Brick Lane (49 page)

The heap of boys scrambled up and disappeared into the bowels of Brick Lane. 'Right now, let me tell you, the world is watching.' The Questioner turned slowly round with his megaphone, speaking his next words to the whole three hundred and sixty degrees. 'Right now, you should know, George Bush is laughing at you.'

Out of the dark, a woman with a microphone ran up to him. He lowered the megaphone. A white man shouldered a camera and swung it in his direction. The woman spoke to the Questioner and the Questioner replied but Nazneen could no longer hear him.

Ahead of her now were a blazing car arid two dozen heels turned up in flight. She began to hope that Shahana was on the train, or in Paignton, anywhere else but here. She tried to run with the crowd but she could not keep up. The next instant, something caught her around the chest and she lashed out at the air.

'Get in here,' said Karim. He dragged her into a doorway.

Nazneen tried to speak but her breath fought against it.

'What are you doing here?'

'Shahana.' It was all she could manage.

'Go home. You shouldn't be here.'

'Shahana. I think she's here.'

Karim held her by the shoulders. There was thunder in his face. He looked as if he wanted to shake her. Then he softened. 'All right. Tell me.'

She told him as quickly as she could. Karim peered both ways and signalled for her to step out and follow him.

'What is happening?' she asked, as they walked past a shattered shopfront. She remembered his words.
Insh' Allah, we all stand together.

'Jamal Zaman got out of hospital today. You know, that lad they call Nonny.'

She trotted to keep up. 'So what is this?' But she knew already, had seen it at the last meeting.

'It's revenge. And revenge for the revenge.' He turned round. 'Man, what it is, it's a mess! It's not even
about
anything any more. It's just about what it is. Put anything in front of them now and they'll fight it. A police car, a shop window, anything.'

'And the march?'

He shrugged. 'We marched. So what, really?'

'The Lion Hearts, did they come?'

'About twenty or thirty. They weren't anything.'

The pavement was blocked by a hillock of clothing, loot half desired and hastily abandoned. They ran in the road.

'They weren't anything?'

'Not here. Not yet. People only take a job on for themselves when their leaders aren't doing it for them. Do you understand?'

They reached the Shalimar. The lights were off. Each table, laid for dinner, had a little pot of plastic flowers next to the triple tin dishes of chutney, chopped onion and raita. Nazneen looked at Karim.

'Go home,' he said.

She put her face up to the glass and cupped her hands to the sides.

'She'll be back by morning.'

She looked across from the toilet doors at the back of the room to the counter stacked with kebabs, tandoori chicken, bhazis, puris, trays of rice and vegetables, milky sweets, sugar-shined ladoos, the faintly sparkling jelabees.

'I'll take you up to the corner. You'll be all right from there.'

Then she saw them. Three waiters with their backs and arms pressed to the wall, and behind them two smaller figures, holding hands.

She pounded on the glass and yelled. 'Shahana. Shahana. It's me. I'm here. Amma's come.'

Chanu knew what she was going to say. That was why he could not stop talking. He talked over the television. Nazneen stared at the screen. The picture was just in red and black; even the Questioner's face was shades of red and black. His words were lost once more. Chanu sat on the arm of the sofa, swaying slightly as if he might fly off in either direction at any moment. He talked with his hands, his arms, his eyes, eyebrows, cheeks and nose as well as his lips. All were in constant motion. His legs swung now and then to show just how animated he had become, how full of life, and possibility, and promise. 'Just a reminder,' he said, waving lavishly at the screen. 'Just a reminder of what we leave behind. Of course, Shahana was a bundle of nerves and she is very highly strung and it's not surprising that she decided, as it were, to show her heels, but look where it got her and where we are going . . .'

Shahana was taking a bath and Bibi was sitting on the side of the bath, keeping an eye on her sister.

Nazneen looked at her husband. He smiled at her as he talked, but he would not halt the words.

'A colleague from Kempton Kars is coming to collect us. At first when I met him I considered him what you could call an ignorant type, and actually he is, more or less, ignorant type but he is a good-hearted man. As they say in English,
salt of the earth.
Do you know what it is?'

'It's very close to the time . . .'

His face bubbled and dimpled. 'I know, I know, how exciting it is! Shall we check the tickets and the passports for the last time? We'll check them again at the airport, I expect, and then they will put stamps all over them and . . .'

'I should have said this before.' Nazneen looked at her hands.

Chanu stood up. He dusted down his trousers, his best blue polyester-cotton mix that came with the pale blue and beige toned-in belt. He walked over to the television. His steps were light and quick; more hop and skip than walk. 'Let's turn it off. Essentially, watching that is looking backwards. Let us look forwards from now on. When we move to the bungalow, your sister will come to live with us. Would you like that?' He replaced the label on the television screen:
Auction.
He crossed the room again. Now he was practically dancing. 'Of course you would. Think of it! Reunited with Hasina, the girls with their aunt, holidays in Cox's Bazaar, maybe the girls would like a little trip to the Sundarbans. They could see a real Bengal Tiger. Ha! Ha, ha. Nazneen? Ha!'

She stood up and went to him and they were very close, there in the channel between the sofa and the armchair. She lifted her hand and placed it on his cheek. He pushed his face against her palm and kissed it with great and very grave tenderness. His neck began to wilt and inch by inch his head drooped lower. She held his face, hard, as if staunching a wound, and put her other arm around him.

'You see,' he said, and he mumbled it inside her palm. 'All these years I dreamed of going home a Big Man. Only now, when it's nearly finished for me, I realized what is important. As long as I have my family with me, my wife, my daughters, I am as strong as any man alive.'

He rested his forehead on her shoulder. A sigh shook his body. She pulled him in a little closer.

'What is all this Big Man?' She whispered in his ear. Sadness crushed her chest. It pressed everything out of her and filled the hollows of her bones. 'What is all this Strong Man? Do you think that is why I love you? Is that what there is in you, to be loved?'

His tears scarred her hand.

'You're coming with me, then? You'll come?'

'No,' she breathed. She lifted his head and looked into his face. It was dented and swollen, almost out of recognition. 'I can't go with you,' she said.

'I can't stay,' said Chanu, and they clung to each other inside a sadness that went beyond words and tears, beyond that place, those causes and consequences, and became a part of their breath, their marrow, to travel with them from now to wherever they went.

She could not sleep. She got up in the night and went to the kitchen. Inside a box marked 'Dr Azad' was all the food they had not eaten up. Nazneen searched for the chopping board. She found her frying pan, a saucepan, knives, spices, onions and red lentils. She washed the lentils, fished out the stones, covered them with water and set the pan to boil. The ladle had vanished, but she retrieved a large spoon and skimmed off the froth and poured it into the sink. She chopped onion, garlic and ginger, dropped a portion into the lentils and put the rest in the frying pan with some oil. A teaspoon of cumin, a pinch of turmeric and some chilli went into the pot. When the onion started to turn, she split eight cardamoms with her teeth to release the little black seeds and threw them into the frying pan. She sprinkled on a few cloves, three bay leaves and some coriander seeds. The spices began to catch and gave off their round and intricate smell. It was a scent that made all others flat; it existed in spheres, the others in thin circles. Nazneen leaned over the frying pan. The coriander seeds began to jump. She lowered the heat. She pushed aside a box to make more space on the work surface, and there was the photograph.

Chanu with his stringy calves sticking out from oversized red shorts which dangled beneath an outsize belly. The girls tucked up in his armpits. Shahana in her dark green kameez and Bibi in pink, their expressions somewhere between Dutiful Daughter and Hostage.

Nazneen rested the picture against the tiles. She looked at the clock. She looked out of the window.

Chanu had called his daughters. 'There has been a change of plan.' He rubbed his face with his palms, getting the blood to flow again. 'I have suggested, and your mother has agreed, that the three of you come later.' He weighed his stomach and slapped it around a little. He cleared his throat and this time the obstruction seemed genuine; it brought tears to his eyes. 'I'll go on ahead now, clear – ahem – the path.'

The girls looked at Nazneen. They saw that it was true. Bibi chewed the ends of both her plaits. Shahana went to her father and put her arms around his neck. 'But who will cook for you, Abba?'

'Who will cut your corns?' said Bibi.

Chanu tickled Shahana under the arms. 'What? Do you not know? I am a better cook than your mother. And look, Bibi, my stomach has gone flatter than a paratha. I can reach my own toes now.' He bent down to prove it. Then he began to rearrange bags and money, tickets and passports. He clicked on his money belt and tested the catch. 'Be good girls, do as your mother tells you, finish your homework every night, don't waste time on television and all that rubbish, read Tagore (I recommend
Gitanjali
)
,
don't think that there's anything you're not good enough for, remember that—' He broke off. 'Yes, well. That should do for now.'

Nazneen stirred the dal.

'We're hungry as well,' said Shahana.

The girls came into the kitchen and began the hunt for the rice.

They took their plates into the sitting room and made space on the table.

'When will we go to Dhaka?' said Bibi.

'If
we go,' said Shahana. 'We don't have to go. Do we, Amma?'

'What about Abba?' said Bibi quickly. 'We can't just leave him on his own.'

'He could come back,' explained Shahana. 'I bet he'll come back. And when he comes back he'll be a lot happier.'

'Why will he be happier?'

Shahana shrugged. 'He just will. I'm telling you.'

'So are we not going, Amma?'

'Just wait and—' Nazneen interrupted herself. She took more rice. She took more dal. She offered more to her daughters. 'We'll talk about it tomorrow, or later, and we'll decide what to do. Staying or going, it's up to us three.'

M
ARCH
2002

Razia took off her glasses. She held the sketch up to her face, almost touching her long nose. 'No problem,' she said. 'We can do this very, very easy.' She put her glasses back on. 'But it's going to cost them more. Do you see all this beading?' She offered the paper to Hanufa. 'Five pounds extra per piece. They can take it or leave it.'

Hanufa passed the drawing to Nazneen. The trousers sat low on the hips, without a waistband, and the bodice cut away above the belly button. The detail indicated gold and diamanté dhakba work and the ends of the dupatta were beaded in a cobweb design. The swatch attached was ice-blue silk.

'What about white organza for the scarf?' said Nazneen. 'Nice contrast.'

'They don't pay us to design as well,' said Razia. She got up and pressed her hands into the small of her back. 'This sofa is an old bitch. It's more broken down than me.'

The sofa came from a junk shop. It was pretend leather, dyed an uncertain purple, the colour of pigeon shit. It was so plastic that if your skin touched it, you received some kind of static shock to the teeth.

'Why not?' said Nazneen.

Razia looked at her sidelong, through narrowed eyes.

'They can pay extra for it.'

'Do it then. You make a design. I'll sell it.'

Razia had been the one to set it up. Walked into Fusion Fashions, bold as a mynah bird, and asked for work. She cleared out of the sweat shop. She got on the bus and went to distant lands: Tooting, Ealing, Southall, Wembley. She came back with orders, swatches, samples, patterns, beads, laces, feather trims, leather trims, fake fur, rubber and crystals. 'These young girls' – she sucked in her lips and sprayed her words like lead shot – 'they'll put anything on a piece of cloth and call it an outfit. They'll be sewing kettles on their pants before you can say "lengha".' She laughed and her laugh clattered around the room like a couple of saucepans dropped from a great height.

Hanufa gasped. 'Oh, poor Mrs Islam. Haven't you heard? She is very ill. She is not even coming out of her house. I am keeping her in my prayers.'

'The old faker,' said Razia. 'She'll outlive us all.'

'The doctors can't find what is wrong with her. She has baffled them all. Do you know, they called a fellow from Manchester. Another came from Scotland. And a third was flown from India. It's a terrible thing.'

'Oh, yes, terrible thing. They can't find anything wrong, do you say?' Razia lay down on the floor. She had got used to the floor and now she thought it was better for her back.

Hanufa opened her eyes a little wider. 'There's a special clinic in Switzerland. Probably she is going there to recuperate. In fact, she is thinking of taking her entire family with her.'

'Her entire family,' said Razia. 'And all her bank accounts.'

The bedroom door opened and Jorina tiptoed out. She wore a cherry-blossom-pink outfit of appliquéd chiffon, with shoestring shoulder straps and trousers slashed to the thigh to reveal the translucent pink silk churidar beneath.

'Oh, my God.' Razia rolled onto her side. 'What has this Bollywood Beauty done with our Jorina?'