Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

When Parvaiz logged off, followed shortly by Aneeka, Isma felt herself released of the day’s burdens and texted a steaming-mug emoji across the room to Eamonn, who in response went upstairs to buy them both fresh cups of coffee. This too had become part of the morning routine over the last week or so — why pretend she wasn’t keeping track? It was nine days since he decided they should be informal in intimacy together. “What’s happening in the world today?” she asked when he returned and sat down across from her, and he presented her his highlights of the local news stories: a bear was reported clawing at a garage door, traffic in the adjoining town was briefly held up because of a three-car accident in which no one was injured, a statue of Ronald McDonald was reported missing from a family’s garden. She said it was clear the Ronald won gold medal for “most local” of the local news stories, but he disagreed on the grounds that Ronald was a global icon.

Daily, after their elevenses, he’d set off to “wander” by wheel and on foot, a Christopher Columbus of modest ambitions, retracing childhood paths and discovering new ones. He would sometimes arrive at the café the next morning with an offering from his journey: a jug of maple syrup from a sugarhouse, a one-dollar bill he’d found nailed to an oak tree with an oak-leaf shape cut out of it, a rubbing from Emily Dickinson’s gravestone, with its peculiar wording—“CALLED BACK”—which he said made Dickinson sound like a faulty product. She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living, but when she asked him the point of it all — imagining a travel book — he said surely experience and observation were point enough. What would happen when his savings ran out, she asked, and he said, actually, those savings he’d mentioned were his mother’s — she had recently semiretired and decided that people gave too much of their lives and relationships to work; while there was no talking her daughter out of her seventeen-hour days, she had quite easily convinced her son to try to find other ways of constructing meaning in life than via paychecks and promotions. Isma found this idea compelling and Eamonn’s less-than-halfhearted pursuit of it disappointing. Surely he should be learning a new language, or piloting a ship through waters where refugees in search of safety were known to capsize in their pitiful dinghies.

In the first few days she had thought he might suggest they do something together past elevenses — a movie, a meal, another walk — but she now understood that she was just part of the way he divided up his days, which had structure in place of content. Between “morning newspaper” and “daily wander” there was “coffee with Isma.” Even the fact that spring break had now started and she’d made it clear she had time on her hands hadn’t changed that.

His father was often a topic of conversation during coffee, but always as “my father,” never as a man in the public eye. The picture Eamonn conjured up, of a devoted, indulgent, practical-joking parent, was so at odds with Isma’s image of the man that she sometimes wondered if the whole thing were an elaborate fiction to disguise the truth about his father. But then she’d observe Eamonn’s unguarded manner and know this wasn’t true.

One morning he was late to the café. She thought it was because of the weather — winter had returned. Snow slashed across the windowpanes, the sky was white, cars alerted cops that they’d overstayed their two-hour parking limit by the depth of snow on their roofs. Just as she’d got past the distraction of his absence and submerged herself in the problem of missing variables for her statistics course, a text arrived from Aneeka:

Have you heard? Lone Wolf new home secretary.

She must have said something out loud because the woman sitting next to her asked, “Are you okay?” but she was already clicking on a bookmark in her browser, pulling up a news site with a BREAKING NEWS banner announcing a cabinet reshuffle, the most significant change of which was the appointment of a new home secretary. There he was — the man whom she had thought Eamonn looked just like before she’d spent enough mornings noticing the particulars of his face, his mannerisms. The accompanying article described the newly elevated minister as a man “from a Muslim background,” which is what they always said about him, as though Muslim-ness was something he had boldly stridden away from. Inevitably, the sentence went on to use the phrase “strong on security.”

She felt sick before she could form the thoughts to understand why. Her phone buzzed and she looked down to a series of messages.

It’s all going to get worse.

He has to prove he’s one of them, not one of us, doesn’t he? As if he hasn’t already.

I hate this country.

Don’t call me, I’ll say things I shouldn’t.

Stop spying on our messages you arseholes and find some bankers to arrest.

“Hey, Greta Garbo, why so serious?”

He sat down across from her, one arm slung over the back of the chair. Such a languid contrast to the coiled spring of his father. She slammed the lid of the laptop, flipped the phone screen over.

“You’re late,” she said.

“Big family news.” He leaned forward, smiling, a proud son. The table was so small his knees knocked against hers. “My father’s just been appointed the new home secretary. Karamat Lone. You know who he is, right?” She nodded, took a sip of coffee for something to do. “I guess you’re one of the people who doesn’t see my face, hear the surname, and put two and two together.”

“It’s not an uncommon Pakistani surname.” An evasion rather than a lie, she told herself.

“I know. Anyway, I’m glad I can finally tell you. Also, this is why I haven’t been able to answer your question of how long I’m staying. I hate all the old muck they scrape up about him every time he’s in the headlines, and this time it’ll be worse. I came to avoid it. He’s good at dealing with it; I’m not. So if you see me obsessing over stuff they’re saying online, take my phone away from me, would you?” He tapped her fingers with his as he spoke to emphasize the final point.

All the old muck. He meant the picture of Karamat Lone entering a mosque that had been in the news for its “hate preacher.” LONE WOLF’S PACK REVEALED, the headlines screamed when a tabloid got hold of it, near the end of his first term as an MP. The Lone Wolf’s response had been to point out that the picture was several years old, he had been there only for his uncle’s funeral prayers and would otherwise never enter a gender-segregated space. This was followed by pictures of him and his wife walking hand in hand into a church. His Muslim-majority constituency voted him out in the elections that took place just a few weeks later, but he was quickly back in Parliament via a by-election, in a safe seat with a largely white constituency, and the tabloids that had attacked him now championed him as a LONE CRUSADER taking on the backwardness of British Muslims. Isma doubted very much that “the old muck” would rise again — oh, unless he meant the opposing side of that story: all the accusations she’d heard, and that seemed entirely accurate, that Karamat Lone had precisely calculated the short-term losses and long-term gains of showing such contempt for the conventions of a mosque. Sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor.

“You’re close to him, aren’t you?”

“You know what fathers and sons are like.”

“Not really, no.”

“They’re our guides into manhood, for starters.”

She’d never understood this, though she’d heard and seen enough anecdotally and academically to know there was something to it. For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition. He must have seen her look of incomprehension, because he tried again.