Zadie Smith - White Teeth

The rest is that terrible thing: history. As Swettenham ordered the American boats to return to Cuba, Marlene came running back with Ambrosia’s reply. One sentence torn from Job: I will fetch my knowledge from afar . (Hortense kept the bible it was ripped from and liked to say that from that day forth no Bowden woman took lessons from anyone but the Lord.) Marlene handed the sentence to Durham, and ran off into the parade ground happy as a clam, in search of her mother and father who were injured and weak, on their last legs and waiting for the boats like thousands of others. She wanted to tell them the good news, what Ambrosia had told her: It soon come, it soon come . The boats? Marlene had asked, and Ambrosia had nodded, though she was too busy with prayer, too ecstatic to hear the question. It soon come, it soon come , she said, repeating what she had learnt from Revelation; what Durham and then Glenard and then Mrs Brenton had taught her in their different ways; what the fire and earth-cracks and thunder attested to. It soon come , she told Marlene, who took her word for gospel. A little English education can be a dangerous thing.

In the great tradition of English education, Marcus and Magid became penpals. How they became penpals was a matter of fierce debate (Alsana blamed Millat, Millat claimed Irie had slipped Marcus the address, Irie said Joyce had sneaked a peek in her address book – the Joyce explanation was correct), but either way they were, and from March ’91 onwards letters passed between them with a frequency let down only by the chronic inadequacies of the Bengal postal system. Their combined output was incredible. Within two months they had filled a volume at least as thick as Keats’s and by four were fast approaching the length and quantity of the true epistophiles, St Paul, Clarissa, Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells. Because Marcus made copies of all his own letters, Irie had to rearrange her filing system to provide a drawer solely devoted to their correspondence. She split the filing system in two, choosing to file by author primarily, then chronologically, rather than let simple dates rule the roost. Because this was all about people. People making a connection across continents, across seas. She made two stickers to separate the wads of material. The first said: From Marcus to Magid . The second said: From Magid to Marcus .

An unpleasant mixture of jealousy and animosity led Irie to abuse her secretarial role. She pinched small collections of letters that wouldn’t be missed, took them home, slipped them from their sheaths, and then, after close readings that would have shamed F. R. Leavis, carefully returned them to their file. What she found in those brightly stamped airmail envelopes brought her no joy. Her mentor had a new protégé. Marcus and Magid. Magid and Marcus. It even sounded better. The way Watson and Crick sounded better than Watson, Crick and Wilkins.

John Donne said more than kisses , letters mingle souls and so they do; Irie was alarmed to find such a commingling as this, such a successful merging of two people from ink and paper despite the distance between them. No love letters could have been more ardent. No passion more fully returned, right from the very start. The first few letters were filled with the boundless joy of mutual recognition: tedious for the sneaky mailroom boys of Dhaka, bewildering to Irie, fascinating to the writers themselves:

It is as if I had always known you; if I were a Hindu I would suspect we met in some former life . – Magid.

You think like me. You’re precise. I like that . – Marcus.

You put it so well and speak my thoughts better than I ever could. In my desire to study the law, in my longing to improve the lot of my poor country – which is victim to every passing whim of God, every hurricane and flood – in these aims, what instinct is fundamental? What is the root, the dream which ties these ambitions together? To make sense of the world. To eliminate the random. – Magid.

And then there was the mutual admiration. That lasted a good few months:

What you are working on, Marcus – these remarkable mice – it is nothing less than revolutionary. When you delve into the mysteries of inherited characteristics, surely you go straight to the soul of the human condition as dramatically and fundamentally as any poet, except you are armed with something essential the poet does not have: the truth. I am in awe of visionary ideas and visionaries. I am in awe of such a man as Marcus Chalfen. I call it an honour to be able to call him friend. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking such an inexplicable and glorious interest in my family’s welfare . – Magid.

It is incredible to me, the bloody fuss people make about an idea like cloning. Cloning, when it happens (and I can tell you it will be sooner rather than later) is simply delayed twinning, and never in my life have I come across a couple of twins who prove more decidedly the argument against genetic determinism than Millat and yourself. In every area in which he lacks, you excel – I wish I could turn that sentence around for a vice versa effect, but the hard truth is he excels in nothing apart from charming the elastic waistband off my wife’s knickers. – Marcus.

And finally, there were the plans for the future, plans made blindly and with amorous speed, like the English nerd who married a nineteen-stone Mormon from Minnesota because she sounded sexy on the chat line:

You must get to England as soon as possible, early ’93 at the very latest. I’ll stump up some of the cash myself if I have to. Then we can enrol you in the local school, get the exams over and done with and send you off post-haste to whichever of the dreaming spires tickles your fancy (though obviously there’s only one real choice) and while you’re at it you can hurry up and get older, get to the bar and provide me with the kind of lawyer I need to fight in my corner. My FutureMouse© needs a staunch defender. Hurry up, old chap. I haven’t got all millennium . – Marcus.

The last letter, not the last letter they wrote but the last one Irie could stomach, included this final paragraph from Marcus:

Well, things are the same round here except that my files are in excellent order, thanks to Irie. You’ll like her: she’s a bright girl and she has the most tremendous breasts… Sadly, I don’t hold out much hope for her aspirations in the field of ‘hard science’, more specifically in my own biotechnology, which she appears to have her heart set on… she’s sharp in a way, but it’s the menial work, the hard grafting, that she’s good at – she’d make a lab assistant maybe, but she hasn’t any head for the concepts, no head at all. She could try medicine, I suppose, but even there you need a little bit more chutzpah than she’s got… so it might have to be dentistry for our Irie (she could fix her own teeth at least), an honest profession no doubt, but one I hope you’ll be avoiding …

In the end, Irie wasn’t offended. She had the sniffles for a while, but they soon passed. She was like her mother, like her father – a great reinventor of herself, a great make-doer. Can’t be a war correspondent? Be a cyclist. Can’t be a cyclist? Fold paper. Can’t sit next to Jesus with the 144,000? Join the Great Crowd. Can’t stand the Great Crowd? Marry Archie. Irie wasn’t so upset. She just thought, right: dentistry. I’ll be a dentist. Dentistry. Right.

And meanwhile Joyce was below deck trying to sort out Millat’s problems with white women. Which were numerous. All women, of every shade, from midnight-black to albino, were Millat’s. They slipped him phone numbers, they gave him blow jobs in public places, they crossed crowded bars to buy him a drink, they pulled him into taxis, they followed him home. Whatever it was – the Roman nose, the eyes like a dark sea, the skin like chocolate, the hair like curtains of black silk, or maybe just his pure, simple stink – it sure as hell worked. Now, don’t be jealous. There’s no point. There have always been and always will be people who simply exude sex (who breathe it, who sweat it). A few examples from thin air: the young Brando, Madonna, Cleopatra, Pam Grier, Valentino, a girl called Tamara who lives opposite the London Hippodrome, right slap in the middle of town; Imran Khan, Michelangelo’s David. You can’t fight that kind of marvellous indiscriminate power, for it is not always symmetry or beauty per se that does it (Tamara’s nose is ever so slightly bent), and there are no means by which you can gain it. Surely the oldest American sentence is relevant here, pertinent to matters economic, politic and romantic: you either got it or you don’t . And Millat had it. In spades. He had the choice of the known world, of every luscious female from a size 8 to a 28, Thai or Tongan, from Zanzibar to Zurich, his vistas of available and willing pussy extending in every direction as far as the eye could see. One might reasonably expect a man with such a natural gift to dip into the tun-dishes of a great variety of women, to experiment far and wide. And yet Millat Iqbal’s main squeezes were almost all exclusively size 10 white Protestant women aged fifteen to twenty-eight, living in and around the immediate vicinity of West Hampstead.