Authors: Monica Ali
'The hallway.'
'You are not too clever to be thrashed,' said Chanu, but his heart was not in it. He was busy with the leaflet. He read both sides then turned it over and read it again. Shahana practised lowering her eyelids in the manner best calculated to invoke fury. He did not notice. He turned the piece of paper around and around.
'These bloody bastards. Next time they come, I'll cut off their testicles.'
At the word testicles, Shahana smiled.
'You think it's funny?' He got quickly to his feet and his lungi slipped. He paused to retie it and Shahana went to stand behind Nazneen at her sewing machine.
'Come on,' said Chanu, and his voice shook. He gave himself a few moments of throat clearing. 'Come on, let's all have some fun. Bibi!' She ran in and stumbled over some files. 'Give this to your sister. She is going to read it for us.'
The leaflet was returned to Shahana.
'Multicultural Murder,'
she read.
'Notice,' said Chanu, holding up a hand, 'notice how the thought of violence is introduced right away. In the very first words.' He lowered his hand.
'In our schools,'
continued Shahana,
'it's multicultural murder. Do you know what they are teaching your children today? In domestic science your daughter will learn how to make a kebab, or fry a bhaji. For his history lesson your son will be studying Africa or India or some other dark and distant land. English people, he will learn, are Wicked Colonialists.'
'See how they do that?' Chanu tried to pace, but he was trapped by his books. He stood still and waved his arms instead. 'Putting Africa with India, all dark together. Read the other side.'
Shahana turned it over.
'And in Religious Instruction, what will your child be taught? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? No. Krishna, Abraham and Muhammad.
'Christianity is being gently slaughtered. It is "only one" of the world's "great religions". Indeed, in our local schools you could be forgiven for thinking that Islam is the official religion.'
Chanu rushed over and grabbed the leaflet. 'This is where they get down to it. This is what it's all about.' Nazneen noticed the hole in his vest, the curling grey hairs at the hollow of his throat. Chanu read,
'Should we be forced to put up with this? When the truth is that it is a religion of hate and intolerance. When Muslim extremists are planning to turn Britain into an Islamic Republic, using a combination of immigration, high birth rates and conversion.
On and on, this rubbish.' He crushed the leaflet in his fist.
Bibi leaned on Nazneen's shoulder and chewed on the ends of her plaits. Nazneen looked at Shahana, who was adjusting the straps of her first bra. She willed her to speak to her father, to say the right thing. Shahana put out her bottom lip and blew up at her fringe.
Chanu sat down in the armchair. 'Shahana, go and put on some decent clothes.'
She looked down at her uniform.
'Go and put some trousers on.'
Nazneen said, 'Bibi, you go as well.'
Chanu smoothed the leaflet out.
'We urge you to write to your Head Teacher and withdraw your child from Religious Instruction. This is your right as a parent under Section 25 of the 1944 Education Act.'
He breathed hard. His tongue probed his cheeks, like a small rodent snouting blindly beneath a thick blanket. 'From now on,' he said, 'all the money goes to the Home Fund. All of it.'
That night, for the first time since they were married, Nazneen watched him take down the Qur'an. He sat on the floor and he stayed with the Book for the rest of the evening.
Nazneen walked a step behind her husband down Brick Lane. The bright green and red pendants that fluttered from the lamp-posts advertised the Bangla colours and basmati rice. In the restaurant windows were clippings from newspapers and magazines with the name of the restaurant highlighted in yellow or pink. There were smart places with starched white tablecloths and multitudes of shining silver cutlery. In these places the newspaper clippings were framed. The tables were far apart and there was an absence of decoration that Nazneen knew to be a style. In the other restaurants the greeters and waiters wore white, oil-marked shirts. But in the smart ones they wore black. A very large potted fern or a blue and white mosaic at the entrance indicated ultra-smart.
'You see,' said Chanu. 'All this money, money everywhere. Ten years ago there was no money here.'
In between the Bangladeshi restaurants were little shops that sold clothes and bags and trinkets. Their customers were young men in sawn-off trousers and sandals and girls in T-shirts that strained across their chests and exposed their belly buttons. Chanu stopped and looked in a shop window. 'Seventy-five pounds for that little bag. You couldn't fit even one book in it.'
Outside a cafe he paused again. 'Two pounds ninety for large coffee with whipped cream.'
A girl at a wooden table on the pavement bent the screen of a laptop computer back and forth to angle it away from the sun. Nazneen thought of Chanu's computer, gathering dust. A spider's web shivered between keyboard and monitor.
They walked to a grocer's shop at the corner of one of the side streets. Nazneen waited outside. She walked a little way down the side street. Three-storey houses, old houses but the bricks had been newly cleaned and the woodwork painted. There were wooden shutters in dark creams, pale greys and dusty blues. The doors were large and important. The window boxes matched the shutters. Inside there were gleaming kitchens, rich dark walls, shelves lined with books, but never any people.
Nazneen walked up and down the street. Some young Bangla men passed on Brick Lane. She recognized the Questioner. His voice carried well and his walk was urgent. Karim did not like him. He had not said anything yet, but she knew.
When Karim came he talked of the world or of his father. He told her about the pills that he left out for his father each morning, blue and yellow for the heart, white tranquillizers, pink for indigestion. The sleeping tablets each evening. He told her about his father's job, twenty or more years on the buses. The uniform, belt and badge. The peaked cap. The ticket machine that he kept in a brown leather case, and the satisfying noise it made as the handle turned. What a proud little boy he had been.
Chanu came out of the grocer's with white plastic bags. She fell into step behind him. He walked a few yards and then stopped. She waited for him to comment. She looked in the shop window, but he said nothing and she saw that he did not know that he had stopped. After a while he said, 'You see, they feel so threatened.' Nazneen turned her head, and then she smiled to herself because she had been caught out like Bibi.
'Because our own culture is so strong. And what is their culture? Television, pub, throwing darts, kicking a ball. That is the white working-class culture.'
He began to move again. Nazneen followed. For a moment she saw herself clearly, following her husband, head bowed, hair covered, and she was pleased. In the next instant her feet became heavy and her shoulders ached.
'From a sociological standpoint, it is very interesting.'
A young woman with hair cropped like a man's pointed an impressive camera at a waiter in a restaurant doorway. She wore trousers, and had she been wearing a shirt her sex would have been obscured. To alleviate this difficulty she had dispensed with a shirt and come out in underwear. She turned round now and pointed the camera at Nazneen.
'You see,' said Chanu to the street, 'in their minds they have become an oppressed minority.'
Nazneen adjusted her headscarf. She was conscious of being watched. Everything she did, everything she had done since the day of her birth, was recorded. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, she thought she saw them. Her two angels, who recorded every action and thought, good and evil, for the Day of Judgement. It struck her then – and the force of it made her gasp – that this street was filled with angels. For every one person there were two more angels and the air was thick with them. She walked with her face turned down to her feet and she felt her head pushing through a density of wings. She was seized with a fear of inhaling a spirit, and pulled cloth over her mouth and nose. For the first time then, she heard the beating of a thousand angel wings and her legs would take her no further.
'Are you resting?' Chanu put his shopping bags down.
She looked up and saw the waiter shaking out a tablecloth.
'No.'
'OK, then. Rest,' said Chanu.
They stood for a while. Chanu hummed. He had one hand on his hip and nursed his stomach with the other.