Homesick (24 page)

The bus was taking a very strange route, around squares and through side streets she had never driven down. She stared through the window at people standing on street corners.

“What a strange day,” she said to no one.

“Yes,” the Muslim boy answered.

“Do you think it might be terrorists?”

“P’raps.”

“Are you from the north?” she asked.

“Yeah, Leeds.”

“Ah. Were you born there?”

“No. Peckham, actually.”

The bus stopped as more police motorbikes drove past.

“But you were brought up there?”

“Yeah.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“I’ve come …” But he didn’t finish his sentence.

•

He had seen someone on a bus passing in the opposite direction. He was certain he had seen Hasib, one of his friends from the study group. The buses stood side by side. Was it Hasib? But it couldn’t be—his beard and moustache were short and Western-looking, he wore jeans, a polo T-shirt, a normal jacket, and a rucksack. No, he was mistaken, Mumtaz thought. Hasib was devout. He wouldn’t have changed so much so quickly.

The bus pulled away, and Mumtaz turned back to Gertie.

“Where d’you think we’re going?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, and she smiled her toothy smile. He wanted to laugh. Her hair had come right down at the back.

He didn’t know why he was on a bus. He was supposed to have met someone an hour before. Now that he was away from home, everything they had taught him seemed watered down. He was like a glass, and jihad was Ribena, and London was a tap, its air the water flowing in. Silly, the ideas he had. Ribena, for goodness sake! But that purpley liquid was the right colour, he thought: the countries
of the world were like a cloth, and jihad was like a purple stain seeping across the cloth, until all the countries were the same pink colour. And everyone will be bloodied by it, and it scared him.

He needed a piss. More people had got on the bus, and more people were milling outside. They were at a standstill again. Someone was crying at the front; he could hear the noise, muffled into someone else’s coat. The grandmother next to him looked as if she had nodded off. Or was she dead? He was startled. What if she were dead? What would he have to do then? He fidgeted deliberately so that his elbow caught her, and her head jerked up. She took a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed the spit at the side of her mouth.

“I need the toilet,” she said to him. “What to do? I will have to hold it.”

•

Gertie liked the look of the boy next to her. No, she liked his demeanour: quiet, slow, thoughtful. He had eyes that seemed to have pain behind them, that private pain of those who have experienced death. The pain that our brief moments of madness stem from. But his dress: this was odd. When she arrived in England in 1961 with nothing but a bag of saris and blouses, a cardigan bought in the department store in Colombo and a pair of shoes, she felt like a foreigner. She and Reggie went to Oxford Street, bought clothes—the best, from Dickins & Jones, John Lewis.
When in Rome
, Reggie said. But it became more than that: in Sri Lanka she still dressed in her skirts and jeans, hip-length kaftan tops and twin sets. She was all mod cons, as Reggie said. When she saw the Muslim girls
about, in their scarves and their black coverings, she worried for them. How would they learn about the world, shut away from it? If you could not see their faces, how were you to place them within the world? Or was that it? Were you supposed to define them
only
as Muslim? Was Islam the only world they could belong to? But they are women, Gertie thought. Women were the world.

She turned to her neighbour: “Does your mother wear hijab?” she asked politely.

The boy shook his head. “Nah, my mum’s dead.”

“Oh. I am sorry. Do all the women in your community wear the headscarf?” she persisted.

“Why?”

She could see it was annoying him. She looked out of the window. Suddenly, a booming noise, so loud, so near, a ghastly, sickening sound, metal screaming against rock. She jumped, put her hand toward the man. He, too, reached inadvertently outward, toward her. There were screams in the bus, and then people running outside, and the noise immediately of sirens.

“What is it?” people were saying. “What was that?”

“An explosion,” Gertie said to the boy. She took his hand and held it. It was shaking. “It is all right. We are safe still. It wasn’t us,” she said kindly. She had been in Colombo when the Tigers had blown up a bus, not so long ago. Her cousin, a minister in the government in the eighties, had been killed by a suicide attack. She was fatalistic now when in Sri Lanka. And she realised that perhaps she would have to extend that fatalism to her days in her own country, in her own town, this centre of the world, this safe haven for all.

•

The bus drove away toward the west of the capital. They were let down at Marble Arch, and it was Gertie who suggested they go in search of toilets and hot tea. She asked him where he was going.

“To the airport. But I think I must have missed my flight.”

“Oh! I love to travel. Where were you going?”

“To Pakistan. I was meeting someone, and we were going to Pakistan together.”

“What? You have relatives there?”

“No. It were a course, you know?”

But she had no idea.

They found an old-fashioned café in the backstreets. Suddenly he felt conspicuous as they sat and watched the television, watched people with terrible injuries being stretchered into ambulances, a woman with a burnt face being guided across the road. They were there, they were part of it.

“Would you like sugar?” she asked him kindly. He had showed her to the toilets, leaving his bag at the counter, telling them he was just there, just over here, going to the bog. He had removed his kufi when he got off the bus, and now he didn’t know where he was, who he was.

“Why did you ask me about my mum wearing hijab?” he said.

“I was thinking about it all,” Gertie said, waving her hand generally at the television they were watching and the people walking beyond the windows of the café.

“Yeah, but, what? What’s hijab got to do with it?”

“Women,” she said.

“What?”

“Young man, I do not want to have a fight with you. We have all had a shock, isn’t it? But …”

He could tell what was coming.

“Nah, man. You’re saying, right, that modest dress in women is to blame? For all this? Nah, man.”

“Yes,” she said emphatically. “Yes, man. If women were given freedom, if they were given the same as men—if they had power, if they were allowed to follow their hearts—
then
 …”—but Gertie drifted off into a reverie. She watched the first pictures of the bus with its roof blown off. “That could have been us,” she said to Mumtaz.

“Yeah, I know.”

She struggled with her bag. “I should call Nandini. She is expecting me. You should phone your friend and your family. Your family will be worried.”

She took her glasses and an ancient mobile phone from her bag. Then, licking her finger, she thumbed through a small brown address book slowly, with the glasses balancing on the end of her nose. Again he wanted to laugh at her natural comedy. She glanced up at him.

“You don’t have a phone?” She picked hers up and pushed it into his hand. “I haven’t found the number yet. You call. Call!” she commanded.

Mumtaz had left his phone in Leeds, with a note to his uncle telling him where he had gone. Telling him he would see him in the next life.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Don’t worry about the expense. I’m a rich old lady,” she said, striking her belly. This time he laughed. “Ah, ah! I make you laugh, now?
Very
nice,” she said, teasing him.

He took the phone and dialled his uncle’s mobile.

“It’s me,” he said. At the other end of the phone he heard his uncle sob.

•

Still in the café, much later, after tea and lunch and cakes and coffee, Gertie said, “Well, I am going to go home. Where will you go tonight?”

“I’ll go home, too,” he said.

“I was not arguing with you,” she said suddenly. “Sometimes, because I am old, I see things. I’m fat, and I’m old, and I’m going deaf. But I see
things
.” This last word she elongated. “If we were allowed to own our own land and till our own soil—and never have a man tell us what and what not we are allowed to do …”

“I see what you’re saying, but …”—and here the need, the passion for jihad left him, because if it weren’t for his dad, his mum would still be alive. Even now, she and the baby floated above him, saying,
Up here, they’re all green, Mumtaz!
And laughing that laugh that mocked him and caught him in love all at once. Tears sprang to his eyes.

“Oh, you are tired,” Gertie said. She watched him. “Tell me,” she said, “how did your mother die?”

For the first and last time in his life, Mumtaz told the one person who would care how it had happened. And when the words were out there, between them, May was between them, sitting in the café, a small girl stroking Gertie’s hand, a young mother tussling Mumtaz’s hair.

•

They said goodbye, and Mumtaz promised to text Gertie to tell her he had arrived home safely. He went back to Euston and got on one train and then another—a trail of trains back to the safety of his uncle and his life. Gertie went home to Poplar and sat in her chair opposite Reggie’s. She would go to see Nandini later in the week, she thought. She had so much to tell her.

S
ometimes, at night, Rohan forgot to breathe. Since Victor died, heart palpitations would come upon him as he finally let go into the first moments of sleep, and he would startle awake like a fat man with an apnoea. He lay there, holding his left pulse with his right forefingers, chanting the cardiac cycle:
diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole, diastole
. That word, “diastole,” became a mantra, meaningless on its own, but a word to calm him, make the racing beats stop within him.

Rationally, he knew it was Victor’s death that caused it.

At breakfast, chewing oatmeal and fresh fruit, drinking green tea, he knew there were no outside influences, nothing to make this happen, but fear of death, the freefall of no longer having his father in the world. It never occurred to him that the death could mean freedom. That it could mean claiming for himself a life that no one would judge.

Diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole, diastole
, he whispered at night, trying to hold a human heart, trying to stop the skipping, the flailing-about, of the air coming in and going out: yes, trying to hold a human heart.

He was at the Oval for a cricket match, with Carl. He had driven into London from the airport the night before in a hire car. He had been late, and Deirdre had hardly spoken as she handed Carl’s things to him in a neat little case. They had slept late, in a double bed together in a
hotel, he and this strange, nearly seven-year-old creature who at some point in the night had pushed his back against Rohan’s back, and Rohan had remained awake, worried, frightened even, of waking him, of causing an emotional explosion. The child was his, was used to the
idea
of him, offhandedly called him Dad in the car on the way to the ground. He was
his
. In the car Carl had said, “So, do you understand cricket?”

“Yes, I understand it. Do you?”

“Of course. Papa told me.” Papa was Victor, and Rohan had a pang of jealousy for the relationship that had been dependent on his absence.

“Have you seen a match before?” he asked the boy.

“Only on telly. It’s boring when it goes on all day.” And then he looked out of the window at the cars. He began to singsong the colour of the cars, shouting, “GREEN,” if there was a green car. Other colours were almost whispered. How to understand this, Rohan wondered?

He had read paper after paper in his work. All of what he did every day was logical. He started at the beginning of a problem and, using straightforward methods, he thought through ideas based on scientific summation and found a solution. And if not a straightforward solution, a way through the problem, a compromise, perhaps, or a different way through, using a new method. It was exciting, and also thoroughly reliable. Like digging for gold. Sitting at his desk, or in consults, there was his stethoscope, as reliable as a spade. And in theatre, there were his catheters, his wires, his reliable needles, so strong and beautiful—he could almost hear the tingle of their worth. In their seats in a half-empty stadium, he smiled at the boy. He had no weaponry to tackle this. He felt love, sure, but my goodness, how can that be enough?

“When are they coming on?”

“Not yet.” He looked up at the sky. “Still, look, the sun’s come out, Carl. That’s good.”

“What’ll we do?”

“Nothing.” They sat still. Rohan looked about him. There were a few Sri Lankans below them, in dark-coloured jackets, a couple of royal blue T-shirts between them. No one he would know. He was out of touch with his parents’ friends. At his father’s funeral, there had been very few people he recognised.

“Shall we go and get a hot chocolate for you?”

“No,” Carl said. Rohan remained where he was. Carl stared steadily ahead. “After Papa’s funeral, you said that we would have fun,” he said. Rohan looked at him.

“I need some tea. Come,” Rohan said. They climbed down from the high terrace where they had been sitting and joined the queue for the drinks van.

•

When he married Deirdre, Rohan made it clear to her that sex was for making children only. It was a function with a purpose, and being a doctor made it easy to take temperatures, plot graphically her fertile days. If he could have given her a cup of sperm and a syringe, it would have made it easier. But into her he came, while wanting to cry, and instead crying out quickly, efficiently, for he knew the unfairness of both their lives was equitable and Deirdre’s suffering must be minimised.

She became fat with pregnancy and remained fat way after the baby grew long limbs and climbed trees. Her demands of him were only material, which suited him well. He worked hard through his residencies, transferring to a hospital in New York for the cardiothoracic surgical residency,
thus creating a crisis in the family: to move Deirdre and Carl with him or to leave them in London with Shamini and his own parents. It seemed natural to take them. He loved Carl, loved the idea that Carl would be something different, something
other
, with an American accent. It would have been perfect to come home to the child and his mother; to walk through his busy days and nights, through corridors at hospitals, down subways and up through tunnelling streets, and arrive into a centre of something he had created: warmth, safety, home.