White Teeth (31 page)

Samad arrived on the train the very next day and stood on the platform, warmly greeting his soft-spoken nephew in the pouring rain, shaking his hand several times and talking as if it were going out of fashion.

“A great day,” he repeated over and over, until both men were soaked to the skin. “A great day for our family, Rajnu, a great day for the
truth.
”

Wet men not being allowed in college libraries, they spent the morning drying off in a stuffy upstairs café, full of the right type of ladies having the right type of tea. Rajnu, ever the good listener, sat patiently as his uncle babbled wildly—Oh, the
importance
of the discovery, Oh, how
long
he had waited for this moment—nodding in all the right places and smiling sweetly as Samad brushed tears from the corners of his eyes. “It is a great book, isn't it, Rajnu?” asked Samad pleadingly, as his nephew left a generous tip for the sour-faced waitresses who did not appreciate overexcited Indians spending three hours over one cream tea and leaving wet prints all over the furniture. “It is recognized, isn't it?”

Rajnu knew in his heart that the book was an inferior, insignificant, forgotten piece of scholarship, but he loved his uncle, so he smiled, nodded, and smiled firmly again.

Once in the library, Samad was asked to fill in the visitors' book:

 

Name:
Samad Miah Iqbal

College:
Educated elsewhere (Delhi)

Research project:
Truth

Rajnu, tickled by this last entry, picked up the pen, adding “and Tragedy.”

“Truth and Tragedy,” said a deadpan librarian, turning the book back round. “Any particular kind?”

“Don't worry,” said Samad genially. “We'll find it.”

It took a stepladder to reach it but it was well worth the stretch. When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tingle and, looking at its cover, shape, and color, saw that it was all he had dreamed of. It was heavy, many-paged, bound in a tan leather and covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious, something rarely touched.

“I left a marker in it. There is much to read but there is something I thought you'd like to see first,” said Rajnu, laying the book down on a desk. The heavy thud of one side of it hit the table, and Samad looked at the appointed page. It was more than he could have hoped for.

“It's only an artist's impression, but the similarity between—”

“Don't speak,” said Samad, tracing his fingers across the picture. “This is our
blood,
Rajnu. I never thought I would see . . . What eyebrows! What a nose! I have his nose!”

“You have his face, Uncle, More dashing, naturally.”

“And what—what does it say underneath. Damn! Where are my reading glasses . . . read it for me, Rajnu, it is too small.”

“The caption?
Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, culminating in a mass uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising.
”

Samad sat down on the bottom rung of the stepladder and wept.

“So. Let me get this straight. Now you're telling me that without Pande there'd be no Gandhi. That without your mad grandad there'd be no bloody Independence—”

“Great-grandad.”

“No, let me finish, Sam. Is that what you're seriously asking
us
”—Archie clapped an uninterested Clarence and Denzel on the back—“to believe? Do
you
believe it?” he asked Clarence.

“Me kyan believe dat!” said Clarence, having no idea of the topic.

Denzel blew his nose into a napkin. “Troof be tol, me nah like to believe any ting. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Dat my motto.”

“He was the tickle in the sneeze, Archibald. It is as simple as that. I
do
believe that.”

There was quiet for a minute. Archibald watched three sugar cubes dissolve in his teacup. Then, rather tentatively, he said, “I've got my own theory, you know. Separate from the books, I mean.”

Samad bowed. “Please enlighten us.”

“Don't get angry, now . . . But just
think
for a minute. Why is a strict religious man like Pande drinking bhang? Seriously, I know I tease you about it. But why is he?”

“You know my opinion on that. He isn't. He didn't. It was English propaganda.”

“And he was a good shot . . .”

“No doubt about it. A. S. Misra produces a copy of a record stating that Pande trained in a special guard for one year, specially trained in the use of muskets.”

“O.K. So: why does he miss? Why?”

“It is my belief that the only possible explanation is that the gun was faulty.”

“Yes . . . there is that. But, maybe, maybe something else. Maybe he was being bullied into going out there and making a row, you know, goaded, by the other guys. And he didn't want to kill anyone in the first place, you know. So he
pretended
to be drunk, so the boys in the barracks room would believe he missed the shot.”

“That is quite the stupidest theory I have ever heard,” sighed Samad, as the second hand of Mickey's egg-stained clock started the thirty-second countdown to midnight. “The kind only you could come up with. It's absurd.”

“Why?”

“Why? Archibald, these Englishmen, these Captain Hearsays, Havelocks, and the rest, were every Indian's mortal enemy. Why should he spare lives he despised?”

“Maybe he just couldn't do it. Maybe he wasn't the type.”

“Do you really believe there is a type of man who kills and a type of man who doesn't?”

“Maybe, Sam, maybe not.”

“You sound like my wife,” groaned Samad, mopping up a final piece of egg. “Let me tell you something, Archibald. A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end—he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle. There will be people he will kill.”

“And there will be people he will save,” said Archie Jones, with a cryptic look his friend would have thought an impossible feat for those sagging, chubby features. “Trust me.”

“Five! Four! Tree! Two! One! Jamaica Irie!” said Denzel and Clarence, raising hot Irish coffees to each other in a toast, then immediately resuming round nine of the dominoes.

“HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR!” bellowed Mickey, from behind the counter.

Irie

1990, 1907

In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect
their
future?

—Vladimir Nabokov,
Lolita

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Miseducation of Irie Jones

There was a lamppost, equidistant from the Jones house and Glenard Oak Comprehensive, that had begun to appear in Irie's dreams. Not the lamppost exactly, but a small, handmade ad that was taped round its girth at eye level. It said:

 

LOSE WEIGHT TO EARN MONEY

081 555 6752

Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara's figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense's substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes, and guavas; the girl had weight; big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth. She was 182 pounds and had thirteen pounds in her savings account. She knew she was the target audience (if ever there was one), she knew full well, as she trudged schoolward, mouth full of doughnut, hugging her spare tires, that the ad was speaking to her. It was
speaking
to her. lose weight (it was saying) to earn money. You, you,
you,
Miss Jones, with your strategically placed arms and cardigan, tied around the arse (the endless mystery: how to diminish that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior?), with your belly-reducing panties and breast-reducing bra, with your meticulous Lycra corseting—the much-lauded nineties answer to whalebone—with your elasticized waists. She knew the ad was talking to
her.
But she didn't know quite what it was saying. What were we talking about here? Sponsored slim? The earning capacity of thin people? Or something altogether more Jacobean, the brainchild of some sordid Willesden Shylock, a pound of flesh for a pound of gold:
meat for money
?

Rapid. Eye. Movement. Sometimes she'd be walking through school in a bikini with the lamppost enigma written in chalk over her brown bulges, over her various ledges (shelf space for books, cups of tea, baskets, or, more to the point, children, bags of fruit, buckets of water), ledges genetically designed with another country in mind, another climate. Other times, the sponsored slim dream: knocking on door after door, butt-naked with a clipboard, drenched in sunlight, trying to encourage old men to pinch-an-inch and pledge-a-pound. Worst times? Tearing off loose, white-flecked flesh and packing it into those old curvaceous Coke bottles; she is carrying them to the corner shop, passing them over a counter; and Millat is the bindi-wearing, V-necked shopkeeper, he is adding them up, grudgingly opening the till with blood-stained paws, handing over the cash.
A little Caribbean flesh for a little English change.

Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, “What's up with you? What in the Lord's name are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you're fine—you're just built like an honest-to-God Bowden—don't you know you're fine?”

But Irie didn't know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.

Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before.
After.
The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather round Dunns River Falls, to
English Rose—
oh, you know her—she's a slender, delicate thing not made for the hot sun, a surfboard rippled by the wave:

Before:                   After:

Mrs. Olive Roody, English teacher and expert doodle-spotter at distances of up to twenty yards, reached over her desk to Irie's notebook and tore out the piece of paper in question. Looked dubiously at it. Then inquired with melodious Scottish emphasis, “Before and after
what
?”

“Er . . . what?”

“Before and after
what
?”

“Oh. Nothing, miss.”

“Nothing? Oh, come now, Ms. Jones. No need for modesty. It is obviously more interesting than Sonnet 127.”

“Nothing. It's
nothing.
”

“Absolutely certain? You don't wish to delay the class anymore? Because . . . some of the class need to listen to
—
are even a wee bit
interested in—
what I have to say. So if you could spare some time from your doooodling—”

No one but no one said “doodling” like Olive Roody.

“—and join the rest of us, we'll continue. Well?”

“Well what?”

“Can you? Spare the time?”

“Yes, Mrs. Roody.”

“Oh,
good.
That's cheered me up. Sonnet 127, please.”

“In the old age black was not counted fair,”
continued Francis Stone in the catatonic drone with which students read Elizabethan verse.
“Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name.”

Irie put her right hand on her stomach, sucked in, and tried to catch Millat's eye. But Millat was busy showing pretty Nikki Tyler how he could manipulate his tongue into a narrow roll, a flute. Nikki Tyler was showing him how the lobes of her ears were attached to the side of her head rather than loose. Flirtatious remnants of this morning's science lesson:
Inherited characteristics. Part One (a).
Loose. Attached. Rolled. Flat. Blue eye. Brown eye. Before. After.

“Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black, her brows so suited, and they mourners seem . . . My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun . . .”

Puberty, real full-blown puberty (not the slight mound of a breast, or the shadowy emergence of fuzz), had separated these old friends, Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal. Different sides of the school fence. Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buckteeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight that in turn required Coke-bottle spectacles in a light shade of pink. (Even those blue eyes—the eyes Archie had been so excited about—lasted two weeks only. She had been born with them, yes, but one day Clara looked again and there were brown eyes staring up at her, like the transition between a closed bud and an open flower, the exact moment of which the naked, waiting eye can never detect.) And this belief in her ugliness, in her
wrongness,
had subdued her; she kept her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all
wrong.

Whereas Millat was like youth remembered in the nostalgic eyeglass of old age, beauty parodying itself: broken Roman nose, tall, thin; lightly veined, smoothly muscled; chocolate eyes with a reflective green sheen like moonlight bouncing off a dark sea; irresistible smile, big white teeth. In Glenard Oak Comprehensive, black, Pakistani, Greek, Irish—these were races. But those with sex appeal lapped the other runners. They were a species all of their own.

“If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head . . .”

She loved him, of course. But he used to say to her: “Thing is, people rely on me. They need me to be Millat. Good old Millat. Wicked Millat. Safe, sweet-as, Millat. They need me to be cool. It's
practically
a responsibility.”

And it practically was. Ringo Starr once said of the Beatles that they were never bigger than they were in Liverpool, late 1962. They just got more countries. And that's how it was for Millat. He was so big in Cricklewood, in Willesden, in West Hampstead, the summer of 1990, that nothing he did later in his life could top it. From his first Raggastani crowd, he had expanded and developed tribes throughout the school, throughout North London. He was simply too big to remain merely the object of Irie's affection, leader of the Raggastanis, or the son of Samad and Alsana Iqbal. He had to please all of the people all of the time. To the Cockney wide-boys in the white jeans and the colored shirts he was the joker, the risk-taker, respected lady-killer. To the black kids he was fellow weed-smoker and valued customer. To the Asian kids, hero and spokesman. Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It was this soft underbelly that made him most beloved, most adored by Irie and the nice oboe-playing, long-skirted middle-class girls, most treasured by these hair-flicking and fugue-singing females; he was their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams . . .

And he was also their
project
: what
was
to be done about Millat? He simply
must
stop smoking weed. We
have
to try and stop him walking out of class. They worried about his “attitude” at sleep-overs, discussed his education hypothetically with their parents (
Just say there was this Indian boy, yeah, who was always getting into . . .
), even wrote poems on the subject. Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. Everybody's bit of rough, Millat Iqbal.

“But you're different,” Millat Iqbal would say to the martyr Irie Jones, “you're
different.
We go way back. We've got history. You're a
real
friend. They don't really
mean
anything to me.”

Irie liked to believe that. That they had history, that she was different in a good way.

“Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place . . .”

Mrs. Roody silenced Francis with a raised finger. “Now, what is he saying there? Annalese?”

Annalese Hersh, who had spent the lesson so far braiding red and yellow thread into her hair, looked up in blank confusion.

“
Anything,
Annalese, dear. Any little idea. No matter how small. No matter how paltry.”

Annalese bit her lip. Looked at the book. Looked at Mrs. Roody. Looked at the book.

“Black? . . . Is? . . . Good?”

“Yes . . . well, I suppose we can add that to last week's contribution: Hamlet? . . . Is? . . . Mad? Anybody else? What about this?
For since each hand hath put on nature's power, Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face.
What might that mean, I wonder?”

Joshua Chalfen, the only kid in class who volunteered opinions, put his hand up.

“Yes, Joshua?”

“Makeup.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Roody, looking close to orgasm. “Yes, Joshua, that's it. What about it?”

“She's got a dark complexion that she's trying to lighten by means of makeup, artifice. The Elizabethans were very keen on a pale skin.”

“They would've loved you, then,” sneered Millat, for Joshua was pasty, practically anemic, curly-haired, and chubby, “you would have been Tom bloody Cruise.”

Laughter. Not because it was funny, but because it was Millat putting a nerd where a nerd should be. In his place.

“One more word from you, Mr. Ick-Ball, and you are out!”

“Shakespeare. Sweaty. Bollocks. That's three. Don't worry, I'll let myself out.”

This was the kind of thing Millat did so expertly. The door slammed. The nice girls looked at each other in
that
way. (He's just
so
out of control,
so
crazy . . . he
really
needs some help, some close one-to-one
personal
help from a
good friend . . .
) The boys belly-laughed. The teacher wondered if this was the beginning of a mutiny. Irie covered her stomach with her right hand.

“Marvelous. Very adult. I suppose Millat Iqbal is some kind of hero.” Mrs. Roody, looking round the gormless faces of 5F, saw for the first time and with dismal clarity that this was exactly what he was.

“Does anyone else have anything to say about these sonnets? Ms. Jones! Will you
stop
looking mournfully at the door! He's gone, all right? Unless you'd like to join him?”

“No, Mrs. Roody.”

“All right, then. Have you anything to say about the sonnets?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Is she black?”

“Is who black?”

“The dark lady.”

“No, dear, she's
dark.
She's not black in the modern sense. There weren't any . . . well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That's more a modern phenomenon, as I'm sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean I can't be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he's unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?”

Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding; so she said, “Don't know, miss.”

“Besides, he says very clearly,
In nothing art thou black, save in thy deeds . . .
No, dear, she just has a dark complexion, you see, as dark as mine, probably.”