What happened to revenge? What happened to just desserts, retribution, jihad?
‘Do you suggest,’ Abdul-Colin solemnly inquired, ‘that the word of Allah as given to the Prophet Muhammad – Salla Allahu ’Alaihi Wa Sallam – is not sufficient?’
Well, no. And so even though it sickened him, Millat had to step aside. In place of the questions of honour, sacrifice, duty, the life and death questions that came with the careful plotting of clan warfare, the very reasons Millat joined KEVIN – in place of these, came the question of translation. Everybody agreed that no translation of the Qur’ān could claim to be the word of God, but at the same time everybody conceded that Plan B would lose something in the delivery if no one could understand what was being said. So the question was which translation and why. Would it be one of the untrusty but clear Orientalists: Palmer (1880), Bell (1937- 9), Arberry (1955), Dawood (1956)? The eccentric but poetic J. M. Rodwell (1861)? The old favourite, passionate, dedicated Anglican convert par excellence Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1930)? Or one of the Arab brothers, the prosaic Shakir or the flamboyant Yusuf Ali? Five days they argued it. When Millat walked into the Kilburn Hall of an evening he had only to squint to mistake this talkative circle of chairs, these supposed fanatic fundamentalists, for an editorial meeting at the London Review of Books.
‘But Dawood is a plod!’ Brother Hifan would argue vehemently. ‘I refer you to 52:44: If they saw a part of heaven falling down, they would still say: “It is but a mass of clouds!” Mass of clouds? It is not a rock concert. At least with Rodwell there is some attempt to capture the poetry, the remarkable nature of the Arabic: And should they see a fragment of the heaven falling down, they would say, “It is only a dense cloud.” Fragment, dense – the effect is far stronger, accha?’
And then, haltingly, Mo Hussein-Ishmaeclass="underline" ‘I am just a butcher-stroke-cornershop-owner. I can’t claim to know much about it. But I like very much this last line; it is Rodwell… er, I think, yes, Rodwell. 52:49: And in the night-season: Praise him when the stars are setting. Night-season. I think that is a lovely phrase. It sounds like an Elvis ballad. Much better than the other one, the Pickthall one: And in the night-time also hymn His praise, and at the setting of the stars. Night-season is very much lovelier.’
‘And is this what we are here for?’ Millat had yelled at all of them. ‘Is this what we joined KEVIN for? To take no action? To sit around on our arses playing with words?’
But Plan B stuck, and here they were, whizzing past Finchley Road, heading to Trafalgar Square to carry it out. And this was why Millat was stoned. To give him enough guts to do something else.
‘I stand firm,’ said Millat, in Shiva’s ear, slurring his words, ‘that is what we’re here for. To stand firm. That is why I joined. Why did you join?’
Well, in fact Shiva had joined KEVIN for three reasons. First, because he was sick of the stick that comes with being the only Hindu in a Bengali Muslim restaurant. Secondly, because being Head of Internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace. And thirdly, for the women. (Not the KEVIN women, who were beautiful but chaste in the extreme, but all the women on the outside who had despaired of his wild ways and were now hugely impressed by his new asceticism. They loved the beard, they dug the hat, and told Shiva that at thirty-eight he had finally ceased to be a boy. They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation could only work so long, and now Shiva was getting more pussy than he ever had as a kaffir.) However, Shiva sensed that the truth was not what was required here, so he said: ‘To do my duty.’
‘Then we are on the same wavelength, Brother Shiva,’ said Millat, going to pat Shiva’s knee but just missing it. ‘The only question is: will you do it?’
‘Pardon me, mate,’ said Shiva, removing Millat’s arm from where it had fallen between his legs. ‘But I think, taking into account your… umm… present condition… the question is, will you?’
Now there was a question. Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.
‘Mill, we’ve got a Plan B,’ persisted Shiva, watching the clouds of doubt cross Millat’s face. ‘Let’s just go with Plan B, yeah? No point in causing trouble. Man. You are just like your dad. Classic Iqbal. Can’t let things go. Can’t let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is.’
Millat turned from Shiva and looked at his feet. He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green → Charing Cross, no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face to face with his great-great-grandfather’s enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. He would be emboldened by it; and he would enter the Perret Institute with revenge and revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart and he would and he would and he
‘I think,’ said Millat, after a pause, ‘I am going to vomit.’
‘Baker Street!’ cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the platform to the connecting train.
Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St Martin’s. All the statues facing the clock.
‘They do love their false icons in this country,’ said Abdul-Colin, with his odd mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing round and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. ‘Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time?’ He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate the rhetorical question.
‘Because they look to their future to forget their past. Sometimes you almost feel sorry for them, you know?’ he continued, turning full circle to look around at the inebriated crowd.
‘They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left.’
‘I’m bloody cold,’ complained Abdul-Jimmy, clapping his mittened hands together (he found his uncle’s speeches a big pain in the arse). ‘Let’s get going,’ he said, as a huge beer-pregnant Englishman, wet from the fountains, collided into him, ‘out of this bloody madness. It’s on Chandos Street.’
‘Brother?’ said Abdul-Colin to Millat, who was standing some distance from the rest of the group. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I’ll be along in a minute.’ He shooed them away weakly. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’
There were two things he wanted to see first. The first of which was a particular bench, that bench over there, by the far wall. He walked over to it, a long, stumbling journey, trying to avoid an unruly conga line (so much hashish in his head; lead weights on each foot); but he made it. He sat down. And there it was.
Five-inch letters, between one leg of the bench and the other. IQBAL. It wasn’t clear, and the colour of it was a murky rust, but it was there. The story of it was old.
A few months after his father arrived in England, he had sat on this bench nursing a bleeding thumb, the top sliced off by a careless, doddering stroke from one of the older waiters. When it first happened, in the restaurant, Samad couldn’t feel it because it was his dead hand. So he just wrapped it in a handkerchief to stem the flow and continued work. But the material had become soaked in blood, he was putting the customers off their food and eventually Ardashir sent him home. Samad took his open thumb out of the restaurant, past theatreland and down St Martin’s Lane. When he reached the square he stuck it in the fountain and watched his red insides spill out into the blue water. But he was making a mess and people were looking. He resolved instead to sit on the bench, gripping it at the root until it stopped. The blood kept on coming. After a while, he gave up holding his thumb upright and let it hang down to the floor like halal meat, hoping it would quicken the bleeding process. Then, with his head between his legs, and his thumb leaking on to the pavement, a primitive impulse had come over him. Slowly, with the dribbling blood, he wrote IQBAL from one chair leg to the next. Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent, he had gone over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.