‘Abba,’ said Magid, after surveying the state of play for a moment. ‘Definitely Abba.’
‘Cha, man. No way,’ said Millat, blinking in the light. ‘I bet you two orange lollies Amma’s going to kick the shit out of him.’
‘Ooooooo!’ cried the twins in unison, as if it were a firework display, and then, ‘Aaaaaah!’
Alsana had just ended the fight with a little help from the garden rake.
‘Now maybe some of us, who have to work in the morning, can get a decent night’s kip! Bloody Pakis,’ shouted a neighbour.
A few minutes later (because they always held each other after these fights, a hug somewhere between affection and collapse) Samad came in from the garden, still mildly concussed and said, ‘Go to bed,’ before brushing a hand through each son’s thick black hair.
As he reached the door, he stopped. ‘You’ll thank me,’ he said, turning to Magid, who smiled faintly, thinking maybe Abba was going to get him that chemistry set after all. ‘You’ll thank me in the end. This country’s no good. We tear each other apart in this country.’
Then he walked up the stairs and phoned Poppy Burt-Jones, waking her up to tell her there would be no more kisses in the afternoon, no more guilty walks, no more furtive taxis. End of affair.
Maybe all the Iqbals were prophets because Alsana’s nose for trouble was more right than it had ever been. Public decapitations, families cremated in their sleep, hanging bodies outside the Kashmir gate, people stumbling around dazed missing pieces of themselves; body parts taken from Muslim by Sikh, from Sikh by Hindu; legs, fingers, noses, toes and teeth, teeth everywhere, scattered throughout the land, mingling with the dust. A thousand people had died by 4 November when Alsana emerged from under the bathwater to hear the crackling voice of Our Man in Delhi telling her about it from the top of the medicine cabinet.
Terrible business. But, as Samad saw it, some of us have the luxury of sitting in the bath and listening to the foreign news while some of us have a living to make, and an affair to forget, and a child to abduct. He squeezed into the white flares, checked the air ticket, phoned Archie to go over the plan, and left for work.
On the tube there was a youngish, prettyish girl, dark, Spanish-looking, mono-browed, crying. Just sitting opposite him, in a pair of big, pink leg-warmers, crying quite openly. Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. Everybody hoped she was getting off at Kilburn. But she kept on like that, just sitting, crying; West Hampstead, Finchley Road, Swiss Cottage, St John’s Wood. Then at Bond Street she pulled a photo of an unpromising-looking young man out of her rucksack, showed it to Samad and some of the other passengers.
‘Why he leave? He break my heart… Neil, he say his name, Neil. Neil, Neil.’
At Charing Cross, end of the line, Samad watched her cross the platform and get the train going straight back to Willesden Green. Romantic, in a way. The way she said ‘Neil’ as if it were a word bursting at the seams with past passion, with loss. That kind of flowing, feminine misery. He had expected something similar of Poppy, somehow; he had picked up the phone expecting gentle, rhythmic tears and later on letters, maybe, scented and stained. And in her grief he would have grown, as Neil was probably doing at this moment; her grief would have been an epiphany bringing him one step closer to his own redemption. But instead he had got only, ‘Fuck you, you fucking fuck.’
‘Told you,’ said Shiva, shaking his head and passing Samad a basket of yellow napkins to be shaped like castles. ‘I told you not to fuck with that business, didn’t I? Too much history there, man. You see: it ain’t just you she’s angry with, is it?’
Samad shrugged and began on the turrets.
‘No, man, history, history. It’s all brown man leaving English woman, it’s all Nehru saying See-Ya to Madam Britannia.’ Shiva, in an effort to improve himself, had joined the Open University. ‘It’s all complicated, complicated shit, it’s all about pride. Ten quid says she wanted you as a servant boy, as a wallah peeling the grapes.’
‘No,’ protested Samad. ‘It wasn’t that way. This is not the dark ages, Shiva, this is 1984.’
‘Show’s how much you know. From what you’ve told me, she’s a classic case, mate, classic.’
‘Well, I have other concerns now,’ muttered Samad (privately calculating that his children would by now be safely tucked in at the Joneses’ sleepover, that it was two more hours before Archie would need to wake Magid, leaving Millat to sleep on). ‘Family concerns.’
‘No time!’ cried Ardashir, who had crept up from behind, imperceptibly as ever, to examine the battlements of Samad’s castles. ‘No time for family concerns, cousin. Everyone’s concerned, everybody’s trying to get their family out of that mess back home – I myself am forking out one thousand big ones for a ticket for my big-mouth sister – but I still have to come to work, I still have to get on with things. Busy night tonight, cousin,’ called Ardashir, as he exited the kitchen to pace around the restaurant floor in a black tuxedo. ‘Don’t let me down.’
It was the busiest night in the week, Saturday, the night when the crowds come in waves: pre-theatre, post-theatre, post-pub, post-club; the first polite and conversational, the second humming show-tunes, the third rowdy, the fourth wide-eyed and abusive. The theatre crowds were naturally the favourite of the waiters; they were even tempered and tipped big and inquired after the geography of the food – its Eastern origin, its history – all of which would be happily fabricated by the younger waiters (whose furthest expedition East was the one they made daily, back home to Whitechapel, Smithfield’s, the Isle of Dogs) or rendered faithfully and proudly by the elders in black biro on the back of a pink napkin.
I’ll Bet She Is! was the show at the National these past few months, a rediscovered mid fifties musical set in the thirties. It was about a rich girl who runs away from her family and meets a poor boy on the road, who is himself off to fight the Civil War in Spain. They fall in love. Even Samad, who had no particular ear for a tune, picked up enough discarded programmes and heard enough tables burst into song to know most of the songs; he liked them, in fact they took his mind off the drudgery (even better – tonight they were sweet relief from worrying whether Archie would manage to get Magid outside the Palace at 1 a.m. on the dot); he murmured them along with the rest of the kitchen in a kind of working rhythm as they chopped and marinaded, sliced and crushed.
I’ve seen the Paris op’ra and the wonders of the East
‘Samad Miah, I’m looking for the Rajah mustard seeds.’
Spent my summers by the Nile and my winters on the piste
‘Mustard seeds… I think I saw Muhammed with them.’
I’ve had diamonds, rubies, furs and velvet capes
‘Accusations, accusations… I have seen no mustard seeds.’
I’ve had Howard Hughes peel me a grape
‘I’m sorry, Shiva, if the old man doesn’t have them, then I haven’t seen them.’
But what does it mean without love?
‘Then what are these?’ Shiva walked over from his place next to chef and picked up a packet of mustard seeds by Samad’s right elbow. ‘Come on, Sam – get it together. Head in the clouds this evening.’