The first weekend after their mother died, Parvaiz had stopped eating. He was unable to explain to himself why he was rejecting every item of food Aunty Naseem and her daughters and Aneeka offered him, and even Aneeka was at a loss to understand it. It was Isma, who disliked cooking above all other domestic chores, who had come into his room with a masala omelet such as their mother used to make for breakfast every Saturday. She had cut it into pieces and fed it to him, forkful by forkful.
Now she looked up in surprise and smiled in a way usually reserved for Aneeka. “I’d like that,” she said.
Her smile sent him out the door into the cold December night, head tipped back to count the stars and keep the tears from falling. It was there that Aneeka found him a short while later.
“You’re going to have to get rid of that growth on your face,” she said, maybe or maybe not noticing the hand he quickly rubbed across his eyes at her approach. “The Heathrow officials might mistake what is fashionista for fundo and decide not to let you board the plane to Pakistan. Particularly if you’re flying through Istanbul. Jihadi alert!”
He laughed too loudly, and his twin touched his arm. “You sure you want to go? You know I’m only allowing you to do it because you obviously have to get away from her. Will you never tell me who she is? I promise I won’t beat her up too badly.”
“I’m going in order to improve my career prospects for that Asian marriage site. Though the bio should still start Handsome Londoner who loves his sister.”
She stepped forward until there was almost no space between them, butted her head against his shoulder. “Both you and Isma leaving. What will I do all alone?”
He held her earlobe between thumb and finger. He knew she had wanted to say this since he first announced he was going. There was no living person for whom he’d leave her just weeks before she had to say good-bye to the older sister who had raised her—raised them both—as much as their mother ever had. But the dead made their own demands, impossible to refuse.
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While the plane was taxiing he ignored the instructions to turn off his phone and listened, instead, to the audio track “Twin Heard from the Garden Shed.”
These were the things her voice said:
It’s getting late; even the birds have gone home.
Oh god, I’m interrupting you again.
Couldn’t you have found a less solitary obsession?
Where are you these days?
Regardless, dinner’s ready. Might as well come in.
The wheels left tarmac. He uploaded the track to her account on the Cloud and deleted her from his phone.
6
PARVAIZ PAID THE MAN in the electronics store with the Turkish liras he was carrying in his knapsack, and then asked, as if it were an afterthought, if he sold phones with SIM cards that allowed international calls.
“The new arrivals will have to call home, and there’s always one who weeps into the phone and covers it with snot. So they’re not getting my phone again,” he said.
“I don’t need to know your business,” said the shopkeeper, moving over to the glass-topped display case housing cell phones. “Here.” He pulled out a bricklike handset that belonged to a time when calls and texts were all anyone expected from a phone, and that continued to exist, Parvaiz was sure, only because people in high-crime areas liked to carry around a decoy phone to hand over to muggers. “No charge,” the man said expansively, as he slipped the SIM card into its compartment.
“Jazakallah khayr,” Parvaiz said, scooping up the pile of boxed equipment for which he’d just paid a small fortune. “Do you have a back door? My car’s parked behind your shop.”
“Can you carry all that? Do you want to call your friend to help you? I would, but my back . . .”
“This is nothing after what they made us do in military training,” he said.
“You’re a fighter? I thought you were with Abu Raees in the studio.”
“I am. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t teach me how to fight in the way of Allah in preparation for a time when I can be more useful that way. Why is it, my friend, that you’re still living in Turkey?”
The man blanched. “I do my part from here. The back door—through there. I’ll open it for you.”
Parvaiz stepped out into the sunlight and started to walk toward the row of parked cars until he heard the door close. He turned, made sure the man had gone back inside, then set the pile of boxes down on the side of the road, placed his traceable smartphone on top of the pile, and began to run.
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Six months earlier he had entered Raqqa in the late afternoon, his stomach contracting with excitement and terror. A motorcycle backfired as it drove past an antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck; the soldier swiveled the weapon in the motorcyclist’s direction. A joke, Farooq told him, relax! A row of palm trees slapped their fronds against one another in a breeze that wasn’t felt at street level. The driver of the car, one of the two men who had picked Farooq and Parvaiz up at Istanbul airport, insisted you could hear the palm fronds whisper Allah if your ear was good enough. His ear was better than anyone else’s in the car, Parvaiz said; he meant good as in “holy,” Farooq explained. The colors of the buildings were sun-bleached, but there was a brightness in the call of the birds. A polyethylene bag caught in the electric wires strung across the street made shivering sounds. A man juggled a flattened loaf of bread the size of his arm that made all the saliva rush to Parvaiz’s mouth; a fwump! sound as the oven-hot bread was dropped onto a table on the pavement. Bearded men stood around a cluster of motorcycles, two in long robes with bomber jackets, the others in jumpers and trousers, arguing in Arabic. Minarets reached high into the sky—at prayer time the azaan would bounce between one slim tower and the next. A tank rumbled past a monument with two headless statues. A very young girl in a green-and-yellow dress walked behind two women in black niqabs, even their eyes invisible beneath a face veil; Farooq hummed the music from a popular ninja video game until one of the men in the car warned him to stop disrespecting sisters or he’d have to report him to the Hisba—this was the first Parvaiz heard of the morality police, and he saw how mention of them strained Farooq’s expression.
The soundscape changed around the central square, or perhaps Parvaiz stopped listening so acutely because of the distraction of heads of enemy soldiers mounted on spiked railings. It was curiously unmoving, something you might see in a TV show. One day, inshallah, there would be no enemy and children would play in the square, Farooq said. In the company of the other men his English conversation had become peppered with Arabic, and perhaps this was what made his words sound false. Then a different part of town, more affluent: villa-like houses, tall apartment blocks, the yellow and white paint on the facades brighter here. The car pulled up in front of one of the double-storied villas, and Farooq said, “This is our stop.”
“Who lives here?” Parvaiz asked, stepping out of the car, taking in the sprawling luxury of the house, the size of three homes in his neighborhood put together.