Irie walked into the lounge. ‘Bloody hell!’ screeched Neena at the approaching vision. ‘What the fuck do you look like!’
She looked beautiful. She looked straight, un-kinky. Beautiful.
‘You look like a freak! Fuck me! Maxine, man, check this out. Jesus Christ, Irie. What exactly were you aiming for?’
Wasn’t it obvious? Straight. Straightness. Flickability.
‘I mean, what was the grand plan? The Negro Meryl Streep?’ Neena folded over like a duvet and laughed herself silly.
‘Niece-of-Shame!’ came Alsana’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Sewing requires concentration. Shut it up, Miss Big-Mouth, please!’
Neena’s ‘nasty friend’, otherwise known as Neena’s girlfriend, a sexy and slender girl called Maxine with a beautiful porcelain face, dark eyes and a lot of curly brown hair, gave a pull to Irie’s peculiar bangs. ‘What have you done? You had beautiful hair, man. All curly and wild. It was gorgeous.’
Irie couldn’t say anything for a moment. She had not considered the possibility that she looked anything less than terrific.
‘I just had a haircut. What’s the big deal?’
‘But that’s not your hair, for fuck’s sake, that’s some poor oppressed Pakistani woman who needs the cash for her kids,’ said Neena, giving it a tug and being rewarded with a handful of it. ‘OH SHIT!’
Neena and Maxine had a hysteria relapse.
‘Just get off it, OK?’ Irie retreated to an armchair and tucked her knees up under her chin. Trying to sound offhand, she asked, ‘So… umm… where’s Millat?’
‘Is that what all this is in aid of?’ asked Neena, astonished. ‘My shit-for-brains cousin-gee?’
‘No. Fuck off.’
‘Well, he’s not here. He’s got some new bird. Eastern-bloc gymnast with a stomach like a washboard. Not unattractive, spectacular tits, but tight-assed as hell. Name… name?’
‘Stasia,’ said Maxine, looking up briefly from Top of the Pops. ‘Or some such bollocks.’
Irie sank deeper into the ruined springs of Samad’s favourite chair.
‘Irie, will you take some advice? Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been following that boy around like a lost dog. And in that time he’s snogged everyone, everyone apart from you. He’s even snogged me, and I’m his first cousin, for fuck’s sake.’
‘And me,’ said Maxine, ‘and I’m not that way inclined.’
‘Haven’t you ever wondered why he hasn’t snogged you?’
‘Because I’m ugly. And fat. With an Afro.’
‘No, fuckface, because you’re all he’s got. He needs you. You two have history. You really know him. Look how confused he is. One day he’s Allah this, Allah that. Next minute it’s big busty blondes, Russian gymnasts and a smoke of the sinsemilla. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. Just like his father. He doesn’t know who he is. But you know him, at least a little, you’ve known all the sides of him. And he needs that. You’re different.’
Irie rolled her eyes. Sometimes you want to be different. And sometimes you’d give the hair on your head to be the same as everybody else.
‘Look: you’re a smart cookie, Irie. But you’ve been taught all kinds of shit. You’ve got to re-educate yourself. Realize your value, stop the slavish devotion, and get a life, Irie. Get a girl, get a guy, but get a life.’
‘You’re a very sexy girl, Irie,’ said Maxine sweetly.
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Trust her, she’s a raving dyke,’ said Neena, ruffling Maxine’s hair affectionately and giving her a kiss. ‘But the truth is the Barbra Streisand cut you’ve got there ain’t doing shit for you. The Afro was cool, man. It was wicked. It was yours.’
Suddenly Alsana appeared at the doorway with an enormous plate of biscuits and a look of intense suspicion. Maxine blew her a kiss.
‘Biscuits, Irie? Come and have some biscuits. With me. In the kitchen.’
Neena groaned. ‘Don’t panic, Auntie. We’re not enlisting her into the cult of Sappho.’
‘I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know such things.’
‘We’re watching television.’
It was Madonna on the TV screen, working her hands around two conically shaped breasts.
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ sniped Alsana, glaring at Maxine. ‘Biscuits, Irie?’
‘I’d like some biscuits,’ murmured Maxine with a flutter of her extravagant eyelashes.
‘I am certain,’ said Alsana slowly and pointedly, translating code, ‘I don’t have the kind you like.’
Neena and Maxine fell about all over again.
‘Irie?’ said Alsana, indicating the kitchen with a grimace. Irie followed her out.
‘I’m as liberal as the next person,’ complained Alsana, once they were alone. ‘But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear that word in this house again,’ said Samad deadpan, stepping in from the garden and laying his weeding gloves on the table.
‘Which one?’
‘Either. I am trying my level best to run a godly house.’
Samad spotted a figure at his kitchen table, frowned, decided it was indeed Irie Jones and began on the little routine the two of them had going. ‘Hello, Miss Jones. And how is your father?’
Irie shrugged on cue. ‘You see him more than we do. How’s God?’
‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Have you seen my good-for-nothing son recently?’
‘Not recently.’
‘What about my good son?’
‘Not for years.’
‘Will you tell the good-for-nothing he’s a good-for-nothing when you find him?’
‘I’ll do my best, Mr Iqbal.’
‘God bless you.’
‘Gesundheit.’
‘Now, if you will excuse me.’ Samad reached for his prayer mat from the top of the fridge and left the room.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked Irie, noticing that Samad had delivered his lines with less than enthusiasm. ‘He seems, I don’t know, sad.’
Alsana sighed. ‘He is sad. He feels like he has screwed everything up. Of course, he has screwed everything up, but then again, who will cast the first stone, et cetera. He prays and prays. But he will not look straight at the facts: Millat hanging around with God knows what kind of people, always with the white girls, and Magid…’
Irie remembered her first sweetheart encircled by a fuzzy halo of perfection, an illusion born of the disappointments Millat had afforded her over the years.
‘Why, what’s wrong with Magid?’
Alsana frowned and reached up to the top kitchen shelf, where she collected a thin airmail envelope and passed it to Irie. Irie removed the letter and the photograph inside.
The photo was of Magid, now a tall, distinguished-looking young man. His hair was the deep black of his brother’s but it was not brushed forward on his face. It was parted on the left side, slicked down and drawn behind the right ear. He was dressed in a tweed suit and what looked – though one couldn’t be sure, the photo was not good – like a cravat. He held a large sun hat in one hand. In the other he clasped the hand of the eminent Indian writer Sir R. V. Saraswati. Saraswati was dressed all in white, with his broad-rimmed hat on his head and an ostentatious cane in his free hand. The two of them were posed in a somewhat self-congratulatory manner, smiling broadly and looking for all the world as if they were about to pat each other roundly on the back or had just done so. The midday sun was out and bouncing off Dhaka University’s front steps, where the whole scene had been captured.
Alsana inched a smear off the photo with her index finger. ‘You know Saraswati?’
Irie nodded. Compulsory GCSE text: A Stitch in Time by R. V. Saraswati. A bitter-sweet tale of the last days of Empire.