Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

Terry Lone picked up a yellow petal, brushed the smoothness of it against the tip of her nose. It was only now that Eamonn understood how you could decide you wanted to marry someone in the course of an afternoon, and without drugs being the primary factor, as he and his sister had concluded many years ago. Did she ever wish she’d continued on to the National Gallery, he wondered. His parents weren’t unhappy together, but there was a separateness to their lives. His mother winding down her daily involvement in her business just as his father became too busy for holidays or even breakfast — that seemed somehow apt for the state their marriage had reached. Today particularly, he wished they were more like the Rahimis.

Glancing around the terrace, he tried to imagine an occasion later this summer when two families might be sitting out for dinner on a balmy evening. Karamat and Terry and Emily and Eamonn, Aneeka and Isma and Aunty Naseem, and maybe even Parvaiz. He acknowledged to himself he had no idea how the world might take him from this moment to that imagined one — he knew only that they all would have to find a way to make it happen.

He entered the house and made his way to his father’s basement office, a room that lacked his mother’s signature spare style and featured instead dark wood and solid lamps and windowlessness. Those years of nocturnal study had left their mark — Karamat Lone was at his most productive when there was no glimmer of natural sunlight.

“Since when does my son knock before entering?” he said, standing up to kiss and embrace Eamonn, a form of greeting that had embarrassed him for years, until one day it didn’t.

“Since my father started bringing home top-secret documents. Do they actually have ‘top-secret document’ written on them?”

“No, they have ‘If you aren’t important enough to have clearance for this, you’ll be dead soon’ written on them. In very, very small print, otherwise there wouldn’t be room for anything else. Why are you awake, let alone here?”

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Can we sit a minute?” He gestured his father back to his worn leather chair and perched on the edge of the desk, facing him — the position in which he’d spent so much time in tense arguments with his father (his GCSE subjects, backpacking with Max, arrangements for his girlfriend’s abortion) through that period of adolescence when Karamat Lone was a backbencher with more time for parenting than his wife had. Terry Lone was the one to whom Eamonn and his sister would turn when they wanted new gadgets, cars, and, later, a flat each of their own — the relationship’s binary options of “yes/no,” usually “yes,” giving it solidity. But with father and son everything was more abstract, the baseline love threaded through with contradictory emotions that left the women of the family exhausted by the up-and-down of it all. Who is this posh English boy with my face, the father would say, sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with pride. Who you made me, so blame yourself, the son would reply, and his father would respond with either There is no blame, my jaan, my life or That was your mother’s doing, not mine .

“I’m seeing someone,” he said, and watched his father’s eyebrows lift. One morning, in the brief period when Eamonn was pining over Alice, the door of his bedroom had been kicked open and Karamat Lone had walked in, knees buckling slightly under the weight of the halibut in his arms, ice chips glinting on its skin. He had lowered the massive fish onto his son’s bed, with the single word “replacement.” It was the coarsest thing anyone in his family had ever known him to do, and Terry and Emily Lone were both horrified, words such as “misogynist” and “chauvinist pig” echoing around the house. Eamonn pretended to side with them, but he had been more amused than he’d ever admit, and the act put a decisive end to his pining. Though it was only since Aneeka that he’d come to agree, yes, Alice really had been a cold fish.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Eamonn said. “She’s not like the others.”

“How so?”

“For starters, she’s not from around here.”

“She’s not British?”

“She’s not West London.”

This was received with his father’s extravagant snort, which his children were always amazed he could restrain from in public life. “Well, that is a change. Where’s she from then? Cheltenham? Richmond — my god, not south of the river!”

“Wembley.”

His father looked surprised, and pleased to be surprised. Eamonn picked up a paperweight with a lion and unicorn etched on it, turned it in his hands, a little shy, all the other concerns pushed to the side as he told the man he loved most in the world about the woman he loved most in the world. Aneeka, he said. Yes, Pakistan — her mother raised in Karachi, her father a second-generation Brit whose parents were originally from Gujranwala. An orphan at the age of twelve, raised by her sister. Preston Road. Beautiful, and so smart, Dad, on a scholarship to LSE for law. Only nineteen but far more mature than that. Yes, very serious. Yeh ishq hai. His father took his hand and squeezed it when Eamonn spoke the Urdu words, beaming at his son.

“Well, if it’s love you’d better bring her around. Next Sunday?”

“There’s one thing I should warn you about. She’s a bit, well, Muslim.”

“How ‘well, Muslim,’ exactly?”

“She prays. Not five times a day, but every morning, first thing. Doesn’t drink or eat pork. She fasts during Ramzan. Wears a hijab.”

“Uh-huh. But she has no problem—” He brought the palms of his hands together and then separated them.

“What? Opening a book?”

“Sex.”

“Dad! No, she has no problem with that. There is no problem with that at all. And if you want hand gestures for sex, try one of these.”

“Those could be useful in Parliament, thank you. So, she’s no halibut. Glad to hear it.” He grinned in the way that had earned him the Wolf part of his nickname.

“You’re taking all this much better than I thought.”

“What? You think I have a problem with you dating a Muslim? I have a lot more trouble with all the double-barreled girls whose fathers don’t waste a minute telling me of their family’s long association with India — governor of this province, aide-de-camp to that viceroy. Helped quell the Mutiny. Helped quell the Mutiny! All delivered in a way that sounds perfectly polite, but everyone knows I’m being informed that my son isn’t good enough for their daughter.” Eamonn waited for the Chip to play itself out. Alice’s poor father would be mortified if he had any idea how much offense he’d caused with his “helped quell the Mutiny” line about his namesake. That’s what Alice had said, and only Hari had rolled his eyes in response, but then Hari had a little version of the Chip himself. “Anyway, if she’s only nineteen, I suspect she can be persuaded out of the hijab in time. Get your sister to take her off to the hair salon next time she comes to visit. I’m mostly joking. You know I grew up a believing Muslim. Didn’t harm anyone but myself with it.”

“I didn’t know that, actually. I mean, I knew your parents made you go to the mosque and fast and stuff, but I didn’t know you really believed.”

“No? Well, I did. That’s how I was raised. There are still moments of stress when I’ll recite Ayat al-Kursi as a kind of reflex.”

“Is that a prayer?”

“Yes. Ask your girlfriend about it. Actually, no, I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention it to anyone.”

“You shouldn’t have to hide that kind of thing.”

“I’d be nervous about a home secretary who’s spoken openly about his atheism but secretly recites Muslim prayers. Wouldn’t you?”