A Week in December (15 page)

As a child, Hassan had songs and verses, stories and prayers embedded in his memory, and perhaps because they were offered to him in an atmosphere of affection and calm, they lodged there like the first marks in wet concrete, never to be erased. He had a pure voice, and under an imam's guidance became adept at
tajwid
, the art of Koranic recital. This could be emotional and competitive, with the reciters wanting to see who could produce the biggest reaction, but when at the end of the service the congregation would stand and sing greetings to the Prophet, Hassan felt secure enough in who he was.

The world outside his home, however, was more troubling. He was made aware that his skin was of a different colour from that of his pasty classmates. By the age of eleven - a slight, black-haired child with wide brown eyes in a Dundee-woven school blazer - he knew a fair amount about the planets and the solar system, but almost nothing of the earth. He was astounded when a prematurely developed Scottish classmate punched him in the solar plexus at break time. As he lay gasping in the corridor, the pain that seeped from him seemed to crystallise into a small certainty. It was a moment he never forgot. The world was not fair, or reasonable, or loving. You could therefore either fight within it like the others, or you could look for a better explanation and a superior way of life.

There were prayer groups and special trips up to the Highlands or down to the Lake District with others of his faith, but while Hassan was thrilled by the stories of Noah, Joseph and others in the Koran, he didn't want to be a special case, in a gaudy coach with wailing music and a devout driver. He watched the same programmes on television as the rest of the children in his class; he went to the same films at the ABC and even supported a football team (Kilmarnock: choosing between Rangers and Celtic had been too fraught). While his father's Punjabi accent was overlaid with a West Riding inflection, Hassan spoke Glaswegian-English like the native he was. Much as he liked his parents, he didn't want to make a fetish of them and their culture; he didn't want to be singled out and stared at, in the way he and his friends gawped at the Jewish children who left early on a Friday in order to be home in Giffnock before dark.

Hassan tried on different disguises. At fourteen he was all Scottish and atheistic: he exaggerated his interest in football and girls; he drank cider and beer from the off-licence and was sick in the park. He derided the women in hijab, calling out insults after them: 'Bloody penguins!'; 'Daleks!'

He enjoyed the sense of release and belonging, but the specific boys that he was obliged to spend his time with all repelled him. At least he was putting on a front, he thought; he was being perverse with the knowledge that a solid cliff of learning and culture lay behind him. But for these boys, the swearing, the bravado and the sex talk was everything: the foul-mouthed emptiness was all they had. By the time he was seventeen, Hassan had come to despise these friends and was looking for another cloak to wear.

It was at this time that his father announced that the family was heading south. He had opened a new factory, in Dagenham, and wanted to supervise its early days himself. The Renfrew operation no longer required his presence and he had installed reliable men in Leicester and Luton, where he had smaller units producing a range of pickles and sauces. He had hired a culinary scientist at Cambridge to try to develop what he viewed as the holy grail: a microwaveable poppadom. The ready-cooked ones in sealed packs lacked flavour, while the old-fashioned sort, which needed deep-frying, tended either to burn or to collect fat in their folds. Either way, they were too much work for the modern person.

Meanwhile, Nasim, Farooq's wife, was tired of the rainy streets of Glasgow. She was still young enough to yearn for the shops and theatres of London, where she pictured herself lunching with elegant friends in Piccadilly, then meeting Knocker in the foyer of the National Theatre. There were not enough spending opportunities in Glasgow for her to dispose of the generous allowance her husband made her, but London ... Her idea of it was based on television programmes and newspaper supplements with pictures of boorish chefs and thin models with brand names coming off the pages in a flickering, subliminal staccato. This year's go-to, must-see, gotta have ... She didn't know why there was such urgency about a 'raunchy' musical or a shiny handbag but she wanted to find out, before she was too old.

Havering-atte-Bower wasn't what Nasim had had in mind. It was almost in Essex. Knocker pointed out to her that in Knightsbridge or Notting Hill they couldn't have had such a lovely house, with an acre of garden, in sight of Edward the Confessor's old hunting lodge. They were at the highest point of Greater London, 110 metres above sea level, surrounded by three parks, with open country to the north and extended views in all directions. It was convenient for the Dagenham factory; and for Nasim, Knocker pointed out, it was a short drive to Upminster station, from where the District Line could take her straight to Sloane Square.

'Do I want a view of Purfleet?' said Nasim. 'Or the M25?'

'Yes,' said Knocker. 'You may grow to like them both.'

'And who was Edward the Confessor?'

'I think he was an English king, or perhaps a monk. A good man anyway.'

Hassan was pleased to make the move with his parents. He'd been arrested in Renfrew during a scuffle outside a club. After a night in a police cell, he'd come before the magistrates and been given a lecture and a conditional discharge. He told his parents he had stayed the night at a friend's, and the local paper's court reporter didn't connect his name to that of his father, so no account of it appeared.

So that was the law, thought Hassan, as he left the court. He wondered how many people had criminal records that they had concealed from their families. He certainly felt no obligation to tell his.

Running with the non-Muslim gang hadn't helped his work, and neither did the move down south. He caught the second year of sixth form in a new school and did well enough in his exams only to squeeze into the University of South Middlesex, a clumped aggregation of prestressed concrete and multiple fire doors in one of the wider streets of Walworth. He put his name down to study Social Policy.

One night after lectures in his first term, Hassan found himself by chance at a meeting of the Left Student Group. One of the third years was giving a talk called 'Multiculturalism: the Broken Dream' and something in the title appealed to Hassan.

The speaker was a scrawny white Londoner with a fluent manner.

'The advertisement read as follows,' he said, leaning forward to the lectern and adjusting his glasses as he looked down at a piece of paper. '"We are trying to recruit from all sections of the community. Because of the specific nature of the work, the number of self-confessed Jews we can appoint will be subject to certain limitations."'

He lifted the piece of paper and shook it at his audience. 'And this,' he said, 'is not the product of some neo-Nazi dictatorship, this is from a local council in our very own capital. Yes. Think about that.'

The audience thought about it, and didn't like it.

'And yes,' said the speaker, 'the wording has been modified by me, with "self-confessed Jews" instead of "gay men", but, it should be stressed, that is the only amendment. Not good, is it?'

There was a murmur of assent.

'What was the advertisement for?' said Hassan.

'Not sure,' said the student next to him. 'Some sort of youth team leaders, I think.'

'Have these people already forgotten who went into the gas chambers at Belsen and Auschwitz?' said the speaker. 'Not only the Jews, but tens of thousands of gypsies and what the local council in question would doubtless call "self-confessed homosexuals". We must fight homophobia wherever it appears. It is a virus as vicious as racism. In fact, homophobia
is
racism.'

Hassan had given little thought to homosexuality. No one he knew in Glasgow had admitted to being gay, and the teaching of the Koran on this matter hardly encouraged debate. Meanwhile, the speaker's voice was rising: '... and such views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility and intolerance of otherness. Only last week, a London evening paper felt able to sponsor a debate entitled "Is Islam good for London?" Do another substitution here and imagine the reaction if Judaism had been the subject. Are Jews good for London? You just can't picture that question being posed in a civilised society. Yet there are still those who claim that Islamophobia can't be racist, because Islam is a religion not a race! They're fooling themselves. A religion is not only about faith but also about identity, background and culture. As we know, the Muslim community is overwhelmingly non-white. Therefore Islamophobia is racist - and so is anti-Semitism.'

Hassan was aware that a kind of slip of logic had taken place in the last two sentences - perhaps that a part and a whole had swapped places, or that an implied 'moreover' had become a 'therefore' - but he couldn't put his finger on it. What he could see was that the flapping dove had been pulled from the conjuror's top hat and so, like the others, he applauded. He was against racism, and homophobia and Islamophobia. He didn't see how he could not be.

Soon, Hassan became a regular at the LSG meetings. They talked about things that had previously troubled him in a peripheral, unformed way; but what was most attractive to him was that the LSG seemed to have an answer to all these uncertainties - a unified explanation of everything. In this way, he thought, it was itself a bit like a religion. When you went to the imam, he could answer all your questions; that, for believers, was the point of him. Presumably it was the same with the Christians and the Jews: no religion would offer partial solutions or offer help on only
some
of the big issues, while admitting that on the others it hadn't a clue. So it was with the LSG. Once you'd got into their way of thinking, there was nothing it couldn't explain: everything could be seen as the wish of the powerful to exploit the weak. As a template for understanding the world, it drew its strength from the fact that it was grounded on the basest part of human nature - the only thing that defined the species: power. Power expressed through money. But really just power. The other attractive thing about the LSG view of the world was that, once you'd cracked it, it was instantly practicable. It was as though after a one-week correspondence course you could sight-read all music, from 'Frere Jacques' to Scarlatti.

Hassan felt ready to try his new skill on an audience, and began with his parents. They disagreed with him, as he'd expected, but what impressed him was how easily he was able to counter all their objections. The LSG model told him that any international situation could be seen as imperialism and its descendants manipulating the less developed, while domestic issues were always about economic exploitation. Abroad, there was a hierarchy of ownership and race that could not be bucked (it was like a card game: spades always trump diamonds; white always exploits black), while at home the ownership of property and/or employment conferred powers in exact proportion to the value of the item owned. Rich, Western-backed Israel was the source of all stress in the Middle East; America, being the biggest and wealthiest country, was by natural logic the worst offender: the embodiment of the power principle.

There were in this system no variables or abstracts, nothing fickle, unpredictable or unquantifiable. Here were the simple laws of physics, before any uncertainty principle. To suggest that people acted for any reason other than economic or cultural self-advancement was wilfully to ignore the evidence; you might as well believe in Creationism. And with these rules of caste and behaviour in mind, you could impute motive with certainty. You knew what drove decisions, because only one motive existed.

'You've become very cynical,' said Nasim. 'You sound so disillusioned with life.'

'Not disillusioned,' said Hassan, quoting an LSG speaker. 'Unillusioned. There's a crucial difference.'

For at least a year, the certainty of his understanding gave Hassan a new confidence. It made him feel better able to talk to his fellow students and more at ease with his parents, whom he could see in a clearer, if smaller, perspective.

It was a kind of joy. He no longer felt brown-skinned or alien or different; he felt enfranchised into a brotherhood of the wise. The many new friends he made through the LSG came from a variety of families, but they had a common intelligence and a bond of knowledge: they had the keys to the kingdom, and Hassan was pleased to be in their number.

What he had found, he told himself, was identity, and an international one at that; what he had stumbled across was nothing less than himself - and such a discovery was sure to be exhilarating.

* * *

Two years after he had first chanced across the LSG, there was an emergency meeting about the American and British occupation of Iraq.

Hassan was standing at the back, next to Jason Salano, a confident third-year whose grandparents had come to London from Jamaica. The second speaker of the evening was a guest from outside the college, an angry woman from a race relations advisory board.

'Let there be no doubt,' she said from the lectern, 'the West wishes to have a base in the Middle East so that if and when its ally Saudi Arabia undergoes a revolution and a new fundamentalist Saudi government is hostile to the West - as Tehran, remember, once kicked out BP - then America and its friends can still have guaranteed access to cheap oil. Did it ever occur to you when the American military was slaughtering Iraqi civilians that Iraq, far from possessing dangerous weapons with intent to use them on the West, was in fact very easy to subdue? Did you ever pause to think that this was precisely
why
Bush and Blair selected Iraq - not because it was strong and threatening, but for precisely the opposite reason: because it was weak and cheap to invade?'

She paused rhetorically. 'It makes sense to the United States to invade countries where it can first use overpowering force to win the war at minimum cost to itself, and then award long-term business contracts to its own multinational companies for decades afterwards to rebuild the devastated country in the American image. Cue Dick Cheney and Haliburton. I'm not saying Saddam Hussein was a blameless leader. But I am saying that Iraq under his leadership had one of the more enlightened regimes in the Middle East, particularly in regard to women's rights and religious freedoms.'