The Sitar

Mrs Chakkarbatti was so simple that it confused people. She was a woman and she was a wife to her house. She ran all the way home in startled fear when she saw her first black man after she had arrived in England. In 1972, she walked the 20 minutes home in the snow wearing her sandals because the women at the factory stole her shoes and she was too dignified to get embroiled in the vulgar behaviour of reporting them. She did not go to mela’s because they were not Bengali; she did not approve of Punjabi culture overshadowing her quiet, contemplative Bangladeshi lifestyle.

  She did not watch TV because Allah did not want her to. She was devout to her husband because there was nobody telling her to do otherwise. She left behind her law career in Sylhet, 1972, for a factory job in Coventry because that is was her husband chose for her.

  She did not lament the fact that she did not have a son; that was the preoccupation of the villagers, the fish-eating working glass gawwali’s who had not yet been distinguished from the rest of the British Bengali’s despite 30 years of immigration to the country.

  Mrs Chakkarbatti came from a political family of finesse and discipline and repression. In their youth, she slapped her daughters if they laughed too loud. They were not allowed to speak or contribute to the conversations of elders. They would not become mindless Bengali philanderers; they would become educated, opinionated women who daren’t look in to their parents’ eyes when getting told off. They would prescribe their own canings, they would get the best textbooks in the world and not piss away their allowances on non-halal penny sweets, and they would have their wealth stored in the attic in the form of solid gold jewellery sets, hoarded over years of visits from Bangladesh, which they will wear on their marriage days.

  It was all planned out and no average local school grades or area statistics or local teen pregnancy rates could change it.

  Yes, the daughters did what they did at university. There was no need to question that.

  But what happened under the roof of Mrs Chakkarbatti’s house, happened under Mrs Chakkarbatti’s rule.

  She tightened her sari around her and began the marathon of cooking and packing so her daughter would be well nourished through her final university term.

  Husband was out buying energy drinks from Lal & Co Cash & Carry, for Jaya’s exam season, as these young people drank nowadays.

  Just one more to go, and that would be Phase 2 of Parenting done: Education. Which naturally came after Phase 1: Spiritual enlightenment.

  Next stop: Marriage.

  Ruby Khan knew that the object of her lustings, Paul Gordon from Year 12, was a racist thug and had his finger in every racist pie in England. She knew there was nothing about him that was even mildly socially acceptable. She knew he was a white supremacist who forcefully and unapologetically imposed every colonial ideal on every Fucking Paki or Curry Loving White Slag he met, in the face of every teacher he spat in, and on the walls of every mosque he walked by. In fact, Ruby Khan knew more about Paul Gordon’s beliefs than he himself knew; she’d watched YouTube videos of his father giving speeches at rallies, she knew he was the one who invited the Quran burning pastor from Florida to the UK, she knew that the network of racists spanned the small towns of England to the highest ranks of Sarah Palin’s Tea Party candidates and their anti-Islamic agendas. She knew their complex, multi-layered facets of belief better than the image of Paul’s scrotum she had pictured smacking in to her buttocks in many a math class.

  But Ruby Khan was a self-hating coconut who was, unfortunately, born to the wrong womb. The Fates had, unequivocally, made a major boobie in Ruby’s birth, by god had they. She had, from her forlorn and confused childhood, always regarded the Browns as a greasy-haired, runny poo’d base type of species who bred far too quickly. Ruby lamented the fact that her extended family could populate a small city and her household’s idea of personal space was somebody not stepping on your toes.

  She hated that every Sunday in her house was set aside for ‘English’ food; like soup and fishfingers (and everybody was glad for the extra bit of green chilli slipped in). Ruby knew the indignation she suffered at home which classmates Louise and Kylie didn’t have to endure; the endless curfews, the questioning before going out, the insistence of wearing a headscarf, the smell of curry in the driveway, the stench of BO from her mother’s wardrobe because soap powder was an unnecessary purchase, the chickens slaughtered in the garden, the thick Pakistani accents and the roving eyes of Uncle Hanif.

  While Ruby the suspected the latter was likely a universal thing, everything else ferociously embarrassed her. Her family certainly weren’t an affront to the stereotype.

  And it was those things, which made Ruby Khan, over the years, unnoticed, transform slowly, quietly, in her bedroom. Subtle, subtle changes, like the tip toe of foxes at night molesting the garbage. It was there, on the thinly carpeted, loose wood-boarded floors the 8-year-old Ruby Khan cowered and quivered like a Kashmiri tulip in the mountains. Quivering with hatred and meekly whimpering in pity for herself; she didn’t want to wear the scratchy spangly suit Auntie Parveen had sent from Pakistan because the metal springs dug in to her skin. She didn’t want to watch the too-loud soap drama on Pak TV about black magic with women who caked their faces with foundation and had sweat patches and lightning bolts every time they managed a facial expression.

  ‘No!’ she would scream like the Exorcist child, ugly, and hard to love, ‘oil is for cooking, not for grooming my hair! Stop putting onions and chilli in my school sandwiches! I’m not going to wear TWELVE sets of gold on my wedding, I’m NOT going to marry cousin Faruq and I’m not going to stuff any more pickled lemons in my luggage!’

  Her parents were afraid of their own child; the child who had come amidst a bizarre series of events and conceived the day after Mr Khan was found to be shooting blanks… She came out of the womb laughing, mocking the world, and Mrs Khan didn’t feed her for 12 days, afraid she would be devoured by the demon child and sent to hell with the Jamaicans and the pork bap sellers.

  Ruby had grown a natural resentment for anything remotely pertaining to be from her heritage. She scoffed at the mention of the Pakistani floods (‘poor mongrels deserve it, bamboo bridges weren’t the best idea’), she saluted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (‘one down; the rest will kill themselves in the aftermath’) and she cursed the cyclone of 1970 for not wiping out the entire country. Fools, she thought, selfish fools who should have surrendered to colonial rule and interbreeding when they had the chance.

  She sabotaged ethnic art pieces from rivals during her GCSE’s; she thinly veiled her hatred for teachers who expected her to do essays on identity crises for Sociology before spitting discreetly in their tea (little did she know it was the method of one very Pakistani ancestor in 1914, Rabia Khan).

  ‘I detest the smell of curry,’ she would spit to Paul during their stolen talks against the grit bin behind the canteen building.

  He would take heavy drags of his weed-laced cigarette and listen nervously, hoping nobody would see them talking. He never said a word, lest he should give anything away to this strange, strange girl who seemed to hate her own type more than his father did. He had no idea that she already knew the in’s and out’s of his extra-curricular activities.

  But Paul was, for Ruby, a conquest. Surely if she could conquer Paul whose very blood curdled at the sight of a successful Brown, at the sight of a multicultural neigbourhood, or seeing an English street sign translated in to Bengali; surely if she could win his approval, it would be the ultimate middle-finger flicking great big ‘fuck you’ to the Establishment and all it stood for?

  Two years ago, Balsall Heath School suffered an unfortunate blow to its position as the host body to the government’s multicultural manifesto; hundreds of photocopied papers were scattered across the floorshallslockerstoilets of the school, loudly declaring a single, bold headline:

  CHILD MOLESTATION RATES HIGHEST IN SOUTH ASIA

  followed by a detailed report in to the research by an fai
rly reliable and media-friendly organisation.

  And it was the note of confession from Ruby Khan which sat atop Paul Gordon’s bike seat the next day, sellotaped and flapping in the wind, that began a strange acquaintance between two young Brummies who seemed to have been born in to each others bodies.

  ‘Mate, seriously, what is this?’

  ‘Hurry up man my mum’s gonna give me bear beats for stayin’ out this late,’

  ‘Sharrap mans! This is for the blessing of Allah, the almighty who has given us the grace of existence and created all things in his image,’

  ‘I ain’t never been to these ends man. For real. What the fuck is with all these rainbows and shit? Fuck Asif, you scaring me. Is those batties over there?’

  Little Asif from No. 13 who had stopped assorting bombs from the bric-a-brac stores to bring his Band of Brothers to the Ungodly Mecca of Sin was excited on this day; his day of glory.

  He was opening his Brothers’ eyes on the mighty carriage of the 16:10 London Midland train via Watford Junction to London Euston. On the Central line tube to Tottenham Court Road where the buildings parted like the Red Sea and they walked in to the cess pit of all seven metapohorical Plagues of Moses, the Hub of Sodom, the Unspoken Evil of the Rejected Monkeys:

  Old Compton Street, Soho.

  ‘Eh be careful yea, don’t touch nothing, you get HIV just like that round here.’

  Asif and his Brotherhood cut a strange set of silhouettes in the winter evening, standing just on the outskirts of London’s gay strip, wearing their skull caps and floor-scraping Punjabi kurtas and muddy Adidas trainers. Asif was a scrawny boy who was obedient to his mother and loving to his younger sisters, at 16, already an untouchable bastion of Islamic knowledge and light and a novelty to take to congregational Friday prayers for perfect Quranic recitation and prayer-leading.

  He had known from the moment of his first ejaculation –signalling his maturity, of course –that his calling was upon him. No more secret resentment of his single mother, no more unspent ambition or overpowering bewilderment at his classmates insistence that the area behind the bike shed was consecrated ground. No more.

  No; now was his time to get his 9/11, his 7/7, his month slash date format trophy.

  They would plan like masters, they would execute like warriors.

  He took a mouthful of halal fizzy cola cubes while the rain fell on them and they watched crowds sit at the sticky tables, high-pitched voices shrilling in delight.

  His time, and their time, approached.

  Paul Gordon was 15 minutes in to watching the pirated copy of ‘Monsoon Wedding’ with its cacophony of orange saris and Indian monsoons and servants and weddings. On standby was ‘Pigs on Patrol’ in case his dad walked in. But he was already confused; he couldn’t tell all the brown faces apart and had no idea which storyline belonged to whom. And he couldn’t understand their accents either. He had thought of getting East is East but decided the birds on the cover weren’t fit enough.

  He scratched his skinhead and pulled off his Doc Martens, popped the lid off his Vaseline tub and decided his evening would be better spent making up his own fantasy about Ruby.

  There were far too many improbabilities to Ruby Ansari Khan’s thinking; could SHE tell the difference between the Monsoon Wedding characters? Was she mocking him with her hatred of the Browns? When she suggested that they were walking turds, was the theory baseless and thoughtless?...no, Paul Gordon concluded. She was surely overcompensating? She was doing inversely doing what the Pigs of Parliament did; by not being born in to a group, she lent extra venom to her words, tried extra hard to make him believe that she too, believed in White Rule.

  The question of what would happen to her if, hypothetically, White Rule occurred, did not trouble Paul. No, he didn’t deal in Utopian principles. He dealt in reality.

  He concluded then, a second or so before ejaculating in to the cover of Monsoon Wedding, that by subverting the rules of Parliament, Ruby Khan would be the Saviour of Britain. Yes.

  And he knew that he would have to do something terrible to impress her and do his own bit of overcompensating for his silences near the grit bin.

  The boys had been eyeing up a target on the faggot fest that was Birmingham’s sad cluster of gay bars. And one of those gay bars attracted Fucking Gay Paki’s.

  Double whammy.

  And he knew Ruby Khan would have to be there when he did it, all by himself. He could picture it; she’d be waiting in the car and he’d go and Kick the Shit out of a Fucking Gay Paki!

  It wasn’t the smile on his face that was registered in Cosmos; it was the fact that a little lower, just as he pictured the scene, his wrist had started pumping again.

  Kulsuma’s mother had yet again refused to buy toilet tissue because it consistently clogged up the pipes, so the empty and lidless bottle of Sprite which sat permanently beside the toilet (‘We will buy a proper bodna from Bangladesh, it is cheaper there’) was being used til the finger dents became permanent, and the family had soggy crotches. This wasn’t a problem for her parents; her father spent all day wearing a lunghi which gave maximum aeration to his bottom and her mother thought underwear was a Western idea anyway.

  But Kulsuma fidgeted uncomfortably (she’d given up hairdrying the area, the cracks between her thighs were already red raw), and had resigned to hoping the cushion would soak up the excess (much like the broken waters of a secret pregnancy of Ruhina Begum in 1942…)

  ‘Abba! I can’t be bothered to drive to work, can you take me?’

  She squinted as she awaited the inevitable reply.

  ‘Whaat? How you can say? You cannot commute a 20 minute?’ Her dad burst through the door. ‘You know in Bangladesh an acceptable commute could involve i-swimming through FLOODWATERS. With a change of clothes balanced on the head! What they teached you in i-school? Good for nothing…’

  He walked out and put on his shoes. ‘I will i-start car in one hour be ready.’

  She smelt the onion in her hair and quickly blasted it with some dry shampoo, sprayed some Charlie between her legs and noticed the white marks on the armpits of her top were crusting, so took it off, before deciding the matter of clothing was secondary to rejuvenating her Facebook profile.

  The ‘I’m Gay and What, Bitch?’ group had sent an invite to another night at the Gaysian club on Hurst Street, B1.

  She could hear her mother screeching and invoking the Prophet at the sight of Jamie Oliver serving a rare steak.

  Her cousin popped up on her MSN screen:

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘Biatch. U seen Mere Zindagi yet? I did, wana take da fam a lam to watch it? I’m cumin ova 2mro’

  BenGAYli69: ‘I wanted to take Abba to watch it. So long as there’s no sex stuff in there?’

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘No. There’s gratuitous violence, swearing and decapitation.’

  BenGAYli69: ‘Yea, but is there even a whiff of sexual tension?’

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘er...no.’

  BenGAYli69: ‘That’s fine then, come over 2nyt, we’ll get ready. I’ll make the pakora’s, you make the dal paranthas and sandwiches. There’s some curry left over from last night, use that in them. Make about four paan’s for dad, and don’t forget to bring his gastric medicines, and Amma’s angina tablets; they’ve run out and they always leave an emergency stash @ yours. I’ll cut up the onions and bag the lemons and green chillies. ’

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘Erm...the film’s an hour and a half long.’

  BenGAYli69: ‘You’re right. I’d better make a flask of tea too.’

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘By the way, there’s a really camp gay policeman in there.’

  BenGAYli69: ‘Oh shit. That’s a no then.’

  Lemoncheesecake85: ‘Ha! Yea, near miss. I’ll keep an eye out for something else. Mwah xox’

  BenGAYli69: ‘See ya.’

  Kulsuma hovered her mouse over the profile picture of Jaya Chakarbatti, University of Leeds Network for a while. It was pointless
for her to even press on the profile anymore; she had already memorised every pixel and zoomed in to every picture on there (downloaded and carefully crafted in to a masterpiece slideshow to the soundtrack of Bollywood love songs, and hidden deep in the crevices of her computer memory so that even she could not bear to follow the long filepath unless she was in dire need of a pleasurable fix of her own teen Bengal drama of unrequited love. Oh! How she would mock herself under the trembling exultations of her own, her very own, unblossomed night-lily of unexploded love!)

  Instead, she looked out of the window, through the tear in the net curtain, over the rows of houses and their big driveways and their ostentatious concrete walls. It was a street full of other Asians who had moved in thinking there were no other Asians there. But as soon as they started moving in, the Whites started moving out. The street looked fine now; but as soon as the Asians clocked on, well, things would start slipping. They’d probably have nobody to suck in their bellies full of pretence for.

  What grew in a concrete jungle: cornershops, roti junctions, souped up boy racer cars, community colleges, academies, masala stalls, hotdog stands, over priced coffee and bitterness; and with some added preservatives, a lot of bizarre accents.

  But what grew best in a concrete jungle, was fantasy; lust and unreasonable dreams gnawing militantly in the brains of little girls and commuters with their stale coffee breath and newspaper stench. Those words people are constantly surrounded by on billboards and headlines and departure boards and mobile phone menus and ingredient lists and paperbacks! All a cacophony of ostentatious statements of purpose, sterile, unless mixed with the repressed imagination of the Urban Dweller.

  As if Birmingham was crying for help, sprawled in brown graffiti on a brick wall were the words:

  “go to work, send your kids to school


  follow fashion, act normal,

  walk on the pavements, watch T.V.

  save for your old age, obey the law


  Repeat after me: I am free"

  The mind of Kulsuma Begum had long numbed to the meaning of this or, indeed, any other subscription to bumper sticker politics. The mainstream had, long ago, lost her. She once optimistically, with the daring glee of an immigrant’s daughter in the Land of Opportunity, believed in The Freedom; even in the abstract joys it bought: the idea that if you were thinking it, someone else probably was too. The notion of the ‘niche’. The marginalized subculture and the fearless British vie for the underdog, a heady fearless dichotomy of victory, a shouty loudmouthed lout of a sister-fucker of a freedom fighter.

  But The Freedom got fucked in the ass.

  They started marketing the margins.

  They started ejaculating labels all over them.

  ‘Postcolonial,’ they said, ‘defined by the disappearance of something else,’ they teased, mercilessly, refusing to let go.

  ‘British Asian,’ they taunted, ‘preceded by something that’s in the midst of disappearing,’ they whispered.

  ‘Other Ethnic Background,’ they bleated, ‘please tick the appropriate box Other than White British, which is on a separate line, here you see, above the rest of the tick boxes.’

  ‘BrAsian,’ they beamed, ‘almost there, still prefixed, don’t worry though, just two more letters to go!’

  She had heard Jaya (oh sweet antithesis of the Conformist!) talk in big words about pedagogy and nationality, but the words washed over Kulsuma and her soggy crotch (for a different reason at the time). All she could think of then (O forgive her mind’s vulgar thoughts towards the bastion of Beauty!) was pushing her face up Jaya’s torn denim miniskirt with its pocket half ripped off, her tiny waist and her lips sprouting words which fell on the uneducated ears of these, these mongrels of nationalities, half chewed and spat out on to the cemented desert of Godless fad-obsessed misfits with odd teeth and ethnic-faced clean-speaking Know It Alls on the Knews.

  Kulsuma Begum, with the bloodline heritage of a fish monger in the almost non-existent village of Angur Boksh (Box of Grapes; the price of buying property there), now found herself in a country that had abandoned her with nothing but an impotent idea of who she was supposed to be.

  But then they, the Lassi Lesbians, were a sub culture of their very own self-impressed margin.

  The Gaysians.

  The Gaysians even had their own Kama Sutra.

  The Cinammon Roll. The Kulfinator. The Cheeky Chuddies. The Girly Grand Sahib. The Hand-Ji. The Burkha Jerker. The Dicksaw Wallah.

  Yes, they wouldn’t be able to take away their self-imposed margin label no matter how hard they tried. (But in the back of her mind whisperings…whisperings of ‘but you’ll all be married to the opposite sex before the decade is out’… ‘you’ll make your own label defunct’…. ‘You’ll tear it apart yourselves’…)

  She thought what the bridge would look like when she came to it, and lit up a cigarette. Surely Jaya The Saviour, with her big savvy words, would save them? She would find the one verse in the Quran which would save all The Gaysians from straight jackets?...

  She looked in the mirror and started wiping her armpits with make-up remover, wondering if Jaya had unsightly dark spots under her armpits and inside her thighs like most other Asian girls. No, she wouldn’t have. She was one-tone all the way through; her body was tight and perfect and always smelt of talcum powder. She didn’t smell of onions or stale curry, Kulsuma concluded. She didn’t have big brown bin-lid nipples either (in Kulsuma’s late-night ponderings, Jaya’s were a neutral shade of beige and didn’t have any hairs in them) and her nether regions were powdery and smooth, not red with the rash that came with Imperial Leather soap from Poundland).

  Kulsuma sighed; a quiet, dejected sigh that smelt of cigarettes and saag. It made her ache, dull and long sort of aches that soaked through to her very bones. A sad, rejected sigh that bore that mark of self-imposition: Pleasure.

  Jaya Chakarbatti, soon to be BA, with her silky smooth accent and her genteel confidence and her head-fucking yearning but mocking looks… the thought of her sometimes sent Kulsuma in to torrents of chain-smoking, listening to superfluous Bollywood love songs, pacing the few feet of visible floor in her room, and often even sweating. Jaya was so English. She could probably eat English food every day of her life and not have curry cravings like all the other desi’s. She ate sushi, for goodness sake, and went to theatres, and drank elderflower juice, very probably even in that order. Her house didn’t smell of East End vegetable margarine and her little tummy would probably hurt if she had chapatti’s and curry for breakfast. She didn’t have rice-belly, the tell-tale mark of Bengaliness, and she didn’t have yellow-stained teeth (they shone, in perfect alignment, oh, did they!). When she was caught smoking hanging out of the bedroom window, Mr Chakkarbatti advised her to go to NHS Smoking Cessation meetings; he didn’t call the local maulvi shrieking about jinn possession or demons. Her auntie’s didn’t wear bobble-ridden polyester scarves soaked with hair-oil and reeking of bhaji. Her father most likely didn’t bark at her mother for being late with the tea in front of guests and there was certainly no way at all that Jaya Chakarbatti was remotely flattered by the stares of the illegal Afghans lining the off-licences at Birmingham New Street station. Words like ‘pregnant’ and ‘girlfriend’ probably weren’t rude words in her household. Jaya probably carried Samsonite suitcases when she went to Bangladesh, and wasn’t forced to secure her baggage with a rope or put a piece of torn salwaar kameez on the handle to recognize it on the conveyor belt. Goodness, she probably used actual refuse sacks to line her dustbin and not Sainsbury’s bags…

  Kulsuma was beating herself with the Stick of Jaya; it was her own form of spiritual discipline. Oh Kulsuma, she berated herself: Oh Kulsuma, forced to squat over toilets Back Home, unable to remove the hard consonants in her speech, possessor of several types of hair oil, secret-lover of Bollywood, leaker of curried burps, student of Sociology and buyer of pirated DVD’s! How could her Beloved even entertain the idea of amour with such
a lowly, smelly paki girl?

  Her father knocked on the door.

  ‘I’ll be ready in five minutes, Abba,’ (…stubbing out the cigarette lest he smelt it and lost himself in spirals of thoughts about why he came to this Godforsaken Country in First Place… )

  The car journey was filled with the comfortable silence of two generations who didn’t care that they understood nothing about one another, and the humming of worn wheel bearings.

  ‘Look at that,’ Kulsuma’s dad nodded at queues of people in Argos, ‘Where they get the money from? All shops, see? Filled. All money from benefits.’ He shook his head. ‘And every night at the pub and di-vorces everywhere. What do they have?’ He chewed his paan vigorously. He didn’t understand how they survived with families scattered everywhere and no definitive pot of family money. In his armchair at home, he often felt bad for them; it must have been debilitating to only speak one language (even Shakespeare thought so! He remembered the Merchant of Venice, approved for the Bangladeshi curriculum for its socially acceptable stereotypes of jews and cross-dressing). He thought how humiliated they must feel with no housing investments in Sylhet, no education funds for their children, no rubber-banded blocks of £50 notes in case they suddenly got thrown out of the country, no Allah...

  O! No Allah! He often cried for them in his prayers. He prayed for their Guidance, and their inner peace. His exultations would turn to despair in the night. He often couldn’t sleep. Purposefully he would perform his ablution: carefully wipe his head, his ears, his nape, his arms, his feet, squeezing in the tears as he heard in his head... for he hath put a veil before their eyes, that they cannot see; their hearts, that they cannot understand. (Isaiah 44:18, Quran 16: 106-109)… He saw Mr Jones’ wife did not stand by him at gatherings, he saw Mrs Jones was not protected from the Preying Eyes...

  And he would pray deep in to the night til his prayer mat showed the dents of his forehead and knees and hands, and praise God is Great! God is Merciful! on each of the transluscent green rosary beads... But he was not concerned for the tree planted for him in heaven with each praise (‘a big tree the size of the earth, with leaves made of gold and silver’ his mother would tell him as little boy, as he tugged at her sari and she stooped over the paraffin cooker in their little hut in Koripur). No no. He was concerned with the Mischief the devil would make for these innocent people and their Misguidance... they were good people Allah... they give their life savings to dogs charities... they have a System for everything... the good from them were reserved and respectful, like Pakistani peoples... they let us in to their country and did not let the racialists have their way...

  But now his thoughts sat in the ripped car seats with his daughter, who pleased him and worried him. She did not yet seem to have gotten her hoosh. In the absence of a proper English translation of this word, which conveyed the weighted and dense implicities of its meaning, he would say ‘this is too highly philosophical for you. And those Englishes have never even, in their four dy-nasties, thought of such a word.’

  It was, to say, her consciousness. Her worldliness encompassed with the spiritual enlightenment and God’s guidance of... no. There was no translation and to forge it in to one would render the term void.

  But while Kulsuma Begum, he saw, had not obtained her hoosh yet, she did not bring any boys home or walk with them in the city centre. She did not watch too much TV and she did not have bad dealings with people. She maintained good relations with the tab keepers at Fakir’s Grocers. She did not speak to him with the Western Mockery and Disbelief which Tariq at the mosque complained of about his own children.

  Yes, he nodded in the car, and Kulsuma didn’t question it. Abba’s thoughts were all-encompassing and not disturbed by people jumping off the zebra crossing as he drove straight over it. She sighed, and thought he was either thinking about the foolishness of the Englishes, or how much money he needed to send to Bangladesh to get the fifth floor of his building done. She looked at the cracked skin on his knuckles, still sore from helping the builders during his last visit there. She knew they would start bleeding now winter was here. But it was difficult to ask a man, who broke his spirit and spent every penny in ensuring her future’s financial security, to moisturise his hands. He may not have spent £1.50 on toilet tissue, but he found thousands to school his nephew in Sylhet. It seemed Abba had turned his life in to a parentheses, slipped neatly in to the lives of others.

  ‘Look at that lady with her chicken-neck dog.’ Abba scoffed, ‘that is her child. She does not see that her wombs are drying up and she need husband to keep her happy,’ (It was a strange nuance that Asians didn’t know much about dogs but at school –mainly because they were the Dirty creatures and the inevitable ‘why would you want a dog when you could feed a family in Bangladesh instead’. Kulsuma’s friends would happily talk about strange and elaborate breeds... Belgian Mastiffes and Cross Border Terriers, and chihuaua’s –which had always sounded like a breed of monkey to her. The Begums referred to dogs only by what they resembled, like chicken-necks or small-horse or Auntie Rumi).

  Kulsuma looked out of the window and hoped no one at work would notice when she slipped toilet tissue in to her bag.