Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

The threaded needle was for him, it turned out. She had noticed the loose button on his sleeve, and he found himself looking at the parting of her dyed black hair as she bent down to set it right, still talking away. “Shukriya,” he said, the Urdu word clumsy on his tongue, and after a moment’s pause in which something else seemed necessary he added “Aunty,” and was rewarded by another pat on his cheek. He assumed all this affection and the generosity of her welcome was just the famed Pakistani hospitality his father sometimes sighingly spoke of when regretting how “English” his children’s lives had turned out (to which Eamonn’s mother would reply, “It’s wonderful in the abstract but when you actually encounter it you call it intrusive and overbearing”); but then she said, “So, Isma sent you to meet us.”

He set down the samosa, which, it was suddenly clear, had been given to him under a false assumption. “Not exactly. In fact, no. I told her I would post the package, but it was such a nice day I thought I would take a long walk and drop it off.”

“You walked here? All the way from Notting Hill, to see us.”

“It’s a nice walk. I like discovering new bits of London — in this case, the canal,” he said, which seemed an effective way of dispelling her misconception without either of them actually mentioning it.

“Oh, she told you how much she loves walking along the canal.” He picked up the samosa and bit into it. Isma could set her straight when they spoke — he didn’t doubt Aunty Naseem would be on the phone to her as soon as he left. “You know, I’ve known her since the day she was born. Her grandmother was my first friend — we were living off the High Road, nothing like today. There were no other Asians at all. And then one day, across the street I saw a woman in a shalwar kameez. I ran across, in the middle of traffic, and caught her by the arm, and we stayed there talking for so long my husband came out looking for me. When we moved to this street, we said to them, Come on, we can’t separate. So they came. And here Isma was born, and grew up. So much sadness in her life, looking after the twins from such a young age. It’s time someone looked after her.”

He was spared the further embarrassment of this conversation by the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.

“We have a guest. A very nice young man. Isma sent him.” The footsteps retreated up the stairs and the old woman’s voice dropped. “Aneeka. She’ll come down again once she’s fixed herself up. In my days either you were the kind of girl who covered your head or you were the kind who wore makeup. Now everyone is everything at the same time.”

He had been about to leave, but instead he reached for another samosa. A few minutes later, the footsteps approached again. The woman who walked in was smaller than he’d expected from the picture — petite, really, and without any of the sense of mischief he’d seen in the photograph — but just as beautiful. Eamonn stood up, conscious of his greasy fingers and of the question of how he might use them to unpin the white hijab that framed her face. She greeted him with a puzzled look, which confirmed how unlikely it was for Isma to have sent someone like him to meet her family. The old lady introduced him by his first name — which was all he had given her — and Aneeka’s expression didn’t so much change as ossify.

“That’s spelled with an e , not an a , Aunty. Eamonn Lone, isn’t it?”

“Isma told you about me?”

“What do you want here? Why do you know my sister?”

“He met Isma in Northampton. At a café,” the old woman said, coming to stand next to Eamonn and place a hand on his arm, looking at him apologetically, not only for the girl’s behavior but for her own “oh” of disappointment when the girl mentioned his surname. “He walked all the way from Notting Hill to bring me M&M’s from Isma. Along the canal.”

The beautiful girl looked at the envelope with Isma’s handwriting on it and then at him, her face confused.

“It’s a lovely walk. The canal flows above the North Circular, along an aqueduct. I never knew that. The IRA tried to bomb it in 1939. It would have flooded all of Wembley.” He had no idea if this last detail was actually true, but he wanted to say something interesting so the girl would see that he might be the kind of person her sister would choose to have coffee with, not just the posh toff who seemed so out of place in this kitchen and in Isma’s life. “You can see news footage about it. Just search for ‘north circular canal bomb’ or something like that and it’ll come up.”

“Right — because that’s a good idea if you’re GWM, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Googling While Muslim. Aunty, did Isma tell you anything about this person?”

“Why don’t we all call her now?” Aunty Naseem said brightly, and the girl — who made less sense with every second — said, “Please stop trying to make me speak to her. Anyway, I have to go out now. And Mr. Lone, since you’ve delivered the M&M’s you can leave with me.”

Despite Aunty’s noises of protest, he followed the girl out. She didn’t say anything until they were at the end of the street, and then she turned sharply on her heels to face him.

“What’s going on here?”

“I really don’t know what you mean,” he said, holding up his hands. “I was just delivering a package for Isma. As your… aunty said, we met in a café. In Massachusetts. Became friends, sort of. Two-Brits-abroad kind of thing.”

A man in a bright red suit that appeared not to have been washed in several years stopped next to Aneeka and held out a filthy square of fur. “Have you met my cat?”

Before Eamonn could chivalrously interpose himself, Aneeka was reaching out to stroke the matted fur as if it were the smoothest mink. “Of course I’ve met Mog, Charlie. She and I are old friends.” The man made happy noises, tucked the fur into his jacket against his heart, and carried on.

After that moment of gentleness, the harshness of her voice when she turned her attention back to him was particularly unsettling. “That doesn’t explain why she asked you to come here.”

“She didn’t. I offered to post it.” He couldn’t imagine articulating to this woman his curiosity about a lost piece of his father, so instead he said, “Okay, this is embarrassing, but I saw a photograph of Isma’s sister, and wanted to know if anyone could really look that beautiful in person.”

She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.

The train pulled out of Preston Road station, and he turned in his seat to look out at the houses alongside the tracks. Beyond the back wall and garden sheds of one property a girl flew up, hovered for a moment, fell, flew up again. A trampoline. She made her body a starfish, and though he knew she couldn’t see him, he raised his own hands to mirror hers. He continued to look through the window after the train picked up speed and left Preston Road behind.

When he finally turned to face forward, a woman standing farther along the mostly empty carriage came over and sat next to him.

“Do you live alone?” Aneeka said.

“Yes.”

“Take me there.”

After the boldness of that line, she barely spoke all the way from Preston Road to Notting Hill. At first he tried to fill the silence with conversation about Isma, but her response made it clear theirs was not the relationship of closeness Isma had portrayed. “Did she tell you—” he started to say, and she replied, “I’m discovering the list of things Isma hasn’t told me is far longer than I would have believed,” which made any further conversation along that line impossible.