White Teeth (28 page)

“Liberties!” squealed Hifan.

“He's cussin' you, yeah?” confirmed Ranil.

“You better tell 'im,” warned Rajik.

Millat waited a minute. Timing was everything. Then he turned around, stuck his arse in the air, and farted long and loud in the ticket man's direction.

The Crew, on cue:
“Somoka¯mi!”

“What did you call me? You—what did you say? You little bastards. Can't tell me in English? Have to talk your Paki language?”

Millat slammed his fist so hard on the glass that it reverberated down the booths to the ticket man at the other end selling tickets to Milton Keynes.

“First: I'm not a Paki, you ignorant fuck. And second: you don't need a translator, yeah? I'll give it to you straight. You're a fucking faggot, yeah? Queer boy, poofter, batty-rider, shit-dick.”

There was nothing Millat's Crew prided themselves on more than the number of euphemisms they could offer for homosexuality.

“Arse-bandit, fairy-fucker, toilet-trader.”

“You want to thank God for the glass between us, boy.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thank Allah, yeah? I hope he fucks you up wicked, yeah? We're going to Bradford to sort out the likes of you, yeah?
Chief!
”

Halfway up platform 12, about to board a train they had no tickets for, a King's Cross security guy stopped Millat's Crew to ask them a question. “You boys not looking for any trouble, are you?”

The question was fair. Millat's Crew looked like trouble. And, at the time, a crew that looked like trouble in this particular way had a name, they were of a breed:
Raggastani.

It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indie kids, wide-boys, ravers, rudeboys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas, and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories. Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati, and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah
featured,
but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck
geezer
who would fight in their corner if necessary; kung fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album
Fear of a Black Planet,
Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani. People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks. People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teachers' comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. People had even fucked with Millat, with his tight jeans and his white rock. But no one fucked with any of them anymore because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in stereo. Naturally, there was a uniform. They each dripped gold and wore bandanas, either wrapped around their foreheads or tied at the joint of an arm or leg. The trousers were enormous, swamping things, the left leg always inexplicably rolled up to the knee; the sneakers were equally spectacular, with tongues so tall they obscured the entire ankle; baseball caps were compulsory, low slung and irremovable; and everything, everything, everything was
Nike
‰; wherever the five of them went the impression they left behind was of one gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval. And they
walked
in a very particular way, the left side of their bodies assuming a kind of loose paralysis that needed carrying along by the right side; a kind of glorified, funky limp like the slow, padding movement that Yeats imagined for his rough millennial beast. Ten years early, while the happy acidheads danced through the Summer of Love, Millat's Crew were slouching toward Bradford.

“No trouble, yeah?” said Millat to the security guy.

“Just going—” began Hifan.

“To Bradford,” said Rajik.

“For business, yeah?” explained Dipesh.

“See-ya! Bida¯yo!” called Hifan, as they slipped into the train, gave him the finger, and shoved their arses up against the closing doors.

“Tax the window seat, yeah? Nice. I've
blatantly
got to have a fag in here, yeah? I'm fuckin'
wired,
yeah? This whole business, man. This fuckin' geezer, man. He's a fuckin' coconut—I'd like to fuck him up, yeah?”

“Is he actually gonna be there?”

All serious questions were always addressed to Millat, and Millat always answered the group as a whole. “No way. He ain't going to be there. Just brothers going to be there. It's a fucking protest, you chief, why's he going to go to a protest against himself?”

“I'm just saying,” said Ranil, wounded, “I'd fuck him up, yeah? If he was there, you know. Dirty fucking book.”

“It's a fucking insult!” said Millat, spitting some gum against the window. “We've taken it too long in this country. And now we're getting it from our own, man. Rhas clut! He's a fucking ba¯dor, white man's puppet.”

“My uncle says he can't even spell,” said a furious Hifan, the most honestly religious of the lot. “And he dares to talk about Allah!”

“Allah'll fuck him up, yeah?” cried Rajik, the least intelligent, who thought of God as some kind of cross between Monkey-Magic and Bruce Willis. “He'll kick him in the balls. Dirty book.”

“You read it?” asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park.

There was a general pause.

Millat said, “I haven't exackly read it exackly—but I know all about that shit, yeah?”

To be more precise, Millat hadn't read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books; could not pick out the writer in a lineup of other writers (irresistible, this lineup 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 smelled 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 filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped 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 midsentence, 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 gray 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 twenty-four-volume-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 flyers collected and preserved over two years, beautiful Air Max sneakers, copies 20–75 of
2000 AD
magazine, signed photo of Chuck D, impossibly rare copy of Slick Rick's “Hey Young World,”
The Catcher in the Rye,
his guitar,
The Godfather I
and
II, Mean Streets, Rumblefish, Dog Day Afternoon,
and
Shaft in Africa—
all had been placed on the funeral pyre, now a smoldering mound of ashes, which was giving off fumes of plastic and paper, stinging the boy's eyes, which 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.”

November 10, 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 it, or whether they would stop dying in future, but it was educational all the same; as good an excuse for a get-together as any. It was a Thursday night, Alsana and Clara had cooked, and everybody was watching history on TV.

“Who's for more rice?”

Millat and Irie held out their plates, jostling for prime position.