Brick Lane (49 page)

Karim came and worked on draft texts at the dining table while she sewed. He read them out and provided his own comments. Twice he came while Chanu was still at home after a long shift that had stretched through the evening and into the night. And though on these occasions he only made the necessary exchanges and left quickly, this proved somehow to Nazneen that there was nothing wrong in his visits, nothing that could not happen in the presence of her husband. A few times he said to her
you've got to stand your ground,
and it was marvellous to her that he should be so sure of where he was standing and why. If the salaat alert came on his phone, she took out her mat and listened to him pray. His father, he told her, had no religion now. He had nothing but his pills. Her husband's religion, she told him, was education.

'What we need,' he said, 'is action. What's the point of all these leaflets? We must stop talking and start doing.'

But he continued to work at his texts.

'All I get is moaning,' he said. 'How can they expect me to run everything and still be out in the street the whole time? It all takes a lot of organizing, man. That lot ain't smart enough to work that out.'

He bemoaned the lack of interest shown by the dissolute youth, most of whom had resisted the charms of the Bengal Tigers. 'We set it all up for them. When I was at school, we used to be chased home every day. People getting beaten up the whole time. Then we got together, turned the tables. One of us got touched, they all paid for it. We went everywhere together, we started to fight, and we got a reputation.' He smiled at the memory. 'But now, these kids – they don't remember how it used to be. They're in their gangs, and they fight the posse from Camden or King's Cross. Or from the next estate. Or they stay away from all that, earn good money in the restaurants, and that's all they care about. They don't think they can be touched.'

But the Questioner was the main thorn. 'It's a strategy question,' Karim said. 'He just don't get it.' He was a man and he spoke as a man. Unlike Chanu, he was not mired in words. He did not talk and talk until he was no longer certain of anything.

Sometimes he became angry and his anger was direct and to the point. 'It's my group. I'm the Chairman.' It was a strong statement, though Nazneen could not help thinking of Shahana and Bibi fighting over their toys.

'I say what is radical and what is not.'

Radical was a new word for Nazneen. She heard it often enough from Karim that she came to understand it and know that it was simply another word for 'right'.

She observed him more openly now, and when he saw her looking at him she did not look away immediately.

'You're always working,' he said.

'Buttons will not sew themselves.'

'Talk to me. Leave it'

'I will listen. You talk.'

He picked up a handful of brass buttons from the cardboard box. He put them in the front pocket of his jeans. He tipped out the remaining buttons onto his palm and pocketed those as well. Nazneen felt an electric current run from her nipples to her big toes. She sat very still.

'Do you know about our brothers in Egypt?' He found his magazine on the table and searched for the right page.

Nazneen tried not to think of the buttons. She could think of nothing else. Why did he take them? Why put them in his pockets? Her skin was attached to thousands of fine silk threads, all of them pulling, pricking at the point of tension.

He told her something of Egypt, the oppression, the jailings, the cowardly American-loving government, and they both pretended that he was not just reading from the magazine. Nazneen thought of Chanu with all his books. He read too much and it did him no good.

'It is sad,' she said.

"Tumi ashol kotha koiso.'
Yeah, man, you're so right.

This was something he did: made her feel as if she had said a weighty piece, as if she had stated a new truth.

Chanu and all his hooks. How much he knew and how baffled he seemed.

Karim pulled out the buttons and put them back in the box. When his phone began to ring he flipped it open, checked the number and turned it off. This meant it was his father calling. Now that he had a smaller, sleeker phone he seemed unable to take calls from his father. The gold chain around his neck had grown fatter.

Nazneen began her work, but Karim could not settle. He walked – with some difficulty, for the way was strewn with obstacles – around the table. He watched from the window but found nothing to comment on. The showcase attracted his attention and he bent down to slide the doors back. He pulled out the pottery tiger and lion, and a porcelain figure of a girl on a swing. He lost interest and put them back without remembering to close the doors. The corner cabinet was stacked with books and he took down a couple and turned them over as if he would judge them by their weight alone. Next he moved across to the far corner of the room and stood by the trolley. It was loaded with files and papers and the computer keyboard which Nazneen had removed in order to make more space on the table. He pushed it right up against the wall. Then he went to the sofa, kicked off his trainers and lay down.

Her fingers trembled and she could not work. Karim squeezed the back of his neck. He closed his eyes. His right leg vibrated up and down. When Chanu fidgeted he showed his unease. When Karim could not be still, he showed his energy. For a few moments she drifted helplessly on a tide of longing. Her mouth became loose and her eyes unfocused.

'When I was a little kid. . .' He sat up and put his feet on the coffee table. It was as if he were taking possession of the room, marking each item as his own. 'If you wanted to be cool you had to be something else – a bit white, a bit black, a bit something. Even when it all took off, bhangra and all that, it was Punjabi, Pakistani, giving it all the attitude. It weren't us, was it? If you wanted to be cool, you couldn't just be yourself. Bangladeshi. Know what I'm saying?'

'Yes,' said Nazneen. She did not know what he was saying. She was waiting to be claimed as well.

'There was no one to look up to.'

'Your father.'

'Exactly.'

He looked straight at her and she held the look. She wished her eyes were not so close together.

'Exactly,' he repeated. 'It's different now. For the little ones. We're the ones who had to stand our ground.'

In the bath, while the incontinent cold tap dribbled and the extractor fan rasped, she examined the hairs on her legs. They were fine and sparse but clearly visible. She ran a hand along a calf. On the ceiling was a little flower of damp. She imagined the plaster breaking and falling into the bath, coating her in white dust. She heard footsteps and the flush of a lavatory. The woman upstairs would be up three or four times in the night. It was getting to be quite a condition.

She thought of her shopping list (tin foil, mustard oil and fennel seeds to add). She thought of plastering the hallway herself: how difficult could it be? She thought of the homework planner that Shahana had pinned on the bedroom wall and how quickly she ticked off the items. Nazneen looked in her exercise books. 'This doesn't look finished,' she said. Or, 'Have you written enough here?' Shahana showed her red ticks that the teacher had marked. There was a red biro on her desk. Nazneen thought about Bibi who had begun to chew her nails. She rehearsed a letter that she would write to Hasina. She counted in her head the money in the hidey-holes. And when she could keep him out no longer she thought of Karim. She thought about his forearms and she rejoiced that they were not thin. She thought about the small flat mole on the left ridge of his jaw and how stunned she had been to discover it only this week. She thought about his certainty, how he walked a straight line while others turned and stumbled. And most of all she thought of what he had that she and Hasina and Chanu sought but could not find. The thing that he had and inhabited so easily. A place in the world.

She sat until the water was cold and then she took Chanu's razor, soaped her legs and began to shave.

The next day, when she was walking back from school with the children, there was a police van parked in the courtyard where no cars were allowed. The door was open and inside was a policeman petting a large dog that quivered to be released. Four police stood with their backs to the two Lion Hearts. The police wore short-sleeved shirts and their helmets all seemed too big, as if they were just dressing up. A group of young Bangladeshi men stood shoulder to shoulder facing the police. The Questioner was at their centre.

The younger of the two leafleteers stepped out from his police barricade, stuck a finger in the air, and stepped back again. The Questioner moved forward but the boys at his side held on to his arms and he seemed willing to be held. The policemen shared a joke. Their radios crackled and their helmets hid their eyes.

Shahana walked on in front. As she passed the Bengali group a couple of the boys turned round. She looked at them and cocked her head. Nazneen wished that Shahana had her trousers on. But today Chanu had ordered skirt and no trousers. Yesterday, both the girls had to put trousers beneath their uniforms. It depended where Chanu directed his outrage.