Home Fire(10)
“It’s not an uncommon Pakistani surname.” An evasion rather than a lie, she told herself.
“I know. Anyway, I’m glad I can finally tell you. Also, this is why I haven’t been able to answer your question of how long I’m staying. I hate all the old muck they scrape up about him every time he’s in the headlines, and this time it’ll be worse. I came to avoid it. He’s good at dealing with it; I’m not. So if you see me obsessing over stuff they’re saying online, take my phone away from me, would you?” He tapped her fingers with his as he spoke to emphasize the final point.
All the old muck. He meant the picture of Karamat Lone entering a mosque that had been in the news for its “hate preacher.” LONE WOLF’S PACK REVEALED, the headlines screamed when a tabloid got hold of it, near the end of his first term as an MP. The Lone Wolf’s response had been to point out that the picture was several years old, he had been there only for his uncle’s funeral prayers and would otherwise never enter a gender-segregated space. This was followed by pictures of him and his wife walking hand in hand into a church. His Muslim-majority constituency voted him out in the elections that took place just a few weeks later, but he was quickly back in Parliament via a by-election, in a safe seat with a largely white constituency, and the tabloids that had attacked him now championed him as a LONE CRUSADER taking on the backwardness of British Muslims. Isma doubted very much that “the old muck” would rise again—oh, unless he meant the opposing side of that story: all the accusations she’d heard, and that seemed entirely accurate, that Karamat Lone had precisely calculated the short-term losses and long-term gains of showing such contempt for the conventions of a mosque. Sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor.
“You’re close to him, aren’t you?”
“You know what fathers and sons are like.”
“Not really, no.”
“They’re our guides into manhood, for starters.”
She’d never understood this, though she’d heard and seen enough anecdotally and academically to know there was something to it. For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition. He must have seen her look of incomprehension, because he tried again.
“We want to be like them, we want to be better than them. We want to be the only people in the world who are allowed to be better than them.” He gestured at himself and around the café with a shrug that encompassed the mediocrity of everything. “Obviously, I worked out long ago that such an attempt would be futile.”
“That’s not true. You’re a much better person than he is.”
“What do you know about it?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t know how to, and he said, “Why were you acting so furtive when I came in?”
She hesitated, turned her laptop around so it faced him, and opened the lid.
“You were reading about him. Isma, did you already know he was my father?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you lie about it?”
She clasped her hands together, looked down at the interlacing of her fingers, which he’d touched so familiarly just a few moments ago.
“You’re one of them? The Muslims who say those ugly things about him?”
“Yes.”
He waited, but there was nothing more she could say.
“I see. Well, I’m very sorry to hear it.” She heard the scraping of the chair and looked up as he stood. “I suppose one day I’ll see the irony in running here to try and escape certain attitudes only to find myself having coffee with their embodiment.” Gone was the friendly, considerate boy, and in his place a man carrying all the wounds his father was almost certainly too thick-skinned to feel as anything more than pinpricks. When he said good-bye there was no mistaking the finality of his tone.
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The wind had dropped, and the snow drifted down in large flakes that retained their shape for a moment on her sleeve before melting into the fabric. Isma walked the short distance home, but as she approached her front door the thought of her studio with its clanging pipes was intolerable. She carried on down to the tree-lined graveyard at the end of the street, unexpectedly positioned beside a nursery school, across the road from a baseball diamond. In the summer it must be a place of shade, in autumn a feast of color; but she had known it only as the white of snow, the gray of stone.
She started on a cleared pathway before cutting across a snowdrift that came halfway up her knee-high boots, and pulled herself onto a nineteenth-century gravestone, feet dangling. Sometimes the dead were a friendly presence, but today they were only dead, and every chiseled slab was a marker of someone’s sorrow. She kicked her heels against the gravestone. “Stupid,” she said.
That was the only word for this sense of enormous loss where there had been so very little to lose.
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“You don’t have to decide that’s the end of it,” Hira Shah said that evening, when they sat down together for a typically elaborate meal. A single woman in her mid-fifties who had never had to cook on a regular basis for anyone, Hira retained the idea that company for dinner must be occasion for pyrotechnics in the kitchen, no matter how frequently company was over—or perhaps she did that only when her company hadn’t had anyone to mother her in a long time. “You should at least try explaining why you feel the way you do. What is there to lose?”