Home Fire(36)
We, she said, but he wondered how often she’d be around. There was hardly a week when she didn’t spend at least one night at Gita’s. He knew Aneeka well enough to recognize she was laying the groundwork for staying out more and more often—and it wouldn’t always be with Gita either.
“This is our home,” he said.
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Always so senti. You should join me in convincing Isma we should sell. You could afford to go to uni with the money we’d get. That’d make up for the loss of More of the Same Heard from the Garden Shed, wouldn’t it?”
“They only gave you a scholarship because you tick their ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ boxes,” he said, wounded enough to vocalize a sentiment Farooq had recently dredged out of his unconscious.
“Since when are you so white?” She flicked his earlobe with her thumb and forefinger.
“Muslim women, particularly the beautiful ones, need to be saved from Muslim men. Muslim men need to be detained, harassed, pressed against the ground with a heel on our throat.”
“None of these things has ever happened to you.”
“How many times have I been stopped and searched by police? Compared to you?”
“Twice. Only twice, P. And you said yourself it was no big deal either time, so stop whining about it after the fact.” She jumped down from the ladder, with that physical confidence that always made his breath stop in terror for her safety. “Isma’s right, you know. It’s time for you to grow up.”
Previously he would have gone after her and turned it into a shouting match that would continue until they’d exhausted themselves into reconciliation. But now he remained where he was, watching all the lives within their narrow frames slide past on the tracks in the darkness, allowing the wound to fester so that tomorrow he could tell Farooq about it and receive the antiseptic of his new friend’s indignation.
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Farooq sent a text asking him to come to the flat in Wembley where he lived with two of his cousins, though not the one who had mugged Parvaiz. It felt momentous enough for Parvaiz to go home from the greengrocer’s, scrub the dirt out from beneath his fingernails, and put on a fresh shirt.
When he pushed open the unlocked door at Farooq’s address he smelled chicken grease from the fast-food joint downstairs, and familiar cologne. A window was rattling in its frame, not because of any breeze but as a consequence of the traffic on the street below. Farooq’s baritone voice told him to stop waiting for a gold-plated invitation and come in.
The furnishings consisted of three mattresses piled on top of one another and pushed against a wall and two green plastic chairs, which faced a flat-screen TV hooked up to a video game console. The kitchen area had a microwave and an electric kettle, the open door of a cabinet offering a glimpse of rolled black T-shirts and black socks. A punching bag hung from a thick bolt in the ceiling, a slight creaking as it oscillated almost imperceptibly. There was a bolt in the floor, similar to the one in the ceiling, that didn’t seem to serve any purpose. He remembered Farooq’s texts—the ones he didn’t know how to respond to—about wanting to chain up women from the American reality TV show, and looked away. An ironing board served as makeshift table for a lamp and a pair of boxing gloves. On the floor beside it, an iron rested on a base the size of a bread box.
“It’s the Ferrari of irons,” Farooq said, proudly, seeing Parvaiz looking at the appliance. “Only one setting so you never burn your clothes. You ever want to iron something, bring it here. Sit, sit, make yourself at home. You are at home. No, on the chair, on the chair.”
Parvaiz sat down, tried to smooth the creases of his shirt. Farooq smiled, cuffed him on the side of the head, and handed him a mug of tea.
“Wait for me. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and walked out.
Parvaiz sipped the tea—too weak—and looked around the flat, trying to find any further clues to his yaar’s life. The Urdu word came closer than “friend” to explaining how he thought of Farooq. Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.
A photograph was taped to the wall just above the ironing board. Three men with their arms around one another’s shoulders under a DEPARTURES sign at an airport—Adil Pasha; Ahmed from the fabric shop, who had convinced Parvaiz’s father to come with him to Bosnia in 1995; and a stocky third man. That must be Farooq’s father. The man who fought for less than a week in Bosnia before running back home, a broken creature with night terrors who embarrassed his young son. Farooq had revealed all this only a few days ago—Ahmed from the fabric shop would come to visit, and every time he brought more and more stories of the heroism of the man who had become Abu Parvaiz, which my father never wanted to hear, but I did. Ahmed had moved away a few years ago—Parvaiz knew him only as the man his mother crossed the street to avoid.
He reached out to touch his father’s arm in the photo, searched his face for signs of similarity. But he and Aneeka took after their mother’s family; it was Isma, unfairly, who had their father’s wider face, thinner lips. He leaned in closer to the photograph, the only one he’d ever seen of his father at the moment he set off on the path that would become his life. He looked excited. It was the first time in years Parvaiz had seen a photograph of his father that he hadn’t already committed to memory. He found himself staring at the paler band of skin on his father’s wrist. Where was his watch? Had he taken it off to go through the metal detector and failed to put it back on? Did they have metal detectors at airports back then? Perhaps at the moment the picture was taken he hadn’t yet realized that he’d left his watch in the security screening area. Once he realized, he would have gone back, perhaps with the slightly anxious expression Parvaiz knew from an Eid photograph, in which he looked off to the side, away from the camera. He thought of all the photographs of his father, the ones before Bosnia, and the very few ones after. Yes, he still had the watch with the silver band afterward. It was a triumph to remember this, to piece together this tiny truth.