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“You don’t have to decide that’s the end of it,” Hira Shah said that evening, when they sat down together for a typically elaborate meal. A single woman in her mid-fifties who had never had to cook on a regular basis for anyone, Hira retained the idea that company for dinner must be occasion for pyrotechnics in the kitchen, no matter how frequently company was over—or perhaps she did that only when her company hadn’t had anyone to mother her in a long time. “You should at least try explaining why you feel the way you do. What is there to lose?”
“What is there to gain? He’ll be going back to London soon in any case.”
Hira looked at her over a forkful of rogan josh. “Do you know when you were at LSE I thought you found me offensive?”
“That’s ridiculous. Oh, you mean that first term. When I rolled my eyes at you?”
It overturned seven hundred ninety years of precedent in British law, the Kashmiri lecturer had been saying during an impassioned presentation on control orders and their impact on civil liberties when Hira saw the quiet girl in the third row roll her eyes. Would you like to say something, Ms. Pasha? Yes, Dr. Shah, if you look at colonial laws you’ll see plenty of precedent for depriving people of their rights; the only difference is this time it’s applied to British citizens, and even that’s not as much of a change as you might think, because they’re rhetorically being made un-British. Say more. The 7/7 terrorists were never described by the media as “British terrorists.” Even when the word “British” was used, it was always “British of Pakistani descent” or “British Muslim” or, my favorite, “British passport holders,” always something interposed between their Britishness and terrorism. Well, you have quite a voice when you decide to use it.
Isma had gone home that evening and stood in front of the mirror, pressing down on her larynx, and felt the slight tremor of something on the cusp of waking. And wake it had—her suppressed anger distilled and abstracted into essays about the sociological impact of the War on Terror. Then Isma’s mother died, and that voice was lost—until now. Dr. Shah was coaxing it back with the shared paper they were working on—“The Insecurity State: Britain and the Instrumentalization of Fear”—which took Isma’s experience in the interrogation room and made it research.
“No, not then. All the way through until you graduated. I thought you disliked something in me personally, and that’s why you acted so distant when I tried to talk about anything other than work. It was only after your mother died and you told me everything that you made sense.”
How she’d wept that day in Hira Shah’s office. For her mother, for the grandmother who had predeceased her daughter-in-law by less than a year, for her father, for the orphaned twins who had never really known their mother before bitterness and stress ate away the laughing, affectionate woman she’d once been—and, most of all, for herself.
“I don’t want Eamonn’s pity, if that’s what you’re driving at here.”
“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”
“So—what? I should just call him up—” She held the saltshaker to her ear, miming a phone. “Eamonn, here’s a funny story about my father.”
“Maybe without the word ‘funny.’”
“And then? Do I follow up with the even funnier story of my brother? To the son of the new home secretary?”
“Mmm. Maybe start with your father, and see how it goes from there. And one other piece of advice. Reconsider the hijab.” She pointed at the turban that Isma had left near the door along with her shoes, the latter out of consideration for Hira’s hardwood floors and Persian carpets, the former out of consideration for her sensibility.
“Don’t miss an opportunity with that one, do you, Dr. Shah?”
“It might be keeping your young man at a distance. He’ll read things into what it means.”
“He’s not my young man and his reading won’t be so wrong. And when did I say I wanted anything from him in that way?” It had been so long since anything approaching “that way” that she didn’t know if she knew how to want it anymore. Mo at university had been the last and—barring some forgettable fumbling—the first man with whom she’d known any physical intimacy. Perhaps if they’d gone further than they had she’d have a sense of missing something, but Mo worried about their eternal damnation and Isma thought you should at least be able to imagine marrying someone before doing something so significant with them. In retrospect, it was a mystery they’d stayed together almost their entire second year of university.
“You know the Quran tells us to enjoy sex as one of God’s blessings?” Hira said.
“Within marriage!”
“We all have our versions of selective reading when it comes to the Holy Book.”
Isma laughed and stood to clear the plates. From her greathearted vantage point Hira Shah saw Isma clearly—so careworn, so blemished by all the circumstances of her life that certain options had simply crossed their arms and turned away from her. But when a boy stepped into Isma’s path, his laughter trailing a promise that life could be joyful if you stayed near enough to him, Hira turned her attention to a piece of fabric and said, There, that and an untold story are the only obstacles between you and him.
For a moment Isma stood in the kitchen, with its familiar scents and the warm glow of its lamps, and allowed herself to believe it.There was perfectly good cappuccino near his grandparents’ house; he didn’t have to drive twenty-five minutes every morning to the same café. She caught her reflection in the window. She had no idea where he went in the evenings, where he spent his nights. Where he was right now.
“Stupid,” she said, and turned her attention to loading the dishwasher.
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Eamonn opened his mouth and the sound that came out was that of a grasshopper. Say something, she said. Chirp. Isma opened her eyes from one darkness into another that was interrupted by a rectangle of light. It was 2:17 a.m. Why was Aneeka calling at this hour? No, no, no, no, no. Her baby, her brother, the child she’d raised. She grabbed at the phone—images in her mind of his death, violent, unbearable—and pressed the answer button. Aneeka’s face a death mask.
“It was you,” her sister said.
“Parvaiz?” her own voice strange with sleep and fear.
“You were the one who told the police what he’d done.”
One kind of panic ending, another beginning. “Who told you that?”
“Aunty Naseem is on the phone talking to Razia Apa about it. So you admit it?”