Song Of Time (14 page)

In far-away Britain, so many things stopped working so quickly in the following hours that it was hard to believe that we, too, weren’t the victims of that same spreading pulse. Even as Caspian was telling me what he’d heard, the newscaster’s voice died as house computer systems went down under some predatory virus. Neighbours’ dogs were barking and the sky seemed unnaturally dark as I pulled on clothes and shouted at Caspian to get back to his own home, then set out alone down Augustus Road with the vague intention of reaching Nan and Pa Ashar’s house in Handsworth.

As if this moment had long been expected, the city had dissolved into delirious chaos. The main roads were jammed with the cars of people seeking relatives, or trying to flee a city which they feared would soon also be destroyed. Car and house alarms were squalling, buses lay overturned, and the pavements were already glittery from looting. But there were odd moments of calm. I remember seeing a woman out riding her horse along a side road which the stalled traffic had left clear. She smiled down at me as she went past, then dug in her heels and increased to a trot as she headed up towards High-gate Park.

News was leaking out at streetcorners and open-doored houses as people clustered around the few devices which were still functioning and receiving information. Not all the bombs had gone off, or reached their intended targets. Islamabad was seemingly intact. So, at least for now, was Delhi. But the shock waves of the weapons which had been ignited on that terrible Asian noon continued to spread. People were already calling it World War Three, or the apocalypse, and it seemed like only a matter of hours, minutes, seconds, before China and the Russian republics joined in. Then there was America and Europe and Egypt, and there was Israel, and there was Iran. And there was also Taiwan and Korea and Japan, whilst Jakarta had gone already in what remains to this day an inexplicable blast.

Things were somewhat better around the fringes of the closed estates in Edgbaston. Few of the residents here were likely to have lost anyone closer than a relative of their cleaning staff, and the high fences and fatal warning signs gleamed in an odd kind of triumph against the low black clouds. To avoid the certain chaos of the city centre, I left the roads and followed the footpaths down beside the canals. The air down beside these blank waters had settled in soft, smoke-scented waves. It was, I had realised by now, just as likely that Nan and Pa had headed towards Moseley to find me, but I kept walking.

Without the canals, I doubt if I’d have made it to Handsworth, for buildings were in flame and barricades were being erected when I returned from beneath the shelter of their bridges. It was Hindu against Muslim. It was black against white. It was tribe against tribe. As a long-festering war broke out here in Birmingham as well, bodies were dangling from streetlamps. Being female and wearing my westernly boyish clothes probably saved me, for no one knew to which of all the many sides I belonged amid this chaos until my arm was grabbed by a distant cousin as I approached my grandparents’ house through the smoke-roiling streets. Slinging the pickaxe he’d been wielding to prise up slabs of tarmac from the road across his shoulder, he led me around the flaming, upturned cars. Nan and Pa had tried several times to get out, both on foot and in their elderly car, but each time, they had been blocked, or had turned back in fear of their lives. They treated my arrival as if I was a ghost—they couldn’t believe anyone could get this far across Birmingham. Uncle Rupa and a hysterical Auntie Indra were also in the house. Like Mum, my cousin Kapil was in India, although his recent e-mails had been cryptic and no one knew exactly where. Other neighbours and relatives came and went. Bricks had been hefted through nearby windows. Kitchen towels were held to bleeding foreheads. Then, with the power still off, the freezers began to leak and we had to leave the toilet unflushed for fear that the water supply would also fail, and buckets and saucepans lined the hall. Candles burned, and gunfire echoed as the long evening darkened towards what seemed like our first night in an entirely changed world.

The next morning dawned oddly quiet and clear. An army vehicle lumbered past the end of our road, guns scanning the terraces, its loud hailer clangorously warning all residents to stay inside, but by mid-after-noon, warnings or no warnings, people had began to re-emerge like the dead reborn onto the changed Handsworth streets.

News that Delhi had gone as well began to filter through. The Indian troops were said either to be still advancing, or in chaotic retreat. Jaipur was a mass grave. So, it was rumoured, was Bradford. Here in Birmingham, the troops moved into the inner city with a decisiveness which suggested some-thing long-readied. Tracked machines began to clear the barricades, then to build up new ones of their own. Our world contracted. Men in body armour and sight goggles stopped you with the snouts of their guns if you walked further than the end of your street. We lived on stale nan and tubs of liquid ice cream. People wore funerary white. Many young men were arrested, and we tried to persuade a catatonic Auntie Indra that perhaps Kapil was better off over in India.

The air smelled of burnt rubber and raw sewerage. It was a time of paper. Burnt paper billowed in the streets, cardboard signs were hung around the necks of mutilated arsonists or supposed Muslim collaborators, old holiday photos pinned to walls and lampposts adorned with desperate pleas, whilst hastily printed images of supposed atrocities or calls to arms were passed hand to hand. Our precious digital identities, with all their clever technology, were suddenly useless. We sifted through the old medical cards and birth certificates which Nan Ashar, who knew a thing or two about bureaucracy from her younger days in India, had never thrown away. They, along with the new smudgily inkjet-printed identity cards which were being issued to all of us so-called ethnic Britons, were suddenly vital to who we were, and everything we might be permitted to do.

Candles flickered in windows. Birmingham had never felt so silent. No one knew anything for certain. India remained a blank territory. It was said that the Pakistani bombs and missiles were damp squibs, or that the Indian government had built secret shelters in which nearly everyone had been saved, then that we were being kept here in Handsworth because of some deadly new disease which was spreading across the world, or that people with European passports were being airlifted out of India, and that the British government had set up a clearing house for returnees at Birmingham’s main airport.

Was Mum alive? The question felt worn-out and meaningless. Her village lay nearly fifty miles away from the centre of Ahmedabad, but no one knew how powerful the bomb had been, nor exactly where it had been targeted. And I knew Mum often went to the city to attend meetings to promote her new charity, and that the blast had occurred at noon. Then, even if she had survived, there was the aftermath, the firestorms, the dysentery, the radiation-poisoning, the Indian and the Pakistani army, the threat of more bombs, the lawlessness…I flickered between endless uncertainties. If I could picture anything, I saw Mum standing on the road outside her village, watching the thunderous rise of that mushroom cloud as the trees bowed and burst into flame, then walking towards it.

Some of the stories turned out to be true. Calcutta had survived, and relatives with the correct passes and permissions really were being shuttled to the airport here in Birmingham. No one knew what was waiting there, but Nan was in her element as she strove to get us passes. She cajoled. She argued. She wheedled. She marshalled her precious collections of paper. After a long night of queuing and bickering, she and I and Uncle Rupa scrambled onto the bus with whited-out windows which would supposedly take us to some kind of clearing house. The rest of Birmingham remained a shadowy mystery as we jerked and trundled over ruined roads. The people travelling with us were silent, or crying quietly.

There were glimpses through the windscreen of tanks and huge concrete blocks drawn across sliproads as the bus finally stopped and we were yelled at by guards to get the fuck out, you black cunts. I saw from the wide expanse of fencing and tarmac in the few moments we really were outside that we were in some far-flung corner of Birmingham’s airport. Then guns were shoved in our backs, and Nan and I lost contact Uncle Indra as we were herded to join several thousand other Indians waiting inside a chilly warehouse, although Nan swore as we squatted on the bleak concrete floor that she’d once come shopping here for a new bathroom carpet in better days.

Day or night, the lights never went off in that warehouse, and the few toilets had long ceased to function. Demarcations were made, and small, pointless attempts at privacy were endlessly erected and squabbled over. Damp dripped down from the distant roof. Still, Nan was soon reforming lost acquaintances.
Ah, now my sister-in-law, she spent some time in that part of Bradford…
Big jets often passed thunderously close over-head. Word went around that similar groups of Muslims were being held in a warehouse nearby—the one, as Nan calmly informed me, which had once held an out-of-town branch of Marks and Spencers. One woman killed herself else by clambering the building’s inner walls and throwing herself off, whilst a young man was found with a piece of scaffolding driven through his heart in some unknown act of revenge. It was said that London and most of the South East had been destroyed in a strike by the Russians, but news, real news, was even more scarce here than it had been in Handsworth, and the guards were saying nothing. Then, on the third day, a large loudspeaker was set up on a tall stand in one far corner of the warehouse and names, many incomprehensibly mis-pronounced, began to be called out.

We crowded towards that big black box. It was ridiculous how our spirits rose as we debated each distorted phrase, and how disputes multi-plied as a selected few were permitted to pass from this long purgatory through a small and well guarded door marked NO EXIT. I fell back into a drowse of waiting.

“That’ll be us,” Nan said, prodding me awake.

Beyond that hallowed door, Nan and I were instantly separated and herded along different corridors, and I didn’t see her again for several days. It was getting harder to remember Mum, or why I was here, as a large, stiff-faced woman led me into a bare room and told me to take off my clothes. Finally, shivering more from the outrage of what had been done to me, dressed again, but still shoeless, I was ordered to take a seat beside a chipped desk amid many office partitions and await my turn. This was surely it—a person nearby was sobbing, someone else was shouting—but I just felt drained.

“Name…?”

I shovelled my hard-earned papers across the desk. They were ignored.

“Name…?”

My interviewer went away. Another came. It was like some weird form of musical chairs. There were long gaps as I just sat there with my bare feet pressed to the studded rubber floor. The woman beyond the partition nearest to me was endlessly repeating the same flight number and I longed to find the energy to tell her to shut up.

“You say your mother was working for a charity. What number is it registered as? Do you have a tax reference? What’s the exact name?”

I realised that my saying Mum was involved in a charity in India was tantamount to describing her as a terrorist. Then there was cousin Kapil.

“Marriage plans, were there?”

Wasn’t Mum—wasn’t
I
—a British Citizen? Didn’t we have
rights
? But the young man with the loosely knotted tie fought back a tired smile as I feebly attempted to rage at him. After all, he probably had as little choice as I did about being here.

I became convinced that the truth of whether Mum was dead or alive was being determined solely by this endless questioning. A mistaken word, the wrong box ticked, and she would vanish forever, destroyed not by nuclear war but mis-administration. After the most part of another day, I was given a pink raffle ticket numbered 219, with a smaller and longer unique number printed yet more crudely beneath it—more paper. Then I and a few others were prodded out into the surprising daylight to board another whited-out bus which bore us through several roadblocks to the glass frontage of the airport’s international departures terminal. I’d been here before to see off Mum and visiting relatives, and this was where we’d have gone if Leo and Dad really had ever made it to Venice. It was strange to see the place like this as, still clutching our precious raffle tickets, we swarmed in.

The terminal seemed to be living out a last mad bank holiday before the world of cheap travel and falling frontiers died forever. People were sleeping on seats or curled up amid the contents of their suitcases. Others wept, sat comatose or argued and gestured towards whoever would listen. Even allowing for my own recent experiences, and my own personal funk, the smell was incredible. Stretchers were lined beside the departures tunnel, along with what could only be body bags. Soldiers milled. Bizarrely, airport muzak was playing.

None of the flight displays were working, but an old man in a Nehru hat had told me that a relief shuttle from India had just come in via Cyprus. Suddenly, people were screaming and fighting over new arrivals of body bags. Fleeing them, I ran up dead escalators to a balcony amid the shuttered or ransacked airport shops which looked down on the scene. All I saw were swarms of dark heads. Where was Nan? Where was Uncle Indra? I slumped, reduced to tears and helplessness.

It was a few minutes before I looked down again, and then with no hope of finding anything. Then, I didn’t believe what I saw—it was too easy—somehow, this was and wasn’t Mum—and there was something odd about the way she was turning her head. I recognised the clothes, but she was moving differently. Dazed, I hobbled back down the dead escalators. A sea of people pushed around me. Anguished voices keened. Old photos of lost family members were waved in my face. I batted them away and Mum came and went as the crowds surged between us. She still hadn’t noticed me, and I’d nearly reached her before she finally turned her head and her hands began to fumble towards me, pushing though a surge of bodies to touch my arms, my shoulders, my face.