“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. “I’ve been thinking, why does the son of Abu Parvaiz seem to know so little about his father?”
Parvaiz had no words with which to answer this. The question had never been a question before. He’d grown up knowing that his father was a shameful secret, one that must be kept from the world outside or else posters would appear around Preston Road with the line DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE? and rocks would be thrown through windows and he and his sisters wouldn’t receive invitations to the homes of their classmates and no girl would ever say yes to him. The secrecy had lived inside the house too. His mother and Isma both carried an anger toward Adil Pasha too immense for words, and as for Aneeka, her complete lack of feeling or curiosity about their father had been the first definite sign that he and his twin were two, not one. His grandmother alone had wanted to talk about the absence in their lives, and part of their closeness came from how sometimes she would call him into her room and whisper stories about the high-spirited, good-looking, laughing-eyed boy she’d raised. But the stories were always of a boy, never of the man he became. Oh, something happened, I don’t know, she’d say whenever Parvaiz tried to find out who his father had become by the time his son entered the world.
“Because no one ever told me,” he said now.
“Do you want to know?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t answer so quickly. Once you know, you’ll have to think about what it means to be that man’s son. Maybe it’s easier never to think about him.”
He had always watched boys and their fathers with an avidity composed primarily of hunger. Whenever any of those fathers had made a certain kind of gesture toward him—a hand placed on the back of his neck, the word “son,” an invitation to a football match—he’d retreat, ashamed and afraid in a jumbled way that only grew more so as the years passed and as the worlds of girls and boys grew more separate; there were times he was not a twin but rather the only male in a house that knew all the secrets women shared with one another but none that fathers taught their sons.
“I think about him every day,” he said, whispering it.
“Good. Good man. What time are you done with work tomorrow?”
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And so it began. At some point mid-morning, every morning, Farooq would text with a location: sometimes a kabab shop, sometimes a street corner—but more often than not, a betting shop on the High Road. That was usually where he was when Parvaiz finished work. Regardless of location, they’d talk and talk. Or Farooq would talk and Parvaiz would listen to those stories of his father for which he’d always yearned—not a footloose boy or feckless husband but a man of courage who fought injustice, saw beyond the lie of national boundaries, kept his comrades’ spirits up through times of darkness. Here was Abu Parvaiz, the first to cross a bridge over a ravine after an earthquake despite continuing aftershocks, to deliver supplies to those stranded on the other side; here was Abu Parvaiz using the butt of his Kalashnikov as a weapon when the bullets ran out; here was Abu Parvaiz dipping his head into a mountain stream to perform his ablutions and coming up with a beard of icicles, which lead to dancing on the riverbank as if he were Adil Pasha at a discotheque rather than Abu Parvaiz in Chechnya, whose every shake of the head produced the sound of wind chimes. Of all the stories this was the one that most clearly evoked the father he’d never known: the rushing stream, the dancing icicles, the men around him similarly braving the cold water so they could provide the jester-warrior Abu Parvaiz with an accompanying orchestra.
“The father every son wishes he had,” Farooq said.
“But I never had him as a father,” Parvaiz replied, tracing the lines of his own palm with the grenade pin—was it really?—Farooq had brought along to the kabab shop.
“Do you think he wanted the world to be as it is? No. But he saw it for what it is. And having seen it he understood that a man has larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to.”
To help Parvaiz understand those responsibilities, Farooq talked to him of history: the terror with which Christendom had watched the ascent of Islam, the thousand years of Muslim supremacy, which was eventually squandered by eunuchlike Ottomans and Mughals who had lost sight of the moral path, and then the bloodlust with which the Christians had avenged themselves for their centuries of humiliation; imperialism, with its racist underpinnings of a “civilizing mission,” followed by the cruel joke of pretending to “give” independence when really they were merely changing economic models via the creation of client states, their nonsensical boundaries designed to cause instability. There didn’t seem to be any part of the Muslim world Farooq didn’t know about—Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan and Palestine and Turkey and Chechnya and Kashmir and Uzbekistan. If ever Parvaiz started to lose his concentration, Farooq would swerve the conversation toward football (he supported Real Madrid, Parvaiz Arsenal, but they agreed on the greatness of ?zil) or the tiniest details of Parvaiz’s life (What did you have for dinner? Any interesting characters at the greengrocer’s? Let me listen to another one of your recordings—this time, I’ll guess what it is) or the American reality TV show Farooq watched devotedly and that Parvaiz started watching too, in order to talk to him about it. But no matter what the topic of conversation, it always returned to the central preoccupation of Farooq’s life, the heart of all his lessons: how to be a man.