there were gleaming kitchens, rich dark walls, shelves lined with books, but never any people.
Nazneen walked up and down the street. Some young Bangla men passed on Brick Lane. She recognized the Questioner. His voice carried well and his walk was urgent. Karim did not like him. He had not said anything yet, but she knew.
When Karim came he talked of the world or of his father. He told her about the pills that he left out for his father each morning, blue and yellow for the heart, white tranquillizers, pink for indigestion. The sleeping tablets each evening. He told her about his father's job, twenty or more years on the buses. The uniform, belt and badge. The peaked cap. The ticket machine that he kept in a brown leather case, and the satisfying noise it made as the handle turned. What a proud little boy he had been.
Chanu came out of the grocer's with white plastic bags. She fell into step behind him. He walked a few yards and then stopped. She waited for him to comment. She looked in the shop window, but he said nothing and she saw that he did not know that he had stopped. After a while he said, 'You see, they feel so threatened.' Nazneen turned her head, and then she smiled to herself because she had been caught out like Bibi.
'Because our own culture is so strong. And what is their culture? Television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball. That is the white working-class culture.'
He began to move again. Nazneen followed. For a moment she saw herself clearly, following her husband, head bowed, hair covered, and she was pleased. In the next instant her feet became heavy and her shoulders ached.
'From a sociological standpoint, it is very interesting.'
A young woman with hair cropped like a man's pointed an impressive camera at a waiter in a restaurant doorway. She wore trousers, and had she been wearing a shirt her sex would have been obscured. To alleviate this difficulty she had dispensed with a shirt and come out in underwear. She turned round now and pointed the camera at Nazneen.
'You see,' said Chanu to the street, 'in their minds they have become an oppressed minority.'
Nazneen adjusted her headscarf. She was conscious of being watched. Everything she did, everything she had done since the day of her birth, was recorded. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, she thought she saw them. Her two angels, who recorded every action and thought, good and evil, for the Day of Judgement. It struck her then – and the force of it made her gasp – that this street was filled with angels. For every one person there were two more angels and the air was thick with them. She walked with her face turned down to her feet and she felt her head pushing through a density of wings. She was seized with a fear of inhaling a spirit, and pulled cloth over her mouth and nose. For the first time then, she heard the beating of a thousand angel wings and her legs would take her no further.
'Are you resting?' Chanu put his shopping bags down.
She looked up and saw the waiter shaking out a tablecloth.
'No.'
'OK, then. Rest,' said Chanu.
They stood for a while. Chanu hummed. He had one hand on his hip and nursed his stomach with the other.
'Where are all my notes from Open University?'
'You kept them?'
'Yes, yes. Somewhere.'
They walked again, past the sweet shop. A pyramid of golden ladoos and a white brick tower of shondesh.
All the time, Nazneen felt the angels at her back. She jerked her shoulders. Karim came into her mind. The angels noted it. She felt irritated. I did not ask him to come into my mind like that. It was recorded.
On Tuesday, when she had counted out twenty-five skirts for him and he leaned in to gather them up, their shoulders missed each other by the slimmest, smallest whisker.
It was not for her to decide.
'In a way,' said Chanu, 'you can't really blame them.'
Sitar and tabla music, mixed with incense, drifted from Ishaq's Emporium. Outside, three old men discussed the state of their knees at a volume that suggested – or possibly induced – deafness.
His neck, thought Nazneen, was just right. Not too thick, and not too thin. And he was taqwa. More God-conscious than her own husband.
'It's their country,' said Chanu. His heels hung off the back of his sandals.
It was, Nazneen realized, more complicated than that. Even if Karim was her future and could not be avoided, there were problems. Happiness, for instance. That would count against her. Because fate must be met with indifference. For the benefit of her angels, she said, 'Whichever way, it does not matter.'
Chanu considered. His eyebrows evaluated. 'No, I would not say that it does not matter.' He smiled at her and his cheeks were full of kindness. 'But you must not worry about it. Soon we will be home again.'
Some tears came to her eyes. Her neck and cheeks were so hot that she thought she had a taste of hell. It was less than she deserved.
'Ah,' said Chanu, 'I can see how much you long for it.'
How had she been so foolish? She put her fingernails against the balls of her eyes. What evil jinn had come to her to play such tricks with her mind? To make her think that this young boy would be part of her life, that he would not retch and tear his hair at the very thought.
Chanu grew animated. 'Yes, it is an emotional thing. Do you know what I have been thinking? I could get a job at Dhaka University. Teaching – sociology or philosophy or English literature.'
To cover her distress she spoke with unusual conviction. 'That is a very good idea.'
'It is,' he confirmed. 'And I will send an email this evening.'
At once she was concerned and wished she had not spoken so.
'At first, of course, I will have to take any opening that is available. I will not be too proud to take anything.'
She smelled disaster, and for the first time it occurred to her that it was not only Shahana she would have to worry about if they ever went to Dhaka.
'Eventually, I should like to return to my first love – English literature.'
In the distance, a white-haired woman defied the sun with a thick cardigan over her sari. At her side a younger man walked with a swagger and a medicine bag.
Chanu spoke in English:
'O rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars.'
Nazneen stared ahead.
'Shakespeare,' said Chanu. He followed her stare and when they were both sure that it was Mrs Islam, by a mutual and unspoken plan they turned away into a side street.
On the estate there was war. The war was conducted by leaflet. They were crudely constructed, printed on the thickness of toilet tissue and smudged by over-eager hands. The type size of the headlines became an important battlefield. After much heated inflation and experimentation with tall but thin type and fat but squat titles, the Bengal Tigers emerged victorious by simply using up an entire page for the headline and relegating the text to the other side.
The Lion Hearts made the opening salvo:
HANDS OFF OUR BREASTS!
The Islamification of our neighbourhood has gone too far. A Page 3 calendar and poster have been removed from the walls of our community hall.
How long before the extremists are putting veils on our women and insulting our daughters for wearing short skirts?
Do not tolerate it! Write to the council! This is England!
Chanu was sanguine. 'You see,' he explained, 'they feel threatened. And this is their only culture – playing darts and football and putting up pictures of naked women.'
The Bengal Tigers replied the next day:
We refer to a leaflet put recently into circulation by those who claim to uphold the 'native' culture.
We have a message for them.
KEEP YOUR BREASTS TO YOURSELF.
And we say this. It is not us who like to degrade women by showing their body parts in public places.
'We always kept quiet,' said Chanu. 'The young ones don't want to keep quiet any more.'
The return of fire took a few days. Nazneen watched the leafleteers at work on the estate. A young boy and an older man, distant enough by age and clothes to be father and son. The father dressed like one of Chanu's 'respectable types'. He looked like one of the teachers at Shahana's school. The son was the kind that Nazneen would cross the road to avoid. This time they called for the community hall to be turned into a disco at the weekends and a bingo parlour on other evenings. They proposed the sale of alcohol on the premises.
SAVE OUR HALL!!!
The addition of three exclamation marks filled up the space nicely and set the tone for the Tigers' riposte.
Undesirable elements are seeking to turn our community centre into a den for gambling and boozing. Do not tolerate it! Write to the council!
Chanu laughed. He was having a good war. 'So they think the council is going to read all these letters? I was once a council man myself,' he informed his wife. 'What is the council going to do? They were not able to keep hold of their best people.'
MARCH AGAINST THE MULLAHS
Most of our Muslim neighbours are peaceful men and women. We have nothing against them. But a handful of Mullahs and Militants are throwing their weight around. March with us against the Mullahs. All interested parties, send details to the PO Box number below.
Chanu frowned. He called for the girls. 'Stay away from marches,' he advised. He studied the leaflet for a long while, and then he brightened. 'They have not even set a date. By then we could be in Dhaka.'
Four red letters filled the front page of the counterattack. DEMO. On the back, in green ink, it said:
Stand up and be counted when the infidels march against us. Very elderly and infirm only are excused from this duty. The organizers will lead you, in a peaceful rally. Spiritual guidance to be given by our Spiritual Leader. All interested parties, send their details.
They have given no address,' said Chanu. 'And the punctuation is poor. It gives a wrong impression of Muslims.'
The leafleting campaigns geared up a notch. Small crowds began to gather around the leafleteers. Insults were exchanged. From her window, Nazneen watched the Questioner jab the air, as if all opposing thoughts were mere bubbles he could burst with the tips of his fingers. She began collecting Shahana as well as Bibi from school. They walked back in a long line with the other mothers. It would only be a few more weeks until school ended for the summer. Although, for many reasons, Nazneen could not allow herself to think of it, she knew that Karim's visits would be curtailed. This made them all the more painfully sweet.
Karim came and worked on draft texts at the dining table while she sewed. He read them out and provided his own comments. Twice he came while Chanu was still at home after a long shift that had stretched through the evening and into the night. And though on these occasions he only made the necessary exchanges and left quickly, this proved somehow to Nazneen that there was nothing wrong in his visits, nothing that could not happen in the presence of her husband. A few times he said to her you've got to stand your ground, and it was marvellous to her that he should be so sure of where he was standing and why. If the salaat alert came on his phone, she took out her mat and listened to him pray. His father, he told her, had no religion now. He had nothing but his pills. Her husband's religion, she told him, was education.
'What we need,' he said, 'is action. What's the point of all these leaflets? We must stop talking and start doing.'
But he continued to work at his texts.
'All I get is moaning,' he said. 'How can they expect me to run everything and still be out in the street the whole time? It all takes a lot of organizing, man. That lot ain't smart enough to work that out.'
He bemoaned the lack of interest shown by the dissolute youth, most of whom had resisted the charms of the Bengal Tigers. 'We set it all up for them. When I was at school, we used to be chased home every day. People getting beaten up the whole time. Then we got together, turned the tables. One of us got touched, they all paid for it. We went everywhere together, we started to fight, and we got a reputation.' He smiled at the memory. 'But now, these kids – they don't remember how it used to be. They're in their gangs, and they fight the posse from Camden or King's Cross. Or from the next estate. Or they stay away from all that, earn good money in the restaurants, and that's all they care about. They don't think they can be touched.'
But the Questioner was the main thorn. 'It's a strategy question,' Karim said. 'He just don't get it.' He was a man and he spoke as a man. Unlike Chanu, he was not mired in words. He did not talk and talk until he was no longer certain of anything.
Sometimes he became angry and his anger was direct and to the point. 'It's my group. I'm the Chairman.' It was a strong statement, though Nazneen could not help thinking of Shahana and Bibi fighting over their toys.
'I say what is radical and what is not.'
Radical was a new word for Nazneen. She heard it often enough from Karim that she came to understand it and know that it was simply another word for 'right'.
She observed him more openly now, and when he saw her looking at him she did not look away immediately.
'You're always working,' he said.
'Buttons will not sew themselves.'
'Talk to me. Leave it'
'I will listen. You talk.'
He picked up a handful of brass buttons from the cardboard box. He put them in the front pocket of his jeans. He tipped out the remaining buttons onto his palm and pocketed those as well. Nazneen felt an electric current run from her nipples to her big toes. She sat very still.
'Do you know about our brothers in Egypt?' He found his magazine on the table and searched for the right page.
Nazneen tried not to think of the buttons. She could think of nothing else. Why did he take them? Why put them in his pockets? Her skin was attached to thousands of fine silk threads, all of them pulling, pricking at the point of tension.
He told her something of Egypt, the oppression, the jailings, the cowardly American-loving government, and they both pretended that he was not just reading from the magazine. Nazneen thought of Chanu with all his books. He read too much and it did him no good.
'It is sad,' she said.
"Tumi ashol kotha koiso.' Yeah, man, you're so right.
This was something he did: made her feel as if she had said a weighty piece, as if she had stated a new truth.
Chanu and all his hooks. How much he knew and how baffled he seemed.
Karim pulled out the buttons and put them back in the box. When his phone began to ring he flipped it open, checked the number and turned it off. This meant it was his father calling. Now that he had a smaller, sleeker phone he seemed unable to take calls from his father. The gold chain around his neck had grown fatter.
Nazneen began her work, but Karim could not settle. He walked – with some difficulty, for the way was strewn with obstacles – around the table. He watched from the window but found nothing to comment on. The showcase attracted his attention and he bent down to slide the doors back. He pulled out the pottery tiger and lion, and a porcelain figure of a girl on a swing. He lost interest and put them back without remembering to close the doors. The corner cabinet was stacked with books and he took down a couple and turned them over as if he would judge them by their weight alone. Next he moved across to the far corner of the room and stood by the trolley. It was loaded with files and papers and the computer keyboard which Nazneen had removed in order to make more space on the table. He pushed it right up against the wall. Then he went to the sofa, kicked off his trainers and lay down.
Her fingers trembled and she could not work. Karim squeezed the back of his neck. He closed his eyes. His right leg vibrated up and down. When Cha
nu fidgeted he showed his unease. When Karim could not be still, he showed his energy. For a few moments she drifted helplessly on a tide of longing. Her mouth became loose and her eyes unfocused.
'When I was a little kid. . .' He sat up and put his feet on the coffee table. It was as if he were taking possession of the room, marking each item as his own. 'If you wanted to be cool you had to be something else – a bit white, a bit black, a bit something. Even when it all took off, bhangra and all that, it was Punjabi, Pakistani, giving it all the attitude. It weren't us, was it? If you wanted to be cool, you couldn't just be yourself. Bangladeshi. Know what I'm saying?'
'Yes,' said Nazneen. She did not know what he was saying. She was waiting to be claimed as well.
'There was no one to look up to.'
'Your father.'
'Exactly.'
He looked straight at her and she held the look. She wished her eyes were not so close together.
'Exactly,' he repeated. 'It's different now. For the little ones. We're the ones who had to stand our ground.'
In the bath, while the incontinent cold tap dribbled and the extractor fan rasped, she examined the hairs on her legs. They were fine and sparse but clearly visible. She ran a hand along a calf. On the ceiling was a little flower of damp. She imagined the plaster breaking and falling into the bath, coating her in white dust. She heard footsteps and the flush of a lavatory. The woman upstairs would be up three or four times in the night. It was getting to be quite a condition.
She thought of her shopping list (tin foil, mustard oil and fennel seeds to add). She thought of plastering the hallway herself: how difficult could it be? She thought of the homework planner that Shahana had pinned on the bedroom wall and how quickly she ticked off the items. Nazneen looked in her exercise books. 'This doesn't look finished,' she said. Or, 'Have you written enough here?' Shahana showed her red ticks that the teacher had marked. There was a red biro on her desk. Nazneen thought about Bibi who had begun to chew her nails. She rehearsed a letter that she would write to Hasina. She counted in her head the money in the hidey-holes. And when she could keep him out no longer she thought of Karim. She thought about his forearms and she rejoiced that they were not thin. She thought about the small flat mole on the left ridge of his jaw and how stunned she had been to discover it only this week. She thought about his certainty, how he walked a straight line while others turned and stumbled. And most of all she thought of what he had that she and Hasina and Chanu sought but could not find. The thing that he had and inhabited so easily. A place in the world.
