White Teeth

revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart and he would and he would and he

‘I think,’ said Millat, after a pause, ‘I am going to vomit.’

‘Baker Street!’ cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the platform to the connecting train.

Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St Martin’s. All the statues facing the clock.

‘They do love their false icons in this country,’ said Abdul-Colin, with his odd mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. ‘Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time?’ He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate the rhetorical question.

‘Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them, you know?’ he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.

‘They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid- looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left.’

‘I’m bloody cold,’ complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mittened hands together (he found his uncle’s speeches a big pain in the arse). ‘Let’s get going,’ he said, as a huge beer-pregnant Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, ‘out of this bloody madness. It’s on Chandos Street.’

‘Brother?’ said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the group. ‘Are you ready?’

‘I’ll be along in a minute.’ He shooed them away weakly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’

There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat down. And there it was.

Five-inch letters, between one leg of the bench and the other. IQBAL. It wasn’t clear, and the colour of it was a murky rust, but it was there. The story of it was old.

A few months after his father arrived in England, he had sat on this bench nursing a bleeding thumb, the top sliced off by a careless, doddering stroke from one of the older waiters. When it first happened, in the restaurant, Samad couldn’t feel it because it was his dead hand. So he just wrapped it in a handkerchief to stem the flow and continued work. But the material had become soaked in blood, he was putting the customers off their food and eventually Ardashir sent him home. Samad took his open thumb out of the restaurant, past theatreland and down St Martin’s Lane. When he reached the square he stuck it in the fountain and watched his red insides spill out into the blue water. But he was making a mess and people were looking. He resolved instead to sit on the bench, gripping it at the root until it stopped. The blood kept on coming. After a while, he gave up holding his thumb upright and let it hang down to the floor like halal meat, hoping it would quicken the bleeding process. Then, with his head between his legs, and his thumb leaking on to the pavement, a primitive impulse had come over him. Slowly, with the dribbling blood, he wrote IQBAL from one chair leg to the next. Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent, he had gone over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.

‘A great shame washed over me the moment I finished,’ he explained to his sons years later. ‘I ran from it into the night; I tried to run from myself. I knew I had been depressed in this country… but this was different. I ended up clinging on to the railings in Piccadilly Circus, kneeling and praying, weeping and praying, interrupting the buskers. Because I knew what it meant, this deed. It meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant I presumed. Like the Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wives, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them. That’s what it meant.’

No, thought Millat, the first time he heard this, no, that’s not what it meant. It just meant you’re nothing. And looking at it now, Millat felt nothing but contempt. All his life he wanted a Godfather, and all he got was Samad. A faulty, broken, stupid, one-handed waiter of a man who had spent eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this. It just means you’re nothing, repeated Millat, working his way through the premature vomit (girls drinking doubles since three o’clock) over to Havelock, to look Havelock in his stony eye. It means you’re nothing and he’s something. And that’s it. That’s why Pande hung from a tree while Havelock the executioner sat on a chaise longue in Delhi. Pande was no one and Havelock was someone. No need for library books and debates and reconstructions. Don’t you see, Abba? whispered Millat. That’s it. That’s the long, long history of us and them. That’s how it was. But no more.

Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think he had a different attitude, a second generation attitude. If Marcus Chalfen was going to write his name all over the world, Millat was going to write it BIGGER. There would be no misspelling his name in the history books. There’d be no forgetting the dates and times. Where Pande misfooted he would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B.

Yes, Millat was stoned. And it may be absurd to us that one Iqbal can believe the breadcrumbs laid down by another Iqbal, generations before him, have not yet blown away in the breeze. But it really doesn’t matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack. And it’s hard to change the mind of the high-strung woman who lays responsibility for all her actions at the feet of her mother, or the lonely guy who sits in a fold-up chair on a hill in the dead of night waiting for the little green men. Amidst the strange landscapes that have replaced our belief in the efficacy of the stars, Millat’s is not such odd terrain. He believes the decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism. What goes around comes around.

‘Ding, ding,’ said Millat out loud, tapping Havelock’s foot, before turning on his heel to make his hazy way to Chandos Street. ‘Round two.’

December 31st 1992

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow

Eccles. ch. 1, v. 18

When Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall’s Thought for the Day desk calendar for 1992, he took especial care to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Too often in the past, Ryan noted, when the assembler came to choose quotations for entirely fatuous, secular days, he let sentiment get the better of him, so that on Valentine’s Day 1991 we find there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear, I John 4:18, as if John were thinking of the paltry feeling that prompts people to send each other Milk Tray and cheap teddy bears rather than the love of Jesus Christ, which nothing surpasseth. Ryan took very much the opposite approach. On a day like New Year’s Eve, for example, when everybody was running around making their New Year resolutions, assessing their past year and plotting their success for the next, he felt it necessary to bring them to earth with a bump. He wanted to offer a little reminder that the world is cruel and pointless, all human endeavour ultimately meaningless, and no advancement in this world worth making besides gaining God’s favour and an entry ticket into the better half of the after-life. And having completed the calendar the previous year and forgotten much of what he’d done, he was pleasantly surprised – when he ripped off the 30th and looked at the crisp white page of the 31st – at just how effective the reminder was. No thought could have been more apt for the day ahead. No warning more propitious.