“Thank you,” Kiran says, standing in the door. “I approached the mosque earlier — knowing there would be people there, hoping I would bring one of them back with me but they were busy with their own troubles.”
“Troubles?”
“Someone left a”—Kiran hesitates—“a pig’s head outside the door during the night. A lot of noise and shouts outside the building as people discovered it.”
A quill of vapour emerges from Shamas’s mouth. He has just been to the mosque to assess the situation, the building that was an ordinary home until a decade ago when it was bought to be converted into a mosque. The widow who had lived here had slowly lost her reason after her husband’s death. She was alone: her husband had brought two of his nephews into England in the 1960s, declaring to the immigration authorities that they were his sons, and when she miscarried complicatedly five times in the 1970s, the doctors did not see why they should not suggest a hysterectomy since the couple already had two children. The husband had consented and persuaded her to consent: knowing very little English and nothing about how the law operated in this country, he feared their refusal to have the operation would somehow result in the doctors’ alerting the immigration authorities and landing all four of them in prison.
The nephews did end up in jail once they grew up. They were briefly brought to the funeral of their uncle in handcuffs: one was serving a sentence for breaking-and-entering, the other for possession-with-intent-to-supply. She flew at them with her nails at the ready and then went into convulsions and the women had to prise open her clenched teeth with a spoon to get at her tongue.
Losing weight rapidly over the coming months — there were reports that there were spiders’ webs on the hobs of her cooker — she went about in rags, her veil as wrinkled as a poppy, having locked all her other clothes and jewellery in a trunk and thrown the key into the lake. Within the year she became convinced that someone had been tampering with the sun: “I can’t find it anywhere, and if ever I do it’s in the wrong place.” That was when her brothers came and took her back to Pakistan, putting the house up for sale.
Shamas pauses outside the mosque, having gone in there looking for the cleric. He had to offer help, talk to the cleric — even though he didn’t want to initially. After the previous cleric died last year, the father of Jugnu’s girlfriend Chanda had taken up the reins at the mosque. Chanda’s family had disapproved of her “living in sin” with Jugnu, and so Shamas would rather not face the missing girl’s father.
But then he remembered being told by Kaukab last week that the missing girl’s father is no longer headman at the mosque: he had stepped down recently, unable to do anything about the talk in the mosque about his “immoral,” “deviant,” and “despicable” daughter, who was nothing less than a wanton whore in most people’s eyes — as she was in Allah’s — for setting up home with a man she wasn’t married to.
And so Shamas had gone in and found the worshippers weeping. They were in tears at the realization that Allah does not consider them worthy enough to have placed them in a position where they could have prevented this insult to His home.
The director of the Community Relations Council, Shamas is the person the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own, visiting his office in the town centre or bringing the problem to his front door that opens directly into the blue-walled kitchen with the yellow chairs.
Had the CRC existed back then, the fears that led to the woman agreeing to the hysterectomy would have been allayed.
Breathing quills of vapour he stands outside the building where plastic bags containing the animal’s head and the blood-soaked crystals of snow are lying against the stump of the apple tree that had been cut down because, according to the cleric, it was the seat of the 360 djinn whose evil influence was responsible for the widow’s lonely bewilderment.
He must go and see if anything has happened at the Hindu temple— responsibility to his neighbourhood driving him on.
Snow creaks underfoot as he goes back towards Kiran’s house once again. Torn pages in a wastepaper basket, the new snowflakes have partly filled the oblong cylinders his feet had made in the snow earlier. It is January in England, and it is January in Pakistan too. When they arrived in England, some of the migrants had become confused by the concept of time zones, and had wondered if the months too were the same at any given time in various continents. Yes, it’s January in Pakistan too. January — the month of Janus, the two-headed god, one looking towards the future while the other looks back.
His father worked in Lahore and came home to Sohni Dharti, on the banks of the river Chenab — Pakistan’s moon river — only on Saturday nights, walking his sons to school on Monday morning before catching the train to Lahore where he was the editor’s assistant at The First Children on the Moon, an Urdu-language monthly for children that had a Bengali sister-publication in Calcutta and a Hindi-language one in Delhi. Shamas has two brothers — one elder, one younger, Jugnu — but Jugnu was fifteen years younger than Shamas, so Shamas had only one sibling during his school days. “Solve this riddle,” their father would say to the boys as they walked: “Twelve or so princesses deep in conversation in their palace, huddledin a circle. What’s the answer?” He still remembers his delight at being presented with such puzzles. The eye that in the adult sees the rough material for metaphors and similes all around it, comparing one thing with another, that eye was already half open in the child. “An orange!”
Shamas wants to get to the Hindu temple as quickly as he can but the snow makes for hard walking, the air itself an obstacle to be overcome, and he fears he’s catching a chill, having heard himself coughing in the night. A mass of dislodged snow slides rapidly down the tiles of the St. Eustace roof, burying with a subdued thump the beehives that are standing apart from the rest, perhaps waiting to be mended. During June and July, the bees work the many thousand flowers of the lindens that are dotted around the churchyard, and under whose fissured bark Humming-bird Hawk moths may be hibernating now — immigrants from Southern Europe that arrive in vibrating clusters each summer to breed here; their wing-beats are said to produce a sharp-toned noise audible only to children, whose ears can still register the higher pitches.
He goes past Kiran’s house and the house that belongs to the woman who may be a prostitute, continuing along the road with the wild cherry trees, towards the river where the Hindu temple is situated. Someone had once asked him if the prostitute was Indian or Pakistani. She is white: had she been Indian or Pakistani, she would have been assaulted and driven out of the area within days of moving in for bringing shame on her people. And so had Chanda brought shame on her family by living with Jugnu: Chanda and Jugnu — the two missing bodies that were not found in the lake when it was dragged, the lake where the many hearts carved on the poles of the xylophone jetty enclose initials in Urdu and Hindi and Bengali as well as English, and where the colour of the waves is that particular blue grey green found on the edge of a sheet of glass, that bright strip of colour sandwiched between the top and the bottom surface.
In another few hours the surface of the snow would harden to a fragile layer of ice that would give out a knife-on-toast scrape when stepped on, but for now it is still powdery.
He comes to the end of the road through the wild cherry trees and begins to walk along the wider road it gives on to. On its way into the town centre, this road — planted with mighty horse chestnuts on either side, its surface patched like a teenager’s denim jeans with lighter and darker triangles and squares of tarmac — leaps over the river. The temple, dedicated to Ram and Sita, is on the riverbank where in early summer the reeds and flag irises stick out of the water in tight bunches as though being held in fists just below the surface.