Farooq sighed heavily and sat down beside him, hooking his arm around Parvaiz’s neck. “What do they teach you in history?”
The French Revolution. That was Farooq’s lesson of the day. The cradle, the bedrock, the foundation of enlightenment and liberalism and democracy and all the things that make the West so smugly superior to the rest of the world. Let us agree to accept for a moment that the ideals that came from it were good. Liberty, equality, fraternity—who could argue against that? Well, Farooq could, but that was another day’s lesson. For the moment, accept those ideals as ideal. But where would those ideals be without the Reign of Terror that nurtured and protected them with blood, eliminating all enemies, internal and external, that threatened the new utopia, and did so in full view of the public? It might have been regrettable—a man would rather fish with his friends than cut off the heads of his enemies—but it was necessary. Eventually the terror ends, having served its purpose of protecting a new—revolutionary—state of affairs that is besieged by enemies who are terrified of its moral power.
“So the question for you is this: Will you protect the new revolution? Will you do the work your father would have done if he’d lived?”
Parvaiz looked from Farooq back to the screen, flicking through the remaining images. A land of order and beauty and life and youth. A Kalashnikov resting on one shoulder, a brother’s arm around the other. It was another planet, one on which he’d always be the boy from Earth whose lungs don’t know how to breathe this wondrous, terrifying atmosphere.
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But increasingly, his lungs didn’t know how to breathe the air of London. MI5 officers were present at Bagram, Farooq told him, and showed him evidence to corroborate that. Your government, the one that took taxes from your family and claimed to represent the people, knew what was going on. How can you live in this place, accepting, after all that you now know? How can you live in this mirage of democracy and freedom? What kind of man are you, what kind of son are you?
The questions followed him through his days now. Everywhere he saw evidence of rot and corruption, lies and cover-ups. His two sisters had allowed themselves to become part of it too: one preparing to go to America, the nation that had killed their father and hundreds of thousands of other Muslim fathers; the other propping up the lie that theirs was a country where citizens had rights and courts of appeal.
At night, via the proxy servers Farooq said he could rely on, he went deeper and deeper into the Web, to stories of dogs raping prisoners at Bagram, pictures of tortured bodies, medical accounts of what the different forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques” could do to a body and mind. One night he lay in bed with his desk lamp directed straight at his eyes, his most powerful headphones blasting heavy metal into his ears—he managed for no more than twenty minutes before, whimpering, pathetic, he had to restore his room to darkness and silence. Increasingly, during the day he would stop in the middle of the smallest action—handing a bag of celery to a customer, waiting for a bus, raising a cup of tea to his mouth—and feel the wrongness of it all, the falseness of his life.
“You need to break up with her, she’s no good for you,” Aneeka kept saying, unable to imagine any pain in the world larger than a bad love affair. More than once he found her trying out different password combinations on his phone—he’d changed it from their joint birthday to the day he first met Farooq.
One day Farooq showed him a photograph that he recognized. A white man kneeling in the sand just prior to his execution, an image that encapsulated for the world the barbarity of the caliphate. When he’d first seen it he’d felt sorrow for the man with the courage to try to look brave with a blade at his throat, whose only crime was the nation he’d been born into. But this time what struck him most powerfully were the man’s clothes, the same shade of orange as the prison jumpsuit in which his father had died. His vision expanded; he saw beyond the expression of the individual kneeling in the desert to the message the caliphate sent with his death: What you do to ours we will do to yours.
So this was how it felt to have a nation that wielded its sword on your behalf and told you acquiescence wasn’t the only option. Dear God, the vein-flooding pleasure of it.
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And then he found himself preparing to leave.
How exactly it happened he couldn’t have said. He had been too busy changing to stop and chart the change. It had been a long time since he and Farooq had discussed football, reality shows, life at the greengrocer’s. There was only one subject, and eventually he understood that the subject was a destination.
“You’re sure I can come back if I don’t like it?”
“Of course you can. I’m back here, aren’t I?”
“You’ve never said why.”
“Had to deal with family stuff. Then you happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Should have left weeks ago. But thought if I waited, maybe you’d come too.”
“You stayed for me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll really help me find people there who knew my father?”
“I really will.”
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“I’m your brother.”
“Yes. I know. Thank you.”
He called his cousin, the guitarist in Karachi—the one he’d hated because on the only occasion they’d met the other boy had said, “I’m a Pakistani and you’re a Paki”—and said he was going to take up the offer, proffered by the guitarist’s mother, to spend some months in Karachi working on a popular music show to build up his professional credentials. He sorted out his paperwork, one half of his brain believing he really would end up in Karachi, and booked a flight with a connection in Istanbul that would arrive in the old Ottoman capital soon after Farooq’s flight. When Aneeka talked about meeting him in Karachi over Easter he enjoyed making travel plans with her, their heads bent together over maps of Pakistan. Badshahi Mosque and Kim’s Gun, the ruins of Taxila, the Peshawar Museum, with the world’s largest Gandhara collection, and in Karachi the studio of the music show they’d been listening to since its inception a few years ago, where Parvaiz would soon be working.
“If I like it there, maybe I’ll stay awhile and you can visit too,” he said to Isma the December night before he was due to leave, the statement brought on by the smell of the masala omelet she was cooking for his final dinner at home.