But when she called back a few minutes later she was anxious, didn’t directly answer his question about whether she’d arranged whatever she was trying to arrange. He’d said perhaps he’d be safest returning to Farooq, maybe trying this again some other time. No, just go to the consulate. I can’t. I’m scared of what they’ll do to me. No, wait, give me five minutes, I’ll call you back. No—if I’m going back I have to go back now, before he realizes I’ve run away. No, no, no. Don’t. I’ll come to you. I’ll get the next flight. Just find someplace he won’t find you, and stay there until I arrive. We’ll go to the consulate together. And all he could think was at least that way he’d see her. Whatever they did to him once he arrived at the consulate, at least he would see her first. He could bear anything else, as long as he saw her first.
A little space of clarity opened up in his brain. Of course they wouldn’t allow her to board a flight to the very place from which her twin had disappeared into the world of the enemy. She was probably still arguing the point, refusing to leave the airport until they gave her a boarding pass. Isma’s voice in his head calling him selfish, irresponsible, and she was right.
He wrote to her: You don’t need to come here and hold my hand. It’ll be ok. I’m going to the consulate now. Will be home soon—biryani when I get there? Page 131 of the recipe book.
He pressed send, his hands steady.
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It was Farooq, in the end, who was his means of escape. He turned up at the villa-cum-studio one afternoon, catching Parvaiz in a headlock as he stepped off the prayer mat in the covered veranda at the end of Zuhr prayers, and kissing him hard on the temple.
“My little warrior’s grown up,” he said. “Do you get a lunch break?”
Abu Raees, who had been praying alongside Parvaiz, tapped Farooq on the arm. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’m a fighter,” Farooq said, moving his shoulders back, his chest forward in a way Parvaiz had once thought of as impressive and now saw as ridiculous. “And I’m his sponsor.”
Abu Raees looked as uninterested in this as he did in all conversations suggesting any of his employees had a life beyond the studio. “Early for lunch,” was all he said.
“I’m driving out soon,” Farooq said, with a tone of self-importance. “Picking up new recruits in Istanbul tomorrow.” Glancing at Parvaiz, he said, “The cousins are getting good at it.”
Parvaiz forced his face into a look of appreciation. A few weeks earlier, during a dinner of kababs at a restaurant overlooking the Euphrates, the Scotsman confirmed what Parvaiz already half knew: when they’d met, Farooq had been in London to train his cousins as recruiters. Parvaiz had appeared at just the right time to serve as guinea pig. The Scotsman hadn’t really said “guinea pig.” The word “pig” was too haram to pass his lips. Instead, he’d found some other way of expressing it that made Parvaiz out to be an instrument of Allah’s will. From Farooq’s manner now it seemed this was a line Parvaiz was expected to have taken too. Parvaiz imagined running a sword through Farooq’s throat, hearing the gurgle of blood.
“Take him with you,” Abu Raees said, jerking a thumb at Parvaiz. “I need some equipment for the studio.”
“If you can organize a pass before I leave,” Farooq said doubtfully, looking at his watch.
“Of course I can,” Abu Raees said.
That easy.
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He stood on the pavement of Me?rutiyet Caddesi, looking at the brick wall with black spikes rising from it that allowed only a partial glimpse of the facade of the consulate. But the view of the red, white, and blue flag that fluttered from the roof, cheerful in all its colors, was uninterrupted. Mo Farah at the Olympics, Aunty Naseem’s commemorative cake tin from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
London. Home.
Aneeka
7
i.
It was not a possibility her mind knew how to contain. Everyone else in the world, yes. Everyone else in the world, inescapably. Some in stages: their grandfather, for weeks half paralyzed, unable to speak, even his breath unfamiliar. Some in a thunderclap: their mother, dropping dead on the floor of the travel agency where she worked, leaving behind the morning’s teacup with her lipstick on the rim, treasured until the day one of the twins stood up in a rage and swung the cup by its handle, smashing their mother’s mouth (Aneeka thought it was her; Parvaiz insisted it was him). Some in a sleight of hand: their grandmother, awaiting the test results that they had already decided would be presented as a death sentence, crossing the road as a drunk driver took a turn too fast; the doctor called two weeks later with the good news that the tumor was benign. Some as abstraction: their father, never a living presence in their life, dead for years before they knew to attach that word to him. Everyone died, everyone but the twins, who looked at each other to understand their own grief.
Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief; grief made a twin wear the same shirt for days on end to preserve the morning on which the dead were still living; grief made a twin peel stars off the ceiling and lie in bed with glowing points adhered to fingertips; grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world. Grief was a shape-shifter, and invisible too; grief could be captured as reflection in a twin’s eye. Grief heard its death sentence the morning you both woke up and one was singing and the other caught the song.
When she received the words that made her singular for the first time in her life, she pushed them away. It was not true, they meant someone else, it wasn’t him. Where was the proof, bring him to me. No, they couldn’t do these things because it was not him. If it had been him it wouldn’t be this man sitting in Aunty Naseem’s living room bringing the news, a plastic comb sticking out of his breast pocket. He wasn’t one of yours, she told the man; we aren’t yours. Then she left him downstairs, went to her room to catch up on the reading for class she had neglected since her brother had called earlier that day. And now he was sulking because she hadn’t come to him though she promised she would. She locked her door against Aunty Naseem’s knocking and entreating. It wasn’t her fault, they hadn’t let her through. For your own protection, they’d said, taking her passport away, refusing to say when she could get it back. Or no, he wasn’t sulking, he was on his way to her, the texts he had sent stuck somewhere in a foreign network, this happened sometimes, a logjam of communication unable to cross borders for hours or days at a time and then the onslaught of pinging that was every message arriving in triplicate. It had happened with her aunt texting from Karachi six months ago: Where is he? When is he coming? He could at least call to explain, don’t they teach manners in England? He was on his way to her, flying home, watching the stars from his window seat—Castor and Pollux holding hands through the cold, dark night.
She fell asleep and at some point there were arms around her in that childhood familial way. It wasn’t a surprise, but that made it no less a pleasure to curl into the warmth of a twin and slip deeper into that level of sleep where nightmares can’t reach, held fast by love, a foretaste of heaven.
ii.