Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

“I assume someone is going to remove the body from the park. On the grounds of hygiene, if nothing else.”

“I’m my nation’s representative to the Court of St. James’s. Do you think I go around talking to municipal councils in Karachi? But maybe things are different in Britain, in which case please tell my bin man not to make such a clanging noise when he comes round in the morning.”

“How’s your son’s student visa application coming along?”

“Actually, he’s decided to go with Harvard rather than Oxford. The girl made some interesting points, don’t you think?”

It was beginning to stop being enjoyable, so he switched to English. “Fine, I spoke out of turn. Pakistan’s judiciary is a credit to your nation.”

“Bunch of bastards,” the high commissioner said unexpectedly. And then he was the one to switch languages — not to Urdu but Punjabi. “Listen, I’m a father too. I would want her off the news as well.”

“It’s not that.”

“Oh shut up, friend, I’m being sympathetic.” Punjabi allowed this breach of etiquette, and Karamat felt something in his whole body shift, become looser. He tightened his shoulders against it. “The issue is, my government has no reason to intervene.”

“Intervene on decency’s behalf. What kind of madness makes someone leave a corpse out in the heat to putrefy?”

“The madness of love. Remember your Laila-Majnu, Karamat? The lover so grief-stricken at the loss of the beautiful beloved that he wanders, in madness, in the desert. This beautiful girl in a dust storm has managed to become Laila and Majnu combined in the nation’s consciousness. Or Sassi and Punnu in parts of the nation — same story, except it’s the girl who runs grief-crazed through the desert in search of her love.”

“This nation, which has decided to cast her as a romantic heroine, is the same one that wants her flogged?”

“Oh, people are already saying your government made up the whole story about her relationship with your son to discredit her, though opinion is divided whether it was you or one of your enemies who was behind it. Either way, for us to act against her now is difficult.”

“For god’s sake, man, do you really expect me to believe your government makes decisions based on a combination of folktales and conspiracy theories?”

“You really are as British as they say you are. Let me put it in language you’ll understand: The people, and several opposition parties, have decided to embrace a woman who has stood up to a powerful government, and not just any powerful government but one that has very bad PR in the matter of Muslims and as recently as yesterday insulted us directly. So, now it’s political suicide for my government to get involved. I hope we’ll see you at our Eid reception. Until then, Allah hafiz.”

The door swung open. The expected supporters, and some unexpected ones too, entered, bowing and throwing imaginary hats in the air. Karamat rubbed the back of his hand against his mouth, tasting dust.

He was in a coffin made of slabs of ice, a prince in a fairy tale. The owner of the city’s largest ice factory said he would supply his product free of charge, a truck driver said he would transport it as a religious duty. Everyone who had gathered in the park took turns unloading the ice slabs and passing them along a conveyer belt of human hands to the white sheet, now soaked through. When the ice left their hands they touched their red palms to their faces, the burn of cold against the burn of heat. Those nearest the corpse wrapped their faces in cloth. The translucency of the ice made it possible for the news channels to continue their live coverage without worrying about meeting broadcast standards: the corpse was little more than a blurry outline. The girl didn’t assist with the continual rebuilding of the melting ice coffin, nor did she stop it. Her only insistence was that his face should remain uncovered. Now, as sunset bruised the sky, she stood with her back pressed against the banyan tree, her eyes never moving from that face.

“Is This the Face of Evil?” a tabloid asked, illustrating the question with a picture of the girl howling as dust flew around her. “Slag,” “terrorist spawn,” “enemy of Britain.” Those were the words being used to describe her, the paper reported, placing inverted commas around the words as proof. Would the home secretary strip her of her citizenship for acting against the vital interests of the UK, as surely she had done by giving ammunition to the enemies of Britain?

The home secretary set the paper aside with a sound of irritation and resumed looking at Aneeka Pasha. Even when there was nothing new to report there was always someone new to interview, and so the TV journalists were thrusting microphones into the faces of the “representatives of civil society” who had shown up in support of the bereaved girl and were now starting to light candles in the deepening twilight.

There was no need to do anything so dramatic as strip her of her citizenship, a move that could be traced back to personal motivations. She couldn’t return to the UK on her Pakistani passport without applying for a visa, which she was certainly welcome to do if she wanted to waste her time and money. As for her British passport, which had been confiscated by the security services when she tried to join her brother in Istanbul, it was neither lost nor stolen nor expired and therefore there were no grounds for her to apply for a new one. Let her continue to be British; but let her be British outside Britain.

The candles threw their reflections onto the ice coffin. Flames trembled along its length, creating the impression of something stirring inside. Karamat walked over to the blinds, opened them to let in the afternoon sunlight, and looked down at the familiar scene of Marsham Street, suddenly so moving in all its quotidian details, cars parked in parking spots, a woman walking by with shopping bags braided around her wrists, trees with thin trunks standing side by side. His London, everyone’s London, everyone except those who wanted to harm it. He touched a vein in his neck, felt the reassuring warmth of his own blood.

He returned home to Holland Park after Newsnight , a tough interview as expected, but he’d maintained his calm, clarified that he had never made a decision about a corpse — his decision had been about a living “enemy of Britain” (he used the expression three times, which seemed just right, though he might have been able to get away with a fourth). The very word “repatriation,” which is what the girl wanted for her brother’s corpse, rested on a fact of citizenship that had ceased to exist the day he, Karamat Lone, took office and sent an unequivocal message to those who treated the privilege of British citizenship as something that could be betrayed without consequences. No, he didn’t think it was harsh to send that message even to the girls who went as so-called jihadi brides. It was well past the point when anyone could pretend they didn’t know exactly what kind of death cult they were joining. The British people supported him, and that included the majority of British Muslims. The news anchor had raised his eyebrows at that.

Are you sure? he’d said. There seems to be a common view, repeated on this program just yesterday by a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain, that you hate Muslims.

I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims, he’d replied quietly.

Up the stairs he went to the bedroom he’d been exiled from. Terry would have been watching, and she’d know how much that question wounded him. He was aware she would still be angry about what she saw as his failure to protect Eamonn, but even so, she would have softened toward him. All he asked for was to be allowed to lie down next to her, not quite touching — unforgiven but not unwanted. At some point in the night she’d touch her foot to his — the once involved rituals of making up pared down to this single gesture over their more than three decades together. Our love is almost middle-aged now, she’d said to him a few weeks earlier, at the anniversary of their first meeting, trying to hide how much she minded that he’d returned home very late from Marsham Street having forgotten the date they always celebrated privately, unlike the wedding anniversary, which was generally a family, or more widely social, affair. His memory lapse was particularly blundering given that it came just months after she’d moved herself to a ceremonial role in her business, something she’d often talked about but that he didn’t think she’d ever do. One of us has to be a fixed point in the universe, otherwise we’ll keep missing each other, she’d said when she announced the decision, the only indication that she’d done it because his promotion to home secretary was imminent. The least he could have done in exchange was to remember the damn anniversary. He was generally a man to acknowledge a mistake the moment it was made, correct it (he had brought her breakfast in bed the next morning, and before leaving for work was attentive in other ways that pleased her), and never think of it again — this raking over a past failure was disquieting, adding to the wrongness of every part of the day, from Suarez’s jumpiness to the conversation with his son to the question about hating Muslims to the girl, that fucking girl.