The British Deputy High Commission compound was surrounded by barbed wire, vans bristling with guns, and roadblocks to prevent any stranger’s approach. But just a few minutes’ walk away there was a park lined with banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.
Here she would sit with her brother until the world changed or both of them crumbled into the soil around them.
Karamat
8
KARAMAT LONE IGNORED the unusual twitchiness of the shadow stretched out alongside his on the Thames path and poured a second shot of coffee from the thermos into a paper cup. On two separate occasions Eamonn had given him one of those insulated mugs as a birthday present, well intentioned but oblivious to the mug’s inability to keep a man’s hands warm while doing the same for the coffee. When it came to his son, Karamat had always treated “well intentioned” as good enough. With his daughter, the only other possible candidate for such preferential treatment, there’d never been any need. Poor fellow, he used to think, considering the gap in abilities and achievements between Eamonn and his younger sister. It had never occurred to him that Eamonn alone was blind to his own—the word hurt in relation to a man’s only son, but nothing else would do—inadequacy. All the good cheer Karamat had admired as a front became an embarrassment when revealed to be a genuine attitude. She loves me! he had continued to insist in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Why is that so impossible to believe? A question Karamat had hated answering. He held the paper cup to his face, allowing the steam to enter his nostrils, warm his cheeks. There was a precise calibration to how long you could do this before the coffee dipped below optimum drinking temperature.
He gulped down the coffee, felt it burn its way pleasingly through him while he continued to look at the Palace of Westminster and its watery reflection, the yellow stone pink-gold in the interlude of sunrise. The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change. Here Britain whittled down the powers of the monarchy, here Britain agreed to leave its empire, here Britain instituted universal suffrage, here Britain would see the grandson of the colonized take his place as prime minister. The most constant criticism against Karamat Lone was that his positions flip-flopped between traditionalist and reformer—but the critics learned nothing from their own inability to know which was which. Take, for instance, his intention to expand the home secretary’s power to revoke British citizenship so that it applied to British-born single passport holders. It was, clearly, the sensible fulfillment of a law that was so far only half made. You had to determine someone’s fitness for citizenship based on actions, not accidents of birth. An increase in draconian powers! said one set of his opponents on the left; a renewed assault on true Englishmen and -women by Britain’s migrant population, said another set on the far right. Both sets probably drank coffee out of insulated mugs.
You’re doing the contemptuous thing again, Terry would say.
It was one of his wife’s few remaining misconceptions about him. Contempt, disdain, scorn: these emotions were stops along a closed loop that originated and terminated in a sense of superiority. In their preservation of the status quo they were of no use to Karamat Lone. A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place. He’d thought he had mastered the art of directing the fire, but yesterday, with TV cameras on him, he’d heard the girl’s one-line explanation for leaving England and hadn’t been able to stop himself from responding: “She’s going to look for justice in Pakistan?” That final word spoken with all the disgust of a child of migrants who understands how much his parents gave up—family, context, language, familiarity—because the nation to which they first belonged had proven itself inadequate to the task of allowing them to live with dignity. At some point, he’d have to respond to the foreign secretary’s irate message about his comment. Or not, if the PM kept up his silence—a silence Karamat worried had less to do with favoring his home secretary than with the PM’s irritation at how Pakistan’s prime minister was trying to make political capital of the situation. He’d sanctimoniously explained that Pakistan, as a matter of state policy, shouldered the cost of repatriating its citizens while the UK government expected the bereaved to pay thousands of pounds to have the remains of their loved ones returned to them.
A Lycra-covered runner approached, swerved skin-scrapingly close to the Thames path barrier as soon as he was close enough to recognize the home secretary, and held up a hand to the officers to indicate he wasn’t a threat. Brown skinned. Karamat clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He twisted off the thermos cap again, shook the container gently, considered the liquid swishing around the glass-lined interior. He didn’t seem to need it despite his total lack of sleep the previous night. The wonders of adrenaline—it had been a long time since he’d stayed up all night wondering what his opponent was going to do. People were usually so predictable.
“Sir,” cautioned Suarez behind him.
“That one too Muslim for comfort?”
“That one was Latino.”
“You always insist the good-looking ones are your cousins rather than mine.”
“We really should go, sir.”
Karamat turned to look at the head of his security detail. From the start, Suarez had understood the home secretary’s insistence that he didn’t want to know anything at all about the threats against him; You do your job and let me do mine, Karamat had said. Of course when they cut down trees in his garden and put officers in their place it was obvious there’d been some “development,” but Suarez maintained an air of calm through everything. Today, though, he was visibly anxious, and although Karamat had managed to insist on this riverside coffee, a post-sleepless-night tradition stretching back to his earliest days as a backbencher, it was clear that he wouldn’t win the argument twice.
He was about to stand up when his phone rang, and the screen told him it was his son. He cradled the phone in his hands for a moment, found the old empty habits forming the word “Bismillah” before he answered.