The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone did and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un – We surely belong to Allah and to him we return.
We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks?
Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.
Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers – a castrated organ?
Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.
Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears’ invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home’? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?
Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?
All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.
But just then Aneeka shrugged in response and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking.
She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.
She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray – all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.
But just a few minutes walk away there was a park lined with Banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.
You think you can compare your disgraceful demands to the terrible decisions I have to make for the good of the company and this family?
You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.
In almost all human history, figures descending from the sky would have been angels or gods or demons – or Icarus hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy. What must it have felt like to inhabit a commonality of human experience – all eyes to the sky, watching for some mythic to land?
Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma’s bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister’s heartbeat could teach the younger one’s frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.
She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living.
By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.
Still children into their twenties, this generation.