“No,” said Vanessa, eyeing her biscuit before she bit into it again, “he’s like Miss Havisham, except he can’t bear to see the wedding cake and stuff going rotten and being buried in cobwebs. Miss Havisham, if she had a tent, and Pip was a girl.”
“And Miss
Havisham was a fifty-something, portly Indian man,” said Sven, rolling his eyes.
“He steps in,” said Amal.
“When? What for?” Vanessa looked at Amal, who did not speak, and then Sven.
“No outdoor plumbing,” he said, shrugging.
“Oh.”
They all looked out at Mirza Uncle. Rehan was talking to him, juggling what looked like a
penknife, a small torch and a packet of chewing gum.
“Did he say anything about his plans?” asked Sven. “Is he ever going to give up?”
“I don’t think there’s any planning going on.” Amal said. “It’s just one day at a time around here.” She stopped suddenly as the words of the azan came floating over the back garden. Outside, Rehan and her uncle were standing in prayer in the back garden, something she only ever saw at Eid prayers once a year at the mosque, when her parents had been still living there. They had rolled out a clean bedsheet over the grass next to the tent, Mirza Uncle standing in front, Rehan behind and to the side, both with heads bowed and hands folded over their stomachs.
Amal stood in the living room, watching her uncle and his student from the edge of the patio curtains. She felt as if she was watching someone as they slept. She moved a chair by the patio door a few inches and rubbed at a stain on the cloth with her thumb. She sat in the chair for a few minutes, looking out at the figures on the lawn, then jumped up again and shifted a potted plant into a triangle of light slicing through the extension. When she looked again, Rehan was walking back to the house with the folded bedsheet in his hands. She hurried back into the house as Rehan slid open the extension door and turned to arrange the books on the coffee table, lining up their spines into a tidy stack.
A few minutes later, Sven and Vanessa left, and Amal sat down with a textbook and tried to read, stroking the cat who jumped into her lap. Moriarty was not impressed, however, with these perfunctory attentions and slid off again.
Rehan opened the door to the living room. His book bag was on his shoulder, and he had a pencil balanced over his ear. “I’m going to leave now,” he said, smiling haltingly at Amal, who was chewing her pen and reading her textbook intently. She mumbled her acknowledgment, and then realized that she was being rude. She looked up only as far as his knees and said goodbye. She cringed when she heard the front door closed, and looked up to watch him cross the front garden. She was still looking at the space where he had been, long after he had gone, until light left the sky and his form was only a half-imagined flicker through the window, like the threads that jump on an old movie screen at the end of a reel.
Chapter 7
“It is long enough, don’t worry,” said Mirza, bending over the outdoor extension cord he was plugging into a projector. Rehan had picked it up at the university, after a little bureaucratic struggle with the head of the architecture department. The words “Property of Arch. Dept., Rm 107” was written in permanent marker along the side of the projector, like a piece of unclaimed luggage on the lawn. The portable screen was a sail, listing slightly on the scraggly grass so that the words on the first transparencies slid off the screen, but Mirza beamed.
“Who needs walls?” he shouted, to no-one in particular. “We are outside the box… open your minds!” he shouted, tapping his own forehead and smiling at Rehan.
A few more students were at the lesson than Amal remembered from the previous week. Some of them had foldable chairs, such as could be seen among people queuing on the pavement for concert tickets. Kiran was eating a sandwich as he took notes.
Mirza rushed from the screen to the projector, wafting a pen in his hand like a conductor’s baton as he explained the stresses upon steel and glass. He was smiling broadly at the students, a few of who were rocking absent-mindedly on their makeshift seating. He was wearing a kurta pajama today, with a brown, hand-knitted sweater over it that barely stretched over the convexities of his stomach. The white of his kurta shone through where the strain against the wool was the strongest. His feet made soft sucking sounds against his leather sandals as they slapped against the ground with each charge forwards and backwards across the lawn.
Amal watched from the patio. She had been speaking to her father on the telephone, trying to calm down his determination to come to England and see what was happening for himself. She knew he could not afford the time off from his job, and besides, the thought that he was coming would make it feel as if Mirza Uncle had failed, that they had all failed. She did not notice Frank Minton until he was standing next to her.
“He’s looking good.”
“Yes. He’s good at this. Teaching.”
“I always think that everyone needs just one thing that they’re good at. Just one thing to save a life, sometimes.” Frank did not look at her as he spoke, but his voice was kind.
“What’s yours?” she asked, surprised at her own forwardness.
He was quiet for a moment and then said shyly, “Ella. Although, I can’t take credit for her. But it works, and it always has.”
“What about your work?”
“Well, you know… I wanted to be something… do something good. Heroic, I suppose. But I wasn’t a hero, it was just a uniform to me. Others were, don’t get me wrong. I just found myself with a couple of really good mates and a decent paycheck, and that was enough for me. I’ve been retired for about ten years, and I miss the force, and all that, but all I want from life now is in that house. What about you? Any young fellow on the horizon?”
“No,” said Amal. “I… I just don’t know.”
“Going to have one of those arranged…?”
“Oh no,” she interrupted quickly. “There’s just no-one.”
“Not for long, I’m sure,” said Frank, smiling.
The lesson was over, but Mirza was still talking fluidly and they watched as he ducked into the tent, re-emerging a moment later with a small orange box. He walked over to the projector and took a slide out of the box and placed it on the glass. A slightly blurry black and white family photograph was displayed on the screen. The photo was taken in an Indian courtyard and looked to be very old. The people were dressed in formal wear, the details faded. They were not smiling, their eyes staring out over the decades with a pensive look.
“Oooh,” said Frank, already walking up to take a closer look. He settled on a flowerpot that was upended, thought twice about it, and then resettled on a wooden chest that had been dragged onto the grass as a bench.
Mirza pointed out a few architectural details in the photos, a cornice here, an archway there. The students were more interested in the people, and the slideshow was soon punctuated by Mirza’s explanations as one face after another was illuminated on the screen.
Amal listened. She had seen some of the same photos in her father’s photo albums, but she realized she did not know their stories, or had them mixed up. Mirza Uncle talked them through the kohl-eyed babies, being dandled on an ayah’s knee that were to die of tuberculosis before they turned seven; the strict, conservative uncle who was arranged in marriage to an activist feminist, and was divorced speedily after one year, never to be remarried: they sat together at what must have been a post-wedding photo, he looking severe, she, leaning forward, mid-laughter, as if only she got the joke their families had played on them; the adventurous younger uncle who could not wait to see the world, going as far as Paris to study at the Sorbonne, then returning to spend the rest of his life in India. There were colored slides of trips to the zoo; an aunt with her eyes closed tightly, head turned away from a parrot sitting on her shoulder; Mirza himself, slim and boyish, with one hand in his pocket, smiling at the camera, the other palm out flat, feeding a treat to an elephant.
There were some slides of the forests of Darjeeling
, and Frank Minton spoke about his great-grandfather’s service in the British military, in India. He told them about a British expedition to quell the nearby state of Sikkim, which led to the Raja’s abdication and his subsequent banishment to the mountainous hinterland. This was followed by a slide of Mirza in aviators and brown flares, one of six perched perilously on a single scooter—“we fell off when it stopped.”—and Sven let out a catcall. There was a general quiet when slides of grandparents came up on the screen, peering at the camera indifferently, surrounded by a sea of black-haired grandchildren striking sassy poses; the occasional small child at the edge of the group smiling, shyly, as if they had given a present and were not sure how it might be received.
When the last slide was shown, and the hum of the projector was quieted, they heard teacups rattling as Rehan made his way from the house with a tray. Amal had not noticed when Ella had entered the garden, but she perceived her now in the twilight, sitting with her head on her husband’s shoulder. Rehan passed out Jaffa Cakes.
“It’s hard to picture you, you now, in all that,” said Vanessa, sleepily, her hand moving in a circular motion over the blank projector screen as if she were washing a window. “You know, you’re the professor. You gave me a B plus on my structural stresses essay—which should have been at least an A minus, by the way—” she winked, “And I see you in the college hallways three days a week, at least I used to, but there’s all this to you… it’s sort of like bumping into you at the launderette—”
“
Or riding the stationary bike at the leisure center,” continued Kiran. They all looked quizzically at him. He shrugged. “I once saw my English teacher from secondary school, huffing and puffing on the track. He was all sweaty like, and I knew I couldn’t look him in the eye. I dunno, it was just all wrong. Not creepy, though, but like, when you see someone in costume on the street, a clown trying to give away pamphlets about the circus, or something, and then when you get close, you can see the real person’s eyes behind the mask, and there’s no smile in them.”
“Mmmm,” said Mirza, smiling, “Clowns, eh? I don’t like where this is going.”
“Clowns are creepy no matter what,” said Saad.
“But I just meant,” continued Vanessa, “when you see someone as they don’t make you see them. Like, everything we see of someone is controlled. How they dress, how they choose to do their hair. What music they’re into. It’s so contrived. You don’t get anything real out of them, unless there’s a crisis, and they just have to react.”
“Wow. That’s bleak,” said Sven, moving back to look at her properly.
“It’s tough at your age, love. You’re still trying to find who you are. You don’t care so much about that stuff when you get older,” said Ella. “The cracks show, and you realize that it doesn’t really matter.”
“Or it’s too late to do anything about them,” said Frank. “I’m never going to have that BMW in my driveway. My knees give out when I try to play tennis. I’m past the age of fooling anyone anymore.”
“See, I would love that, that freedom. So many girls I know are all about getting that bloke, impressing him, getting asked out. So many blokes have even less high aims.” They laughed.
“L’enfer, c’est les autres,” said Mirza. When they looked at him, he shrugged. “Sartre’s idea was that hell is other people. Five people in a room realize they’re in hell because there are no doors, and they can’t get away from others. No Exit.”
“But it’s not other people. It’s what we twist ourselves into to suit other people,” said Kiran, playing with a flashlight that Mirza kept in his tent. He swept the beam over the boxes and trunks on the lawn, their shadows pulling and stretching, like the profile of ghosts startled from their slumber in the grass. “When I get together with my old mate from high school, we don’t really say much, but I feel like I’m not alone, even when I’m not doing anything or saying anything. I don’t have to say anything funny or interesting.”
“Well, that’s lucky,” said Sven, “because that’s not your strong suit.” Kiran laughed and shone the beam directly in Sven’s face so that he had to hold up his hand over his eyes.
“When you don’t have to twist yourself,” Kiran went on, “you like that other person more, and you like yourself more too. Like, I’m ok
ay really. No pressure.”
“Well, don’t we want to feel challenged by someone we care for or love? Where’s the excitement in feeling safe? What about growth? I don’t want to find myself living with my old man like we’re a pair of tortoises,” said Vanessa, slapping a mosquito on her arm.
“There are worse things,” said Mirza. “I’d settle for being a tortoise right now.”
Everyone was silent for a moment, and then Rehan said, “You are a tortoise, Uncle, just without a shell.”
“A naked tortoise,” said Sven.
“Yes, yes,” said Mirza smiling broadly. “I like that. A naked tortoise.” He chuckled and looked around the garden. “And right now, the breeze is feeling very good.”
The last light was leaving the sky. Amal glanced up and saw the outline of a bat pinned against the darkening blue. Rehan was standing and stretching. Kiran offered Vanessa and Sven a ride home. Ella gathered up the teacups while Frank moved the makeshift chairs to their regular pile in the corner. Her uncle was removing each slide carefully with forefinger and thumb and slipping them into their orange storage boxes, their secrets held tight once more, like shelved books in a dark corner of a library.