Home Fire(32)

Isma walked into all this, preceded by the smell of dry-cleaning solvent, and said, “A total lack of career prospects is the real problem.” Parvaiz pushed the chopping board to a side, took off the goggles, and picked up his phone, its screen without message notifications from Preston Road friends, now scattered emotionally and geographically by the demands of post-school life. “Turn the volume down and listen to me,” Isma said. She had a serious look about her that made him do as she asked even though ordinarily he would have turned the volume up in response. Aneeka saw it too, and reached out to put a hand on their sister’s wrist: “Tell us,” she said.

Isma had been issued her visa for America. She would leave for Massachusetts in mid-January. She announced all this in the way another woman would have announced an engagement—proud, shy, worried about her family’s reaction to news no one had anticipated.

Aneeka stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her. “We’ll miss you, but we’re so pleased for you. And proud of you. Isn’t that right, P?”

“America,” Parvaiz said. The word felt strange in his mouth. “They really gave you the visa?”

“I know, I didn’t think they would either.”

When she’d first come to the twins to discuss the letter Dr. Shah had written to her, with its suggestion—almost a command—that she apply for the PhD program, Parvaiz had said, “What’s the point?” And Isma had immediately agreed yes, he was right. Neither Parvaiz nor Isma had come right out and actually said it was the unlikelihood of a visa that made the whole thing futile, but they all recognized well enough when their father was subtext to a conversation. Still, Aneeka was adamant that she apply. “Sometimes the world surprises you,” she said, “and more to the point, if you don’t even try, you’ll always wonder what might have happened.” After enough of Aneeka’s badgering, Isma finally said that it would seem ungrateful to Dr. Shah if she didn’t at least try. She clearly had a greater capacity for hurling herself at disappointment than he’d known, Parvaiz had thought at the time with both irritation and regret.

“So,” Aneeka said. “What are we going to do about the house?”

Parvaiz shoved his twin’s shoulder. “I’m getting her bedroom. I need a studio, and you’re not around nearly as much as I am anymore.”

The sisters looked at each other and back at him. Isma said a number. It was the household’s monthly expenditure. She invoked this number every time she wanted to remind Parvaiz that his earnings as a greengrocer’s assistant were insufficient, that the time he spent building up his sound reel rather than chasing after job postings was wasteful. She didn’t believe he was good enough to find work doing what he loved, didn’t see that his sound reel was as much an investment in the future as Aneeka’s law degree was. She doesn’t think our lives allow for dreaming, Aneeka had said, in a way that rang as both indictment of and justification for Isma’s position.

They’d been all right so far, Isma continued. But in America she would have only enough from the university to sustain herself, just as Aneeka had only enough from her scholarship for the most basic living expenses. The mortgage alone would become impossible.

“Don’t go, then,” he said. Aneeka threw a cube of potato at him, and he head-butted it back at her—reflex rather than play.

Isma opened the crockery cupboard and started unloading plates and glasses for dinner. She’d just stopped in across the road, she said; Aunty Naseem was getting older, she needed help around the house, and even though her daughters and grandchildren were often around to help out, she was struggling to keep up. Some extra hands about the place would be a huge assistance. That’s how Aunty Naseem had presented the option.

“What option?” said Parvaiz.

“We’ll move in with Aunty Naseem, and sell the house.” Aneeka said this as if it were a matter as small as buying a new set of towels. Now it was Isma who looked stricken; she said she was only thinking they’d rent it out. With the new French school opening in Wembley the following year, property values were going to go up and up, so it would be foolish to sell now. And anyway, in a few years, when she had her PhD and Aneeka was a lawyer, they’d be able to move back in. Ordinarily, Parvaiz would have felt the blade of being omitted from the conversation. But just then Aneeka shrugged in response, and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking.

Aneeka would leave them. That’s what the shrug said. After university she had no intention of continuing to live in this house and remain a sibling rather than anything else that a law degree made possible.

“You can’t just decide this for us,” Parvaiz said to Isma. But the “us” carried no weight with his twin helping her sister set the kitchen table, refusing to meet his eye.

“Traitor,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He made enough of a production of looking for keys and phone and mic that anyone who had wanted to stop him could have, but when they didn’t, he had no option but to walk out, though the night looked less than inviting.

An autumn evening that carried more anticipation of winter than memory of summer. Cold seeped in through his badly chosen jacket, and his skin quickly speckled with goose bumps. The neighborhood lights captured by the clouds turned the sky a pale red. The sound of the world turned up just that little bit. One of the first occasions he’d become aware of the acuteness of his hearing was when he had asked a teacher why planes sounded louder on overcast days, and the teacher said they didn’t, to the laughter of his classmates, only to return the next day to tell Parvaiz he’d been right.