Smiling, I produced the expected response: ‘Mash Allah, it’s you, Mustafa — Mustafa, my old friend!’ I hadn’t seen him since I had left at the age of sixteen, but underneath the extra weight he was immediately recognizable. I put the flowers on the coffee table next to the bronze vase containing the plastic roses, then leant on my stick.
‘I am sorry.’ He glanced at my left leg, suspended an inch off the ground. ‘I heard about your injury. But you,’ his gaze lifted, catching mine, ‘you look strong.’
‘If I squint my eyes I don’t see my bad leg,’ I laughed.
‘I see you have finally given in, family and wife. Fine thing. No life without wife.’ He laughed and elbowed me in the side. ‘No life without wife!’
‘Sit down, brother,’ I said, gesturing towards the sofa.
Ignoring my offer, he nodded deliberately and said, ‘Inshallah, I will pray that your wife will soon bear you a son.’
I nodded, feeling myself blush. ‘Inshallah.’
‘It’s good you have returned, brother. I have also. ’ He paused. ‘I have, so to speak, also returned.’ He looked around the room as though sweeping for unseen listeners. Then he clasped both of my hands in his, warm and chubby. ‘It’s time we were reacquainted, you and I.’
I extricated my hands and dug one into a pocket, seeking my cigarettes. Mustafa’s eyes followed my hand, and for some reason I took it out, leaving the cigarettes undisturbed.
‘Come, Brother Akram,’ he said, ‘spare me a few hours of your time. I beg forgiveness from your good wife’ — he pointed towards the stairs — ‘but I will not detain you for long, and you can get back to business.’ He winked, and added confidently, ‘You and I, brother, we will now go out.’ He turned towards the door. Over a long white shirt he wore a British army-issue combat jacket. His baggy white trousers were pulled up to his ankles, above green Adidas trainers.
Once outside he walked slowly, and I was able to keep up. Like me, he too seemed to have difficulty walking. Mustafa spoke all the time, hardly pausing for breath. We soon reached the high street, where the traffic crawled bumper to bumper. I had to laugh as we passed a small orange car clad in a sporty body kit. From it emanated loud Punjabi music, its solitary male occupant nodding vigorously to the drumbeat. He turned towards me and snarled self-consciously through the open window, a gold front tooth and his mirrored sunglasses both reflected in the car windscreen.
Amid the noise of the street, I intermittently lost the precise words but kept the thread of Mustafa’s conversation, which focused on his children, three boys attending a madrasa in Birmingham and two daughters sent to be educated in Pakistan. Mustafa and his wife now lived in a council house next door to his mother, who had also been rehoused, and had knocked out the dividing walls to create, as he put it, a four-bedroom mansion. Burqa-clad women pushed toddlers in buggies. Following Mustafa’s lead, I sidestepped onto the road to create a respectful distance between us as they passed. Mustafa had another wife — or were there several others? — and further children, in another mansion, in Pakistan. The boys were fed on the milk of cows in the yard: it would make them strong, he said. He talked about bringing them over to the UK, and I pointed out that polygamy was illegal here. Mustafa, with a glint in his eye, said it was perfectly possible, indeed the British authorities respected it. On the footpath, little boys rushed boisterously between their mothers, while their little sisters clutched each other as they trailed behind, heads covered by a simple scarf pinned below the chin. The aroma of frying jalebi and curry spice filled the air. Young women with short fashionable hairstyles appeared quite natural and at ease in colourful kurta-pajama as they sauntered past, their hips swaying and painted lips moving fast as they talked with each other or into their mobile phones.
‘Smell that,’ I said brightly as we passed Ivan’s chip shop. ‘Smells of old England!’
‘Rendered pig fat,’ said Mustafa sharply, ‘what they call lard.’
‘Ivan might deny that.’
‘You have been away longer than I. There is more.’ He pointed to a Malik’s Halal Poultry. ‘The chickens they slaughter are bought from an English farm. They share a field with pigs and feed on their excrement.’
I shook my head and tutted.
‘Brother, it is very difficult to keep clean in this country.’
‘You know that for sure?’ I replied.
‘All I know is that over there’ — he indicated across the road — ‘is a budget beer shop belonging to the treasurer of Best Street mosque.’ He looked up at a swirling orange bulb outside a taxi office, Royal Cars. ‘And that our minicab driver brothers hose down the drunken vomit of their passengers every Friday and Saturday night.’
The warm rays of the sun bathed my face and arms, and tilting my head up I saw a cloudless blue sky. I took a big breath in and exhaled long and hard as though the warmth of the air would cleanse me of Mustafa’s cynicism.
Mustafa squinted hard at the sky, putting his hands together. His lips barely moved, the hum of a rapid-fire prayer alternating with the sound of his tongue pressing it against the roof of his mouth.
‘What is the prayer for?’ I asked.
Mustafa swiped his hands vertically down his face and nodded, sucking air through his teeth. ‘My brother,’ he replied. Did he mean me?
As though suddenly drained of energy, Mustafa shuffled on, taking short steps. When confronted with a kerb or a protruding paving stone he seemed to take great care in how and where he placed each foot. He reminded me of a child learning to walk.
Men and women stopped to smile at Mustafa, then did a suspicious double take when they saw me. My parents would never have openly admitted to my career but, just the same, everybody would know what I had done. An Afghan perched cross-legged on a mobile phone kiosk gave Mustafa a knowing nod, a gesture Mustafa reciprocated by placing his right fist over his heart and making a deep respectful bow.
‘You say you’ve been away?’ I asked.
‘Same place as you, brother.’ Mustafa put out his right hand, inches from my eyes. ‘Three is a sacred number.’
I drew back to focus on his hand. The three digits between his thumb and little finger were missing, the stubs gnarled, some longer than others but none progressing beyond the middle joint. The nails on his thumb and little finger were paper-thin and brittle, the faintest pink blush showing through them. I shivered involuntarily.
Mustafa smiled, exposing perfect white teeth. ‘As long as it takes, brother, we will bide our time. We will have justice.’
‘You were a jihadi?’
‘Sunshine out there played havoc with my eyes,’ he joked.
I laughed nervously. ‘You didn’t get a tan.’
‘Worked mostly at night.’
‘You were the enemy?’
‘I was good with my hands.’ He smiled and wriggled his stubs. ‘And can you believe it? I had to blacken my face; just like your British soldier friends I painted streaks of camo across my face.’ Carefully he mounted the steps of the Kashmiri Karahi House and Sweet Shop.
A brother, not looking where he was going, brushed between us on his way out of the store, a carrier bag swinging at his hips. A few feet on he stopped, swivelled on his toes and exclaimed, ‘Brother Mustafa, it is you! Mash Allah. Mash Allah.’
The stranger rushed back, clasped both of Mustafa’s hands in his own and said, ‘Allahu Akbar, brother, you are safe, Allahu Akbar.’ The speaker glanced at me with penetrating eyes before returning his attention to Mustafa. ‘Anything you need, Brother Mustafa, please call upon me. My brothers and I, we await your call, don’t forget us.’ The man had a long black beard. In the centre of his forehead was a thick circular patch of skin, dark and slightly raised — a third eye, a marker of a true believer.