Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

More than twenty-four hours after the speech that ended with those sentences, the media attention had barely died down. Across the political spectrum, except at its extreme edges, the home secretary was being lionized for his truth-telling, his passion, the fearlessness with which he was willing to take on both the antimigrant attitudes of his own party and the isolationist culture of the community he’d grown up in. #YouAreWeAreBritish was trending on social media, as were #Wolfpack and its Asian offshoot, #Wolfpak. The phrase “future prime minister” was everywhere.

The Eamonn of a month ago would have been proud. Now, he kept imagining a meme of his father’s voice saying “Don’t set yourself apart in the way you dress” played over a video of Aneeka standing up from her prayer mat and walking into his embrace, shedding her clothes along the way until only the hijab remained. The video wouldn’t reveal the things that were most striking about her in those moments: the intensity of her concentration, how completely it could swerve from her God to him in the time she took those few footsteps, or her total lack of self-consciousness in everything she did — love and prayer, the covered head and the naked body. He heard the door open — Aneeka entered and called out from the hallway to say she was taking a shower.

He no longer had feelings of dread if she didn’t turn up when he expected, or of relief when she did — he had come to accept that he was who she wanted to be with. The joy of that moved through the days with him, burnishing every moment, even this one in which he stretched out on his sofa, listening to the different tones of the rain — clattering against windows, slapping against leaves, pinging off bricks. In Aneeka’s company he’d learned to listen to the sounds of the world. “Hear that,” she used to say in the beginning, somewhere between a command and a question. Soon he learned the pleasure of being the one to say it to her, hear that, the London we never enter together: the lawn mower rattling against pebbles at the edges of the garden; the differing weight of vehicles on the street outside — the swoosh of the motorcycle, the trundle of the van; the voices of drunk English lovers, matched in pitch though not in tone by caffeinated Italian tourists. Hear that, the varied creaks of the bed frame: the short cry of disappointment when you leave, the long groan of pleasure when you return. Hear that, the quickening of my breath, my blood, when you touch me, just so. At her urging, he started to record snippets of the time he spent without her, playing them back and asking her to identify the sounds he linked together to form a narrative of life without her: tube barriers opening and closing, his mother’s pruning shears cutting through stems in the rose garden, the heavy thud of the door to the newly constructed panic room in his parents’ house, a row of men on treadmills at the gym engaging in unacknowledged competitions of speed and stamina, conversations with the interactive Urdu learning tutorial, his hand bringing himself to climax while he thought of her. When he asked her why she didn’t bring him the soundscape of her days, she shrugged and said he’d have to think up a game of his own for her to play, he couldn’t simply borrow hers. But his mind didn’t know how to do that.

“Caught in the rain?” he said, going over to kiss her when she entered the room in his blue-and-white-striped dressing gown, carrying an armload of wet clothes. She pulled away almost immediately, holding up the wet clothes as explanation. When she’d deposited them in the dryer, she sat down on one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and he walked over to dry her hair with a towel.

“Does anyone give you a hard time because of the hijab?” he said.

She tilted her head back to rest it against his chest and look up at him. “If you’re nineteen and female you’ll get some version of a hard time for whatever you wear. Mostly it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to shrug off. Sometimes things happen that make people more hostile. Terrorist attacks involving European victims. Home secretaries talking about people setting themselves apart in the way they dress. That kind of thing.” He didn’t say anything to that, just gripped a fistful of her hair and squeezed while moving his hand down along the length of it, water dripping onto the wood floor. “And no, I wasn’t showering because I got caught in the rain. Some guy spat at me on the tube.”

“Some guy what?”

She swiveled the stool around. “What do you say to your father when he makes a speech like that? Do you say, ‘Dad, you’re making it okay to stigmatize people for the way they dress’? Do you say, ‘What kind of idiot stands in front of a group of teenagers and tells them to conform’? Do you say, ‘Why didn’t you mention that among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice’?”

“Wait, wait. Stop it. My father would never…” He had never heard her speak of any of this since the first time they met, when she’d made her Googling While Muslim comment, which he’d managed to put out of his mind until now. “Do you think he doesn’t know what it is to face down racists? He wants people like you to suffer less from them, not more. That’s why he said what he did, even if it wasn’t the best way of phrasing it.”

A small, sad smile. “‘People like you’?”

“That came out wrong.”

“No, I don’t think it did. There are people like me and people like you. I’ve always known it. Why do you think I did all this ‘Let’s be secret’ stuff? I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in your life if you had to tell your family and friends about me.”

“I know.” The admission surprised them both. “But that was before. Now if the world wants to divide into Aneeka and everyone else, there’s no question where I’m standing. Or kneeling, which is really what I’d like to do right now, but I don’t know if you’re anywhere near ready for me to do that.”

“Do what?”

“I just proposed proposing to you.”

For a moment he thought he’d made a terrible mistake, Aneeka looking at him as though he’d said the craziest thing in the world. And then her mouth was on his, his hands on her shower-warm skin, everything he wanted in the world right here, right now, this woman, this life, this completeness.

Although they never went as far as the private communal garden, the flat roof jutting out a few feet from Eamonn’s bedroom window, which he’d failed to turn into a terrace in the four years he’d lived here, had become a favorite retreat. With a little nudging from Aneeka, he had bought a variety of tall plants — cactus, chili, kumquat — which they placed along the edge of the roof, and although they shut out the view of the gardens below, they also made privacy possible while alfresco.

The morning after the “proposed proposal,” as she enjoyed calling it, they sat outdoors pitting cherries for jam, the sun beating down almost as palpably as the previous day’s rain. Eamonn in a pair of khaki shorts and Aneeka once again in the blue-and-white dressing gown, now hiked above her knees. The concrete warm on their skin as they sat cross-legged at the very edge of the janglingly colorful floor cushions that had been her way of objecting to the muted tones of Eamonn’s flat. She’d carried them in a couple of weeks earlier, her glare daring him to comment on the fact that she was claiming his space as hers, as he’d wanted her to do almost from the start. He placed a cherry in his mouth, considered kissing her, the cherry passing between them, but settled for watching her instead, enjoying her evident satisfaction at the clean workings of the cherry pitter she’d mocked not an hour earlier as an accessory of the rich who don’t know what else to do with their money. It’s a cherry pitter. It pits cherries. How is that some wild extravagance? In response she’d opened a kitchen drawer and held up one utensil after another: A cherry pitter to pit cherries, a garlic peeler to peel garlic, a potato masher to mash potatoes, a lemon zester to zest lemons, an apple corer to core apples. She’d grinned at him. All you need is basic cutlery and a little know-how. But here she was now, making a small satisfied noise with every cherry pit she neatly punched out using the gadget in her hand. She’d gathered up the dark weight of her hair and twisted it into a loose knot at the base of her neck. A temptation to tug just so and watch it tumble down.