Alsana thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘Maybe, Samad Miah.’
‘What do you mean, “maybe”?’
‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’
Alsana had decided to stop speaking directly to her husband. Through the next eight years she would determine never to say yes to him, never to say no to him, but rather to force him to live like she did – never knowing, never being sure, holding Samad’s sanity to ransom, until she was paid in full with the return of her number-one-son-eldest-by-two-minutes, until she could once more put a chubby hand through his thick hair. That was her promise, that was her curse upon Samad, and it was exquisite revenge. At times it very nearly drove him to the brink, to the kitchen-knife stage, to the medicine cabinet. But Samad was the kind of person too stubborn to kill himself if it meant giving someone else satisfaction. He hung on in there. Alsana turning over in her sleep, muttering, ‘Just bring him back, Mr Idiot… if it’s driving you nutso, just bring my baby back.’
But there was no money to bring Magid back even if Samad had been inclined to wave the white dhoti. He learnt to live with it. It got to the point where if somebody said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Samad in the street or in the restaurant, he hardly knew how to respond, he had come to forget what those two elegant little signifiers meant. He never heard them from Alsana’s lips. Whatever the question in the Iqbal house, there would never again be a straight answer:
‘Alsana, have you seen my slippers?’
‘Possibly, Samad Miah.’
‘What time is it?’
‘It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four.’
‘Alsana, where have you put the remote control?’
‘It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa.’
And so it went.
Sometime after the May cyclone, the Iqbals received a letter from their elder-son-by-two-minutes, written in a careful hand on exercise paper and folded around a recent photograph. It was not the first time he had written, but Samad saw something different in this letter, something that excited him and validated the unpopular decision he had made; some change of tone, some suggestion of maturity, of growing Eastern wisdom; and, having read it carefully in the garden first, he took great pleasure in bringing it back to the kitchen and reading it aloud to Clara and Alsana, who were drinking peppermint tea.
‘Listen: here he says, “Yesterday, grandfather hit Tamim (he is the houseboy) with a belt until his bottom was redder than a tomato. He said Tamim had stolen some candles (it’s true. I saw him do it!), and this was what he got for it. He says sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it is Allah’s turn or his own. I hope one day I will be a wise man.” Do you hear that? He wants to be a wise man. How many kids in that school do you know who want to be wise men?’
‘Maybe none, Samad Miah. Maybe all.’
Samad scowled at his wife and continued, ‘And here, here where he talks about his nose: “It seems to me that a vase should not be in such a silly place where it can fall and break a boy’s nose. It should be somebody’s fault and somebody should be punished (but not a bottom smack unless they were small and not a grown-up. If they were younger than twelve). When I grow up I think I should like to make sure vases are not put in such silly places where they can be dangerous and I would complain about other dangerous things too (by the way, my nose is fine now!).” See?’
Clara frowned. ‘See what?’
‘Clearly he disapproves of iconography in the mosque, he dislikes all heathen, unnecessary, dangerous decoration! A boy like that is destined for greatness, isn’t he?’
‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’
‘Maybe he’ll go into government, maybe the law,’ suggested Clara.
‘Rubbish! My son is for God, not men. He is not fearful of his duty. He is not fearful to be a real Bengali, a proper Muslim. Here he tells me the goat in the photograph is dead. “I helped to kill the goat, Abba,” he says. “It kept on moving some time after we had split it in two.” Is that a boy who is fearful?’
It clearly being incumbent upon someone to say no, Clara said it with little enthusiasm and reached for the photograph Samad was passing her. There was Magid, dressed in his customary grey, standing next to the doomed goat with the old house behind him.
‘Oh! Look at his nose! Look at the break. He’s got a Roman nose, now. He looks like a little aristocrat, like a little Englishman. Look, Millat.’ Clara put the photo under Millat’s smaller, flatter nose. ‘You two don’t look so much like twins any more.’
‘He looks,’ said Millat after a cursory glance, ‘like a chief.’
Samad, never au fait with the language of the Willesden streets, nodded soberly and patted his son’s hair. ‘It is good that you see the difference between you two boys, Millat, now rather than later.’ Samad glared at Alsana as she spun an index finger in a circle by her temple, as she tapped the side of her head: crazee, nutso. ‘Others may scoff, but you and I know that your brother will lead others out of the wilderness. He will be a leader of tribes. He is a natural chief.’
Millat laughed so loud at this, so hard, so uncontrollably, that he lost his footing, slipped on a wash cloth and broke his nose against the sink.
Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame while the television underneath him spewed out all the shit of the eighties – Irish bombs, English riots, transatlantic stalemates – above which mess the child rose untouchable and unstained, elevated to the status of ever smiling Buddha, imbued with serene Eastern contemplation; capable of anything, a natural leader, a natural Muslim, a natural chief – in short, nothing but an apparition. A ghostly daguerreotype formed from the quicksilver of the father’s imagination, preserved by the salt solution of maternal tears. This son stood silent, distant and was ‘presumed well’, like one of Her Majesty’s colonial island outposts, stuck in an eternal state of original naivety, perpetual pre-pubescence. This son Samad could not see. And Samad had long learnt to worship what he could not see.
As for the son he could see, the one who was under his feet and in his hair, well, it is best not to get Samad started up on that subject, the subject of The Trouble with Millat, but here goes: he is the second son, late like a bus, late like cheap postage, the slowcoach, the catch-up-kid, losing that first race down the birth canal, and now simply a follower by genetic predisposition, by the intricate design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up, not in those all-seeing parabolic mirrors, not in those glassy globes of the godhead, not in his father’s eyes.
Now, a more melancholy child than Millat, a more deep-thinking child, might have spent the rest of his life hunting these two minutes and making himself miserable, chasing the elusive quarry, laying it finally at his father’s feet. But what his father said about him did not concern Millat all that much: he knew himself to be no follower, no chief, no wanker, no sell-out, no fuckwit – no matter what his father said. In the language of the street Millat was a rudeboy, a badman, at the forefront, changing image as often as shoes; sweet-as, safe, wicked, leading kids up hills to play football, downhill to rifle fruit machines, out of schools, into video shops. In Rocky Video, Millat’s favourite haunt, run by an unscrupulous coke-dealer, you got porn when you were fifteen, 18s when you were eleven, and snuff movies under the counter for five quid. Here was where Millat really learnt about fathers. Godfathers, blood-brothers, pacinodeniros, men in black who looked good, who talked fast, who never waited a (mutherfuckin’) table, who had two, fully functioning, gun-toting hands. He learnt that you don’t need to live under flood, under cyclone, to get a little danger, to be a wise man. You go looking for it. Aged twelve, Millat went out looking for it, and though Willesden Green is no Bronx, no South Central, he found a little, he found enough. He was arsey and mouthy, he had his fierce good looks squashed tightly inside him like a jack-in-a-box set to spring aged thirteen, at which point he graduated from leader of zit-faced boys to leader of women. The Pied Piper of Willesden Green, smitten girls trailing behind him, tongues out, breasts pert, falling into pools of heartbreak… and all because he was the BIGGEST and the BADDEST, living his young life in CAPITALS: he smoked first, he drank first, he even lost it – IT! – aged thirteen and a half. OK, so he didn’t FEEL much or TOUCH much, it was MOIST and CONFUSING, he lost IT without even knowing where IT went, but he still lost IT because there was no doubt, NONE, that he was the best of the rest, on any scale of juvenile delinquency he was the shining light of the teenage community, the DON, the BUSINESS, the DOG’S GENITALIA, a street boy, a leader of tribes. In fact, the only trouble with Millat was that he loved trouble. And he was good at it. Wipe that. He was great.