‘I’m not actually from India, you know,’ said Samad, with infinitely more patience than he had ever previously employed the many times he had been required to repeat this sentence since moving to England.
Poppy Burt-Jones looked surprised and disappointed. ‘You’re not?’
‘No. I’m from Bangladesh.’
‘Bangladesh…’
‘Previously Pakistan. Previous to that, Bengal.’
‘Oh, right. Same sort of ball-park, then.’
‘Just about the same stadium, yes.’
There was a bit of a difficult pause, in which Samad saw clearly that he wanted her more than any woman he had met in the past ten years. Just like that. Desire didn’t even bother casing the joint, checking whether the neighbours were in – desire just kicked down the door and made himself at home. He felt queasy. Then he became aware that his face was moving from arousal to horror in a grotesque parody of the movements of his mind, as he weighed up Poppy Burt-Jones and all the physical and metaphysical consequences she suggested. He must speak before it got any worse.
‘Well… hmm, it is a good idea, retabling the motion,’ he said against his will, for something more bestial than his will was now doing the talking. ‘If you could spare the time.’
‘Well, we can talk about it. I’ll give you a call about it in a few weeks. We could meet after orchestra, maybe?’
‘That would be… fine.’
‘Great! That’s agreed, then. You know, your boys are really adorable – they’re very unusual. I was saying it to the Chalfens, and Marcus put his finger on it: he said that Indian children, if you don’t mind me saying, are usually a lot more-’
‘More?’
‘Quiet. Beautifully behaved but very, I don’t know, subdued.’
Samad winced inside, imagining Alsana listening to this.
‘And Magid and Millat are just so… loud.’
Samad tried to smile.
‘Magid is so impressive intellectually for a nine-year-old – everybody says so. I mean, he’s really remarkable. You must be so proud. He’s like a little adult. Even his clothes… I don’t think I’ve ever known a nine-year-old to dress so – so severely.’
Both twins had always been determined to choose their own clothes, but where Millat bullied Alsana into purchases of red-stripe Nike, Osh-Kosh Begosh and strange jumpers that had patterns on the inside and the out, Magid could be found, whatever the weather, in grey pullover, grey shirt and black tie with his shiny black shoes and NHS specs perched upon his nose, like some dwarf librarian. Alsana would say, ‘Little man, how about the blue one for Amma, hmm?’, pushing him into the primary colours section of Mothercare. ‘Just one blue one. Go so nice with your eyes. For Amma, Magid. How can you not care for blue? It’s the colour of the sky!’
‘No, Amma. The sky isn’t blue. There’s just white light. White light has all of the colours of the rainbow in it, and when it is scattered through the squillions of molecules in the sky, the short-wave colours – blue, violet – they are the ones you see. The sky isn’t really blue. It just looks that way. It’s called Rayleigh scattering.’
A strange child with a cold intellect.
‘You must be so proud,’ Poppy repeated with a huge smile. ‘I would be.’
‘Sadly,’ said Samad sighing, distracted from his erection by the dismal thought of his second son (by two minutes), ‘Millat is a good-for-nothing.’
Poppy looked mortified at this. ‘Oh no! No, I didn’t mean that at all… I mean, I think he’s probably a little intimidated by Magid in that way, but he’s such a personality! He’s just not so… academic. But everybody just loves him – such a beautiful boy, as well. Of course,’ she said, giving him a wink and a knock on the shoulder, ‘good genes.’
Good genes? What did she mean, good genes?
‘Hullo!’ said Archie, who had walked up behind them, giving Samad a strong thud on the back. ‘Hullo!’ he said again, shaking Poppy’s hand, with the almost mock-aristocratic manner he used when confronted with educated people. ‘Archie Jones. Father of Irie, for my sins.’
‘Poppy Burt-Jones. I take Irie for-’
‘Music, yes, I know. Talks about you constantly. Bit disappointed you passed her over for first violin, though… maybe next year, eh? So!’ said Archie, looking from Poppy to Samad, who was standing slightly apart from the other two and had a queer look, Archie thought, a bloody queer look on his face. ‘You’ve met the notorious Ick-Ball! You were a bit much in that meeting, Samad, eh? Wasn’t he, eh?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Poppy sweetly. ‘I thought Mr Iqbal made some good points, actually. I was really impressed by a lot of what he said. I’d like to be that knowledgeable on so many subjects. Sadly, I’m a bit of a one-trick pony. Are you, I don’t know, a professor of some kind, Mr Iqbal?’
‘No, no,’ said Samad, furious that he was unable to lie because of Archie, and finding the word ‘waiter’ stopping in his throat. ‘No, the fact is I work in a restaurant. I did some study in younger days, but the war came and…’ Samad shrugged as an end to the sentence, and watched with sinking heart as Poppy Burt-Jones’s freckled face contorted into one large, red, perplexed question mark.
‘War?’ she said, as if he had said wireless or pianola or water-closet. ‘The Falklands?’
‘No,’ said Samad flatly. ‘The Second World.’
‘Oh, Mr Iqbal, you’d never guess. You must have been ever so young.’
‘There were tanks there older than us, love,’ said Archie with a grin.
‘Well, Mr Iqbal, that is a surprise! But they say dark skin wrinkles less, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ said Samad, forcing himself to imagine her taut, pink skin, folded over in layer after layer of dead epidermis. ‘I thought it was children that kept a man young.’
Poppy laughed. ‘That too, I’d imagine. Well!’ she said, looking flushed, coy and sure of herself, all at the same time. ‘You look very good on it. I’m sure the Omar Sharif comparison’s been made before, Mr Iqbal.’
‘No, no, no, no,’ said Samad, glowing with pleasure. ‘The only comparison lies in our mutual love of bridge. No, no, no… And it’s Samad,’ he added. ‘Call me Samad, please.’
‘You’ll have to call him Samad some other time, Miss,’ said Archie, who always persisted in calling teachers Miss. ‘Because we’ve got to go. Wives waiting in the driveway. Dinner, apparently.’
‘Well, it was nice talking to you,’ said Poppy, reaching for the wrong hand again, and blushing as he met her with the left.
‘Yes. Goodbye.’
‘Come on, come on,’ said Archie, fielding Samad out of the door and down the sloping driveway to the front gates. ‘Dear God, fit as a butcher’s dog, that one! Phee-yooo. Nice, very nice. Dear me, you were trying it on… And what were you on about – mutual love of bridge. I’ve known you decades and I’ve never seen you play bridge. Five-card poker’s more your game.’
‘Shut up, Archibald.’
‘No, no, fair dues, you did very well. It’s not like you, though, Samad – having found God and all that – not like you to be distracted by the attractions of the flesh.’
Samad shook Archie’s hand from where it was resting on his shoulder. ‘Why are you so irredeemably vulgar?’
‘I wasn’t the one…’
But Samad wasn’t listening, he was already reciting in his head, repeating two English phrases that he tried hard to believe in, words he had learnt these past ten years in England, words he hoped could protect him from the abominable heat in his trousers:
To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure.
Can’t say fairer than that. Can’t say fairer than that. Can’t say fairer than that.
But let’s rewind a little.
1. To the pure all things are pure
Sex, at least the temptation of sex, had long been a problem. When the fear of God first began to creep into Samad’s bones, circa 1976, just after his marriage to the small-palmed, weak-wristed and disinterested Alsana, he had inquired of an elderly alim in the mosque in Croydon whether it was permitted that a man might… with his hand on his…