Authors: Monica Ali
'Nothing. I was just coming to see you.'
Nazneen held out her arm. 'Come.'
'It's OK,' said Bibi, backing out. 'I've seen you.'
People were pouring into the courtyard now. They came thick and fast. It was as if a couple of blocks of flats had been tipped on their side and all the people came helter-skelter out into the street and landed up in the middle of Dogwood. There were women among the crowd, and girls. A white banner with black and gold letters proclaimed
Bethnal Green Islamic Girls' Group.
Nazneen saw Sorupa, Jorina, Nazma and Hanufa. Hanufa was back in favour. She looked for Karim.
The boys outnumbered the girls and the women, but they were all outnumbered by the older men. They came with their green and brown herringbone overcoats buttoned over baggy trousers. They walked in knots of three or four, and ignored those they walked with and shouted across to others. White beards tinged with nicotine, skullcaps and missing teeth. Dark polished faces and watchful eyes. A few wore lungis; others carried walking sticks. They came with plastic Iceland bags and moved along like hospital patients. Nazneen wondered if Karim's father was among them.
There was another group: white people. They were the smallest of the clans but they were the most active. They buzzed around the older men, giving out cardboard signs mounted on wooden poles. The white people wore trousers with pockets all over them. They had pockets at the thigh, the knee, down on their shins. All their clothes had little tabs and toggles, zips and flaps and fasteners. It was as if they had dressed themselves in tents and to settle for the night they would simply insert a few poles and lie down. They moved among the crowd and began to hand out something (badges? stickers? sweets?) to the lads. Finding themselves rebuffed, they retrenched a generation or two. The Bangladeshi patriarchs dangled their placards along with the Iceland bags. A white girl with tiny silver-framed glasses held up her placard and jabbed it in the air. She wedged it between her knees and began a little mime. Clasped her hands together. Pointed to the sky. Palms out to the patriarchs. Rub and a pat on the cardboard sign. HOLD. UP. YOUR. PLACARDS.
The patriarchs 'listened' politely. Then they discussed it among themselves.
Nazneen examined the faces near the stage. Karim would be there. He would stand up on the stage and speak. It was his big day.
It was her big day as well.
Somewhere, down there, he was preparing his speech. Adding the finishing touches.
She had not yet made a start on hers.
A chant was setting up among the demonstrators. Nazneen could not make out the words. She opened the window. The white people moved among the patriarchs. They were the chanters, these two groups. The bespectacled girl and her friends made pistons of their arms:
go, go, go.
The patriarchs stowed their Iceland bags on top of their feet, turned up their collars and buttoned their coats beneath their chins. They chanted along with their new friends.
'What fresh hell is this?'
She had not noticed Chanu come in.
'It's a massacre out there. Three hundred and five people have stood on my toes. "Mind out," I said. "Man with corns coming through. Man with chilblains." Nobody listened.'
He came to the window.
'What are they saying?' asked Nazneen. 'Something about Gurkhas? Or burkhas?'
'Workers. That is the cry which they have taken up. "Workers! United!" It's a myth, of course. Those white people are from the Workers United Front. When I was passing through, they were attempting to get a longer chant going.
"Workers. United. Will never be defeated."
They gave it up for a bad job.'
Chanu eased his shoes off. He lifted a foot, rested it on his knee and began to massage it through the sock.
He cleared his throat. 'Ahem. Hem. What they are doing, you see, is co-opting these immigrants into their grand political schemata in which all oppressed minorities combine in the overthrow of the state and live happily ever after in a communal paradise. This theory fails to take account of culture clash, bourgeois immigrant aspirations, the hatred of the Hindu for the Muslim, the Bangladeshi for the Pakistani, and so on and so forth. In all reality, it is doomed to failure.'
He switched feet.
'See those people down there, chanting? All aged about – what? – forty-five to sixty-five. Workers united? They are not even workers! Ninety-nine per cent, they are unemployed.'
'What about the other march?'
'Lion Hearts? I didn't see anything. Maybe they cancelled.'
Nazneen remembered Mrs Islam's words.
Not more than ten will come.
Karim mounted the stage. He held a megaphone to his lips.
Chanu closed the window. 'What is going to happen to our people here?' He took her hand and led her away. Karim's voice was indistinct, a radio playing out of tune in the background.
'The young ones,' said Chanu, 'they'll be the ones to decide. Do you know how many immigrant populations have been here before us? In the eighteenth century the French Protestants fled here, escaping Catholic persecution. They were silk weavers. They made good. One hundred years later, the Jews came. They thrived. At the same time, the Chinese came as merchants. The Chinese are doing very well.' Chanu still had hold of her hand. 'Which way is it going to go?'
'Shefali is going to university. Sorupa's nephew is going to Oxford.'
'And Tariq? What is he doing?'
Nazneen reclaimed her hand.
Chanu motioned with his head towards the window. 'What are they doing out there? What are they marching for?'
'Because the others, who have a wrong idea about our religion, are going to march against Islam.'
'Islam,' said Chanu, turning the word over carefully. 'It could be about Islam. But I don't think so. I don't think it is.' He entered his own private world of theory and refutation, striving and puzzlement.
Then he plumped up his cheeks and his hopes. 'But when we're back home, we won't need to think about these things. Back home we'll really know what's what.'
When the courtyard had cleared, Chanu went out again. He was going to a shop called Liberty's to buy soap. His briefcase had been transformed into a sample carrier. Already it was full of bars of Lux, Fairy, Dove, Palmolive, Imperial Leather, Pears, Neutrogena, Zest, Cuticura and Camay Classic. 'First rule of management,' said Chanu. 'Know the competition.' At Liberty's he would stock up on the Refined-End Soap Market. He had plans for the factory. When they came to fruition, he would move the family to a bungalow in Gulshan, with a guest cottage at the bottom of the garden. To start with, they could have a couple of rooms above the office. 'Second rule of management,' said Chanu. 'Think big, act small. Then the rewards will come.'
Nazneen went to the bedroom and lay down on the bare mattress. She slept a dreamless sleep. When she woke it was dark outside. She checked the time. Six o'clock. A vision rose before her. Chanu sitting on an aeroplane, trying to peer out of the window. No matter how he struggled he could not reach the window. He was too small. Just a baby-sized Chanu, and his legs did not reach the end of the seat. Nazneen lifted him up and put him on her knee. She looked out of the window and saw the runway lights. But they were not on the runway! The lights were lamp-posts and houses, office blocks and tower blocks, and they were pulling down and away, shrinking, sinking, into the black.
'Amma.' Bibi stood against the wall with her hands behind her back.
'Yes, Bibi. Were you waiting for me? You could have woken me.'
Bibi slid down the wall and straightened up, slid down again.
'Let's go to the kitchen. We'll get something to eat.'
'Amma.'
'Go and tell your sister. You can give me a hand, both of you.'
Bibi slipped right down the wall and sat on her bottom.
Nazneen went to her and felt her forehead. 'Are you ill? Shall I get the doctor?'
'She's gone,' said Bibi. She began to cry. 'She's run away.'
Bibi was sworn to secrecy. Between big sobs she explained this to her mother, and then she told her the rest. Shahana had gone to meet Nishi at the Shalimar Cafe. They were going to have a kebab and a banana lassi and possibly a jelabee and then they would catch the train to a place called Paignton. In Paignton, Nishi said, there were no Bangladeshis and they could do as they pleased. Nishi's sister, who was sixteen years old, had gone for a 'holiday' in Sylhet and returned six months later with a husband and a swelling belly. Nishi, strong on forward-planning skills, was taking evasive action: she was going on a holiday of her own and she would return when she was twenty-five. At that ancient age the danger of marriage was over.
'Which Shalimar Cafe?' said Nazneen.
'The one on Cannon Street,' said Bibi. 'I think it's the Brick Lane one.'
'You're sure? Brick Lane.'
Bibi nodded. Then shook her head. 'No. I don't think so. Cannon Street.'
'Think, Bibi! Think!'
'Cannon Street.' She said it with the air of a game show contestant, hovering in suspense, waiting to be affirmed.
'Wait here,' said Nazneen. 'Don't go anywhere. Whatever you do, don't move.'
Nazneen ran. Down Bethnal Green Road. Turned at Vallance Road. Jogged down New Road. Stitch in her side on Cannon Street.
The door of the Shalimar Cafe had a sprung hinge. It swung back and hit her on the shoulder. The solitary customer lifted his head. His jumper was unravelling at many different places; it straggled like a pubescent beard. He went back to his chapattis.
'Has a girl been in here?' Nazneen held her side where it was splitting. 'Twelve years old. Blue kameez. Yellow here and here. Two girls together.'
The man behind the counter was peeling carrots. He dropped the peelings into a steel basin and the carrots into a plastic tub of water.
'How old the other girl?'
'Thirteen,' said Nazneen. 'But she looks older, more like fourteen, fifteen.'
The man put his carrot down. He removed a little something from his nostril. The seconds came and went and infuriated Nazneen.
The man wiped his finger on his apron. 'What she wearing?'
'I don't know.' She looked over the tables and under them. What was she looking for? Would they leave a trail behind them? 'Look,' she said. 'Have you seen them or not?'
'Today?' said the man. 'No. No customers today. Only this one.' He pointed with a carrot.
The George Estate was covered in scaffolding. Dense green netting ran between the poles. It looked like the entire building had been hunted down and taken captive, the people with it. Nazneen crossed over Cable Street and passed under the railway bridge. The Falstaff pub was boarded up, the forecourt choked with weeds and grass, and a bathtub filled with traffic cones, rubble and mossy cushions. She had to walk, to let her breath come back to her. A shopkeeper came out on the pavement and emptied a bucket of foul-smelling water into the gutter. Nazneen turned her head. Through an open door, down a flight of concrete stairs, she glimpsed a row of sewing machines beneath a low yellow ceiling. A woman stood up to stretch and touched the ceiling with her palms. Nazneen pressed on, past the Sylhet Cash and Carry, the International Cheap Calls Centre, the open jaws of a butcher's shop, the corner building run to ruin and bearing the faded legend of a time gone by, Schultz Famous Salt Beef.
She turned into the Berner Estate. Here, every type of cheap hope for cheap housing lived side by side in a monument to false economy. The low rises crouched like wounded monsters along concrete banks. In the gullies, beach-hut fabrications clung anxiously to the hard terrain, weathered and beaten by unknown storms. A desolate building, gouged-out eyes in place of windows, announced the Tenants' Association: Hall for Hire. Nazneen looked up to the balconies. A woman in a dark blue burkha hung a prayer mat over the railing, and withdrew. A small child trundled a red plastic truck along a balcony and back, over and over again. At the end, near the sick orange light of a lamppost, two black children sat behind bars, watching their new world. Where had they come from? What had they escaped? Nazneen had learned to recognize the face of a refugee child: that traumatized stillness, the need they had, to learn to play again.
Out of the estate and onto Commercial Road, past the clothes wholesalers, up Adler Street and left onto the brief green respite of Altab Ali Park where the neat, pale-faced block of flats had picture windows and a gated entrance, from which the City boys could stroll to work. Nazneen ran down the slope and caught the green man at the crossing on Whitechapel.
A row of police vans covered the mouth of Brick Lane. Behind them a legion of policemen stood with arms folded and feet turned out. A length of tangerine-and-white-striped tape stuck the sides of the street together.
'Let me through,' said Nazneen.
'The street is closed, madam. Go back.' The policeman sounded friendly but decisive. He seemed to think the conversation was finished.
'I have to go to Shalimar Cafe and find my daughter.'
The policeman looked ahead, as if she had not spoken. Nazneen glanced down the line at the black-suited men, all of them braced against an invisible force. What was happening in Brick Lane? Could they have closed it just for the Bengal Tigers to march? Wasn't this the last place on Karim's route? But it was dark, it was late. By now the marches would be over.
'Why I can't go through?' said Nazneen. She put her face right up to the policeman's face.
Do you see me now? Do you hear me?
'Disturbances,' said the policeman. She felt the warmth of his breath and drew her head back.
'My daughter is there.'
The policeman shook his head. 'Madam, she isn't. We cleared everyone out who wanted to come out. There's only the waiters and restaurant owners left. They didn't want to come away. Unless your daughter is participating in the disturbance, she has taken herself back home. I suggest you do the same thing.'
Without seeming to move, the policeman filled her space so that she was forced to step back.
But Shahana would not be at home. And if a policeman came to get her, and the other runaway, what would she think? What would she do?
Nazneen looked beyond the cordon into the neck of Brick Lane. It revealed nothing. The electrical shops were shuttered, the stonemason's dark, the sandwich-shop window showed empty trays and a naked glass counter, and only the steps and the awning of the Capital City Hotel were lit up.
Inside her, the thoughts ebbed and flowed. Shahana had cleared out long ago. She was at the station, buying a ticket to Paignton. Shahana was still at the Shalimar, trapped by looters or her own fear, cowering in the toilets with Nishi. If she was at the station, it was too late. But if she was on Brick Lane . . .
Panic hit Nazneen like an asthma attack. For a few moments she felt she would expire then and there, into the policeman's folded arms.
A white couple came up to the cordon and asked something. They looked disappointed. They wanted curry. More people were arriving, expecting curry and lager. Nazneen's policeman spoke to a woman with a wattled neck and a strident voice.
'Can I suggest that you consult a restaurant guide, madam.'
Nazneen slipped around the back of him. She hoisted her sari and hurdled over the orange and white tape. Someone thumped her on the back. She turned her head, but there was no one behind her. It was only her heart playing tricks. She stuck close to the walls and shadows, crossed a side street with its little vein of houses and entered the main artery of Brick Lane.
Across the way, formed in a semi-circle, was a row of perspex shields, and behind the shields an arc of police with bulging jackets. A group of lads stood on the pavement and in the road, hoods pulled up, scarves around their faces, as though they had entered a manly purdah. It was quiet.
Nazneen passed behind the boys. They paid her no attention. In lighted windows, waiters pressed their foreheads to the glass. Restaurant owners stood by, nerves flickering across important faces. All the mixed-blood vitality of the street had been drained. Something coursed down the artery, like a bubble in the bloodstream.
A police car was parked at a crazy angle in the road, the front doors wide open and the interior abandoned. The car rocked. A door swung shut. It rocked again. Nazneen looked at the boys pushing it. They worked quickly and quietly, as though this was a task they had been assigned to do and they wanted to make a good job of it. The car went over and suddenly a noise licked around Brick Lane like a flame, crackling from every corner.
'Bengal Tigers,
zindabad!'
went the cry. Long live the Bengal Tigers.
As the boys whooped, Nazneen began to run again. A tall dark shape smashed the windows of the police car with a stick. Another hurled something through the hole. It whizzed through the air and exploded with a dull thud. From behind the black municipal bins, out of doorways, round corners and up from car bonnets, more and more people appeared, ejected by this simple purgative. Nazneen ran past the car. A figure dressed in white was crumpled on the ground by the rear wheel. She turned round. The figure rose and fell again, toppled by a large and heavy head. It was the Multicultural Liaison Officer, and he was praying. Nazneen sprinted towards the car. She got hold of the man's flappy white sleeve and pulled it.
'Please,' she said. 'Get up.'
He turned his face towards her and the whites of his eyes showed clearer than his robe in the dark. 'Ah, sister, how many rakahs for the isha prayer?'
'Are you mad? Get up. Run.'
'What? I is praying to Allah to save all these boys. Can't get up now.'
'Allah,' said Nazneen, heaving at the neck of his robe, 'does not want your prayer now. He wants you to save yourself.' The cotton ripped and she let go.
'Damn,' said the Multicultural Liaison Officer. He got on his knees. 'Shit. You made me swear.'
Nazneen pulled his arm. 'You can make du'a later. Run. Now. Run.'
A siren wail smacked the sky and showered their heads. They ran down the road. Nazneen's feet hit the pavement so hard she felt it in her teeth. At the corner of Hanbury Street she stopped and looked over her shoulder. The police car belched a little black smoke and burst into a ball of fire.
'
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
—'
The Shalimar was three blocks up. Nazneen said, 'Let's go. Come on.'
The Multicultural Liaison Officer raised his arms.
'I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.'
'I can't wait for you.'
'Thy rod and thy staff comfort me.'
He turned to Nazneen. 'In these circumstances, better safe than sorry.' He lifted his face to heaven.
She left him and walked close to the shops, brushing the walls with her arm. Ahead, eight or ten boys gathered behind a bin. The large black tank stood at shoulder height. Two lads darted out to the side and made an overarm bowling motion. They hurled themselves behind the bin and all the lads crouched down. Nazneen stopped moving. A lighted window at her back. She wished she had picked a better place to be, during this sinister game of hide-and-seek. There were no white people here at all. These boys were fighting themselves. A dizziness came over her and she leaned against the glass. How long, she thought, how long it has taken me to get this far.
Missiles rained across the road. Empty bottles, full cans, a brick, a chair, a winged stick. A bottle smashed at Nazneen's feet. She decided to run again. But which way? Towards the Shalimar and the source of the missiles? Or back up the road to take shelter? She turned round and back and round and suddenly she was not sure which way the cafe was. She recognized nothing. Silhouettes across the way, substantial as shadows but solid enough to smash through windows. Crouching shapes and whirling arms, the pale streak of trainers on the black ground that had gone soft beneath her feet. The buildings curved away from her, shrinking from the violent pavement. The light came in crackling twists of red that stabbed at the dark and did not lift it, as though a devil had danced through with his blazing torch. Nazneen tried to focus on a window and take refuge in the clean white light, but when she looked the light burned her eyes. In the middle of the road, a coiled snake of tyres flamed with acrid fury and shed skins, thick, black, choking, to the wind. Shop alarms rang,
clang, clang, clang,
more frightened than warning. Back up the road, an ambulance crawled stubbornly along, its twirling blue eye sending out a terrible, keening lament.
Nazneen got her legs to move. She walked with her arms in front of her, as if she did not trust her eyes. Gradually, she came back to herself. She had the sensation that she had fainted, and now the world was forming again. The light steadied itself. She recognized shapes for what they were and sensed the bodies that filled the dark, people-shaped outlines. A fire engine slashed across the tarmac. She passed the burning tyres and for a while her eyes became useless again. When she stepped out of that smoky infestation, she saw a figure standing alone in the middle of the road. His face was covered by a megaphone, but even then, even in the twisted light, he had a spare look about him. There was not an inch of waste. His jacket hung from his shoulders as from a coat hanger, no unnecessary flesh covering the bones.
'Brothers,' he said, and his voice was familiar. 'Brothers, why are you fighting yourselves, Musalman against Musalman?'
Another winged stick flew through the air and clattered on the pavement next to Nazneen. She bent down to look at it. It was a placard and it read: STOP THE WAR.
'Is this what happens when Islam goes on the march?' said the Questioner.
Nazneen hurried on. The megaphone competed with the screech of car brakes, car doors slamming, the clanging of shop alarms, a high-pitched whistle blown by a hooded youth as he raced past on a bicycle.
'The police are laughing at you, my friends. They are waiting for you to finish each other off.'
A boy ran into the road, beckoning with two hands wide,
come on, come on.
Within seconds, five others jumped on him and he fell to the ground. Another three piled on top. And then came the waiters, black-trousered, white-shirted, brandishing skewers and carving knives and chests pumped with outrage.
You bloody bastards,
they screamed.
What the hell you shitting on our doorsteps for? Go to Oxford Street! Go to Piccadilly Circus! Go to hell!