White Teeth

It is some time since my last letter, but I felt compelled to write to you about a wonderful development in my garden which has brought me no little pleasure these past few months. To make a long story shorter and sweeter, I have finally gone for the chop and removed that old oak tree from the far corner and I cannot begin to describe to you the difference it has made! Now the weaker seeds are receiving so much more sun and are so healthy I am able even to make cuttings from them – for the first year in my memory each of my children has a vase of peonies on their windowsill. I had been suffering under the misapprehension all these years that I was simply an indifferent gardener – when all the time it was that grand old tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.

The letter went on, but Samad stopped there. Irritably he said, ‘And I am meant to divine from this precisely… what?’

Archie tapped the side of his nose knowingly. ‘Chop, chop. It’s got to be Millat. An omen, mate. You can trust Ibelgaufts.’

And Samad, who usually had no time for omens or nose tapping, was nervous enough to take the advice. But then Poppy (who was acutely aware that she was fading from Samad’s mind in comparison with the question of the boys) suddenly took an interest, claiming to have just sensed in a dream that it should be Magid and so it was Magid once more. Samad, in his desperation, even allowed Archie to flip a coin, but the decision was hard to stick by – best out of three, best out of five – Samad couldn’t trust it. And this, if you can believe it, was the manner in which Archie and Samad went about playing lottery with two boys, bouncing the issue off the walls of O’Connell’s, flipping souls to see which side came up.

In their defence, one thing should be made clear. At no point was the word kidnap mentioned. In fact had this been offered as terminology for what he was about to do, Samad would have been appalled and astounded, would have dropped the whole thing like the somnambulist who wakes up to find himself in the master bedroom with a breadknife in his hand. He understood that he had not yet informed Alsana. He understood that he had booked a 3 a.m. flight. But it was in no way self-evident to him that these two facts were related or would combine to spell out kidnap. So it was with surprise that Samad greeted the vision of a violently weeping Alsana, at 2 a.m. on 31 October, hunched over the kitchen table. He did not think, Ah, she has discovered what I am to do with Magid (it was finally and for ever Magid), because he was not a moustachioed villain in a Victorian crime novel and besides which he was not conscious of plotting any crime. Rather his first thought was, So she knows about Poppy, and in response to this situation he did what every adulterous man does out of instinct: attack first.

‘So I must come home to this, must I?’ – slam down bag for effect – ‘I spend all night in that infernal restaurant and then I am having to come back to your melodramatics?’

Alsana convulsed with tears. Samad noticed too that a gurgle sound was emanating from her pleasant fat which vibrated in the gap between her sari; she waved her hands at him and then put them over her ears.

‘Is this really necessary?’ asked Samad, trying to disguise his fear (he had expected anger, he didn’t know how to deal with tears). ‘Please, Alsana: surely this is an overreaction.’

She waved her hand at him once more as if to dismiss him and then lifted her body a little and Samad saw that the gurgling had not been organic, that she had been hunched over something. A radio.

‘What on earth-’

Alsana pushed the radio from her body into the middle of the table and motioned for Samad to turn it up. Four familiar beeps, the beeps that follow the English into whatever land they conquer, rang round the kitchen, and then in Received Pronunciation Samad heard the following:

This is the BBC World Service at 03.00 hours. Mrs Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was assassinated today, shot down by her Sikh bodyguards in an act of open mutiny as she walked in the garden of her New Delhi home. There is no doubt that her murder was an act of revenge for ‘Operation Blue Star’, the storming of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine at Amritsar last June. The Sikh community, who feel their culture is being attacked by -

‘Enough,’ said Samad, switching it off. ‘She was no bloody good anyway. None of them is any bloody good. And who cares what happens in that cesspit, India. Dear me…’ And even before he said it, he wondered why he had to, why he felt so malevolent this evening. ‘You really are genuinely pathetic. I wonder: where would those tears be if I died? Nowhere – you care more about some corrupt politician you never met. Do you know you are the perfect example of the ignorance of the masses, Alsi? Do you know that?’ he said, talking as if to a child and holding her chin up. ‘Crying for the rich and mighty who would disdain to piss upon you. Doubtless next week you will be bawling because Princess Diana broke a fingernail.’

Alsana gathered all the spit her mouth could accommodate and launched it at him.

‘Bhainchute! I am not crying for her, you idiot, I am crying for my friends. There will be blood on the streets back home because of this, India and Bangladesh. There will be riots – knives, guns. Public death, I have seen it. It will be like Mahshar, Judgement Day – people will die in the streets, Samad. You know and I know. And Delhi will be the worst of it, is always the worst of it. I have some family in Delhi, I have friends, old lovers-’

And here Samad slapped her, partly for the old lovers and partly because it was many years since he had been referred to as a bhainchute (translation: someone who, to put it simply, fucks their sisters).

Alsana held her face, and spoke quietly. ‘I am crying with misery for those poor families and out of relief for my own children! Their father ignores them and bullies them, yes, but at least they will not die on the streets like rats.’

So this was going to be one of those rows: the same positions, the same lines, same recriminations, same right hooks. Bare fists. The bell rings. Samad comes out of his corner.

‘No, they will suffer something worse, much worse: sitting in a morally bankrupt country with a mother who is going mad. Utterly cuckoo. Many raisins short of the fruitcake. Look at you, look at the state of you! Look how fat you are!’ He grabbed a piece of her, and then released it as if it would infect him. ‘Look how you dress. Running shoes and a sari? And what is that?’

It was one of Clara’s African headscarfs, a long, beautiful piece of orange Kenti cloth in which Alsana had taken to wrapping her substantial mane. Samad pulled it off and threw it across the room, leaving Alsana’s hair to crash down her back.

‘You do not even know what you are, where you come from. We never see family any more – I am ashamed to show you to them. Why did you go all the way to Bengal for a wife, that’s what they ask. Why didn’t you just go to Putney?’

Alsana smiled ruefully, shook her head, while Samad made a pretence of calm, filling their metal kettle with water and slamming it down on the stove.

‘And that is a beautiful lungi you have on, Samad Miah,’ she said bitterly, nodding in the direction of his blue-towelling jogging suit topped off with Poppy’s LA Raiders baseball cap.

Samad said, ‘The difference is what is in here,’ not looking at her, thumping just below his left breast bone. ‘You say you are thankful we are in England, that’s because you have swallowed it whole. I can tell you those boys would have a better life back home than they ever-’

‘Samad Miah! Don’t even begin! It will be over my dead body that this family moves back to a place where our lives are in danger! Clara tells me about you, she tells me. How you have asked her strange things. What are you plotting, Samad? I hear from Zinat all this about life insurance… who is dying? What can I smell? I tell you, it will be over my dead body-’

‘But if you are already dead, Alsi-’