But Parvez had been unable to bring this subject up with his friends. He was too ashamed. And he was afraid, too, that they would blame him for the wrong turning his boy had taken, just as he had blamed other fathers whose sons had taken to running around with bad girls, truanting from school and joining gangs…Was it asking too much for Ali to get a good job now, marry the right girl and start a family? Once this happened, Parvez would be happy. His dreams of doing well in England would have come true. Where had he gone wrong?
My Son the Fanatic
He returned his father’s long looks with more than a hint of criticism, of reproach even, so much so that Parvez began to feel that it was he who was in the wrong, and not the boy!
In fact they made jokes about the local mullahs walking around with their caps and beards, thinking they could tell people how to live, while their eyes roved over the boys and girls in their care.
Ali then reminded Parvez that he had ordered his own wife to cook pork sausages, saying to her, ‘You’re not in the village now, this is England. We have to fit in!’
‘The problem is this,’ the boy said. He leaned across the table. For the first time that night his eyes were alive. ‘You are too implicated in Western civilization.’
Parvez burped; he thought he was going to choke. ‘Implicated!” he said. ‘But we live here!’
‘The Western materialists hate us,’ Ali said. ‘Papa, how can you love something which hates you?’
‘But I love England,’ Parvez said, watching the boy in the mirror. ‘They let you do almost anything here.’
Ali accused Parvez of ‘grovelling’ to the whites; in contrast, he explained, he was not ‘inferior’; there was more to the world than the West, though the West always thought it was best.
‘In other people. I will continue - in you.’ At this the boy appeared a little distressed. ‘And your grandchildren,’ Parvez added for good measure. ‘But while I am here on earth I want to make the best of it. And I want you to, as well.’
‘All over the world our people are oppressed,’ was the boy’s reply.
‘I know,’ Parvez replied, not entirely sure who ‘our people’ were, ‘but still – life is for living!’”
Parvez became aware of Bettina’s short skirt, gaudy rings and ice-blue eyeshadow. He became conscious that the smell of her perfume, which he loved, filled the cab. He opened the window.
The boy neither covered himself nor retaliated; there was no fear in his eyes. He only said, through his split lip, ‘So who’s the fanatic now?’
