Home Fire(16)

He left the canal path near high-rises embodying the word “regeneration” and was soon on Ealing Road, walking past Gurkha Superstore, Gama Halal Meat, a Hindu temple intricately carved of limestone, cheerful stalls and restaurants. He couldn’t point to anything in particular he recognized, yet he had complete certainty that he had looked out a car window onto this street many times in his childhood. “We’re going,” is all his father would say before the annual outings to Eamonn’s great-uncle’s house every Eid, a holiday that his mother explained as “marking the end of the month of not observing Ramzan for all of us.” On that one day of the year, his father became someone else, and it was this that he knew his mother hated as much as he did. Surrounded by his extended family, Karamat Lone disappeared into another language, with its own gestures and intonations—even when he was speaking English. One year, when Eamonn was nine or ten, Eid fell just after Christmas. The American family was visiting, and there were plans every day for outings with cousins. “You don’t have to come this year,” his father agreed after some judiciously timed postprandial Christmas Day pleading, and went on his own. The next year it was “Do you want to come?” and he didn’t seem to mind when his wife and children said no. Just when Eamonn was becoming old enough to want to know the part of his father’s life that remained so mysterious, there was the whole business with the mosque photographs and a falling-out with the cousins over the necessary damage control.

He was nearing a mosque, crossed the street to avoid it, then crossed back so as not to be seen trying to avoid a mosque. Everyone always went on about the racism his father had had to face when a section of the press tried to brand him an extremist, but it was London’s Muslim population who had turned their back on Karamat Lone and voted him out, despite all the good he’d done for his constituents. All because he’d expressed a completely enlightened preference for the conventions of a church over those of a mosque and spoke of the need for British Muslims to lift themselves out of the Dark Ages if they wanted the rest of the nation to treat them with respect.

On the High Road now, with its pound stores and pawnshops, glancing up every so often at the bone-white rainbow of Wembley Stadium for its reassuring familiarity—and then north toward Preston Road, where everything turned residential, suburban. Any one of these semidetached houses could be the home in which he’d spent all those Eid afternoons, sitting pressed against his mother in an alliance she tried to push him out of, knowing that he would rather be in the garden playing cricket with the boy cousins whose invitations to join them were located confusingly at the border between the merely polite and the genuine. His sister, habitually free of the burden of alliances, would be upstairs with the girl cousins, throwing herself into a rapture of family feeling that would disappear as soon as they were back in Holland Park. She was, everyone said, her father’s daughter, a claim she was proving with her determined ascent, at twenty-two, through the world of investment banking in Manhattan.

On the rare occasions he remembered his father’s family it was only to recall the feelings of estrangement that visits to them brought up, but spending time with Isma had reminded him that there were other, more familial feelings. She evoked in particular his father’s youngest cousin, the one who once affixed a Band-Aid and a healing kiss on his elbow when he took a tumble in the garden, gashing open his skin. He wondered if, in turn, he reminded Isma of Parvaiz, the younger brother to whom she referred only in passing, twin to the beautiful woman in the photograph.

He was walking past curving side streets that he seemed to know had been laid directly over country roads more recently than a person might assume. The distance between his father’s life and his own revealed itself here more acutely than in West London. This was the London of Karamat Lone’s childhood, these were the homes of the affluent relatives whose lives his father had aspired to when he sat up all night in his cramped flat in Bradford, studying for exams. Late at night was the only time he could spread his books onto the surface that was kitchen counter, dining table, and workspace for his seamstress mother. On the wall across from him a large poster of the Ka’aba, the faithful prostrating themselves around it. Eamonn knew this from a photograph, one of the few his father had from his childhood, about which he had always been too embarrassed to ask.

Finally, he approached the street on which Isma had grown up, just off a commercial stretch of Preston Road. Now that he was here he felt awkward about not simply posting the package, and he walked up Preston Road for a while—past a Jewish bakery beside an Islamic bookshop beside a Romanian butcher—before turning back toward Isma’s street again. He was unable to let go of the feeling that behind these doors existed a piece of his childhood—of his father—that he’d been too ready to forget. He knocked on the door of a pebble-dash house and an elderly woman made small by age answered, wearing a shalwar kameez with a thick cardigan that signaled her internal thermometer was still set to another country. This must be the old friend and neighbor, Aunty Naseem, in whose house Isma’s sister was living while studying law at LSE. He said he had brought something for her from Isma, which made her open the door wide and reach up to place the palm of her hand against his cheek before turning to walk back inside with the words “Come, have some tea.”

The Arabic calligraphy on the wall, the carpeted stairs, the plastic flowers in a vase, the scent of spices in the kitchen despite there being nothing on the stove: all brought back his great-uncle’s home, and with it the shameful memory of his own embarrassment about it.