Children. Samad had caught children like a disease. Yes, he had sired two of them willingly – as willingly as a man can – but he had not bargained for this other thing. This thing that no one tells you about. This thing of knowing children. For forty-odd years, travelling happily along life’s highway, Samad had been unaware that dotted along that road, in the crèche facilities of each service station, there lived a subclass of society, a mewling, puking underclass; he knew nothing of them and it did not concern him. Then suddenly, in the early eighties, he became infected with children; other people’s children, children who were friends of his children, and then their friends; then children in children’s programmes on children’s TV. By 1984 at least 30 per cent of his social and cultural circle was under the age of nine – and this all led, inevitably, to the position he now found himself in. He was a parent-governor.
By a strange process of symmetry, being a parent-governor perfectly mirrors the process of becoming a parent. It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual Spring Fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whisky (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you’re turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water-fountains – you’re implicated in the school, you’re involved in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your child at the school gates. You start following them in.
‘Put your hand down.’
‘I will not put it down.’
‘Put it down, please.’
‘Let go of me.’
‘Samad, why are you so eager to mortify me? Put it down.’
‘I have an opinion. I have a right to an opinion. And I have a right to express that opinion.’
‘Yes, but do you have to express it so often?’
This was the hissed exchange between Samad and Alsana Iqbal, as they sat at the back of a Wednesday school governors meeting in early July ’84, Alsana trying her best to force Samad’s determined left arm back to his side.
‘Get off, woman!’
Alsana put her two tiny hands to his wrist and tried applying a Chinese burn. ‘Samad Miah, can’t you understand that I am only trying to save you from yourself?’
As the covert wrestling continued, the chairwoman Katie Miniver, a lanky white divorcee with tight jeans, extremely curly hair and buck teeth, tried desperately to avoid Samad’s eye. She silently cursed Mrs Hanson, the fat lady just behind him, who was speaking about the woodworm in the school orchard, inadvertently making it impossible to pretend that Samad’s persistent raised hand had gone unseen. Sooner or later she was going to have to let him speak. In between nodding at Mrs Hanson, she snatched a surreptitious glance at the minutes which the secretary, Mrs Khilnani, was scribbling away on her left. She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still racist (but she had read Colour Blind, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention. But no, no. She wasn’t crazy. Any random extract highlighted the problem:
13.0 Mrs Janet Trott wishes to propose a second climbing frame be built in the playground to accommodate the large number of children who enjoy the present climbing frame but unfortunately have made it a safety risk through dangerous overcrowding. Mrs Trott’s husband, the architect Hanover Trott, is willing to design and oversee the building of such a frame at no cost to the school.
13.1 Chairwoman can see no objection. Moves to put the proposition to a vote.
13.2 Mr Iqbal wishes to know why the Western education system privileges activity of the body over activity of the mind and soul.
13.3 The Chairwoman wonders if this is quite relevant.
13.4 Mr Iqbal demands the vote be delayed until he can present a paper detailing the main arguments and emphasizes that his sons, Magid and Millat, get all the exercise they need via headstands that strengthen the muscles and send blood to stimulate the somatosensory cortex in the brain.
13.5 Mrs Wolfe asks whether Mr Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands.
13.6 Mr Iqbal infers that, considering Susan’s academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.
‘Yes, Mr Iqbal?’
Samad forcefully removed Alsana’s fingers from the clamp grip they had assumed on his lapel, stood up quite unnecessarily and sorted through a number of papers he had on a clipboard, removing the one he wanted and holding it out before him.
‘Yes, yes. I have a motion. I have a motion.’
The subtlest manifestation of a groan went round the group of governors, followed by a short period of shifting, scratching, leg-crossing, bag-rifling and the repositioning of coats-on-chairs.
‘Another one, Mr Iqbal?’
‘Oh yes, Mrs Miniver.’
‘Only you’ve tabled twelve motions already this evening; I think possibly somebody else-’
‘Oh, it is much too important to be delayed, Mrs Miniver. Now, if I can just-’
‘Ms Miniver.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘It’s just… it’s Ms Miniver. All evening you’ve been… and it’s, umm… actually not Mrs. It’s Ms. Ms.’
Samad looked quizzically at Katie Miniver, then at his papers as if to find the answer there, then at the beleaguered chairwoman again.
‘I’m sorry? You are not married?’
‘Divorced, actually, yes, divorced. I’m keeping the name.’
‘I see. You have my condolences, Miss Miniver. Now, the matter I-’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Katie, pulling her fingers through her intractable hair. ‘Umm, it’s not Miss, either. I’m sorry. I have been married you see, so-’
Ellen Corcoran and Janine Lanzerano, two friends from the Women’s Action Group, gave Katie a supportive smile. Ellen shook her head to indicate that Katie mustn’t cry (because you’re doing well, really well); Janine mouthed Go On and gave her a furtive thumbs-up.
‘I really wouldn’t feel comforta – I just feel marital status shouldn’t be an issue – it’s not that I want to embarrass you, Mr Iqbal. I just would feel more – if you – it’s Ms.’
‘Mzzz?’
‘Ms.’
‘And this is some kind of linguistic conflation between the words Mrs and Miss?’ asked Samad, genuinely curious and oblivious to the nether wobblings of Katie Miniver’s bottom lip. ‘Something to describe the woman who has either lost her husband or has no prospect of finding another?’
Alsana groaned and put her head in her hands.
Samad looked at his clipboard, underlined something in pen three times and turned to the parent-governors once more.
‘The Harvest Festival.’
Shifting, scratching, leg-crossing, coat-repositioning.
‘Yes, Mr Iqbal,’ said Katie Miniver. ‘What about the Harvest Festival?’
‘That is precisely what I want to know. What is all this about the Harvest Festival? What is it? Why is it? And why must my children celebrate it?’
The headmistress, Mrs Owens, a genteel woman with a soft face half hidden behind a fiercely cut blonde bob, motioned to Katie Miniver that she would handle this.
‘Mr Iqbal, we have been through the matter of religious festivals quite thoroughly in the autumn review. As I am sure you are aware, the school already recognizes a great variety of religious and secular events: amongst them, Christmas, Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, the birthday of Haile Selassie, and the death of Martin Luther King. The Harvest Festival is part of the school’s ongoing commitment to religious diversity, Mr Iqbal.’
‘I see. And are there many pagans, Mrs Owens, at Manor School?’
‘Pagan – I’m afraid I don’t under-’
‘It is very simple. The Christian calendar has thirty-seven religious events. Thirty-seven. The Muslim calendar has nine. Only nine. And they are squeezed out by this incredible rash of Christian festivals. Now my motion is simple. If we removed all the pagan festivals from the Christian calendar, there would be an average of’ – Samad paused to look at his clipboard – ‘of twenty days freed up in which the children could celebrate Lailat-ul-Qadr in December, Eid-ul-Fitr in January and Eid-ul-Adha in April, for example. And the first festival that must go, in my opinion, is this Harvest Festival business.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Owens, doing her pleasant-but-firm smile and playing her punchline to the crowd, ‘removing Christian festivals from the face of the earth is a little beyond my jurisdiction. Otherwise I would remove Christmas Eve and save myself a lot of work in stocking-stuffing.’
Samad ignored the general giggle this prompted and pressed on. ‘But this is my whole point. This Harvest Festival is not a Christian festival. Where in the bible does it say, For thou must steal foodstuffs from thy parents’ cupboards and bring them into school assembly, and thou shalt force thy mother to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of a fish? These are pagan ideals! Tell me where does it say, Thou shalt take a box of frozen fishfingers to an aged crone who lives in Wembley?’
Mrs Owens frowned, unaccustomed to sarcasm unless it was of the teacher variety, i.e., Do we live in a barn? And I suppose you treat your own house like that!
‘Surely, Mr Iqbal, it is precisely the charity aspect of the Harvest Festival that makes it worth retaining? Taking food to the elderly seems to me a laudable idea, whether it has scriptural support or not. Certainly, nothing in the bible suggests we should sit down to a turkey meal on Christmas Day, but few people would condemn it on those grounds. To be honest, Mr Iqbal, we like to think of these things as more about community than religion as such.’
‘A man’s god is his community!’ said Samad, raising his voice.
‘Yes, umm… well, shall we vote on the motion?’
Mrs Owens looked nervously around the room for hands. ‘Will anyone second it?’
Samad pressed Alsana’s hand. She kicked him in the ankle. He stamped on her toe. She pinched his flank. He bent back her little finger and she grudgingly raised her right arm while deftly elbowing him in the crotch with her left.
‘Thank you, Mrs Iqbal,’ said Mrs Owens, as Janice and Ellen looked over to her with the piteous, saddened smiles they reserved for subjugated Muslim women.
‘All those in favour of the motion to remove the Harvest Festival from the school calendar-’
‘On the grounds of its pagan roots.’
‘On the grounds of certain pagan… connotations. Raise your hands.’
Mrs Owens scanned the room. One hand, that of the pretty red-headed music teacher Poppy Burt-Jones, shot up, sending her many bracelets jangling down her wrist. Then the Chalfens, Marcus and Joyce, an ageing hippy couple both dressed in pseudo-Indian garb, raised their hands defiantly. Then Samad looked pointedly at Clara and Archie, sitting sheepishly on the other side of the hall, and two more hands moved slowly above the crowd.
‘All those against?’
The remaining thirty-six hands lifted into the air.
‘Motion not passed.’
‘I am certain the Solar Covenant of Manor School Witches and Goblins will be delighted with that decision,’ said Samad, retaking his seat.
After the meeting, as Samad emerged from the toilets, having relieved himself with some difficulty in a miniature urinal, the pretty red-headed music teacher Poppy Burt-Jones accosted him in the corridor.
‘Mr Iqbal.’
‘Hmm?’
She extended a long, pale, lightly freckled arm. ‘Poppy Burt-Jones. I take Magid and Millat for orchestra and singing.’
Samad replaced the dead right hand she meant to shake with his working left.
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’
‘No, no. It’s not painful. It just does not work.’
‘Oh, good! I mean, I’m glad there’s no, you know, pain.’
She was what you would call effortlessly pretty. About twenty-eight, maybe thirty-two at most. Slim, but not at all hard-bodied, and with a curved ribcage like a child; long, flat breasts that lifted at their tips; an open-neck white shirt, some well-worn Levis and grey trainers, a lot of dark red hair swished up in a sloppy ponytail. Wispy bits falling at the neck. Freckled. A very pleasant, slightly goofy smile which she was showing Samad right now.
‘Was there something you wanted to discuss about the twins? A problem?’
‘Oh no, no… well, you know, they’re fine. Magid has a little difficulty, but with his good marks I’m sure playing the recorder isn’t high on his list, and Millat has a real flair for the sax. No, I just wanted to say that I thought you made a good point, you know,’ she said, chucking her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the hall. ‘In the meeting. The Harvest Festival always seemed so ridiculous to me. I mean, if you want to help old people, you know, well, vote for a different government, don’t send them cans of Heinz spaghetti.’ She smiled at him again and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
‘It is a great shame more people do not agree,’ said Samad, flattered somehow by the second smile and sucking in his well-toned 57-year-old stomach. ‘We seemed very much in the minority this evening.’
‘Well, the Chalfens were behind you – they’re such nice people – intellectuals,’ she whispered, as if it were some exotic disease of the tropics. ‘He’s a scientist and she’s something in gardening – but both very down to earth with it. I talked to them and they thought you should pursue it. You know, actually, I was thinking that maybe we could get together at some point in the next few months and work on a second motion for the September meeting – you know, nearer the actual time, make it a little more coherent, maybe, print out leaflets, that sort of thing. Because you know, I’m really interested in Indian culture. I just think those festivals you mentioned would be so much more… colourful, and we could tie it in with art work, music. It could be really exciting,’ said Poppy Burt-Jones, getting really excited. ‘And I think it would be really good, you know, for the kids.’
It was not possible, Samad knew, for this woman to have any erotic interest in him whatsoever. But still he glanced around for Alsana, still he jangled his car keys nervously in his pockets, still he felt a cold thing land on his heart and knew it was fear of his God.
‘I’m not actually from India, you know,’ said Samad, with infinitely more patience than he had ever previously employed the many times he had been required to repeat this sentence since moving to England.
Poppy Burt-Jones looked surprised and disappointed. ‘You’re not?’
‘No. I’m from Bangladesh.’
‘Bangladesh…’
‘Previously Pakistan. Previous to that, Bengal.’
‘Oh, right. Same sort of ball-park, then.’
‘Just about the same stadium, yes.’
There was a bit of a difficult pause, in which Samad saw clearly that he wanted her more than any woman he had met in the past ten years. Just like that. Desire didn’t even bother casing the joint, checking whether the neighbours were in – desire just kicked down the door and made himself at home. He felt queasy. Then he became aware that his face was moving from arousal to horror in a grotesque parody of the movements of his mind, as he weighed up Poppy Burt-Jones and all the physical and metaphysical consequences she suggested. He must speak before it got any worse.
‘Well… hmm, it is a good idea, retabling the motion,’ he said against his will, for something more bestial than his will was now doing the talking. ‘If you could spare the time.’
‘Well, we can talk about it. I’ll give you a call about it in a few weeks. We could meet after orchestra, maybe?’
‘That would be… fine.’
‘Great! That’s agreed, then. You know, your boys are really adorable – they’re very unusual. I was saying it to the Chalfens, and Marcus put his finger on it: he said that Indian children, if you don’t mind me saying, are usually a lot more-’
‘More?’
‘Quiet. Beautifully behaved but very, I don’t know, subdued.’
Samad winced inside, imagining Alsana listening to this.
‘And Magid and Millat are just so… loud.’
Samad tried to smile.
‘Magid is so impressive intellectually for a nine-year-old – everybody says so. I mean, he’s really remarkable. You must be so proud. He’s like a little adult. Even his clothes… I don’t think I’ve ever known a nine-year-old to dress so – so severely.’
Both twins had always been determined to choose their own clothes, but where Millat bullied Alsana into purchases of red-stripe Nike, Osh-Kosh Begosh and strange jumpers that had patterns on the inside and the out, Magid could be found, whatever the weather, in grey pullover, grey shirt and black tie with his shiny black shoes and NHS specs perched upon his nose, like some dwarf librarian. Alsana would say, ‘Little man, how about the blue one for Amma, hmm?’, pushing him into the primary colours section of Mothercare. ‘Just one blue one. Go so nice with your eyes. For Amma, Magid. How can you not care for blue? It’s the colour of the sky!’
‘No, Amma. The sky isn’t blue. There’s just white light. White light has all of the colours of the rainbow in it, and when it is scattered through the squillions of molecules in the sky, the short-wave colours – blue, violet – they are the ones you see. The sky isn’t really blue. It just looks that way. It’s called Rayleigh scattering.’
A strange child with a cold intellect.
‘You must be so proud,’ Poppy repeated with a huge smile. ‘I would be.’
‘Sadly,’ said Samad sighing, distracted from his erection by the dismal thought of his second son (by two minutes), ‘Millat is a good-for-nothing.’
Poppy looked mortified at this. ‘Oh no! No, I didn’t mean that at all… I mean, I think he’s probably a little intimidated by Magid in that way, but he’s such a personality! He’s just not so… academic. But everybody just loves him – such a beautiful boy, as well. Of course,’ she said, giving him a wink and a knock on the shoulder, ‘good genes.’
Good genes? What did she mean, good genes?
‘Hullo!’ said Archie, who had walked up behind them, giving Samad a strong thud on the back. ‘Hullo!’ he said again, shaking Poppy’s hand, with the almost mock-aristocratic manner he used when confronted with educated people. ‘Archie Jones. Father of Irie, for my sins.’
‘Poppy Burt-Jones. I take Irie for-’
‘Music, yes, I know. Talks about you constantly. Bit disappointed you passed her over for first violin, though… maybe next year, eh? So!’ said Archie, looking from Poppy to Samad, who was standing slightly apart from the other two and had a queer look, Archie thought, a bloody queer look on his face. ‘You’ve met the notorious Ick-Ball! You were a bit much in that meeting, Samad, eh? Wasn’t he, eh?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Poppy sweetly. ‘I thought Mr Iqbal made some good points, actually. I was really impressed by a lot of what he said. I’d like to be that knowledgeable on so many subjects. Sadly, I’m a bit of a one-trick pony. Are you, I don’t know, a professor of some kind, Mr Iqbal?’
‘No, no,’ said Samad, furious that he was unable to lie because of Archie, and finding the word ‘waiter’ stopping in his throat. ‘No, the fact is I work in a restaurant. I did some study in younger days, but the war came and…’ Samad shrugged as an end to the sentence, and watched with sinking heart as Poppy Burt-Jones’s freckled face contorted into one large, red, perplexed question mark.
‘War?’ she said, as if he had said wireless or pianola or water-closet. ‘The Falklands?’
‘No,’ said Samad flatly. ‘The Second World.’
‘Oh, Mr Iqbal, you’d never guess. You must have been ever so young.’
‘There were tanks there older than us, love,’ said Archie with a grin.
‘Well, Mr Iqbal, that is a surprise! But they say dark skin wrinkles less, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ said Samad, forcing himself to imagine her taut, pink skin, folded over in layer after layer of dead epidermis. ‘I thought it was children that kept a man young.’
Poppy laughed. ‘That too, I’d imagine. Well!’ she said, looking flushed, coy and sure of herself, all at the same time. ‘You look very good on it. I’m sure the Omar Sharif comparison’s been made before, Mr Iqbal.’
‘No, no, no, no,’ said Samad, glowing with pleasure. ‘The only comparison lies in our mutual love of bridge. No, no, no… And it’s Samad,’ he added. ‘Call me Samad, please.’
‘You’ll have to call him Samad some other time, Miss,’ said Archie, who always persisted in calling teachers Miss. ‘Because we’ve got to go. Wives waiting in the driveway. Dinner, apparently.’
‘Well, it was nice talking to you,’ said Poppy, reaching for the wrong hand again, and blushing as he met her with the left.
‘Yes. Goodbye.’
‘Come on, come on,’ said Archie, fielding Samad out of the door and down the sloping driveway to the front gates. ‘Dear God, fit as a butcher’s dog, that one! Phee-yooo. Nice, very nice. Dear me, you were trying it on… And what were you on about – mutual love of bridge. I’ve known you decades and I’ve never seen you play bridge. Five-card poker’s more your game.’
‘Shut up, Archibald.’
‘No, no, fair dues, you did very well. It’s not like you, though, Samad – having found God and all that – not like you to be distracted by the attractions of the flesh.’
Samad shook Archie’s hand from where it was resting on his shoulder. ‘Why are you so irredeemably vulgar?’
‘I wasn’t the one…’
But Samad wasn’t listening, he was already reciting in his head, repeating two English phrases that he tried hard to believe in, words he had learnt these past ten years in England, words he hoped could protect him from the abominable heat in his trousers:
To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure.
Can’t say fairer than that. Can’t say fairer than that. Can’t say fairer than that.
But let’s rewind a little.
1. To the pure all things are pure
Sex, at least the temptation of sex, had long been a problem. When the fear of God first began to creep into Samad’s bones, circa 1976, just after his marriage to the small-palmed, weak-wristed and disinterested Alsana, he had inquired of an elderly alim in the mosque in Croydon whether it was permitted that a man might… with his hand on his…
Before he had got halfway through this tentative mime, the old scholar had silently passed him a leaflet from a pile on a table and drawn his wrinkled digit firmly underneath point number three.
There are nine acts which invalidate fast:
(i) Eating and drinking
(ii) Sexual intercourse
(iii) Masturbation (istimna), which means self-abuse, resulting in ejaculation
(iv) Ascribing false things to Almighty Allah, or his Prophet, or to the successors of the Holy Prophet
(v) Swallowing thick dust
(vi) Immersing one’s complete head in water
(vii) Remaining in Janabat or Haidh or Nifas till the Adhan for Fajr prayers
(viii) Enema with liquids
(ix) Vomiting
‘And what, Alim,’ Samad had inquired, dismayed, ‘if he is not fasting?’
The old scholar looked grave. ‘Ibn ’Umar was asked about it and is reported to have answered: It is nothing except the rubbing of the male member until its water comes out. It is only a nerve that one kneads.’
Samad had taken heart at this, but the Alim continued. ‘However, he answered in another report: It has been forbidden that one should have intercourse with oneself.’
‘But which is the correct belief? Is it halal or haraam? There are some who say…’ Samad had begun sheepishly, ‘To the pure all things are pure. If one is truthful and firm in oneself, it can harm nobody else, nor offend…’
But the Alim laughed at this. ‘And we know who they are. Allah have pity on the Anglicans! Samad, when the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away,’ said the Alim, shaking his head. ‘And one third of his religion. There is an hadith of the Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon Him! – it is as follows: O Allah, I seek refuge in you from the evil of my hearing, of my sight, of my tongue, of my heart, and of my private parts.’
‘But surely… surely if the man himself is pure, then-’
‘Show me the pure man, Samad! Show me the pure act! Oh, Samad Miah… my advice to you is stay away from your right hand.’
Of course. Samad, being Samad, had employed the best of his Western pragmatism, gone home and vigorously tackled the job with his functional left hand, repeating To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure, until orgasm finally arrived: sticky, sad, depressing. And that ritual continued for some five years, in the little bedroom at the top of the house where he slept alone (so as not to wake Alsana) after crawling back from the restaurant at three in the morning each and every morning; secretly, silently; for he was, believe it or not, tortured by it, by this furtive yanking and squeezing and spilling, by the fear that he was not pure, that his acts were not pure, that he would never be pure, and always his God seemed to be sending him small signs, small warnings, small curses (a urethra infection, 1976, castration dream, 1978, dirty, encrusted sheet discovered but misunderstood by Alsana’s great-aunt, 1979) until 1980 brought crisis point and Samad heard Allah roaring in his ear like the waves in a conch-shell and it seemed time to make a deal.
2. Can’t say fairer than that
The deal was this: on 1 January 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that they can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I’m basically a good man. I don’t slap the salami. Give me a break. I have the odd drink. Can’t say fairer than that…
But of course he was in the wrong religion for compromises, deals, pacts, weaknesses and can’t say fairer than thats. He was supporting the wrong team if it was empathy and concessions he wanted, if he wanted liberal exegesis, if he wanted to be given a break. His God was not like that charming white-bearded bungler of the Anglican, Methodist or Catholic churches. His God was not in the business of giving people breaks. The moment Samad set eyes on the pretty red-haired music teacher Poppy Burt-Jones that July of 1984, he knew finally the truth of this. He knew his God was having his revenge, he knew the game was up, he saw that the contract had been broken, and the sanity clause did not, after all, exist, that temptation had been deliberately and maliciously thrown in his path. In short, all deals were off.
Masturbation recommenced in earnest. Those two months, between seeing the pretty red-haired music teacher once and seeing her again, were the longest, stickiest, smelliest, guiltiest fifty-six days of Samad’s life. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets on his way to work; and this in turn led to a knowledge of every public convenience in London, led to the kind of masturbation that even a fifteen-year-old boy living in the Shetlands might find excessive. His only comfort was that he, like Roosevelt, had made a New Deal: he was going to beat but he wasn’t going to eat. He meant somehow to purge himself of the sights and smells of Poppy Burt-Jones, of the sin of istimna, and, though it wasn’t fasting season and these were the longest days of the year, still no substance passed Samad’s lips between sunrise and sunset, not even, thanks to a little china spitoon, his own saliva. And because there was no food going in the one end, what came out of the other end was so thin and so negligible, so meagre and translucent, that Samad could almost convince himself that the sin was lessened, that one wonderful day he would be able to massage one-eyed-Jack as vigorously as he liked and nothing would come out but air.
But despite the intensity of the hunger – spiritual, physical, sexual – Samad still did his twelve hours daily in the restaurant. Frankly, he found the restaurant about the only place he could bear to be. He couldn’t bear to see his family, he couldn’t bear to go to O’Connell’s, he couldn’t bear to give Archie the satisfaction of seeing him in such a state. By mid August he had upped his working hours to fourteen a day; something in the ritual of it – picking up his basket of pink swan-shaped napkins and following the trail of Shiva’s plastic carnations, correcting the order of a knife or fork, polishing a glass, removing the smear of a finger from the china plates – soothed him. No matter how bad a Muslim he might be, no one could say Samad wasn’t a consummate waiter. He had taken one tedious skill and honed it to perfection. Here at least he could show others the right path: how to disguise a stale onion bhaji, how to make fewer prawns look like more, how to explain to an Australian that he doesn’t want the amount of chilli he thinks he wants. Outside the doors of the Palace he was a masturbator, a bad husband, an indifferent father, with all the morals of an Anglican. But inside here, within these four green and yellow paisley walls, he was a one-handed genius.
‘Shiva! Flower missing. Here.’
It was two weeks into Samad’s New Deal and an average Friday afternoon at the Palace, setting up.
‘You’ve missed this vase, Shiva!’
Shiva wandered over to examine the empty, pencil-thin, aquamarine vase on table nineteen.
‘And there is some lime pickle afloat in the mango chutney in the sauce carousel on table fifteen.’
‘Really?’ said Shiva drily. Poor Shiva; nearly thirty now; not so pretty; still here. It had never happened for him, whatever he thought was going to happen for him. He did leave the restaurant, Samad remembered vaguely, for a short time in 1979 to start up a security firm, but ‘nobody wanted to hire Paki bouncers’ and he had come back, a little less aggressive, a little more despairing, like a broken horse.
‘Yes, Shiva. Really and truly.’
‘And that’s what’s driving you crazy, is it?’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say crazy, no… it is troubling me.’
‘Because something,’ interrupted Shiva, ‘has got right up your arse recently. We’ve all noticed it.’
‘We?’
‘Us. The boys. Yesterday it was a grain of salt in a napkin. The day before Gandhi wasn’t hung straight on the wall. The past week you’ve been acting like Führer-gee,’ said Shiva nodding in Ardashir’s direction. ‘Like a crazy man. You don’t smile. You don’t eat. You’re constantly on everybody’s case. And when the head waiter’s not all there it puts everybody off. Like a football captain.’
‘I am certain I do not know to what you are referring,’ said Samad, tight-lipped, passing him the vase.
‘And I’m certain you do,’ said Shiva provocatively, placing the empty vase back on the table.
‘If I am concerned about something, there is no reason why it should disrupt my work here,’ said Samad, becoming panicked, passing him back the vase. ‘I do not wish to inconvenience others.’
Shiva returned the vase to the table once more. ‘So there is something. Come on, man… I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but we’ve got to stick together in this place. How long have we worked together? Samad Miah?’
Samad looked up suddenly at Shiva, and Shiva saw he was sweating, that he seemed almost dazed. ‘Yes, yes… there is… something.’
Shiva put his hand on Samad’s shoulder. ‘So why don’t we sod the fucking carnation and go and cook you a curry – sun’ll be down in twenty minutes. Come on, you can tell Shiva all about it. Not because I give a fuck, you understand, but I have to work here too and you’re driving me mad, mate.’
Samad, oddly touched by this inelegant offer of a listening ear, laid down his pink swans and followed Shiva into the kitchens.
‘Animal, vegetable, mineral?’
Shiva stood at a work surface and began chopping a breast of chicken into perfect cubes and dousing them in corn flour.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?’ repeated Shiva impatiently. ‘The thing that’s bothering you.’
‘Animal, mainly.’
‘Female?’
Samad dropped on to a nearby stool and hung his head.
‘Female,’ Shiva concluded. ‘Wife?’
‘The shame of it, the pain of it will come to my wife, but no… she is not the cause.’
‘Another bird. My specialist subject.’ Shiva performed the action of rolling a camera, sang the theme to Mastermind and jumped into shot. ‘Shiva Bhagwati, you have thirty seconds on shagging women other than your wife. First question: is it right? Answer: depends. Second question: shall I go to hell?-’
Samad cut in, disgusted. ‘I am not… making love to her.’
‘I’ve started so I’ll finish: shall I go to hell? Answer-’
‘Enough. Forget it. Please, forget that I mentioned anything of this.’
‘Do you want aubergine in this?’
‘No… green peppers are sufficient.’
‘Alrighty,’ said Shiva, throwing a green pepper up in the air and catching it on the tip of his knife. ‘One Chicken Bhuna coming up. How long’s it been going on, then?’
‘Nothing is going on. I met her only once. I barely know her.’
‘So: what’s the damage? A grope? A snog?’
‘A handshake, only. She is my sons’ teacher.’
Shiva tossed the onions and peppers into hot oil. ‘You’ve had the odd stray thought. So what?’
Samad stood up. ‘It is more than stray thoughts, Shiva. My whole body is mutinous, nothing will do what I tell it. Never before have I been subjected to such physical indignities. For example: I am constantly-’
‘Yeah,’ said Shiva, indicating Samad’s crotch. ‘We noticed that too. Why don’t you do the five-knuckle-shuffle before you get to work?’
‘I do… I am… but it makes no difference. Besides, Allah forbids it.’
‘Oh, you should never have got religious, Samad. It don’t suit you.’ Shiva wiped an onion-tear away. ‘All that guilt’s not healthy.’
‘It is not guilt. It is fear. I am fifty-seven, Shiva. When you get to my age, you become… concerned about your faith, you don’t want to leave things too late. I have been corrupted by England, I see that now – my children, my wife, they too have been corrupted. I think maybe I have made the wrong friends. Maybe I have been frivolous. Maybe I have thought intellect more important than faith. And now it seems this final temptation has been put in front of me. To punish me, you understand. Shiva, you know about women. Help me. How can this feeling be possible? I have known of the woman’s existence for no more than a few months, I have spoken to her only once.’
‘As you said: you’re fifty-seven. Mid-life crisis.’
‘Mid-life? What does this mean?’ snapped Samad irritably. ‘Dammit, Shiva, I don’t plan to live for one hundred and fourteen years.’
‘It’s a manner of speaking. You read about it in the magazines these days. It’s when a man gets to a certain point in life, he starts feeling he’s over the hill… and you’re as young as the girl you feel, if you get my meaning.’
‘I am at a moral crossroads in my life and you are talking nonsense to me.’
‘You’ve got to learn this stuff, mate,’ said Shiva, speaking slowly, patiently. ‘Female organism, gee-spot, testicle cancer, the menstropause – mid-life crisis is one of them. Information the modern man needs at his fingertips.’
‘But I don’t wish for such information!’ cried Samad, standing up and pacing the kitchen. ‘That is precisely the point! I don’t wish to be a modern man! I wish to live as I was always meant to! I wish to return to the East!’
‘Ah, well… we all do, don’t we?’ murmured Shiva, pushing the peppers and onion around the pan. ‘I left when I was three. Fuck knows I haven’t made anything of this country. But who’s got the money for the air fare? And who wants to live in a shack with fourteen servants on the payroll? Who knows what Shiva Bagwhati would have turned out like back in Calcutta? Prince or pauper? And who,’ said Shiva, some of his old beauty returning to his face, ‘can pull the West out of ’em once it’s in?’
Samad continued to pace. ‘I should never have come here – that’s where every problem has come from. Never should have brought my sons here, so far from God. Willesden Green! Callingcards in sweetshop windows, Judy Blume in the school, condom on the pavement, Harvest Festival, teacher-temptresses!’ roared Samad, picking items at random. ‘Shiva – I tell you, in confidence: my dearest friend, Archibald Jones, is an unbeliever! Now: what kind of a model am I for my children?’
‘Iqbal, sit down. Be calm. Listen: you just want somebody. People want people. It happens from Delhi to Deptford. And it’s not the end of the world.’
‘Of this, I wish I could be certain.’
‘When are you next seeing her?’
‘We are meeting for school-related business… the first Wednesday of September.’
‘I see. Is she Hindu? Muslim? She ain’t Sikh, is she?’
‘That is the worst of it,’ said Samad, his voice breaking. ‘English. White. English.’
Shiva shook his head. ‘I been out with a lot of white birds, Samad. A lot. Sometimes it’s worked, sometimes it ain’t. Two lovely American girls. Fell head-over-heels for a Parisian stunner. Even spent a year with a Romanian. But never an English girl. Never works. Never.’
‘Why?’ asked Samad, attacking his thumbnail with his teeth and awaiting some fearful answer, some edict from on high. ‘Why not, Shiva Bhagwati?’
‘Too much history,’ was Shiva’s enigmatic answer, as he dished up the Chicken Bhuna. ‘Too much bloody history.’
8.30 a.m., the first Wednesday of September, 1984. Samad, lost in thought somewhat, heard the passenger door of his Austin Mini Metro open and close – far away in the real world – and turned to his left to find Millat climbing in next to him. Or at least a Millat-shaped thing from the neck down: the head replaced by a Tomytronic – a basic computer game that looked like a large pair of binoculars. Within it, Samad knew from experience, a little red car that represented his son was racing a green car and a yellow car along a three-dimensional road of l.e.d.’s.
Millat parked his tiny backside on the brown plastic seat. ‘Ooh! Cold seat! Cold seat! Frozen bum!’
‘Millat, where are Magid and Irie?’
‘Coming.’
‘Coming with the speed of a train or coming with the speed of a snail?’
‘Eeek!’ squealed Millat, in response to a virtual blockade that threatened to send his red car spinning off into oblivion.
‘Please, Millat. Take this off.’
‘Can’t. Need one, oh, two, seven, three points.’
‘Millat, you need to begin to understand numbers. Repeat: ten thousand, two hundred and seventy-three.’
‘Men blousand, poo bumdred and weventy-wee.’
‘Take it off, Millat.’
‘Can’t. I’ll die. Do you want me to die, Abba?’
Samad wasn’t listening. It was imperative that he be at school before nine if this trip were going to have any purpose whatsoever. By nine, she’d be in class. By nine-oh-two, she’d be opening the register with those long fingers, by nine-oh-three she’d be tapping her high-mooned nails on a wooden desk somewhere out of sight.
‘Where are they? Do they want to be late for school?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Are they always this late?’ asked Samad, for this was not his regular routine – the school run was usually Alsana’s or Clara’s assignment. It was for a glimpse of Burt-Jones (though their meeting was only seven hours and fifty-seven minutes away, seven hours and fifty-six minutes away, seven hours…) that he had undertaken the most odious parental responsibility in the book. And he’d had a hard time convincing Alsana there was nothing peculiar in this sudden desire to participate fully in the educational transportation of his and Archie’s offspring:
‘But Samad, you don’t get in the house ’til three in the morning. Are you going peculiar?’
‘I want to see my boys! I want to see Irie! Every morning they are growing up – I never see it! Two inches Millat has grown.’
‘But not at eight thirty in the morning. It is very funnily enough that he grows all the time – praise Allah! It must be some kind of a miracle. What is this about, hmm?’ She dug her fingernail into the overhang of his belly. ‘Some hokery-pokery. I can smell it – like goat’s tongue gone off.’
Ah, Alsana’s culinary nose for guilt, deceit and fear was without equal in the borough of Brent, and Samad was useless in the face of it. Did she know? Had she guessed? These anxieties Samad had slept on all night (when he wasn’t slapping the salami) and then brought to his car first thing so that he might take them out on his children.
‘Where in hell’s name are they?’
‘Hell’s bells!’
‘Millat!’
‘You swore,’ said Millat, taking lap fourteen and getting a five-oh-oh bonus for causing the combustion of Yellow Car. ‘You always do. So does M’ster Jones.’
‘Well, we have special swearing licences.’
Headless Millat needed no face to express his outrage. ‘NO SUCH THING AS-’
‘OK, OK, OK,’ back-pedalled Samad, knowing there is no joy to be had in arguing ontology with a nine-year-old, ‘I have been caught out. No such thing as a licence to swear. Millat, where’s your saxophone? You have orchestra today.’
‘In the boot,’ said Millat, his voice at once incredulous and disgusted: a man who didn’t know the saxophone went in the boot on Sunday night was some kind of a social retard. ‘Why’re you picking us up? M’ster Jones picks us up on Mondays. You don’t know anything about picking us up. Or taking us in.’
‘I’m sure somehow I will muddle through, thank you, Millat. It is hardly rocket science, after all. Where are those two!’ he shouted, beeping the horn, unhinged by his nine-year-old son’s ability to recognize the irregularity in his behaviour. ‘And will you please be taking that damn thing off!’ Samad made a grab for the Tomytronic and pulled it down around Millat’s neck.
‘YOU KILLED ME!’ Millat looked back in the Tomytronic, horrified, and just in time to witness his tiny red alter-ego swerving into the barriers and disappearing in a catastrophic light show of showering yellow sparks. ‘YOU KILLED ME WHEN I WAS WINNING!’
Samad closed his eyes and forced his eyeballs to roll up as far as possible in his head, in the hope that his brain might impact upon them, a self-blinding, if he could achieve it, on a par with that other victim of Western corruption, Oedipus. Think: I want another woman. Think: I’ve killed my son. I swear. I eat bacon. I regularly slap the salami. I drink Guinness. My best friend is a kaffir non-believer. I tell myself if I rub up and down without using hands it does not count. But oh it does count. It all counts on the great counting board of He who counts. What will happen come Mahshar? How will I absolve myself when the Last Judgement comes?
… Click-slam. Click-slam. One Magid, one Irie. Samad opened his eyes and looked in the rear-view mirror. In the back seat were the two children he had been waiting for: both with their little glasses, Irie with her wilful Afro (not a pretty child: she had got her genes mixed up, Archie’s nose with Clara’s awfully buck teeth), Magid with his thick black hair slicked into an unappealing middle-parting. Magid carrying a recorder, Irie with violin. But beyond these basic details, everything was not as it should be. Unless he was very much mistaken, something was rotten in this Mini Metro – something was afoot. Both children were dressed in black from head to toe. Both wore white armbands on their left arms upon which were painted crude renditions of baskets of vegetables. Both had pads of writing paper and a pen tied around their necks with string.
‘Who did this to you?’
Silence.
‘Was it Amma? And Mrs Jones?’
Silence.
‘Magid! Irie! Cat got your tongues?’
More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.
‘Millat, do you know what this is about?’
‘ ’Sboring,’ whined Millat. ‘They’re just being clever, clever, snotty, dumb-bum, Lord Magoo and Mrs Ugly Poo.’
Samad twisted in his car seat to face the two dissenters. ‘Am I meant to ask you what this is about?’
Magid grasped his pen and, in his neat, clinical hand, printed: IF YOU WANT TO, then ripped off the piece of paper and handed it to Samad.
‘A Vow of Silence. I see. You too, Irie? I would have thought you were too sensible for such nonsense.’
Irie scribbled for a moment on her pad and passed the missive forward. WE ARE PROSTESTING.
‘Pros-testing? What are Pros and why are you testing them? Did your mother teach you this word?’
Irie looked like she was going to burst with the sheer force of her explanation, but Magid mimed the zipping up of her mouth, snatched back the piece of paper and crossed out the first s.
‘Oh, I see. Protesting.’
Magid and Irie nodded maniacally.
‘Well, that is indeed fascinating. And I suppose your mothers engineered this whole scenario? The costumes? The notepads?’
Silence.
‘You are quite the political prisoners… not giving a thing away. All right: may one ask what it is that you are protesting about?’
Both children pointed urgently to their armbands.
‘Vegetables? You are protesting for the rights of vegetables?’
Irie held one hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming the answer, while Magid set about his writing pad in a flurry. WE ARE PROTESTING ABOUT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL.
Samad growled, ‘I told you already. I don’t want you participating in that nonsense. It has nothing to do with us, Magid. Why are you always trying to be somebody you are not?’
There was a mutual, silent anger as each acknowledged the painful incident that was being referred to. A few months earlier, on Magid’s ninth birthday, a group of very nice-looking white boys with meticulous manners had turned up on the doorstep and asked for Mark Smith.
‘Mark? No Mark here,’ Alsana had said, bending down to their level with a genial smile. ‘Only the family Iqbal in here. You have the wrong house.’
But before she had finished the sentence, Magid had dashed to the door, ushering his mother out of view.
‘Hi, guys.’
‘Hi, Mark.’
‘Off to the chess club, Mum.’
‘Yes, M – M – Mark,’ said Alsana, close to tears at this final snub, the replacement of ‘Mum’ for ‘Amma’. ‘Do not be late, now.’
‘I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIM IQBAL!’Samadhad yelled after Magid when he returned home that evening and whipped up the stairs like a bullet to hide in his room. ‘AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!’
But this was just a symptom of a far deeper malaise. Magid really wanted to be in some other family. He wanted to own cats and not cockroaches, he wanted his mother to make the music of the cello, not the sound of the sewing machine; he wanted to have a trellis of flowers growing up one side of the house instead of the ever growing pile of other people’s rubbish; he wanted a piano in the hallway in place of the broken door off cousin Kurshed’s car; he wanted to go on biking holidays to France, not day-trips to Blackpool to visit aunties; he wanted the floor of his room to be shiny wood, not the orange and green swirled carpet left over from the restaurant; he wanted his father to be a doctor, not a one-handed waiter; and this month Magid had converted all these desires into a wish to join in with the Harvest Festival like Mark Smith would. Like everybody else would.
BUT WE WANT TO DO IT. OR WE’LL GET A DETENTION. MRS OWENS SAID IT IS TRADITION.
Samad blew his top. ‘Whose tradition?’ he bellowed, as a tearful Magid began to scribble frantically once more. ‘Dammit, you are a Muslim, not a wood sprite! I told you, Magid, I told you the condition upon which you would be allowed. You come with me on haj. If I am to touch that black stone before I die I will do it with my eldest son by my side.’
Magid broke the pencil halfway through his reply, scrawling the second half with blunt lead. IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR!
‘Welcome to the twentieth century. It’s not fair. It’s never fair.’
Magid ripped the next piece of paper from the pad and held it up in front of his father’s face. YOU TOLD HER DAD NOT TO LET HER GO.
Samad couldn’t deny it. Last Tuesday he had asked Archie to show solidarity by keeping Irie at home the week of the festival. Archie had hedged and haggled, fearing Clara’s wrath, but Samad had reassured him: Take a leaf from my book, Archibald. Who wears the trousers in my house? Archie had thought about Alsana, so often found in those lovely silken trousers with the tapered ankle, and of Samad, who regularly wore a long piece of embroidered grey cotton, a lungi, wrapped round his waist, to all intents and purposes, a skirt. But he kept the thought to himself.
WE WON’T SPEAK IF YOU DON’T LET US GO. WE WON’T SPEAK
Great, thought Samad, more blood and sticky guilt on my one good hand.
Samad didn’t know anything about conducting, but he knew what he liked. True, it probably wasn’t very complex, the way she did it, just a simple three/four, just a one-dimensional metronome drawn in the air with her index finger – but aaah, what a joy it was to watch her do it! Her back to him; her bare feet lifting – on every third beat – out of her slip-on shoes; her backside protruding ever so slightly, pressing up against the jeans each time she lunged forward for one of the orchestra’s ham-fisted crescendos – what a joy it was! What a vision! It was all he could do to stop himself rushing at her and carrying her off; it frightened him, the extent to which he could not take his eyes off her. But he had to rationalize: the orchestra needed her – God knows they were never going to get through this adaptation of Swan Lake (more reminiscent of ducks waddling through an oil slick) without her. Yet what a terrific waste it seemed – akin to watching a toddler on a bus mindlessly grabbing the breast of the stranger sitting next to him – what a waste, that something of such beauty should be at the disposal of those too young to know what to do with it. The second he tasted this thought he brought it back up: Samad Miah… surely a man has reached his lowest when he is jealous of the child at a woman’s breast, when he is jealous of the young, of the future… And then, not for the first time that afternoon, as Poppy Burt-Jones lifted out of her shoes once more and the ducks finally succumbed to the environmental disaster, he asked himself: Why, in the name of Allah, am I here? And the answer returned once more with the persistence of vomit: Because I simply cannot be anywhere else.
Tic, tic, tic. Samad was thankful for the sound of baton hitting on music-stand, which interrupted him from these thoughts, these thoughts that were something close to delirium.
‘Now, kids, kids. Stop. Shhh, quieten down. Mouths away from instruments, bows down. Down, Anita. That’s it, yes, right on the floor. Thank you. Now: you’ve probably noticed we have a visitor today.’ She turned to him and he tried hard to find some part of her on which to focus, some inch that did not heat his troubled blood. ‘This is Mr Iqbal, Magid’s and Millat’s father.’
Samad stood up as if he’d been called to attention, draped his wide-lapelled overcoat carefully over his volatile crotch, waved rather lamely, sat back down.
‘Say “Hello, Mr Iqbal.” ’
‘HELLO, MR ICK-BALL,’ came the resounding chorus from all but two of the musicians.
‘Now: don’t we want to play thrice as well because we have an audience?’
‘YES, MISS BURT-JONES.’
‘And not only is Mr Iqbal our audience for today, but he’s a very special audience. It’s because of Mr Iqbal that next week we won’t be playing Swan Lake any more.’
A great roar met this announcement, accompanied by a stray chorus of trumpet hoots, drum rolls, a cymbal.
‘All right, all right, enough. I didn’t expect quite so much joyous approval.’
Samad smiled. She had humour, then. There was wit there, a bit of sharpness – but why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was? He was thinking like a Christian again; he was saying Can’t say fairer than that to the Creator.
‘Instruments down. Yes, you, Marvin. Thank you very much.’
‘What’ll we be doin’ instead, then, Miss?’
‘Well…’ began Poppy Burt-Jones, the same half-coy, half-daring smile he had noticed before. ‘Something very exciting. Next week I want to try to experiment with some Indian music.’
The cymbal player, dubious of what place he would occupy in such a radical change of genre, took it upon himself to be the first to ridicule the scheme. ‘What, you mean that Eeeee E E E A A aaaa E E E eeee A A O oooo music?’ he said, doing a creditable impression of the strains to be found at the beginning of a Hindi musical, or in the back-room of an ‘Indian’ restaurant, along with attendant head movements. The class let out a blast of laughter as loud as the brass section and echoed the gag en masse: Eeee Eaaaoo O O O Aaaah Eeee O O O iiiiiiii… This, along with screeching parodic violins, penetrated Samad’s deep, erotic half-slumber and sent his imagination into a garden, a garden encased in marble where he found himself dressed in white and hiding behind a large tree, spying on a be-saried, bindi-wearing Poppy Burt-Jones, as she wound flirtatiously in and out of some fountains; sometimes visible, sometimes not.
‘I don’t think – ’ began Poppy Burt-Jones, trying to force her voice above the hoo-hah, then, raising it several decibels, ‘I DON’T THINK IT IS VERY NICE TO – ’ and here her voice slipped back to normal as the class registered the angry tone and quietened down. ‘I don’t think it is very nice to make fun of somebody else’s culture.’
The orchestra, unaware that this is what they had been doing, but aware that this was the most heinous crime in the Manor School rule book, looked to their collective feet.
‘Do you? Do you? How would you like it, Sophie, if someone made fun of Queen?’
Sophie, a vaguely retarded twelve-year-old covered from head to toe in that particular rock band’s paraphernalia, glared over a pair of bottle-top spectacles.
‘Wouldn’t like it, Miss.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’
‘No, Miss.’
‘Because Freddie Mercury is from your culture.’
Samad had heard the rumours that ran through the rank and file of the Palace waiters to the effect that this Mercury character was in actual fact a very light-skin Persian called Farookh, whom the head chef remembered from school in Panchgani, near Bombay. But who wished to split hairs? Not wanting to stop the lovely Burt-Jones while she was in something of a flow, Samad kept the information to himself.
‘Sometimes we find other people’s music strange because their culture is different from ours,’ said Miss Burt-Jones solemnly. ‘But that doesn’t mean it isn’t equally good, now does it?’
‘NO, MISS.’
‘And we can learn about each other through each other’s culture, can’t we?’
‘YES, MISS.’
For example, what music do you like, Millat?’
Millat thought for a moment, swung his saxophone to his side and began fingering it like a guitar. ‘Bo-orn to ruuun! Da da da da daaa! Bruce Springsteen, Miss! Da da da da daaa! Baby, we were bo-orn-’
‘Umm, nothing – nothing else? Something you listen to at home, maybe?’
Millat’s face fell, troubled that his answer did not seem to be the right one. He looked over at his father, who was gesticulating wildly behind the teacher, trying to convey the jerky head and hand movements of bharata natyam, the form of dance Alsana had once enjoyed before sadness weighted her heart, and babies tied down her hands and feet.
‘Thriiiii-ller!’ sang Millat, full throated, believing he had caught his father’s gist. ‘Thriii-ller night! Michael Jackson, Miss! Michael Jackson!’
Samad put his head in his hands. Miss Burt-Jones looked queerly at the small child standing on a chair, gyrating and grabbing his crotch before her. ‘OK, thank you, Millat. Thank you for sharing… that.’
Millat grinned. ‘No problem, Miss.’
While the children queued up to exchange twenty pence for two dry digestives and a cup of tasteless squash, Samad followed the light foot of Poppy Burt-Jones like a predator – into the music cupboard, a tiny room, windowless, with no means of escape, and full of instruments, filing cabinets overbrimming with sheetmusic, and a scent Samad had thought hers but now identified as the maturing leather of violin cases mixed with the mellowing odour of cat-gut.
‘This,’ said Samad, spotting a desk beneath a mountain of paper, ‘is where you work?’
Poppy blushed. ‘Tiny, isn’t it? Music budgets get cut every year until this year there was nothing left to cut from. It’s got to the point where they’re putting desks in cupboards and calling them offices. If it wasn’t for the GLC, there wouldn’t even be a desk.’
‘It is certainly small,’ said Samad, scanning the room desperately for some spot where he might stand that would put her out of arm’s reach. ‘One might almost say, claustrophobic.’
‘I know, it’s awful – but won’t you sit down?’
Samad looked for the chair she might be referring to.
‘Oh God! I’m sorry! It’s here.’ She swept paper, books and rubbish on to the floor with one hand, revealing a perilous-looking stool. ‘I made it – but it’s pretty safe.’
‘You excel in carpentry?’ inquired Samad, searching once again for more good reasons to commit a bad sin. ‘An artisan as well as a musician?’
‘No, no, no – I went to a few night classes – nothing special. I made that and a foot stool, and the foot stool broke. I’m no – do you know I can’t think of a single carpenter!’
‘There is always Jesus.’
‘But I can’t very well say “I’m no Jesus”… I mean, obviously I’m not, but for other reasons.’
Samad took his wobbly seat as Poppy Burt-Jones went to sit behind her desk. ‘Meaning you are not a good person?’
Samad saw that he had flustered her with the accidental solemnity of the question; she drew her fingers through her fringe, fiddled with a small tortoiseshell button on her blouse, laughed shakily. ‘I like to think I’m not all bad.’
‘And that is enough?’
‘Well… I…’
‘Oh my dear, I apologize…’ began Samad. ‘I was not being serious, Miss Burt-Jones.’
‘Well… Let’s say I’m no Mr Chippendale – that’ll do.’
‘Yes,’ said Samad kindly, thinking to himself that she had far better legs than a Queen Anne chair, ‘that will do.’
‘Now: where were we?’
Samad leant a little over the desk, to face her. ‘Were we somewhere, Miss Burt-Jones?’
(He used his eyes; he remembered people used to say that it was his eyes – that new boy in Delhi, Samad Miah, they said, he has eyes to die for.)
‘I was looking – looking – I was looking for my notes – where are my notes?’
She began rifling through the catastrophe of her desk, and Samad leant back once more on his stool, taking what little satisfaction he could from the fact that her fingers, if he was not mistaken, appeared to be trembling. Had there been a moment, just then? He was fifty-seven – it was a good ten years since he’d had a moment – he was not at all sure he would recognize a moment if one came along. You old man, he told himself as he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief, you old fool. Leave now – leave before you drown in your own guilty excrescence (for he was sweating like a pig), leave before you make it worse. But was it possible? Was it possible that this past month – the month that he had been squeezing and spilling, praying and begging, making deals and thinking, thinking always about her – that she had been thinking of him?
‘Oh! While I’m looking… I remember there was something I wanted to ask you.’
Yes! said the anthropomorphized voice that had taken up residence in Samad’s right testicle. Whatever the question the answer is yes yes yes. Yes, we will make love upon this very table, yes, we will burn for it, and yes, Miss Burt-Jones, yes, the answer is inevitably, inescapably, YES. Yet somehow, out there where conversation continued, in the rational world four feet above his ball-bag, the answer turned out to be – ‘Wednesday.’
Poppy laughed. ‘No, I don’t mean what day it is – I don’t look that ditsy do I? No, I meant what day is it; I mean, for Muslims. Only I saw Magid was in some kind of costume, and when I asked him what it was for he wouldn’t speak. I was terribly worried that I’d offended him somehow.’
Samad frowned. It is odious to be reminded of one’s children when one is calculating the exact shade and rigidity of a nipple that could so assert itself through bra and shirt.
‘Magid? Please do not worry yourself about Magid. I am sure he was not offended.’
‘So I was right,’ said Poppy gleefully. ‘Is it like a type of, I don’t know, vocal fasting?’
‘Er… yes, yes,’ stumbled Samad, not wishing to divulge his family dilemma, ‘it is a symbol of the Qur’ān’s… assertion that the day of reckoning would first strike us all unconscious. Silent, you see. So, so, so the eldest son of the family dresses in black and, umm, disdains speech for a… a period of… of time as a process of – of purification.’
Dear God.
‘I see. That’s just fascinating. And Magid is the elder?’
‘By two minutes.’
Poppy smiled. ‘Only just, then.’
‘Two minutes,’ said Samad patiently, because he was speaking to one with no knowledge of the impact such small periods of time had amounted to throughout the history of the Iqbal family, ‘made all the difference.’
‘And does the process have a name?’
‘Amar durbol lagche.’
‘What does it mean?’
Literal translation: I feel weak. It means, Miss Burt-Jones, that every strand of me feels weakened by the desire to kiss you.
‘It means,’ said Samad aloud, without missing a beat, ‘closed-mouth worship of the Creator.’
‘Amar durbol lagche. Wow,’ said Poppy Burt-Jones.
‘Indeed,’ said Samad Miah.
Poppy Burt-Jones leant forward in her chair. ‘I don’t know… To me, it’s just like this incredible act of self-control. We just don’t have that in the West – that sense of sacrifice – I just have so much admiration for the sense your people have of abstinence, of self-restraint.’
At which point Samad kicked the stool from under him like a man hanging himself, and met the loquacious lips of Poppy Burt-Jones with his own feverish pair.