White Teeth

them. It is too late now. I have lost my family. Why don’t you go back to yours and leave us alone?’

‘You think it’s paradise over at my house? My family has been split by this too. Joshua isn’t speaking to Marcus. Did you know that? And those two were so close…’ Joyce looked a bit weepy, and Alsana reluctantly passed her the kitchen roll. ‘I’m trying to help all of us. And the best way to start is to get Magid and Millat talking before this escalates any further than it has. I think we can both agree on that. If we could find some neutral place, some ground where they both felt no pressures or outside influence…’

‘But there are no neutral places any more! I agree they should meet, but where and how? You and your husband have made everything impossible.’

‘Mrs Iqbal, with all due respect, the problems in your family began long before either my husband or I had any involvement.’

‘Maybe, maybe, Mrs Chalfen, but you are the salt in the wound, yes? You are the one extra chilli pepper in the hot sauce.’

Millat heard Joyce draw her breath in sharply.

‘Again, with respect, I can’t believe that it is the case. I think this has been going on for a very long time. Millat told me that some years ago you burnt all his things. I mean, it’s just an example, but I don’t think you understand the trauma that kind of thing has inflicted on Millat. He’s very damaged.’

‘Oh, we are going to play the tit for the tat. I see. And I am to be the tit. Not that it is any of your big-nose business, but I burnt those things to teach him a lesson – to respect other people’s lives!’

‘A strange way of showing it, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘I do mind! I do mind! What do you know of it?’

‘Only what I see. And I see that Millat has a lot of mental scars. You may not be aware, but I’ve been funding sessions for Millat with my analyst. And I can tell you, Millat’s inner life – his karma, I suppose you might call it in Bengali – the whole world of his subconscious shows serious illness.’

In fact, the problem with Millat’s subconscious (and he didn’t need Marjorie to tell him this) was that it was basically split-level. On the one hand he was trying real hard to live as Hifan and the others suggested. This involved getting his head around four main criteria.

To be ascetic in one’s habits (cut down on the booze, the spliff, the women).

To remember always the glory of Muhammad (peace be upon Him!) and the might of the Creator.

To grasp a full intellectual understanding of KEVIN and the Qur’an.

To purge oneself of the taint of the West.

He knew that he was KEVIN’s big experiment, and he wanted to give it his best shot. In the first three areas he was doing fine. He smoked the odd fag and put away a Guinness on occasion (can’t say fairer than that), but he was very successful with both the evil weed and the temptations of the flesh. He no longer saw Alexandra Andrusier, Polly Houghton or Rosie Dew (though he paid occasional visits to one Tanya Chapman, a very small redhead who understood the delicate nature of his dilemma and would give him a thorough blow job without requiring Millat to touch her at all. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: she was the daughter of a judge and delighted in horrifying the old goat, and Millat needed ejaculation with no actual active participation on his side). On the scriptural side of things, he thought Muhammad (peace be upon Him!) was a right geezer, a great bloke, and he was in awe of the Creator, in the original meaning of that word: dread, fear, really shit-scared – and Hifan said that was correct, that was how it should be. He understood this idea that his religion was not one based on faith – not like the Christians, the Jews, et al. – but one that could be intellectually proved by the best minds. He understood the idea. But, sadly, Millat was far from possessing one of the best minds, or even a reasonable mind; intellectual proof or disproof was beyond him. Still, he understood that to rely on faith, as his own father did, was contemptible. And no one could say he didn’t give one hundred per cent to the cause. That seemed enough for KEVIN. They were more than happy with his real forte, which was the delivery of the thing. The presentation. For instance, if a nervous-looking woman came up to the KEVIN stall in Willesden Library and asked about the faith, Millat would lean over the desk, grab her hand, press it and say: Not faith, Sister. We do not deal in faith here. Spend five minutes with my Brother Rakesh and he will intellectually prove to you the existence of the Creator. The Qur’an is a document of science, a document of rational thought. Spend five minutes, Sister, if you care for your future beyond this earth. And to top it off, he could usually sell her a few tapes (Ideological Warfare or Let the Scholars Beware), two quid each. Or even some of their literature, if he was on top form. Everyone at KEVIN was mightily impressed. So far so good. As for KEVIN’s more unorthodox programmes of direct action, Millat was right in there, he was their greatest asset, he was in the forefront, the first into battle come jihad, cool as fuck in a crisis, a man of action, like Brando, like Pacino, like Liotta. But even as Millat reflected on this with pride in his mother’s hallway, his heart sank. For therein lay the problem. Number four. Purging oneself of the West.

Now, he knew, he knew that if you wanted an example of the moribund, decadent, degenerate, over-sexed, violent state of Western capitalist culture and the logical endpoint of its obsession with personal freedoms (Leaflet: Way Out West), you couldn’t do much better than Hollywood cinema. And he knew (how many times had he been through it with Hifan?) that the ‘gangster’ movie, the Mafia genre, was the worst example of that. And yet… it was the hardest thing to let go. He would give every spliff he’d ever smoked and every woman he’d ever fucked to retrieve the films his mother had burnt, or even the few he had purchased more recently which Hifan had confiscated. He had torn up his Rocky Video membership and thrown away the Iqbal video recorder to distance himself from direct temptation, but was it his fault if Channel 4 ran a De Niro season? Could he help it if Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags to Riches’ floated out of a clothes shop and entered his soul? It was his most shameful secret that whenever he opened a door – a car door, a car boot, the door of KEVIN’s meeting hall or the door of his own house just now – the opening of GoodFellas ran through his head and he found this sentence rolling around in what he presumed was his subconscious:

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

He even saw it like that, in that font, like on the movie poster. And when he found himself doing it, he tried desperately not to, he tried to fix it, but Millat’s mind was a mess and more often than not he’d end up pushing upon the door, head back, shoulders forward, Liotta style, thinking:

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim.

He knew, in a way, this was worse, but he just couldn’t help it. He kept a white handkerchief in his top pocket, he always carried dice, even though he had no idea what a crap game actually was, he loved long camel jackets and he could cook a killer seafood linguine, though a lamb curry was completely beyond him. It was all haraam, he knew that.

Worst of all was the anger inside him. Not the righteous anger of a man of God, but the seething, violent anger of a gangster, a juvenile delinquent, determined to prove himself, determined to run the clan, determined to beat the rest. And if the game was God, if the game was a fight against the West, against the presumptions of Western science, against his brother or Marcus Chalfen, he was determined to win it. Millat stubbed his fag out against the bannister. It pissed him off that these were not pious thoughts. But they were in the right ball park, weren’t they? He had the fundamentals, didn’t he? Clean living, praying (five times a day without fail), fasting, working for the cause, spreading the message? And that was enough, wasn’t it? Maybe. Whatever. Either way, there was no going back now. Yeah, he’d meet Magid, he’d meet him… they’d have a good face-off, he’d come out of it the stronger; he’d call his brother a little cock- a-roach, and walk out of that tete-a-tete even more determined to fulfil his destiny. Millat