Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

@gladysinraqqa

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Ooh such beautiful boys, let me lift my veil to see them better — oh, I’m being gently #crucified.

Come on boys, look at me, I can do things those 72 virgins don’t know about. #MaybeThisIsntHeaven

What was this? Not grief. Grief she knew. Grief was the stepsibling they’d grown up with, unwanted and inevitable. Grief the amniotic fluid of their lives. Grief she could look in the eyes while her twin stared over its shoulder and told her of the world that lay beyond. Grief changed its shape to fit your contours — enveloping you as a second skin you eventually learned to slip into and resume your life. Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overhead, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them never to turn around. Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

But this was not grief. It did not cleave to her, it flayed her. It did not envelop her, it leaked into her pores and bloated her beyond recognition. She did not hear his footsteps or his laughter, she no longer knew how to hunch down and inhabit his posture, she couldn’t look into a mirror and see his eyes looking back at her.

This was not grief. It was rage. It was his rage, the boy who allowed himself every emotion but rage, so it was the unfamiliar part of him, that was all he was allowing her now, it was all she had left of him. She held it to her breast, she fed it, she stroked its mane, she whispered love to it under the starless sky, and sharpened her teeth on its gleaming claws.

The police came around, notepads on knee, recorders in hand, received as their due Isma’s thanks for not insisting on an interview at Scotland Yard.

“Why won’t you let him come home? He wanted to come home, he was trying to come home.”

They weren’t there to talk about Parvaiz, they were SO1, Specialist Protection, assigned to the home secretary.

“Oh. This is about Eamonn?”

Isma had lifted the teapot to pour a cup for the policemen and seemed to forget what she intended to do with it, holding it motionless just a few inches off the table, looking at her sister, color rising from her throat to her face.

“I was with him because I thought he could help. Ask him, he’ll tell you, I wanted my brother to be able to come back. It’s all I want now. Why the secrecy? Why do you think? Because of men like you with your notepads and your recorders. Because I wanted him to want to do anything for me before I asked him to do something for my brother. Why shouldn’t I admit it? What would you stop at to help the people you love most? Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.”

Watching Isma, who had set the teapot down without pouring it and was staring at her. Suspecting something that had never occurred to her before. What might she have felt about it were there space for other feelings?

“There’s no need for any such warning. What good would it do me to contact him now?”

When they left there was Isma, wounded and appalled.

“Don’t look at me like that. If you liked him you should have done it yourself. Why didn’t you love our brother enough to do it yourself?”

“Aneeka. Can I come up?”

“Why? I don’t want to see you, and now you know about Eamonn you don’t want to see me either.”

“You’re the only family I have left. There’s nothing bigger than that.”

“What’s that noise?”

“The movers packing up inside.”

“Have they left? The Migrants?”

“Yes. We have their expensive blinds and an electric kettle with four heat settings in place of next month’s rent.”

“You’re blaming him, aren’t you? For the loss of your posh tenants.”

“Stop acting as if you’re the only one whose heart is broken. He was my baby boy.”

“And Eamonn? What was he? I think you mind about him more than Parvaiz.”

“Why do you want to be so hurtful? He was five minutes of my life. You two were my life. I’m coming up.”

“You never did when he was sitting here.”

“Move up a little, won’t you?”

“I don’t think he wants you here.”

“He’s beyond wanting now.”

“I don’t want you here. You betrayed him.”

“That isn’t why he’s dead. That has nothing to do with why he’s dead. You have to forgive me. Please, I’m sorry, forgive me.”

“Do you believe in heaven and hell?”

“Only as parables. A god of mercy wouldn’t condemn any of his creation to eternal suffering.”

“So what happens after death?”

“I don’t know. Something. Our dead watch over us, I know that. They’re trying to speak to me today, to tell me what I can do for you.”

“Nothing. There is nothing to do for me. What are you willing to do for him?”

“I pray for him, for his soul.”

“What about his body?”

“That’s just a shell.”

“Hold a shell up to your ear and you can still hear the ocean it came from.”

“Hmm. So, what do you believe happens after death?”

“I don’t know the things you know. Life, death, heaven, hell, god, soul. I only know Parvaiz.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to come home. He wants me to bring him home, even in the form of a shell.”

“You can’t.”

“That isn’t reason not to try.”

“How?”

“Will you help me?”

“Why can you never understand the position we’re in? We can’t even say the kinds of things Gladys said, we don’t have that liberty. Remember him in your heart and your prayers, as our grandmother remembered her only son. Go back to uni, study the law. Accept the law, even when it’s unjust.”

“You don’t love either justice or our brother if you can say that.”

“Well, I love you too much to see anything else right now.”

“Your love is useless to me if you won’t help.”

“Your love is useless to him now he’s dead.”

“Get off his shed. Your voice doesn’t belong here.”

“Aneeka. I need my sister — how can either of us bear this alone?”

Isma’s hand stroking her hair, trying to take her away from Parvaiz.

“Go.”

“SHATTERED AND HORRIFIED”: SISTER OF PARVAIZ PASHA SPEAKS

Early this morning, Isma Pasha, the 28-year-old sister of London-born terrorist Parvaiz Pasha, who was killed in Istanbul on Monday, read a statement to journalists outside her family home in Wembley. She said, “My sister and I were shattered and horrified last year when we heard that our brother, Parvaiz, had gone to join people we regard as the enemies of both Britain and Islam. We informed Counter Terrorism Command immediately, as Commissioner Janet Stephens has already said. We wish to thank the Pakistan High Commission in Turkey for the efforts they’re making to have our brother’s body sent to Pakistan, where relatives will make plans for his burial, as an act of remembrance to our late mother. My sister and I have no plans to travel to Pakistan for the funeral.”

Pasha’s local mosque has also issued a statement to clarify it does not intend to hold funeral prayers for the dead man, and condemned rumors to the contrary as “part of a campaign of hatred against law-abiding British Muslims.”

Pasha’s body is in a mortuary in Istanbul, and sources say it could be several days before it is released for repatriation to Pakistan.