9 Mutiny -1

who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is manmade.

It is different for the people of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal. They live under the invisible finger of random disaster, of flood and cyclone, hurricane and mud-slide. Half the time half their country lies under water; generations wiped out as regularly as

clockwork; individual life expectancy an optimistic fifty-two, and they are coolly aware that when you talk about apocalypse, when you talk about random death en masse, well, they are leading the way in that particular field, they will be the first to go, the first to slip Atlantis-like down to the seabed when the pesky polar ice-caps begin to shift and melt. It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God's idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy. You don't need to give out questionnaires to Bengalis. The facts of disaster are the facts of their lives.

Between Alsana's sweet sixteenth birthday (1971), for example, and the year she stopped speaking directly to her husband (1985), more people died in Bangladesh, more people perished in the winds and the rain, than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden put together. A million people lost lives that they had learnt to hold lightly in the first place.

And this is what Alsana really held against Samad, if you want the truth, more than the betrayal, more than the lies, more than the basic facts of a kidnap: that Magid should learn to hold his life lightly. Even though he was relatively safe up there in the Chittagong Hills, the highest point of that low-lying, flatland country, still she hated the thought that Magid should be as she had once been: holding on to a life no heavier than a paisa coin, wading thoughtlessly through floods, shuddering underneath the weight of black skies .. .

Naturally, she became hysterical. Naturally, she tried to get him back. She spoke to the relevant authorities. The relevant authorities said things like, "To be honest, love, we're more worried about them coming in or "To tell you the truth, if it was your husband who arranged the trip, there's not a great deal that we-', so she put the phone down. After a few months she stopped ringing. She went to Wembley and Whitechapel in despair and sat in the houses of relatives for epic weekends of weeping and eating and commiserations, but her gut told her that though the curry was sound, the commiserations were not all they seemed. For there were those who were quietly pleased that Alsana Iqbal, with her big house and her blacky white friends and her husband who looked like Omar Sharif and her son who spoke like the Prince of Wales, was now living in doubt and uncertainty like the rest of them, learning to wear misery like old familiar silk. There was a certain satisfaction in it, even as Zinat (who never revealed her role in the deed) reached over the chair arm

to take Alsana's hand in her sympathetic claws. "Oh, Alsi, I just keep thinking what a shame it is that he had to take the good one! He was so very clever and so beautifully behaved! You didn't have to worry about drugs and dirty girls with that one. Only the price of spectacles with all that reading."

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

Alsana sensed all these and more at the other end of her telephone line as the calls flooded in 28 May 1985 to inform her of, to offer commiserations for, the latest cyclone. "Alsi, I simply had to call. They say there are so many bodies floating in the Bay of Bengal..."

"I just heard the latest on the radio ten thousand!"

"And the survivors are floating on rooftops while the sharks and crocodiles snap at their heels."

"It must be terrible, Alsi, not knowing, not being sure .. ."

For six days and six nights, Alsana did not know, was not sure. During this period she read extensively from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and tried hard to believe his assurances (Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn), but she was, at heart, a practical woman and found poetry no comfort. For those six days her life was a midnight thing, a hair's breadth from the witching hour. But on the seventh day came light: the news arrived that Magid was fine, suffering only a broken nose delivered by a vase which had fallen from its perilous station on a high shelf in a mosque, blown over in the first breath of the first winds (and keep one eye on that vase, please, it is the same vase that will lead Magid by the nose to his vocation). It was only the servants, having two days earlier taken a secret supply of gin and piled into the family's dilapidated transit van on a pleasure trip to Dhaka, who were now floating belly-up in the Jamuna

River as fish finned-silver stared up at them, pop-eyed and bemused.

Samad was triumphant. "You see? He'll come to no harm in Chittagong! Even better news,he was in a mosque. Better he break his nose in a mosque than in a Kilburn fight! It is exactly as I had hoped. He is learning the old ways. Is he not learning the old ways?"

Alsana thought for a moment. Then she said: "Maybe, Samad Miah."

"What do you mean, "maybe"?" "Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not."

Alsana had decided to stop speaking directly to her husband. Through the next eight years she would determine never to say yes to him, never to say no to him, but rather to force him to live

like she did never knowing, never being sure, holding Samad's sanity to ransom, until she was

paid in full with the return of her number-one-son-eldest-by-two-minutes, until she could once

more put a chubby hand through his thick hair. That was her promise, that was her curse upon

Samad, and it was exquisite revenge. At times it very nearly drove him to the brink, to the

kitchen-knife stage, to the medicine cabinet. But Samad was the kind of person too stubborn to kill

himself if it meant giving someone else satisfaction. He hung on in there. Alsana turning over in her

sleep, muttering, "Just bring him back, Mr. Idiot... if it's driving you nut so just bring my baby back."

But there was no money to bring Magid back even if Samad had been inclined to wave the

white dhoti. He learnt to live with it. It got to the point where if somebody said 'yes' or no' to

Samad in the street or in the restaurant, he hardly knew how to respond, he had come to forget what

those two elegant little signifiers meant. He never heard them from Alsana's lips. Whatever the

question in the Iqbal house, there would never again be a straight answer:

"Alsana, have you seen my slippers?"

"Possibly, Samad Miah."

"What time is it'

"It could be three, Samad Miah, but Allah knows it could also be four."

"Alsana, where have you put the remote control?"

"It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa."

And so it went.

Sometime after the May cyclone, the Iqbals received a letter from their

elder-son-by-two-minutes, written in a careful hand on exercise paper and folded around a recen photograph. It was not the first time he had written, but Samad saw something different in this letter,

something that excited him and validated the particular decision he had made; some change of tone,

some

SS o ^urity, of growing Eastern wisdom; and, having

^carefully in the garden first, he took great pleasure in sneaking into the kitchen and reading it

aloud to Clara and

Alcana who were drinking peppermint tea.

Listen- here he says, "Yesterday, grandfather hit Tamm (he is the houseboy) with a belt until his

bottom was redder than a from to He said Tamim had stolen some candles (it's true. I saw Ct'it!),

and this was what he got for it. He says; sometrmes MUh pun she's and sometimes men have to do

it, and it >s a wise n who knows if it is Allah's turn or his own. I hope one day I can be a wise

man." Do you hear that? He wants to be a Wise man How many kids in that school do you know

who want to

be wise men?"

Maybe none, Samad Miah. Maybe all."

Samad scowled at his wife and continued, "And here here where he talks about his nose: "It

seems to me that a vase should lot be in such a silly place where it can fall and break a boy s nose It

should be somebody's fault and somebody should be punished (but not a bottom smack unless they

were small and not grown-up. If they were younger than twelve). When I grow up I Sink I should

like to make sure vases are not put in such places where they can be dangerous and I would comp

lam about oAer dangerous things too (by the way, my nose is fine now!) See?"

Clara frowned. "See what?"

Clara rrownea. occ wA-.

"Clearly he disapproves of iconography in the mosque, he dislikes all heathen, unnecessary,

dangerous decoration! A boy like that is destined for greatness, isn't he?" "Maybe, Samad Miah,

maybe not." Maybe he'll go into government, maybe the law, suggested

^Rubbish' My son is for God, not men. He is not fearful of his duty. He is no" fearful to be a

real Bengali, a proper MusUm.

Here he tells me the goat in the photograph is dead. "I helped to kill the goat, Abba," he says. "It

kept on moving some time after we had split it in two." Is that a boy who is fearful?"

It clearly being incumbent upon someone to say no, Clara said it with little enthusiasm and

reached for the photograph Samad was passing her. There was Magid, dressed in his customary

grey, standing next to the doomed goat with the old house behind him.

"Oh! Look at his nose! Look at the break. He's got a Roman nose, now. He looks like a little

aristocrat, like a little Englishman. Look, Millat." Clara put the photo under Millat's smaller, flatter

nose. "You two don't look so much like twins any more."

"He looks," said Millat after a cursory glance, 'like a chief."

Samad, never au fait with the language of the Willesden streets, nodded soberly and patted his son's hair. "It is good that you see the difference between you two boys, Millat, now rather than later." Samad glared at Alsana as she spun an index finger in a circle by her temple, as she tapped the side of her head: crazee, nut so "Others may scoff, but you and I know that your brother will lead others out of the wilderness. He will be a leader of tribes. He is a natural chief."

Millat laughed so loud at this, so hard, so uncontrollably, that he lost his footing, slipped on a wash cloth and broke his nose against the sink.

Two sons. One invisible and perfect, frozen at the pleasant age of nine, static in a picture frame

while the television underneath him spewed out all the shit of the eighties Irish bombs, English riots, transatlantic stalemates above which mess the child rose untouchable and unstained, elevated

to the status of ever smiling Buddha, imbued with serene Eastern contemplation; capable of anything, a natural leader, a natural Muslim, a natural chief- in short, nothing but an apparition. A ghostly daguerreotype formed

from the quicksilver of the father's imagination, preserved by the salt solution of maternal tears.

This son stood silent, distant and was 'presumed well', like one of Her Majesty's colonial island

outposts, stuck in an eternal state of original naivety, perpetual pre-pubescence. This son Samad

could not see. And Samad had long learnt to worship what he could not see.

As for the son he could see, the one who was under his feet and in his hair, well, it is best not to

get Samad started up on that subject, the subject of The Trouble with Millat, but here goes: he is the

second son, late like a bus, late like cheap postage, the slow coach the catch-up-kid, losing that first

race down the birth canal, and now simply a follower by genetic predisposition, by the intricate

design of Allah, the loser of two vital minutes that he would never make up, not in those all-seeing

parabolic mirrors, not in those glassy globes of the godhead, not in his father's eyes. Now, a more

melancholy child than Millat, a more deep thinking child, might have spent the rest of his life

hunting these two minutes and making himself miserable, chasing the elusive quarry, laying it

finally at his father's feet. But what his father said about him did not concern Millat all that much:

he knew himself to be no follower, no chief, no wanker, no sell-out, no fuck wit no matter what his

father said. In the language of the street Millat was a rude boy a badman, at the forefront, changing

image as often as shoes; sweet-as, safe, wicked, leading kids up hills to play football, downhill to

rifle fruit machines, out of schools, into video shops. In Rocky Video, Millat's favourite haunt, run

by an unscrupulous coke-dealer, you got porn when you were fifteen, i8s when you were eleven,

and snuff movies under the counter for five quid. Here was where Millat really learnt about fathers.

Godfathers, blood-brothers, pacinodeniros, men in black who looked good, who talked fast, who

never waited a (mutherfuckin') table, who had two, fully functioning, gun-toting hands. He learnt

that you don't need to live under

flood, under cyclone, to get a little danger, to be a wise man. You go looking for it. Aged twelve,

Millat went out looking for it, and though Willesden Green is no Bronx, no South Central, he found

a little, he found enough. He was arsey and mouthy, he had his fierce good looks squashed tightly

inside him like a jack-in-a-box set to spring aged thirteen, at which point he graduated from leader

of zit-faced boys to leader of women. The Pied Piper of Willesden Green, smitten girls trailing

behind him, tongues out, breasts pert, falling into pools of heartbreak.. . and all because he was the

BIGGEST and the BADDEST, living his young life in CAPITALS: he smoked first, he drank first,

he even lost it IT! aged thirteen and a half. OK, so he didn't FEEL muchorTOUCH

much,itwasMOIST andCONFUS IN G, he lost IT without even knowing where IT went, but he still

lost IT because there was no doubt, NONE, that he was the best of the rest, on any scale of juvenile

delinquency he was the shining light of the teenage community, the DON, the BUSINESS, the

DOG'S GENITALIA, a street boy, a leader of tribes. In fact, the only trouble with Millat was that

he loved. trouble. And he was good, at it. Wipe that. He was great.

Still, there was much discussion at home, at school, in the various kitchens of the widespread Iqbal/Begum clan about The Trouble with Millat, mutinous Millat aged thirteen, who farted in

mosque, chased blondes and smelt of tobacco, and not just Millat but all the children: Mujib

(fourteen, criminal record for joyriding), Khandakar (sixteen, white girlfriend, wore mascara in the

evenings), Dipesh (fifteen, marijuana), Kurshed (eighteen, marijuana and very baggy trousers),

Khaleda (seventeen, sex before marriage with Chinese boy), Bimal (nineteen, doing a diploma in Drama); what was wrong with all the children, what had gone wrong with these first descendants of

the great ocean crossing experiment? Didn't they have everything they could want? Was there not a substantial garden area, regular meals, clean clothes from Marks 'n' Sparks, A-class top-notch education?

Hadn't the elders done their best? Hadn't they all come to this island for a reason? To be safe.

Weren't they safe"!

"Too safe," Samad explained, patiently consoling one or other weeping, angry ma or baba, perplexed and elderly dadu or dida, 'they are too safe in this country, accha? They live in big plastic

bubbles of our own creation, their lives all mapped out for them. Personally, you know I would spit

on Saint Paul, but the wisdom is correct, the wisdom is really Allah's: put away childish things.

How can our boys become men when they are never challenged like men? Hmm? No doubt about it,

on reflection, sending Magid back was the best thing. I would recommend it."

At which point, the assembled weepers and moaners all look mournfully at the treasured picture

of Magid and goat. They sit mesmerized, like Hindus waiting for a stone cow to cry, until a visible

aura seems to emanate from the photo: goodness and bravery through adversity, through hell and

high water; the true Muslim boy; the child they never had. Pathetic as it was, Alsana found it faintly

amusing, the tables having turned, no one weeping for her, everyone weeping for themselves and their children, for what the terrible eighties were doing to them both. These gatherings were like last-ditch political summits, they were like desperate meetings of government and church behind

closed doors while the mutinous mob roamed wild on the streets, smashed windows. A distance

was establishing itself, not simply between father sons old young bomtherebornhere, but between those who stayed indoors and those who ran riot outside.

"Too safe, too easy," repeated Samad, as great-aunt Bibi wiped Magid lovingly with some Mr. Sheen. "A month back home would sort each and every one of them out."

But the fact was Millat didn't need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother's life and his own (he was a twin after all). Alsana was the first to spot it. She confided to Clara: By God, they're tied together like a cat's cradle,

connected like a see-saw, push one end, other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and vice versa! And Alsana only knew the incidentals: similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart. She did not know that while Magid watched the 1985 cyclone shake things from high places, Millat was pushing his luck along the towering wall of the cemetery in Fortune Green;

that on 10 February 1988, as Magid worked his way through the violent crowds of Dhaka, ducking

the random blows of those busy settling an election with knives and fists, Millat held his own against three sotted, furious, quick footed Irishmen outside Biddy Mulligan's notorious Kilburn public house. Ah, but you are not convinced by coincidence? You want fact fact fact? You want brushes with the Big Man with black hood and scythe? OK: on the 28th of April, 1989, a tornado whisked the Chittagong kitchen up into the sky, taking everything with it except Magid, left miraculously curled up in a ball on the floor. Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a

dark secret from her); the condoms are unopened in a box in his back pocket; but somehow he will not catch it; even though he is moving rhythmically now, up and in, deeper and sideways, dancing with death.

Three days:

1 October 1987

Even when the lights went out and the wind was beating the shit out of the double glazing,

Alsana, a great believer in the oracle that is the BBC, sat in a nightie on the sofa, refusing to budge.

"If that Mr. Fish says it's OK, it's damn well OK. He's BBC, for God's sake!"

Samad gave up (it was almost impossible to change Alsana's mind about the inherent reliability

of her favoured English institutions, amongst them: Princess Anne, Blu-Tack, Children's Royal

Variety Performance, Eric Morecambe, Woman's Hour). He got the torch from the kitchen drawer

and went upstairs, looking for Millat.

"Millat? Answer me, Millat! Are you there?"

"Maybe, Abba, maybe not."

Samad followed the voice to the bathroom and found Millat chin-high in dirty pink soap suds, reading Viz.

"Ah, Dad, wicked. Torch. Shine it over here so I can read."

"Never mind that." Samad tore the comic from his son's hands. There's a bloody hurricane blowing and your crazy mother intends to sit here until the roof falls in. Get out of the bath. I need

you to go to the shed and find some wood and nails so that we can-'

"But Abba, I'm butt-naked!"

"Don't split the hairs with me this is an emergency. I want you to '

An almighty ripping noise, like something being severed at the roots and flung against a wall, came from outside.

Two minutes later and the family Iqbal were standing regimental in varying states of undress, looking out through the long kitchen window on to a patch in the lawn where the shed used to be.

Millat clicked his heels three times and hammed it up with corner shop accent, "O me O my.

There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

"All right, woman. Are you coming now?"

"Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe."

"Dammit! I'm not in the mood for a referendum. We're going to Archibald's. Maybe they still have light. And there is safety in numbers. Both of you get dressed, grab the essentials, the life or death things, and get in the car!"

Holding the car boot open against a wind determined to bring

it down, Samad was first amused and then depressed by the items his wife and son determined essential, life or death things:

Millat Abana

Born to Run (album) Sewing machine

Springsteen Three pots of tiger balm

Poster of De Niro in "You tal- Leg of lamb (frozen)

kin' to me' scene from Taxi Foot bath

Driver Linda Goodman's Starsigns Betamax copy of Purple Rain (book) (rock movie) Huge box of beedi cigarettes

Shrink-to-fit Levis 501 (red tab) Divargiit Singh in Moonshine Pair of black conversebaseball over Kerala (musical video)

shoes A Clockwork Orange (book)