Home Fire

by

Kamila Shamsie

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Home Fire: Chapter 5 – Parvaiz Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
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.
Shamsie plays with time and perspective in an interesting way in this chapter, showing readers their first glimpse of Parvaiz through the terrified eyes of others and hiding any information about who Farooq is. Yet over the course of the chapter, Shamsie complicates the stereotypes that readers may share about someone like Parvaiz and shows how an average British kid could wind up joining ISIS.
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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.”
Although Isma and Aneeka feel betrayed by the actions that Parvaiz takes in the subsequent months, it is he who first believes that he has been betrayed by his sisters: one leaving for America and forcing them to leave their childhood home, and the other who doesn’t care enough to try and salvage that home and who telegraphs that she will eventually separate herself from him. Thus, this perceived betrayal is what actually begins the divide within the family.
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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.
Given Parvaiz’s lamenting of “the inevitability of his life” and the fact that he feels inadequate in comparison to the achievements of his sisters, it makes sense that Parvaiz goes in search of some kind of path to follow—and finds it in the legacy his father has left for him. Additionally, Gladys makes her first appearance here. She will resurface later after Parvaiz is killed to fight for the idea that Parvaiz wasn’t a bad kid, and that the media’s picture of him is more stereotypical than it should be.
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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.”
Perhaps part of the reason that Parvaiz ultimately becomes so involved and invested in what his father did is because his father once expressed this warmth and tenderness toward his son. Even though his sisters and mother always characterized Adil as a bad presence in their lives, his investment in his son is clear from the inscription in the album and is ultimately a successful way to get Parvaiz interested in becoming a jihadi.
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Quotes
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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.”
Parvaiz’s need for some kind of connection to the father he knew becomes clear in the emotion that Farooq stirs in him, and this feeling sparks much of his path from here through the rest of the book.
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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.”
Again, Shamsie emphasizes Parvaiz’s need to view his father as a role model and someone he can look up to, rather than the way that he has been characterized by Isma. Additionally, the history lessons that he receives from Farooq provide some background context of the long struggle between Christianity and Islam, and why it is so difficult for Parvaiz and other Muslims to find a sense of belonging in Britain, which has always been a majority Christian country.
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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.
Farooq himself also starts to fill this role of a father figure for Parvaiz, and this is one of the reasons that Parvaiz gets so wrapped up in Farooq’s toxic lessons: he is searching for a person who can make him feel connected to his father and who can show him the path to becoming a man. This is not dissimilar to some of the language that Eamonn used when he described father-son relationships to Isma in the book’s early chapters.
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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.
This exchange between Aneeka and Parvaiz illustrates how much he has already been persuaded by Farooq’s arguments. Aneeka completely understands what he is saying, and she knows that there is truth in the idea that the country is particularly hard on Muslim men—she even makes similar arguments to Eamonn—but Parvaiz’s vitriol and inability to have a discussion with his sister foreshadow his impending decision to leave the family.
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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.
Parvaiz continues to build a connection between himself and his father through Farooq and through finding out more about what it means to be a jihadi. Noting the excited expression in his father’s face is part of the allure for Parvaiz himself, as he wants to feel the same excitement over a greater purpose as his father did.
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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.
At first, Parvaiz doesn’t understand what is happening and why he is being literally tortured. This contrasts with Parvaiz’s eventual desire to be tortured in order to be connected with his father, as he describes in the subsequent pages. This gradual change enables readers to see Parvaiz not as some kind of psychopath or masochist, but instead as a normal boy who ended up in the wrong circumstances.
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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.
Parvaiz starts to recognize how being tortured and feeling some of the same pain that  plagued his father actually makes him feel connected to his father. Shamsie also illustrates how Parvaiz is moving away from the comfort of his sister and instead is trying to find personal comfort in that connection to his father. But his secrecy about what he is doing is ultimately what makes Aneeka feel betrayed by him.
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Quotes
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.”
In a short time, Parvaiz transitions from being upset by what Farooq allowed to happen to him to actively wanting to feel the pain again, not only to be connected to his father but to be rewarded for the bravery that he is showing. It is this acknowledgement of bravery that puts him on the path towards joining ISIS, as he feels like he is achieving the same version of manhood that his father did.
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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.
This exchange between Aneeka and Parvaiz draws another connection between Eamonn and Parvaiz. Whereas Eamonn’s friends joke that he is joining ISIS when really he is in a secret relationship, the opposite is true of Parvaiz. The fact that Aneeka never saw this decision coming is part of what creates a huge divide within the family.
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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.”
All of these actions are continued tests on Farooq’s part. But where Farooq thinks that Parvaiz is training to be a loyal warrior to the cause, Parvaiz simply wants to live up to his father’s legacy as a brave hero, and to be praised for the man that he is shaping up to be.
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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.
Farooq’s language here plays exactly into Parvaiz’s desires to have a father figure whose life and legacy he can look up to. For so long, he has been trying to avoid mentions of his father and associations with what his father represented, so now finding something positive in his father’s life is a powerful shift for him.
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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.”
Here, Shamsie illustrates how Parvaiz’s newfound pride in his father’s cause also highlights some of the shortcomings of countries like America and the U.K. He now recognizes that the countries do not prioritize their Muslim citizens and often force people to choose between their faith and their nationality—which is one of the reasons that Parvaiz is drawn to Syria, where he will not have to make this choice.
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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.
By showing readers Parvaiz’s full transformation, Shamsie creates a sympathetic portrait of a boy who is in search of his father, rather than simply painting him as a terrorist—as the rest of the world is all too eager to do.
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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.”
Shamsie also reminds readers how much of a betrayal Parvaiz’s actions constitute for his sisters. He is choosing to abandon them to follow the memory of his dead father, which ultimately puts his living family back home in danger and under surveillance. Now, Isma’s unforgiving language at the beginning of the novel makes more sense given the full context of what Parvaiz has done.
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