Home Fire(35)
“The father every son wishes he had,” Farooq said.
“But I never had him as a father,” Parvaiz replied, tracing the lines of his own palm with the grenade pin—was it really?—Farooq had brought along to the kabab shop.
“Do you think he wanted the world to be as it is? No. But he saw it for what it is. And having seen it he understood that a man has larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to.”
To help Parvaiz understand those responsibilities, Farooq talked to him of history: the terror with which Christendom had watched the ascent of Islam, the thousand years of Muslim supremacy, which was eventually squandered by eunuchlike Ottomans and Mughals who had lost sight of the moral path, and then the bloodlust with which the Christians had avenged themselves for their centuries of humiliation; imperialism, with its racist underpinnings of a “civilizing mission,” followed by the cruel joke of pretending to “give” independence when really they were merely changing economic models via the creation of client states, their nonsensical boundaries designed to cause instability. There didn’t seem to be any part of the Muslim world Farooq didn’t know about—Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan and Palestine and Turkey and Chechnya and Kashmir and Uzbekistan. If ever Parvaiz started to lose his concentration, Farooq would swerve the conversation toward football (he supported Real Madrid, Parvaiz Arsenal, but they agreed on the greatness of ?zil) or the tiniest details of Parvaiz’s life (What did you have for dinner? Any interesting characters at the greengrocer’s? Let me listen to another one of your recordings—this time, I’ll guess what it is) or the American reality TV show Farooq watched devotedly and that Parvaiz started watching too, in order to talk to him about it. But no matter what the topic of conversation, it always returned to the central preoccupation of Farooq’s life, the heart of all his lessons: how to be a man.
“It’s your sisters’ fault,” Farooq said one afternoon when they were sitting side by side in green bucket seats in the betting shop, watching a bank of screens with greyhounds racing around a track and sweating men in another time zone walloping a cricket ball in the direction of sponsors’ billboards. The volume was off, allowing for some pleasing moments of synchresis, such as when the dogs were released from their cages just as the front door was hurled open by a drunk, or when the strip light overhead started to buzz and the on-field umpire batted midges away from his face. Farooq had placed three phones on Parvaiz’s leg between knee and hip, and each time one pinged with a text message he’d glance down and go to the counter to place another bet. It was good training for Parvaiz to stop fidgeting, he said the first time he did it. Parvaiz always kept his legs so tensed up during those betting shop sessions he had trouble walking afterward. “They want you in the house, doing their shopping and mowing the garden, so they’ve tried to keep you a boy, a child in need of a mother. That older one particularly, you know what I mean? The one who claims to be a good Muslim, and thinks she has the right to decide whether or not you can live in your own house. Tell her it is written in the Quran, ‘Men are in charge of women because Allah has made one of them to excel the other.’ And by Allah’s law, you, not your women, dispose of your property.”
Your women. Parvaiz turned the phrase in his mouth while Farooq placed another bet. He liked how it felt. Though that didn’t mean he’d be stupid enough to try to quote the Quran to Isma, particularly when it came to the roles of men and women. He was a Muslim, of course; he believed in God, and went to the mosque for Eid prayers, and put aside 2.5 percent of his income for zakat, which he split between Islamic Relief and the library campaign, but beyond that, religion had, since early childhood, been a space he’d vacated rather than live in it in the shadow of Isma’s superiority. But in Farooq’s company he came to see there was such a thing as an “emasculated version of Islam, bankrolled in mosques by the British government, which wants to keep us all compliant,” and there was more than a little satisfaction in knowing this.
“Where are you these days?” Aneeka asked him one night, climbing up the ladder he’d propped against the garden shed to get onto the roof with his phone, headphones, and pride and joy, the secondhand shotgun mic. A favorite perch since childhood that allowed a clear view of the trains pulling in and out of Preston Road. The bodies of the trains were shadows in the darkness but the long windows revealed illuminated snapshots of life passing by. Every so often there was a jagged break in the conventions of tube behavier: a man throwing a punch, a kiss so concentrated that train carriage or gondola ride or bedroom were irrelevant details, someone pressing a palm against the glass, leaning toward the boy on the garden shed as though fate wanted them together but the wheels of plot weren’t allowing it. Nearly two years ago he had started working on a project that would eventually be a 1,440-minute track that his ideal listener would play between midnight of one day and the next—a soundscape of every minute of a day from this perch.
He stopped the recording, took off his headphones, scribbled in his notepad. It might be nice to leave in that Where are you these days between 20:13 and 20:14. Aneeka’s was the only human voice scattered through his audio files of Preston Road Station Heard from the Garden Shed.
“I’m here. You’re the one who’s hardly around.”
“I meant where are you here?” She reached out to tap his head. “And here.” She rested her hand on his wrist, at his pulse point, in the old childish way, but he didn’t reciprocate. “Is this about moving to Aunty Naseem’s? I know you’re upset about losing this spot, but at least we’ll still be in the neighborhood.”