The Sitar

  Chapter 5

  Kulsuma had managed to corner herself in to a situation at work where the ignorant likes of Laura were asking about her culture. In the way many Unlearned Types –as her father called them- often did, her questions were direct and purposeful and left no room for explanation.

  ‘What, so women have to cover their faces and men don’t?’

  Kulsuma fidgeted with a roll of cotton, pulling it off the shelf and placing it on another.

  ‘Pretty much,’ she said meekly.

  Laura wiped off the smear of cheese from her bottom lip and placed her ham sandwich back in to its Tupperware. ‘I’m not being racist or anyfin, but isn’t that a bit out of order? Like, who’s to say a woman won’t find a man attractive with his face on display an’ everyfink?’

  ‘I think it’s because women have more self control.’

  Laura thought for a few seconds.

  ‘Yea man, I hear that. Don’t even aaks me about what Spliffy done to me last night.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  Laura leaned forward, her bra-less chest spilling over the buttons on the till, her almost translucent skin suddenly aflush with pink. She waggled the well-fingered ham sandwich about her as she spoke.

  ‘He tried puttin’ it in my ear, man,’

  Kulsuma stopped what she was doing, confused. ‘What? But it wouldn’t fit, right?’

  ‘Bloody hell, he tried.’

  Kulsuma looked at Laura’s ears, thrust outward from the force with which she tied back her hair.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’, as though she expected this to be an everyday occurrence which elicited no explanation.

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘Well, he jizzed in my ear, didn’t he.’

  ‘Won’t that mess up your hearing?’

  ‘O god yea, didn’t fink about that.’ She stopped for a second. ‘Nah, allow, it’ll be fine. Took me ages to clean out the cock cheese though. Dirty bastard needs to clean more often. O, maybe I should tell him to go to one of your lot. You’d chop it off, wouldn’t ya?’

  ‘Yea. Quick snip, all done.’

  ‘Makes it smaller though, yea?’

  ‘Nah, just makes it look smaller. I heard its more hygienic too.’

  Kulsma mentally kicked herself as she realised just what a string of questions she’d subjected herself to.

  ‘You ever seen one then? Or you waiting to get married an’ that?’

  ‘Well…’

  Laura looked at her expectedly. How to explain to a ham sandwich wielding council estate girl with one GNVQ the complicated existential philosophies of being both the victim and the judge of your sexual perpetrations? As Laura squeezed out a pore from her cheek, and examined it before wiping it on her tracksuit bottoms, Kulsuma wondered if the fervent castings of her cranium could ever be expounded to somebody who had the luxury of asking such direct questions with the innocence of a child. The years of prime-time cultural sketch shows and Oscar winning films depicting palatable bedraggled Indian kids that didn’t threaten any feelings of colonial superiority had paved a false pathway to her culture. She knew it would probably upset Laura to know that Kulsuma wasn’t actually a Punjabi, with loud and colourful aunties and Bacardi-laden conversations deep in to the night. But nor was she the type to be sipping teas on verandas with crickets chirping and soliloquising about globalisation and eastmeetswest atop wicker chairs (although the latter type hadn’t quite found its way in to the mainstream so Laura was possibly less corrupted with both polarised stereotypes, and therefore under less of an illusion about a limited faux variety of her community).

  As though her inner monologue was making Laura impatient, a bombardment of questions ensued.

  ‘Do Asians eat curry for, like, every meal? Why do your families have rhyming names? Is it true that you have an actress called Poo-Jar Butt? Is it true your men can have four wives? And oh, my, god,’ she stood upright and shook her hands as though she was drying her nail varnish, ‘is it true one of your gods has eight arms?’

  Although Kulsuma was actually impressed by Laura’s apt social observations, words were forming and unforming themselves in the back of her throat, failing to come out, tumbling around in a vortex in her brain saying ‘go go go, this is it, this is your chance, this is all it would take, just quip one sentence to reiterate to Jaya and she’ll be yours, all yours!’

  The many faces heritages partitions branchesandroots should, under all circumstances, have prepared her for this somewhat menial conversation. But Laura’s barrage of questions and their sheer sharp-tipped inquisitiveness left Kulsuma’s brain gasping for breath. She didn’t want to trivialise the issues; Mr Begum would have disapproved, Jaya would find it laughable, and her Lassi Lesbians would expect some Brummie gusto to projectile itself from her smokey mouth. But it remained in a state of half-open contemplation. She could see Laura wanted something juicy, and she wished she had something interesting to tell her about; something about loud music and hairy chested brother in laws, about the many stories of different gods, about Shiva and Hanuman and mysterious plants and evil rulers and holy men and bags of oil, about karma and yoga and hot bikram yoga, something that was exposed and overexposed to the Englishes, some over-psyched hyper-orthodox ethnic habit that had become so farcical and caricatured that it had won their hearts.

  But no: all she could think of was the quiet and simple sunni Muslim culture of moderation. The monotheistic, panacean homograph of the Islam which most Englishes, it seemed, had come to mean something stone-cold and alien (even though Patel’s halal meat was already in their pies by the 60’s).

  She couldn’t tell them of randy cousins trying it on at weddings (men and women sat separately), nor of half-dressed first cousins (modesty was the core staple of all dressage), nor of raucous drunken behaviour (alcohol was seen as an evil disease), and certainly not of loud music and colourful ceremonies (the quiet and contemplative nature meant prayer was always what people turned to in extremities); she couldn’t even talk about honour killings (usually the preserve of the lower classes, dad would say; and for the rest, murder and disownment were Forbidden). And even the infamous obsession with ‘shame on the family name’ was struck in to insignificance with the rising Asian middle class sense of pioneering relations (and on a different note, bringing a non-Asian in to the family meant another conversion and more trees in heaven). At the very least, Kulsuma though, there was always Terrorism to bank on; something Tom Dick and Hari was an expert on, that was something they could universally discuss… but even that was a no-go, since the general consensus was that they were a bunch of hormonal misguided miscreants… and the views that they were the forerunners of the fight against Western imperialism was a boundary that Kulsuma let Jaya fight, while they sat on her car bonnet sipping mango lassi looking up at the dull stars…

  No, while Laura’s taste buds were intolerant of any form of spice besides chipshopcurrysauce, her appetite for bold flamboyant titbits of media-perpetuated caricatured cultural phoenixes was big. The inaudible mendacity of The Average would throw her in to confusion; wouldn’t give her the comfortable distancing characteristics of The Other. The mystery would be gone. Laura, Allah forbid, might realise that the two girls were actually more alike than she wanted to admit.

  Or perhaps, Kulsuma thought, her dad the armchair philosopher, was being too tough on the Lauras of Britain. On their walks through the paved over parks with swings wound tight around the top of the metal frame, while Kulsuma would marvel at the graffiti and dodge huge blobs of phlegm on the rubber turf and shield her nose from the piss-soaked bark under the peeling splintered see-saw, her dad would talk for hours about how the Englishes had an agenda. He’d rub the skin on his hand and look at her wryly.

  ‘Look at the colour of your skin. You will always be the black man.’ (She was seven years old, so this came as a shock to her at the time.)

  As the lenses of her colour-blind youth eventually wore t
hin, she began -reluctantly- to understand her dad’s extroverted lassitude; he had resigned to sighs of dejection and tortured statements of rejections; always, always tinted with pain and helplessness. For a man whose oral expressions were all he had, left with the crappy end of the linguistic stick and consigned to master a dialect which had no written form, his Sylheti profundities aimed at the Englishes were what he clung to. He would often watch Kulsuma write (he had no time to learn the tongues of Elizabeth amidst making a new life and holding the reins of his motherland tightly); effortlessly construct squiggles translated from sounds and pictures from her brain. He marvelled quietly, before returning to the business of crossing metaphorical seas and negotiating prayer time and funds for the heritage he could see slipping away from under his feet (one of which was still firmly ground in to the streams of District 24, Sylhet, Bangladesh).

  ‘Do you know about Hitler?’ He had asked her on one of their walks to the Cash & Carry. Kulsuma nodded.

  ‘I tell you. These Englishes, they call him evil. I call him fagol. But you know,’ he ran a hand absentmindedly down the front of his dark green wool vest and pulled down his tunic, as though smarting up for a lecture, ‘he helped the Indians achieve their independence.’

  ‘If you speak any louder you’ll get us jumped, Abba.’ He looked at her, confused. ‘People will kill us.’

  ‘O, yes yes. Well,’ he continued to chew on his miswak, ‘when Hitler was fighting with the Englishes, they did not have enough manpower to fight him back. So they called back many of their men from the colonies. You know what this means?’ Kulsuma shook her head and lowered her gaze as a group of softly spoken men floated by with Qurans in their hands, knocking on people’s doors. ‘This meaning, their presence in India was downing.’ He rolled his head from side to side as though he had masterminded this occurrence, ‘And then! Their grip on the colonies weakened. And eventually of course they had to do the releasing of India to our people.’ He scoffed. ‘Independence had nothing to do with India rising up in a ‘brave’ struggle.’

  Kulsuma didn’t think it was fruitful to address the potential paucity of his words at the time (there was a group of young bridesmaids with capacious bosoms and glowing cheeks marvelling over an Asian glossy in Nirpal’s Newsagents); but now, as Laura began fiddling with the sequins lying near the til, Kulsuma wished she had. She wished she had understood everything her father had told her; gleaned every morsel of knowledge he expounded on a daily basis, every tainted, racist, forlorn and pitiful comment he made, so that she could weave it in to the fabric of her being and obtain her hoosh -which he so lamented the lack of- in order to Fully Understand and construct some palliative answers to this girl stood in front of her, pink from eating nothing but pork every day of her life, who’d never watched the sun set anywhere beyond Lewisham Underground Station.

  Kulsuma Begum, born in 1989 on a dull day in Hope Hospital, Birmingham, in to the clinical surroundings of Ward 43 and taken home to a family who believed men should eat copiously and women should have a different gold set for every occasion in life, felt like an insignificant blip at this moment in her life. Here she was, face to face with an English, the epitome of everything she was taught to believe was wrong with Britain, who probably didn’t change her knickers on a regular basis, who Had No Heritage, who bought things from Argos on finance, whose most prized qualification was an ASBO… Here she was, Kulsuma, who had quite frankly been taught she was better than that any White Type, struggling to find even one answer to her questions.

  All recapitulations fled from her brain, as Laura continued to watch her, waiting, her deadpan face losing its flush and her cheeks waxing and waning with each chew of her gum.

  ‘Well,’ she started, and quickly picked up a roll of 100% Batik Cotton with fish prints on it, when the owner of the shop waddled in. Beads of sweat clung to the hairs on her upper lip and her grey hair was oiled down over her scalp. Her metallic blue polyester salwar kameez was bobbling at the crotch (but she didn’t care; her Time was almost up; she was 54) and she clutched her cholesterol monitor in her podgy hand.

  ‘O kully,’ she said lazily, rolls of fat around her neck stifling her vocal chords, ‘read my sugar levels.’

  As Kulsuma watched the small blob of blood form on the tip of Mrs Paisa’s finger, she was overcome with an overwhelming sense of assiduity; the need to continue, hurtle forwards in to an oblivion of godknowswhat, the relentless pursuit of Perfection that seemed, right now, to come out of nowhere. She knew that from now on, no matter what, she would make her life flow. No more jarring encounters with people’s questions, no more sense of bewilderment; no more crises of thought.

  Kulsuma Begum was going to move out of the bright lights of her own interrogation room and in to the forestry undergrowth of Life. O yes! She could already feel the music; she had to take life by the proverbials and show Laura and Jaya and the Lassi Lesbians that she, she from the confusing household of unkempt rooms and cluttered bric-a-brac could answer all of life’s questions no matter how fast they came. She wouldn’t be put in to a coma by off-guardianship of her perimeters. She would round up her Lassi Lesbians and become Queen of the Scene!

  (She knew the time approached fast when she would eventually have to bow to the invasion of cock in to those perimeters, but by all that was mischievous in this world, she was going to enjoy every fucking second of whatever came before it.)

  In the same way that Asif wanted to wash off the halcyon of indifference The West had spritzed themselves with, his mother, living in the penumbra of his Islamic reverence, endeavoured to scrub off the blobs of damp growing in the cracks of her house. The council had refused to do anything about it for weeks, and now, as she hitched up her sari, got down on her hands and knees and wiped the floor with a j-cloth and some water (mops, she found, were bizarre things), she wondered if the blobs were ever going to go.

  She’d seen the great Damp Disease spread like a plague on the walls of Bangladesh houses, but there it was ok; just like it was normal to have geckos residing around the tube light.

  Here, she’d heard it devalued homes and, like an oversalted korma, was forever destined to the resigned wastage that outwardly looks fine but will forever be unusable.

  It did bother her that the glut of disease from the outside was seeping it’s way through her (apparently impenetrable) walls, and although she had watched it grow bigger and more obvious, she was helpless to do anything about it. She could not find her way through books or speak English well enough to really explain to the authorities how bad it was and unless they uprooted and moved elsewhere, there was no way she could do anything about the walls that seemed to her, particularly at night, to be caving in.

  The bits in between that were supposed to hold the household together then, had turned on her.

  But she knew she could still take care of the foundation; so she scrubbed the floor religiously and with pride, until the j-cloth was tattered and her hands were raw. Yes, she knew, the foundation was what she could help. Lay it down, and polish it; make sure its there because even if everything else caved in, the foundation was still there to re-build.

  Upstairs, Asif was reciting. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. The Nine Inch Nails CD lay decrepit in the CD case he had made in GCSE Woodwork lessons, and the well thumbed Kerrang magazines were piled and propped underneath the leg of his chest of drawers. He sat, cross legged and in contemplation, at the top of his bunk bed, his Quran closed, as he held it hovering above his lap, wondering if he should finalise the details of his plan before his 3 hour long recital before evening prayer.

  He laughed at himself.

  ‘The Devil will disguise himself as good deeds,’ he said out loud. While Asif did consider the idea that talking out loud to oneself may have been a sign of madness, he quickly checked himself, remembering the Prophet (‘What a dude’, he would often think) had once said ‘Practice your religion until others think you are mad.’

  T
here was no doubt that homosexuality was haraamforbidden, as Amma would say. It was so haraamforbidden that in hell, red hot pokers would be shoved up the arses of batty boys. It was, of course, something the Westerners did to distract themselves, something the government had spread the idea of to decrease the population. It was the New World Order paving the way for Dajjaal, the one eyed heretic, who would rise and confuse the Believers and non-Believers alike. Those Kuffaar, Asif would pray, his inner monologue stunted with pity and hatred and anger and apology and confusion, Uff! The Kuffaar! The Heathens!

  And when Isa, Jesus, whatever they called him, would rise again, they’d know. They’d thank Asif and his Brothers for warning them. They would look to the perished nations, the people of Sodom who were frozen in unspeakable positions, forever to feel the pain in their souls like the preserved body of Pharoah…

  It was too much for Asif sometimes. He laughed at The West; their whimsical transient ideas that had no beginning or end.

  He could See. Asif could see that the powers of The West were gaining momentum and one by one, their Freemasonic powers would take their elitist ideology to a new level and bring the world to its knees. It was already happening; there was no cash anymore, all of it was electronic, kept as meaningless digits on screens Somewhere. It was, of course, so that nobody had any cash anymore, no powers to trade, so that one day, all of their money could be seized and the people would be powerless…

  Or at least that was what Junaid at Primrose Hill Mosque was saying. Although the technicalities didn’t really make sense to Asif, something did. It was the anger he carried around inside him. It happened one day (his memory failed him much nowadays; it may have been on his way to buy computer cables from PC World), out of the blue; it dawned on him that every menial quotidian thing in his life was politicised beyond sense.

  He went to school and was laughed at when he talked about God, because it was the State which determined how religion was taught. In meaningless, bitesize shit-all morsels that were made in to hoops to jump through in a three hour exam. What kind of a bullshit joke was an exam on Islam when the likes of Asif –who read Quran and studied Shari’ah law as a past time for four hours a day- only managed to scrape a pass mark?

  And why, when he had shaken his head in the dinner queue to reject the haraamforbidden beef burger, had the dinner lady given him disapproving tuts?

  Not to forget the look of hysteria that sweeped across the classroom when he declared his self-imposed disqualification from performing in a talent show to raise money for British troops coming home from the War in Iraq.

  Like blind sheep, they followed the Rules of Conformity. The girls who wore miniskirts thought they were ‘free’ but really they were like ugly bulls in china shops who trampled all over the concept of Modesty. If they wanted to be free, why didn’t they just walk around in trackies all day? If they wanted to be free, why did they take away the civil liberties of those in Afghanistan? Why did they mock the concept of the burkha and tear it up and pin pieces to their lapels like trophies? Why did they bind themselves to haraamforbidden loans with sky-high interest repayments of 12.5% APR?

  Asif closed his eyes and saw the plans imprinted inside his eyelids. He was careful not to write anything down. His Brothers, he, and Allah. A calm peace descended on him, and he opened his Quran and recited and prayed until the birds started twittering at dawn.

  The next few days flew by and he felt invincibility lay like dew over his every action. They visited the Bargain Corner and Cheema’s Pharmacy, Sandhu’s Auto Parts and Select ‘n’ Save; all for some cut price Salvation. And they drank masala chai, slurping and sipping deep in to the night, as Amma scrubbed away at the floor and pretended she saw nothing from the corner of her eye, while Abba drove his taxi and got the Immodest West on its drunken way.

  ‘Brother Asif,’ said Junaid one night, adjusting his testicles under the full length kurta he wore, ‘we’ll feel minimal pain right? Like, I don’t want to hurt or nothing’.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be over pretty quick. But just think man, think about what we’re gonna get after all this,’

  The boys looked at each other and grinned. They’d gone over this bit; more than anything else. They’d thought about the fast cars and the Ferraris and the wide open roads; they’d thought about the copious amounts of video games and unending abilities to run and run for miles upon miles, the expanses of green fields, the rivers of gold, the skunk and endless death metal concerts, the infinite supply of whey protein and batteries.

  ‘Yea man. What’s the point of hangin’ round if we can go up there?’ Junaid looked at the sky. ‘Wonder why everyone doesn’t do it.’

  ‘Cuz they’re all fools. They’re too busy racing their egos and listening to black people rap about tits and ass. If they listened to some Lowkey man, some Flying Lotus, heard our Palestinian brothers and stopped falling in to the Zionist trap, man they’d be where we are,’

  ‘Blowin’ themselves up?’

  ‘Nah man,’ Asif tapped his temple, ‘in here, bruv. They’d be on our level and wouldn’t go around doin’ no batty business.’

  ‘But man, I was thinking: who declared this jihad?’

  ‘The West.’

  ‘When man?’

  ‘It’s been going on for years, we just had our eyes closed. When they snuck pig’s blood in to our Pepsi and opened up Marks & Spencers to fund the Israeli war. When they started instigating the Signs of The Day of Judgment. Y’know man, they turn everything inside out and upside down. Live their lives, like, diametrically opposite to the way of Islam.’

  ‘What ya mean man?’

  Asif thought for a while. ‘Y’know how Muslim men are supposed to wear their trousers just above their ankles yea? Well look how these men wear long trousers that drape over the top of their shoes. And you know how our guys are told to keep a beard, at least a fistful on their chins? Well look how The West promote this weird unnatural, feminine clean-shaven look. And man,’ he tutted, ‘you know how we’re told to look after our elders yea? Look at them lot, dumping them in old people’s homes,’ he spat the words, ‘gettin’ raped by carers and pissing themselves.’ He shook his head. ‘All the wrong way round man.’

  ‘Yea man. I don’t think its no coincidence that the day the British soldiers got their first so called victory in Afghaanistan,’ (the word came from his throat, over emphasised like an zealous student) ‘and the men started shavin’ off their beards and that,’ he gave Asif a knowing look, ‘It ain’t no coincidence that God gave ‘em an earthquake right after,’

  ‘Praise be to Allah, man, right there, ya hear me man?’ Asif shook his head in awe. ‘They got it all wrong man. Democracy, yea right. They say they’re in there to promote fucking democracy when their own government are corrupt, with immorality and pissing taxpayers money up the wall on porn an’ that. They’re in there to steal oil man. They can’t bear to see an Arab have more money than them. They’re sucking Saudi’s dick right now man, ya geh me?’

  Junaid laughed. ‘Yea man, batty bwoi’s,’

  ‘We’re gona fucking show them man. Them and their pork. You seen them? So pink from all that pig,’

  ‘Man, that’s just racist.’

  ‘Yea man, that is. Although, I’ve been called a burnt chapatti before,’

  ‘Mate, I’ve been called everythin’ under the son. Paki, sister-fucker, shopkeeper…’

  ‘We just gotta do sabr man. Have patience. We’ll wipe this disease, send a message to the Zionists and let The West know what’s goin’ down, man. Proper.’

  ‘Yea man.’

  And it seemed that Little Asif from No. 13 and his motley Brotherhood and assortment of household cleaning acids etc etc, was sent hurling forwards to a kingdom which they could only conceive in their heads. And for all the strong foundations and theories of rebuilding, Amma could not ignore that the walls which seemed to cave in and crumble around her would probably crack the foundation upon their demise.

 
The weeks followed in the reliable chronological order that only they can manage to do; monotonously, self-importantly and with utter disregard for anything or anyone. It was this abstract theory that guided the sheer bloody-minded (albeit sketchy) plans of the Brotherhood to impose an attack with the aim of Punishment and Redemption and Wisdom and Guidance and the excellence of their monotheistic deity, on a community of homosexuals in Central London.

  ‘I can’t help but feel this is all a bit, y’know, predictable,’ said Brother Munir one day after congregational Friday prayer. They weaved their way out of the crowd of men with wrinkled faces, smelling of itr, talking in hushed tones to one another about how good the Imam was.

  ‘There’s no other way though,’ replied Junaid, ‘This is the only way to get through the veil on their heads, and in front of their eyes, and in their-‘

  ‘This is the cheapest and quickest way to do it,’

  ‘But Brother Asif, can we just stop and think for one second: what if we blow up someone innocent, someone who’s not batty? Even someone who’s a practising Muselmaan?’

  Asif sighed. ‘Munir, I understand your point. But as in every battle, there will be collateral damage.’

  ‘But what if that Muslim is destined to do good?’

  ‘No god-fearing Muslim would be in that cesspit of a place.’

  ‘We’re going though.’

  ‘Only Allah can know. We can do only what we know. The rest is up to Him.’

  They arrived at Asif’s house, smelling of freshly cooked curry. Abba was helping Amma peel some ginger. They stood next to each other, Abba’s itr filling the kitchen with its scent, mixing with the curry to create an acrid but comfortably familiar Friday feeling for Asif. He smiled. He would miss them. He missed them even now. He had always missed them, since they day he had opened his eyes as a baby, since he could sense who they were. There was fear and too much Distance, an unshakeable unfamiliarity with his parents that nobody could vocalise.

  ‘Amma, is there any ice-cream?’

  Amma pointed in the direction of the garage, where the industrial sized freezer held half-year supplies of frozen raw chicken, blocks of whole fish and pre-cooked curry bases, frozen samosas and kebabs. To his dismay, he discovered that the various ice-cream tubs contained nothing but spinach curries or potato bhaji, so the boys went up to Asif’s room and continued to plot.

  ‘It’s gotta be simple but effective, and BBC News has got to dedicate more time to it than to dead troops in Afghanistan,’ Asif said, his voice calm, contemplative and lazy.

  ‘And someone else apart from us lot has to die.’

  ‘And how about I hold pages of the Quran and they’re scattered everywhere when we go?’

  ‘No. The pages will fall on the floor, that’s just disrespectful man.’

  ‘How about pages from the Ahadith telling them how wrong it is?’

  ‘They won’t listen to that stuff.’

  ‘Punishments of hell?’

  ‘They probably don’t believe in the afterlife.’

  Junaid’s predilection for panache was grating on Asif.

  ‘Brother, we don’t need any extra frills. Our action of sacrifice alone will suffice.’

  ‘But shouldn’t we be teaching them a lesson? Isn’t this to stop them from being batty?’

  ‘No. The larger message is to The West.’

  ‘O right, yea man. I get it.’ Junaid picked his nose, rolled the resulting extraction between his thumb and forefinger and absentmindedly threw it somewhere on the floor. ‘Man, I got the munchies.’

  ‘You need to stop doing ganga man. You need to be clear headed as we do this thing.

  ‘Yea, yea man. I know. I will be.’

  ‘You’ll get a neverending supply Up There once we’re done man.’

  Junaid nodded. ‘I hear that man.’

  The paradigm of bombing gays had a temerity to it that made Asif bubble with excitement. All the while, as the Brotherhood sat about his bedroom, he fantasised about blowing the Unnaturals in to oblivion.

  Junaid’s asinine recommendations ceased to annoy him once they were in full swing: they would get the 20.52 train to London tomorrow, they would carry the home-made explosives in their rucksacks, dressed in jeans and t-shirts to blend in; it would be evening and they’d have the darkness on their side; this wasn’t a schoolboy fantasy anymore, where they would make all the tools and lose interest by dinnertime. They had nothing but anger to guide them and that was the most powerful fuel they had (also, it was misleading and clouded judgement, thought Asif, but that added to the adrenaline rush).

  They’d seen it on the news several times before, and they’d YouTube’d the shit out of How To Execute A Military Plan. They’d been to underground talks about Freedom To Palestine! And The Evils of The West and they’d watched the Disney Channel enough times to see the young Zionists be pushed up through the ranks regardless of talent. They’d spend –what? Hours? Days?- reaching a state of mind, Back In The Day, of total peace, high on all sorts of mind-altering herbs, feeling a little peace of heaven. But those day of Ignorance gave birth to a bitter resolve by the Brotherhood. They saw all the Tory-voting anti-Islamist paraphernalia being spewed through their letterboxes and churned out by the media, aimed at hoodwinking the public.

  ‘They’re everywhere!’ Asif suddenly said, and the boys jumped. ‘They’re bloody everywhere! Everything you do, everything you watch. Even The Simpsons has freemasonic subliminal messages in it. All the people in the top ranking jobs and media –all Jews, man!’

  ‘Shakespeare got it right.’ Munir said quietly. The Brotherhood looked at him, confused. ‘The Merchant of Venice, mate. There was a money-grabbing, interest-charging, hook-nosed, flesh-eating Jew-boy in there.’

  ‘Have you guys ever met a jew?’

  ‘No, but I see them everywhere I bloody well look. They blend in so well. Do you know Jews are encouraged to be hypocrites if they feel that people might hate them for their religion?’

  Junaid sat bolt upright. ‘Yeeeea?!’ He threw down his lollipop. ‘That’s it, man. That is IT. They gotta get the message; if they don’t back down man, that’s it….’

  The Brotherhood sat and mapped out the events to every minute detail; tonight was going to be the last night in the life of three boys, who’d lived every day in this city and (o the shame!) its mascot of a naked lady on a horse. In keeping with the defiance of government-imposed authority, Asif, Junaid, Hanif and Munir from Coventry were going to take a stance against (what they thought was) The West.

  Often, Jaya would feel she simply echoed the white noise of the modern world. The gloom of this thought hung over the ghettos of her mind like fog. Was she doing enough to subvert mainstream thinking? Did she really see through the bullshit? (In the eventuality that a point of view sat too comfortably with her,) Was she defiant enough? It was a fear that her opinions were not rooted correctly and originated only from touting her ethnicity and it was simply a case of East v West.

  She wanted to be significantly more multi-faceted than that, a bit more omniscient. Maybe even a tad more holistic, she dared herself to think.

  But often it was difficult to be all-encompassing when life was so bloody subjective. It was her aim to understand and explain without snobbery or malice every point of view that existed in the world (because to explain meant to explain away, surely) and therefore, by setting up and cutting down and undercutting every possible facet of every possible thing in the world, maybe she could come to terms with the idea of marrying a bloke. After all, it was the human bond that was important, and that was sexless… (?) And in any case, there were some relationship that started as great big exciting boulders but time would slowly chip away at them until they eroded in to resentment or, for those still bothered, divorce. While others started as small snowflakes and snowballed and grew bigger with time.

  She was under no illusion that ‘love’ was violins and flowers, or its symbiotic partner: pleasurable self-imposed poss
esive, savage jealousy. Mr Chakkarbatti said to her (It Was Said That The Prophet Said, would begin his sentences, belieing the hundreds of years collecting these words of Prophetic wisdom): ‘Love is like a seed. If you water it, it will grow. If you leave it, it will wither and die.’

  The effervescent warnings contained in such a deceitfully simple sentence did, then, have the effect on Jaya much as cracking eggs would; fairly understandable in its attempt at demystefying a miracle of nature in to a pallatable portion of the matter.

  She knew that by the loud fanfare showered with extra dosings of ‘iloveyou’ leaving quivering lips like verbal diarrhoea and copious amounts of honeymoonperiodsex, the Westerners didn’t fool anyone but the party (or parties) involved.

  She knew there were connections between people that were transcendental; and although questions could be posed about the plain of its existence, the long lasting lifelong partnerships of her parents and the Elders in general, although missing the more palpable ‘signs’ of ‘love’, were ironically the ones that matched the Utopia which the Englishes so fervently sang about. Perhaps her parents did have love; but when the love wasn’t there, duty got them through; which she noticed was an idea the Englishes would scoff at. In their labored attempt to diminish the worth of domestic stability, Jaya thought perhaps Englishes misidentified infatuation, and lust, as love. It may all have been semantics (since in the absence of a conclusively significant body of unending relationships, the Englishes phrased, paraphrased, personified and poeticised with words their ideas of love), but Jaya contended that perhaps they had mistaken the many ephemeral relationships floating around in the Englishes lives, as love.

  The question of marrying (a man) therefore was never really up for debate, in Jaya’s mind. Her mother had alway said ‘High thinking, clean living’. Teamed with dad’s militarily precise planning and his ability to soldier on in the face of Things Going Wrong, the emotial constipation instilled in Jaya was a seared and quartered exterior that kept in all the juicy musings that proliferated in the inner sanctums of her (preposterously over-sexed) mind.

  It struck at random times, these ethereal postulations; but she mocked them. She mocked them like insolent pretence-conscious public school educated middle-aged white men did, their appetite for deprication destroying anything in its path. She laughed inwardly whenever she went on a binge of self-important over-hypothesised Eastern philosophising, masturbating the illusion of grandeur that many heavy-blooded thick-haired South Asian international students gave themselves.

  It wasn’t that Jaya didn’t see herself as astute; but she felt that transposition was more of a desirable quality than a complex surfeit of Thought. It was still important though; she was definitely more of an observer than a co-operator. To watch something and understand it, she was content. Unless it was sex or drugs, in which case she was willing to fully co-operate.

  And there it was; the glut of Thought ramming itself in to her head as she got up from the toilet and almost kicked over the water jug on the floor.

  Eleven o clock had been texting her for a few days and the bubbling cauldron of unspoken female desire between two unrestricted girls had begun to take place. It hung in the air that the two wanted to eat each others faces off, but they were Teasing; they were mutually addicted to the Forming Phase of a relationship and this one made a steady and heady direct line in their brains and groins. The unashamed use of double entendres (‘curry’ was cum, ‘saag aloo’ was pussy, and ‘aata’ was bum) made for raucous late night conversations that lasted hours. One conversation has lasted 7 hours; but it was normal; yes it was one of those unspoken intensities that lay below the skin of two women trapped in a minority within a minority.

  Eleven was a Safe Place (she was occupied emotionally with her three children and thick husband) and allowed Jaya to pay obeisance to the transcendental no-strings-attached kind of love she had extracted and formed in her head (she often wondered if this was cop-out for the likes of casual polygamists but she knew that wasn’t the case because the sheer amount of mental capacity needed to not get emotionally involved took this to another level). She was beautiful and a little bit stupid, and quite frankly didn’t give a flying fuck about Jaya’s white noise or the pretentious quips she would make and Jaya knew this and wanted to fuck her brains out (hypothetically speaking; it was the hunt they were both interested in). Both convincingly gave the illusion of being an open book.

  So now, as Jaya fluffed up her hair and pulled on a pair of jeans and chunky bangles (with two chipped glass ones from Bangladesh) and wound a sitar string above around her wrist above her pink watch, smeared kohl roughly around her eyes and glossed her lips til they were almost dripping, she thought how appropriate it would be if Eleven turned out to be the last fling before her inevitable Marriage To A Bloke. On some preposterous level, Jaya knew that she needed to ask someone honest questions about married life; it wasn’t that she needed answers, it was more the therapeutic mediation that questions brought to the territory of the mind.

  Eleven clanged about in her head like a new pop song that sat uncomfortably on scratchy vinyl. She made her think in Hinglish. She made her feel like an uncomfortably sexual being.

  On the train to Birmingham, temporarily leaving behind the terraced houses and sorry patches of green, approaching the glorious zinc-disced blob of a shopping mall nestled like a brooding pup on Birmingham’s sky line, she could feel the tension building in her muscles. She felt the adequacy of somebody who was desired by someone else who was themselves highly desirable; not some opportunistic pervert. Somebody who didn’t care to distinguish the charm of a girl from her bodily beauty, but who didn’t devour the entire package as obliterate it altogether in to a steaming pulp of materialised guitar-riffing mad bad heap of groaning pleasure.

  Eleven was stood nonchalantly leaning against the pole of a Tense-a-Barrier; a bemused smile sliced itself across her face and she lifted her head by the tiniest of angles and looked down her nose at Jaya as she approached, in this station of departure boards, yellow floors, blinking adverts; the landing pad of many a Coventrian runaway.

  ‘Salaam Alaikum, whore.’ Eleven smirked.

  ‘Afternoon, adulterer,’

  And feeling (proverbially) emasculated, Jaya sat in the passenger seat of Eleven’s car feeling eyes burn in to her whenever they turned left.

  Why gay bars played bass-heavy electronica at lunch time, Jaya could never quite figure out, but it became an appropriate soundtrack to their psychedelic evening where (despite fingering menus) neither ate anything all day and smoked until their voices became hoarse with carcinogens and lust. It was embarrassing because the transparency of their physical restriction was so palpably floating in the space between them; goodness, they were Mirroring.

  Eleven’s hair was glossy and made Jaya’s fingertips itch. As though she had made a covenant with some follicular dark force, it fell at perfect angles, rough and choppy at times, oil-advert-perfect at others. It being an important icon of femininity, Jaya wanted to talk about it; the handling of it, the symbolism of it, how it was taken care of; but Eleven would shoot her down and laugh at her obsession with the tiny cracks of life. She, Eleven, strode atop the solid ground and used it as was proper: as a stepping stone to get her to the next big piece of land.

  But they both clung to the forever-nascent promise of a happy ending; the strange whimpering of a flailing Closure that was stifled with the dreams of the road that led to it. The road was wide and just like any other, and they trod it with confident steps, convincing themselves it was innocuous (inwardly the irresolute whisperings were never given appropriate airtime). Simultaneously though, for Jaya at least, there was no romanticising of pain; she knew there were age old stories of Those That Could Never Be, the bonds that were never allowed to grow. Asides from the fact that being forced apart was actually quite a fun notion (better than the comfortable numbness of Happiness) and the passing joy of a fleeting relationship was actually thoroughl
y underrated, the fear of the unknown gripped her in a bitch-vice sometimes. She wondered what effect it would have on her psyche; for somebody who, for the majority of the time, thought in English –the language of the colonised, the language of frenetically enthused ephemeral lovers- was it possible that she would eventually give in to their tracing-paper ideologies? Would she become mixed up in the trivialising of the ephemera?

  Because right now, as Jaya Chakarbatti watched the light from the window hit Eleven’s face and she looked so picturesque and superior that Jaya never wanted her to know that she farted and masturbated to images of fat hairy Indian men sometimes, Jaya knew that however fleeting the physical plane of this relationship may have held, she didn’t want to grow up, because the guileless adolescent indecisions made her think that things could never seem as beautiful as they did right now.

  It didn’t take either girl too long to figure out that making the first move would be a constipated decision; so today, while they were already on a roll, the day stretched out (according to the time-space compendium; in their minds it seemed to fly by as the Lovers Watch has a knack of doing). They were lying on the bonnet of Eleven’s car; the night was balmy –strange for a city full of municipal mills and discarded warehouses- and the evening was dark and full of distant shouts and drunken yells. Eleven was indulging Jaya’s musings. The kids were being fed by the live-in mistress, her mobile was turned off, and Home seemed a pleasurably non-existent place. She was with an exotic creature whom she could never have conceivably come across unless the Gods were on her side; the type she’d only heard about from the Distant Educated Relatives who had laminated floors and could afford to ignore practicalities in their households. Jaya had one knee up and the other leg muscles rippled gently under her jeans as she rocked her foot side to side. And for once, Eleven could put aside being a mother and school rota’s, and talk about some numbness-inducing topic that put her completely out of her depth and in to the realms of Jaya’s existence. They were talking about how slowly immigration was progressing:

  ‘Well, we don’t live in a utopian society of universal knowledge yet. It still stands that a brown person can talk about brown issues, and I’m brown so I’ll be interested. In an ideal world, I suppose,’ she stopped rocking her foot from side to side, ‘a white could make a film or write a story about being a slave and I’d be convinced.’

  ‘Well, what about Asians who talk about stuff other than spices and palm trees?...’

  She thought for a moment. ‘….Are you convinced by them?’

  ‘Not for shit, mate.’

  ‘I am, sometimes. Very rarely.’ She took a long drag of her cigarette. ‘But we’re still making our way out of the pile of labels they buried us under. And maybe,’ her voice became soft, ‘there’s still a lot more work to be done, to address all of those labels and scoop the shit off our heads before we can get to ground level and breathe the same air as them.’

  ‘How long will that take?’ She rolled her head to look at Jaya, her hair falling about her shoulders, strands of softness falling on the cold glass of the windscreen. Her eyes were half open looking absentmindedly in to somewhere in the sky. She laughed quietly.

  ‘I don’t know, man. Not too long for the superficial stuff. Our kids will probably fill in all the subtle, hard-to-reach cracks of white knowledge. You know, about bird life in the humber and all that. And then, if our generation harp on about it enough, the whites’ll start taking in stuff by osmosis and start talking about identity crises and shit.’

  ‘I already have kids.’

  ‘Do they know about bird life in the Humber?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re shafted then.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Please do.’

  Eleven thumped her in the side. ‘You’re an obnoxious cow.’ She watched as Jaya smiled fleetingly, dismissively, as though she was laughing more at a fatuous stray thought. ‘Why do you have a sitar when you can’t even play it?’

  ‘It looks nice. It sounds nice. It makes me feel Asian. The Beatles, John Lennon; all those quintessentially White boys that took it universal, they added another layer to our cultural pizza base.’

  ‘”Our” cultural base? You’re a bengy. Sitars are Indian.’

  ‘Aah same thing. We’re all brown. In fact, we’re still pretty much black.’

  ‘I’m bloody well not. I don’t have any Indians or blacks or bengali goose’s in to my house.’

  ‘Ha! A bona fide Paki you are then. And it’s geese.’

  ‘Screw you. And anyway, how can you say that? Most of your friends are white, you went to a private school full of all whites, you talk like a white girl, your uni class are all ghoriye. Of all people, I thought you’d be the one to say we’re all, you know, assimilated or whatever.’

  ‘They’re the first ones to exoticise me. I used to think I was like them until at school one day, the teacher said to me ‘So Jaya, what do you eat at home?’ I said ‘curry and rice’. She said ‘ooooh’, as though it was something different. And that was it. She lay the barrier down.’ Jaya sighed. ‘I know people should acknowledge difference; ignoring them doesn’t do anyone any good. For school projects I played up to them I suppose; they were voyeurs of the East, them lot. I even wrote a project called ‘Welcome to the Saffron Revolution’. That really made ‘em jizz their pants. I fed ‘em so much crap about arranged marriages and self harm and religious fundamentalism and fucking Bhangra music. I didn’t understand any of it. Jesus I don’t even understand Bollywood or Bhangra.’

  ‘Why do you listen to it now then?’

  ‘Cuz it sounds nice. But then, man, all of those things were their views of what was going on with browns; it was probably happening, but I perpetuated it even thought I didn’t come across any of it. I used to tell them about my yearly holidays to Bangladesh, feed em stories about mud huts and wiping my ass with leaves.’ She laughed. ‘There were no fucking mud huts in my life. Our house has English toilets and is made of white marble for fucks sake. And all that malarkey about arranged marriages, well, Dad says I’m not allowed to get married til I’m 26 and settled in to a career and that he’d rather I stay unmarried for the rest of my life than marry somebody I don’t want to.’

  Eleven looked at her from the corner of her eye. She spoke of straight marriage with such ease that it was confusing.

  ‘I used to tell them I felt sorry for the limbless beggars on the streets in Sylhet. Which I did. But I didn’t tell them we had servants in the house, that’d piss them right off. Start saying it was barbaric and call for emancip-… freedom and rights, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t think they realise that if these kids weren’t house servants, they’d be prostitutes.’

  ‘But they don’t get that. Their money buys them a stake in the moral high ground. They’re so comfortable. They don’t do sacrifice. Some dick was on about Primark the other day, saying people should boycott them and stop the child labour they employ, y’know, in those sweatshops back home. They don’t realise that sewing is the only skill these kids have. They’ll resort to thuggery if they lose their sewing jobs.’ She threw the cigarette and it flew in an arc shape and hit the ground. They watched the orange glow falter and fade. ‘I suppose there are a few alternatives set up; you know, to take them out of the sweatshops and educate them. But can you do that on a national level? The bastards are starving British students of an education, cutting their bloody funding, raising fees, and they think they can solve the educational problems of the whole of Asia.’ Her voice became bitter. ‘They go there for two weeks ‘to find themselves’ and ‘walk barefooted like the natives’ and ‘eat dry-fish off the street stalls’, being overcharged till they’re bleeding out of their arseholes on their ‘gap yah’s’ and they think they can solve everything. Their money is welcome, I suppose, but I wish they’d stop being so fucking smug about the whole thing. I can capitalise on my heritage but when they do it, its just annoying.’

  ?
??And you reckon you can solve the problem back home?’

  ‘We invest back home; we have long term commitments; we build houses in Sylhet. So many massive houses there, made from money our lot sent back. Big sprawling vulgar bangladesh-style houses with those cheap faux-mosaic floors you get in upmarket village service stations. We don’t attempt to change the fucking culture, man. We do it their way. We don’t preach to them. If you go to Sylhet, there’s shitloads of development, theme parks, family stuff. Not a single major nightclub, no KFC’s, no McDonalds; we’re not trying to make it a mini-London. Its done with our money, but on their terms.’

  She pushed herself up the bonnet a little, her face gently strewn with the disgust afforded only to an insider marvelled at from both sides of the glass wall. ‘Yes, the Sylheti’s probably resent us for it, but the rest of Bangladesh resent us for it too. The people from Dhaka have always thought Sylheti’s are shit; I suppose maybe they’re jealous, or maybe Sylheti’s have become smug about themselves and it gets Dhaka’s back up. I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’re Bengali, y’know.’

  Jaya laughed. ‘You’re so racist.’

  ‘Well I thought they were all short and dark and, y’know, a bit thick and that. Chewing paan and stuff. Eating fish and rice all the time.’

  ‘Jesus. If our own type can’t figure out the different classes, the whites have no chance.’

  ‘No, shut up a minute. You’re not like that though, are you?’

  ‘And what if I was?’

  ‘Then I wouldn’t want anything to do with you. Although, you do have those Chinese-y eyes that Bangladeshi people have.’

  ‘That’s so cruel. Look at you; you’re a typical Paki and I don’t mind.’

  ‘No I am not! I am a homosexual. And an adulterer. And I speak English. And I don’t cook curry all the time.’

  ‘Gosh, really pushing the boundaries there, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You keep telling yourself that.’

  ‘When I walk out of the house, the neigbours look, cuz I don’t wear Salwar Kameez and I go out and have a good time.’

  ‘Maybe in your world you’re not, but in my world, you’re just the same as every other bored Pakistani housewife.’ Jaya stuck out her tongue.

  ‘You really are a piece of work, aren’t you?’

  And in the secure knowledge that the truth is very rarely what comes out of people’s mouths, Eleven and Jaya threw caution to the acrid Birmingham winds and begun what, in anybody’s world, would become a bizarre relationship that seemed to last only minutes in the general timescale of things, but as History showed through Her ignorance of all things Substantial, became the focal point of almost any thread of thought either women had in their futures.

  Eleven uhm’d and ah’d her way through life, the frontline of which was held up by the impenetrable force of her three children. They were cleaned, fed and sent regularly to the local Leisure Centre, averting the prying eyes and probing questions of her in-laws and the prick of her husband (what he did on his overnight taxi rounds was his business, while her live-in mistress (a relative from Pakistan they were accommodating while her visa application pended) was her business).

  She woke up in the mornings and dropped the children off at school, and picked them up on time, and they did their homework on time, and she sent them to bed at the prescribed time, and she cooked for her family on time, and helped the local women fill in their benefit forms on time, and ordered a new dining table on time, and rang Back Home in time, and put the copper highlights in her hair in time, and started her period on time, and sowed the spinach seeds on time, and kneaded the chapatti dough on time.

  Her home was an open forum for all manner of visitors while the picture file on her mobile phone and online profiles were restricted with impenetrable security measures. Her leather wristbands and khaki baggies were under lock and key to prevent any collision with her militarity arranged collection of salwaar kameezes and dupattas; paralleling the situation one storey below where the Elephant atta sat innocently unaware of the packets of Marlborough Lights and Absynthh locked in the cupboard beside it.

  And then, under the damp-blackened carpet underlay, beneath a loose rotting floorboard in her lank bedroom with its flowery textured wallpaper, was her secret collection of films.

  FIRE! screamed one, I Can’t Think Straight, claimed another, Chutney Flavoured Popcorn, joked the other… they slunk around, like contraband; or the equivalent of a teenage boys porn stash…

  Like the left-behind social movement, pushed underground, they uncomfortably sported three problem areas; they were about coloured gay women (the kind of cause that sent middle classes in to ecstatic furors of ‘equality!’ and bored the shit out of everyone else). Peeking out from the corners of their muslin cloths (for effect, she’d gleefully think to herself), the brown faces were either glamourised for the merciless braying mobs of commercialism or grainy unkempt women with dark skin and unstraightened hair. Earthy, she’d heard Jaya say once; with that knack of anchoring everything with a vocal pin (Eleven called them ugly but she realised that didn’t encompass the multitude of meaning behind a woman who chose to openly appear un-groomed).

  And there she was. Jaya Chakarbatti. With her mocking raised eyebrow and her lips curled up at one corner, sharp and savvy, with her edgy words that cut like razor blades through the mendacity of Eleven’s existence; there she walked with cheekbones and the jawline of a Bollywood femme fatale, her outline slightly blurred, her milky, pale skin -the cursed fantasy of any Pakistani housewife. Even the fact that she was Bangladeshi (generally considered to be at the bottom of the pecking order) didn’t put her off; Eleven thought it was cute when Jaya repeated Urdu words after her (profanities, of course) in her stunted, Englishified accent.

  Through the quiet heartbroken sighs of malcontent as she watched the masala bubble away on the hob, Eleven knew that nobody really listened to her inner monologues or the quiet narrative than went on quietly in the background of her life, all jostling for space within her head, babbling away like the blub blub hotpot of potatoes and tomatoes and paneer floating about in front of her eyes (every Thursday right after the children settled to watch TV).

  The indignant polyglot of Mutterings would strike in whatever linguistic weaponry was fit for the purpose; Urdu if she was peaceful, Mirpuri if she felt vulgar, Hindi if she felt filmi, and Punjabi if she was really pissed off, with its tirade of consecutive consonants and intimidating sets of tongue rolling and nasal squawks. And when the in-laws would stride superciliously in to her living room demanding family albums and tea and bay leaves and cinammon sticks and enquire after the children, they would talk to her in whatever mish-mash they felt like and she, always, respectfully thank you-ji, replied in Mirpuri, hiding behind its safe insulated free falling diction that had no written form, knowing she could never slip up about her co-marital affairs in a language that didn’t even have a word for girlfriend.

  It was a quiet refuge then, her sexuality. In places that were always dark (clubs generally always were; she didn’t have time for the bars, like all refuges, hers were quickquick stopovers used for emergency relief); full of whispers and desirous looks and the ineffable bond of forbidden perpetrations, she would hunt for the next item on her extra-curricular syllabi by following the trail of poppers and BO and the raucous laughter of the crowd who were enjoying themselves far too much to be regulars; far too loud and savouring every moment far too much, overflowing with enthusiasm for every passing moment and lapping up the badly mixed pop music too too much because they weren’t allowed out often enough to distinguish tasteful music from non…

  And she would watch as the drag queens performed their rusty dance routines copied from pirated Bollywood DVD’s, hips rolling and wrists twisting, fake eyelashes fluttering and their wide jaws looking odd as their midnight shadows sprouted through the layers of liquid foundation, their botoxed lips like swollen vaginas as a r
eplacement for their prick and balls squeezed tucked and bound flat between their legs, the sweat patches seeping through the scratchy net of their shiny Pathiala blouses.

  These acrimonious subversions of gender were, Eleven knew, the only expression left for these poor boys who had been squeezed out of the Asian patriarch and fallen between the cracks, fucking perversely in the margins like a mirage on the peripherals of society’s vision. Forced to be part of the world’s sexual deviants, they were the unwanted T of the LGB’s, struggling like the bottomless basket for independence but leeching off the comfort that comes with sharing the value of the lowest common denominator.

  The multicoloured lights would momentarily flicker over those sitting on the sidelines, wary and unsure as to why they were there, lugged with the burden of being the Opposition to possibly the strictest heterocentric nation on earth, where men were so secure in their superiority that they were even allowed to hold hands without being questioned. They all sat in these hidden coves, after-hours, with thumping bass and mangled sitar blaring out on to the dancefloor attempting to bring something upbeat to a sodden state of mind.

  There was Kalvinder Ramakrishnan (alter ego Kareena Rani) who wore his hair in cane rows and dressed like a homophobic rapper, but his eyebrows were far too neat to pass if off as authentic. And there was Rafique, painfully skinny and teeth reddened and chipped from chewing so much pan, newly arrived from Bangladesh and looking to pick up a sugar daddy who could help him support his wives and children Back Home. Sliding his way up and down a hand railing on the stage was Haich, 17 and HIV Positive, mindlessly spreading his venom towards the world by depositing his seeds in the anal caverns of various men he met at the gay sauna without saying a word, squinting in hateful pleasure when could feel his own passages ravaged by an overenthusiastic father of three… And young Bob Singh, who would ask for forgiveness every morning during puja, for the ungodly lustings that would take over in dark alleyways with Raja Singh from next door… and poor young Noreen, forever consigned to helping her single mother live vicariously through her by meeting cousin after cousin hoping for marriage, but who came to these nights in the hope of some female affection without an agenda, even if it meant giving up her virginity… And Sam Sumaira (‘o yea, I live in Central London’) who was determined plug her degree and superiority and penchant for caviar and fling it in the face of all these sorry specimens of people whom she felt owed her something for gracing their scene…

  It seemed then, that the only hope lay on the shoulders of the few who positively revelled in their sexually subversive existence; although few and far between, they weren’t there to Head Fuck, they weren’t Asian Psychos.

  Some wore their sexuality like a political identity; Joshua Kerala who, after years of sex-and-drug fuelled youth and trawling online sites for somebody whose profile picture was not a set of abs or an erect penis, had found a husband and lobbied hard for the 2004 Civil Partnership Act, and celebrated that December by making his man honest in the student union bar. And the two women from India, Reena and Heena, who had crossed religious boundaries and finally took the last train to Mumbai and fled to a life in the UK, stunned that it seemed to be a hyper-orthodox version of India in the 1970’s which the immigrants had brought along and stagnated in the dewey surroundings of the city…

  Yes, the variegated surface of the gaysian existence had many things stuck in its ridges, from which Eleven licked and picked to continue her day to day life. And it floated obdurately in the pithy prosaic surroundings of the immigrant cities, divided and subdivided in the way that torn clouds usually seem to do in the face of changed winds.

  Eleven would sit with Jaya and watch, as only a mother and lover could, the struggle in her face. The lines that would form on her forehead, the twitching feet as she regaled Eleven with tales of some bygone era, opening doors which Eleven didn’t care to know existed. A world so distanced from either of their lives that it was a wonder the lines of history had even thought to make them cross. How bizarre that a girl so young was weighed down with the fights of the past and, as the hours clocked up and their watches ticked on (onwards, to Their inevitable demise) it didn’t seem to matter that there was no agenda. Eleven, who had gotten by in life not concerned about anything beyond her own stomach, and whose sun rose and set on her children and whose nights were filled with mistresses and taxis, was amused and afraid to be moved by Jaya’s damp eyelashes as she forgot to blink sometimes as they spoke.

  ‘There’s so much our people don’t know about, Eleven… There was Rosa Parks who refused to give up her bus seat to a white… And the tattoo’d Holocaust survivors who saw their own killed like animals…There was Emily Davidson and the Suffragettes who won the vote for women-‘

  ‘Was she a dyke?’

  ‘Who cares? They were amazing, they did something for nothing… and we struggle to fight back at a few words… paki, or dyke, no matter what, we just sit passively and don’t care about the class wars thinking our people will naturally become considered equal over the years… and we fall for the governments Equality Bills and all the bullshit bureaucracy they weigh everyone else down with… and before it’s even had a chance to mature we’ve got idiot Asians who side with the Whites and say ‘o you’re just playing the race card’ thinking that’s enough to be considered assimilated. You know we’re still second class citizens,’

  ‘I know. But you can make a life for yourself without getting in to theirs,’

  ‘We need to fight for the option. We can’t pull the rug out from under our own people. Think of those of us who could potentially become great, actually do something for this country’s history, who’ll be starved of the options just because the rest of us were too incestuous, too lazy to make a life outside our colonies.’

  ‘You know most people don’t care about this stuff.’

  ‘Most people are stupid. They’re not the problem. It’s the ones who harbour hatred and think of us as inferior. And even then, there are those who think they’re totally colourblind but don’t realise the subconscious prejudices they have, they see a brown face amongst lots of job candidates and distance themselves without even realising. The figures show it, Eleven. They show that those in high places aren’t brown.’

  ‘Maybe that’s cuz we haven’t been here long enough.’

  ‘We’ve had just as much training and experience in the same job.’ She pulled out a newspaper and pointed at an article. ‘It’s here in black and white. In like for like job positions, browns get paid the least. Just because they’ve pulled the wool over your eyes, don’t fall for it. You think you can just get on with it and everything will be ok. No. Even though some of us speak better English than them, we’re overlooked.’

  ‘Maybe it’s cuz you have a chip on your shoulder.’

  ‘But I haven’t. And even if I did, they wouldn’t know. I’d just be working as hard as everyone else, with the same can-do attitude and ‘managerial synergy’ that they teach me and everyone else. Look,’ she turned to face her, ‘if you were a white man working with a group of white men and one Asian person, naturally you’ll grow an affinity to the whites. So naturally you’ll pull him up for promotion. Asians do it; most of our businesses are family run and there’s plenty of nepotism,’

  ‘So…? What’s the problem?’

  Jaya laughed. ‘There is a huge problem. Why should anybody be held back?’

  ‘O now you’re just being spoilt.’

  ‘You shut your face.’

  ‘And anyway, how about you fight your own battles. You go on about freedom and stuff, but you haven’t told your parents about you yet.’

  ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. You married a guy…’

  ‘I’m not the one with all the fighting talk.’

  ‘Look right, I’m just an adaptable person. Just because someone has an opinion one way, doesn’t mean they have a blanket, one-shoe-fits-all attitude to life.’

  ‘O right, yea. There’s a word fo
r that? What is it, erm…’ Eleven mockingly scratched her head. ‘O yea. Hypocrite.’

  ‘Piss off. What am I supposed to do? Marry a girl? No way, that’d hurt my family, there’d be a problem having children, I’d lose everyone in my life for what? One woman who isn’t even guaranteed to last. The trade off’s not worth it.’

  ‘Are they going to be the one having sex with him? Are they the one’s who’re going to be there in 30 years when you’re unhappy?’

  ‘You assume I can’t be happy with a guy. There’s more to marriage than sex, y’know.’

  ‘And there’s more to sexuality than sex, you know. You’re attracted to women for more than just how they look.’

  ‘Am I? Isn’t sexuality just a difference in who you shag?’

  ‘No you twat. First of all, it’s about the pleasures of community, innit? There’s a whole different lifestyle, being gay an’ that. And then there’s the natural understanding a girl gives you; something sweet about them, that a guy can’t match for shit.’

  ‘I don’t know, Eleven. I think all the emotional stuff is universal….’.

  ‘If that was true, there’d be no difference between men and women at all, and everything would be equal. You of all people know it’s not.’

  ‘Maybe it is. Maybe men and women just like to forge differences and think they’re more different than they actually are…’

  Eleven looked incredulous. ‘You live on a different planet, you do.’

  Jaya sighed. She watched Eleven’s movement from the corner of her eye. She was too embarrassed to look her in the face for too long; they hadn’t reached that point yet. But she wanted to look! She wanted to stare and stare and pretend that there was no pride or pretence, no inhibitions to the Full Surrendering of The Soul to somebody else. Then she realised how boring that would be, so she whetted her appetite watching but not watching; using the superior female gift of peripheral vision (o the graceful and understated qualities of the femme!). They were sitting right next to each other but the surreal feeling of Eleven’s presence was (and would always be) unsatisfactory. She still missed her; and she couldn’t quite believe she was there.

  There was moment of silence that either could have picked up to do whatever they wanted; as if incapable of tailoring so much freedom, neither said anything and the moment simmered. Eleven (consciously revelling in the heaviness of the air between them and chose to keep Jaya at arms length by dismissing it –it was a skill she learned in the face of a husband whose very existence she practiced passively detesting) decided to ask a few dud questions –dud, because the answers were already written in manual of all sexual deviants; an unwritten wisdom the Straights would never quite be willing to come to terms with:

  ‘So you think you can be Muslim and gay then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jaya sighed, and, as though reciting from a script: ‘I’m not trying to justify my sexuality with my religion; I know Islam says it’s forbidden and I accept that. But everyone is allowed their indulgences, right?’

  Eleven laughed under her breath.

  Jaya turned around and looked at her. ‘Are you just taking the piss now?’

  ‘Yes! You dick. ‘ooo justify Islam and sexuality’, you prick. God, don’t you ever shut up?’

  They were both caught off guard as they made fully frontal nude eye contact.

  Occasionally, in a country where self-deprecation and criticism was a way of life –so much so that it debilitated one’s own brain in to becoming a self-reductive machine- great gluts of inner monologue were harangued by the ostentatious tittering of realism. Trains of Thought were stunted, cut short, diverted because of signal failures, leaves and trees all over the track, refusing to let it run its distance. As though it were some anti-Self campaign, and contradicting its great traditions of letting wine mature, one’s own thoughts were rarely allowed to marinate. In the Bangladeshi tradition of pickling almost anything –from lemons to cow’s heads- the lines of Jaya’s blood ran thick and came across the occasional British clot that found it’s way in her system until her blood (and along with it, her thoughts) ran thin.

  But having her ancestry weighted in Sylhet (‘Rock, move!’), there was something of a habit of moving boulders with mere thoughts.

  With a few unsightly spurts, there would come forth a Kind of Thinking that would coarse through her veins til she could feel them dangling off the keratin on the tips of her fingers and toes and split ends; a kind of rip roaring riveting sense of passion that defied all stoical sagacity or emotional constipation that had poured in from both sides of the Atlantic and meandered in to her being. With all the dichotomous resonances of a philosophically (open) minded, critical thinking prone, bullshit chatting, inquiry-driven nature of a Lofty Lesbian, Jaya Chakra-BORty felt the gushing forth of all the things she tried hard not to feel (which somehow gave her the illusion that she did, indeed, not feel); it was a bizarre feeling that left her lost.

  Because, for a fleeting moment, there was, in the surrounding area of Eleven’s eyes, a flicker of being completely off-guard; caught in the glare, sheer confused I-Don’t-Know-Where-To-Go-ness. And when Jaya stared helplessness in the eyes, the oblivion looked in to her. It wasn’t an intangible sense of overwhelming profundity that made the world comb through her being or any sense of romanticised undergrowth that was best left in the bowels of vacuous Euro pop; it was something shared between two women who were, in all senses of the word, pulled together by an attraction that was dependant on nothing but. Not a transient jiffy that once moved on from, would fizzle out in the ether of Forever, but a free-floating moment of clarity and solidarity that was so rude in its starkness that again, Jaya found herself embarrassed that she had left her perch as the Purveyor of all things Confusing and was suddenly clapped humbly and purposefully in the face by something which she had always mocked.

  And from then on, every awkward moment the two shared, every empty space between speech and thought, every inquiring breath that would prefix every question, was somehow, someway, just an attempt at realising exactly what this moment meant.

  (And always the inevitable end.)