Mustafa made a deep bow. ‘I will, brother, I will, but right now,’ he pointed to the stranger’s carrier bag, ‘your wife will be cross if you let those sweetmeats melt in this heat!’
Ali, the owner of Kashmiri’s, stood behind a refrigerated glass counter. The curved glass at the front reflected a distorted image of Mustafa and me, our faces long and curved and Mustafa’s beard spiralling to a thin point. In the chilled compartment were brightly coloured sweetmeats shaped into cubes and spheres and crusted with chopped nuts. One type of milky barfi was covered in gold leaf.
Ali put his right fist over his heart. ‘Salaam to you, Dr Mustafa bhai. I saw you from the window and could not believe my eyes. Had you not come in, I would have come out to greet you. Welcome most humbly to my shop.’
‘Brother,’ said Mustafa, ‘I need to trouble you for fifty boxes of assorted sweetmeats.’
Ali nodded. After fumbling in his pockets, Mustafa pulled out a long thin piece of paper like a till receipt. He handed it to Ali and asked him to deliver the sweetmeats to the addresses written on the chit.
The shopkeeper considered the list and nodded. ‘Yes, bhai, of course, bhai, I will close up shop and do it personally.’
‘May Allah bless you,’ said Mustafa, pulling out a large wad of brand-new banknotes.
Ali shrank back towards the wall behind him, shaking his head. ‘No, bhai, here you will not pay. I will not accept a penny. Please, bhai, give it to the poor.’
‘Brother, you are kind. The poor have never needed it more.’ And as Mustafa smiled, I understood ‘the poor’ to mean a fund for jihad.
Outside the shop we leant against a column of brickwork at the centre of the glass frontage, eating samosas out of a paper bag Ali had insisted we take. Mustafa spoke, flakes of pastry caught on his lower lip. ‘Brother Akram, in our own ways we were both jihadi.’
‘Ali in the shop called you doctor?’ I said.
His milky eyes stared into mine. ‘Ali, mash Allah, is one of the faithful, and although I prefer the honorific mister over the title doctor, people really respect the doctor.’ A smile spread across his lips and he returned his attention to the bag of samosas.
‘Mister?’ I enquired, further confused.
‘I was awarded the honorific by no less an institution than the Dental Faculty at the University of London.’
‘You were placing fillings in Talibs’ teeth?’
Mustafa put a hand on my wrist. ‘My dear brother. If you understood the anatomy of how a tooth is suspended by ligaments into the bones of the skull, you would then understand how the dental complex is possibly the weakest part of the body. Allah, in his graciousness it seems, has designed the system to limit our time on this earth. When the dento-alveolar complex fails — and inevitably sooner or later it does — its sequelae is a potent infection spreading like a sponge soaking up water into the eyes and the brain. I, with nothing more complicated than a pair of forceps,’ he beamed proudly, ‘gave renewed life to our brothers and sheikhs.’
‘You met the sheikhs?’ I asked.
‘I was often taken blindfolded—’ He broke off, clearly deciding he had said enough.
‘So a sheikh bit off your fingers?’ I tried not to laugh.
‘I don’t talk about the sheikhs.’ His eyes stared wistfully into the distance and he nodded before continuing. ‘As part of my training I was taught ethics. Patient confidentiality. But I will tell you this. Even the great sheikh trembled at the sight of my needle.’
‘You met—’
Mustafa interrupted. ‘It was a cause of concern to me that I was unable to sterilize my instruments, and a strange irony that only through the pursuit of a solution to that problem was I introduced to acids and nitrates and chlorides, and there too my medicinal knowledge of chemistry was useful.’
‘You laid IED?’
‘There was always a shortage of mobile phones.’
‘Mobile phones?’
Mustafa laughed before continuing. ‘My preferred detonation method was by text message. A short text message sent to a mobile phone wired to the fuse.’
‘What did the text say?’
‘For luck I used the numbers seven-eight-six.’
‘We in the army, we didn’t do jihad,’ I stated, but no sooner had I spoken than I realized he would make capital out of my alliance with the gora.
‘No. Really? Not jihad? Then what for?’
I shrugged my shoulders, conscious that I now had to support my statement. ‘I was there for my mates and the army, for Queen and country, for England, forever England, green hills and that. It’s the thing they drum into you.’
Mustafa didn’t reply immediately. With a loose tail of turban he wiped the sweat off his brow, and as he pushed up his turban it revealed his third eye, a callused circle of brown skin that stood out against his white forehead. Proof, if it were needed, that his real Pakistani colour could be beaten to the surface.
I was afraid of what he might say and looked away when he finally spoke. ‘Are you really stupid enough to believe all that? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? When you were drinking with your mates in the NAAFI did you not look down at your brown arms and little black hairs poking out of your skin and think what the fuck am I doing here?’ He inspected me closely, running his eyes over every contour of my face. ‘You’re a cripple, and where are your mates now, and where is this green Eng-a-land?’
‘I got compo. I have a pension. You’re in England now too, so where are your jihadi?’
A pink blush spread rapidly across Mustafa’s face, and he spoke angrily. ‘Have you not seen them? Are you blind? That man who stopped me outside Ali’s, the one with the shopping bag, he might look like a nobody to you but he works as a specialist surgeon. The fellow at the phone card kiosk is an Afghan veteran. And, and. ’ In his fury, Mustafa struggled for words. ‘Did you not witness how Ali would not take my money? If I stood here and called, a hundred men would come to my aid. Here, my foolish brother, my dear brother Akram,’ he spread out his arms as though he spoke for all of Cradley, ‘here, everywhere are my jihadi.’ He spoke loudly, almost shouting, panting for breath between words. ‘We cannot all fight, but we each do our bit.’
Suddenly, Mustafa stooped over and struggled for air. Letting my stick take my weight, I nudged a shoulder into his to offer support. A thick red tracked up from his neck and quickly engulfed his cheeks. He put his maimed hand to his face, clearly in pain. I could feel heat coming off him. A number of brothers who were out shopping, some a few feet away and others across the street, stopped and stared. Some pointed Mustafa out to their wives or companions, but each stood at a reverent, almost fearful distance, as though primed to help and waiting for a signal.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘When the fuse blew off my fingers,’ he gasped, ‘I had a minor heart attack. They could seal the ends of my fingers with a branding iron but my heart they could only monitor. I have not been the same since. At first I thought my confidence had gone, but doctors say it is worse. They say we albinos have weak hearts.’
‘Serves you right for messing around with fuses.’
Mustafa’s laughter seemed valiant amid his short, panicked intakes of breath. He grappled for my shoulder and straightened. Like a bottle slowly drained, the redness gradually disappeared below the collar of his combat tunic. Seeing the brothers staring at him, Mustafa simultaneously bowed and put his right fist to his heart. The brothers across the road, and others surrounding us from a distance of only a few feet, slunk off.