We were late as usual for our appointment. Mir, full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of London life and excited by the prospect of the short journey to Stratford, had insisted on procuring a minicab to take us there from Mafeking Avenue.
– I’ll be two minutes, he cried; and disappeared out through the door for thirty. Hamid was out, and I was left alone in the front room, nibbling sugared mulberries and listening to the silence of the suppurating house. Mir returned at last in a dented Toyota driven by a decrepit Pashtun tribesman who spoke no English and had even less idea than I did how to get to Stratford High Street.
– He is a werry good man, Mir explained in a whisper. He lives close to here. I believe he is in need of the work.
It was a wet London evening that slowed the traffic in the tortuous gyratory system of central Stratford to a crawl. I sat low in the collapsed and greasy front seat, swatting irritably at the condensation on the windscreen and trying to match the prismatic chaos in the dark outside to the tattered road map on my lap. Ever deferential, Mir had insisted on sitting in the back. He chattered happily at the deaf old tribesman, who turned out to be an Afridi, from the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.
Tony Banks’s office was in a lone redbrick Victorian building, incongruous amidst the 1970s brutalism that surrounded it. The windows were protected by stout grilles. A large Labour Party banner mounted on the façade seemed defiant, like a Union Jack above some lonely imperial outpost in a foreign land.
We arrived so late that the officious young volunteer on the reception desk almost turned us away. We had missed our slot, he said, and there were many other people wanting to see Mr Banks. From the little waiting room over his shoulder a dozen brown faces silently turned to look at us, upturned white eyes in a small sea of turbans and beards. But the volunteer relented when we pleaded, and eventually we were granted an audience.
I had always admired Tony Banks, and recognised his famous pixie-like face at once. He was a maverick, one of the country’s few true conviction politicians, a left winger of the old school in the mould of Tony Benn or Tam Dalyell. The horde in his surgery waiting room suggested that he looked kindly on the plight of ethnic minorities in his constituency. I felt a spark of hope.
– You look busy tonight, I offered.
– I’m always busy, he snapped. I’ve got very little time. What do you want?
But his crinkled features softened as I rolled out the story once again, his shrewd eyes darting between me and Mir, who sat with pasha-like calm in the corner. He didn’t once question my motivation in helping Mir. If it was unusual for a white man to come pleading an Afghan’s case, he gave no indication of it. He was overworked and irascible, but I knew I had found a valuable ally to the cause. When I had finished he looked down at his desk with his head in his hands and exhaled deeply.
– The Home Office is useless, he muttered, almost to himself. Bloody useless. Take a note, Eileen, he added to a secretary who had slipped into the office. We’ll write to them and see if we can stir them up. He stood and nodded purposefully at Mir who was still watching and smiling pleasantly in the corner. Call me in a month if you haven’t heard from me by then, OK?
I felt elated as we bowed our way out. There was a terrier-like determination about Tony Banks that made me certain he would not let this case languish in a Home Office in-tray for long. Once again, however, it was uncertain how much of the meeting Mir had really understood.
– Is it good? he asked, out in the rain again.
– Good? It’s brilliant. I’d say he’s definitely going to help you.
– He is a nice man, Mir replied with cheerful equanimity. Perhaps I will give him a carpet also.
In the days and weeks that followed I tried to resist the impulse to check up on Mir. Technically I had fulfilled my side of the bargain we had struck in Islamabad. I thought I understood the dangers of meddling, of trying to shape or influence his new life. I had no intention of adopting a protege or, worse, of treating him like some kind of social experiment. This was not Pygmalion. Mir was a real person, not Eliza Doolittle, and I did not see myself as Henry Higgins. Yet at the same time I was deeply curious to know what he made of this alien land. His first impressions of the West might be valuable, and I wanted to record them. Moreover, I had promised to show him where and how I lived, and he kept asking for a ride on the motorbike. So one day I invited him over to my side of town.
He came out of the tube station where we’d arranged to meet, looking shaken.
– A man shouted at me, he explained. I thought he would hit me. It was werry embarrassing.
A racist, I thought immediately. He was bound to bump into one eventually: what a shame that it had happened so soon. It was a warm spring day, but it surely wasn’t the heat that made him mop at his brow with his sleeve.
– It was my fault, he continued. I was staring at his woman.
– James! he protested when I laughed. I could not help it. She was wearing a dress so short that it was…that it was no dress at all!
Later Mir confirmed that the greatest cultural shock, the most astonishing thing he had so far seen in London, was not the shops or the traffic or the size of the place – it was the women. I could understand the difficulty he was having in adjusting. He had grown up in a purdah environment where, with the possible exception of his immediate family, the female form was almost permanently hidden from view. All social activity was sexually segregated. There were no women’s magazines, no advertising hoardings. Under the Taliban, television sets were banned on the grounds that the female shape distracted the citizenry from their pious duties in the mosque. I had experienced the effect of such sensory depravation at first hand, and found that the Taliban probably had a point. Freud, according to a poster I once owned, reckoned that the average red-blooded male thinks about sex every three minutes, but in Afghanistan I hardly thought about it at all. This realisation had only dawned on me when I left the country. My first contact with non-Muslims had been in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where, according to my overtuned antennae, the streets seemed weirdly crammed with blondes in miniskirts. Like Mir in London I found myself staring at these apparitions. It was like seeing green grass again after a long sea voyage. Yet I had been in Afghanistan for just a few weeks. How much more amazing must London have been for Mir, who had been denied the sight of women’s legs for a lifetime?
The attitude towards women had always struck me as the main faultline of misunderstanding between the Islamic world and the West. I’d first experienced it years before, in the newsagent’s around the corner from my parents’ house in Kensington. The shop was run by a Mr Haroun and his family. They were friendly, diligent and always open, as well as charmingly loyal to their regulars, a comparative rarity in that cosmopolitan part of London. We weren’t on first-name terms, quite, yet there was always time to stop and chat. We did not think of them as Muslims, or even as foreigners, particularly. If we ever wondered about their country of origin or how they had come to settle in London, we certainly never asked. We observed that they were Asian, of course, but to us they were really just great shopkeepers, whose longer-than-average tenure in that high-turnover neighbourhood made them a valued focal point for the community. So it was a shock when one day Mr Haroun’s plump, easy-going son was accused of sexual assault by an Australian backpacker. I had gone over to buy a pint of milk, and could not help but notice the backpacker’s girlfriend standing by the door as I entered. She was wearing sandals, cut-off shorts and a spectacularly tight T-shirt, her tanned arms folded protectively across her well-developed breasts. Her beach-blonde hair, however, framed an expression of thunderous self-righteousness. The backpacker had broached sacred ground and gone behind the till. He was wagging his finger viciously at Mr Haroun’s son, who had backed away pathetically into the corner, too astonished and frightened to defend himself.
– And if you ever, EVER touch my girlfriend again, the backpacker was saying, I’ll come back and kill you and