“Hello,” he said, in a tone that wasn’t unfriendly but more formal than his usual “hey.” Was it because of their last conversation or because she was without a turban? His eyes slipped across her face and beyond it, as if he thought it might be impolite to look straight at her while she was uncovered. She saw him take in the glass and plate in the drying rack, the bare walls, the single bed with its white duvet and sheets.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Uncluttered.” He unbuttoned his coat, the popping sound intimate in the silence of the studio. She wondered if “uncluttered” was a polite word for “austere,” or if he really saw the studio as she had until that moment—a home that made almost no demands on you, allowed you simply to be. Now she wished she’d put a little more care into it, and that the single bed wasn’t so determinedly single.
“Sorry about yesterday,” he said.
“I’m the one who should be saying that. Tea?”
He kicked off his Wellies, and while she was filling the kettle she could hear him walking over to the desk, then a low whistle telling her he’d seen the photograph of Aneeka.
“That’s my sister,” she said.
He turned toward her, photo frame in his hands. The picture had been taken the previous year, soon after the twins graduated. Aneeka was dressed to go out in her favorite ensemble: black knee-high boots, black leggings, and long white tunic, a black bonnet cap accentuating the angles of her face, a scarf of black and white gauze wrapped loosely over it. One hand on hip, jutting her chin in a show of attitude to her twin behind the camera while Isma, elbow resting on her sister’s shoulder, smiled indulgently. How broad her face looked next to her sister’s, how washed-out her features compared to the lipstick-and-mascara enhancements at which Aneeka was so skillful.
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen.” A woman-child, a mature-immature. Isma couldn’t think of any words that would reach her.
He put the photograph down. “Attractive family,” he said. He finally looked straight at her. “You have nice hair.” The remark followed the one before it in going straight to her stomach, but he’d already turned his attention to the other frame on her desk, which contained an Arabic verse, handwritten on lined paper. “And this?”
“It’s from the Quran. La yukallifullahu nafsan ilia wus-ahaa. Allah does not burden a soul with more than it can bear.” When her grandmother died she had found this taped inside her bedside-table drawer.
He looked at her with more pity than she could endure, which he must have seen, because when he spoke his tone was lightly wry: “Here ends the small-talk part of the conversation, then.”
She sat down on her bed, wondering if he’d sit next to her or choose the desk chair several feet away. He did neither, settling himself on the floor instead, knees drawn up to his chest.
“Tell me about your father,” he said.
“I don’t really know what to tell you about him, is the thing. I didn’t know him. He tried his hand at many things in his life—guitarist, salesman, gambler, con man, jihadi, but he was most consistent in the role of absentee father.”
She told him everything as she remembered it, without evasion. The first time her father had abandoned his family she was too young to remember either his departure or his presence before it. So she grew up in a house with her mother and grandparents, unaware that her heart was missing anything. When Isma was eight years old, he reappeared—Adil Pasha, known to his friends as “Pash, short for Passion,” a laughing, broad-shouldered man who delighted in her resemblance to him. Like every woman in his life she quickly fell for his charm, which was so devastatingly effective it gained his readmittance to the marital bed, even though when he first walked through the door her mother overrode her in-laws and insisted he sleep on the couch. He stayed long enough to impregnate his wife with twins and to ensure his daughter found the thought of his ever leaving again unbearable, and then he was gone once more. This time his excuse for going wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme but an aid convoy to Bosnia, which was then in the final months of war, allowing him to cloak his departure in righteousness. The convoy returned a few weeks later, but he didn’t, and Isma never saw him again.
Every so often a card in his scribbly handwriting would arrive to say how invaluable he was to some fight or other against oppression, or a bearded man would appear at the doorstep with some small amount of money and the name of wherever Pash was fighting—Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo. In October 2001 he called. He was in Pakistan, en route to Afghanistan, and had heard of his father’s death. He wanted to speak to his mother, and also to hear his son’s voice. His wife hung up without waiting to find out if he might also want to hear Isma’s voice—the voice of the only one of his children he’d ever known.
Eamonn shifted, rested his ankle against hers, an act of sympathy just small enough for her to bear.
“A few months later MI5 and Special Branch officers came around, asking about him, though they wouldn’t say why. We knew something was wrong, and my grandmother said maybe we should try to contact someone—the Red Cross, the government, a lawyer—to find out where he was. If my grandfather had still been alive that might have happened, but he wasn’t, and my mother said if we tried looking for him we’d be harassed by Special Branch, and by people in the neighborhood, who would start to suspect our sympathies. My grandmother went to the mosque looking for support, but the Imam sided with my mother—he’d heard too many stories of abuse suffered by the families of British men who’d been arrested in Afghanistan. One of my grandmother’s friends had said the British government would withdraw all the benefits of the welfare state—including state school and the NHS—from any family it suspected of siding with the terrorists.”
Eamonn made a face of distaste, clearly offended in a way that told her he saw the state as part of himself, something that had never been possible for anyone in her family. She raised a hand to hold off his objections. “My mother knew that wasn’t true, but she allowed my grandmother to believe it. So that was that until 2004, when a Pakistani man released from Guantánamo contacted my father’s family in Pakistan to say he had been imprisoned at Bagram with my father from early 2002. In June that year both he and my father were among the men put on a plane for transport to Guantánamo. My father died during takeoff, some sort of seizure. He said other things also, about what happened to my father in Bagram, but the family in Pakistan said no one needed those images in their head, and didn’t tell us.”
“No one told you he was dead for two years?”
“Who was going to tell us? The Americans? British intelligence? We weren’t told anything. We still haven’t been told anything. They haven’t released records of Bagram from that time period. We don’t even know if anyone bothered to dig a grave.”
“I’m sure they dug a grave,” he said.
“Why? Because they’re so civilized?” She had promised herself she wouldn’t lie to him, and that included not curtailing her rage.
“I’m sorry. I was trying to . . . I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you, for your whole family.”
She made a helpless, hopeless gesture. “We didn’t talk about it. We were forbidden to talk about it. Only Aunty Naseem and her daughters who lived across the road knew because we were essentially one family divided into two households. Other than that there was only one other person who was told—a man who my grandparents had known since they first moved to Wembley and there were so few Asian families around that all of them knew each other. On my grandmother’s behalf, this man went to visit his cousin’s son, a first-term MP, and asked if the British government could find out any information about Adil Pasha, who died on his way to Guantánamo, and whose family deserved answers. ‘They’re better off without him,’ the MP said, and left the room.”
“That was my father?”
“Yes.”
He slumped forward, his face in
his hands.
She wanted to run her fingers through his thick hair, stroke his arm. There was a lightness inside her, entirely new, that made the whole world rearrange itself into a place of undreamt-of possibilities. In this lightness Aneeka’s anger was short-lived, Parvaiz’s choices reversible.
He looked up, held her gaze. “Can I?” he said, pointing to a spot on the bed next to her. She nodded, not trusting her voice enough to use it.
The mattress dipped slightly beneath his weight. He took her hand, looked at her with deep feeling in those brown eyes of his. “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve suffered,” he said. “You’re a remarkable woman.” And then he patted her hand, once, twice, and let go of it. “You need to understand something about my father.”
She didn’t want to understand anything about his father. She wanted his hand back sending currents through her, including in the most intimate places. Almost as if he’d touched her there.
“It’s harder for him,” he said. “Because of his background. Early on, in particular, he had to be more careful than any other MP, and at times that meant doing things he regretted. But everything he did, even the wrong choices, were because he had a sense of purpose. Public service, national good, British values. He deeply believes in these things. All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.”
There he sat, his father’s son. It didn’t matter if they were on this or that side of the political spectrum, or whether the fathers were absent or present, or if someone else had loved them better, loved them more: in the end they were always their fathers’ sons.
“I’m not saying that makes it okay,” he said. He touched two fingers to his temple, rubbed. Perfect half-moons in his fingernails. “I’m not very good at this. He should be the one explaining. I’ll tell you what—next time you’re in London, you two can meet. I’ll set it up. Confront him with this—make him account for it. He’d be up for that. My guess is, you’ll feel more favorably about him at the end.”
“Me? Meet Karamat Lone?”
Mr. British Values. Mr. Strong on Security. Mr. Striding Away from Muslim-ness. He would say, I know about your family. You’re better off without your brother, too. And Eamonn, his devoted son, would sadly have to agree.
“Don’t sound so worried about it. He’ll be nice. For my sake.” He took hold of a strand of her hair, pulled it lightly. “Now that I’ve seen your head uncovered, I’m practically your brother, aren’t I?”
“Is that what you are?”
“Sorry, is that too presumptuous?”
She stood, turned, shrugged. “No, it’s fine,” she said, making her voice light, making him seem absurd for sounding so serious about it. “Oh, look, I never made you that cup of tea, and now I have to go out. Appointment.”
“Will you come to the café after?”
“Probably not today. Actually, maybe not for a while. A friend has invited me to come and spend the rest of spring break at her place.” Not strictly untrue. At the end of their meal the previous night Hira had said, You’re welcome to move into my spare room for a few days if you want company. Don’t be heartbroken alone.
“Oh, but then we won’t see each other. I’ll be leaving in the next day or two. News cycle already moving on from my father. And to tell you the truth, I think I’m cramping my grandparents’ social life.”
“Well, then. I’m glad we cleared the air,” she said, holding herself straight-backed, upright.
“Me too. Well. Good-bye. Thanks for being such a fantastic coffee companion.” He stepped forward and held his arms out slightly awkwardly. What followed was not an embrace so much as two bodies knocking into each other then moving away. He smiled, pushed his hair back from his face in a way that already felt as familiar to her as the tics of people she’d grown up with. She watched him put on his Wellies, button up his coat, smile again, turn to go. His hand reached for the doorknob, and then he paused.
“Isma?”
“Yes?” The trace of hope still working its way through her veins.
He picked up the padded envelope from the kitchen counter, which was filled with M&M’s—there was a long-running joke between the neighboring households about Aunty Naseem’s sweet tooth for American confectionery after a vacation there in the 1980s.
“This the same package you had in the café last week? Weren’t you going to the post office with it?”
“Keep forgetting,” she said.
He tucked it under his arm. “I’ll post it from London.”
“There’s no need.”
“It’s really no problem. Cheaper and quicker.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks.”
“Bye, sis,” he said with a wink. Then he stepped through the door and closed it behind him.
She ran over to her balcony. Moments later, he stepped out onto the street, rolling back his shoulders as if released from the weight of her company. He walked away without looking up, his stride long.
Isma knelt down on the snow-dusted balcony floor and wept.
Eamonn
3
A KAYAK GLIDED high above the stationary traffic of the North Circular Road, two ducks paddling in its wake. Eamonn stopped along the canal path, looked over the edge of the railing. Cars backed up as far as he could see. All the years he’d been down there he’d taken this aqueduct for just another bridge, nothing to tell you that canal boats and waterfowl were being carried along above your head. Always these other Londons in London. He typed “canal above north circular” into his phone, followed a link that led to another link, and was soon watching news footage of a bomb planted on this bridge by the IRA in 1939. When the newsreader came to details of what would have happened if the bridge had been destroyed, he clicked pause mid-sentence, and hurriedly strode on.
But today was not a day to worry about the precariousness of things. It was the start of April, and London was bursting into spring, magnolia flowers opening voluptuously on the trees in Little Venice where he’d entered the tow path. Now he was walking along a wilder terrain, weeds and bushes growing in all directions, sometimes tall enough to hide the industrial blight that lay beyond, sometimes not. And then it changed again, became beautiful, almost rural—swans on the bank, yellow buds studding the trees, a man and his dog both snoring on the roof of a canal boat, the sky an expanse of blue smeared with white. Isma the invisible presence walking alongside him, her expression intense except when he could make her smile. He wondered if she would get in touch next time she was in London. Probably not. Despite their attempt to clear the air, the history of their fathers had made things between them far too strange. He tried to imagine growing up knowing your father to be a fanatic, his death a mystery open to terrible speculation, but the attempt was defeated by his simple inability to know how such a man as Adil Pasha could have existed in Britain to begin with.
He left the canal path near high-rises embodying the word “regeneration” and was soon on Ealing Road, walking past Gurkha Superstore, Gama Halal Meat, a Hindu temple intricately carved of limestone, cheerful stalls and restaurants. He couldn’t point to anything in particular he recognized, yet he had complete certainty that he had looked out a car window onto this street many times in his childhood. “We’re going,” is all his father would say before the annual outings to Eamonn’s great-uncle’s house every Eid, a holiday that his mother explained as “marking the end of the month of not observing Ramzan for all of us.” On that one day of the year, his father became someone else, and it was this that he knew his mother hated as much as he did. Surrounded by his extended family, Karamat Lone disappeared into another language, with its own gestures and intonations—even when he was speaking English. One year, when Eamonn was nine or ten, Eid fell just after Christmas. The American family was visiting, and there were plans every day for outings with cousins. “You don’t have to come this year,” his father a
greed after some judiciously timed postprandial Christmas Day pleading, and went on his own. The next year it was “Do you want to come?” and he didn’t seem to mind when his wife and children said no. Just when Eamonn was becoming old enough to want to know the part of his father’s life that remained so mysterious, there was the whole business with the mosque photographs and a falling-out with the cousins over the necessary damage control.
He was nearing a mosque, crossed the street to avoid it, then crossed back so as not to be seen trying to avoid a mosque. Everyone always went on about the racism his father had had to face when a section of the press tried to brand him an extremist, but it was London’s Muslim population who had turned their back on Karamat Lone and voted him out, despite all the good he’d done for his constituents. All because he’d expressed a completely enlightened preference for the conventions of a church over those of a mosque and spoke of the need for British Muslims to lift themselves out of the Dark Ages if they wanted the rest of the nation to treat them with respect.
On the High Road now, with its pound stores and pawnshops, glancing up every so often at the bone-white rainbow of Wembley Stadium for its reassuring familiarity—and then north toward Preston Road, where everything turned residential, suburban. Any one of these semidetached houses could be the home in which he’d spent all those Eid afternoons, sitting pressed against his mother in an alliance she tried to push him out of, knowing that he would rather be in the garden playing cricket with the boy cousins whose invitations to join them were located confusingly at the border between the merely polite and the genuine. His sister, habitually free of the burden of alliances, would be upstairs with the girl cousins, throwing herself into a rapture of family feeling that would disappear as soon as they were back in Holland Park. She was, everyone said, her father’s daughter, a claim she was proving with her determined ascent, at twenty-two, through the world of investment banking in Manhattan.
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