White Teeth

might stand that would put her out of arm’s reach. ‘One might almost say, claustrophobic.’

‘I know, it’s awful – but won’t you sit down?’

Samad looked for the chair she might be referring to.

‘Oh God! I’m sorry! It’s here.’ She swept paper, books and rubbish on to the floor with one hand, revealing a perilous-looking stool. ‘I made it – but it’s pretty safe.’

‘You excel in carpentry?’ inquired Samad, searching once again for more good reasons to commit a bad sin. ‘An artisan as well as a musician?’

‘No, no, no – I went to a few night classes – nothing special. I made that and a foot stool, and the foot stool broke. I’m no – do you know I can’t think of a single carpenter!’

‘There is always Jesus.’

‘But I can’t very well say “I’m no Jesus”… I mean, obviously I’m not, but for other reasons.’

Samad took his wobbly seat as Poppy Burt-Jones went to sit behind her desk. ‘Meaning you are not a good person?’

Samad saw that he had flustered her with the accidental solemnity of the question; she drew her fingers through her fringe, fiddled with a small tortoiseshell button on her blouse, laughed shakily. ‘I like to think I’m not all bad.’

‘And that is enough?’

‘Well… I…’

‘Oh my dear, I apologize…’ began Samad. ‘I was not being serious, Miss Burt-Jones.’

‘Well… Let’s say I’m no Mr Chippendale – that’ll do.’

‘Yes,’ said Samad kindly, thinking to himself that she had far better legs than a Queen Anne chair, ‘that will do.’

‘Now: where were we?’

Samad leant a little over the desk, to face her. ‘Were we somewhere, Miss Burt-Jones?’

(He used his eyes; he remembered people used to say that it was his eyes – that new boy in Delhi, Samad Miah, they said, he has eyes to die for.)

‘I was looking – looking – I was looking for my notes – where are my notes?’

She began rifling through the catastrophe of her desk, and Samad leant back once more on his stool, taking what little satisfaction he could from the fact that her fingers, if he was not mistaken, appeared to be trembling. Had there been a moment, just then? He was fifty-seven – it was a good ten years since he’d had a moment – he was not at all sure he would recognize a moment if one came along. You old man, he told himself as he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief, you old fool. Leave now – leave before you drown in your own guilty excrescence (for he was sweating like a pig), leave before you make it worse. But was it possible? Was it possible that this past month – the month that he had been squeezing and spilling, praying and begging, making deals and thinking, thinking always about her – that she had been thinking of him?

‘Oh! While I’m looking… I remember there was something I wanted to ask you.’

Yes! said the anthropomorphized voice that had taken up residence in Samad’s right testicle. Whatever the question the answer is yes yes yes. Yes, we will make love upon this very table, yes, we will burn for it, and yes, Miss Burt-Jones, yes, the answer is inevitably, inescapably, YES. Yet somehow, out there where conversation continued, in the rational world four feet above his ball-bag, the answer turned out to be – ‘Wednesday.’

Poppy laughed. ‘No, I don’t mean what day it is – I don’t look that ditsy do I? No, I meant what day is it; I mean, for Muslims. Only I saw Magid was in some kind of costume, and when I asked him what it was for he wouldn’t speak. I was terribly worried that I’d offended him somehow.’

Samad frowned. It is odious to be reminded of one’s children when one is calculating the exact shade and rigidity of a nipple that could so assert itself through bra and shirt.

‘Magid? Please do not worry yourself about Magid. I am sure he was not offended.’

‘So I was right,’ said Poppy gleefully. ‘Is it like a type of, I don’t know, vocal fasting?’

‘Er… yes, yes,’ stumbled Samad, not wishing to divulge his family dilemma, ‘it is a symbol of the Qur’an’s… assertion that the day of reckoning would first strike us all unconscious. Silent, you see. So, so, so the eldest son of the family dresses in black and, umm, disdains speech for a… a period of… of time as a process of – of purification.’

Dear God.

‘I see. That’s just fascinating. And Magid is the elder?’

‘By two minutes.’

Poppy smiled. ‘Only just, then.’

‘Two minutes,’ said Samad patiently, because he was speaking to one with no knowledge of the impact such small periods of time had amounted to throughout the history of the Iqbal family, ‘made all the difference.’

‘And does the process have a name?’

‘Amar durbol lagche.’

‘What does it mean?’

Literal translation: I feel weak. It means, Miss Burt-Jones, that every strand of me feels weakened by the desire to kiss you.

‘It means,’ said Samad aloud, without missing a beat, ‘closed-mouth worship of the Creator.’

‘Amar durbol lagche. Wow,’ said Poppy Burt-Jones.

‘Indeed,’ said Samad Miah.

Poppy Burt-Jones leant forward in her chair. ‘I don’t know… To me, it’s just like this incredible act of self-control. We just don’t have that in the West – that sense of sacrifice – I just have so much admiration for the sense your people have of abstinence, of self-restraint.’

At which point Samad kicked the stool from under him like a man hanging himself, and met the loquacious lips of Poppy Burt-Jones with his own feverish pair.

7 Molars

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day. Sometimes at the very same moment. At least, that would explain how two weeks later, during the old Druid festival of harvest, Samad can be found quietly packing the one shirt he’s never worn to mosque (To the pure all things are pure) into a plastic bag, so that he might change later and meet Miss Burt- Jones (4.30, Harlesden Clock) without arousing suspicion… while Magid and a change-of-heart Millat slip only four cans of past-their-sell-by-date chickpeas, a bag of variety crisps and some apples into two rucksacks (Can’t say fairer than that), in preparation for a meeting with Irie (4.30, ice-cream van) and a visit to their assigned old man, the one to whom they will offer pagan charity, one Mr J. P. Hamilton of Kensal Rise.

Unbeknownst to all involved, ancient ley-lines run underneath these two journeys – or, to put it in the modern parlance, this is a rerun. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still