That night I received a reverse-charges call from a phone box on “the coast.” Wolf, typically talking in a whisper, said they’d packed their things, left the boardinghouse, got into the old Porsche they’d bought with the money from the robbery and were heading for the South of France. It was a good idea, Wolf said, for them to “lie low” for a while. They had been looking for an excuse to get away.
Their careers had hardly been prospering. So they ran and were not pursued, except by their consciences, if they had any. But from my point of view, they had disappeared for good.
“I cannot believe my papa is not coming back,” Ajita said when she called the next day.
“At least you’ll be able to sleep at night now.”
“What are you meaning?”
“You know what I mean.”
“But I can’t close my eyes at all! The racists are chasing behind us now, Jamal. We are all in great danger here.”
This was not only paranoia. We didn’t know, in those days, which way the “race question,” as it was called, would go. My father had often said “the persecution” might begin any day. When it did, he’d come and get us. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
“Where else can we possibly live?” I asked Ajita. “Can’t I come with you?”
“I’m being looked after by my uncle. Darling, I will be in touch.”
The next thing I heard from Ajita, ringing from the airport, was that she, Mustaq and the uncle, accompanied by the aunt who lived in the house, were taking their father’s body to India for burial. The house would be put up for sale.
“Goodbye,” she said. Before I could ask her when she’d be back, she added, “Wait for me, and never forget that I will love you forever,” and put the phone down.
I followed the case in the news, reading all the papers in the college library. Eventually, the charges against the so-called murderers were dropped. There was much speculative talk of a racist attack by white thugs, and the Left condemned the police for not taking racist attacks seriously. But there were no clues. Apart from the watch, we took nothing with us. There were no fingerprints or blood.
The factory was closed down; the pickets went away. I was amazed by the inability of the police to find me. I guess I’d have confessed pretty easily, but there was no evidence to connect me with the dead man.
The upshot of this nifty piece of criminality was that I never saw Ajita again. She had gone to India, where I didn’t know where to find her. I waited, but she didn’t contact me, though I told Mum that if she rang she was to take her number.
Ajita was gone; I hadn’t realised she was saying goodbye for good. There was only silence, and I had lost my three closest friends.
I was in shock for another reason: I didn’t kill the father with my bare hands, but without my assistance he’d be walking around, even now perhaps.
I had done for him, and called myself “murderer.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The plane must have touched down around three in the morning.
I had to slap and shake Miriam awake. She’d been living in a squat in Brixton and was eager to get away. The area had recently been torn apart by antipolice riots. Miriam had been up for a week throwing bricks and helping out at the law centre. The contemporary graffiti advised: HELP THE POLICE-BEAT YOURSELF UP.
Inevitably, Miriam had taken something to calm her nerves on the flight, cough syrup, I think, one of her favourites, which had poleaxed her. I helped her throw her stuff into her various hippy bags and shoved her out into the Third World. Lucky them.
It was still dark but warming up. In the chaos outside the airport, scores of raggedy beggars pressed menacingly at us; the women fell at, and kissed, Miriam’s red Dr. Martens.
Wanting to escape, we got into the first car that offered a ride. I was nervous, not knowing how we’d find our way around this place, but Miriam closed her eyes again, refusing to take responsibility for anything. I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.
We couldn’t have been in Pakistan, the land of our forefathers, for more than an hour when the taxi driver pulled a gun on us. He and his companion, who looked about fourteen, wrapped in a grim blanket against the night cold, had been friendly until then, saying, as we took off from the airport to Papa’s place with Bollywood music rattling the car windows, “Good cassette? Good seat, comfortable, eh? You try some paan? You want cushion?”
“Groovy,” murmured Miriam, shutting her eyes. “I think I’m already on a cushion.”
This was the early 80s; I had graduated, Lennon had been murdered, and the revolution had come at last: Margaret Thatcher was its figurehead. Miriam and I were in an ancient Morris Minor with beads and bells strung across it. She must have thought we were approaching some sort of head idyll and would soon run into Mia Farrow, Donovan and George Harrison meditating in front of a murmuring Indian.
The driver had taken a sharp left off the road, through some trees and across a lot of dirt, where we came to a standstill. He dragged us out of the car and told us to follow him. We did. He was waving a gun at our faces. It was not Dad’s house; it was the end. A sudden, violent death early in the morning for me-on day one in the fatherland. A death not unlike the one I had caused not long ago. That would be justice, wouldn’t it? An honest and almost instant karma? I wondered whether we’d be in the newspapers back home, and if Mum would give them photographs of us.
Not that Miriam and I were alone. I could see people in the vicinity, living in tents and shacks, some of them squatting to watch us, others, skinny children and adults, just standing there. It looked like some kind of permanent pop festivaclass="underline" rotting, ripped canvas and busted corrugated metal, fires, dogs, kids running about, the heat and light beginning to come up. No one was going to help us.
We considered the shooter. Oh, did we take it in! Sister and I were shouting, indeed jumping up and down and wildly yelling like crazies, which made the robber confused. He appeared to get the message that we didn’t have any money. Then Miriam, who was accustomed to intense situations, had the stunning idea of giving him the corned beef.
She said, “It’s not sacred to them, is it?”
“Corned beef? I don’t think so.”
She became very enthusiastic about it; she seemed to believe they should want corned beef, perhaps she thought they’d had a famine recently. They did indeed want corned beef. The robber grabbed the heavy bag and kept it without looking inside. Then the other man drove us back to the road and to Papa’s place. Even robberies by taxi drivers are eccentric in Karachi.
“Papa won’t be getting a brand-new bag then,” I said as we hit the main road. Miriam groaned as we swerved past donkey carts, BMWs, camels, a tank with Chinese markings, and crazy-coloured buses with people hanging from the roofs like beads from a curtain.
Luckily, along with the reggae records Dad had requested, I’d put a couple of cans of corned beef in my own bag. Papa wasn’t disappointed; it had been his request. Although, apparently, he had told Miriam that corned beef was the thing he missed most about Britain, I can’t believe he’d have wanted a suitcase full of it. He was partial to the stuff, though, sitting at his typewriter eating it from the can and helping it down with vodka obtained from a police friend. “It could be worse,” he’d say. “The only other thing to eat is curried goat brain.”
Mother had wanted us to come here. She was sick of worrying about Miriam when she wasn’t at home, and arguing with her when she went there to crash. Mother was also, at times, bitterly angry with Father. She had found us hell to cope with, and she had no support. It would benefit all of us to spend time with him, getting to know how he lived and how he really felt about things. Even Miriam agreed.
Long before we got to Pakistan, like a lot of other “ethnics,” she’d been getting into the roots thing. She was a Pakistani, a minority in Britain, but there was this other place where she had a deep connection, which was spiritual, even Sufi. To prepare for the trip, she’d joined a group of whirling dervishes in Notting Hill. When she demonstrated the “whirling” to me, at Heathrow, it was pretty gentle, a tea-dance version. Still, we’d see just how spiritual the place was. So far we’d had a gun at our heads.