Woke up to rain gusting in through the windows broken by rocks. Isma had said at least it meant they spared Aunty Naseem’s house. Isma, shattered and horrified, playing the good citizen even now, dragging her sister’s name into that shameful act. Isma, traitor, betrayer.
Alone now in the house they’d grown up in, empty, the Migrants gone with all their furniture, only a mattress for furnishing, which Kaleem Bhai and Isma dragged across the street, since you insist on sleeping here, a double mattress for both sisters but this house was for the twins only now. Made Isma leave with a shrieking flapping of arms madwoman behavior that finally drove her away. Downstairs a pounding sound, what? Someone trying to break in, to break the house from inside for the crime of having been a roof over the terrorist’s head. Picked up the electric kettle with four heat settings the closest thing to a weapon that remained. Opened the door to David Beckham, the Queen, Zayn Malik boarding up the broken windows. Beckham almost hammered his thumb in surprise. “Didn’t think anyone was here,” he said from behind the mask with the voice of Abdul.
“Better go inside there may still be journos lurking,” said Zayn Malik, who was really David Beckham’s father.
“Cuppa would be lovely, though,” said the Queen aka Nat the greengrocer, jerking her tiaraed head toward the kettle.
xii.
Countless hours of recording, and never his own voice. As though he’d started to practice disappearing long ago. Now he wouldn’t even enter her dreams. Too angry.
xiii.
HOW MANY PARVAIZ PASHAS WILL IT TAKE FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO WAKE UP?
The revelation that Adil Pasha, the father of recently dead terrorist Parvaiz Pasha, abandoned his family in order to take up jihad has not entirely come as a surprise to one former classmate of the Preston Road resident.
“There was a rumor that his father had been a jihadi in Afghanistan who died in Guantánamo,” said the classmate, who wished to remain unnamed. “His sisters always denied it and said he’d died of malaria while abroad, but Parvaiz never did. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back it’s obvious he thought jihad was something to boast about when he was still just a little kid.”
Sources at the Met say Adil Pasha fought with jihadi groups in Bosnia and Chechnya in the ’90s, and traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 to fight with the Taliban. He is believed to have died soon after. “We have no idea if he was killed in a battle or died of malaria or from other causes. But if he’d ever been in Guantánamo there would have been records, and there simply aren’t,” said a retired Special Branch officer who interviewed the Pasha family in 2002. “I remember the son, Parvaiz. He was very young but was already being allowed to idolize the father who fought with Britain’s enemies. I took away the photograph album he had with pictures of his dad holding a Kalashnikov, and an inscription saying ‘One day you’ll join me in jihad.’ I recommended CPS keep a close eye on him, but unfortunately this recommendation was never taken up.”
It’s a cause of profound concern that the children of jihadis, many of them British-born, are not closely watched by the state. How many more Parvaiz Pashas will it take for things to change?
xiv.
He’d returned from the Pakistan High Commission that day to say he didn’t have to pay the exorbitant visa fees for British nationals or go through bureaucratic processes in order to work in Karachi because turns out he had something called a NICOP.
“Oh yes,” Isma said, “I got them for all of us when I was planning that trip to Pakistan which never happened, remember?”
Up to the attic Parvaiz went, and down he came triumphant. One for you and one for me, he said, handing Aneeka the laminated card with NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD FOR OVERSEAS PAKISTANI printed on it. She glanced at the picture, remembered then how sullenly she had accompanied her sister to the High Commission to have the card issued, hating the idea of missing a summer in London, to spend it in a country teeming with relatives who thought blood ties gave them the right to interrogate and lecture and point to the sisters’ hijabs as proof that British Pakistanis were “caught in the past” then point to their jeans to prove they were “mixed up.” It didn’t improve her mood to see that the card insisted on listing NAME OF FATHER. In the end, though, something in the phone conversations with the rich relatives who had promised to fund the trip had gotten Isma’s back up, and the cards were dispatched to the filing cabinet in the attic along with birth certificates and NHS cards and X-rays of broken bones.
“What is an Overseas Pakistani, exactly?” she asked.
Parvaiz shrugged. “Think it just means your family’s from there so you’re exempt from visas. Anyway, that’s the only part that’s relevant to me.”
“To us,” she said. “I’ll need it when I come to visit you. Put it in my purse, would you? I don’t want to have to go up to the spidery attic to find it when you’re gone.” She had no memory of his expression as he did as she asked.
Now the laminated card with her sullen fourteen-year-old self sat on the desk at the High Commission while the man with the plastic comb in his pocket looked sadly down on it.
“You should do what your older sister says, and stay away,” he said. “Ladies don’t go for the burial anyway, so you would only be praying at home, which you can do just as well in London as in Karachi—Allah would hear even a prayer whispered by a mute from the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean.”
“Am I or am I not entitled to a Pakistani passport?”
“Yes.”
“I have a bank draft for the urgent-processing fee. Please tell me who I should give it to.”
xv.
HO-JABI! PERVY PASHA’S TWIN SISTER ENGINEERED SEX TRYSTS WITH HOME SECRETARY’S SON
Aneeka “Knickers” Pasha, the 19-year-old twin sister of Muslim fanatic Parvaiz “Pervy” Pasha has been revealed as her brother’s accomplice. She hunted down the Home Secretary’s son, Eamonn, 24, and used sex to try and brainwash him into convincing his father to allow her terrorist brother back into England.