Exit West(27)

From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must be like in light London, where they imagined people dined in elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least went to work in offices and shops and were free to journey about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued, uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb.

At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and surveillance balloons prowled intermittently overhead, fights would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes and assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled deck during the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind, like with like, or rather superficially like with superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans.

Saeed and Nadia did not move, but their house began to change nonetheless. Nigerians were initially the largest among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-Nigerian family would relocate out of the house, and their place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so the house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two on either side. The elder Nigerians of these three houses would meet in the garden of the property to the right of Saeed and Nadia’s, and this meeting they called the council. Women and men both attended, but the only obvious non-Nigerian who attended was Nadia.

The first time Nadia went the others seemed surprised to see her, not merely because of her ethnicity but because of her relatively young age. Momentarily there was a silence, but then an old woman with a turban who lived with her daughter and grandsons in the bedroom above Saeed and Nadia’s, and whom Nadia had helped on more than one occasion to ascend the stairs, the old woman being regal in posture but also quite large, this old woman motioned to Nadia, beckoned Nadia to come stand at her side, to stand beside the garden chair on which she was sitting. This seemed to settle the matter, and Nadia was not questioned or asked to leave.

Initially Nadia did not follow much of what was being said, just snippets here and there, but over time she understood more and more, and she understood also that the Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some were half Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from families that spanned both sides of a border, and further that there was perhaps no such thing as a Nigerian, or certainly no one common thing, for different Nigerians spoke different tongues among themselves, and belonged to different religions. Together in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English, but not solely from English, and some of them were in any case more familiar with English than were others. Also they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many.

The activities of the council were mundane, making decisions on room disputes or claims of theft or unneighborly behavior, and also on relations with other houses on the street. Deliberations were often slow and cumbersome, so these gatherings were not particularly thrilling. And yet Nadia looked forward to them. They represented something new in her mind, the birth of something new, and she found these people who were both like and unlike those she had known in her city, familiar and unfamiliar, she found them interesting, and she found their seeming acceptance of her, or at least tolerance of her, rewarding, an achievement in a way.

Among the younger Nigerians Nadia acquired a bit of a special status, perhaps because they saw her with their elders, or perhaps because of her black robe, and so the younger Nigerian men and women and the older Nigerian boys and girls, the ones who often had quick jibes to make about many of the others in the house, rarely said anything of that nature to her, or about her, at least in her presence. She came and went unruffled through the crowded rooms and passages, unruffled except by a fast-talking Nigerian woman her own age, a woman with a leather jacket and a chipped tooth, who stood like a gunslinger, with hips open and belt loose and hands at her sides, and spared no one from her verbal lashings, from her comments that would follow you even as you passed her and left her behind.

Saeed, though, was less comfortable. As he was a young man the other young men would size him up from time to time, as young men do, and Saeed found this disconcerting. Not because he had not encountered anything similar in his own country, he had, but because here in this house he was the only man from his country, and those sizing him up were from another country, and there were far more of them, and he was alone. This touched upon something basic, something tribal, and evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear. He was uncertain when he could relax, if he could relax, and so when he was outside his bedroom but inside the house he seldom felt fully at ease.

Once, he was alone, arriving home while Nadia was at a meeting of the council, and the woman in the leather jacket stood in the hall, blocking his way with her narrow, jagged form, her back leaning against one wall, a foot planted on the other. Saeed did not like to admit it but he was intimidated by her, by her intensity and by the speed and unpredictability of her words, words that he often could not understand, but words that made others laugh. He stood there and waited for her to move, to yield space for him to pass. But she did not move, and so he said excuse me, and she said why should I excuse you, she said more than that, but all he could catch was that phrase. Saeed was angry that she was toying with him, and alarmed also, and he considered turning around and coming back later. But he realized at that moment that there was a man behind him, a tough-looking Nigerian man. Saeed had heard that this man had a gun, though he could not see it on him, but many of the migrants in dark London had taken to carrying knives and other weapons, being as they were in a state of siege, and liable to be attacked by government forces at any time, or in some cases being predisposed to carrying weapons, having done it where they came from, and so continuing to do it here, which Saeed suspected was the case with this man.