Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

“We want to be like them, we want to be better than them. We want to be the only people in the world who are allowed to be better than them.” He gestured at himself and around the café with a shrug that encompassed the mediocrity of everything. “Obviously, I worked out long ago that such an attempt would be futile.”

“That’s not true. You’re a much better person than he is.”

“What do you know about it?”

She didn’t answer, didn’t know how to, and he said, “Why were you acting so furtive when I came in?”

She hesitated, turned her laptop around so it faced him, and opened the lid.

“You were reading about him. Isma, did you already know he was my father?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you lie about it?”

She clasped her hands together, looked down at the interlacing of her fingers, which he’d touched so familiarly just a few moments ago.

“You’re one of them? The Muslims who say those ugly things about him?”

“Yes.”

He waited, but there was nothing more she could say.

“I see. Well, I’m very sorry to hear it.” She heard the scraping of the chair and looked up as he stood. “I suppose one day I’ll see the irony in running here to try and escape certain attitudes only to find myself having coffee with their embodiment.” Gone was the friendly, considerate boy, and in his place a man carrying all the wounds his father was almost certainly too thick-skinned to feel as anything more than pinpricks. When he said good-bye there was no mistaking the finality of his tone.

The wind had dropped, and the snow drifted down in large flakes that retained their shape for a moment on her sleeve before melting into the fabric. Isma walked the short distance home, but as she approached her front door the thought of her studio with its clanging pipes was intolerable. She carried on down to the tree-lined graveyard at the end of the street, unexpectedly positioned beside a nursery school, across the road from a baseball diamond. In the summer it must be a place of shade, in autumn a feast of color; but she had known it only as the white of snow, the gray of stone.

She started on a cleared pathway before cutting across a snowdrift that came halfway up her knee-high boots, and pulled herself onto a nineteenth-century gravestone, feet dangling. Sometimes the dead were a friendly presence, but today they were only dead, and every chiseled slab was a marker of someone’s sorrow. She kicked her heels against the gravestone. “Stupid,” she said.

That was the only word for this sense of enormous loss where there had been so very little to lose.

“You don’t have to decide that’s the end of it,” Hira Shah said that evening, when they sat down together for a typically elaborate meal. A single woman in her mid-fifties who had never had to cook on a regular basis for anyone, Hira retained the idea that company for dinner must be occasion for pyrotechnics in the kitchen, no matter how frequently company was over — or perhaps she did that only when her company hadn’t had anyone to mother her in a long time. “You should at least try explaining why you feel the way you do. What is there to lose?”

“What is there to gain? He’ll be going back to London soon in any case.”

Hira looked at her over a forkful of rogan josh. “Do you know when you were at LSE I thought you found me offensive?”

“That’s ridiculous. Oh, you mean that first term. When I rolled my eyes at you?”

It overturned seven hundred ninety years of precedent in British law, the Kashmiri lecturer had been saying during an impassioned presentation on control orders and their impact on civil liberties when Hira saw the quiet girl in the third row roll her eyes. Would you like to say something, Ms. Pasha? Yes, Dr. Shah, if you look at colonial laws you’ll see plenty of precedent for depriving people of their rights; the only difference is this time it’s applied to British citizens, and even that’s not as much of a change as you might think, because they’re rhetorically being made un-British. Say more. The 7/7 terrorists were never described by the media as “British terrorists.” Even when the word “British” was used, it was always “British of Pakistani descent” or “British Muslim” or, my favorite, “British passport holders,” always something interposed between their Britishness and terrorism. Well, you have quite a voice when you decide to use it.

Isma had gone home that evening and stood in front of the mirror, pressing down on her larynx, and felt the slight tremor of something on the cusp of waking. And wake it had — her suppressed anger distilled and abstracted into essays about the sociological impact of the War on Terror. Then Isma’s mother died, and that voice was lost — until now. Dr. Shah was coaxing it back with the shared paper they were working on—“The Insecurity State: Britain and the Instrumentalization of Fear”—which took Isma’s experience in the interrogation room and made it research.

“No, not then. All the way through until you graduated. I thought you disliked something in me personally, and that’s why you acted so distant when I tried to talk about anything other than work. It was only after your mother died and you told me everything that you made sense.”

How she’d wept that day in Hira Shah’s office. For her mother, for the grandmother who had predeceased her daughter-in-law by less than a year, for her father, for the orphaned twins who had never really known their mother before bitterness and stress ate away the laughing, affectionate woman she’d once been — and, most of all, for herself.

“I don’t want Eamonn’s pity, if that’s what you’re driving at here.”

“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

“So — what? I should just call him up—” She held the saltshaker to her ear, miming a phone. “Eamonn, here’s a funny story about my father.”

“Maybe without the word ‘funny.’”

“And then? Do I follow up with the even funnier story of my brother? To the son of the new home secretary?”

“Mmm. Maybe start with your father, and see how it goes from there. And one other piece of advice. Reconsider the hijab.” She pointed at the turban that Isma had left near the door along with her shoes, the latter out of consideration for Hira’s hardwood floors and Persian carpets, the former out of consideration for her sensibility.

“Don’t miss an opportunity with that one, do you, Dr. Shah?”

“It might be keeping your young man at a distance. He’ll read things into what it means.”

“He’s not my young man and his reading won’t be so wrong. And when did I say I wanted anything from him in that way?” It had been so long since anything approaching “that way” that she didn’t know if she knew how to want it anymore. Mo at university had been the last and — barring some forgettable fumbling — the first man with whom she’d known any physical intimacy. Perhaps if they’d gone further than they had she’d have a sense of missing something, but Mo worried about their eternal damnation and Isma thought you should at least be able to imagine marrying someone before doing something so significant with them. In retrospect, it was a mystery they’d stayed together almost their entire second year of university.

“You know the Quran tells us to enjoy sex as one of God’s blessings?” Hira said.

“Within marriage!”

“We all have our versions of selective reading when it comes to the Holy Book.”