Brick Lane (40 page)

'Abdul Ali has bought his land, finally. Three and one-half hectares.'

'I heard it was only two.'

'Three and one-half hectares.'

'That is what he was planning. But in the end he only bought two.'

'As God is my witness, I swear—'

'May God strike me deaf, dumb and blind if I lie, and shrivel my manhood like a dead woodlouse.'

This would go on for some time while the scissors flashed like miniature lightning against dark heads. Detached and ineffably impressive, the barber took no part in debate. He bided his time.

Eventually, someone would say, 'Tamizuddin Mizra Haque, settle this affair. How many hectares?'

And without hesitation the barber made his pronouncement.

'Three and one-half hectares.'

Or, 'Two hectares only.'

Whatever the verdict, the opposing side immediately caved in. A man could be yellow and purple from his exhortations; he might have sworn on his honour, his children's lives, or even his testicles; he might have ranted in every emotional key, oozing sincerity, spitting with frustration or weeping with anger, but when Tamizuddin Mizra Haque pronounced, he would cave.

'Is it so, Tamizuddin Mizra Haque? Well, you know best.'

Nazneen and Hasina delighted in this moment of transformation. Squeezing each other's hands, they squatted with their hems in the dirt and stared at the man who settled everything with a word or two. They were proud that a man like this, who knew all that there was to know, actually lived in Gouripur. That he should choose to live among them was a wondrous thing.

The girls said to each other, 'What do you want to know? Let's go and ask Tamizuddin Mizra Haque.'

Nazneen thought hard. Hasina said, 'How high is the tallest mountain in the world? No, that's too easy. If a python swallowed a baby whole, could you cut open its tummy and take the baby out still alive? Who killed Auntie's mynah bird? That's what I'd ask him. No, what I really want to know is, who are we going to marry?' They often played this game but they never went to ask the barber anything. To actually ask him would spoil the anything-at-all-ness, which is what they liked.

Some of the children were not quite as enraptured. They shouted from a safe distance, 'Tamizuddin Mizra Haque, what the President having for breakfast today, eh?'

Anyway, thought Nazneen, I should write to Hasina soon. Running a hand along the eggshell cracks of the pale green sewing machine, she realized she had scarcely begun on her work. And it would be better if Karim left soon. Another few minutes and the salaat alert would come on his mobile phone, and then he would stay for his prayer. She let the thought wash over her. It saturated her so heavily that she was unable to act on it.

From the set of his neck, Karim was intent on his work at the computer. Magazines, he had explained, could be radical. But the internet was where things got
really
radical.

Nazneen knew she would never write about him to Hasina. Her next letter, when she got round to it, would follow in the footsteps of the others.
We are all well. Shahana is getting top marks in her class, and Bibi has grown at least one inch. I tried again to make dhoie but it never comes out quite right, too much sugar I think, or not the right kind. I pray for your friend Monju and her boy.

What a poor answer it would make. Hasina's letter had arrived yesterday:

I tell you about friend Monju. Acid melt cheekbone and nose and one eye. Other eye damage only with pain and very hate. Difficult thing how I make you describe? Is worse see this good eye. Is where hope should be but no hope is there.

Monju sister has take Khurshed in village. Boy has not see the mother. She will not allow. 'Promise me.' She say every time I go. Promise me the boy get his operation. What can I say? What to do?

Nazneen stood up and walked about the room. Perhaps she would mention Tamizuddin Mizra Haque to Hasina, ask how she remembered him. Of course, she thought, the barber did not know everything. That was only how it seemed to us as children. But about village affairs he knew a great deal, and everyone deferred to his knowledge. He could settle such matters very easily. Or perhaps it was just a way of ending the conversation. Maybe they were mocking him, and he knew so little that he did not know even when he was being mocked.

'Who benefits?' Karim got up so fast he kicked over his chair. 'That's the key question, man. Who benefits?'

'From what?' It was obvious she should know what he was talking about.

But he didn't hear her. 'I can tell you – no Arab nation benefits. No Muslim, anywhere in the world. We are the ones who're going to suffer. You got to ask, who benefits?'

Nazneen looked behind her and back again.

'Not that difficult to work it out,' said Karim.

Nazneen thought, what a lot of rubbish I have in my mind about barbers and pipal trees, as if there is nothing important to think about. At the same time she thought, only my husband and this boy are thinking all the time about New York and terrorists and bombs. Everybody else just living their lives.

Karim picked up the chair. 'A devout Muslim, right, willing to sacrifice himself for his religion. Does he go to bars and watch naked girls and drink alcohol? What kind of Muslim takes his Qur'an into a bar? And
leaves
it there? These stories are made up by idiots. People who don't know nothing about Islam. Maybe a Christian carries his Bible round like a pack of cigarettes. He don't know how a Qur'an is treated.'

Glancing up at the specially built high shelf, Nazneen regarded her own Qur'an in its cloth case.

'They're saying
another
Qur'an got left behind in a rental car by these so-called Islamic terrorists.' He laughed without mirth. 'All these devout men throwing away the Word of God like sweet papers.'

'And a Muslim cannot commit suicide,' said Nazneen. No matter how many times he explained about martyrs, it seemed to her incontrovertible.

He who kills himself with sword, or poison, or throws himself off a mountain will be tormented on the Day of Resurrection with that very thing.

'It's not as simple as that.' Karim talked over her. 'There's other stuff too. It don't add up. Listen. All four black boxes from the aeroplanes – that's where everything that went on is recorded – were destroyed. But have you heard about the magic passport? One of the hijackers' passports survived the fire – heat of over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Found in the rubble of the World Trade Centre. What kind of fools does the FBI take us for?'

'Who did it then?'

He touched his skullcap briefly, as a woman might touch the hair coiled on her head to make sure it was still in place. 'Ask the right question. Who benefits?'

It seemed to Nazneen that no one benefited.

She would not let him pray at her home again. Maybe it was not, officially, a sin. But it was not right. It was something she could stop, and if she could stop that then maybe she could end the rest of it too.

But she had tried and she had failed.

'It isn't right,' she said, with his breath hot in her ear.

'I know,' he moaned. 'I'll fix it. Don't worry.' And the weight of his body was all that she needed.

How could she tell him not to come any more? What would it mean? That she had taken her pleasure and had enough? That what was between them was within her power to stop? That, controlling it, she need never have begun it?

For a while she pinned her hopes on Chanu. That day when he wandered in and Karim was using the computer, she thought,
he knows it all.
But he said nothing to her. Everyone else knew. Nazma – that glint in her eye when she ran her hand over the sewing machine. 'Still getting plenty?' she had said. Razia showed no surprise at all when let in on the 'secret'. How early had she guessed it? Who had not noticed the comings and goings?

Let my husband find out, Nazneen prayed. Let him kill me, she added.

Chanu was not so obliging. Can't you see what is going on under your nose, she demanded silently of him every day.

In the mornings she said her prayers and did housework and began her sewing and there was nothing inside her that demanded more. By lunchtime when she looked for Karim out of the window, her stomach began to surge with excitement and dread and on the days when he did not come she had to leave the flat and walk around the streets for fear that she would wear out the remaining threads of carpet.

'Why do you like me?' she asked one day, hoping that the words came naturally, as if she had just thought of them.

He was in a playful mood.
'Keno tumake amar bhalo lage?'
Who says that I like you? His fingers touched the hollow of her throat.

'I do,' she said in a firm way.

'I see.' He kissed a trail from her throat to her armpit.

'I am not beautiful. I am not a young girl.'

'Not young and not beautiful? Then I must be crazy.'

'And you are young.'

'What about beautiful?'

She was determined to be serious. 'But you do not answer me.'

Karim rolled onto his back. As he moved his hands up behind his head Nazneen watched the muscles in his arms tense and relax. His skin was golden, like honey. It looked like you could lick it off.

'Well, basically you've got two types. Make your choice. There's your westernized girl, wears what she likes, all the make-up going on, short skirts and that soon as she's out of her father's sight. She's into going out, getting good jobs, having a laugh. Then there's your religious girl, wears the scarf or even the burkha. You'd think, right, they'd be good wife material. But they ain't. Because all they want to do is
argue.
And they always think they know best because they've been off to all these summer camps for Muslim sisters.'

'What about me?'

He propped himself up on one elbow. She smelled his sweat and it stirred her. 'Ah, you. You are the real thing.'

'Real thing?'

'You can arrange for a girl from the village. Bring her over here.' He was still setting out his options. 'But then there's all the settling-in hassle. And you never know
what
you're going to get.'

'I am the real thing?' A conversation overheard in the early days of her marriage came to her mind. She stood in her nightdress in the hallway while Chanu was on the telephone.
An unspoilt girl. From the village. All things considered, I am satisfied.

Karim was getting out of bed. He had his back to her.

'My husband is taking us to Dhaka,' she said.

She watched the curve of his spine to see if he had noticed: the emphasis in her voice had got out of control.

He straightened up but he did not turn.

She curled herself into a ball. The shush of air in her nostrils, the minute clicks of her skull, the wheeze of her chest, gurgles from her gut, blood thumping dully in her ears.

At last, he spoke. 'When I went to Bradford, I went to see a girl. Selected for me. I turned her down. For you.'

'What can I do?' Her face was hot and wet.

'What do you want to do?'

She had wanted to go. But now she did not know. The children would suffer; Chanu would face fresh agonies of disappointment; and she was not the girl from the village any more. She was not the real thing.

Karim picked her up like a child and held her. 'Don't be scared. Let your husband go. It's gonna be the best thing. Then you get a divorce because he's left you. Don't be scared. I'll sort it.'

* * *

October arrived and with it Chanu's chilblains, colds and coughs for the girls, and condensation. Nazneen began her winter ritual of wiping the windows with a towel every morning. It helped with the damp. Two workmen blundered along to fix the toilet.

'How long's it been broken, darlin'?'

She told them.

'That's the council for you, darlin'.'

They poked around a bit and then cleared off.

'Got yourself a problem there, sweetheart. Shouldn't'a left it so long.'

The suitcase stood on its little smart wheels at the bottom of the wardrobe, on top of Chanu's certificates. Nazneen tested the handle. It was heavy.

She gave up trying to persuade Chanu to eat and then she gave up cooking. The girls had burgers or baked beans or whatever they wanted. Once, when she got up in the night and pulled open the door of an empty fridge, she started making cauliflower curry, and as the spices hit the hot fat and burst their seams she thought she would waken everybody and they would eat together like a normal family. But it was two o'clock in the morning and she ate alone, standing up against the sink, watching the moon and wondering if she would ever eat a meal with her sister again.

The next day, the leaflet appeared through the letterbox.

MARCH AGAINST THE MULLAHS

Karim picked it up. He turned it over. 'Yes!' he said. 'We've got a date.' He folded his arms and stood with his legs wide. 'Let them come. We'll be ready.'

When Chanu got home he picked up the leaflet and studied it for some time. Then he put it down, went into the bedroom and closed the door.

The only thing on which everyone could agree was that the boy had been stabbed. Everything else was as hotly disputed as the price of brinjals on market day. Some said the fight was between two gangs, with as many as ten boys involved. Others said twenty or thirty or fifty while their opponents maintained it was only two, the stabber and the stabbed. It was said that the gangs had a long history of rivalry, dating back to their schooldays when they had all bunked off to attend noon-time raves in darkened warehouses, getting changed in the toilet, taking nips of whisky and drags of cigarettes and listening to Joi Bangla, Michael Jackson, James Brown, Amiruddin and Abdul Gani, making up new dances and hostilities, inventing their lives in a way that no one – especially not their parents – had imagined for them. Between these two gangs there was always tension, and the only surprise was that someone had not been stabbed sooner.

But this was all lies. The boys involved were members of the same gang, and they had fallen out over a girl. More lies. The issue was drugs. Or it was money. Indeed, it was drugs money. This, for a certain fact, was what led the boy to end up in hospital with a wound this deep in his thigh.

Some people were ignorant as donkeys! For the wound was to the chest and he was not expected to live, although only Allah would decide and it was not up to anyone to be expecting or not expecting, but it was difficult not to expect this kind of thing to happen because what else were gangs for but trouble?

Of course some people had only mustard plants growing between their ears and they would believe anything. As a matter of fact, and as the song said, in spite of their eyes they were blind. There were no gangs at all. The white press had made them up to give Bangladeshis a bad name. The
Tower Hamlets Bugle
was the worst offender (but all white newspapers were culprits); if you read that rubbish you'd think that our boys were getting as bad as the blacks. No, there weren't any gangs. Just boys who grew up together and hung around together.

The
Bugle
reported the identity of the victim as Haroon Zaman. The majority took issue with this report. The boy who lay at death's door – or on his right-hand side to protect his wounded left thigh – was actually
Jamal
Zaman. Or Jamal Shamser. Or, according to Razia who got it from Tariq, it was somebody called Nonny. And nobody seemed to know Nonny's real name, although many people pretended to have heard of him and agreed that he was a violent character, just the type to be fighting, and many others felt sorry for Nonny because he was such a meek boy, just the type to be picked on.

Chanu said, 'Do you know the problem with these boys?'

'Not enough studying,' said Bibi smartly.

'Too much roaming around,' said Shahana. 'Like goats.'

'Don't try to be clever.'

'Tell us, Abba.' Bibi stood up to speak.

'I don't know,' said Chanu. 'Apart from this: sometimes, when it seems that the world is against you, it is tempting to side with the world.' He picked up his car keys and Shahana reached for the television remote. 'Of course, if they studied more then they would be strong. Mental strength, that's the key.' He took the remote control from his daughter and gave it to Nazneen. 'They will sit with their books tonight.'

Razia and Nazneen stood with a little group of mothers outside Alam's High Class Grocery shop on Bethnal Green Road. On a pair of wooden trestle tables beneath the windows was a box of tomatoes that had ripened to a point beyond red, darkening now like old bruises, a hairy pyramid of coconuts, a heap of dark green knobbly korela, bitter even to look at, and a large glass jar filled with neem twigs. Nazma poked a tomato and wiped her finger on the fake grass mat covering the table.

'High class?' she said, and a wobbling indignation set up in her cheeks. 'In Bangladesh, a man calling his wares high class and selling rotten tomatoes would not be allowed to get away with it.'

'Oh yes,' said Sorupa. 'There are laws against that kind of thing.'

'Laws?' cried Nazma, as if she had never heard the word before. 'A scoundrel like that would never get to see the inside of a court.'

Sorupa was less sure now and, to compensate, spoke more emphatically. 'Never.'

'The people would take the affair in their own hand. One or two good thrashings is all you need. Is simple. Is quick. Is effective.' Nazma went over to the table with the korela. Nazneen imagined her rolling along on little round feet. Nazma picked up a vegetable and pinched it. Judging from the expression on her face she had squeezed out at least a dozen caterpillars.

Sorupa had by now got the idea. 'Is the best best system. Beat up the scoundrel on the double. No bribes to pay, no waiting around for police and lawyer and all that thing.' She extolled the virtues of the village justice system. What she lacked in material she made up for in her willingness to repeat herself.

Nazma quickly grew bored. 'I hear the boy who got himself stabbed has got punctured lung. I hear he getting involved in drugs.' She looked at Razia and opened her eyes as wide as they would go so Nazneen could see the whites top and bottom.

Nazneen watched the two women. Nazma's breasts, high and round as footballs, heaved beneath her thin black coat. They emphasized the slackness of Razia's chest, hanging low beneath her jumper.

Razia looked at the coconuts. She picked one up and weighed it in her hand, selected another and weighed that.

'Drugs,' said Nazma. She said it the way a parent might say 'monsters' to thrill a young child.

'Drugs,' said Sorupa.

Nazma looked annoyed. She clicked her tongue at Sorupa, who pretended not to notice.

'Of course you hear all sorts about boys getting mix-up in drugs these days. The parents can't control and they bring shame on the family. Anyone who had any sense would send them back to Bangladesh.'

Little light flakes, no bigger than Chanu's dandruff, began to fall on the tomatoes and other high-class items and on the women's heads. They landed and vanished without trace.

'Rain,' said Razia to Nazneen. 'We'd better go.'

'Snow,' said Nazma. 'Of course, some people can't see what's beneath their own nose.'

Sorupa brushed the air with her fingers, demonstrating clearly the fact of snow. 'Right beneath their nose.'

On Commercial Street there was a funeral procession. Four big black cars followed a hearse packed with lilies and chrysanthemums and presumably somewhere beneath them a coffin. Inside the cars, people were stuffed together as densely as the flowers. A red van with a picture of a pig on the side was caught up in the procession and kept swinging out into the other lane in an attempt to overtake. The pig sat as if on an invisible chair, with his fat little legs crossed, eating a pie. As Nazneen waited in the middle of the road she looked inside one of the funeral cars and a woman raised her head from checking her lipstick in a compact mirror and stared back at Nazneen. The woman had short blond hair cut in an efficient style around her jaw. She looked at Nazneen with a ready kindness, a half-smile on her lips, but in her eyes there was nothing. It was the way she might look at a familiar object, her keys that she had just found, the kitchen table as she wiped the juice her daughter had spilled, a blankness reserved for known quantities like pieces of furniture or brown women in saris who cooked rice and raised their children and obeyed their husbands. Nazneen lifted her hand and waved. The funeral procession pulled away with the red van trapped like a beating heart in a comatose body.

They walked over to Wentworth Street and Razia did not say a word all the way. Nazneen thought about Nazma and Sorupa and the little group outside Alam's. At the time she had not realized it, but none of the women had spoken to her. Had it been deliberate? Would she find that people hurried past her in the street? Would there be no more women popping round to borrow something for the kitchen, an eggcup's worth of misti jeera, a couple of sticks of cinnamon, just a pinch of saffron when an unexpected visitor stayed for dinner? It happened to other women. Only recently Hanufa had been frozen out when it was discovered she had been attending a massage course. It was un-Islamic behaviour and, apparently, the imam at the Jamme Masjid had preached against that very thing. Hanufa protested that it was a women-only course and that she was practising for the sake of her husband who suffered with a bad back. But it was too late. 'If she so damn proud of it, what the hell she creeping around behind our backs for?' Nazneen remembered that she too had not called on Hanufa, though she had not snubbed her deliberately. She turned this last thought over a few times, trying to decide if it was true. In the end she gave up and reflected that Hanufa would at least have the opportunity to snub her in return, Nazneen's crime being so much vaster than her own.

They walked along past the shoe stalls, where every shoe resembled an instrument of torture. At the fried chicken stand, a man patted chicken quarters with a kind of tenderness as though he was trying to rub them back to life. Nazneen saw that he was coaxing spices into the skin. A group of African girls tried on shoes, twisting their backs to look down at the heels.

Nazneen wanted to ask Razia if she was getting the Hanufa treatment.

'Shall we go into Yellow Rose? Or Galaxy Textiles?'

Razia shrugged.

'Let's try this shop,' said Nazneen, and pulled her arm.

They went inside and ran their hands over lengths of cherry-red silk, mauve and turquoise cottons, and peacock-blue satin. Razia said, 'Maybe we should leave it for today.' And sounded so much like a person who could never be tempted by anything again that the sales assistant did not even attempt to delay them.

Although it was early it was beginning to get dark and as they walked the lights went on in windows and pulled them up to the panes without them even willing it. They looked at trays of gold rings, rack upon rack winking lewdly under the spotlights. At Best Buy Trading Ltd they were arrested by three mannequins all draped in hot pink crepe de chine. The mannequins were posed like dancers, their arms bent in ways that suggested movement, gayness, maybe even abandon. But their faces remained detached, giving no clue to the ecstasy below. For the actions of their bodies, there was no accountability.

Nazneen longed for Razia to speak, to roll her eyes and begin
puff puff-ing
to turn herself into Nazma. She did an excellent imitation of Nazma. After every few words she inserted a
puff puff,
and though Nazma did not in fact puff, this lent an essence of Nazma to the speech: the bumptiousness of the woman and, somehow, the roundness. Sorupa she also had to perfection. The way she pressed her lips flat against her teeth in self-righteousness, and the way she nibbled them and looked away when Nazma slapped her down.

Nazneen wanted Razia to slip into these other voices, to become the old Razia once again. She studied her friend. Nothing lit up her eyes today. Not anger, not fear, not pain. How long had it been since mischief starred in those deep gold flecks?

She remembered another day when they had come shopping together for fabric and how bursting with secrets she had been. She blurted out everything about Mrs Islam, and it had felt good and Razia said she would help, but now Razia was devoured by her own troubles and Nazneen could not say, but what about this help you said you would give to me? Everything she had suspected about Tariq, it was all true but what could be said about it now? Should they wring their hands and cry every time they met and poke around every little bit of pain?

Then there was Karim.

A few times she had imagined conversations with Razia. She played them out, reading both the parts, trying a new phrase here and there.
He will never give me up.
Razia tucking her feet under her bottom and leaning over to squeeze all the juice out of the story.
It consumes us. It's not something we can control.
Razia shaking her bony shoulders; the intensity – even at this remove – enough to make her shiver.
The most astonishing thing of all. . .
She never knew what she would say then, but the phrase kept coming to her. With narrowed eyes and her sideways look, Razia attempted to tease it from her.
The most astonishing thing of all. . .

They did not speak of him. It was not possible.

With all those secrets between them, how easy it was to talk. Talk flowed like the Meghna: the fast-flowing gush of new gossip; the hiss and splash of their various moans and complaints; disturbances around the rocks of the more serious stuff, always family; a widening and a narrowing, running deep and coming shallow; even in silent stretches the currents between them never stopped and the whole vast outpouring tumbled endlessly into the sea of their friendship. And now the river had met a dam, built out of truth and knowledge and need. These things had stopped up their mouths.

They paused outside a new shop.

'Fusion Fashions,' said Razia, reading out the name.

Inside, a white girl stood in front of a mirror turning this way and that in a black kameez top with white embroidered flowers and a sprinkling of pearls stitched near the throat. The trousers were not the usual baggy salwaar style but narrow-hipped and slightly flared at the bottom. The girl picked up a stack of green glass bangles from a shelf and attempted to get one over her hand.

'She'll never get it on like that,' said Nazneen.

A similar outfit was displayed in the window, only this version was red with black embroidery and black beads. Razia looked at the price tag. She shook her head and sighed as if the evils of the world had been revealed to her.

'Look how much these English are paying for their kameez. And at the same time they are looking down onto me. They are even happy to spit on their own flag, as long as I am inside it. What is wrong with them? What is wrong?'

Chanu was out, driving ignorant types and collecting parking fines. He had taken to keeping the penalty notices in an envelope addressed to the local council. On each of the slips he had written: gone away to address unknown, return to issuer. The girls were sitting on the sofa and Bibi had the remote control on her lap. Every time she touched it Shahana kicked her on the ankle.