White Teeth

keep thinking what a shame it is that he had to take the good one! He was so very clever and so beautifully behaved! You didn’t have to worry about drugs and dirty girls with that one. Only the price of spectacles with all that reading.’

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. Alsana sensed all these and more at the other end of her telephone line as the calls flooded in – 28 May 1985 – to inform her of, to offer commiserations for, the latest cyclone.

‘Alsi, I simply had to call. They say there are so many bodies floating in the Bay of Bengal…’

‘I just heard the latest on the radio – ten thousand!’

‘And the survivors are floating on rooftops while the sharks and crocodiles snap at their heels.’

‘It must be terrible, Alsi, not knowing, not being sure…’

For six days and six nights, Alsana did not know, was not sure. During this period she read extensively from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and tried hard to believe his assurances (Night’s darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn), but she was, at heart, a practical woman and found poetry no comfort. For those six days her life was a midnight thing, a hair’s breadth from the witching hour. But on the seventh day came light: the news arrived that Magid was fine, suffering only a broken nose delivered by a vase which had fallen from its perilous station on a high shelf in a mosque, blown over in the first breath of the first winds (and keep one eye on that vase, please, it is the same vase that will lead Magid by the nose to his vocation). It was only the servants, having two days earlier taken a secret supply of gin and piled into the family’s dilapidated transit van on a pleasure trip to Dhaka, who were now floating belly-up in the Jamuna River as fish finned-silver stared up at them, pop-eyed and bemused.

Samad was triumphant. ‘You see? He’ll come to no harm in Chittagong! Even better news, he was in a mosque. Better he break his nose in a mosque than in a Kilburn fight! It is exactly as I had hoped. He is learning the old ways. Is he not learning the old ways?’

Alsana thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘Maybe, Samad Miah.’

‘What do you mean, “maybe”?’

‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’

Alsana had decided to stop speaking directly to her husband. Through the next eight years she would determine never to say yes to him, never to say no to him, but rather to force him to live like she did – never knowing, never being sure, holding Samad’s sanity to ransom, until she was paid in full with the return of her number-one-son-eldest-by-two-minutes, until she could once more put a chubby hand through his thick hair. That was her promise, that was her curse upon Samad, and it was exquisite revenge. At times it very nearly drove him to the brink, to the kitchen-knife stage, to the medicine cabinet. But Samad was the kind of person too stubborn to kill himself if it meant giving someone else satisfaction. He hung on in there. Alsana turning over in her sleep, muttering, ‘Just bring him back, Mr Idiot… if it’s driving you nutso, just bring my baby back.’

But there was no money to bring Magid back even if Samad had been inclined to wave the white dhoti. He learnt to live with it. It got to the point where if somebody said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Samad in the street or in the restaurant, he hardly knew how to respond, he had come to forget what those two elegant little signifiers meant. He never heard them from Alsana’s lips. Whatever the question in the Iqbal house, there would never again be a straight answer:

‘Alsana, have you seen my slippers?’

‘Possibly, Samad Miah.’

‘What time is it?’

‘It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four.’

‘Alsana, where have you put the remote control?’

‘It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa.’

And so it went.

Sometime after the May cyclone, the Iqbals received a letter from their elder-son-by-two- minutes, written in a careful hand on exercise paper and folded around a recent photograph. It was not the first time he had written, but Samad saw something different in this letter, something that excited him and validated the unpopular decision he had made; some change of tone, some suggestion of maturity, of growing Eastern wisdom; and, having read it carefully in the garden first, he took great pleasure in bringing it back to the kitchen and reading it aloud to Clara and Alsana, who were drinking peppermint tea.

‘Listen: here he says, “Yesterday, grandfather hit Tamim (he is the houseboy) with a belt until his bottom was redder than a tomato. He said Tamim had stolen some candles (it’s true. I saw him do it!), and this was what he got for it. He says sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it is Allah’s turn or his own. I hope one day I will be a wise man.” Do you hear that? He wants to be a wise man. How many kids in that school do you know who want to be wise men?’

‘Maybe none, Samad Miah. Maybe all.’

Samad scowled at his wife and continued, ‘And here, here where he talks about his nose: “It seems to me that a vase should not be in such a silly place where it can fall and break a boy’s nose. It should be somebody’s fault and somebody should be punished (but not a bottom smack unless they were small and not a grown-up. If they were younger than twelve). When I grow up I think I should like to make sure vases are not put in such silly places where they can be dangerous and I would complain about other dangerous things too (by the way, my nose is fine now!).” See?’

Clara frowned. ‘See what?’

‘Clearly he disapproves of iconography in the mosque, he dislikes all heathen, unnecessary, dangerous decoration! A boy like that is destined for greatness, isn’t he?’

‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’

‘Maybe he’ll go into government, maybe the law,’ suggested Clara.

‘Rubbish! My son is for God, not men. He is not fearful of his duty. He is not fearful to be a real Bengali, a proper Muslim. Here he tells me the goat in the photograph is dead. “I helped to kill the goat, Abba,” he says. “It kept on moving some time after we had split it in two.” Is that a boy who is fearful?’

It clearly being incumbent upon someone to say no, Clara said it with little enthusiasm and reached for the photograph Samad was passing her. There was Magid, dressed in his customary grey, standing next to the doomed goat with the old house behind him.

‘Oh! Look at his nose! Look at the break. He’s got a Roman nose, now. He looks like a little aristocrat, like a little Englishman. Look, Millat.’ Clara put the photo under Millat’s smaller, flatter nose. ‘You two don’t look so much like twins any more.’

‘He looks,’ said Millat after a cursory glance, ‘like a chief.’

Samad, never au fait with the language of the Willesden streets, nodded soberly and patted his son’s hair. ‘It is good that you see the difference between you two boys, Millat, now rather than later.’ Samad glared at Alsana as she spun an index finger in a circle by her temple, as she tapped the side of her head: crazee, nutso. ‘Others may scoff, but you and I know that your brother will lead others out of the wilderness. He will be a leader of tribes. He is a natural chief.’

Millat laughed so loud at this, so hard, so uncontrollably, that he lost his footing, slipped on a wash cloth and broke his nose against the sink.

Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame while the television underneath him spewed out all the shit of the eighties – Irish bombs, English riots, transatlantic stalemates – above which mess the child rose untouchable and unstained, elevated to the status of