Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

“Knickers” kept her true identity hidden from her lover until hours before her twin brother was fortunately killed while trying to enter the British consulate in Istanbul. Eamonn Lone quickly informed the Home Secretary that the woman he had allowed into his bed wanted him to use his influence with his father to bring her evil brother back into Britain. Karamat Lone immediately contacted the security services, but before any actions could be taken Pervy Pasha was killed.

The brave Home Secretary, who has taken a strong stand against extremists at risk to his own life, had kept quiet while a police investigation was taking place. This morning his office issued a short statement revealing the sordid affair and promised “full transparency.” Although the terrorist’s Twisted Sister cannot be proved to have broken any laws, she has been told to keep her distance from the Home Secretary’s son, who is understood to be staying with friends in Norfolk. “She was barking up the wrong tree. The Home Secretary would never compromise this nation’s security for any reason,” say sources close to the Lone family.

INSIDE: DAUGHTER AND SISTER OF MUSLIM TERRORISTS, WITH HISTORY OF SECRET SEX LIFE — THE EXCLUSIVE STORY OF “KNICKERS” PASHA

Packed a suitcase, wheeled it outside, the first time leaving the house in days, cameras, microphones, police holding them back. Isma rushing out from Aunty Naseem’s house across the road “where are you going.” Isma not someone she ever had to answer to again.

Kept walking, police flanking her “miss please go back inside” stepped into the waiting car, Dame Edna this time aka Abdul who had become chief protector, ally, jumping garden walls to enter her house unseen by the press outside. Abdul, who had taken her token and picked up the passport, booked her ticket, paid for it so that Isma wouldn’t receive an alert from the credit card company.

Joined quickly by a police escort, TV vans following, never mind, nothing to hide, better this way.

“Why are you helping me, Abdul?”

“Something about me you don’t know.”

“I’ve known you’re gay since before you did, probably.”

“Not that but thank you for never mentioning. I told that Farooq’s cousin who Parvaiz was, the rumors about your father, I mean. I think that’s why Farooq came for him.”

“It’s not your fault he went.”

“Why did he go?”

“I don’t know exactly. I stopped asking it. He wanted to return home, that’s what mattered.”

“If he comes back, Farooq, I’ll kill him.”

“No, don’t kill him. Take his skin off with the world’s smallest scalpel, remove his eyes with an ice cream scoop, drip slow-working acid on his tongue.”

“You’ve thought about this, I guess.”

“It’s one of the few things I can concentrate on.”

“I don’t think I could do any of that.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

“One other thing you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“Really fancied your brother.” Said in a Dame Edna voice.

“Thank you, Abdul. I’d forgotten what it felt like to smile.”

At the airport she expected the interrogation room again, but the man at the security checkpoint looked over her shoulder at the police, then down at her new passport and the boarding card to Karachi, and nodded her through.

“Why are you going?” one of the journalists called out from across the barrier, just before she walked into the departure lounge.

“For justice,” she said.

Karachi: colorful buses, colorless buildings, graffitied walls, billboards advertising cell phones and soft drinks and ice cream, birds circling in the white-hot sky. Parvaiz would have wanted the windows down to listen to every new sound, but she sat back in the car in silence disrupted only by the rattling vents of the air conditioner, a silence not of her own devising but of her cousin’s, the guitarist, who refused to explain why she had been escorted off the plane by airport officials who drove her to the cargo terminal where he was waiting to pick her up in a beige car with a sticker on its windscreen announcing its membership to a golf club; it looked more suited to a businessman than a musician.

“Take off the hijab and put these on,” was the only thing he’d said, passing her a pair of oversize glasses. She refused, but eventually the sun’s glare made her change her mind about the glasses.

The silence continued until he turned into the driveway of a tall white hotel, cleared an ineffectual security check, and pulled over, waving away the valet who came around to take his keys.

“You can get out here,” he said.

“For what?”

“Entrance to the hotel is through there. I’ve checked you in for three days. Under the name Mrs. Gul Khan. His body arrives tomorrow, he’ll be buried by the evening. We’ve arranged a funeral plot, I’ll send a car to take you there the next morning. Nine a.m. You can pray over the grave, and leave. Okay? Do not call me. Do not call my mother. You understand?”

“You’re the one who needs to understand. He isn’t going to be buried. I’ve come to take him home.”

The cousin held his hands up. “I don’t want to know. Crazy girl. I don’t want to know anything. My sister lives in America, she’s about to have a child there — did you or your bhenchod brother stop to think about those of us with passports that look like toilet paper to the rest of the world who spend our whole lives being so careful we don’t give anyone a reason to reject our visa applications? Don’t stand next to this guy, don’t follow that guy on Twitter, don’t download that Noam Chomsky book. And then first your brother uses us as a cover to join some psycho killers, and then your government thinks this country can be a dumping ground for its unwanted corpses and your family just expects us to jump up and organize a funeral for this week’s face of terrorism. And now you’ve come along, Miss Hojabi Knickers, and I have to pull strings I don’t want to pull to get you out of the airport without the whole world’s press seeing you, and it turns out you’re here to try some stunt I don’t even know what but my family will have nothing to do with it, nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t want you or your family to have anything to do with it. Just tell me what time tomorrow he’s arriving, and who to speak to about where to bring him.”

“What do you mean, where to bring him? You planning on checking a corpse into your hotel room?”

“You really want to know?”

“No. Get out.”

“Who do I speak to about where to bring him?”

He reached into his wallet, pulled out a business card, and threw it at her.

“Thank you. By the way, how far are we from the British Deputy High Commission?”

“Look at a map,” he said, leaning across to open her door.

The British Deputy High Commission compound was surrounded by barbed wire, vans bristling with guns, and roadblocks to prevent any stranger’s approach. But just a few minutes’ walk away there was a park lined with banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.