‘You’re a very sexy girl, Irie,’ said Maxine sweetly.
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Trust her, she’s a raving dyke,’ said Neena, ruffling Maxine’s hair affectionately and giving her a kiss. ‘But the truth is the Barbra Streisand cut you’ve got there ain’t doing shit for you. The Afro was cool, man. It was wicked. It was yours.’
Suddenly Alsana appeared at the doorway with an enormous plate of biscuits and a look of intense suspicion. Maxine blew her a kiss.
‘Biscuits, Irie? Come and have some biscuits. With me. In the kitchen.’
Neena groaned. ‘Don’t panic, Auntie. We’re not enlisting her into the cult of Sappho.’
‘I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know such things.’
‘We’re watching television.’
It was Madonna on the TV screen, working her hands around two conically shaped breasts.
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ sniped Alsana, glaring at Maxine. ‘Biscuits, Irie?’
‘I’d like some biscuits,’ murmured Maxine with a flutter of her extravagant eyelashes.
‘I am certain,’ said Alsana slowly and pointedly, translating code, ‘I don’t have the kind you like.’
Neena and Maxine fell about all over again.
‘Irie?’ said Alsana, indicating the kitchen with a grimace. Irie followed her out.
‘I’m as liberal as the next person,’ complained Alsana, once they were alone. ‘But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear that word in this house again,’ said Samad deadpan, stepping in from the garden and laying his weeding gloves on the table.
‘Which one?’
‘Either. I am trying my level best to run a godly house.’
Samad spotted a figure at his kitchen table, frowned, decided it was indeed Irie Jones and began on the little routine the two of them had going. ‘Hello, Miss Jones. And how is your father?’
Irie shrugged on cue. ‘You see him more than we do. How’s God?’
‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Have you seen my good-for-nothing son recently?’
‘Not recently.’
‘What about my good son?’
‘Not for years.’
‘Will you tell the good-for-nothing he’s a good-for-nothing when you find him?’
‘I’ll do my best, Mr Iqbal.’
‘God bless you.’
‘Gesundheit.’
‘Now, if you will excuse me.’ Samad reached for his prayer mat from the top of the fridge and left the room.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked Irie, noticing that Samad had delivered his lines with less than enthusiasm. ‘He seems, I don’t know, sad.’
Alsana sighed. ‘He is sad. He feels like he has screwed everything up. Of course, he has screwed everything up, but then again, who will cast the first stone, et cetera. He prays and prays. But he will not look straight at the facts: Millat hanging around with God knows what kind of people, always with the white girls, and Magid…’
Irie remembered her first sweetheart encircled by a fuzzy halo of perfection, an illusion born of the disappointments Millat had afforded her over the years.
‘Why, what’s wrong with Magid?’
Alsana frowned and reached up to the top kitchen shelf, where she collected a thin airmail envelope and passed it to Irie. Irie removed the letter and the photograph inside.
The photo was of Magid, now a tall, distinguished-looking young man. His hair was the deep black of his brother’s but it was not brushed forward on his face. It was parted on the left side, slicked down and drawn behind the right ear. He was dressed in a tweed suit and what looked – though one couldn’t be sure, the photo was not good – like a cravat. He held a large sun hat in one hand. In the other he clasped the hand of the eminent Indian writer Sir R. V. Saraswati. Saraswati was dressed all in white, with his broad-rimmed hat on his head and an ostentatious cane in his free hand. The two of them were posed in a somewhat self-congratulatory manner, smiling broadly and looking for all the world as if they were about to pat each other roundly on the back or had just done so. The midday sun was out and bouncing off Dhaka University’s front steps, where the whole scene had been captured.
Alsana inched a smear off the photo with her index finger. ‘You know Saraswati?’
Irie nodded. Compulsory GCSE text: A Stitch in Time by R. V. Saraswati. A bitter-sweet tale of the last days of Empire.
‘Samad hates Saraswati, you understand. Calls him colonial-throwback, English licker-of-behinds.’
Irie picked a paragraph at random from the letter and read aloud.
As you can see, I was lucky enough to meet India’s very finest writer one bright day in March. After winning an essay competition (my title: ‘Bangladesh – To Whom May She Turn?’), I travelled to Dhaka to collect my prize (a certificate and a small cash reward) from the great man himself in a ceremony at the university. I am honoured to say he took a liking to me and we spent a most pleasant afternoon together; a long, intimate tea followed by a stroll through Dhaka’s more appealing prospects. During our lengthy conversations Sir Saraswati commended my mind, and even went so far as to say (and I quote) that I was ‘a first-rate young man’ – a comment I shall treasure! He suggested my future might lie in the law, the university, or even his own profession of the creative pen! I told him the first-mentioned vocation was closest to my heart and that it had long been my intention to make the Asian countries sensible places, where order prevailed, disaster was prepared for, and a young boy was in no danger from a falling vase (!) New laws, new stipulations, are required (I told him) to deal with our unlucky fate, the natural disaster. But then he corrected me: ‘Not fate,’ he said. ‘Too often we Indians, we Bengalis, we Pakistanis, throw up our hands and cry “Fate!” in the face of history. But many of us are uneducated, many of us do not understand the world. We must be more like the English. The English fight fate to the death. They do not listen to history unless it is telling them what they wish to hear. We say “It had to be!” It does not have to be. Nothing does.’ In one afternoon I learnt more from this great man than-
‘He learns nothing!’
Samad marched back into the kitchen in a fury and threw the kettle on the stove. ‘He learns nothing from a man who knows nothing! Where is his beard? Where is his khamise? Where is his humility? If Allah says there will be storm, there will be storm. If he says earthquake, it will be earthquake. Of course it has to be! That is the very reason I sent the child there – to understand that essentially we are weak, that we are not in control. What does Islam mean? What does the word, the very word, mean? I surrender. I surrender to God. I surrender to him. This is not my life, this is his life. This life I call mine is his to do with what he will. Indeed, I shall be tossed and turned on the wave, and there shall be nothing to be done. Nothing! Nature itself is Muslim, because it obeys the laws the creator has ingrained in it.’