The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  Aisha hovered. She had run from the bus and had been running all day; her warm smell was milky and girlish and something bland and meaty Nazia could not identify, the smell of food from outside, the food that the school gave them that Aisha had said straight away she really liked. She had a piece of paper in her hand, and stood like a pupil in the head teacher’s office.

  ‘How was your day?’ Nazia said. ‘Nice day at school?’

  ‘Can I go to a party?’ Aisha said. ‘A girl at school asked me to her birthday party. It’s on Saturday afternoon. Mummy, I don’t know what I’ve got to wear to a party. I can’t wear …’

  Strangely enough, Aisha put her face in her hands. It might have been an adult performance of despair, done to amuse, but her shoulders began to judder. Nazia should have felt relieved. She had ignored the half-expressed advice of the office worker that Aisha would feel more at home at some other school where (Nazia concluded) new arrivals could be dumped, where Urdu was heard in the playground and hopes were not raised. Three weeks before, she had taken Aisha to the school that was nearest, the one that was normal to go to. She had sat in the upstairs office of the headmaster, a man no older than Sharif, and had watched his eyes go from one of them to the other, rubbing his hands in what might be enthusiasm and, surely, speaking a little more slowly, a little more loudly about the large family at Latchworthy Middle, about Class 2 Mg and lovely Mrs Morgan, about welcoming Aisha to that family and helping her feel at home (at home, as if it were a rare and probably unfamiliar idiom to Nazia, who suppressed the irritated reflection that she had a first-class degree in English literature and had written her dissertation on Dryden’s tragedies). He had made no allusion to their being anything but English until almost the very end. ‘Are there any special dietary requirements we should be aware of?’ he said.

  ‘No, no,’ Nazia said. ‘She eats anything.’ They had no particular religion. With a cheerful and not a lingering look, Nazia had let Aisha go and walked back towards the exit. She could not dawdle or peer too much, but it did appear to her that every room she looked into was a roomful of English children. She corrected herself: white children. This was not a matter of nationality, but of race, and in time she would be British, Sharif would be British, Aisha would be British and certainly the Lump would emerge as brown as any of them but would be nothing but British from the start, whatever humanity surrounded them.

  Only three weeks later at least one girl in her class had decided she liked her well enough to invite her to her ninth birthday party. Nazia wondered she had ever doubted it. Her daughter was a little pet in the family, a little love to half the doctors’ wives of Dhanmondi, with dozens of friends her own age, the judges’ twin granddaughters, the daughters of the professor of physics, who had married late, the little girl called Rita, the one called Baby and the other called Sweetie. Perhaps Sharif had been right: people only saw the colour of someone’s skin from a distance. With a start, Nazia realized that she had been doing what she had forbidden herself to do, comparing the past to their life here, in the slowly filling house in Lodge Moor with the wind whistling and banging against the windows. In her arms, her daughter was still crying, and all she was crying for was that she didn’t think she had a dress to wear to her new friend’s party.

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ Nazia said, rubbing her shoulders. She took the invitation from Aisha’s hand; it was a piece of paper with balloons and fireworks on it, and Aisha’s name, misspelt as ‘Ayeesha’ by someone called Wendy. ‘Daddy will drive us into Sheffield, and we will buy you a lovely new dress for the party. I don’t know – maybe I can persuade Daddy to buy me a new dress to wear to it as well?’

  ‘Mummy,’ Aisha said, detaching herself, ‘you’re not supposed to come. It’s Wendy’s party.’

  ‘But they’re expecting Wendy’s friends’ mummies and daddies too, I should have thought,’ Nazia said.

  ‘It’s not like that here!’ Aisha shouted. ‘You come and you leave me there and then you come back later and take me away again. That’s what birthday parties are supposed to be like!’

  Nazia checked herself. Birthday parties in Dacca had been all mixed up; in the worst of them, she remembered, the children had sat timidly on sofas while the fathers engaged in dull conversation about grown-up things, and because there were sweets and it was somebody’s birthday, it was called a children’s party. Of course things were not like that here.

  They had fled from the military dictators, and now she saw they were justified in doing so: their daughter’s worries were that they might not get a children’s party right. Safety.

  And then the invitations started to flow, one almost every week for Aisha. One day she came home with three separate invitations, going forward almost a month into the future. It was so nice that she had friends, and that Susan, Marian and Katy were including her in their weekend lives. It might be that she was the first person they had ever met who did not look like them; they would remember her. Nazia knew what it had been like to be that age, and when the second invitation arrived, she took Aisha to the shops again, not telling Sharif, and bought her two other party dresses. One of them was in denim, but very smart, and Aisha had begged for it; the dress in Cole Brothers that Nazia had thought lovely, a very sweet gingham dress with puffed lace at the shoulders, Aisha had pulled a face and had only tried on at all under duress. Aisha had two beautiful salwar khameez in silver and pale mauve. They would probably never be seen again.

  ‘Do you think she had a good time?’ Sharif asked once, as she returned one Saturday afternoon from one of these parties.

  ‘She had a lovely time,’ Nazia said firmly. The mother had smiled so sweetly, saying goodbye to them, and Aisha knew how to behave better than her parents did. She had picked up a set phrase at goodbye, ‘Thank-you-for-having-me’, though Nazia thought that she said it with too much feeling, not rattling it off sourly, like the other little girls. The rest of the guests departed in twos and threes; the mothers seemed to know each other, had been to school with each other, to drop in and out of conversations that had started and been suspended days before. Aisha left with her mother, not looking back, holding the slice of birthday cake wrapped in a paper napkin. ‘Did you not eat a slice at the party?’ Nazia asked, but Aisha shook her head. Everyone asked for a slice to take home. Sharif had once picked up Aisha. In truth, he later admitted, he was concerned that Aisha was the only one to be picked up by a mother on foot. He had put on his tweed jacket and a tie, and driven off in the new Vauxhall. But he had been greeted by a look of such horror and humiliation on his daughter’s face, suspended in a world of mothers and daughters, that he never suggested it again. There was no escaping the wrong thing, or so it seemed. Nazia had found herself isolated from the other mothers, not just by her pedestrian arrival and departure, and was held at arms’ length by polite smiles and the carefully enunciated compliments to little Aisha, how charming she was and how happy they were to have her. Dismissed. It would take time, she knew, and driving lessons. It would have been just the same – Sharif’s point again – if a white German family had moved into a house in Dhanmondi and expected their children to be included in everything.

  Now Sharif’s daughter appeared to be the most popular member of the family there had ever been, but of course he would want to make sure that she took some pleasure in it. ‘The first we hear about any of these girls,’ Sharif said, lowering his voice, ‘is when one of them sends an invitation. Are they truly her friends? I hope things are all right for her at that school.’

  ‘Well,’ Nazia said, ‘it’s her birthday next month. She can have her own party.’

  ‘No mishti doi and no jelapi and no biryani and no fish to eat …’

  ‘I know,’ Nazia said, amused. ‘Imagine a birthday party without any fish. I am going to ask my daughter to tell me what her party should consist of, and I am going to do it absolutely correctly, to the letter. I am ahead of you by some distance.’

  ‘They could play kumir dang
a, at least,’ Sharif said. ‘I used to adore kumir danga, I longed to be the crocodile. I was so good at it. They would love it.’

  ‘Let them have their own little games,’ Nazia said. ‘If Aisha heard you talking about kumir danga or shaat chara or any of those old street games, she would be mortified. They can play pass-around-the-box if they want to.’

  ‘Pass the parcel, I believe,’ Sharif said, laughing.

  6.

  It had taken a number of months, but the Post Office now assured Dr Mohammed Sharifullah that the telephone line at number seven, Sycamore Close would be connected on 9 April. They might have said reconnected, since the previous owners had disconnected the same number before moving out. Dr Sharifullah himself was under no doubt that they merely had to perform a simple step. Nazia said that they ought to insist on being ‘Dr’ Sharifullah to the Post Office. Dr Sharifullah had thought it would be more effective to mention that his wife was pregnant. But 9 April came, and 9 April went, and still the telephone produced nothing but a dull enclosed silence when picked up.

  The next morning, Nazia sent Sharif and Aisha off after breakfast, and determined that she would, without fail, take the 51 bus down to the Post Office in the centre of Sheffield and demand to know what was happening. But she was just about to put her coat and hat on when the unexpected happened: a curious, repeated warble, like a drowning bird. It was, astonishingly, the noise that the telephone would make if it ever worked. She picked the receiver up – looked at it, a foot from her face – brought it suspiciously to her ear.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘You’re supposed to say your number!’ the voice at the other end said. ‘In this country, you answer and you say what your number is!’

  ‘Who is this?’ Nazia said, amazed. ‘Not Rekha? Is this Rekha?’

  Rekha laughed, her big gurgling laugh. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Am I your first telephone call?’

  In the months they had been waiting for the telephone to be connected, Sharif had sometimes tetchily asked who they had to telephone in any case. Recently, Nazia had been able to answer that it would be useful to be able to telephone some of these mothers, to ask what time it would be appropriate to collect Aisha. But at first and for a number of weeks Nazia had only been able to answer that it would be nice to be able to telephone the people who were supposed to be delivering the beds, or the three-piece suite, or the television, and nicer still to be able to telephone Rashed and Rekha, over there in Manchester.

  Rashed and Rekha had been in England for years now. Nazia remembered their wedding in Dacca, but they had left very soon afterwards; Rashed, like her brother Zahid, had been a solicitor but now worked in local government. Rekha, now, had trained in England as a librarian. They had been good friends to Nazia and Sharif when they were here before, Sharif finishing his doctorate and Nazia having her baby at the same time, more or less, as Rekha having her second. Little Bobby was already in school, a beautifully turned-out child who would never deign to muddy himself or even run for a bus. People said that your life was changed by having children, and of course it was, but the alteration in routine and interests was surely complemented by a more outward-facing change, that you felt admitted to the part of the world that knew what it was to feel responsible for another soul.

  Together they moved onwards with their babies, Rekha sometimes offering advice or reassurance, Nazia feeling protected and a little superior and saved from selfishness. Rekha had become huge with Fanny and afterwards remained plump, puffing up the stairs, a sweet little yellow bun of a person where Nazia had bulged, neatly, containedly, then melted back to the person she had been. Once a month they tried to see each other, Rashed and Rekha, who had a car, a white Morris Traveller with picturesque wooden insets, lumbering over the Pennines. Baby Fanny was on Rekha’s lap, Bobby in the back seat. They had been happy times, sitting in the dank sitting room of the flat over the newsagent’s, crowing when Fanny took her first steps across the carpet (or were they? Was Rashed in his kindness just making sure that they felt special in their cousins’ lives by witnessing this?). Fanny and Aisha would always be great friends, there was no doubt about that; they were second cousins, and they sat up, side by side, and embarked on their own parallel courses of investigation.

  Nazia had managed to call Rekha two or three times since they’d arrived, from the phone box at the end of the road, and they had exchanged postcards, too, but she had looked forward to this conversation – a real one, over her own telephone.

  ‘… and a television set, and a radio for the kitchen, and, oh, you can’t imagine, so many things a house has to contain,’ Nazia said. ‘We hardly brought anything from Dacca.’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Rekha said. ‘When we came, Rashed’s mother insisted on us bringing everything, and the shipping cost a fortune, and it was all wrong when it finally arrived, and – Well, that was fifteen years ago and I don’t think we’ve got a single thing remaining. It’s all from English shops now. Rashed’s mother, in every letter she asks whether her father’s buffet table is still as beautiful, but we gave it to Oxfam years ago when we bought a nice new unit. Polished mahogany, it was just – oh, you can imagine. How are your neighbours?’

  ‘It’s so nice to speak to you,’ Nazia said. ‘The neighbours love Aisha – well, their children do, it seems. She’s always going to birthday parties.’

  ‘I know!’ Rekha said. ‘Those birthday parties. They are the curse of my existence. Every week, an invitation for Fanny, an invitation for Bobby, every week a present or two presents to buy – the awful junk! But this is what I was telephoning about. I don’t know how it is, but there isn’t a party this week, on Saturday. And I said to Rashed that we might come over and visit you.’

  ‘Oh, Rekha,’ Nazia said. ‘You don’t know how happy I feel about that. You’ll be so horrified when you see me, too. I’m twice the size that I was with Aisha.’

  Nazia would not treat them as the source of memory and nostalgia. In Dacca she and Sharif had enjoyed their long, languid, nostalgic conversations about catching the number 51 bus, of going to Cole Brothers, of the wind biting just at Barker’s Pool outside the City Hall, about faraway Sheffield. Now Nazia could step out of her own front door and walk to the number 51 bus stop, and one would be along in a moment to take her into town. In a month, Sharif had calculated, they would be in a position to buy a new car, and she could start learning to drive. They would not reverse the situation, and now start discussing what they missed about Dacca. Rekha and Rashed and Bobby and Fanny were part of this new world, and they were part of the best of it.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she said, when Sharif and Aisha were home. ‘It was so nice to hear cousin’s voice on the telephone, and so near-sounding. Do you remember cousin Fanny, Aisha? You were such friends when you were tiny.’

  ‘Mummy,’ Aisha said. ‘Caroline’s having a party. I said I would go. I promised.’

  ‘But, Fanny, child,’ Nazia said. ‘You see Caroline all week, and Fanny you haven’t seen in years. Your cousin!’

  ‘But I promised!’

  ‘Well, that’s quite all right,’ Sharif said, in his generous way. ‘I have the perfect solution. It’s unfair if there’s a lovely party going on and you can’t go to it. So I’ll phone – no, Mummy will phone Caroline’s mummy and ask if it would be all right if Aisha came to the party with her cousin Fanny, since she’s going to be here. Bobby won’t mind staying on his own, I’m sure.’

  ‘That would be perfect,’ Nazia said, clapping her hands. ‘That solves everything. We’ll come and pick you up at five, and all the boring grown-up talk will have happened.’

  Aisha had acquired an expression of complete horror. Her knife and fork were frozen in mid-air. ‘Mummy,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that. No one ever brings their cousin to a party. They would think you were mental even asking.’

  ‘They would think –’

  ‘They would think you were mental,’ Aisha said. ‘Oh, you know what I mean, c
razy, mad. Please don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ Nazia said. Her daughter was in a position to instruct her in detail about correct behaviour. ‘Shall I phone Caroline’s mummy and explain that, unfortunately, you can’t come?’

  ‘No, Mummy,’ Aisha said. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve promised Caroline.’

  ‘So,’ Sharif said slowly, but there was a hint of amusement in his voice at these tiny dilemmas, ‘you don’t want to take cousin Fanny and you don’t want to stay at home to spend time with her here? You want to say goodbye to them and go off on your own to your friend Caroline’s party?’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Aisha said, almost on the verge of tears.

  ‘Don’t you think that poor Fanny would be very upset that you don’t want to spend time with her?’ Nazia said. But she felt that even in asking Aisha’s opinion she had taken an important step. Aisha, strangely enough, won this competition over the course of two days, and even stranger, Rekha and Rashed humbly accepted the decision. It really didn’t matter, Rekha assured them. Everyone understood. So they came over as early as they could; they had lunch together, shouting and laughing and not agreeing at all about anything, not even whether this was hot weather or not. Bobby delighted them with his beautiful manners, saying that he was simply delighted to meet his cousins again after such a time. And Aisha went upstairs and put on her new party dress and came down to be admired. Her father took her off, a gift-wrapped cube in hand, and came back to find Fanny reading a book in a corner. He made a fuss of her and soon it was all right. It was a lovely day.

  7.

  There were eleven houses in Sycamore Close. Three on either side of the road where it ran straight, and five around the wide circle that it bulged out into at the end. They knew the other four houses in the circle. There was the older couple, and there were the parents with the daughter who had peered into the house on the first day. Next door, to the left, there was a family with two teenage daughters – one Sunday afternoon one of them had stuck her head out of the window and shouted into the quiet street, ‘I hate you!’ Who? Perhaps she was saying that she hated Sycamore Close, Lodge Moor, Sheffield, or England. Or perhaps she was shouting at her mother. To the right there was a single man who had an executive job of some sort; his shoes shone brilliantly, his suit was pinstriped, his briefcase was black and plastic, with a leather finish. He had a small dog, a white one with an intelligent face called Rosie. His was the only household in the close that had a servant of any sort, an older woman who came twice a week and let herself in, apparently to clean. For some time Nazia wondered whether this woman might be the man’s mother.