Jamila tried to recruit me to her cadre for training but I couldn’t get up in the morning. ‘Why do we have to start training at eight?’ I whined.
‘Cuba wasn’t won by getting up late, was it? Fidel and Che didn’t get up at two in the afternoon, did they? They didn’t even have time to shave!’
Anwar didn’t like these training sessions of hers. He thought she was meeting boys at these karate classes and long runs through the city. Sometimes she’d be running through Deptford and there, in a doorway with his collar turned up, his hairy nose just visible, would be Baby Face watching her, turning away in disgust when she blew Daddy a kiss.
Soon after Daddy’s hairy nose had been blown a kiss that didn’t reach its destination, Anwar got a phone installed and started to lock himself in the living room with it for hours on end. The rest of the time the phone was locked. Jamila had to use a phone-box. Anwar had secretly decided it was time Jamila got married.
Through these calls Anwar’s brother in Bombay had fixed up Jamila with a boy eager to come and live in London as Jamila’s husband. Except that this boy wasn’t a boy. He was thirty. As a dowry the ageing boy had demanded a warm winter overcoat from Moss Bros., a colour television and, mysteriously, an edition of the complete works of Conan Doyle. Anwar agreed to this, but consulted Dad. Dad thought the Conan Doyle demand very strange. ‘What normal Indian man would want such a thing? The boy must be investigated further – immediately!’
But Anwar ignored Dad’s feeling. There had been friction between Anwar and Dad over the question of children before. Dad was very proud that he had two sons. He was convinced it meant he had ‘good seed’. As Anwar had only produced one daughter it meant that he had ‘weak seed’. Dad loved pointing this out to Anwar. ‘Surely, yaar, you have potentially more than one girl and one girl only in your entire lifetime’s seed-production, eh?’
‘Fuck it,’ Anwar replied, rattled. ‘It’s my wife’s fault, you bastard. Her womb has shrivelled like a prune.’
Anwar had told Jamila what he’d decided: she was to marry the Indian and he would come over, slip on his overcoat and wife and live happily ever after in her muscly arms.
Then Anwar would rent a flat nearby for the newly-weds. ‘Big enough for two children,’ he said, to a startled Jamila. He took her hand and added, ‘Soon you’ll be very happy.’ Her mother said, ‘We’re both very glad for you, Jamila.’
Not surprisingly for someone with Jamila’s temper and Angela Davis’s beliefs, Jamila wasn’t too pleased.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked, as we walked.
‘Creamy, I’d have walked out there and then. I’d have got the Council to take me into care. Anything. I’d have lived with friends, done a runner. Except for my mother. He takes it out on Jeeta. He abuses her.’
‘Hits her? Really?’
‘He used to, yes, until I told him I’d cut off his hair with a carving knife if he did it again. But he knows how to make her life terrible without physical violence. He’s had many years of practice.’
‘Well,’ I said, satisfied that there wasn’t much more to be said on the matter, ‘in the end he can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.’
She turned on me. ‘But he can! You know my father well, but not that well. There’s something I haven’t told you. Come with me. Come on, Karim,’ she insisted.
We went back to their shop, where she quickly made me a kebab and chapati, this time with onions and green chillis. The kebab sweated brown juice over the raw onions. The chapati scalded my fingers: it was lethal.
‘Bring it upstairs, will you, Karim?’ she said.
Her mother called through to us from the till. ‘No, Jamila, don’t take him up there!’ And she banged down a bottle of milk and frightened a customer.
‘What’s wrong, Auntie Jeeta?’ I asked. She was going to cry.
‘Come on,’ Jamila said.
I was about to wedge as much of the kebab as I could into my gob without puking when Jamila pulled me upstairs, her mother shouting after her, ‘Jamila, Jamila!’
By now I wanted to go home; I’d had enough of family dramas. If I wanted all that Ibsen stuff I could have stayed indoors. Besides, with Jamila’s help I’d wanted to work out what I thought of Dad and Eva, whether I should be open-minded or not. Now there was no chance of contemplation.
Half-way up the stairs I smelled something rotten. It was feet and arseholes and farts swirling together, a mingling of winds which hurried straight for my broad nostrils. Their flat was always a junk shop, with the furniture busted and fingerprints all over the doors and the wallpaper about a hundred years old and fag butts sprinkled over every surface, but it never stank, except of Jeeta’s wonderful cooking, which went on permanently in big burnt pans.
Anwar was sitting on a bed in the living room, which wasn’t his normal bed in its normal place. He was wearing a frayed and mouldy-looking pyjama jacket, and I noticed that his toenails rather resembled cashew nuts. For some reason his mouth was hanging open and he was panting, though he couldn’t have run for a bus in the last five minutes. He was unshaven, and thinner than I’d ever seen him. His lips were dry and flaking. His skin looked yellow and his eyes were sunken, each of them seeming to lie in a bruise. Next to the bed was a dirty encrusted pot with a pool of piss in it. I’d never seen anyone dying before, but I was sure Anwar qualified. Anwar was staring at my steaming kebab as though it were a torture instrument. I chewed speedily to get rid of it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he’s sick?’ I whispered to Jamila.
But I wasn’t convinced that he was simply sick, since the pity in her face was overlaid with fury. She was glaring at her old man, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, nor mine after I’d walked in. He stared straight in front of him as he always did at the television screen, except that it wasn’t on.
‘He’s not ill,’ she said.
‘No?’ I said, and then, to him, ‘Hallo, Uncle Anwar. How are you, boss?’
His voice was changed: it was reedy and weak now. ‘Take that damn kebab out of my nose,’ he said. ‘And take that damn girl with you.’
Jamila touched my arm. ‘Watch.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned towards him. ‘Please, please stop all this.’
‘Get lost!’ he croaked at her. ‘You’re not my daughter. I don’t know who you are.’
‘For all our sakes, please stop it! Here, Karim who loves you –’
‘Yes, yes!’ I said.
‘He’s brought you a lovely tasty kebab!’
‘Why is he eating it himself, then?’ Anwar said, reasonably. She snatched the kebab from me and waved it in front of her father. At this my poor kebab started to disintegrate, bits of meat and chilli and onion scattering over the bed. Anwar ignored it.
‘What’s going on here?’ I asked her.
‘Look at him, Karim, he hasn’t eaten or drunk anything for eight days! He’ll die, Karim, won’t he, if he doesn’t eat anything!’
‘Yes. You’ll cop it, boss, if you don’t eat your grub like everyone else.’
‘I won’t eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get my family to obey me by exactly the same.’
‘What do you want her to do?’
‘To marry the boy I have selected with my brother.’
‘But it’s old-fashioned, Uncle, out of date,’ I explained. ‘No one does that kind of thing now. They just marry the person they’re into, if they bother to get married at all.’
This homily on contemporary morals didn’t exactly blow his mind.
‘That is not our way, boy. Our way is firm. She must do what I say or I will die. She will kill me.’
Jamila started to punch the bed.
‘It’s so stupid! What a waste of time and life!’