White Teeth

other writers (irresistible, this line-up of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras, Ovid and Juvenal, Radclyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things. He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.

‘So… you ain’t read it?’ asked Ranil nervously.

‘Look: you best believe I ain’t buying that shit, man. No way, star.’

‘Me neither,’ said Hifan.

‘True star,’ said Rajik.

‘Fucking nastiness,’ said Ranil.

‘Twelve ninety-five, you know!’ said Dipesh.

‘Besides,’ said Millat, with a tone of finality despite his high-rising terminals, ‘you don’t have to read shit to know that it’s blasphemous, you get me?’

Back in Willesden, Samad Iqbal was expressing the very same sentiment loudly over the evening news.

‘I don’t need to read it. The relevant passages have been photocopied for me.’

‘Will someone remind my husband,’ said Alsana, speaking to the newsreader, ‘that he does not even know what the bloody book is about because the last thing he read was the bloody A- Z.’

‘I’m going to ask you one more time to shut up so I can watch the news.’

‘I can hear screaming but it does not appear to be my voice.’

‘Can’t you understand, woman? This is the most important thing to happen to us in this country, ever. It’s crisis point. It’s the tickle in the sneeze. It’s big time.’ Samad hit the volume button a few times with his thumb. ‘This woman – Moira whateverhernameis – she mumbles. Why is she reading news if she can’t speak properly?’

Moira, turned up suddenly in mid-sentence, said, ‘… the writer denies blasphemy, and argues that the book concerns the struggle between secular and religious views of life.’

Samad snorted. ‘What struggle! I don’t see any struggle. I get on perfectly OK. All grey cells in good condition. No emotional difficulties.’

Alsana laughed bitterly. ‘My husband fights the Third World War every single bloody day in his head, so does everybody-’

‘No, no, no. No struggle. What’s he on about, eh? He can’t wangle out of it by being rational. Rationality! Most overrated Western virtue! Oh no. Fact is, he is simply offensive – he has offended-’

‘Look,’ Alsana cut in. ‘When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers.’

‘Hardly the same thing, Mrs Iqbal, hardly the same kettle with fish in it.’

‘Oh, passions are running high at the Women’s Committee – shows how much Samad Iqbal knows. But I am not like Samad Iqbal. I restrain myself. I live. I let live.’

‘It is not a matter of letting others live. It is a matter of protecting one’s culture, shielding one’s religion from abuse. Not that you’d know anything about that, naturally. Always too busy with this Hindi brain popcorn to pay any attention to your own culture!’

‘My own culture? And what is that please?’

‘You’re a Bengali. Act like one.’

‘And what is a Bengali, husband, please?’

‘Get out of the way of the television and look it up.’

Alsana took out BALTIC- BRAIN, number three of their 24-set Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia, and read from the relevant section:

The vast majority of Bangladesh’s inhabitants are Bengalis, who are largely descended from Indo-Aryans who began to migrate into the country from the west thousands of years ago and who mixed within Bengal with indigenous groups of various racial stocks. Ethnic minorities include the Chakma and Mogh, Mongoloid peoples who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District; the Santal, mainly descended from migrants from present- day India; and the Biharis, non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from India after the partition.

‘Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans… it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, ‘you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy-tale!’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re out of your depth.’

Alsana held up the encyclopedia. ‘Oh, Samad Miah. You want to burn this too?’

‘Look: I’ve no time to play right now. I am trying to listen to a very important news story. Serious goings on in Bradford. So, if you don’t mind-’

‘Oh dear God!’ screamed Alsana, the smile leaving her face, falling to her knees in front of the television, tracing her finger past the burning book to the face she recognized, smiling up at her through light tubes, her pixilated second-son beneath her picture-framed first. ‘What is he doing? Is he crazy? Who does he think he is? What on earth is he doing there? He’s meant to be in school! Has the day come when the babies are burning the books, has it? I don’t believe it!’

‘Nothing to do with me. Tickle in the sneeze, Mrs Iqbal,’ said Samad coolly, sitting back in his armchair. ‘Tickle in the sneeze.’

When Millat came home that evening, a great bonfire was raging in the back garden. All his secular stuff – four years’ worth of cool, pre- and post-Raggastani, every album, every poster, special-edition t- shirts, club fliers collected and preserved over two years, beautiful Air Max trainers, copies 20- 75 of 2000 AD Magazine, signed photo of Chuck D., impossibly rare copy of Slick Rick’s Hey Young World, Catcher in the Rye, his guitar, Godfather I and II, Mean Streets, Rumblefish, Dog Day Afternoon and Shaft in Africa – all had been placed on the funeral pyre, now a smouldering mound of ashes that was giving off fumes of plastic and paper, stinging the boy’s eyes that were already filled with tears.

‘Everyone has to be taught a lesson,’ Alsana had said, lighting the match with heavy heart some hours earlier. ‘Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later.’

10 November 1989

A wall was coming down. It was something to do with history. It was an historic occasion. No one really knew quite who had put it up or who was tearing it down or whether this was good, bad or something else; no one knew how tall it was, how long it was, or why people had died trying to cross