White Teeth

‘And what?’

‘Are they…?’ Archie repeated the mime, but this time with the kind of anatomical exaggeration that leaves air-traced women unable to stand upright.

‘Oh, but I have still some time to wait,’ he said, smiling wistfully. ‘Unfortunately, the Begum family do not yet have a female child of my generation.’

‘You mean your wife’s not bloody born yet?’

‘What of it?’ asked Samad, pulling a cigarette from Archie’s top pocket. He scratched a match along the side of the tank and lit it. Archie wiped the sweat off his face with a greasy hand.

‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’

‘Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean,’ said Samad tersely, ‘that it is a good idea.’

Their final evening in the village was absolutely dark, silent. The muggy air made it unpleasant to smoke, so Archie and Samad tapped their fingers on the cold stone steps of a church, for lack of other hand-employment. For a moment, in the twilight, Archie forgot the war that had actually ceased to exist anyway. A past tense, future perfect kind of night.

It was while they were still innocent of peace, during this last night of ignorance, that Samad decided to cement his friendship with Archie. Often this is done by passing on a singular piece of information: some sexual peccadillo, some emotional secret or obscure hidden passion that the reticence of new acquaintance has prevented being spoken. But for Samad, nothing was closer or meant more to him than his blood. It was natural, then, as they sat on holy ground, that he should speak of what was holy to him. And there was no stronger evocation of the blood that ran through him, and the ground which that blood had stained over the centuries, than the story of his great-grandfather. So Samad told Archie the much neglected, 100-year-old, mildewed yarn of Mangal Pande.

‘So, he was your grandfather?’ said Archie, after the tale had been told, the moon had passed behind clouds, and he had been suitably impressed. ‘Your real, blood grandfather?’

‘Great-grandfather.’

‘Well, that is something. Do you know: I remember it from school – I do – History of the Colonies, Mr Juggs. Bald, bug-eyed, nasty old duffer – Mr Juggs, I mean, not your grandfather. Got the message through, though, even if it took a ruler to the back of your hand… You know, you still hear people in the regiments calling each other Pandies, you know, if the bloke’s a bit of a rebel… I never thought where it came from… Pande was the rebel, didn’t like the English, shot the first bullet of the Mutiny. I remember it now, clear as a bell. And that was your grandfather!’

‘Great-grandfather.’

‘Well, well. That’s something, isn’t it?’ said Archie, placing his hands behind his head and lying back to look at the stars. ‘To have a bit of history in your blood like that. Motivates you, I’d imagine. I’m a Jones, you see. ’Slike a “Smith”. We’re nobody… My father used to say: “We’re the chaff, boy, we’re the chaff.” Not that I’ve ever been much bothered, mind. Proud all the same, you know. Good honest English stock. But in your family you had a hero!’

Samad puffed up with pride. ‘Yes, Archibald, that is exactly the word. Naturally, you will get these petty English academics trying to discredit him, because they cannot bear to give an Indian his due. But he was a hero and every act I have undertaken in this war has been in the shadow of his example.’

‘That’s true, you know,’ said Archie thoughtfully. ‘They don’t speak well about Indians back home; they certainly wouldn’t like it if you said an Indian was a hero… everybody would look at you a bit funny.’

Suddenly Samad grabbed his hand. It was hot, almost fevered, Archie thought. He’d never had another man grab his hand; his first instinct was to move or punch him or something, but then he reconsidered because Indians were emotional, weren’t they? All that spicy food and that.

‘Please. Do me this one, great favour, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgement. If you are told “they are all this” or “they do this” or “their opinions are these”, withhold your judgement until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call “India” goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’

Samad released his hand and rummaged in his pocket, dabbing his finger into a repository of white dust he kept in there, slipping it discreetly into his mouth. He leant against the wall and drew his fingertips along the stone. It was a tiny missionary church, converted into a hospital and then abandoned after two months when the sound of shells began to shake the windowsills. Samad and Archie had taken to sleeping there because of the thin mattresses and the large airy windows. Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine to be found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down his little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his little bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little into his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lay back on the cool terracotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left three hundred years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there – but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only truly struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deckchair. And he would sit in it a while and watch his world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande’s brothers – every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother – he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?

‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ said Archie, following Samad’s eyes and catching the church dome’s reflection in them. ‘If I’d only had a few hours left, I wouldn’t have spent it painting pictures on the ceiling.’

‘Tell me,’ inquired Samad, irritated to have been dragged from his pleasant contemplation, ‘what great challenge would you undertake in the hours before your death? Unravel Fermat’s Theorem, perhaps? Master Aristotelian philosophy?’

‘What? Who? No… I’d – you know… make love – to a lady,’ said Archie, whose inexperience made him prudish. ‘You know… for the last time.’

Samad broke into a laugh. ‘For the first time, is more likely.’

‘Oh, go on, I’m serious.’

‘All right. And if there were no “ladies” in the vicinity?’

‘Well, you can always,’ and here Archie went a pillar-box red, this being his own version of cementing a friendship, ‘slap the salami, as the GIs say!’

‘Slap,’ repeated Samad contemptuously, ‘the salami… and that is it, is it? The last thing you would wish to do before you shuffled off this mortal coil is “slap your salami”. Achieve orgasm.’

Archie, who came from Brighton, where nobody ever, ever said words like orgasm, began to convulse with hysterical embarrassment.

‘Who is funny? Something is funny?’ asked Samad, lighting a fag distractedly despite the heat,