White Teeth (61 page)

“Great,”
said Millat. “What do we do now?”

“Can't you
read
?” inquired Abdul-Jimmy.

“We do what the board suggests, Brothers,” said Abdul-Colin, short-circuiting any argument with his deep, calming baritone. “We change at Finchley Road. Allah provides.”

The reason Millat couldn't read the writing on the wall was simple. He was stoned. It was the second day of Ramadan and he was stoned. Every synapse in his body had clocked out for the evening and gone home. But there was still some conscientious worker going round the treadmill of his brain, ensuring one thought circulated in his skull:
Why? Why get stoned, Millat? Why?
Good question.

At midday he'd found an aging eighth of an ounce of hash in a drawer, a little bundle of cellophane he hadn't had the heart to throw away six months ago. And he smoked it all. He smoked some of it out of his bedroom window. Then he walked to Gladstone Park and smoked some more. He smoked the great majority of it in the parking lot of Willesden Library. He finished it off in the student kitchen of one Warren Chapman, a South African skateboarder he used to hang with back in the day. And as a result, he was so stoned now, standing on the platform with the rest, so
stoned
that he could not only hear sounds within sounds but sounds within sounds
within
sounds. He could hear the mouse scurrying along the tracks, creating a higher level of harmonious rhythm with the crackle of the PA system and the offbeat sniff of an elderly woman twenty feet away. Even when the train pulled in, he could still hear these things beneath the surface. Now, there
is
a level of stoned that you can be, Millat knew, that is just so
very very
stoned that you reach a level of Zen-like sobriety and come out the other side feeling absolutely tip-top as if you'd never sparked up in the first place. Oh, Millat
longed
for that. He only wished he'd got that far. But there just wasn't quite enough.

“Are you all right, Brother Millat?” asked Abdul-Colin with concern as the tube doors slid open. “You have gone a nasty color.”

“Fine, fine,” said Millat, and did a credible impression of being fine because hash just isn't like drink; no matter how bad it is, you can always, at some level, pull your shit together. To prove this theory to himself, he walked in a slow but confident fashion down the carriage and took a seat at the very end of the line of Brothers, between Shiva and some excitable Australians heading for the Hippodrome.

Shiva, unlike Abdul-Jimmy, had had his share of wild times and could spot the tell-tale red-eye from a distance of fifty yards.

“Millat,
man,
” he said under his breath, confident he couldn't be heard by the rest of the Brothers above the noise of the train. “What have you been
doing
to yourself?”

Millat looked straight ahead and spoke to his reflection in the train window. “I'm preparing myself.”

“By getting messed up?” hissed Shiva. He peered at the photocopy of Sura 52 he hadn't quite memorized. “Are you crazy? It's hard enough to remember this stuff without being on the planet Mars while you're doing it.”

Millat swayed slightly, and turned to Shiva with a mistimed lunge. “I'm not preparing myself for
that.
I'm preparing myself for
action.
Because no one else will do it. We lose one man and you all betray the cause. You desert. But I stand firm.”

Shiva fell silent. Millat was referring to the recent “arrest” of Brother Ibr
h
m ad-Din Shukrallah on trumped-up charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience. No one took the charges seriously, but everybody knew it was a not-so-gentle warning from the Metropolitan Police that they had their eye trained on KEVIN's activities. In the light of this, Shiva had been the first one to beat a retreat from the agreed Plan A, quickly followed by Abdul-Jimmy and Hussein-Ishmael, who, despite his desire to wreak violence upon somebody,
anybody,
had his shop to think about. For a week the argument raged (with Millat firmly defending Plan A), but on the twenty-sixth Abdul-Colin, Tyrone, and finally Hifan conceded that Plan A might not be in KEVIN's long-term interest. They could not, after all, put themselves in an imprisonment situation unless they were secure in the knowledge that KEVIN had leaders to replace them. So Plan A was off. Plan B was hastily improvised. Plan B involved the seven KEVIN representatives standing up halfway through Marcus Chalfen's press conference and quoting Sura 52, “The Mountain,” first in Arabic (Abdul-Colin alone would do this) and then in English. Plan B made Millat sick.

“And that's it? You're just going to
read
to him? That's his punishment?”

What happened to revenge? What happened to just deserts, retribution, jihad?

“Do you suggest,” Abdul-Colin solemnly inquired, “that the word of Allah as given to the Prophet Muhammad
—Salla Allahu 'Alaihi Wa Sallam—
is not sufficient?”

Well,
no.
And so even though it sickened him, Millat had to step aside. In place of the questions of honor, sacrifice, duty, the life-and-death questions that came with the careful plotting of clan warfare, the very reasons Millat joined KEVIN—in place of these, came the question of
translation.
Everybody agreed that no translation of the Qur
n could claim to be the word of God, but at the same time everybody conceded that Plan B would lose something in the delivery if no one could understand what was being said. So the question was
which
translation and
why.
Would it be one of the untrusty but clear Orientalists: Palmer (1880), Bell (1937–39), Arberry (1955), Dawood (1956)? The eccentric but poetic J. M. Rodwell (1861)? The old favorite, passionate, dedicated Anglican convert par excellence Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1930)? Or one of the Arab brothers, the prosaic Shakir or the flamboyant Yusuf Ali? Five days they argued it. When Millat walked into the Kilburn Hall of an evening he had only to squint to mistake this talkative circle of chairs, these supposed fanatic fundamentalists, for an editorial meeting at the
London Review of Books.

“But Dawood is a plod!” Brother Hifan would argue vehemently. “I refer you to 52:44:
If they saw a part of heaven falling down, they would still say:
‘
It is but a mass of clouds!
' Mass of clouds? It is not a rock concert. At least with Rodwell there is some attempt to capture the poetry, the remarkable nature of the Arabic:
And should they see a fragment of the heaven falling down, they would say,
‘
It is only a dense cloud.
' Fragment, dense—the effect is far stronger, accha?”

And then, haltingly, Mo Hussein-Ishmael: “I am just a butcher-stroke-cornershop-owner. I can't claim to know much about it. But I like very much this last line; it is Rodwell . . . er, I think, yes, Rodwell. 52:49:
And in the night-season: Praise him when the stars are setting.
Night-season. I think that is a lovely phrase. It sounds like an Elvis ballad. Much better than the other one, the Pickthall one:
And in the night-time also hymn His praise, and at the setting of the stars.
Night-season is very much lovelier.”

“And is this what we are here for?” Millat had yelled at all of them. “Is this what we joined KEVIN for? To take no action? To sit around on our arses playing with words?”

But Plan B stuck, and here they were, whizzing past Finchley Road, heading to Trafalgar Square to carry it out. And this was why Millat was stoned. To give him enough guts to do something else.

“I stand firm,” said Millat, in Shiva's ear, slurring his words, “that is what we're here for. To stand firm. That is why I joined. Why did you join?”

Well, in fact Shiva had joined KEVIN for three reasons. First, because he was sick of the stick that comes with being the only Hindu in a Bengali Muslim restaurant. Second, because being Head of Internal Security for KEVIN beat the hell out of being second waiter at the Palace. And third, for the women. (Not the KEVIN women, who were beautiful but chaste in the extreme, but all the women on the outside who had despaired of his wild ways and were now hugely impressed by his new asceticism. They loved the beard, they dug the hat, and told Shiva that at thirty-eight he had finally ceased to be a boy. They were massively attracted by the fact that he had renounced women and the more he renounced them, the more successful he became. Of course this equation could only work so long, and now Shiva was getting more pussy than he ever had as a kaffir.) However, Shiva sensed that the truth was not what was required here, so he said: “To do my duty.”

“Then we are on the same wavelength, Brother Shiva,” said Millat, going to pat Shiva's knee but just missing it. “The only question is: will you do it?”

“Pardon me, mate,” said Shiva, removing Millat's arm from where it had fallen between his legs. “But I think, taking into account your . . . umm . . . present condition . . . the question is, will
you
?”

Now
there
was a question. Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.

“Mill, we've got a Plan B,” persisted Shiva, watching the clouds of doubt cross Millat's face. “Let's just go with Plan B, yeah? No point in causing trouble.
Man.
You are
just
like your dad. Classic Iqbal. Can't let things go. Can't let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is.”

Millat turned from Shiva and looked at his feet. He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green Æ Charing Cross, no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face-to-face with his great-great-grandfather's enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. He would be emboldened by it; and he would enter the Perret Institute with revenge and revisionism in his mind and lost glory in his heart and he would and he would and he

“I think,” said Millat, after a pause, “I am going to vomit.”

“Baker Street!” cried Abdul-Jimmy. And with the discreet aid of Shiva, Millat crossed the platform to the connecting train.

Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St. Martin's. All the statues facing the clock.

“They do love their false icons in this country,” said Abdul-Colin, with his odd mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing round, and crawling over the many lumps of gray stone. “Now, will somebody please tell me: what is it about the English that makes them build their statues with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time?” He paused to let the shivering KEVIN Brothers contemplate the rhetorical question.