White Teeth

like Irie. It’s funky. It’s different.’

Alsana loves this. ‘For pity’s sake, what does Archibald know about funky. Or different. If I were you, dearie,’ she says, patting Clara’s knee, ‘I’d choose Sarah and let that be an end to it. Sometimes you have to let these men have it their way. Anything for a little – how do you say it in the English? For a little’ – she puts her finger over tightly pursed lips, like a guard at the gate – ‘shush.’

But in response Niece-of-Shame puts on the thick accent, bats her voluminous eyelashes, wraps her college scarf round her head like purdah. ‘Oh yes, Auntie, yes, the little submissive Indian woman. You don’t talk to him, he talks at you. You scream and shout at each other, but there’s no communication. And in the end he wins anyway because he does whatever he likes, when he likes. You don’t even know where he is, what he does, what he feels, half the time. It’s 1975, Alsi. You can’t conduct relationships like that any more. It’s not like back home. There’s got to be communication between men and women in the West, they’ve got to listen to each other, otherwise…’ Neena mimes a small mushroom cloud going off in her hand.

‘What a load of the cod’s wallop,’ says Alsana sonorously, closing her eyes, shaking her head, ‘it is you who do not listen. By Allah, I will always give as good as I get. But you presume I care what he does. You presume I want to know. The truth is, for a marriage to survive you don’t need all this talk, talk, talk; all this “I am this” and “I am really like this” like in the papers, all this revelation – especially when your husband is old, when he is wrinkly and falling apart – you do not want to know what is slimy underneath the bed and rattling in the wardrobe.’

Neena frowns, Clara cannot raise serious objection, and the rice is handed around once more.

‘Moreover,’ says Alsana after a pause, folding her dimpled arms underneath her breasts, pleased to be holding forth on a subject close to this formidable bosom, ‘when you are from families such as ours you should have learnt that silence, what is not said, is the very best recipe for family life.’

For all three have been brought up in strict, religious families, houses where God appeared at every meal, infiltrated every childhood game, and sat in the lotus position under the bedclothes with a torch to check nothing untoward was occurring.

‘So let me get this straight,’ says Neena derisively. ‘You’re saying that a good dose of repression keeps a marriage healthy.’

And as if someone had pressed a button, Alsana is outraged. ‘Repression! Nonsense silly-billy word! I’m just talking about common sense. What is my husband? What is yours?’ she says, pointing to Clara. ‘Twenty-five years they live before we are even born. What are they? What are they capable of? What blood do they have on their hands? What is sticky and smelly in their private areas? Who knows?’ She throws her hands up, releasing the questions into the unhealthy Kilburn air, sending a troupe of sparrows up with them.

‘What you don’t understand, my Niece-of-Shame, what none of your generation understands…’

At which point Neena cannot stop a piece of onion escaping from her mouth due to the sheer strength of her objection. ‘My generation? For fuckssake, you’re two years older than me, Alsi.’

But Alsana continues regardless, miming a knife slicing through the niece-of-shame tongue- of-obscenity, ‘… is that not everybody wants to see into everybody else’s sweaty, secret parts.’

‘But Auntie,’ begs Neena, raising her voice, because this is what she really wants to argue about, the largest sticking point between the two of them, Alsana’s arranged marriage. ‘How can you bear to live with somebody you don’t know from Adam?’

In response, an infuriating wink: Alsana always likes to appear jovial at the very moment that her interlocutor becomes hot under the collar. ‘Because, Miss Smarty- pants, it is by far the easier option. It was exactly because Eve did not know Adam from Adam that they got on so A-OK. Let me explain. Yes, I was married to Samad Iqbal the same evening of the very day I met him. Yes, I didn’t know him from Adam. But I liked him well enough. We met in the breakfast room on a steaming Delhi day and he fanned me with The Times. I thought he had a good face, a sweet voice, and his backside was high and well formed for a man of his age. Very good. Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.’

Neena stamps her foot in exasperation at the skewed logic.

‘Besides, I will never know him well. Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you’re stoned.’

Neena laughs despite herself. ‘Water out of a stone.’

‘Yes, yes. You think I’m so stupid. But I am wise about things like men. I tell you’ – Alsana prepares to deliver her summation as she has seen it done many years previously by the young Delhi lawyers with their slick side partings – ‘men are the last mystery. God is easy compared with men. Now, enough of the philosophy: samosa?’ She peels the lid off the plastic tub and sits fat, pretty and satisfied on her conclusion.

‘Shame that you’re having them,’ says Neena to her aunt, lighting a fag. ‘Boys, I mean. Shame that you’re going to have boys.’

‘What do you mean?’

This is Clara, who is the recipient of a secret (kept secret from Alsana and Archie) lending library of Neena’s through which she reads, in a few short months, Greer’s Female Eunuch, Jong’s Fear of Flying and The Second Sex, all in a clandestine attempt, on Neena’s part, to rid Clara of her ‘false consciousness’.

‘I mean, I just think men have caused enough chaos this century. There’s enough fucking men in the world. If I knew I was going to have a boy’ – she pauses to prepare her two falsely conscious friends for this new concept – ‘I’d have to seriously consider abortion.’

Alsana screams, claps her hands over one of her own ears and one of Clara’s, and then almost chokes on a piece of aubergine. For some reason the remark simultaneously strikes Clara as funny; hysterically, desperately funny; miserably funny; and the Niece-of-Shame sits between the two, nonplussed, while the two egg-shaped women bend over themselves, one in laughter, the other in horror and asphyxiation.

‘Are you all right, ladies?’

It is Sol Jozefowicz, the old guy who back then took it upon himself to police the park (though his job as park keeper had long since been swept away in council cuts), Sol Jozefowicz stands in front of them, ready as always to be of aid.

‘We are all going to burn in hell, Mr Jozefowicz, if you call that being all right,’ explains Alsana, pulling herself together.

Niece-of-Shame rolls her eyes. ‘Speak for yourself.’

But Alsana is faster than any sniper when it comes to firing back. ‘I do, I do – thankfully Allah has arranged it that way.’

‘Good afternoon, Neena, good afternoon, Mrs Jones,’ says Sol, offering a neat bow to each. ‘Are you sure you are all right? Mrs Jones?’

Clara cannot stop the tears from squeezing out of the corners of her eyes. She cannot work out, at this moment, whether it is crying or laughing.

‘I’m fine… fine, sorry to have worried you, Mr Jozefowicz… really, I’m fine.’

‘I do not see what’s so very funny-funny,’ mutters Alsana. ‘The murder of innocents – is this funny?’

‘Not in my experience, Mrs Iqbal, no,’ says Sol Jozefowicz, in the collected manner in which he said everything, passing his handkerchief to Clara. It strikes all three women – the way history will, embarrassingly, without warning, like a blush – what the ex-park keeper’s experience might have been. They fall silent.