Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

“Boys are different from us,” Isma said. “They see what they want through tunnel vision.”

The screen became a place of confusion, all motion and shapes, for a few seconds, and then she saw her sister lying in bed, face turned toward the phone that had been settled in its dock.

“Maybe if we start looking now for cheap flights I could come to you for my Easter break,” Aneeka said, but Isma shook her head firmly before the sentence was finished.

“Don’t want me telling the security monkeys at Heathrow how much I admire the Queen’s color palette?”

“I do not.” Her muscles tightened at the thought of Aneeka in the interrogation room. “Are we really not going to talk about the fact that Parvaiz has reappeared on Skype?”

“If we talk about him we’ll argue. I don’t want to argue right now.”

“Neither do I. But I want to know if you’ve spoken to him.”

“He sent a chat message just to say he’s okay. You get the same?”

“No, I got nothing.”

“Oh, Isma. I was sure you had. I would have told you otherwise. Yes, just that. He’s okay. He must have assumed I’d tell you as soon as I heard.”

“That would imply he remembers how to think about anyone other than himself.”

“Don’t, please. I know anger is the way you express your concern but, just don’t.”

Anger is the way I express my anger, she would have said on another night, but tonight she said “I miss you.”

“Stay with me until I fall asleep,” Aneeka said, her hand reaching toward Isma, swerving to switch off the light.

“Once upon a time, there lived a girl and a boy called Aneeka and Parvaiz, who had the power to talk to animals.”

Aneeka laughed. “Tell the one with the ostrich,” she said, voice muffled by her pillow.

She was asleep before Isma was done telling the childhood story their mother had invented for her firstborn and Isma had modified for the twins, but Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma’s bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister’s steady heartbeat could teach the younger one’s frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.

ALL MORNING SHE PRETENDED not to notice him sitting across the café basement, working on a crossword. But when she ordered a sandwich for lunch and brought it to her table, he came over and said he was about to have a bite himself, would it be all right if he sat with her.

“Preston Road,” he said, returning a few minutes later with a plate of pasta. “It sounded familiar when you said that’s where you grew up but I didn’t know why until I looked it up on a map. That’s in Wembley. My father’s family lives somewhere around there. I used to visit every Eid.”

“Oh, really?” she said, choosing not to mention that she knew exactly where his father’s family used to live, and that she also knew, as he seemed not to, that they’d moved away, to Canada.

“There was a song my cousins used to sing to my little sister when the adults weren’t around. I’ve had a line of it stuck in my head for years. Drives me crazy that I can’t remember the rest, and my sister has no memory of it. Do you know it?” Unexpectedly he broke into a Pakistani pop song that predated his birth — he was four years her junior, she’d discovered. She recognized the song by the tune more than the words, which came out as gibberish tinged with Urdu. He sang two lines, softly, face turning red — a self-consciousness she wouldn’t have expected, particularly given how pretty his voice was. She pulled up a song for him from the music library on her phone and watched as Eamonn plugged in his headphones — unconscionably expensive; Parvaiz had coveted such a pair. He listened, eyes closed, recognition rather than pleasure in his expression.

“Thank you,” he said, when he was done. “What does it actually mean?”

“It’s in praise of fair-skinned girls, who have nothing to fear in life because everyone will always love their fair skin and their blue eyes.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, laughing. “I knew that once. They sang it to tease my sister, but she just treated it as a compliment and made it one. That’s my sister for you.”

“And you? Are you like that too?”

He frowned a little, sliding the tines of his fork into the little tubes of pasta. “No, I don’t think so,” he said in the unconvinced manner of someone who isn’t accustomed to being asked to account for his own character. He raised the fork to his face and with little sucking sounds drew the pasta into his mouth. “Oh, sorry. My table manners are usually better than this.”

“I don’t mind. Do you know any Urdu?” He shook his head, a response his singing had anticipated, and she said, “So you don’t understand ‘bay-takalufi.’”

He sat up straight and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I do know that one. It’s informality as an expression of intimacy.”

She experienced a brief moment of wonder that a father who hadn’t taught his son basic Urdu had still thought to teach him this word. “I wouldn’t say intimacy. It’s about feeling comfortable with someone. Comfortable enough to forget good table manners. If done right, it’s a sort of honor you confer on the other person when you feel able to be that comfortable with them, particularly if you haven’t known them long.” The words rushing out to cover how her voice had caught at “intimacy.”

“Okay,” he said, as if accepting a proposition. “Let’s be comfortable with each other beyond table manners.” He pushed his plate toward her. Extravagantly, she dipped the crust of her sandwich into his pasta sauce and leaned forward over his plate to bite into it.

At the end of lunch — a lunch that was relaxed, swift-flowing — he stood up and said, “See you here again one of these days? I’ve discovered that when the coffee machine is working, this place has the best cappuccino in town.”

“I only have afternoon classes, and this is my favorite place to spend my mornings,” she said. In fact, she sometimes went to her second-favorite café when it seemed too crowded in here, but really, what was the need for such fussiness?

The siblings watched one another, and watched one another watching one another. At least it felt that way, though in all probability she was far more aware of the twins than they were of her. She raised her eyes briefly from the screen to see Eamonn at a table neither too close nor too far away from her, so intent on some story in the local paper that he didn’t take his eyes off the page even as he lifted his mug of coffee and drank. Existing in another world entirely from the one she now inhabited for these few seconds each morning at eleven a.m. Her brother had always been a creature of habit, and that at least was something to be grateful for, else hours of every day might go like this: watching Aneeka waiting for Parvaiz to come online, then that moment when the green check mark appeared next to his name, Isma wondering, What is he saying is he telling her something that will upset her is he asking her to become part of this madness he’s joined oh no please he wouldn’t do that but why can’t he just leave her alone ; but every day it was only a few seconds before his name moved into the offline column again. Just after, Aneeka would text Isma to say: he checked in. Check in, one twin used to say to the other when there were school trips or sleepovers that kept them apart, and at some prearranged hour a text would arrive saying nothing more than checking in.