Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  Aneeka would leave them. That’s what the shrug said. After university she had no intention of continuing to live in this house and remain a sibling rather than anything else that a law degree made possible.

  “You can’t just decide this for us,” Parvaiz said to Isma. But the “us” carried no weight with his twin helping her sister set the kitchen table, refusing to meet his eye.

  “Traitor,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He made enough of a production of looking for keys and phone and mic that anyone who had wanted to stop him could have, but when they didn’t, he had no option but to walk out, though the night looked less than inviting.

  An autumn evening that carried more anticipation of winter than memory of summer. Cold seeped in through his badly chosen jacket, and his skin quickly speckled with goose bumps. The neighborhood lights captured by the clouds turned the sky a pale red. The sound of the world turned up just that little bit. One of the first occasions he’d become aware of the acuteness of his hearing was when he had asked a teacher why planes sounded louder on overcast days, and the teacher said they didn’t, to the laughter of his classmates, only to return the next day to tell Parvaiz he’d been right.

  His mother’s old friend Gladys stopped him halfway down the street to talk about the ongoing library campaign, and to ask him if his doorbell had rung differently at any point today. Hers had—the usual chimes replaced by a gonglike sound. When she’d gone to answer the door there was no one there so she’d returned indoors, switched on the TV, and there was that psychic she liked to watch, saying that if ever your doorbell rings with a different sound that means it’s the devil and you mustn’t answer.

  “Do you think the devil’s in your house now, Glad?” he said, smiling. “Isma will know some exorcism prayers.”

  “I hope to find out when I go to bed tonight—keep that sister of yours away!” He held up three fingers in a Scout’s sign and noticed the deepening lines around Gladys’s eyes when she laughed. She and his mother had been only a few months apart in age.

  Leaving Gladys to entertain the devil, he walked down to Preston Road, mostly shuttered and quiet. He dipped his head in acknowledgment at the curved spine of the stadium arch as he always did, and rapped his knuckles affectionately on the door of the notary’s office, which had housed a pop-up library during one stage of the library campaign, before continuing on to the sports ground—it had rained for most of the day and perhaps he could improve on the “shoes on wet grass” segment of his sound reel, which he was overlaying on footage of a video game that had won sound awards. By early next year he’d start sending it out to both the big and the little gaming outfits, and—please God!—work offers would come in.

  He was walking across the car park, attaching the mic and its homemade windscreen to his phone, paying no attention to the lone car until its doors opened and three boys he knew from football games on this ground stepped out. Designer sneakers, pristine white robes, ecosystem beards (Aneeka had named them: large enough to support an ecosystem, she’d said). They hung around the neighborhood trying to look troublesome, not understanding they’d done themselves no favors with the name they’d chosen: Us Thugz. A shortened form of the Arabic astaghfirullah. What exactly are you seeking Allah’s forgiveness for, Isma had asked them when they accosted her in the street one day and told her that sisters should cover up more. Their response made it clear they had no idea what astaghfirullah meant.

  “Give it,” one of them said, holding out an upturned palm for Parvaiz’s phone and mic.

  “I’ll tell your mother,” Parvaiz said.

  The boy—Abdul, his childhood friend—lowered his hand and mumbled something about Parvaiz’s phone being too old anyway, but the older boy standing next to him, who wasn’t from the neighborhood, stepped forward, kneed Parvaiz in the groin, and, when he doubled over in pain, took the phone from his hand, tossing aside the expensive mic as if to prove his own stupidity.

  Parvaiz lay on the ground of the car park, waiting for the pain to pass, as the boys’ car screeched past him. The sound envelope: slow attack, short sustain, long decay. Nothing to hear that he hadn’t heard before. How he hated his life, this neighborhood, the inevitability of everything.

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  Farooq found him the next morning, standing among empty crates around the back of the greengrocer’s, trying to remove a splinter from his palm.

  “Asalaamu Alaikum,” said an unfamiliar voice in the faux-Arabicized accent of a non-Arab Muslim who is trying too hard, and Parvaiz looked up to see a compact but powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket. Somewhere around thirty years old, with hair that fell in ringlets to his shoulders offsetting a beard neither hipster nor ecosystem but simply masculine. An instant glamor to him that excused all accents. He was holding out the tweezer component of his Swiss Army Knife, a surprising delicacy in the gesture. Parvaiz took it and tried to capture the splinter, but his left hand felt clumsy, and he kept pinching his skin instead. Without saying anything, the man took the tweezers from him, rested his hand beneath Parvaiz’s to steady it, and plucked out the splinter with a flourish and a wink. Then he pressed his thumb against the drop of blood that appeared, stanching the inconsequential wound.

  “My kutta cousin took something of yours. I apologize. He didn’t realize who you were.” He reached into a pocket of his combat trousers and handed back the stolen phone. Who am I? Parvaiz wanted to ask, but he knew the answer already. He was Aneeka’s brother. When older boys, the kind you would die to be friends with, paid attention to him, it was always because he was Aneeka’s brother. Aneeka never liked the ones Parvaiz tried to nudge her toward, though; she preferred the quieter boys she could boss around.

  “You know my sister?”

  The man looked displeased. “What are sisters to do with me? I know of Abu Parvaiz.”

  “I’m Parvaiz. I don’t know any Abu Parvaiz.”

  “Don’t you know your own father’s name?”

  Parvaiz assembled his features into neutrality with a tinge of bewilderment. Who was this man—MI5? Special Branch? They too had seemed so friendly that time they’d come to the house in his childhood. One of them had entered his room and played racing cars with him on the track that took up all the space between his bed and Aneeka’s—then he’d picked up the photograph album that Parvaiz’s father had sent him and walked out with it. They’d returned most of the items they took, but not the pictures of Adil Pasha climbing a mountain, sitting beside a campfire, wading across a stream—sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other men, always smiling, always with a gun slung over his shoulder or cradled in his lap. When you’re old enough, my son, his father had inscribed inside it, which made Parvaiz’s mother furious for reasons he didn’t then understand. Although his grandmother had intervened to prevent her daughter-in-law from taking the album away from him when it had first arrived, he’d always suspected his mother had told the friendly man about it so he would remove those images of Adil Pasha from his son’s life. It was discomforting to remember that and, with it, how early on he’d started to look at his always harried mother and think, No wonder he left.

  “I never knew my father.” This was what he’d been taught to say, over and over, by his mother and grandmother. There were whispers in the neighborhood about Adil Pasha, he knew, and one day in the school playground a group of boys had accosted him to ask if it was true his father was a jihadi who’d been killed in Guantánamo. I never knew my father, he had replied weakly. The boys walked over to Aneeka and asked the same question. She shrugged and turned away, disdain already perfected at the age of nine, but later she whispered to the most loose-lipped of her friends, It makes him sound like someone in a movie, doesn’t it? More interesting than a father who died of malaria in Karachi.

  “He regretted that,” the stranger said. “That you never knew him. He fought with m
y father; I heard all the stories of the great warrior Abu Parvaiz.”

  “That wasn’t my father’s name. It was Adil Pasha.”

  “It was his—” the man said something that sounded like numb digger. “That’s French for ‘jihadi name.’ Superhero name is how I think of it, though some of the brothers don’t like that. But, yeah. Your dad. When he entered the fight for justice he called himself Father of Parvaiz. That was his way of keeping you close. So anytime someone said his name—his enemies, with fear; his brothers, with love; his comrades, with honor—they were saying your name too.”

  Horribly, Parvaiz felt tears come to his eyes in the company of a man who probably wouldn’t cry if you drove a tank over his legs. But the man didn’t seem to think any less of him for it. Instead he drew Parvaiz close, in a cologne-scented embrace, and said, “I’m glad I’ve found you, brother.”

  Parvaiz went home that evening with the incandescence of a beautiful secret in his heart. He did all the cooking, didn’t take his plate off to the TV room while his sisters ate at the kitchen table, teased Isma about the American accent she would acquire in Massachusetts.

  “What’s happened to you?” Aneeka asked, and he had the satisfaction of having a hidden corner of his life that his sisters didn’t know about.

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  Late that night, Farooq called.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. “I’ve been thinking, why does the son of Abu Parvaiz seem to know so little about his father?”

  Parvaiz had no words with which to answer this. The question had never been a question before. He’d grown up knowing that his father was a shameful secret, one that must be kept from the world outside or else posters would appear around Preston Road with the line DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE? and rocks would be thrown through windows and he and his sisters wouldn’t receive invitations to the homes of their classmates and no girl would ever say yes to him. The secrecy had lived inside the house too. His mother and Isma both carried an anger toward Adil Pasha too immense for words, and as for Aneeka, her complete lack of feeling or curiosity about their father had been the first definite sign that he and his twin were two, not one. His grandmother alone had wanted to talk about the absence in their lives, and part of their closeness came from how sometimes she would call him into her room and whisper stories about the high-spirited, good-looking, laughing-eyed boy she’d raised. But the stories were always of a boy, never of the man he became. Oh, something happened, I don’t know, she’d say whenever Parvaiz tried to find out who his father had become by the time his son entered the world.

  “Because no one ever told me,” he said now.

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t answer so quickly. Once you know, you’ll have to think about what it means to be that man’s son. Maybe it’s easier never to think about him.”

  He had always watched boys and their fathers with an avidity composed primarily of hunger. Whenever any of those fathers had made a certain kind of gesture toward him—a hand placed on the back of his neck, the word “son,” an invitation to a football match—he’d retreat, ashamed and afraid in a jumbled way that only grew more so as the years passed and as the worlds of girls and boys grew more separate; there were times he was not a twin but rather the only male in a house that knew all the secrets women shared with one another but none that fathers taught their sons.

  “I think about him every day,” he said, whispering it.

  “Good. Good man. What time are you done with work tomorrow?”

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  And so it began. At some point mid-morning, every morning, Farooq would text with a location: sometimes a kabab shop, sometimes a street corner—but more often than not, a betting shop on the High Road. That was usually where he was when Parvaiz finished work. Regardless of location, they’d talk and talk. Or Farooq would talk and Parvaiz would listen to those stories of his father for which he’d always yearned—not a footloose boy or feckless husband but a man of courage who fought injustice, saw beyond the lie of national boundaries, kept his comrades’ spirits up through times of darkness. Here was Abu Parvaiz, the first to cross a bridge over a ravine after an earthquake despite continuing aftershocks, to deliver supplies to those stranded on the other side; here was Abu Parvaiz using the butt of his Kalashnikov as a weapon when the bullets ran out; here was Abu Parvaiz dipping his head into a mountain stream to perform his ablutions and coming up with a beard of icicles, which lead to dancing on the riverbank as if he were Adil Pasha at a discotheque rather than Abu Parvaiz in Chechnya, whose every shake of the head produced the sound of wind chimes. Of all the stories this was the one that most clearly evoked the father he’d never known: the rushing stream, the dancing icicles, the men around him similarly braving the cold water so they could provide the jester-warrior Abu Parvaiz with an accompanying orchestra.

  “The father every son wishes he had,” Farooq said.

  “But I never had him as a father,” Parvaiz replied, tracing the lines of his own palm with the grenade pin—was it really?—Farooq had brought along to the kabab shop.

  “Do you think he wanted the world to be as it is? No. But he saw it for what it is. And having seen it he understood that a man has larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to.”

  To help Parvaiz understand those responsibilities, Farooq talked to him of history: the terror with which Christendom had watched the ascent of Islam, the thousand years of Muslim supremacy, which was eventually squandered by eunuchlike Ottomans and Mughals who had lost sight of the moral path, and then the bloodlust with which the Christians had avenged themselves for their centuries of humiliation; imperialism, with its racist underpinnings of a “civilizing mission,” followed by the cruel joke of pretending to “give” independence when really they were merely changing economic models via the creation of client states, their nonsensical boundaries designed to cause instability. There didn’t seem to be any part of the Muslim world Farooq didn’t know about—Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan and Palestine and Turkey and Chechnya and Kashmir and Uzbekistan. If ever Parvaiz started to lose his concentration, Farooq would swerve the conversation toward football (he supported Real Madrid, Parvaiz Arsenal, but they agreed on the greatness of Özil) or the tiniest details of Parvaiz’s life (What did you have for dinner? Any interesting characters at the greengrocer’s? Let me listen to another one of your recordings—this time, I’ll guess what it is) or the American reality TV show Farooq watched devotedly and that Parvaiz started watching too, in order to talk to him about it. But no matter what the topic of conversation, it always returned to the central preoccupation of Farooq’s life, the heart of all his lessons: how to be a man.

  “It’s your sisters’ fault,” Farooq said one afternoon when they were sitting side by side in green bucket seats in the betting shop, watching a bank of screens with greyhounds racing around a track and sweating men in another time zone walloping a cricket ball in the direction of sponsors’ billboards. The volume was off, allowing for some pleasing moments of synchresis, such as when the dogs were released from their cages just as the front door was hurled open by a drunk, or when the strip light overhead started to buzz and the on-field umpire batted midges away from his face. Farooq had placed three phones on Parvaiz’s leg between knee and hip, and each time one pinged with a text message he’d glance down and go to the counter to place another bet. It was good training for Parvaiz to stop fidgeting, he said the first time he did it. Parvaiz always kept his legs so tensed up during those betting shop sessions he had trouble walking afterward. “They want you in the house, doing their shopping and mowing the garden, so they’ve tried to keep you a boy, a child in need of a mother. That older one particularly, you know what I mean? The one who claims to be a good Muslim, and thinks she has the right to decide wheth
er or not you can live in your own house. Tell her it is written in the Quran, ‘Men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them to excel the other.’ And by Allah’s law, you, not your women, dispose of your property.”

  Your women. Parvaiz turned the phrase in his mouth while Farooq placed another bet. He liked how it felt. Though that didn’t mean he’d be stupid enough to try to quote the Quran to Isma, particularly when it came to the roles of men and women. He was a Muslim, of course; he believed in God, and went to the mosque for Eid prayers, and put aside 2.5 percent of his income for zakat, which he split between Islamic Relief and the library campaign, but beyond that, religion had, since early childhood, been a space he’d vacated rather than live in it in the shadow of Isma’s superiority. But in Farooq’s company he came to see there was such a thing as an “emasculated version of Islam, bankrolled in mosques by the British government, which wants to keep us all compliant,” and there was more than a little satisfaction in knowing this.

  “Where are you these days?” Aneeka asked him one night, climbing up the ladder he’d propped against the garden shed to get onto the roof with his phone, headphones, and pride and joy, the secondhand shotgun mic. A favorite perch since childhood that allowed a clear view of the trains pulling in and out of Preston Road. The bodies of the trains were shadows in the darkness but the long windows revealed illuminated snapshots of life passing by. Every so often there was a jagged break in the conventions of tube behavier: a man throwing a punch, a kiss so concentrated that train carriage or gondola ride or bedroom were irrelevant details, someone pressing a palm against the glass, leaning toward the boy on the garden shed as though fate wanted them together but the wheels of plot weren’t allowing it. Nearly two years ago he had started working on a project that would eventually be a 1,440-minute track that his ideal listener would play between midnight of one day and the next—a soundscape of every minute of a day from this perch.