by Hafsa Zayyan
‘And these huge puddles would form in the villages and the street and there would be crocodiles in them?’ Sameer’s father adds.
‘I used to go out in that rain and my mother would scream at me,’ Haroon Fua joins in, catching on.
‘It really wasn’t safe!’ Sameer’s mother laughs.
Mhota Papa’s eyes light up; they always do when talk turns to Uganda. Mhota Papa starts to speak, and Sameer zones out. Making sure his father can’t see, he rolls his eyes at Zara. She rolls hers back and they begin to talk in low voices about new music they’ve been listening to as the adults continue to reminisce about the old days.
After dinner, Zara disappears to help Mhota Papa to bed. Sameer’s mother makes tea for everyone and then announces loudly that she is going to pray (despite this, no one else joins her). Sameer flicks the TV on, volume low. The adults are talking about someone he doesn’t know. He hears snippets of the conversation – unbelievable the way she just walked in there like she owned the place; every time, it’s like this with her, people don’t change, you know; it always comes down to money in the end! – but he is uninterested in listening to the family gossip, which focuses on a different person every week. He suddenly feels uncomfortably restless; he needs to get out of the house. He retrieves his phone from his pocket, opens WhatsApp and scrolls to a group titled ‘Leicester League 2k2’. There are at least fifteen numbers in the group, mainly friends from secondary school, before he went to St Thomas High. Over the years, people have left and joined, but the group has continued to exist and Sameer has not been ex-communicated yet. He’s had the group on mute for several months; there are hundreds of unread messages. Sameer ignores them all and types.
Sameer (22.30): Lads, footie tomorrow?
He waits a moment, flicking through the channels on the TV.
Harry is typing. Harry (22.32): Sam, mate, where the fuck u been?
Roy (22.32): Can you not read any more? Roy has replied to a message above, sent earlier that day, organising a kickabout at 11.30 in Victoria Park.
Sameer (22.33): Been busy. But I’m back this weekend. See you tomo.
Jaspreet (22.34): We’re honoured, mate.
Sameer grins.
Sameer (22:34): You should be.
His mother enters the living room, having returned from her prayers. ‘Oh, Mum – I’ll be out tomorrow morning,’ he says.
‘Who with?’ she asks, frowning.
‘Friends, Mum,’ he groans.
‘Which friends?’ she snaps back. ‘Rahool?’
‘No, the boys from Belgrave – you know, the group with Jeremiah.’
His mother is still frowning. ‘Well, I want to know when you’re going and when you’ll be back. I don’t want you spending too long with those boys. You came back to see us, not them.’
‘OK, OK,’ Sameer says, suppressing the urge to roll his eyes. Why does it have to be so difficult?
That night, he struggles to fall asleep. His bed is king-sized, and the sheets are fresh and smell like soap, like home. He tosses and turns and eventually fitful sleep comes, in which he dreams that he forgets to tell his family about Singapore and only remembers when he is on the plane there, but the plane crashes mid-flight, and he dies.
Eight people show up to Victoria Park the following morning – just enough for a game. Sameer is tired and does not play well – his team ends up losing, which annoys him: having been absent for so long, he’d wanted to impress. After the game, Roy, Jaspreet and Harry ask Sameer if he wants to grab some food. Sameer shakes his head – his mother will be making lunch – but then he thinks: Fuck it.
Over burgers and fries, the boys catch up. Roy is still living at home with his mother on an estate in St Matthews, but is saving steadily and the plan is to move them both out as soon as he’s got enough. Roy left school at sixteen and became a plumber, so he has nearly ten years’ worth of savings. Sameer almost feels guilty as Roy speaks: Sameer’s yearly salary is probably more than Roy will save in a lifetime. Jaspreet is also living at home, in Melton, but only because it is easy – he’s a dentist and is doing very well. Harry, who works as an estate agent, is the only one who has moved out of his parents’ house – he’s bought a flat with his girlfriend.
Sameer does not tell them about Singapore. He needs to tell his family first. He makes a mental note to tell Jeremiah and Rahool – especially Rahool – to keep it to themselves for now.
‘So did you hear about Batts?’ Harry asks. Sameer shakes his head. Johnny Batt was one of the original members of their group, who lived on the same estate as Roy. ‘He’s in prison.’
‘What?’ Sameer racks his brain, trying to remember the last time he saw Johnny. He draws a blank.
‘He started hanging out with the lads from North Road – know what I mean? We took him off the WhatsApp group when we realised what he was doing. We’re not really about that …’ Harry tails off and Sameer nods; Harry does not need to say any more.
There is silence for a moment. Sameer sucks up some Diet Coke from his straw.
‘He was desperate, you know?’ Roy says. ‘He didn’t finish school, he didn’t have any GCSEs. Dad not around, his mum not much either. He used to spend a lot of time at my house – my mum would make food for him and that.’
‘I think he felt a bit shit when we all went off and started making money,’ Harry says. ‘But it’s like he didn’t realise that we had to work for it, and we weren’t exactly making big bucks straight away. I mean, both Roy and me, we didn’t do A levels, we didn’t go uni, but we tried to do something with our lives. Now we’re not doing too bad.’
‘Obviously we’re nothing compared to you two,’ Roy adds. ‘A lawyer and a dentist.’
‘Yeah, but you forget – Asian parents,’ Jaspreet says and the boys laugh. They talk for a while longer and Sameer feels the satisfaction of knowing why his friends are his friends; knowing that they can go for months without speaking and nothing has changed. At 4 p.m., he stands, grabbing each of their hands and promising not to leave it so long next time.
When he gets home, his mother is in the living room, just finishing the late-afternoon prayer, on her knees, scarf wrapped loosely around her face, where her hair stubbornly escapes from its ends. He watches her for a moment as she turns her head to greet the angels on her shoulders – right first, then left. She looks younger somehow – the lines in her face have fallen away. His mother, the only one in the family who observed the five daily prayers, who had tried and failed to get her children to copy her, who muttered that if their father had prayed, then she is sure that her children would have prayed too. His mother, for whom prayer delivered comfort and peace, not rigidity and obligation. She notices him and calls him over and he sits cross-legged next to her while she whispers duas into her hands and blows them over his face. ‘Where have you been?’ she asks.
Sameer ignores the question. ‘Mum, I brought these.’ He hands her the jeans he is holding: a peace offering.
‘OK, beta,’ she says, taking them from him and leaning on his shoulder to get to her feet. ‘I’d better go and put them in the wash so that they’re dry by the time you leave.’
His parents ask after his old crew over dinner. Sameer tells them about Johnny Batts. His mother purses her lips and tuts. ‘Now, this is exactly why I don’t like you hanging out with those boys.’
Sameer’s father hushes her and says, ‘That is unfortunate and sad – a waste of a young man’s life. He must have felt very alone to turn to something like that.’
‘Exactly.’ Sameer is sometimes surprised by the depth of his father’s insight; it confuses him. ‘That’s exactly what I said.’
‘You know, when we first came to Leicester in the early seventies,’ his father says, ‘and we all lived on top of each other in these tiny flats in Belgrave, the government decided that there were too many of us in the local schools and we needed to be moved to different ones.’
‘They had quotas for us,’ his mother says in a si
ngle breath. Sameer’s face burns at the use of the word quota. ‘Once the local school had reached its quota of immigrants, we had to go to another school.’
‘They put us on these buses, and we were sent from Belgrave to schools in what were essentially white areas.’
‘We were so young. I was seven years old when my family moved from Kenya to Leicester; your father came from Uganda a few years later. How old were you, Rizwan – twelve?’
His father nods. Sameer and Zara exchange glances.
‘How could they get away with that?’ Zara asks. ‘It seems so racist?’
‘Well, they said it was to force us to integrate, force us to learn English,’ his father shrugs and takes a sip of water. ‘Even though my English was actually better than my Gujarati.’
‘It didn’t work,’ Sameer’s mother adds. She glances at the clock hanging on the kitchen wall and begins to collect the dishes from the table; Sameer will have to leave soon. ‘It just made things worse. The white kids would call us “the Paki bus kids”. Of course, most of us were not Pakistani – we were East African Indians, from Kenya, Tanzania and, of course, Uganda. There were Afro-Caribbean immigrants at that time as well. But they would call the black kids Pakis too.’
‘We’d arrive at school as a group,’ Sameer’s father says, ‘and we would have to leave early as a group. The bus monitor would come into the classroom and say in front of everyone: immigrants please. Every kid that wasn’t white stood up.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Sameer says. ‘You could never imagine something like that happening now.’ Zara nods in agreement.
‘Well, I never, ever wanted you kids to feel that way,’ his father says. ‘That is why we worked so hard as a family, to improve our circumstances and make the best possible life for you both.’
‘Yes,’ Sameer’s mother calls from the kitchen. ‘It’s only because of your father’s sacrifices that you are where you are today. You mustn’t forget that, beta.’
His father reminds them how hard he worked to get them into St Thomas High, although the way his father tells the story it’s as if Sameer played no role in sitting the entrance exams. He listens patiently while his father recounts the numerous sacrifices that he has made for his children.
Sameer does not tell his father that he and Rahool made up two of only four brown kids in the entire school, and that he has not stayed in touch with anyone other than Rahool from St Thomas. He does not tell his father that he felt more at home at the comprehensive near Belgrave, with his Asian and black friends, than he ever did at St Thomas, with the posh white boys. He does not tell his father that he is grateful though, because at least St Thomas prepared him well for Cambridge, where he also struggled to meet other people like him. He does not tell his father that he had tried to join the Indian society, but they were all from India, and were nothing like him. He does not tell his father that he had tried to meet other Muslims by attending the Islamic society, but the boys there expected him to agree with them that it was haraam to look a woman in the eye. He does not tell his father that, in the end, he did what he knew best and joined the football society. He does not tell his father that the boys in the football society spiked his Coke with vodka for a laugh, and before he knew it, he was drunk for the first time in his life.
4
To my first love, my beloved
15th August 1947
I must tell you what has happened to our daughter, Farah.
I write to you today from my study on the second floor of our house. Shabnam has gone out shopping with her friends, the children are at school, the ayah tends to the babies. The door is locked and I will not be disturbed. You did not know this study; it had not been built when we first moved here. But you loved scenery, and you would have loved the view from the window – from the highest point of the house, the land is networked beneath us. You loved the sprawling, fierce landscapes of Uganda. Remember how we used to sit on the shores of Lake Victoria at sunset, careful not to get too close to the water, and watch as the pinks and the golds and the reds infused with the blue, cloud-streaked sky, the way tea diffuses through water? ‘Can you feel Allah’s presence?’ you would say, leaning your head on my shoulder.
It has been nearly three years since you left me, but time has not abated the intensity of this loss. When I think of you, you feel so close; my shoulder, still warmed from the place where your head rested; the sunset, still blinding me beneath my eyelids. I have traced your footsteps as they left this house a thousand times over. I have prostrated, asking Allah: Why her? But God sends us trials to test our faith. The worst trial that a man can endure, I suffered with you. Now, I must exercise strength to deal with Farah. Now, I must exercise patience.
But first, let me tell you of a momentous occasion: India has today gained independence. I have followed reports on the departure of the British, who sold our ancestral land for blood. There is no creation in the absence of blood, is there? The mother cannot give birth without pain. This wrenching of India from Britain, and of Pakistan from India, has cost thousands of lives. But I suspect that the worst is yet to come. Jinnah now has his Pakistan, and Muslims living in the new India must leave for it at once. It seems somewhat ironic that Jinnah himself is a convert’s son, a man of Lohana descent, his own grandfather a Hindu to Khoja-Ismaili convert. Why should a change in religion prompt the creation of a new country? He cannot change that he is of India. We all are.
I must admit that hearing reports of the barbarism that has engulfed India is almost shameful. Indians have lived in peace for centuries – must they fall apart now that the British are to depart? It frightens me to think what will happen to Uganda if it is ever to gain independence.
I am sorry to say that I have not been able to bring myself to ask after your family in India. I have seen your father in the mosque, greeted him quickly and moved on; I have passed the shadows of your siblings. An intense sorrow hangs like a dark cloud over them, and I am enveloped into it when I am near. You understand, don’t you? I cannot bear to be around them. But I can promise you that I have prayed for the safety of your family. I hope that it is enough.
Perhaps if I’d had relatives in India, I would have found the courage to speak to your family; perhaps we could have shared mutual concerns for the welfare of our loved ones. But I was born here, I have never been to India, and I did not travel with you on the occasions you went back. Dadi, Dada and Ma are all buried here. You are buried here. And I will be buried here, next to you, one day inshallah.
But although my family no longer has a physical connection to India, we have preserved our Indian culture and our values – Muslim values – the values of our parents and their parents, the values of our ancestors. In leaving India, we have clung to those values more tightly than ever before, guided by a powerful instinct not to forget where our ancestors came from and what we left behind. Papa instilled this in me; Dadi and Dada made sure that I knew who I was. It gives me great pain to say it, but I have failed to instil these same values in Farah. I have failed in my duty as a Muslim, my duty to you, my duty to my ancestors.
Shabnam tells me of her fondness for Uganda; that it reminds her of home, but a better version – here, there are no caste or class divides: there are only Indians. Just as you were, she is friends with the Sheiks, the Lakanis, the Narulas and the Sodhas. She has mingled into their circles and assimilated into their structures in a way, she says, that was not possible in India. She too has left behind a family in India and since news of the violence reached Uganda, she has waited anxiously to hear from them, hoping that they will one day be able to join us. But, she tells me, ‘I will never go back to India. Our life here is so much better. This is our home now – and we can bring India here.’ And that we have done. Our small minority of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs has created for itself a little India, an integrated India. Shabnam delights in the fact that together we all celebrate each festival – be it Diwali, Vaisakhi, Ashura, Khushali or Eid – without distinction.
> But in the midst of all of this, Dadi and Dada did not let us forget who we are, as Muslims, or the ways in which we do things. Papa chose you and me for each other, my dear, based on those same values that they saw in your family. There is a structure to be maintained in our small community; it shuns and accepts in equal measure. We have never been seen to touch alcohol, we observe daily prayer. We stay away from things haraam; we provide the biggest donations to the mosque. I suppose it is to be expected that I should be tested in such ways; indeed, when Allah loves a people, he afflicts them with trials.
India’s independence has coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, and Eid is only a few days away. This will be my third Eid without you. Ramadan has always been a time of comfort for me, both spiritually and socially. But since you passed away, I have been unable to devote myself fully to Ramadan. When my stomach growls, or my feet become numb from standing in prayer, your absence plays on my mind like a cruel joke. This year has been even worse. I have been almost completely disengaged, worrying about Farah.
Yesterday, we hosted an iftar at our home for some sixty people. I have not hosted guests for iftar since you passed away. But this year, Shabnam said to me that enough time has passed, and that we must fulfil our duty to feed our community during Ramadan. Enough time will never pass, I thought, but I relented. Two days were spent preparing the food; Shabnam insisted that the ladies of our house must make it themselves. Tasneem and Farah were recruited to the kitchen, and platters and platters of food were prepared. Shabnam has learned slowly, from Tasneem – who learned from you, my dear – to fuse our traditional Indian recipes with Ugandan foodstuffs: she can now make peanut and sweetcorn curry, lemon chilli mogo, corn rotli. Her food will never compare to yours, of course, but she is improving.
