Home Fire

Farooq and Parvaiz walk into an electronics store in Istanbul to pick up an audio recorder. The man behind the counter and the rest of the customers are quite intimidated by Farooq and Parvaiz’s appearance and air of superiority. Farooq leaves Parvaiz to go to a café on the corner while Parvaiz tests several mics to see which ones work best with the recorder. Parvaiz’s journey really began the previous autumn, when Isma walked into the kitchen on an otherwise normal night and announced she was going to America.

The narration returns to that night, with Isma’s announcement. They then discuss what to do about their home. Aneeka is about to start school, and Parvaiz’s earnings as a greengrocer’s assistant aren’t sufficient to cover the house. Isma says that the best option is for them to move in with Aunty Naseem and to rent out their house. Parvaiz is upset, but Aneeka doesn’t seem to be as concerned. Parvaiz realizes that Aneeka has no intention of coming back after getting her degree; he calls her a “traitor.”

Parvaiz grabs his keys, phone, and microphone and walks out of the house, upset. He meets an old friend of his mother’s, Gladys, on the road, and they talk briefly. He continues his walk through the neighborhood, pulling out his microphone to record more sound footage for a video game he is working on. He hopes desperately that he might get job offers after sending out the game. Suddenly, a band of neighborhood boys Parvaiz knows stops him in the street and demands his phone. They beat him up, stealing his phone but leaving the expensive mic. He thinks how much he hates his life and its inevitability.

The next day, when Parvaiz is at work, a man named Farooq introduces himself. He apologizes for his cousin’s actions the night before and returns Parvaiz’s phone, saying he didn’t realize that he was the son of “Abu Parvaiz.” Parvaiz immediately becomes skeptical, wondering if the man is from MI5. He remembers when agents had come to the house and played with him and Aneeka, before taking the album that Adil had sent him. The album held many photographs of Adil with a gun slung over his shoulder across various landscapes, inscribed with the words, “When you’re old enough, my son.”

Parvaiz protests that he never knew his father. Farooq says that Adil regretted that, which is why his jihadi name was “Abu Parvaiz”—Father of Parvaiz. Farooq says his own father told many stories of “the great warrior Abu Parvaiz.” Parvaiz is amazed, feeling tears come to his eyes. Farooq says, “I’m glad I’ve found you, brother.”

Farooq and Parvaiz meet every day over the next weeks. Farooq tells Parvaiz of “stories of his father for which he’d always yearned—not a footloose boy or feckless husband but a man of courage who fought injustice.” Farooq also tells him about the centuries-old conflicts between Christianity and Islam, explaining the history of the conflict in various parts of the world: the “centuries of humiliation; imperialism, with its racist underpinnings of a ‘civilizing mission,’ followed by the cruel joke of pretending to ‘give’ independence.”

Farooq always returns the conversation to the heart of all of his lessons: how to be a man. He says it’s Parvaiz’s sisters’ fault for bringing him up to be soft and to serve them. He says that Allah has made men to be in charge of women. Parvaiz likes the sound of this, though he knows better than to try to convince Isma of this idea.

One evening, Aneeka asks Parvaiz what he’s been up to, noting that he seems upset about moving. She assures him that they’ll still be in the neighborhood and that if they sell the house, he could go to university. Parvaiz starts to rattle off a rant about the fact that she only got scholarships because she ticks their “inclusive” and “diverse” boxes. He says that people think Muslim women need to be saved from Muslim men, while Muslim men need to be detained and harassed. Aneeka points out that he’s only been stopped and searched by the police twice, and that he said neither time was a big deal. She leaves him alone.

Farooq invites Parvaiz over to the flat where he lives. He gives Parvaiz some tea, then leaves the flat and asks Parvaiz to wait for a few minutes. On the wall, Parvaiz notices a photograph of Adil and a man who must be Farooq’s father, taken as they departed for Bosnia. Parvaiz notes his father’s excited expression, and he is thrilled to see a photograph of Adil that he has never seen before.

At that moment, two of Farooq’s cousins enter the flat. They knock Parvaiz to the ground, tie a chain around his ankles, and shackle his wrists, looping the chain through a bolt in the floor so that he is forced to remain in a squatting position. They leave him there, playing a loud video game so that they can’t hear him begging to be let go. He screams in pain for hours, until finally they unshackle him. They carry him to the kitchen sink, which is filled with water, and dunk his head in over and over. After a few rounds, they carry him over to a pile of mattresses.

Farooq returns, tears in his eyes, and explains that they had done this to Adil for months. Parvaiz cries as well, unable to move. Farooq brings him a hot water bottle for his back and gives him an ice cream stick. He asks if Parvaiz knows about the torture that prisoners like his father endured, but Parvaiz shakes his head and gets up to leave, still shaky. On the bus home, he texts Aneeka, asking her to come home. But then he remembers that before the pain became too unbearable, he looked at the photo of his father and thought, “I am you, for the first time.” He texts Aneeka to say he was just kidding.

Soon after, Parvaiz starts to do research on some of the torture that Adil experienced—some of the images he finds are so visceral that he throws up. After reading this, he returns to Farooq’s flat. He tells Farooq to chain him again, saying, “I want to feel my father’s pain.” Farooq replies, “My brave warrior.”

Later, Aneeka asks Parvaiz about the girl he’s been seeing, and why he’s being so secretive about it. Parvaiz doesn’t answer, instead asking why Aneeka is studying the law, because the law never helped Adil. Aneeka is confused, saying that Adil never had anything to do with them. Parvaiz says she doesn’t understand, and he tells her to leave him alone.

A few days later, Parvaiz returns to Farooq’s flat to find him ironing his clothes. After they speak for a bit, Farooq tells him to put his hand on the ironing board, saying he’s going to press the iron into it. Parvaiz realizes he isn’t joking, and sets his hands on the ironing board. Farooq then places the iron on his hands—it is hot but not unbearable. Farooq says that it uses steam more than heat, and it wouldn’t burn his hand. He commends Parvaiz: “My faithful warrior.”

Farooq then tells Parvaiz that there is a place where they can go, where Parvaiz can live like a prince and talk about Adil “with pride, not shame.” Farooq says that he’s just come back from Syria, saying that the media has been lying about what it’s really like. He shows him idyllic pictures of life in Syria. Parvaiz asks if the pictures are real, and Farooq shows Parvaiz that he’s in a few of the photos.

Parvaiz then asks if the stories of violence are true, and Farooq explains that the pursuit of the ideals that they hold dear warrants a revolution. Farooq asks, “Will you protect the new revolution? Will you do the work your father would have done if he’d lived?” Parvaiz doesn’t know how to answer, but increasingly over the next days he feels more and more suffocated in London. He sees evidence everywhere of rot and corruption, noting that one of his sisters is traveling to “the nation that had killed their father” and the other is “propping up the lie that theirs was a country where citizens had rights.”

Suddenly, Parvaiz realizes that he is preparing to leave, though he’s not quite sure how it happened. Farooq assures him that he can come back if he wants to, and Parvaiz thanks him for being his friend and for helping him find people in Syria who knew Adil.

Parvaiz tells Aneeka and Isma that he is going to Karachi to stay with a cousin of theirs and work on a popular music show. He half believes that he is going to actually stay, even while booking a flight with a connection to Istanbul. Aneeka is upset that Parvaiz is leaving, particularly with Isma going away as well. Parvaiz thinks that there is no living person for whom he’d leave her, “but the dead made their own demands.”