The Halfways, page 17
He thought of the lunch he had at his mother’s when he had visited the week before on his day off.
‘This fish has a funny smell to it, Amma,’ he said, grimacing at the fish curry she placed before him.
‘It’s fine, just eat it!’ she said testily. ‘We can’t afford to buy fresh fish every day, not like your Islams. We do what we can.’ She sniffed, poured him a glass of water. ‘Do you have it?’
Riaz handed his father the brown envelope stuffed with his month’s wages. ‘Why have they cut it again?’
‘Who knows?’ his father grumbled. ‘They say they sent a letter asking for something or other, who knows?’
‘Abba!’ Riaz raised his voice. ‘Respond then! When they send you a letter, bloody respond!’
His father glared at him. ‘Am I a barrister? Am I to know what is written in these things?’
‘Every few months they cut the benefits, and I can’t bail you out every time.’
‘What? We placed a stone in our stomach to feed you, and now you are turning away?’
Riaz had eaten the fish, along with his sister and his father, and it was to sit heavily in his gut for days to come. As she dropped him at the station, his sister had asked him for money.
‘Am I a bank?’ he had shouted. ‘What the fuck you need that much for?’
‘We need to pay the rent, Bhaiya.’
‘I just gave you my wages!’
‘You gave it to him!’ she said, her voice shrill. ‘You know where it goes when you give it to him!’
He had turned away from the look on her face, the pit of his stomach filling with fear, for her and for himself.
That evening, when he went to fetch the Peacock’s table linen that had been in the Islams’ dryer, Riaz was feeling agitated. He found the girls in the kitchen, ready for work: Afroz looking ridiculous in a yolk-coloured kameez (turmeric can’t stain yellow, she explained to him) and Nasrin resembling a younger, pre-Richard Naz. Like his old Naz. Her hair was pulled into a clasp, and the oversized shirt revealed her collar bones and the delicacy of her shoulders.
‘You fools!’ he said laughing, the sight of the girls diverting him, momentarily, from his family’s worries. He saw how Nasrin suppressed her smile, scrunched up her nose: an old expression of hers that made his chest tighten. He nodded at Jahanara, picked up the neatly stacked linen and led the girls next door.
Jahanara stood with her arms around her grandson and watched Riaz. She had noticed the tension in him and how, when he smiled, it did not reach his eyes. Riaz’s smile usually lit up his whole face. Elias led her to the fireplace where she helped him unload a shital basket of his toys onto the rug. As she watched him stack bricks of Lego, her fingers played with the tassels on the basket lid, tassels that were the deep green of the Bangladeshi flag. She remembered how proud her father had been of the Bangladeshi flag. ‘Jani,’ he used to say as he straightened his hat, ‘this flag can bring a grown man to his knees,’ and Jahanara had secretly wondered why that should be a good thing.
Shamsur had once told her that Riaz was a boy with many invisible ties binding him to duty, burdens that the boy’s pride prevented him from sharing. Burdens as compelling as a flag to its country’s youth. Shamsur had been one to notice such things: had broken the shackles of others to free them where he could. But there was no more Shamsur. Jahanara prayed that whatever weighed on this proud boy, he had the strength to shake himself free.
The Boy Deprived of a Braggable History
Sitting in the clammy living room of their terraced home in Lozells, Riaz’s father delivers his verdict. Riaz will take a job in an Indian restaurant in the Beacons, far away from the scandal of the scantily-clad Janine next door, and the drug peddlers that trudge up and down the street delivering pot like they are neighbourhood milkmen.
Riaz is sceptical, but his scepticism barely penetrates his pot-induced haze. He knows from the agitated way his father moves about the house and the caustic way he has been rebuking them of late that he has ulterior motives. The bets have been more frequent, the stakes more than they can afford to lose. It is because of this that Riaz is being exiled to the middle of nowhere – an alien place, whose very remoteness, Riaz knows, means it will be full of white people and no brown. Lozells is a small brown world inside the big white one and Riaz doubts his ability to navigate outside it.
‘You will go,’ his father bellows, cutting through his son’s reverie, ‘and you will meet her. You have left me no face to show people. On the street people spit at me with disrespect. Do you know why?’ He leans so close that Riaz can see the huge pores on the sides of his nostrils. ‘Because I cannot control this family – my family! These drugs! These girls! I cannot control you!’
Riaz ponders his father’s words, and despite himself, airs his curiosity.
‘Her?’
‘That’s right,’ interjects Riaz’s mother, placing diced mangos in front of Riaz and his father, but ignoring his sister. ‘Her. Sham Bhai’s wife is a distant cousin of your father’s and she is doing us a favour, so—’
‘So, don’t mess it up, you good for nothing son of a pig!’ His father snatches the bowl of mango and begins to shove forkfuls into his mouth.
Sniggers squeeze through Riaz’s lips, and within moments the contagious laughter spreads to his sister, who begins shaking beside him. Their mother leaps on them, smacking the sides of their heads; the majority of the blows, Riaz is aware, are borne by his poor sister. He lifts his hand to shield her, and this only emboldens his mother’s rage.
‘Don’t you dare disrespect your father! Don’t you dare!’
His father waits patiently for the beating to subside before he runs his hand down his beard. ‘Don’t think just because it’s a she that the job’s going to be easy. She comes from a good family. Izzaddar zaath. Father was a daroga in Biswanath district police.’ He shakes his head. ‘But be careful about that Sham Bhai, he’s a bit too mishook with the whites – too much mixing with the locals, forgetting who he is—’
‘You’re going there to stay out of trouble and earn some money,’ interrupts his mother. She is a woman who is silent unless she is interrupting her husband or interjecting on his behalf. ‘So, don’t get too friendly with them, keep your distance.’
When he finally meets her, Riaz finds that Jahanara lives up to his curiosity. She has a regal, almost numinous beauty that he has never observed in the other Sylheti women he has grown up around. She wears the same brightly hued polyester sarees, and she has the familiar glint of gold on her left nostril, but her lips are not stained with paan juice, and there is not a hair out of place on her head. The Peacock itself stands in the darkest corner of the tiny market town, and yet, upon closer inspection, has a certain distinction. As if it said to the square and the statue of the Duke of Wellington that it faced, Yes, I’m different, but I can hold my own, I can stand here in this corner and hold my own.
‘Do you have any qualifications?’ Jahanara asks him. Riaz laughs.
‘Well, don’t need a degree to be waiter, right, Mrs Islam?’
‘Your father is related to my Abba’s uncle on his maternal side,’ she says evenly. Her words, so familiar to him, are enunciated in what he laughingly deduces is posh Sylheti. He says nothing, watches her count the cash in the till and carefully write it into a ledger. He notices how dry her hands are, notices the patches of skin inflamed with eczema. ‘So, instead of being so Western,’ she continues, ‘you can call me Fufu. As for qualifications,’ she looks up at him briefly, ‘education is important. My daughters, they are your age, and they will also study, find a good job. No, you do not need a degree to serve customers, but education is important.’
She points behind Riaz to a wiry, bespectacled man in his forties, who is hovering near the entrance. ‘Gul almost had a BA in commerce from the Dhaka University, and Junaid’ – a stockily built youth not much older than Riaz appears behind her as if on cue – ‘he was accepted into Sylhet Medical, but of course his studies were put on indefinite hold so he could come to England. Our assistant chef, Lindsay, who you will meet in a minute, has a Hospitality Management degree from Bala. And Hannan and Saleh take English-language lessons in town. And this,’ she waves at a large, curly-haired man who nods at Riaz, ‘is Mustafa, our chef.’
‘Right.’ Riaz coughs a little, abashed, and surprised at how much he suddenly wants this job. The prospect of being surrounded by a different type of Bangladeshi – a superior type – than the ones in Lozells is alluring. ‘Suppose I’m a bit under-qualified.’ He shrugs. ‘Suppose the customers around here pay extra for their tikka masala, you know, to be served up by all your graduates here?’
Jahanara puts down her pen, draws closer to Riaz, looking him square in the face. ‘It’s a shame not to encourage a little aspiration in people as young as you. I have children too. I only tell you what we tell our children. Education is freedom, baba.’
Even in his defensiveness, Riaz recognises that Jahanara’s words are borrowed ones. When he finally meets Shamsur, he realises that Jahanara has taken her words and her demeanour wholesale from him.
‘Perhaps,’ she remarks as she turns away, ‘you might be better suited to the kitchen sink – you’ll find that our dishwashers can say a single sentence in English between them: “Afa, can I have my pay check early?”’
Junaid chuckles, and Riaz joins in. He notices and is reassured by the whiff of marijuana that hovers about Junaid. When Lindsay is introduced to him, he notices and appreciates the low-cut T-shirt that reveals the delicate dip of her breasts. There is nothing in Birmingham that he would miss here.
Just a few days later, he once again takes the train from Birmingham New Street, this time clutching a holdall with most of his clothes, and a small container of curry and rice. He is conscious that even though he cannot smell it, others probably can. He watches the craggy yellow fields of the Midlands rush past, before the landscape starts to take on a gentler and greener hue.
At the station, a man with high cheekbones and a small, fragile frame who seems to be cowering from the cold is waiting on the platform. Riaz is surprised. He had expected Shamsur to be taller, and stronger. They shake hands in the Islamic way, touch one cheek and then the other during the embrace, the older man guiding the younger in the greeting as though the latter’s education has just begun. Then Shamsur calls out to his daughters, tells them to welcome their cousin, and Riaz can see in Sabrina’s eyes that she has been forewarned and is delighted by the prospect of all the trouble he is bringing with him from Birmingham. He glances at Nasrin, and then averts his eyes quickly. On the drive back to the Peacock, he is painfully aware that she sits inches away from him, and he is unable to shrug away the image of the slant of her eyes, and the dip of her upper lip. There is something fragile and transient about her. It makes him afraid to look again, for fear that his greed will dissolve her.
Those first few months, life is about waiting eagerly for the weekends when the girls present themselves at the Peacock, dressed charmingly in baggy black trousers, and white shirts with bow ties: his own workwear made sexy in their wearing. The girls slowly adopt him, and he’s soon invited to their house next door for his breaks; he is singled out as blood, and he forgets all about his mother’s warning to keep a distance.
He enrols into the school a year above Nasrin’s and realises how far behind he is. There has never seemed to be anything important between the pages of a book – school has always been a necessity both he and his parents have resented. But the Islams revere learning, treating every book in the house as a Quran, every sentence as a surah. Jahanara and Shamsur, usually such mild-tempered people, fly into a rage if a book is mishandled.
In his own home, Riaz barely hears the voice of his sister, but around the Islams’ dinner table laden with mouthwatering delights, female voices reign supreme. Jahanara’s stories are as lavish as her food as she regales them with her childhood adventures with her brother, Masoom, and her myna, Chinthamoni. Shamsur favours the story of the turquoise tiles transported from Istanbul by his great-grandfather, that have given his ancestral home the name Neel Bari. Riaz listens to it all and marvels. These are a people with history.
Riaz has heard that even ordinary people have their own history. People like Riaz, who have tumbled out of the filthy ghetto of Lozells, where the walls are sticky with cooking oil and the air smells of cannabis and curry. People who venture out into the world bearing the nuisance of their rounded vowels. Even they, those unfortunate scramble-uppers, those people living hand to mouth, month to abysmal month, have their own history.
But the foundation of history is its transmission from one generation to another and Riaz’s parents can’t place a memory in the right decade, let alone the right year; both of them celebrate their birthdays on Christmas Day because they don’t know their date of birth. Their lack of knowledge of their own heritage coupled with their shady childhood memories (which Riaz attributes to the chewing tobacco corroding their brains along with their teeth) makes it impossible for him to construct a family history. With recollections as vague as, ‘I remember sitting on the bazaar wall as the army traipsed through with their guns, and someone said that we were at war with West Pakistan,’ how can you build a history?
He has tried to construct a past by relying on his own memory, and this takes him back only as far as his fifth birthday, which he spent on his grandparents’ farm in Sylhet. His grandparents tilled their own land, and reared their own cattle, and that summer Riaz saw a calf being born, its vibrant auburn coat slathered in slime. Given the privilege of naming it, Riaz honoured his favourite superhero, Batman, which the villagers mispronounced as Betaman, and he saw Batman again over the next three summers, until Batman was sacrificed during Bakra Eid. The animal’s body jerked horrifically as Riaz ran around demented with grief, screaming, ‘They’re doing Allah hu Akbar on Batman, someone save him, they’re doing Allah hu Akbar!’ It is his first memory of loss and he remembers screaming until his father took a bamboo cane to his legs.
Riaz’s grandmother tended to his bruised legs with the same hands she used to mix manure with clay to even out the porch after every rainy season. And when he recalls this, it is as though he can smell the manure, and he feels ashamed, because the stink of dung is the stench of poverty, and it is poverty that repels him, it is poverty that frightens him.
The thing about ordinary people like Riaz is not that they don’t have history, it is that the history they do have lacks braggability. Where is the uncle that served his country, or an aunt who owned a textile mill, or a grandfather who worked with so-and-so in the Civil Service? None in his family. Menial paper rounds, homework done on a sticky kitchen counter and washed clothes that always smelled of onions and ginger-garlic paste: these are the memories of his childhood which sabotage his ability to construct a proud history. His pimply-faced adolescence was no better, peppered as it was with cannabis-induced sex with white girls in New Street Station and driving around the dirty streets with boy racers in souped-up BMWs. And now he must contend with all his father’s gambling problems, his mother’s tears, and his sister’s terrified voice begging him to pay their rent. These are the burdens that deplete his young life, the burdens that deprive him of a braggable history.
No, Riaz denies his history until he can construct himself a worthier one. Here, sitting at the mahogany dining table, Riaz breathes in the history of the Islam family: a family with roots similar to his, but one that is neither struggling working class nor bored bourgeoise, residing somewhere halfway having broken free from the shackles of illiteracy and poverty. All around him is evidence of the Islams’ uneasy sprint towards progress and their daughters’ embrace of modernity. The walls hang with photos and degrees and awards and memorabilia, and he reads in them the narrative of a family that have rid themselves of an ignominious history. Riaz is inspired to reach for it himself, to write for himself a future that will be worth its pages in a glorious history.
6
A quarter of an hour before opening time, Nasrin was walking through the restaurant floor with a lighter in her hand. The wan light of the candles she lit flickered uneasily against the last sharp rays of the setting sun. Behind her, Junaid hummed as he restocked the bar with mixers and glassware. Riaz had sat Elias on the bar to finish the jalmuri chanasur snack that Afroz had made for him and the familiar smell of the mustard oil and chilli made Nasrin’s mouth water. She called over to her son, ‘Can I have a bite, Eli?’
Riaz laughed. ‘I tried already, but this boy’s not sharing!’
‘It smells so good! We should add this to the menu—’ Nasrin was cut off by her phone ringing.
It was Mrs Humphreys.
‘Hello? Naz?’
‘Hello.’
‘I’m so so sorry to hear about your father.’
‘Thank you,’ Nasrin said. ‘It was very sudden.’
‘Oh, Naz. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling. And your poor mother. If I lost William … Shamsur seemed like such a nice man, always such a smiley face when I saw him in your garden, always so friendly.’
‘Thank you,’ Nasrin said, this time more sincerely. Mrs Humphreys had always been friendly if she caught her parents in her garden on the rare occasions they visited.
‘You will have seen, we’ve been watering the geraniums in your window box while you’ve been away. We wouldn’t want them to wither away.’
‘Thank you for that.’
‘I thought we could maybe pop by to see you later today?’
