– Isa, Hamid snorted again. A stupid bastard.
Mir looked momentarily put out by this, but recovered quickly.
– Isa had a bakery in…another city here. With a Moroccan man. But the Moroccan man was bad and took all Isa’s money and went back to Rabat.
Hamid silenced Mir with a hard look. There was obviously more to this story, and when Hamid went to the kitchen to fetch tea, Mir leaned forward and began speaking in a breathless stage whisper. It seemed that Isa had spent the previous night at Mafeking Avenue.
– This Isa. He is very bad. James, he smokes a lot of chars! Hamid also. They are both…hash-heads. And Isa has a girlfriend. From Mexico!
He began to speak more quickly, clasping my arm as something clattered in the kitchen.
– Isa gambles. He lost £8000 in a gambling house. In one night!
It seemed an impressive amount of money for an Afghan refugee to own, let alone lose. But Hamid returned before more information could be extracted and Mir recomposed himself, the conspiracy neatly concealed.
The conversation turned to Mir’s bid for asylum, and Hamid at last became less reticent. He had been through all the hoops of the system himself and knew exactly what Mir now needed to do. He said that the granting of ELR – Exceptional Leave to Remain – was usually automatic for Afghans, and would almost certainly be so in Mir’s case. The trick would be to persuade the Home Office to upgrade Mir’s ELR to the full refugee status of ILR, Indefinite Leave to Remain. A case would have to be mounted, for which a solicitor would have to be found – a legal aid solicitor, of course. In the meantime Mir could stay with him for as long as he liked. He would show him how to sign on for unemployment benefit, maybe even help him find a job.
– You will also help him, he added bluntly. You must write letters. You and the man from the BBC. Witness statements. Character testimonials.
– How long will it take? How long did it take for you?
– A long time. Years. And it is harder now. There are too many asylum seekers here. The Home Office doesn’t know what to do.
– I’m sure we’ll manage, I said.
– Insha’allab, grinned Mir.
We talked on for an hour or so, drinking tea and nibbling nuts. We discussed the Afghan community in London, the finer points of the immigration system and the war at home. Things were not going well for the men of Mir’s family, who had been persecuted as I feared they would be by the Hazara Shi’ites in proxy revenge for his role in the death of the looter. Mir’s face fell for a moment as he described how his brothers had been imprisoned by the Hazaras, but he was too happy about being in London to allow himself to dwell on it, and quickly changed the subject.
When the time came to go Mir followed me out to the street and helped me strap the carpet onto the back of the bike.
– Will you be all right?
– I will be fine, James Bond.
– You shouldn’t worry about Hamid smoking spliff…chars. You’re in London now. A lot of people smoke chars in London.
– In Afghanistan also, said Mir contemptuously. But I do not. It is werry bad to smoke chars. It is against Islam.
As we spoke a Pakistani family had advanced down the pavement towards us, the father loping along in a brown shalwar qamiz, the red and gold folds of the mother’s sari flapping, three querulous children in tow. We stepped aside to let them pass. Mir eyed the Pakistani, and the Pakistani eyed him back. Something flashed between them, a sort of ethnic face-off, but it was Mir who looked away first. He giggled when he saw that I’d noticed.
– Hohh, he said wonderingly, when the family were out of earshot. The Pakis are ewerywhere!
– It’s a big city. A lot of people live here, including a lot of Pakis.
– It is exactly like Islamabad, he said, shaking his head. Is all of London like this?
– Not all of London, no. You’ll see.
We looked up and down Mafeking Avenue. Never mind the liberal principles of multiculturalism: to this Afghan newcomer, his place in E6’s social pecking order looked depressingly familiar.
– You’ll see what London is like. I’ll show you. You must come and visit me.
– I’ll come soon, James Bond.
I looked back at the house and saw Hamid through the window. He was holding the bottle of beer and studying the label with such a proprietary air that I knew at once that he intended to drink it. I caught his eye and wagged my finger jokily, letting him know that I knew what he was thinking, but there was no smile, no discernible sign that we had just spent over an hour together or that anything had passed between us. Too bad, I thought to myself. Mir is in London now, and there’s nothing you can do about it. There was no knowing where all this would lead or end, but at that moment it didn’t matter. Mir’s optimism was infectious. I winked at him and he smiled back like the sun.
Aaron Stein’s office in Islington was on the front line of the immigration war. From three rooms in a rundown house off Upper Street he waged a heroic and almost single-handed battle against the massed forces of the Home Office, which constantly threatened to overwhelm his position. Rows of wonky filing cabinets burst with case histories, correspondence with officialdom, notices of changes to the law. The precarious stacks of papers on his desk added to the impression of a hard-pressed general in a well sandbagged bunker. In the Stygian corridor, made gloomier by the grime on the frosted glass above the door onto the street, the traffic of applicants for asylum never stopped. It was interesting to try to guess their nationalities – Kurds, Iraqis, Tamils, Albanians. During office hours the door was left on the latch so they could come and go, for as an underpaid legal aid lawyer Aaron could not afford the luxury of a receptionist. It felt a long way from the Inns of Court in central London, with their oak-panelled and book-lined chambers, their aura of history and learning and respectful hush. Aaron Stein’s legal practice operated in a permanent state of near chaos.
We squeezed past other asylum seekers who waited patiently in the corridor or on the narrow staircase like medieval supplicants. There was a queue to use a payphone on which someone was jabbering in a subcontinental tongue. Aaron, one telephone jammed to his ear, another ringing unanswered somewhere beneath the awesome clutter of his desk, beckoned us in with a perfunctory wave.
– The name is Chandrasekaran, he was saying. All one word. First name Bari, not Chandra. That’s B,A,R,I…No, B. B for Bravo…
He spoke with a slight but unmistakably Semitic sibilance. There was a recognisable archetype here, a north London Jewish lawyer fighting for international justice in an underfunded garret of an office, principled, romantic, determinedly left wing. He looked younger than he had sounded on the telephone, only a little older than I was, although behind his John Lennon glasses his eyes were supremely tired. The telephone conversation went on and on. Some vital application form had been lost in the Home Office system. The consequence for Bari Chandrasekaran, who appeared to have been filed away as Chandra Sekaran, would be a significant delay in his asylum decision. Aaron was arguing the unfairness of this, but it seemed there was nothing the Home Office could do. Bari Chandrasekaran, properly logged and registered, would have to go to the back of the queue and start again.
– Three months, said Aaron flatly, putting down the phone at last. Another three months, she says. At least.
He looked