‘Things are really going to change round here with another man about the place,’ he told me jubilantly. ‘The shop needs decorating. I want some boy who can climb a ladder! Plus I need someone to carry boxes from the wholesaler. When Changez arrives he can run the shop with Jamila. I can take that woman’ – he meant his wife – ‘Out somewhere beautiful.’
‘Where beautiful will you take her, Uncle, to the opera? I heard there’s a good production of Rigoletto on at the moment.’
‘To an Indian restaurant that a friend of mine owns.’
‘And where else beautiful?’
‘To the zoo, dammit! Any place she wants to go!’ Anwar became sentimental, as unfeeling people often do. ‘She has worked so hard all her life. She deserves a little break. She has given us all so much love. So much love. If only the women could grasp my points of view. They will begin to understand only when the boy gets here. Then they will see, eh?’
I also learned in the store-room-of-secrets that Anwar was looking forward to having grandchildren. According to Anwar, Jamila would become pregnant immediately, and soon there’d be little Anwars running all over the place. Anwar would attend to the kids’ cultural upbringing and take them to school and mosque while Changez was, presumably, redecorating the shop, moving boxes and impregnating my girlfriend Jamila again. As Anwar and I had these conversations Jamila liked to open the door to the store-room and just point the black barrel-ends of her eyes at me as if I were sitting with Eichmann.
Upstairs in the flat, Jeeta and Jamila had prepared a steaming, delicious feast of keema and aloo and all, and rice, chapatis and nan. There was Tizer and cream soda and beer and lassi to drink, all of it laid out on white tablecloths with tiny paper napkins for all of us. You wouldn’t have believed from the pristine state of the scrubbed room overlooking the main road to London that a man had tried to starve himself to death in it only a few weeks before.
It was hell on earth at first, the party, with everyone awkward and self-conscious. In the silence, Uncle Anwar, Oscar Wilde himself, made three attempts to jump-start the conversation, all attempts stalling. I examined the threadbare carpet. Even Helen, who looked around at everything with great sympathetic curiosity and could usually be relied upon for cheer and irritating opinion, said nothing but ‘yum-yum’ twice and looked out of the window.
Changez and Jamila sat apart, and although I tried to catch them looking at each other, I can guarantee that not a single surreptitious glance was exchanged by the future bed-mates. What would Changez make of his wife when he finally looked at her? The days of tight tops and mini-skirts for women were gone. Jamila was wearing what looked like several sacks: long skirts, perhaps three, one over the other, and a long smock in faded green beneath which the flat arcs of her braless breasts were visible to the slightly interested. She had on her usual pair of National Health glasses, and on her feet a rather unrelenting pair of Dr Martens in brown, which gave the impression that she was about to take up hill-walking. She was crazy about these clothes, delighted to have found an outfit she could wear every day, wanting, like a Chinese peasant, never to have to think about what to put on. A simple idea like this, so typical of Jamila, who had little physical vanity, did seem eccentric to other people, and certainly made me laugh. The one person it didn’t seem eccentric to, because he didn’t notice it, was her father. He really knew little about Jamila. If someone had asked him who she voted for, what the names of her women friends were, what she liked in life, he couldn’t have answered. It was as if, in some strange way, it was beneath his dignity to take an interest in her. He didn’t see her. There were just certain ways in which this woman who was his daughter had to behave.
Eventually four relatives of Anwar’s turned up with more drink and food, and gifts of cloth and pots. One of the men gave Jamila a wig; there was a sandalwood garland for Changez. Soon the room was noisy and busy and animated.
Anwar was getting to know Changez. He didn’t seem in the least displeased with him, and smiled and nodded and touched him constantly. Some time passed before Anwar noticed that his much-anticipated son-in-law wasn’t the rippling physical specimen he’d expected. They weren’t speaking English, so I didn’t know exactly what was said, but Anwar, after a glance, followed by a concerned closer study, followed by a little step to one side for a better angle, pointed anxiously at Changez’s arm.
Changez waggled the hand a bit and laughed without self-consciousness; Anwar tried to laugh too. Changez’s left arm was withered in some way, and stuck on the end of the attenuated limb was a lump of hard flesh the size of a golf ball, a small fist, with only a tiny thumb projecting from the solid mass where there should have been nimble, shop-painting, box-carrying fingers. It looked as if Changez had stuck his hand into a fire and had had flesh, bone and sinew melted together. Though I knew a remarkable plumber with only a stump for a hand who worked for Uncle Ted, I couldn’t see Changez decorating Anwar’s shop with one arm. In fact, had he four Mohammed Ali arms I doubted if he’d know what to do with a paintbrush, or with a toothbrush for that matter.
If Anwar now perhaps had reason for entertaining minor reservations about Changez (though Changez seemed delighted by Anwar, and laughed at everything he said even when it was serious), this could be nothing compared to Jamila’s antipathy. Did Changez have any idea of the reluctance with which his bride-to-be, now moving across to her bookshelf, picking up a book by Kate Millett, staring into it for a few minutes and replacing it after a reproachful and pitying glance from her mother, would be exchanging vows with him?
Jamila had phoned me the day after Helen and I fucked in Anerley Park to tell me of her decision. That morning I was so ecstatic about my triumph in seducing the dog-owner’s daughter that I’d completely forgotten about Jamila’s big decision. She sounded distant and cold as she told me she would marry the man her father had selected from millions, and that was the end of it. She would survive, she said. Not one more word on the subject would she tolerate.
I kept thinking to myself, Typical Jamila, that’s exactly what she would do, as if this were something that happened every day. But she was marrying Changez out of perversity, I was sure of it. We lived in rebellious and unconventional times, after all. And Jamila was interested in anarchists and situationists and Weathermen, and cut all that stuff out of the papers and showed it to me. Marrying Changez would be, in her mind, a rebellion against rebellion, creative novelty itself. Everything in her life would be disrupted, experimented with. She claimed to be doing it only for Jeeta, but there was real, wilful contrariness in it, I suspected.
I sat next to Changez when we started to eat. Helen watched from across the room, unable to eat, virtually retching at the sight of Changez balancing a plate on his knee, garland trailing in his dal, as he ate with his good hand, nimbly using the fingers he had. Maybe he’d never used a knife and fork. Of course, Jamila would be entertained by that. She’d crow all over the place to her friends, ‘Do you know my husband has never been in contact with cutlery before?’