Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

Aneeka would leave them. That’s what the shrug said. After university she had no intention of continuing to live in this house and remain a sibling rather than anything else that a law degree made possible.

“You can’t just decide this for us,” Parvaiz said to Isma. But the “us” carried no weight with his twin helping her sister set the kitchen table, refusing to meet his eye.

“Traitor,” he said, pushing away from the counter. He made enough of a production of looking for keys and phone and mic that anyone who had wanted to stop him could have, but when they didn’t, he had no option but to walk out, though the night looked less than inviting.

An autumn evening that carried more anticipation of winter than memory of summer. Cold seeped in through his badly chosen jacket, and his skin quickly speckled with goose bumps. The neighborhood lights captured by the clouds turned the sky a pale red. The sound of the world turned up just that little bit. One of the first occasions he’d become aware of the acuteness of his hearing was when he had asked a teacher why planes sounded louder on overcast days, and the teacher said they didn’t, to the laughter of his classmates, only to return the next day to tell Parvaiz he’d been right.

His mother’s old friend Gladys stopped him halfway down the street to talk about the ongoing library campaign, and to ask him if his doorbell had rung differently at any point today. Hers had — the usual chimes replaced by a gonglike sound. When she’d gone to answer the door there was no one there so she’d returned indoors, switched on the TV, and there was that psychic she liked to watch, saying that if ever your doorbell rings with a different sound that means it’s the devil and you mustn’t answer.

“Do you think the devil’s in your house now, Glad?” he said, smiling. “Isma will know some exorcism prayers.”

“I hope to find out when I go to bed tonight — keep that sister of yours away!” He held up three fingers in a Scout’s sign and noticed the deepening lines around Gladys’s eyes when she laughed. She and his mother had been only a few months apart in age.

Leaving Gladys to entertain the devil, he walked down to Preston Road, mostly shuttered and quiet. He dipped his head in acknowledgment at the curved spine of the stadium arch as he always did, and rapped his knuckles affectionately on the door of the notary’s office, which had housed a pop-up library during one stage of the library campaign, before continuing on to the sports ground — it had rained for most of the day and perhaps he could improve on the “shoes on wet grass” segment of his sound reel, which he was overlaying on footage of a video game that had won sound awards. By early next year he’d start sending it out to both the big and the little gaming outfits, and — please God! — work offers would come in.

He was walking across the car park, attaching the mic and its homemade windscreen to his phone, paying no attention to the lone car until its doors opened and three boys he knew from football games on this ground stepped out. Designer sneakers, pristine white robes, ecosystem beards (Aneeka had named them: large enough to support an ecosystem , she’d said). They hung around the neighborhood trying to look troublesome, not understanding they’d done themselves no favors with the name they’d chosen: Us Thugz. A shortened form of the Arabic astaghfirullah. What exactly are you seeking Allah’s forgiveness for, Isma had asked them when they accosted her in the street one day and told her that sisters should cover up more. Their response made it clear they had no idea what astaghfirullah meant.

“Give it,” one of them said, holding out an upturned palm for Parvaiz’s phone and mic.

“I’ll tell your mother,” Parvaiz said.

The boy — Abdul, his childhood friend — lowered his hand and mumbled something about Parvaiz’s phone being too old anyway, but the older boy standing next to him, who wasn’t from the neighborhood, stepped forward, kneed Parvaiz in the groin, and, when he doubled over in pain, took the phone from his hand, tossing aside the expensive mic as if to prove his own stupidity.

Parvaiz lay on the ground of the car park, waiting for the pain to pass, as the boys’ car screeched past him. The sound envelope: slow attack, short sustain, long decay. Nothing to hear that he hadn’t heard before. How he hated his life, this neighborhood, the inevitability of everything.

Farooq found him the next morning, standing among empty crates around the back of the greengrocer’s, trying to remove a splinter from his palm.

“Asalaamu Alaikum,” said an unfamiliar voice in the faux-Arabicized accent of a non-Arab Muslim who is trying too hard, and Parvaiz looked up to see a compact but powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket. Somewhere around thirty years old, with hair that fell in ringlets to his shoulders offsetting a beard neither hipster nor ecosystem but simply masculine. An instant glamor to him that excused all accents. He was holding out the tweezer component of his Swiss Army Knife, a surprising delicacy in the gesture. Parvaiz took it and tried to capture the splinter, but his left hand felt clumsy, and he kept pinching his skin instead. Without saying anything, the man took the tweezers from him, rested his hand beneath Parvaiz’s to steady it, and plucked out the splinter with a flourish and a wink. Then he pressed his thumb against the drop of blood that appeared, stanching the inconsequential wound.

“My kutta cousin took something of yours. I apologize. He didn’t realize who you were.” He reached into a pocket of his combat trousers and handed back the stolen phone. Who am I? Parvaiz wanted to ask, but he knew the answer already. He was Aneeka’s brother. When older boys, the kind you would die to be friends with, paid attention to him, it was always because he was Aneeka’s brother. Aneeka never liked the ones Parvaiz tried to nudge her toward, though; she preferred the quieter boys she could boss around.

“You know my sister?”

The man looked displeased. “What are sisters to do with me? I know of Abu Parvaiz.”

“I’m Parvaiz. I don’t know any Abu Parvaiz.”

“Don’t you know your own father’s name?”

Parvaiz assembled his features into neutrality with a tinge of bewilderment. Who was this man — MI5? Special Branch? They too had seemed so friendly that time they’d come to the house in his childhood. One of them had entered his room and played racing cars with him on the track that took up all the space between his bed and Aneeka’s — then he’d picked up the photograph album that Parvaiz’s father had sent him and walked out with it. They’d returned most of the items they took, but not the pictures of Adil Pasha climbing a mountain, sitting beside a campfire, wading across a stream — sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other men, always smiling, always with a gun slung over his shoulder or cradled in his lap. When you’re old enough, my son, his father had inscribed inside it, which made Parvaiz’s mother furious for reasons he didn’t then understand. Although his grandmother had intervened to prevent her daughter-in-law from taking the album away from him when it had first arrived, he’d always suspected his mother had told the friendly man about it so he would remove those images of Adil Pasha from his son’s life. It was discomforting to remember that and, with it, how early on he’d started to look at his always harried mother and think, No wonder he left.

“I never knew my father.” This was what he’d been taught to say, over and over, by his mother and grandmother. There were whispers in the neighborhood about Adil Pasha, he knew, and one day in the school playground a group of boys had accosted him to ask if it was true his father was a jihadi who’d been killed in Guantánamo. I never knew my father, he had replied weakly. The boys walked over to Aneeka and asked the same question. She shrugged and turned away, disdain already perfected at the age of nine, but later she whispered to the most loose-lipped of her friends, It makes him sound like someone in a movie, doesn’t it? More interesting than a father who died of malaria in Karachi.