There was worse. It took some prompting– as a Pashtun, Mir was touchingly reluctant to betray almost any personal confidence – but over the chicken curry he eventually confessed that Hamid was more than just a secret tippler. He made a comfortable living from his job as a dispatch driver, about £400 a week, much of which Mir reckoned he spent on drink; and his friend Isa was even more profligate.
– They sound unhappy, I suggested.
I was building an image of two depressed and dislocated men who had been seduced and corrupted by the temptations of the West. In turning their backs on the Islamic principles of home they had badly lost their way. Perhaps they ought even to be pitied. But Mir didn’t feel pity for them – he merely disapproved of them, although their behaviour also mystified him. For instance, Hamid’s friend Isa had a wife and children in Pakistan, and he had been in the UK long enough to have earned the right to bring them over to join him, yet he had chosen not to, opting instead for a seedy bachelor half-life that was no kind of substitute in Mir’s eyes. Isa had replaced his wife with a girlfriend of sorts, a poor lost Mexican student whom Mir had met once or twice at the house on Mafeking Avenue. Isa was in the house often, Mir said, because the shared bedsit he rented nearby was so small and uncomfortable. Isa never introduced or explained the Mexican, who spoke little English and appeared not even to like her lover very much. It was Mir’s theory that the girl was essentially homeless, and sometimes stayed at the house or at Isa’s bedsit only because she had nowhere else to go. No wonder Mir hated it there.
The final straw had come the previous week, when Isa had brought Mir along to a crowded bedsit party on a housing estate in Forest Gate. Homesick and keen for fresh company, Mir had been looking forward to the evening but was appalled by what he found there. The ex-Kabul tour guide’s friends were a mixed bag of Afghan men, Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks. One of them described himself as being in the motoring trade, but Mir soon realised he was really just a small-time car thief. Like some of the others he had entered the country illegally via the Channel Tunnel, hidden in the back of a truck. His identity papers were naturally false. As far as the authorities in Britain were concerned he simply did not exist. From the way Mir wrinkled his nose it was plain that he had found the bedsit squalid, the people squashed into it morally contaminated. Like Isa these people had developed a taste for sex and alcohol and drugs; they were bad Muslims who had let themselves go.
– They are crazy people, he insisted. This thief. He keeps bullshitting. He says he wants to buy a gun so that he can shoot people, pow, pow!
The party had begun amicably, but as the second vodka bottle circulated they began to discuss domestic politics and the gathering grew fractious. A Pashtun man swore his undying support for the Taliban. A Tajik lost his temper and threw a punch, at which point Isa stepped into the fray. Somebody toppled back hard into a table, splintering it. Then a knife was pulled and suddenly a new front in the Afghan civil war had broken out in London E7. It was fortunate that an irate neighbour had already called the police, who arrived just in time to mediate a ceasefire. They ordered the partygoers out into the street, where they were frisked, but no drugs or weapons were found. Either the search was too cursory or the Afghans were too crafty for the officers, who responded by cautioning them with a little lecture. If they caught them misbehaving again, they said, they would speak to the housing authorities, who at their command would instantly disperse them to different cities around the country. It seemed a weak sort of threat to Mir, and the dreaded demand for identity papers never came. He assumed that disturbances among the immigrant community of Forest Gate were so common that the police had developed a local policy of lenience. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t be bothered with the extra paperwork that arrests that evening would entail.
Either way, the partygoers felt great relief – except for Mir, who mostly felt just anger. He had not escaped the summary justice of Afghanistan in order to get into trouble here. Spreadeagled against the cold council estate wall, he determined to speak to the local housing authorities himself as soon as possible in order to escape the world inhabited by the likes of Hamid and Isa. This was not a decision he took lightly, for these were still the only Afghans he knew in London; but for the sake of his spiritual well-being and integrity he was ready to cut himself off from their company and to make his way alone. He would never succumb to the decadent pleasures of the West, he wanted to assure me. London was his land of opportunity, and he was not about to blow it. Success, insha’allah, would surely attend the good Pashtun who kept to the path of righteousness with piety and iron discipline. I knew he had already located his nearest mosque in West Ham and was still rigorous about praying five times a day. I heard the conviction in his voice and gave him a silent cheer.
The curry was barely finished when Mir’s manager sternly tapped his watch from across the room. Mir smiled unctuously back, and grimaced privately at me. I produced some coins but he closed his hand over mine and insisted that it was his turn to pay. Lunch had cost all of £4.20, small change to me but a sum representing two hours and six minutes of drudgery to him. The ensuing pantomime of protest and counter-protest did not end when I slapped the money down and headed smartly for the door. He chased after me, sweeping the coins from the table and fluidly stuffing them back into my jacket pocket.
– Mir, it’s different here, I began. You can’t afford such generosity in your situation. You need this money to survive.
– This is the Pashtun way, came the inevitable reply. He retreated triumphantly to the dark regions of the diner and I was forced to leave.
The exchange was disquieting. Although I could understand and even approved of his decision to move out of Mafeking Avenue, it was far from certain that Mir was capable of surviving on his own so soon after his arrival. The tenacity with which he clung to his Pashtun principles was surely an indication of how much he still had to learn about his adopted country. Money, meanwhile, looked as if it could quickly become a serious problem. The bus boy job was far beneath his capabilities, and £24 for a twelve-hour day was a truly desperate wage for London. He would never manage to save anything at that rate, especially if he insisted on giving it away. He had set his sights on a medical conversion course at the Newham College of Further Education, and savings of some sort were going to be vital if he was serious about enrolling there. Surely better employment could be found for him without too much difficulty. Anything was better than £2 an hour. And so it was that a few days later I took him to my parents’ house in Kensington. There was a day’s work that needed doing in the garden, for which my father was prepared to pay him a respectable £5 an hour.
– Hohh, you live in a palace, Mir said with infinite satisfaction as he came inside.
Mum and Dad’s house was certainly different from the cramped terraces replicated around Mafeking Avenue. It had four floors, seven bedrooms, a large garden with a garage at the end and off-street parking for three cars. Here at last was the Western affluence of Mir’s dreams. And yet the houses in our street were not so very different from the developments in the East End. They had been built in the early nineteenth century, at the beginning of the same explosion of urban expansion that had swept through the parish of West Ham.* A hundred yards away stood a red granite memorial to Victoria, Empress of India. The Great White Queen, born at Kensington Palace just up the road, looked sternly down on our house with bulbous eyes above sagging jowls, one of the capital’s many celebrations of the colonial conquest that had made London’s expansion possible and turned it into the greatest city in the world. Perhaps the Queen would have been amused after all by this unlikely visitation, an Afghan in the Royal Borough of Kensington.
The heavily burglar-alarmed drawing room was large and light and filled with pretty paintings and delicate antiques. An ornate grand piano that my father liked to improvise on in the evenings gleamed in the corner of the room. Mir stroked its silky rosewood surfaces as though it were a cat.
– It is beauuutiful, he crooned.
It had stood there all my life, an object so familiar that it had become practically invisible to me. Now I reexamined the intricately painted cherubs and garlands that curled around its polished sides, and saw that Mir was quite right.
My