‘It’ll be nice to see Mrs Kamal,’ said Rohinka, sweetly. Ahmed swivelled around and glared at her. But Rohinka – it was part of what made her sexy – was a genius at mock-innocence. She fluttered and dimpled at Ahmed from her place by the sink. He gave a snort.
Shahid realised that he was sitting with his head in his hands. His mother would without question be on at him about getting married, an arranged marriage at that – she might well have a candidate in mind. If she didn’t have a specific person she would certainly have a plan. She would bully him into agreeing to come to Lahore to assess suitable candidates. He had done this once before, two years ago, and it was excruciating, like a sustained assault on his sense of himself, on everything he wanted to be as a man, a free spirit, a traveller, a citizen of the world, a man who had seen and done things but was still young; sitting in a series of Lahore rooms with a series of variously embarrassed Pakistani women, some of them as reluctant as him, some (and this was much worse) evidently quite keen on the idea. At this point, it would be hard to find anything he more exactly didn’t want to do than go to Pakistan and leave Iqbal in his flat with his smelly feet and his opinions… Then Shahid had an idea. Maybe he could use the fact that he had to go to Lahore as a way of getting Iqbal out of his flat…
‘She’ll be on at me. What have I done to deserve this?’ said Shahid. He would like to say more – would like to say much more – but it was hard to, because Rohinka and Ahmed had had an arranged marriage, so it would be grossly insulting to go into his objections. And there was also the difficult-to-ignore fact that their marriage was a self-evident roaring success. Ahmed loved Rohinka and she (less explicably in Shahid’s view) loved him back; and she was also seriously foxy. So arranged marriages were outdated, wrong in principle, demeaning, no better than a form of licensed prostitution (but then so was Western marriage), patriarchal, sexist, and yet on the other hand if you ended up with someone like Rohinka…
‘Aren’t you going to denounce arranged marriages?’ asked Ahmed, guessing what Shahid was thinking, since Mrs Kamal plus Shahid meant a guaranteed row on exactly this subject. Shahid thought about saying, not everybody is as lucky as you – but he didn’t, because it was true, and would give Ahmed too much pleasure.
‘Ahmed, how much weight would you say you’ve put on since you got married?’ said Shahid. ‘It must be at least ten kilos, wouldn’t you say? Usman, don’t you think our brother is about twenty-five pounds fatter?’
Rohinka returned from clattering around at the far end of the room with a tray of Indian sweets – kulfi, gulab jamun. Mohammed slapped the sides of his high chair to make sure his interest in this new development was generally known. ‘Boys, boys,’ said Rohinka, in a voice which made it clear that she hadn’t been really listening, and beneath that, implied that male conversation never really advanced the state of knowledge much anyway, but should be tolerated all the same, as long as it didn’t get in the way of important things.
‘I’ll go through and get some Häagen-Dazs from the shop,’ said Ahmed. He wanted some ice cream, and he was also giving in to the need to check on Hashim. Fatima got down from the table and came over to take his hand. She had strong opinions about ice cream.
36
The Refuge was a double-fronted late Victorian house in a Tooting side street. It was near the Common, near the Tube, not too far from the Lido, and handy for shops and amenities. There was a kitchen and two communal areas, one of them dominated by a large old cathode-ray television, the other furnished with battered sofas. The garden was untidy but functioning; it was possible to sit out there, but hardly anyone ever did. There were eight bedrooms, with eight people staying in them, including a house manager who was a paid employee of the charity. If it had been a domestic residence it would have been worth upwards of a million pounds. Instead it was a hostel for stateless failed asylum-seekers, and locals felt, bitterly, that it had a suppressing effect on house prices.
By now, Quentina had lived there for the best part of two years, and she had a good acquaintance with the range of types who came into contact with the charity. All of them were damaged by their experiences, some grievously, and many of them could barely function. Some were too angry: their rage was on a hair-trigger. These were the likeliest to get into real trouble. A Sudanese woman from the Refuge who kept getting into fights over perceived insults – proper fist fights, like a man – had gone to jail for three months for assault, after she punched a woman who she thought had jostled her while they were both sheltering from the rain under a butcher shop’s awning. She would normally have been deported at the end of her sentence, but thanks to the Human Rights Act she couldn’t be because it wasn’t safe for her to go back to Sudan, so when she came out of prison she had been taken in by another branch of the Refuge, this time in North London. Quentina did not foresee a happy ending for her. Other ‘clients’ were defeated by the burden of their own grievances and could think of very little else. The symptoms of this condition were silence, and then, in the face of kindness or interest or understanding, torrential unburdening. Ragah, the Kurd, was like that. She had no mode in between brooding on her losses and telling all about them, at length, in English which as she got more excited Quentina found impossible to understand, and which in any case she would often drop to lapse into Kurdish, apparently without realising that she was doing so. Ragah had lost her family, Quentina gathered, but that was all she knew, because beyond that she lost the thread of the story. By now she could hardly ask.
Silence was hard to diagnose because it was such a common symptom. In their heads, some of the refugees were still in whichever country they had left; they hadn’t yet caught up with their own lives. Others were culture-shocked and had no idea what to make of London; they were blank. That was usually OK because it usually wore off with time. Others still were silent because they were depressed. There had been only one suicide recently in the South London refuge, an Afghan who had hung herself in the bathroom. That was the week after Quentina arrived. One suicide in two years was good going. Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover – their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.
Quentina didn’t fit any of these categories. Perhaps what was decisive was that she was fully resolved to take part in her new life in London. She was determined to make a go of it. At the same time she was not planning to be in London for ever. Mugabe could not live for ever. Chinese peasants might once have thought Chairman Mao was immortal, but no one except the tyrant himself believed that Mugabe was. If he died the whole system might collapse overnight, or there might be a transition period, but Quentina felt sure that anyone who had had to flee him would be welcome back. So Quentina, however hard things currently were, felt sure that she had a future, and consequently she was the client of the Refuge who functioned best, a fact which was openly acknowledged by the charity workers and the other clients. She was not angry, she was not insane, she had a job (albeit an illegal one), she spoke good English, people could talk to her. As a result she had an informal but real role as a liaison and go-between for the refugees and the charity that was helping them. Quentina liked that: it appealed to the side of her that enjoyed administering and running things, getting involved. When the small committee of the charity had its weekly meeting to talk things over, she would be present as the clients’ representative. Martin, the house manager, a shy Northerner with a bossy streak, would chair the meetings. New clients didn’t often arrive at the Refuge – because to do so someone would have to leave, which they only did when they won a judgment allowing them leave to legally stay, which never happened, or they were forcibly deported, which had happened twice in two years. When new clients did arrive, they would be given a case worker to look after them, and then Quentina too would be asked to keep an eye on them. So Quentina was unofficially the leader of the Refuge, or anyway of its clients.