Ayesha had repelled me with her caustic manner then filled me with sympathy. I surprised myself by how completely I took her side. She had a fierceness about her; to the world she appeared tough and unfeeling, yet I felt that I understood her. The arrogance hid a wounded girl who needed help.
I was curious, too, about her father, the enigmatic Ibrahim who had gone from fond parent to torture victim in what appeared to be a sadistic murder. In life as in fiction, we are drawn into people’s stories by the lure of outcomes.
Ayesha’s flat was at the top of a Victorian mansion block overlooking the Regent’s Canal. She answered the door in jeans and a T-shirt. She was working on a pitch to the troubled Tesco group, an IT system that would fix the catastrophic glitches in their accounts reporting, boost the group’s slipping image and bolster Rahburn’s reputation. Meeting her again after the emotional intensity of the previous week’s evening in the bar was awkward. Ayesha was, if not cold, business-like. I hardly expected the same confessional ardour, but I was surprised how far she had retreated from self-revelation. She had opened up too much; now she was irked, embarrassed, distant.
I sat on her white sofa and drank her black Nespresso. She was wary about why I had come back and why I had changed my mind about wanting to write about her. I tried small talk but I couldn’t get her talking. I asked her to resume her story; she responded reluctantly.
She had succeeded in rewrapping her father’s body before the men came to carry him off. They seemed suspicious but didn’t say anything; perhaps they feared they would be blamed for letting her into the morgue. When she had tried to follow them, they pushed her away; women were not welcome at an Islamic funeral. She went with Guddu to see her grandmother, but the old woman was too distracted by grief to speak to anyone. At the funeral feast, she found some of the men who had been guarding the morgue talking to her Uncle Ahmed. When Ayesha told him she didn’t believe her father had committed suicide, he frowned and asked what evidence she had. Guddu had warned her not to tell anyone about their discoveries in the morgue, so she told Ahmed she simply could not accept that Ibrahim had killed himself.
Ahmed left her in the care of his surly friends and came back two hours later with the Police Station In-Charge. Inspector Iqbal seemed flustered. ‘I have some news. We have determined that Mr Rahman did not commit suicide. We have determined that Mr Rahman was murdered by the administration of poison. We have two miscreants in custody who have confessed to the crime. I have now sealed this dossier.’
Her father’s death had become a murder. But why were the police talking about poison? Ayesha had found head injuries and ligature marks. Without telling anyone, she scoured the Karachi phone book and hired a private detective. Masood Jilani was a long-serving former policeman and had come across such scenarios in the past. He said the poisoning story smacked of a charade mounted by a police department bribed to cover up a crime. The arrested ‘miscreants’ would be part of the plot, paid to plead guilty to poisoning in the knowledge that when the case came to trial, months or years later, the judge would be told there had been no poison in the dead man’s body. The prisoners would be released and it would be too late for the authorities to start looking for the real culprits.
Ayesha had been in Pakistan for over a week and needed to fly back to England. There was an IT contract that needed to be wrapped up and she didn’t trust her deputy to clinch it. She told her great-uncle Guddu she would return as soon as she could, but her work kept her tied up in London for the next three months. That was the reason she came to me. A mutual acquaintance, Mike, had told her I could help with her investigation and then write about it in a newspaper or a book. Now she seemed to have cooled on the idea.
‘So there you are. I’ve told you everything. You’re up to date. There’s nothing more I can tell you.’
I had been in her apartment for barely half an hour and she was ready to be rid of me. If I left now I felt I would never see her again. I tried another approach.
‘Why don’t you tell me some more about your father, Ayesha? I need to know about him if we’re going to do something about it.’
It worked. Ayesha slipped off her shoes and leaned back on the couch. When she began talking again the warmth had returned.
Ibrahim Rahman was born in Kahin Nahi, then a rural community on the outskirts of Karachi, in 1953. The Rahmans were landowners and conscious of their status. They belonged to one of the higher castes, living off the revenues from their land, farming some of it themselves and leasing the rest to other families. Ibrahim’s father, Hassan, had fought in the war, serving in an Indian regiment alongside British units in the Far East. He had returned to Kahin Nahi in 1945 and married a cousin. They had had three girls and, despairing of having a son, had adopted the orphaned son of a second cousin. Two years later, Ibrahim was born.
The years following the war had been difficult. As head of the family, Hassan had the responsibility of preserving the Rahman land in a period of turmoil. The 1947 partition of India triggered mass migrations as Muslims flocked to the newly created Pakistan and Hindus fled in the opposite direction. The new arrivals needed somewhere to live and Pakistan was riven by clashes over property ownership. Hassan fought for the family’s territory, but it wasn’t easy. Land rights had long been contentious in the subcontinent, with disputes kindling vendettas that flamed into violence and murder. The British had set up a land registry in the late nineteenth century, but corruption and inefficiency meant that it remained an approximate business. Local officials known as patwaris were put in charge of the written records. Personal greed, bribes and threats could persuade them to falsify ownership documents in favour of their friends or themselves.
Hassan had to be careful. He paid money and homage to the patwari, knew whom to flatter, whom to court and whom to cajole. He was a local man, adept at intrigue. By the time Ibrahim was born, the family’s prospects seemed secure. Hassan ran the land and oversaw the farming, leaving his wife to manage affairs at the house.
Ibrahim’s earliest memories were happy ones. From the moment he could walk he spent his days with his father, tramping the fields, inspecting the cattle. At harvest time, he and his cousins would meet to gather the crops in a round of festive activity that united the family. Ibrahim learned the ways of the Pakistani countryside, absorbed its sights and sounds and smells and saw the way its character changed with the seasons. He soaked up the heat of the summer and drank in the rains that slaked the land in spring. Autumn beguiled him with its imperceptible progression, turning the world from green to brown; the crisp winter nights sent him huddling under his eiderdown.
A joyful childhood left Ibrahim with a love of his native land. In later years with Ayesha on his knee he embellished its charms. She grew up with an image of her father as a latter-day Mowgli living wild in nature’s realm, never knowing when he would encounter charging elephants or be forced to run in panic from man-eating tigers.
Ibrahim’s tales of the adventures he shared with his father endeared him to her. She loved this man who seized her by the waist and threw her dizzyingly, thrillingly high. She screamed for mercy, but knew he would not let her down; she learned the feel of him, the contours of his shoulders that she clung to in exhilarated terror, the warmth of his chest as he hugged her to him. She imbibed the smells of his body, the acrid fragrance of his sweat, the sweetness of his aftershave, the half-life of the spices he’d consumed the night before, the shiny Brylcreem that he plastered on his hair.
When Ibrahim recounted his life, his daughter heard it change and expand from one telling to the next, full of colourful variations that she later recognised as the bountiful fantasies of a happy imagination. When, older, she realised that Daddy had never slain leopards or fought off bandits and dacoits, she loved him all the more for it. He had cherished her so much that his fondest wish was to impress her with his valour, to convince her that he was the greatest, loveliest daddy who had ever lived. For Ayesha, he was.
In some of his childhood tales, Ibrahim spoke of his sisters and brother. In Pakistan, he told her, a family would educate only one of its sons while the other children would remain at home to help with the family’s business. Ahmed was the elder, so he got the education. Ibrahim had no problem with that; the sons would inherit equally, and he had no interest in going to school. He was happy to wave Ahmed off to the madrasa and stay behind with Hassan to roam the land. The girls got no schooling because they were girls so it would have been a waste. When Ayesha interrupted to protest, ‘But Daddy, I’m a girl!’ Ibrahim would laugh and say, ‘Things are different now, Ish. You’ll get whatever you want. You know Daddy can’t refuse you anything . . .’
For the young Ibrahim, the Pakistan of his childhood was open spaces and nature’s bounty. But the legacy of Britain’s presence in the country remained strong. The Asian homeland and the British motherland were divided by geography, culture and religion; after 1947 statues of Queen Victoria were pulled down and smashed, some of them replaced by bronze replicas of the Qur’an. But when things were hard at home, when monsoon rains washed away the crop, when violence and dissension threatened the family or the nation, the people looked to Britain. Britain held their dreams and their ambitions. They learned about it in books and films, in school and in the flighty comedies that came through their radios and TVs. A world where naughty vicars chased scantily clad women, where men dressed up in frocks and everyone saluted a matriarch in a gold coach carried ineffable fascination. It was a place the young wanted to experience and the old dreamed of, a distant paradise where life’s troubles would be soothed by contented prosperity. ‘To London!’ was their equivalent of the Jews’ ‘Next year in Jerusalem . . .’ Even the fulminations of the baleful Enoch Powell, the man who had lived in and known the subcontinent but took delight in demonising its people, failed to dampen the enthusiasm for migration to the foggy nirvana.
In 1965 Ahmed went. He had done well at school and completed his studies. Hassan respected his adopted son; he took pride in his achievements, but he never had the same affection for him as he did for Ibrahim, his youngest child and dutiful companion in the rural life he loved. Seeing Ahmed off on the boat to Southampton was not such a wrench in Hassan’s heart. He gave him his grandfather’s amulet for guidance in the new world and whispered words of advice in his ear. He told him to work hard, keep out of trouble and write as often as he could. But he didn’t shed a tear as the boat left the quay.
Ahmed’s passage had taken some manoeuvring. Uncle Kabir, a relative by marriage to Hassan’s cousin, was already living in Lancashire and had agreed to be Ahmed’s sponsor. That satisfied England’s demand for financial guarantees from its new residents. But the British consul in Karachi was a stickler, renowned for his obdurate questioning and citing of rules. So Hassan and his wife decided to play safe. When they filled in the forms they wrote that Ahmed was Kabir’s son, automatically entitled to join his father in the UK. At the visa interview the consul looked suspicious. But records of births, marriages and deaths in Pakistan are flexible things that can be moulded to suit many purposes. Members of a family marry their first and second cousins with bewildering regularity and the system of given and family names is so unregulated that Pakistanis themselves barely understand it. A harassed, red-faced foreigner is very unlikely to get to the bottom of things, and the consul didn’t. He huffed and puffed then applied his stamp to the triplicated forms that would send Ahmed on his way.
In the week before Ahmed was due to sail, he drew Ibrahim into an adventure much darker than any he’d had before. It started as a joke. The boys in the village knew Amir and they knew his boasting. They were teenagers and most of them rubbed along together. But Amir was always talking about how rich his family was, how they had a car while others had to travel on foot, how his father could spend more in a day than the other boys’ parents did in a year. Ibrahim, who was young, would listen and smile. Ahmed, older, got angry.
Ibrahim smiled when Amir said he was going to see Nour. Nour was a girl with long plaits and a slightly scared manner. She was pretty; the boys admired her from afar. When Amir boasted that he would do more, Ibrahim didn’t really understand. Ahmed listened to Amir’s prattle and kept his counsel.
When Amir disappeared from the village and Nour disappeared shortly afterwards, Ahmed went to see the girl’s father. He told him he had overheard the young lovers’ conversations and knew their plans. Nour’s father, humiliated by his daughter’s betrayal, thanked Ahmed and asked him to come with him; he wanted the young man’s help to locate the lovers’ refuge. Ahmed agreed and told Ibrahim to jump into the four-wheel drive with him. Was he looking for safety in numbers? Did he want a twelve-year-old to witness the wages of dishonour? Or did Ahmed know that what was about to happen would shock and scar his brother for ever? However much he thought about it in the years that followed, Ibrahim could not find the answer.
Both boys saw what happens to a daughter who betrays her family’s honour. Ahmed and Ibrahim saw Amir being hanged. And they saw Nour buried alive. They saw her trying to clamber out of the pit, catching their eye in a desperate, imploring panic that Ibrahim never forgot. Angered by her struggling, Nour’s father smacked her head with the spade he had used to dig her grave and she fell back in. The men took it in turns to shovel the earth onto her quivering body.
When Ahmed sailed for England, Ibrahim was left with the memory of Nour’s last moments. It kept him awake then soured his dreams when he slept. Ahmed had shrugged and mocked him. ‘These things happen. It’s the will of Allah. Get used to it.’
Ibrahim tried to harden his soul, tried to tell himself he must accept the absence of kindness and mercy in the world. But it wasn’t easy. He wondered what he would do if ever he were to have a daughter who betrayed him in the way that Nour had done. Would he too enforce the just retribution that the code of honour demands?
With Ahmed gone, Ibrahim blossomed. He was his own man now. He went into the world, met new people and learned from them. He was no longer the simple country boy at home only in the fields. He frequented the town, learned the ways of commerce and saw what sort of thing makes money and what is merely a waste of time. Unlike Ahmed, Ibrahim was sociable and open. He had a frankness about him that endeared him to people. He could talk to anyone, from a chai wallah to a professor.
Ibrahim’s ambitions grew with his confidence. The life of a backwater like Kahin Nahi was no longer enough. He asked his father if he too could make the trip to England, but Hassan was reluctant. Ibrahim was his favourite, destined to take over the stewardship of the family’s lands as the baton passed between generations. Ibrahim persisted. Hassan tried to be firm, but he loved his son and wanted him to be happy. Soon after his sixteenth birthday, Ibrahim followed in his brother’s footsteps.
Ahmed had been working in England for four years and had saved enough to buy his brother an air ticket from Karachi to London. To satisfy the British authorities he acted as Ibrahim’s sponsor and financial guarantor, and on an October morning in 1969 the two were reunited in the terminal of Gatwick airport. Ahmed had borrowed a car from a Pakistani friend who ran a cab firm in Burnley and driven down before dawn. As they headed north the brothers drank tea from Ahmed’s Thermos flask and ate cold samosas out of a Tupperware box. Ibrahim marvelled at the roads, the cars, the houses and the newness of everything. Ahmed, sophisticated cosmopolitan, mocked his bumpkin brother and boasted of the life he had been living in Albion’s bright delights.
When Ahmed said they were approaching Burnley, Ibrahim’s stomach tightened. This was home now. He felt the thrill of anticipation, the dread of the unknown. As they drove by the terraced houses he pictured the lives of those who resided behind the lace curtains and pot plants. His heart filled with hope. Britain was the land of opportunity.
Kabir’s house looked like all the others. The paint was peeling and the windows were dirty, but when they dragged Ibrahim’s suitcases into the hallway the smell of curry that leached from the carpets, the ceilings and the bright patterned wallpaper was comfortingly familiar. Two Pakistani men ran down the stairs and out of the front door with a cheery as salaam alaikum in the characteristic burr of Kahin Nahi.
Ahmed saw Ibrahim’s look of surprise. ‘It’s not just you and me who live with Uncle Kabir, ’Brahim. There’s a dozen of us. Don’t worry – we’re all from Kahin Nahi. There are no outsiders.’
‘But Ahmed,’ Ibrahim said, wide-eyed. ‘How can everyone fit in? Where does everyone sleep?’
‘All in good time, brother,’ Ahmed said. ‘You’ll get used to things. It’s different from at home, but we manage.’
Ahmed told Ibrahim to put his bags in the back bedroom. There were two rooms upstairs and each had four beds. All but two of them were occupied by sleeping men huddled under blankets.
‘We sleep in relays,’ Ahmed said. ‘It’s not a problem, because we all work at the mill and we all do different shifts. Different shifts at work . . . different shifts in bed! Come on, I’ll show you the kitchen.’
In a room downstairs an iron pot was bubbling on the stove. ‘We keep the curry cooking round the clock,’ Ahmed said. ‘There’s always someone who needs a meal, so we just add more ingredients as the day goes on. On Sunday afternoons everyone sits around the pot and we eat and smoke and talk, just like at home. Abdul’s in charge of the cooking; he makes the curry and the chapattis and we all chip in to the cost. Life is sweet, little brother.’
On Monday morning, Ahmed took him to the mill. It was bigger than anything Ibrahim had seen, a looming hulk of blackened brick towering over the terraced streets, shading out the light. Inside, the noise engulfed him; the air shuddered with the moto perpetuo of machinery, cogwheels spinning, shuttles flying in the complex cross rhythms of the industrial dance. Men hurried back and forth with hammers and oil and bobbins, midgets beside the dark machines. Wisps of cotton hung in the air like clouds of icing sugar dusting the rumbling lathes.
The foreman weighed Ibrahim up. The man was a north Punjabi and Ibrahim struggled with his accent. In his eagerness to please he heard himself gabbling obsequiously in reply to the fellow’s questions. ‘Where are you from? Are you legal over here? What experience do you have? How will you show your gratitude if I take you on?’ Ahmed had told Ibrahim what to expect. He would receive no pay for the first month and the foreman would take a cut of his wages for the next six. After that the arrangement would be reviewed, with the level of future contributions dependent on Ibrahim’s work rate and on his participation in the complex scams that the foreman outlined to him.
The mills were owned by white bosses, but the workforce was almost exclusively Pakistani and Pakistani work practices had taken root. The foreman and the shift masters demanded a sliding scale of bribes in return for getting or keeping a job, for promotions and for the right to take holidays. The workers got their pay in cash every two weeks and there was no point in complaining if some of it was missing. Phantom employees were put on the payroll, clocked on, clocked off and paid at the going rate with their wages shared among those in charge according to the level of respect their position commanded. The bookkeepers were Pakistani, too, so the bosses never learned of the money that percolated out of their accounts.
Pakistani communities in Britain bring with them the customs of their homeland, and Pakistan does not work in the same way that Europe does. Formal law, formal justice and formal policing are not the order of the day; society runs along other lines, with patronage, respect and honour taking the place of codified rules. Law is clan-based, family and tribal, administered by powerful men whose rulings are imposed by force. And when Pakistani tribes settle in Britain, they settle together. The population of east Bradford hails from one region of Pakistan, that of north Rochdale from another. Clan structures, practices and accents are all preserved.
The area of Burnley where Uncle Kabir had settled was a mini Kahin Nahi. The men who passed through his house, staying for a week, a month or a year as they strove to establish themselves in Britain, were from the same suburb of western Karachi. They shared a common background and common tales of life back home. In the evenings they returned from the mill, ate their curry and chapattis, smoked their cigarettes and reminisced about the past. When things were going well they would talk about their women, their ambitions and their plans for the future. Then it was time to wake the others who were on night shift and take their place in bed.
The camaraderie, the shared memories and the familiar codes of conduct made it easy for Ibrahim to settle. He was a young man and the future was his. England delighted and surprised him. Shortly after his arrival he came out from his shift in the factory to find the world magically transformed. The grimy buildings and litter-strewn streets had vanished and in their place a pristine veil of white had made the universe anew. Ibrahim marvelled at the miracle, ran to tell his housemates and slid headlong on the icy pavement.
There were things that were less easy to accommodate. In his first months in Britain he found the country’s easy-going ways and lax morality disconcerting. After Pakistan’s fierce insistence on the dictates of honour and religious observance, the Britishers’ addiction to drink, their love of gambling and their displays of sexual depravity shocked him. But Ibrahim acclimatised. He was a nice-looking boy, tall and gangly with a shock of thick black hair and a winning smile. The 1970s were dawning and he looked good in flared jeans and denim waistcoats; he grew a moustache that gave him the air of a young Omar Sharif. Pakistani boys were still not that common in Lancashire and Ibrahim discovered that he held a fascination for English girls who didn’t mind cocking a snook at their fuddy-duddy parents. For three liberating years, he went out, forced himself to drink shandy and improved his English with the help of crackly LPs by David Bowie and Herman’s Hermits.
For all his accreted Britishness, Ibrahim’s heart remained Pakistani. Unlike some of his friends he didn’t pine for the old country, but he kept in touch with his family, writing letters that took a fortnight to arrive and eagerly awaiting replies that took even longer. He attended the mosque on Fridays and tried to pray five times a day, Salat al-fajr at dawn, Salat al-zuhr at midday, Salat al-'asr in the afternoon, Salat al-maghrib at sunset and Salat al-'isha at midnight. When he forgot, he reasoned that he was young and Allah would probably understand.
The Pakistani code of social precedence had followed its sons to their new home and few questioned its demands. Social rank derived from age, wealth, influence and the position a man occupied in a family. The system of castes and clans seemed mysterious to outsiders, but those who belonged to it understood every nuance. Families were assigned their place on the scale according to the history they brought with them, the land they owned or the connections they had with the dynasties of Pakistani politics. Kabir was venerated as the patriarch who had brought the Kahin Nahi boys to Britain and the father who replaced their fathers. He demanded and received money and deference; even when he was wrong he was right. They may have resented having to pay homage, having to assuage Kabir’s vanity and rapaciousness, but they did it because that was how things worked.
The same relationship of entitlement and debt ran right down the social ladder. Each man knew to whom he owed respect and from whom he could command it. Even those at the bottom, the poor, the progeny of insignificant families and despised castes, accepted their fate as the immovable equation of life. It had been thus since time began, and there was little chance of it changing.
But for all its feudal stability, the system imposed demands. For individuals and families to preserve their place in the pecking order they had to be constantly on guard to defend it. Maintaining respect and protecting honour were paramount requirements; losing face, allowing oneself to be disrespected was fatal. If a family let an insult go it could be shamed and ridiculed, its authority gone.
The result was that insults, real or imagined, were answered with shattering force. Implacable violence was the response to loss of face; those who didn’t avenge a slur were weaklings and cowards. And slurs were everywhere, from disparaging remarks to insufficient toadying, the failure to pay bribes, the refusal of a wedding proposal or a marriage that went wrong. A girl could dishonour her father by declining an arranged marriage or falling for the wrong boy. A boy could dishonour his parents-in-law by abandoning or divorcing their daughter. All these offences demanded immediate, manifest retribution.
Young Ibrahim did not question the ways of his homeland. He was obligated to his older brother because Ahmed had brought him to England, acted as his sponsor and taught him the customs of English life. Ahmed was owed respect and Ibrahim gave it.
Ibrahim’s footloose years came to an end in 1974. He was twenty-one and it was time to marry. From Kahin Nahi Hassan wrote to say that the family had found him a bride; Asma was seventeen and Ibrahim’s first cousin. They had met as children when they helped to harvest the crops on the Rahman estate, but they hadn’t seen each other for years. Hassan enclosed a photograph so Ibrahim could picture his future partner. As both families had agreed on the match, Ibrahim knew there was no point arguing; he wrote to say he would be pleased to marry Asma.
In the early summer he flew to Karachi and took the bus down rutted roads to Kahin Nahi. He was back for the first time in five years and the place struck him as primitive. The countryside he had loved when he walked out as a child with Hassan seemed arid now, the animals malnourished, the villages impoverished.
But Ibrahim found Asma a willing and grateful bride; she was pretty and personable and her family had provided a generous dowry. For them, Ibrahim was a catch. Marrying ‘an Englishman’ was a sign of status. It meant their daughter could bank on an invitation to join her husband in Britain; there were bureaucratic hurdles to leap, but their grandchildren would be British.
The wedding was low-key. Ibrahim had told his foreman that he was getting married, but a week off work was the best he could negotiate. When he returned to Burnley he was joshed by his housemates. They quizzed him on his wedding night performance and asked if the beautiful Asma had appreciated his virility. Ibrahim smiled and took it in good spirits. When the letter came three months later telling him that Asma was pregnant, he showed it to his friends and they slapped him on the back.
Ibrahim was growing up. A married man had responsibilities and he lived up to them. Every month he sent a portion of his salary by Western Union transfer to Asma’s father in Kahin Nahi. Every month Asma’s father wrote to thank him and to explain why Ibrahim would need to increase the amount of money he was sending. Urgent repairs were needed to the family home, an unexpected tax bill had come in, a member of the extended family had had another baby. The flow of money from Pakistani men in the new world to families in the old was a fact of life. Some of Ibrahim’s mates grumbled about the feckless folk back home and their insatiable demands for cash. But Ibrahim shrugged and sent them what they asked for.
Ibrahim worked hard because he owed it to his future family and because he was a young man who liked to please. When the foreman offered him overtime he did it; when they told him to sign a dodgy worksheet he signed it. Ibrahim liked Burnley life and Burnley liked him. His old girlfriends stayed friends; some would have liked to stay more, but Ibrahim thought of Asma back in Kahin Nahi and told them he was spoken for. On his birthday they helped his Pakistani housemates stage a party, first at Uncle Kabir’s and then at the pub on the corner. Several of the English girls were married or going steady and they brought their partners. Young working-class white men, they were suspicious of the Pakistani boys but drink and jollity helped bridge the divide.
The following weekend some of them invited Ibrahim and Ahmed to Turf Moor. Burnley had just been promoted from the second division of the Football League and were storming up the table in the top flight. Their opponents were West Ham United, the stadium was packed and the fiesta was on. No one noticed two non-white faces among the 18,216 who passed through the turnstiles; Ibrahim and Ahmed were part of the crowd and part of the fun. When the white boys chanted ‘Up the Clarets!’ and ‘Super Dobbo!’ they did the same. They barely understood the rules of the game, but it was exhilarating to sing and shout, to share in something that Englishmen felt passionately about. When Geoff Nulty put Burnley ahead with a rasping volley into the top of the net, their white friends included them in the communal embraces. They bought them pork pies at half-time and didn’t notice when the brothers slipped them uneaten into their pockets. In the second half West Ham’s Graham Paddon equalised with a scuffed shot that crept over the line to silence the home fans. Ibrahim sensed the change that swept over the terraces and motioned Ahmed to stop shouting. The rest of the game was played in a mood of frustration; there was discontented muttering as the crowd streamed out of the ground. Ibrahim and Ahmed said goodbye to their friends and set off down Brunshaw Road to walk home. At the corner of Irene Street a gang of youths set on them, attacking them with bottles and sticks, kicking them as they lay on the ground, shouting, ‘Kill the Pakis! Up with Enoch! Send the bastards home!’
The doctor in A&E told Ahmed that he had two broken ribs and Ibrahim that he was lucky not to lose his sight. Some of the boys at Uncle Kabir’s nodded sagely in an ‘I told you so’ way. Abdul the chapatti maker produced a leaflet he’d found lying on the ground in the Open Market and everyone gathered round the curry pot while the English speakers translated it out loud. It was from an organisation called the National Front and it carried extracts from a speech by an MP called Enoch Powell:
In fifteen or twenty years there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. Whole areas and towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant population. We must be mad, literally mad, to permit the annual inflow of some 50,000 immigrant dependants. It is like watching a nation heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry.
The reference to fraudulent entry provoked a little nervous laughter. Most of those present had bent the rules in one way or another, and all of them had fiancées in Pakistan waiting to become part of Powell’s statistics. The MP went on:
The native English population find themselves made strangers in their own country. They find their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they find that employers hesitate to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and integrity required of the native-born worker; they begin to hear more and more voices telling them that they are now the unwanted.
There was some tittering at the mention of corrupt work standards, but the mood was edgy.
The idea that immigrants can be integrated into our population is a dangerous delusion [the leaflet concluded]. We are seeing the growth of vested interests in sharpening racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of domination over the native population. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the ancient Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with blood.
At the end of the reading there was silence. One of the younger boys asked if this meant ‘the English are going to send us all back home’. But Uncle Kabir, who had sat immobile throughout, stood up slowly then loudly and deliberately farted. As the room collapsed into laughter, he folded the leaflet three times and lit it on the gas jet under the curry pot before dropping the burning ashes into the bin.
Ahmed and Ibrahim’s injuries were slow to heal, but they couldn’t afford to miss work. When they turned up at the mill their fellow workers averted their eyes, thinking how easily they could have suffered the same fate. Racism was rising as the British economy slumped.
Ahmed and Ibrahim didn’t speak about the attack or the effect it had had on them, but Ibrahim sensed that his brother blamed him. Ahmed made disapproving references to Ibrahim’s ‘so-called white friends’ who had taken them to the football game then left them to fend for themselves. Ibrahim tried to explain. ‘I think those miscreants must have been West Hammers people,’ he said. ‘Because Burnley people love us.’ Ahmed snorted and walked away.
At the next kitchen gathering, Ahmed spoke about the danger Pakistani people faced in Britain and how they must band together to protect themselves. Several of the men agreed; the only way to be safe was to build strong communities and keep the whites out. Ibrahim spoke, too, but with an apologetic smile. ‘The whites aren’t all racists,’ he said. ‘The people I know are ordinary folk like us. We don’t want to cut ourselves off from everyone, do we?’ The reaction from the rest of the room took him aback. A welter of voices damned the English and warned about the dangers of trusting any of them. Ibrahim tried to object, but Ahmed waved him to be quiet. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I am your senior. You owe me respect and I order you to stop seeing your whites. They have brought shame upon us and pain. I will not permit you to expose us to such hostility.’
Ibrahim bowed his head and sat down. Ahmed was his older brother; to argue with him in public would be an affront to his dignity that neither of them would be able to live with. But the following day on the way to the mill, Ibrahim reopened the discussion. ‘I’m not arguing with you, Ahmed. Of course you’re right about the racists. But the way to deal with them isn’t to retreat into ourselves. We’ll end up living in ghettoes. Why don’t you try and learn English, brother? You’ll get on much better in this country. You could be a part of things.’
Ahmed laughed. ‘You saw what the National Front wrote, didn’t you? They don’t want integration – they say it will never work. So why should we even try? They don’t want us, ’Brahim, so why should we want them? This is our country too, you know. We need to get whatever we can out of it.’
A month later a letter came from Kahin Nahi informing Ibrahim that he was a father. Asma had gone into labour unexpectedly. She had endured the ride along bumpy roads to the hospital. She hadn’t complained about the heat and the flies, the primitive maternity unit and the lack of hygiene during the birth. But she cried when the doctor told her it was a girl. By the time the letter arrived in Burnley, Ibrahim’s daughter was already three weeks old.
‘And that baby was me.’ Ayesha sat up on the couch and looked in my direction. ‘Apparently my dad read the letter out to his mates and said something like, “I’d rather have had a boy, but never mind.” I think he was just playing it cool, though, because that night he went out to the pub and bought drinks for the whole bar. He was only twenty-two, so at that age you don’t want to be too sentimental, do you?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said. ‘But can I ask you something? You said this all happened in 1975, right? So doesn’t that make you nearly forty? I thought you told me you were thirty-four . . .’
Ayesha grinned. She had a luminous smile that I hadn’t noticed when I first met her; she could probably convince people she was whatever age she told them she was. ‘In my business, you need to be young and bright. Let’s say thirty-four is my professional age. How old are you?’
‘Almost old enough to be your father . . .’ I stopped myself. ‘I’m sorry. That’s not a very sensitive thing to say under the circumstances.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ayesha said. ‘I don’t find it offensive. There’s something I quite like about it . . . Can I ask you something? Why are you here? Is this just an opportunity for a book for you?’
‘It’s partly that.’
‘And what’s the other part?’
‘I suppose I’m interested in you.’
‘As a person? Or as a character?’
We laughed.
‘Both . . . I’m interested in you and in writing your story. I don’t want you to pay me a fee, though.’
‘Yes, you said that. Why not?’
‘Because if you’re paying me, you’d think you had the right to tell me what to write. It’s to do with integrity and telling the truth.’
‘Really? So you’d be telling the truth, would you? You wouldn’t be changing and embellishing things to make the drama better? Are you sure about that? And how could I be sure you wouldn’t write something I don’t like?’
‘You’d have to trust me. Not everything can be guaranteed by money, Ayesha. Sometimes you have to put your faith in someone.’