

The Sitar

### Rebecca Idris

### The Sitar

### Rebecca Idris

### Smashwords Edition

### Copyrigh 2012 Rebecca Idris

For Nobo, my eleventh hour sitar

### Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

#  Chapter 1

The sitar lay next to the Pink Paper, like Ghandi conversing with the embarrassing flamboyant indignity of Gok fucking Wan. They lay awkwardly atop the multi-coloured, mismatched bedspread of a one Jaya Lubaba Chakarbatti, daughter of Abdul Malik Chakarbatti, an immigrant from Bangladesh, who chose to rear his family in the respected and modern establishment surroundings of the West Midlands, London.

1967, Dhaka, Bangladesh:

Dadoo Chakarbatti: "He is going to become a Londoni, maa, going to London just like those Londoni's from Babloo's house"

"...where in London will you be settling Abdul?"

"Coventry"

"Oh yes, one of my niece settled in London now. He lives in Manchester."

"....whereabout in London is Manchester?"

"North."

Jaya, who at this moment was sculpting her quiff to aesthetic perfection, was a junction. A jostling spaghetti junction of tangled bloodlines, conflicts, colonies, boundaries, tube wells, affairs... so dense that they made her blood thick, so linear in improbability that her mismatching bed set, with its cacophony of boisterous colours, was inadvertently the perfect place to harbour all the changes that beds often do. Atop this one then, lay two objects: both made from a tree. One hollow, but self-importantly heavy, one flimsy, easy to discard, but full of tasty titbits.

But ambiguous metaphors will never do. More literally, there stood another tree-derivative in the corner of the room. Tucked away on the bookshelf was Jaya Chakarbatti's Quran, still, wrapped in silk, always there, handed down from Chakarbatti to Chuck-your-Batty; like the black box of a plane, absorbing everything, not useful until the end, but useful for the end. When everything crash lands.

Jaya hummed a dance track from the Ministry of Sound mp3 she had (illegally) downloaded, absentmindedly, oblivious to the fact that almost 5,000 miles away in a mud hut in rural Bangladesh, where bridges were made of a single bamboo trunk, Akram Kashif, who seemed to have two first names, was towing a cart of saffron through the woods, which he had (illegally) obtained from Mr Jyoti's crocus processing factory. The front wheel of his cart came flying off when he hit a tree stump. He cursed various peoples' mothers for not seeing the offending stump, oblivious to the fact that the stump was there because its flesh had been cut down to make cheap Sitars for export to London... one of which lay atop Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty's bed... whom Akram would later...

The saffron spilled gloriously across the stump, covering it in a rich, blood red blanket, blended indelibly with the dirt and grit. As a result, his mother's pilau rice suffered, which meant the suitor's mother who came later that evening to consider Akram's sister for marriage, turned up her nose and refused the match, because, naturally, a mother who cannot prevent dirt from entering her pilau, surely cannot prevent dirt from entering her daughter.

"Fakkin' ho yeah? Ho's wot she is. Ho boat, cha. Here man, take a drag. We got some samosey in dat cupboard yea? ...Facking sket."

Kulsuma Begum belied her wholesome middle-class upbringing in Hodge Hill, Birmingham, very much in B36. She flicked the ash off her Mayfair cigarette and threw a look of lust towards Jaya, intently bent over a cluster of computer wires.

"All she did was kiss him, Kully-"

"Which far-kin dykette scrapes the bottom of the barrel so hard that she goes for a guy, man?..." Kulsuma's thunderous look of disgust scared all of the girls in the room. A feeble whimper rose from the corner.

"She's been praying recently. I think it's her first step towards-"

"Sucking cock, yea," Kulsuma took a cancerously long drag on her cigarette which, despite her propounds, her fingers clutched stiffly.

O the annihilating whirlpool of distractions that racked Kulsuma Begum's mind! O ineffable concoctions of hatred and wisdom and fury! The stale odour of BO hung about her cluttered rammed jammed room, old farts and dadi amma's peanuts, musty, thick musty, and pure, like the inalienable opposition of the clean 'tring' of a ricksaw wallahs bell and the choking smell of his sweat. Now 23, Kulsuma embraced the clutter in her room, defining herself, and defying the birth order by falling solidly on a 6 in the Kinsey Scale. The old kettle, arthritic fold-out coffee table, yellowing calendar featuring Mekkah, plastic gold and velvet tissue box, pile of Jamdani sari's, empty Patak pickle jars, the forgotten brass tap... under which Shilpi Begum crouched, quivering, during the 1947 partition... upon which the Bangladesh Liberation War was reflected in 1974...

Atop the pile of Jamdani sari's was, however, a very deliberately placed copy of Orwell's '1984'. Placed pleadingly there, directly in Jaya's eyeline, militarily angled to hit her retina, and only hers, as she sat at the computer stool raised above Kulsuma's discarded heritage. '1984', a disciplined white rectangle on its pedestal of busy gold swirls and luminous green scratchy cotton. Kulsuma Begum knew that Jaya had studied it during her impossibly respectable English degree. But Kulsuma Begum didn't know that Jaya once described it as the bible for the 'faux intelligentsia'. O Jaya! O the Urban Maharani of Kulsuma's barren coital lands! O the purveyor of sustenance to her fierce lustings!

On the floor, Smita Chandrashekar sat with her knees up, her grey skinny jeans stretched tensely over her dark, light-absorbing skin (which had caused another argument with her mother this morning, leading to her sitting so forlornly against Kulsuma's wall, next to the folded up bedsheet on which Shilpi Begum had engaged in fumbled illicit sex with General Davies on the even of Partition):

"Somebody jacked my jhuttiya from the mandir this morning,"

The words fascinated Jaya's ears, and the smallest smile curled her lip. Kulsuma burned inside; trifles light as air, are, to the jealous mind...

She indignantly stubbed out her Mayfair and had no sooner lit up another that Mrs Amina Latiful Begum's voice, like the crack of a hunting whip, sounded up the stairs:

"Aiiiiiiiii Kulsumaa! Nomaj forr, joldiii!" A screech for prayer in the vulgar diction of Sylheti, discarding the caressing Arabic azaan... 'come to success, come to triumph'...

"For fuck's sake, man. Come on, let's get to the scene quickly." Kulsuma handed her cigarette to Raj Dhokia cramped between a pile of Maya Begum's marriage jewellery and a hookah pipe Maya had acquired in 1952. Raj stared at the cigarette for a little while, thinking it would be sad to waste a solid object that was handed to her gratis. She stubbed it out and placed it carefully in her pocket, hoping that later on tonight, in the thudding basement of DV8 nightclub at the heart of Birmingham's floundering gay scene, at Saathi club night, a beautiful gaysian girl would ask her for a cigarette, and Raj Dhokia would have the perfect pulling tool. She hoped her facial hair and the slight whiff of Dabur Amla would be masked by the overbearing influences of curry and vodka.

Jaya Chakarbatti had grown up always wanting to be somewhere else. In her head, where she lived while growing up, she wasn't sitting in Nawaaz Balti in the dinghy part of Coventry. She was in somewhere respectably white, somewhere where music tinkled, somewhere where waiters didn't serve semi-erections with the parathas... somewhere like Harvester. Or, when she was faced with a threat to her heritage, she was in a fetish-ised scenario in Bangladesh, where the heat was sweltering and the nights were balmy, where the palm trees rustled in the breeze around the large inherited estate, and where the sexual tension between cousins was enough to keep the parents wary but happy. Now, as she drove her selection of Lassi Lesbians to a nightclub where the clientele thought 'degrees' were a pathway for the New World Order and nothing to do with education, she was already in the club. She knew it wouldn't satisfy her; her belly was full of fire! Always, so full, so full of fire, like the unfulfilled potential of a self-destructive young man, bursting shurshting, led by his ego and his phallus and his mother.

Jaya knew that if she didn't have her slender fingers running through the (long, cascading) hair of a girl tonight (whose own Sitar had come from the same stump... which Akram had...), then she would be miserable and empty. Unbeknown to her though, she would compromise her status within her group. Her elevated, untouchable, mercilessly enigmatic position within her gaysian group. Ironically however, that was one place which, for some cosmological reason, had never existed in her head.

1957, Dhaka, Bangladesh:

Abdul Malik Chuck-Your-Batty (as his children would later be known) was crouched in the wheat field, squatting over a patch of mud, the colour matching his malnourished faeces he was contentedly squeezing out. He could hear the shouts of his cousins a few metres away, scuffling for the football he had made out of balling together dozens of plastic bags with a lime brick at its core. The few minutes he had taken out filled his head with thoughts he hadn't been prepared for: who would make the footballs if he ever made it to London? To whom would his father turn for all-encompassing discussions on the world and all it contained, in the face of his absence, and the stupidity of his brothers? Who would be his substitute for his mother's reversed Oedipus Complex? Who would Bilal the GollKipper push his body against when he thought they were all asleep? Who would carry the fish to the rooftops for sun-drying? No, no, he thought, it would not do. His fantasies of marrying a British bride were ultimately going to come to nothing.

He wiped with a rock, pulled his shorts up and ran towards the game.

Kulsuma knew that tonight was the only chance she could conceivably have with the ineffable Jaya. She sipped determinedly on her Snakebite, and watched Jaya's every movement through narrowed eyes. The fact that one day, Jaya would be forced to fill her sacred crevice with a man's genitalia pained Kulsuma like she was already in the hell which her grandma so vividly drew up. Kulsuma had a very graphic image of hell, which was full of Sikh people and chocolate with white powder on it. She wondered if Jaya would mention Kulsuma's strategically placed '1984', of which she had Googled the synopsis before placement. She had a restless feeling in her tonight; she was feeling selfish, she was feeling entitled. She hurt.

'I really don't want to be here,' Jaya shouted in to the ear of Eleven O Clock, smiling. The girl smiled back. She had no idea what she'd just said.

'Gosh, this place fucking stinks!'

'Yea man!' The girl beamed up at her, 'It is sick! I love this place,'

The colloquial dialect of Birmingham had equalised their conversation.

Then, quietly, in Eleven O Clock's ear: 'I bet everyone here will be married with kids within five years.' Aloud: 'Who are you here with?'

Eleven O Clock was a silly girl who couldn't believe her eyes when she saw Jaya. She was fair-skinned enough for Eleven to act pretentious with her own friends when taking Jaya to meet them, yet earthed enough to charm if any of them got through her protective cage. Eleven O Clock was also married with three children, forced to marry at gunpoint in Hyderabad when she was 15, and a frequent adulterer with a skewed sense of loyalty.

Kulsuma continued to burn. She watched Jaya half-heartedly talk to a girl, whose long hair annoyed Kulsuma to the point where she could conceivably put a match to it. She clutched her plastic cup and gulped down her drink. The surreal ambience of clubbing started to kick in. She felt naughty, she felt that if a 15-year-old Asian girl were to see her now, she'd pass as cool. She'd pass as modern. She's pass as 'safe'. But if they knew about her longing, her shameful, class-ladder-climbing, humiliating sense of need, then she would be classified as a fool.

She stood up and started walking towards Jaya. She approached her outside of her peripheral vision, lest Jaya could detect the nervous wobble in her walk. The vacuum in her eyes. The film of sweat forming in the creases of her sockets. She knew about the element of surprise (as did General Davies on the eve of Partition) and she wanted to utilise it. She avoided the lined up hookah pipes, she walked over the damp tissues, she sidestepped the camp Pakistani boy who was willing to kiss anything tonight to just feel wanted. She could feel her breath getting sharper. She knew that what she was doing was wrong, that Jaya was a masterpiece that needed to be preserved, that Jaya didn't need more desire in her life to prolong the ever-ominous date of inevitable marriage shackles loneliness oblivion. Would Jaya think of her when she woke up in the morning in Bangladesh, next to her husband, thousands of miles away from home, her husband still sleeping? Would she awake and sit up, and feel the blanket of isolation and never being understood? Would she feel utterly, completely, depressingly alone? Suppressed? Or would she meet Kulsuma, for a quick fix of ego? Or would she come home from work, walk in to her house, and hoard useless pieces of heritage around her, like a gatekeeper to her history? Would she take comfort in the romanticising? Kulsuma needed to give Jaya the key, the way out, the option, the ladder, the understanding emotion gravity.

Jaya turned around and faced Kulsuma point blank in the eye. There was a century's worth of sadness in her eyes, and a millennia's worth of dread. It was duplicated in Kulsuma's own eyes, when she smiled and walked right past her, to fill her plastic cup at the bar.

It was a time where Sony Walkmans had ceased production and CDs were thrown away after use rather than resold. It was in the West Midlands, and discreet music players meant bored teenagers could pretend they lived somewhere edgier than industrial Birmingham by soundtracking their walk to school with The Kills (if you were white) or Imran Khan (if you were brown). It was the middle of winter; frosty, grey, depression-inducing kind of weather. Schoolgirls would dig their hands deep in to their Primark leather jackets, perfect manicures covering the haldi-stained nails from helping cook the dhansak last night, poker straight hair that was tinted copper with the smell of fried onions blasted out of it; perfectly groomed eyebrows which, if even one hair was let out of place, would give a shocking insight in to their hairy auntie-ji DNA which they would inevitably give in to at the age of 30.

But for now, the facial hair was waxed, the eyes were smokey, the sexual tension simmered pleasurably in their bellys, and their grades were mediocre enough to secure a place to do psychology and media studies at the polytechnic college up the road.

Balsall Heath Grammar School was nestled in between three areas, all of which the police has abandoned long ago; where the polite BBC local radio staff never cared to report on, and where discarded condoms and syringes were like debris floating in a sea of miles upon miles of cracked concrete streets. The girls were desperate and/or pregnant, the boys were comatose from cheap skunk, and everyone else was either a social worker or a zygote.

It was natural then, that the school played host to all the congealed crap that trickled down from these areas.

Ruby aka Rubina Ansari Khan was cold this morning as she walked to class. Her GHD'd hair was perilously close to frizzing which would do nothing to help her achieve the fuck of her life from Paul Gordon in Sixth Form.

Paul Gordon's father was a member of Combat 18, the cheaper, white-trash version of the BNP. After a night attacking brown kids and general racist-fueled merriment and splitting various lips, Paul knew his father would be shocked to know how he fiercely masturbated to mental images of a Pakistani girl in his school.

It was why he never let the guys see his face as he raped yet another Fucking Paki they'd hunted down.

# Chapter 2

Mr Abdul Chakkarbatti was worried as the police asked him for a statement to describe the person who stole his car, because all white people looked the same to him.

'Well, brown hair, he had. And, uhm, aaahm, he has white skin and such such...'

He faltered and became irritated with himself. Jaya had let her pernickety Westernised side get the best of her and forced him to tell the police their shiny but dented Mercedes had been stolen.

Mr Chakkarbatti thought this was a waste of time. The police here came with their notepads and judgements and raped their little Muslim household with their big white presence. And goodness, they talked a lot. Although, Mr Chakkarbatti always found their words strangely reassuring, as though simply talking was actually doing half the work. Yes, this he had always approved of with the white peoples.

'Well Mr Chakra-Borty, we'll certainly do our best, and we'll be in touch.'

Aaah, the distancing words of the White Goodbye. He closed the door behind them, feeling a little violated that his Mahal had been infiltrated.

His wife emerged from the kitchen after coyly hiding while the police finished questioning him.

'Tut,' she shuffled about the place readjusting things the visitors hadn't even touched, 'Ish, Ish! Coming in to the house when they eating the pork and drinking the alcohol, ish!' She hitched up her sari, wound up the loose end around her fat Buddha-belly and savagely tucked it in to the hip. She then proceeded to read a series of Quranic verses and furious dusting, to cleanse the place of invisible remnants of pig and alcohol.

Abdul sat back at his desk and sighed. It was end of the tax year and he had to finish off his clients' accounts, pray at the mosque, collect some rent, and deposit some money at the bank. The Mercedes was replaceable. But little else was.

He stared at the figures in front of him. He still did his books by hand.

'Wife, where is Jaya?'

'She is revising at her friend's house.'

There was a long silence. It was one currency they used to pay the price for bringing up their children in England.

Jaya was often described as a coconut. Her wholesome middle-class English accent was a freak accident in the middle of Coventry's ghetto. Her university education belied the gun-crime statistics of her area. David Cameron's policies sat nicely with her as much as they grated on her neighbours. She did not lend herself well to exotic, fetishized images of British-Asian 'otherness' for posh white lecturers and be-sandled Guardian columnists to salivate over.

She was angry, horny and informed.

Jaya also had something bubbling inside her belly that was unexplainable; an idea, a potential, deep in the pits of her belly, no, lower than that, her gut. Somewhere embedded in the cilia of her intestines. It was such an intensely concentrated mixture of somethingness that it was highly sensitive, and whenever she came near to something that could fulfil it, she ran away, unable to handle the intensity.

She was pretty sure it was this abstract and somewhat pretentious aspect of her life that drove her forward and made her special; for she was special of course yes she was.

But unfortunately this somethingsomething was a distraction. It meant that she was always somewhere else in her head, chasing some other idea lifestyle girl grade car career philosophy, that she was always deeply unsatisfied about where she was.

This made her a yearning personality. It showed in her eyes. Teamed with the anger, it was an intoxicating combination.

Well, it wasn't just Jaya's eyes, per se, that fucked with peoples' heads. It never actually is the eyes, she thought; it's a romanticised notion. If a person's eyeballs were ripped out of their face, did they relay any emotion? No. It was the area around the eyes; the eyebrows, the wrinkles, the eyelids, where the emotion was.

She always knew that was why Asian girls pioneered threading in Britain (every shopping centre from Putney to Bradford had a little hut with a bitchy-looking Asian girl offering her twisted string). They weren't lost in inaccurate romanticising a la 'eyes are the windows to the soul'. They were beaten with the stick of reality and knew what the deal was. They were expected to be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.

It was in the eye brows.

For Jaya, though ,eyebrows and all of their romance were as transient as the frost on her breath. She was walking through the ghetto of Coventry, her farcically cursed home town, leaving her house in the bitter January cold, past the row of grim terraced houses, net curtains drawn, hush hush about what went on inside. The thoughts of Hamida at No. 42 who was about to run away with the rice delivery boy. The convictions of Little Asif at No. 13, who had just hit puberty but had already learnt how to construct a small bomb using ingredients from the local bric-a-brac shop. The inner whisperings of Mrs Choudhury's head, who relentlessly cooked curry after curry in the hope that the steam and the bubbling would choke the voices that told her after 40 years of marriage is was time to listen to the NHS leaflet about Domestic Violence written in badly translated Bengali, and delivered to No. 38. The resentment felt by Mrs Kaur who had once heard on Sunrise Radio that the reason British Asians were so prone to obesity was because they came from famine-struck countries and their genes dictated that they store all their fat for survival, so that now they were in England, a country of Abundance, their waistbands expanded hugely. Imagine! Being fat in this country was a tell-tale sign of a beggar's heritage! As a result, Mrs Kaur starved her daughters... she didn't want anyone thinking they were anything other than the wealthy Kaur's of No. 10 who didn't dilute the Fairy Liquid with water...

These were houses whispering secrets, pantry's full of masala and gin stuffed in bedroom drawers.

Jaya walked past these houses pumping out their smells of onion at various stages of cooking. She pulled on her leather gloves and absentmindedly plumped up her back-combed jet black hair, proudly void of Paki-Copper highlights. Her skin was winter milky, the kind that attracted secret mutterings of black magic from jealous housewives in Bangladesh. She always got mistaken for an Italian; she didn't admit it, but it made her proud. Anything to belie the short-and-dark Bangladeshi DNA. It was the only neo-colonial indulgence she allowed herself (or so she thought).

She walked with her head down; it was something the after-school mosque lessons has taught her and stuck for life. Jaya's was a strange posture: her head was bowed, weighted with the shyness taught from religion; her back was straight and self-important, from a proud education, her walk was quick, from the humility taught from parents from a cripplingly poor country (quick walkers, to get out of everyone's way). Today, her stride was wide, from her coital exploits of last night.

But this morning was not about her Lassi Lesbians; no no! Today was Jaya's day of revelling in the jarring nostalgia of her childhood! She was in Coventry, the Ghost Town of 1983, the bastard cousin of Birmingham, the shit that slipped out with the last few farts of the deflated car industry, the bastion of urban decay and its disgusting decrepit twisting series of ring roads and concrete and breeze blocks and piles upon piles of pissed-on bricks and broken bus stops and shattered cider bottles and potholes and flattened speed humps.

Glorious, towering blocks of flats housing overcrowding immigrants on one side, and St George's flags hanging off the balcony on the other side. There were alleyways, lots and lots of them, everywhere; but Jaya strode past them, she ignored the swastika painted on the side of the mosque, didn't look as the hooded boys at the bus shelter skulked, hardly noticed the beggar in the subway, or the Somali prostitute outside the casino. No, they were the Invisibles. They were interwoven in the fabric of the city, simply background detail, fodder, like the sawdust in the coke.

Jaya was in the final year of university, enjoying an end of term holiday away from the ponces at the University of Leeds, in that bizarre period where she was ecstatic with the end of hearing countless nonce's intellectually masturbate about post-colonialism and identity crises and multiculturalism and diasporas, in their middle-class drone and painfully flowery academic theses which they prescribed to all their students.

On the other hand, she would miss being the only Asian in her English Literature year of 400. She would miss how everybody would pay extra attention to her during seminars, acting as though she wasn't their only brown friend. She would miss the arrogant sense of security university gave her, the temporary ground it lent her to look down at those unemployed bastards kicked in the balls by the recession.

She faltered for a moment. What awaited her on the other side of summer? All the textbooks and pussy and prayer during exams and results and graduation would have to end... and of course everybody knew postgraduate degrees were for people who failed to find a job after their undergrad... she couldn't fail the burning ambition burning in her bloodline... her sister was a plastic surgeon... her father an accountant... impossible! She would HAVE to either kill herself or find her slot in the world... her untouchable position in the Chakarbatti heritage, the lofty ideals had to be fulfilled. She had Asian Superwoman Syndrome; what a label! Her ancestors had not graduated from Cambridge and sat around in the tea gardens of Bengal waxing lyrical about the Partition just to be insulted by Jaya's inability to get a job in the midst of the UK's credit crunch!

Akram Chakarbatti The Closet Womaniser of Dhaka, 1972, did not ostentatiously overpay the riksha-wallah in front of his neighbours just to have his legacy crushed by a lesbian from Coventry!

And on the eve of Britain surrendering it's hold over India in 1947, a one Farhana Chakarbatti did not become the first educated female to start a violent protest to have her efforts abruptly ended by her great great great (and so on) granddaughter who was too preoccupied with boobs! No! The efforts went back, back through time, back through the dynasties, the British Raj, the Moghul era, the Khilji reign, the endless planes of battlefields and evolution, hot deserts and palm trees and leather water sacks and Eastern philosophies and scriptures...

And landed here outside a pub in the bowels of Urban England. Jaya looked up guiltily at the big red 'Filly & Firkin' sign, had a quick look over both shoulders, and slunk inside. The only thing that would sizzle away those heavy thoughts of lineage would be a shot of Bombay Sapphire; bottling the glory days of the Empire and selling it back to them on their tiny little island of failure.

'How much cinammon do you like in your tea?' Mrs Datta asked, her maternal beam showering over Jaya, who consciously didn't talk too much in case the gin could be smelt. Mrs Datta was a Hindu and Jaya and her sister would get beaten with the wooden curry spoon if they came home smelling of incense and methi after visiting the Datta's in their childhood. But now, Jaya would drop by, since Mr Datta had died of testicular cancer, her son was a drug dealer and her daughter Ananya was the city slut. But still, Mrs Datta would wear her dignified gold and purple sari's, her eyes dull but kind, her smile knowing but young, her voice croaky but intrigued, making her tea in a saucepan like her in-laws had always loved, but who never came round anymore for they blamed her for Mr Datta's death from a cancer prevalent in his family history and his 30-a-day smoking habit.

'As much as you think is right for me, please,' Jaya smiled, and welcomed the masala chai. She walked in to the living room and pretended to not notice Ananya hurriedly turn the page away from the Bollywood column in the Metro –it was something everybody secretly did but didn't admit to.

The girls hugged; it was genuine. There was an understanding that even though they only bothered to see each other twice a year, there was something unifying about being the only English-speaking Bengalis in the area.

The news headlines read inane stories about government policies and Islamic militants, commentaries on 9/11 and 7/7 anniversaries and a spout of comments about halal slaughter Vs stunning. It had suddenly become normal for a mainstream working-class paper to carry articles on age-old beliefs and for work experience kids to compile commentaries on British Muslims. Jaya laughed at the finding that Wembley stadium was serving halal meat unlabelled; she'd know for years; Patel's Halal Butchers round the corner took most of their outsourcing requests. Hardworking little bastard that Patel was, he undercut the prices of almost anyone in England, rounded up his Midland Meat Men (one in Coventry, two in Birmingam) and supplied pretty much all meat eaten in major venues across the country. Undeclared, tax-evading, underhanded genius that he was, even he could not understand white peoples' taste for eating congealed pig's blood and thought he was doing the country a favour.

The evening wore on and the girls talked and Mrs Datta shuffled about in the kitchen, nobody noticing her eyes getting sadder and the lines on her face getting deeper. That her daughter worked in a call centre –which was something she could have done if they'd stayed in India- and her son was selling drugs cheaper than in Punjab, strained her heart hugely. That it was suddenly OK to let a Muslim girl visit their house freely, hurt her even more. That the Muslim girl was more respectable that her own family, well, that would eventually kill her.

She fixed her sari and put some more tea in the saucepan.

# Chapter 3

Mrs Chakkarbatti was so simple that it confused people. She was a woman and she was a wife to her house. She ran all the way home in startled fear when she saw her first black man after she had arrived in England. In 1972, she walked the 20 minutes home in the snow wearing her sandals because the women at the factory stole her shoes and she was too dignified to get embroiled in the vulgar behaviour of reporting them. She did not go to mela's because they were not Bengali; she did not approve of Punjabi culture overshadowing her quiet, contemplative Bangladeshi lifestyle.

She did not watch TV because Allah did not want her to. She was devout to her husband because there was nobody telling her to do otherwise. She left behind her law career in Sylhet, 1972, for a factory job in Coventry because that is was her husband chose for her.

She did not lament the fact that she did not have a son; that was the preoccupation of the villagers, the fish-eating working glass gawwali's who had not yet been distinguished from the rest of the British Bengali's despite 30 years of immigration to the country.

Mrs Chakkarbatti came from a political family of finesse and discipline and repression. In their youth, she slapped her daughters if they laughed too loud. They were not allowed to speak or contribute to the conversations of elders. They would not become mindless Bengali philanderers; they would become educated, opinionated women who daren't look in to their parents' eyes when getting told off. They would prescribe their own canings, they would get the best textbooks in the world and not piss away their allowances on non-halal penny sweets, and they would have their wealth stored in the attic in the form of solid gold jewellery sets, hoarded over years of visits from Bangladesh, which they will wear on their marriage days.

It was all planned out and no average local school grades or area statistics or local teen pregnancy rates could change it.

Yes, the daughters did what they did at university. There was no need to question that.

But what happened under the roof of Mrs Chakkarbatti's house, happened under Mrs Chakkarbatti's rule.

She tightened her sari around her and began the marathon of cooking and packing so her daughter would be well nourished through her final university term.

Husband was out buying energy drinks from Lal & Co Cash & Carry, for Jaya's exam season, as these young people drank nowadays.

Just one more to go, and that would be Phase 2 of Parenting done: Education. Which naturally came after Phase 1: Spiritual enlightenment.

Next stop: Marriage.

Ruby Khan knew that the object of her lustings, Paul Gordon from Year 12, was a racist thug and had his finger in every racist pie in England. She knew there was nothing about him that was even mildly socially acceptable. She knew he was a white supremacist who forcefully and unapologetically imposed every colonial ideal on every Fucking Paki or Curry Loving White Slag he met, in the face of every teacher he spat in, and on the walls of every mosque he walked by. In fact, Ruby Khan knew more about Paul Gordon's beliefs than he himself knew; she'd watched YouTube videos of his father giving speeches at rallies, she knew he was the one who invited the Quran burning pastor from Florida to the UK, she knew that the network of racists spanned the small towns of England to the highest ranks of Sarah Palin's Tea Party candidates and their anti-Islamic agendas. She knew their complex, multi-layered facets of belief better than the image of Paul's scrotum she had pictured smacking in to her buttocks in many a math class.

But Ruby Khan was a self-hating coconut who was, unfortunately, born to the wrong womb. The Fates had, unequivocally, made a major boobie in Ruby's birth, by god had they. She had, from her forlorn and confused childhood, always regarded the Browns as a greasy-haired, runny poo'd base type of species who bred far too quickly. Ruby lamented the fact that her extended family could populate a small city and her household's idea of personal space was somebody not stepping on your toes.

She hated that every Sunday in her house was set aside for 'English' food; like soup and fishfingers (and everybody was glad for the extra bit of green chilli slipped in). Ruby knew the indignation she suffered at home which classmates Louise and Kylie didn't have to endure; the endless curfews, the questioning before going out, the insistence of wearing a headscarf, the smell of curry in the driveway, the stench of BO from her mother's wardrobe because soap powder was an unnecessary purchase, the chickens slaughtered in the garden, the thick Pakistani accents and the roving eyes of Uncle Hanif.

While Ruby the suspected the latter was likely a universal thing, everything else ferociously embarrassed her. Her family certainly weren't an affront to the stereotype.

And it was those things, which made Ruby Khan, over the years, unnoticed, transform slowly, quietly, in her bedroom. Subtle, subtle changes, like the tip toe of foxes at night molesting the garbage. It was there, on the thinly carpeted, loose wood-boarded floors the 8-year-old Ruby Khan cowered and quivered like a Kashmiri tulip in the mountains. Quivering with hatred and meekly whimpering in pity for herself; she didn't want to wear the scratchy spangly suit Auntie Parveen had sent from Pakistan because the metal springs dug in to her skin. She didn't want to watch the too-loud soap drama on Pak TV about black magic with women who caked their faces with foundation and had sweat patches and lightning bolts every time they managed a facial expression.

'No!' she would scream like the Exorcist child, ugly, and hard to love, 'oil is for cooking, not for grooming my hair! Stop putting onions and chilli in my school sandwiches! I'm not going to wear TWELVE sets of gold on my wedding, I'm NOT going to marry cousin Faruq and I'm not going to stuff any more pickled lemons in my luggage!'

Her parents were afraid of their own child; the child who had come amidst a bizarre series of events and conceived the day after Mr Khan was found to be shooting blanks... She came out of the womb laughing, mocking the world, and Mrs Khan didn't feed her for 12 days, afraid she would be devoured by the demon child and sent to hell with the Jamaicans and the pork bap sellers.

Ruby had grown a natural resentment for anything remotely pertaining to be from her heritage. She scoffed at the mention of the Pakistani floods ('poor mongrels deserve it, bamboo bridges weren't the best idea'), she saluted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto ('one down; the rest will kill themselves in the aftermath') and she cursed the cyclone of 1970 for not wiping out the entire country. Fools, she thought, selfish fools who should have surrendered to colonial rule and interbreeding when they had the chance.

She sabotaged ethnic art pieces from rivals during her GCSE's; she thinly veiled her hatred for teachers who expected her to do essays on identity crises for Sociology before spitting discreetly in their tea (little did she know it was the method of one very Pakistani ancestor in 1914, Rabia Khan).

'I detest the smell of curry,' she would spit to Paul during their stolen talks against the grit bin behind the canteen building.

He would take heavy drags of his weed-laced cigarette and listen nervously, hoping nobody would see them talking. He never said a word, lest he should give anything away to this strange, strange girl who seemed to hate her own type more than his father did. He had no idea that she already knew the in's and out's of his extra-curricular activities.

But Paul was, for Ruby, a conquest. Surely if she could conquer Paul whose very blood curdled at the sight of a successful Brown, at the sight of a multicultural neigbourhood, or seeing an English street sign translated in to Bengali; surely if she could win his approval, it would be the ultimate middle-finger flicking great big 'fuck you' to the Establishment and all it stood for?

Two years ago, Balsall Heath School suffered an unfortunate blow to its position as the host body to the government's multicultural manifesto; hundreds of photocopied papers were scattered across the floorshallslockerstoilets of the school, loudly declaring a single, bold headline:

CHILD MOLESTATION RATES HIGHEST IN SOUTH ASIA

followed by a detailed report in to the research by an fairly reliable and media-friendly organisation.

And it was the note of confession from Ruby Khan which sat atop Paul Gordon's bike seat the next day, sellotaped and flapping in the wind, that began a strange acquaintance between two young Brummies who seemed to have been born in to each others bodies.

'Mate, seriously, what is this?'

'Hurry up man my mum's gonna give me bear beats for stayin' out this late,'

'Sharrap mans! This is for the blessing of Allah, the almighty who has given us the grace of existence and created all things in his image,'

'I ain't never been to these ends man. For real. What the fuck is with all these rainbows and shit? Fuck Asif, you scaring me. Is those batties over there?'

Little Asif from No. 13 who had stopped assorting bombs from the bric-a-brac stores to bring his Band of Brothers to the Ungodly Mecca of Sin was excited on this day; his day of glory.

He was opening his Brothers' eyes on the mighty carriage of the 16:10 London Midland train via Watford Junction to London Euston. On the Central line tube to Tottenham Court Road where the buildings parted like the Red Sea and they walked in to the cess pit of all seven metapohorical Plagues of Moses, the Hub of Sodom, the Unspoken Evil of the Rejected Monkeys:

Old Compton Street, Soho.

'Eh be careful yea, don't touch nothing, you get HIV just like that round here.'

Asif and his Brotherhood cut a strange set of silhouettes in the winter evening, standing just on the outskirts of London's gay strip, wearing their skull caps and floor-scraping Punjabi kurtas and muddy Adidas trainers. Asif was a scrawny boy who was obedient to his mother and loving to his younger sisters, at 16, already an untouchable bastion of Islamic knowledge and light and a novelty to take to congregational Friday prayers for perfect Quranic recitation and prayer-leading.

He had known from the moment of his first ejaculation –signalling his maturity, of course –that his calling was upon him. No more secret resentment of his single mother, no more unspent ambition or overpowering bewilderment at his classmates insistence that the area behind the bike shed was consecrated ground. No more.

No; now was his time to get his 9/11, his 7/7, his month slash date format trophy.

They would plan like masters, they would execute like warriors.

He took a mouthful of halal fizzy cola cubes while the rain fell on them and they watched crowds sit at the sticky tables, high-pitched voices shrilling in delight.

His time, and their time, approached.

Paul Gordon was 15 minutes in to watching the pirated copy of 'Monsoon Wedding' with its cacophony of orange saris and Indian monsoons and servants and weddings. On standby was 'Pigs on Patrol' in case his dad walked in. But he was already confused; he couldn't tell all the brown faces apart and had no idea which storyline belonged to whom. And he couldn't understand their accents either. He had thought of getting East is East but decided the birds on the cover weren't fit enough.

He scratched his skinhead and pulled off his Doc Martens, popped the lid off his Vaseline tub and decided his evening would be better spent making up his own fantasy about Ruby.

There were far too many improbabilities to Ruby Ansari Khan's thinking; could SHE tell the difference between the Monsoon Wedding characters? Was she mocking him with her hatred of the Browns? When she suggested that they were walking turds, was the theory baseless and thoughtless?...no, Paul Gordon concluded. She was surely overcompensating? She was doing inversely doing what the Pigs of Parliament did; by not being born in to a group, she lent extra venom to her words, tried extra hard to make him believe that she too, believed in White Rule.

The question of what would happen to her if, hypothetically, White Rule occurred, did not trouble Paul. No, he didn't deal in Utopian principles. He dealt in reality.

He concluded then, a second or so before ejaculating in to the cover of Monsoon Wedding, that by subverting the rules of Parliament, Ruby Khan would be the Saviour of Britain. Yes.

And he knew that he would have to do something terrible to impress her and do his own bit of overcompensating for his silences near the grit bin.

The boys had been eyeing up a target on the faggot fest that was Birmingham's sad cluster of gay bars. And one of those gay bars attracted Fucking Gay Paki's.

Double whammy.

And he knew Ruby Khan would have to be there when he did it, all by himself. He could picture it; she'd be waiting in the car and he'd go and Kick the Shit out of a Fucking Gay Paki!

It wasn't the smile on his face that was registered in Cosmos; it was the fact that a little lower, just as he pictured the scene, his wrist had started pumping again.

Kulsuma's mother had yet again refused to buy toilet tissue because it consistently clogged up the pipes, so the empty and lidless bottle of Sprite which sat permanently beside the toilet ('We will buy a proper bodna from Bangladesh, it is cheaper there') was being used til the finger dents became permanent, and the family had soggy crotches. This wasn't a problem for her parents; her father spent all day wearing a lunghi which gave maximum aeration to his bottom and her mother thought underwear was a Western idea anyway.

But Kulsuma fidgeted uncomfortably (she'd given up hairdrying the area, the cracks between her thighs were already red raw), and had resigned to hoping the cushion would soak up the excess (much like the broken waters of a secret pregnancy of Ruhina Begum in 1942...)

'Abba! I can't be bothered to drive to work, can you take me?'

She squinted as she awaited the inevitable reply.

'Whaat? How you can say? You cannot commute a 20 minute?' Her dad burst through the door. 'You know in Bangladesh an acceptable commute could involve i-swimming through FLOODWATERS. With a change of clothes balanced on the head! What they teached you in i-school? Good for nothing...'

He walked out and put on his shoes. 'I will i-start car in one hour be ready.'

She smelt the onion in her hair and quickly blasted it with some dry shampoo, sprayed some Charlie between her legs and noticed the white marks on the armpits of her top were crusting, so took it off, before deciding the matter of clothing was secondary to rejuvenating her Facebook profile.

The 'I'm Gay and What, Bitch?' group had sent an invite to another night at the Gaysian club on Hurst Street, B1.

She could hear her mother screeching and invoking the Prophet at the sight of Jamie Oliver serving a rare steak.

Her cousin popped up on her MSN screen:

Lemoncheesecake85: 'Biatch. U seen Mere Zindagi yet? I did, wana take da fam a lam to watch it? I'm cumin ova 2mro'

BenGAYli69: 'I wanted to take Abba to watch it. So long as there's no sex stuff in there?'

Lemoncheesecake85: 'No. There's gratuitous violence, swearing and decapitation.'

BenGAYli69: 'Yea, but is there even a whiff of sexual tension?'

Lemoncheesecake85: 'er...no.'

BenGAYli69: 'That's fine then, come over 2nyt, we'll get ready. I'll make the pakora's, you make the dal paranthas and sandwiches. There's some curry left over from last night, use that in them. Make about four paan's for dad, and don't forget to bring his gastric medicines, and Amma's angina tablets; they've run out and they always leave an emergency stash @ yours. I'll cut up the onions and bag the lemons and green chillies. '

Lemoncheesecake85: 'Erm...the film's an hour and a half long.'

BenGAYli69: 'You're right. I'd better make a flask of tea too.'

Lemoncheesecake85: 'By the way, there's a really camp gay policeman in there.'

BenGAYli69: 'Oh shit. That's a no then.'

Lemoncheesecake85: 'Ha! Yea, near miss. I'll keep an eye out for something else. Mwah xox'

BenGAYli69: 'See ya.'

Kulsuma hovered her mouse over the profile picture of Jaya Chakarbatti, University of Leeds Network for a while. It was pointless for her to even press on the profile anymore; she had already memorised every pixel and zoomed in to every picture on there (downloaded and carefully crafted in to a masterpiece slideshow to the soundtrack of Bollywood love songs, and hidden deep in the crevices of her computer memory so that even she could not bear to follow the long filepath unless she was in dire need of a pleasurable fix of her own teen Bengal drama of unrequited love. Oh! How she would mock herself under the trembling exultations of her own, her very own, unblossomed night-lily of unexploded love!)

Instead, she looked out of the window, through the tear in the net curtain, over the rows of houses and their big driveways and their ostentatious concrete walls. It was a street full of other Asians who had moved in thinking there were no other Asians there. But as soon as they started moving in, the Whites started moving out. The street looked fine now; but as soon as the Asians clocked on, well, things would start slipping. They'd probably have nobody to suck in their bellies full of pretence for.

What grew in a concrete jungle: cornershops, roti junctions, souped up boy racer cars, community colleges, academies, masala stalls, hotdog stands, over priced coffee and bitterness; and with some added preservatives, a lot of bizarre accents.

But what grew best in a concrete jungle, was fantasy; lust and unreasonable dreams gnawing militantly in the brains of little girls and commuters with their stale coffee breath and newspaper stench. Those words people are constantly surrounded by on billboards and headlines and departure boards and mobile phone menus and ingredient lists and paperbacks! All a cacophony of ostentatious statements of purpose, sterile, unless mixed with the repressed imagination of the Urban Dweller.

As if Birmingham was crying for help, sprawled in brown graffiti on a brick wall were the words:

"go to work, send your kids to school

follow fashion, act normal,

walk on the pavements, watch T.V.

save for your old age, obey the law

Repeat after me: I am free"

The mind of Kulsuma Begum had long numbed to the meaning of this or, indeed, any other subscription to bumper sticker politics. The mainstream had, long ago, lost her. She once optimistically, with the daring glee of an immigrant's daughter in the Land of Opportunity, believed in The Freedom; even in the abstract joys it bought: the idea that if you were thinking it, someone else probably was too. The notion of the 'niche'. The marginalized subculture and the fearless British vie for the underdog, a heady fearless dichotomy of victory, a shouty loudmouthed lout of a sister-fucker of a freedom fighter.

But The Freedom got fucked in the ass.

They started marketing the margins.

They started ejaculating labels all over them.

'Postcolonial,' they said, 'defined by the disappearance of something else,' they teased, mercilessly, refusing to let go.

'British Asian,' they taunted, 'preceded by something that's in the midst of disappearing,' they whispered.

'Other Ethnic Background,' they bleated, 'please tick the appropriate box Other than White British, which is on a separate line, here you see, above the rest of the tick boxes.'

'BrAsian,' they beamed, 'almost there, still prefixed, don't worry though, just two more letters to go!'

She had heard Jaya (oh sweet antithesis of the Conformist!) talk in big words about pedagogy and nationality, but the words washed over Kulsuma and her soggy crotch (for a different reason at the time). All she could think of then (O forgive her mind's vulgar thoughts towards the bastion of Beauty!) was pushing her face up Jaya's torn denim miniskirt with its pocket half ripped off, her tiny waist and her lips sprouting words which fell on the uneducated ears of these, these mongrels of nationalities, half chewed and spat out on to the cemented desert of Godless fad-obsessed misfits with odd teeth and ethnic-faced clean-speaking Know It Alls on the Knews.

Kulsuma Begum, with the bloodline heritage of a fish monger in the almost non-existent village of Angur Boksh (Box of Grapes; the price of buying property there), now found herself in a country that had abandoned her with nothing but an impotent idea of who she was supposed to be.

But then they, the Lassi Lesbians, were a sub culture of their very own self-impressed margin.

The Gaysians.

The Gaysians even had their own Kama Sutra.

The Cinammon Roll. The Kulfinator. The Cheeky Chuddies. The Girly Grand Sahib. The Hand-Ji. The Burkha Jerker. The Dicksaw Wallah.

Yes, they wouldn't be able to take away their self-imposed margin label no matter how hard they tried. (But in the back of her mind whisperings...whisperings of 'but you'll all be married to the opposite sex before the decade is out'... 'you'll make your own label defunct'.... 'You'll tear it apart yourselves'...)

She thought what the bridge would look like when she came to it, and lit up a cigarette. Surely Jaya The Saviour, with her big savvy words, would save them? She would find the one verse in the Quran which would save all The Gaysians from straight jackets?...

She looked in the mirror and started wiping her armpits with make-up remover, wondering if Jaya had unsightly dark spots under her armpits and inside her thighs like most other Asian girls. No, she wouldn't have. She was one-tone all the way through; her body was tight and perfect and always smelt of talcum powder. She didn't smell of onions or stale curry, Kulsuma concluded. She didn't have big brown bin-lid nipples either (in Kulsuma's late-night ponderings, Jaya's were a neutral shade of beige and didn't have any hairs in them) and her nether regions were powdery and smooth, not red with the rash that came with Imperial Leather soap from Poundland).

Kulsuma sighed; a quiet, dejected sigh that smelt of cigarettes and saag. It made her ache, dull and long sort of aches that soaked through to her very bones. A sad, rejected sigh that bore that mark of self-imposition: Pleasure.

Jaya Chakarbatti, soon to be BA, with her silky smooth accent and her genteel confidence and her head-fucking yearning but mocking looks... the thought of her sometimes sent Kulsuma in to torrents of chain-smoking, listening to superfluous Bollywood love songs, pacing the few feet of visible floor in her room, and often even sweating. Jaya was so _English_. She could probably eat English food every day of her life and not have curry cravings like all the other desi's. She ate sushi, for goodness sake, and went to theatres, and drank elderflower juice, very probably even in that order. Her house didn't smell of East End vegetable margarine and her little tummy would probably hurt if she had chapatti's and curry for breakfast. She didn't have rice-belly, the tell-tale mark of Bengaliness, and she didn't have yellow-stained teeth (they shone, in perfect alignment, oh, did they!). When she was caught smoking hanging out of the bedroom window, Mr Chakkarbatti advised her to go to NHS Smoking Cessation meetings; he didn't call the local maulvi shrieking about jinn possession or demons. Her auntie's didn't wear bobble-ridden polyester scarves soaked with hair-oil and reeking of bhaji. Her father most likely didn't bark at her mother for being late with the tea in front of guests and there was certainly no way at all that Jaya Chakarbatti was remotely flattered by the stares of the illegal Afghans lining the off-licences at Birmingham New Street station. Words like 'pregnant' and 'girlfriend' probably weren't rude words in her household. Jaya probably carried Samsonite suitcases when she went to Bangladesh, and wasn't forced to secure her baggage with a rope or put a piece of torn salwaar kameez on the handle to recognize it on the conveyor belt. Goodness, she probably used actual refuse sacks to line her dustbin and not Sainsbury's bags...

Kulsuma was beating herself with the Stick of Jaya; it was her own form of spiritual discipline. Oh Kulsuma, she berated herself: Oh Kulsuma, forced to squat over toilets Back Home, unable to remove the hard consonants in her speech, possessor of several types of hair oil, secret-lover of Bollywood, leaker of curried burps, student of Sociology and buyer of pirated DVD's! How could her Beloved even entertain the idea of amour with such a lowly, smelly paki girl?

Her father knocked on the door.

'I'll be ready in five minutes, Abba,' (...stubbing out the cigarette lest he smelt it and lost himself in spirals of thoughts about why he came to this Godforsaken Country in First Place... )

The car journey was filled with the comfortable silence of two generations who didn't care that they understood nothing about one another, and the humming of worn wheel bearings.

'Look at that,' Kulsuma's dad nodded at queues of people in Argos, 'Where they get the money from? All shops, see? Filled. All money from benefits.' He shook his head. 'And every night at the pub and di-vorces everywhere. What do they have?' He chewed his paan vigorously. He didn't understand how they survived with families scattered everywhere and no definitive pot of family money. In his armchair at home, he often felt bad for them; it must have been debilitating to only speak one language (even Shakespeare thought so! He remembered the Merchant of Venice, approved for the Bangladeshi curriculum for its socially acceptable stereotypes of jews and cross-dressing). He thought how humiliated they must feel with no housing investments in Sylhet, no education funds for their children, no rubber-banded blocks of £50 notes in case they suddenly got thrown out of the country, no Allah...

O! No Allah! He often cried for them in his prayers. He prayed for their Guidance, and their inner peace. His exultations would turn to despair in the night. He often couldn't sleep. Purposefully he would perform his ablution: carefully wipe his head, his ears, his nape, his arms, his feet, squeezing in the tears as he heard in his head... for he hath put a veil before their eyes, that they cannot see; their hearts, that they cannot understand. (Isaiah 44:18, Quran 16: 106-109)... He saw Mr Jones' wife did not stand by him at gatherings, he saw Mrs Jones was not protected from the Preying Eyes...

And he would pray deep in to the night til his prayer mat showed the dents of his forehead and knees and hands, and praise God is Great! God is Merciful! on each of the transluscent green rosary beads... But he was not concerned for the tree planted for him in heaven with each praise ('a big tree the size of the earth, with leaves made of gold and silver' his mother would tell him as little boy, as he tugged at her sari and she stooped over the paraffin cooker in their little hut in Koripur). No no. He was concerned with the Mischief the devil would make for these innocent people and their Misguidance... they were good people Allah... they give their life savings to dogs charities... they have a System for everything... the good from them were reserved and respectful, like Pakistani peoples... they let us in to their country and did not let the racialists have their way...

But now his thoughts sat in the ripped car seats with his daughter, who pleased him and worried him. She did not yet seem to have gotten her hoosh. In the absence of a proper English translation of this word, which conveyed the weighted and dense implicities of its meaning, he would say 'this is too highly philosophical for you. And those Englishes have never even, in their four dy-nasties, thought of such a word.'

It was, to say, her consciousness. Her worldliness encompassed with the spiritual enlightenment and God's guidance of... no. There was no translation and to forge it in to one would render the term void.

But while Kulsuma Begum, he saw, had not obtained her hoosh yet, she did not bring any boys home or walk with them in the city centre. She did not watch too much TV and she did not have bad dealings with people. She maintained good relations with the tab keepers at Fakir's Grocers. She did not speak to him with the Western Mockery and Disbelief which Tariq at the mosque complained of about his own children.

Yes, he nodded in the car, and Kulsuma didn't question it. Abba's thoughts were all-encompassing and not disturbed by people jumping off the zebra crossing as he drove straight over it. She sighed, and thought he was either thinking about the foolishness of the Englishes, or how much money he needed to send to Bangladesh to get the fifth floor of his building done. She looked at the cracked skin on his knuckles, still sore from helping the builders during his last visit there. She knew they would start bleeding now winter was here. But it was difficult to ask a man, who broke his spirit and spent every penny in ensuring her future's financial security, to moisturise his hands. He may not have spent £1.50 on toilet tissue, but he found thousands to school his nephew in Sylhet. It seemed Abba had turned his life in to a parentheses, slipped neatly in to the lives of others.

'Look at that lady with her chicken-neck dog.' Abba scoffed, 'that is her child. She does not see that her wombs are drying up and she need husband to keep her happy,' (It was a strange nuance that Asians didn't know much about dogs but at school –mainly because they were the Dirty creatures and the inevitable 'why would you want a dog when you could feed a family in Bangladesh instead'. Kulsuma's friends would happily talk about strange and elaborate breeds... Belgian Mastiffes and Cross Border Terriers, and chihuaua's –which had always sounded like a breed of monkey to her. The Begums referred to dogs only by what they resembled, like chicken-necks or small-horse or Auntie Rumi).

Kulsuma looked out of the window and hoped no one at work would notice when she slipped toilet tissue in to her bag.

# Chapter 4

(Because South Asians seemed to have an aversion to physical proximity for reasons unexplained,) Jaya and Shagufta sat opposite each other eating a plate of potato wedges in a thickly carpeted barcumpub with too many chunky brass fixtures and sodden brown leather couches. A lunchtime smattering of pink-faced pasty-skinned suit-with-no-blazer dry-conversationalist office workers sat around, sipping tentatively on beers; a group of obviously-secretaries seemed to be getting high on lattes (and low on banter, Jaya thought, lamenting on their behalf their routine existence and labourious hours). There were snippets of unfollowed-up conversations hanging like fog in the air.. buying my boyfriend a willy warmer for his birthday!, Malaga was epic, mate, epic, I'm double shifting for that knob do you have any painkillers?, mmm the pasta was nice, very fresh.

The sea of dead fish-eyes was normal viewing for this square of Birmingham; it was Colmore Row, with its intimidating maze of narrow streets and faux-old red brick buildings and office blocks and lawyers clerks and the ongoing etc etc etc of their lives. Half-baked thoughts and coffee breath cluttered up what little space there was left in the air of bus fumes and the lingering smell of commercial bakedgoodsandpastries; discarded cigarettes were stamped in between the cracks of the cobbles, only half smoked because the chain smokers couldn't take anymore and were bound more to the chain than the smoke.

Shagufta looked at the menu, bemused at how spectacularly the English managed to commercialise the quotidian; the cooking method of the basil actually elicited an entire line, pan-fried scallops (as opposed to fried in a baking tray?) seemed like an exotic netherwordly creature, going by the tri-paragraph description of them, 'stick of rosemary' as though it were a meal in itself... the lack of flavour in the food meaning then perhaps, they had to exaggerate what little they had. If an Indian restaurant listed the jungle of herbs in each of its curries with this much self-importance, oh! Shagufta delighted in her resentment of their lowly culinary capabilities. Her eyes flickered to the last few wedges left on the plate, teasing her (as the poisoned laddoo had tempted her fatbaldsweating father, because the tight-sari'd Moni was already sucking someone else's laddoo's and she needed to oust this fatman suitor and diarrhoea would do the job hurryhurry).

The only sign of class wars and Changing Britain and a world gripped in the thighs of TERRORISM! were on the muted flat screen TVs placed intermittently throughout the barcumpub. They were little windows of knews from the Know It Alls. Newsreader-Graphics-Talking Person-Green Pitch-Newsreader. An endless cycle of predictable pictures set to the soundtrack of muted lives and whatever the iPod was playing. Nobody actually listened to anyone anymore.

Apart from Jaya. She listened to things people spaces guts. Jaya Lubaba Chakarbatti of the torrential hot dense fairandwise bloodline spanning as far back as when space and time collided, sat on an uncomfortable couch in Birmingham. She saw the Silence and knew it was Her which spoke the most (See! How the feminine habit of chitterchatter did not transcend even Her abstract embodiments!). Jaya, the attractor of shiny elements and taker in of strays. SHE knew All Is Not As It Seems; the pervert amongst the puritans of Truth.

But, as all things had their limits, even she could not see past the layers of cracked foundation on Shagufta's face (to the crater-littered scratchy skin beneath). Jaya's own eyes watered just seeing the clumped up lashings of jet black mascara smothered on to Shagufta's stumpy eyelashes; the inch thick eyeliner on her lids, gathering in the corner of eyes like the whore of Babylon. Her rolls of fat jutted stiffly and gloriously over her trousers, protruding from any holes they could find not restricted by her bra or waistband. Her fat stumpy fingers which couldn't bend properly for the gatherings of corpulent flesh pushing against themselves, had the audacity of being adorned by rings, on every one of them; heavy, rusty, elaborate rings with crust forming in their creases, stale finger sweat, scum and lint gathering at every flick and turn of the cheap metal they were made of.

And her lipstick, slathered like scarlet tar across a slit prune, with lipliner refusing to accept God's final word on where her lips ended, drawn on like a godforsaken blow-up doll slowly deflating under somebody's bed.

Shagufta was, in short, an abomination to the human eye. Her cheeks squeezed in to the space that was supposed to be for her eyes, her chin was small and heading the hoops of podge that ringed down her neck, drooping until they almost overflowed on to her chest.

And still, still, she would yabber on in her nasal voice about how Eamon from work eyed her up at the water cooler, how she'd had to tell Singh the taxi driver to keep his hands to himself, how the paki boys at the local would try it on with her, and how her hip movements would mesmerize the punters on the club dancefloor.

She would regale Jaya's dumbfounded ears of her conquests at the local gay bar, how she could turn even gay men straight, how she was so classy and turned heads when ordering a glass of rose (at which point her nasal voice climaxed) and they just stared and stared at her divine ethereal beauty, wondering who is this enigma? Who, pray tell, was this specimen of beauty? Her black-lined eyes would twinkle as she spun her tales, flashing her cigarette-yellow-stained teeth; tales of mysterious auras emanating from her glorious vast expansive body. She reckoned she drove men wild and sent women in to blazes of unspoken desire.

She would say how the women at the eyebrow parlour would get far too close, how the guy at the Cash and Curry touched her hand when he was handing over the packets of masala, how she would have to fend off the admirers buying her drinks at the Asian Ball Dinner and Dance: The Classiest Event in Birmingham, No Trainers or Hoodies.

Shagufta's sexuality was Disc Error. While it was tempting to suggest she would simply go for the first ugly thing that came her way, Jaya sensed (with the wiseandtrue proportion of her loaded bloodline) that it was far more deliberate than that. Shagufta was, currently, in a relationship with a gay man; Saqib (beautiful muscle Mary untouchable beautiful Shah Rukh Khan-esque Saqib with his razor sharp jawline and that most covetable of gay traits: straight-acting).

Now, while it may have seemed to the naked eye that this most bizarre of liaisons may have a hidden agenda (it was common knowledge that Saqib was skint and awaiting deportation to Pakistan, and Shagufta's paycheque-and-red passport wielding qualities attracted him), there was something less sinister and more comprehensible about their relationship.

Shagufta, whose own mother would look upon her with shame, felt that love transcended physicality. Saqib, whose jeans were as tight as his morals were loose, felt the same. While both had the same means for different endings (although the knowingandforeseeing portion of Jaya's blood couldn't quite yet decipher how Shagufta saw the end of their relationship), it was clear that their coming together did have more credence to it than most other peculiar relationships on the gaysian scene, despite Saqib's open promiscuity with other men (this was explained by the fact that Shagufta did not view other men as competition, it was the women she was worried about; unless the man was Asian, or the woman was white, and various other clauses and sub-clauses which would adapt, as any good system, to the changing landscape of polysexuality). It couldn't be ignored however, than they were both using each other for adequacy. Shagufta, who spun decadent tales of superiority and sexual potence, was tragically, a lonely woman who thought her attraction to both sexes was a mysterious ambiguity that piqued interest, and not sheer desperation for the potential of human contact. Saqib, proudly indulgent in the fashion of flamboyant bona fide homosexuality he had discovered upon arrival in England as a horny young stowaway in the back of a lorry, needed somebody to fuel his lifestyle, his poppers collection and his ego.

Still, Jaya not only listened to Shagufta, she heard her. The often wavering vocal chords, choked by fat and too many Silk Cuts, continued their flurry of Shehrazadian glory. They would charm the airs with anecdotes about obsessive suitors, the effluvia of retreating femininity seeping out of her as she took on the appearance more and more of being a man trying to dress like a woman. Her moribund career as a receptionist (although Accountant's Clerk was the term she used) was spoken about with such forged enthusiasm, as though the entire British economy would collapse if she didn't do the work she did.

And all the while, she would be drinking her glass of house rose, thinking the narrowed, intensely focused eyes of Jaya Chakarbatti were not because she was trying hard to decipher the meaning behind her words, but because –of course!- she was undressing her with her eyes, unspoken desire and admiration directed towards the superiority which, naturally, every straight girl had over every gay girl.

They were the ones who would have to deal with the complexities of being a minority within a minority.

They were the ones having to deal with choosing earthly indulgence in same-sex love, or Hell.

And they were the ones who had to deal with non-conformity.

She, born in to the fortunate echelons of The Masses, socially adherent and placid, wouldn't have to deal with the humiliation of not fitting in.

Jaya finished off the last of her gin and tonic, and said goodbye, pretending she never saw Shagufta manically shovel the last of the potato wedges in to her shriveled prune-mouth.

The house smelt of freshly fried samosas, pilao rice and bay leaf. Jaya quietly closed her front door behind her and took off her shoes in the hallway. There were three extra pairs of shoes neatly lined up underneath the radiator: a ragged pair of Bata sandles; a shiny pair of Italian loafers, and a pair of gold heeled sequined sandals. The low murmurs of men came from the lounge, and the soft laughter of women from the kitchen.

She heard the door from the lounge open and close, and Auntie Shamina emerged in the hallway, and looked her up and down.

'Take off your English clothes and go put on a nice salwaar kameez; make sure it has plenty of decoration and embroidery.' Her three chins wobbled as she spoke, her eyes magnified manically under the thick-rimmed NHS glasses, 'he is here with his family.' A wave of her musty floral perfume assaulted Jaya's nostrils. 'For the sake of Allah, go and comb your hair. Take off this devil-child eye make up, and go and put on some red lipstick.'

'What is this, a military occupation?' Jaya teased, and dodged the silver handbag that swung towards her.

'Be quiet! You don't want them to hear you. Make sure you speak quietly and keep your eyes to the ground when you emerge with the tea tray. Make sure your scarf is half-on half-off, and keep your lips together. And for the love of Muhammad, peace upon his beleagred soul, don't sit with crossed legs!' She looked with wide, warning eyes at Jaya, her nostrils flaring, her skin stretched tight over her plump face, thick eyebrows stiff with disapproval.

'Stop it, I need to get in to the romantic mindset...'

'Insolent girl!' Auntie Shamina pinched her lightly, then ran her hands over Jaya's hair and pulled her to her chest. The stiff sari material was a comfort. 'We have our only chance with you. Your sister isn't yet married; these people are good for accepting that the little one can get married before the eldest. We should accept that graciously; now go. Go put on something nice for your auntie, and help me put the Custard Creams in a nice pattern on the plate. And for the sake of Hazrat Ali and his gentle daughters, go and hide that Sitar on your bed, they'll think we're in to all of this Hindu-pindu nonsense,'

Jaya padded quietly up the stairs and in to her room, now smelling of mothballs and flowers.

She left The Sitar where it was; this family wouldn't make it upstairs to see the bedrooms, she could tell by the pattern of her auntie's sari; it wasn't elaborate enough, not the type she'd wear for a real High Class Suitor.

Jaya Chakarbatti opened up her wardrobe; on the left were her English clothes, a darkly coloured half of a few greys, varying shades of black, the odd bit of denim....

But on the right, a veritable dissonance of eye-wateringly bright colours; blue, orange, green, shocking pink, gold and sequin and diamonte and net and cotton and silk, spilling out like a waterfall of closet dysentery, bursting in to a glorious mess of footumshootum, each piece crying for attention as it positively popped out of the neatly lined-up arrangement. The trouser suits with their impossibly wide legs, the sari's with their painfully wise patterns containing years of heritage and stirring up a different emotion with every piece of 6 foot long magnificent material that was almost eloquent in its expression, the lehengas with their blouser tops and filmi-style wide skirts, an entity unto themselves, weighing almost twice that of their wearers, steel hooks and metal buttons and safety pins everywhere...

And then, squeezed to the back, the modernshoddern ones... quietly pushed behind the boisterous maal, were the subtly patterned, a-line skirts, figure huggers, with plunging necklines and swirls of colours that melted in to one another, evoking secret unisons and behind-the-back enmeshments... the ankle-loving skinny trousers, the seductive textiles of the virile, silks and schiffons, marble-satins and soft-whispers, almost-transparent dupattas that would be draped over chests but revealing more to the imagination than should have been allowed...

Jaya picked out one of the boisterous trouser suits, with a pattern of silver and blue clumsily arranged plastic bits on black and red net. It looked like an organised spat of vomit, that fell neatly over her body, not hugging the prescribed places and loose enough at the chest to win the nod of approval from Auntie Shamina. She combed out the deliberately placed kinks in her hair, wiped off her eyeliner and in its place drew on some kohl from the brass vial her father had purchased from Bangladesh, wincing as its roughly assembled metal wand scratched across her eye lids. Her hair was smoothed down, the rest of her face was void of make-up, and she secured the red polka-dotted scarf on her head (half-on half-off) with a discreet hair pin.

There. Simple Girl. No offensive signifiers of individuality or off-the-beaten-trackness.

She could hear the murmurs of conversation dying out downstairs. The tension seeped in to her muscles as she wondered what this boy would be like. More importantly, she wondered how Auntie Shamina and Amma and Abba would be like around him. Would Abba be overly modern, or overly religious? Would Amma be wearing her burkha, or wearing a sari? Would she be talking about family, or the values of education? Or, if she was really comfortable, talk about cooking and swapping secret recipes for bhuna and curry bases?...

Jaya accepted that the Suitor Visits were a spectator sport for the family. She embraced meeting with every one of the (42) boys she was presented with over the last year. In her heavy blooded intersectional wisdom, she also knew it was a cruel carrot-and-stick policy to see boys like this, fending off the Question of Marriage and appeasing The Family with her acceptance of this part of the process. Although, she didn't seem to understand why other girls didn't see this. Why oh why, she would bewail, did they not perceive that it was actually funny to see the slickly side-parted hair of the ostentatiously named boy from The Respectable Township? Why did they not appreciate the tales of ownership of four rice mills and steel factories in Sylhet? Why did they not see the forced confidence of The Mother, agreeing vehemently to Mr Chakarbatti's insistence that the true decision was down to the Youngsters? And why did they not see that the boys were enthralled at the idea of being entertained by a British Asian girl who wouldn't look twice at them in a normal social context? Did they not embrace the discreet looks between The Mother and The Father; or the nervous twitch as The Brother attempted to hide texts from his girlfriend?

Jaya's own phone vibrated; it was a message from Eleven O Clock from last night.

'Hey sister-ji. Great fuck last night. Potato chaat same time tomorrow? Kiss kiss.'

Jaya grinned, and slid the phone under the Sitar.

'Your father is greatly educated, no?'

'By the grace of Allah, he has worked hard.'

'And your sister?'

'We're proud of her, she takes pleasure in helping others.'

Jaya bit hard on her tongue to stop herself from scoffing at her own self-righteous, sterile responses.

The Mother nodded, thoughtfully.

Jaya absentmindedly slid one thigh on top of other. Auntie Shamima fiercely but silently signalled her to put it down (which she did, biting harder).

Nobody, but nobody, could fill the dense silence which filled the room. The clinking of tea cups prevailed.

Her eyes were downcast, she didn't dare make eye contact with the boy, who sat nervously next to his mother, hiding behind her meek frame. The elders talked about shared relatives, and Jaya was (not played) the Dutiful Daughter. It wasn't unpleasant, per se, but she did hope they couldn't see the stubble rash around her mouth from last night.

Mr Chakarbatti ushered The Father back in to the front room, and Mrs Chakkarbati invited the women in to the garden to see her new collection of cabbages.

They were left alone in the living.

The Boy coughed.

A few minutes passed.

Jaya knew she could have made conversation, but wanted to make him squirm a little. She'd seen better. Boy 24, she remembered, had a raucous laugh and had the audacity to address her directly in front of the elders. Boy 36 was shy and beautiful, with green eyes and aeons of sadness nestled in his eyebrows. Boy 31, albeit clearly a homosexual, was chatty and didn't realise there was still cum on his tie. Boy 8, a muscly type who looked like he bathed in steroids, asked her what kind of cars she liked and approved of the fact that she'd never heard of a Mitsubishi Evolution like all other Birmingham Sluts, as he so articulately put it.

And Boy 14, Abdul Malika Mausoom Rahmat Choudhury -whose entire family referred to him by his full name- spoke about himself in the third person, in narrative allegories... 'he who would respect and humble himself for his wife'... 'his manners are very good'... 'he can understand the true meaning of marriage'...

And o! Boy 41, who had stumbled freshly off the plane from Bangladesh and was mesmerised by Jaya's unmarked skin and straight posture, and assumed that she must have been one of those mythical Foreign Birds they had only dreamed of in London College (very much in the heart of Sylhet)... and assumed therefore that she, undoubtedly, was one of 'those loose types you only get in Eng-laaaynd'... and so was shocked when he sent her a sex message later on that night which was forever destined to be unreplied.

She remembered Boy 17, who was mentally rejected by Mr Chakkarbatti as soon as he sat down, because he crossed his legs (insolence!) and spoke to him like they were old friends.

And of course, there was Boy 2, who was an egotistical maniac and positively shook with humiliation when he found out Jaya's big sister earned more than him, was more educated than him, and the rest of the evening was spent in a one-sided contest of one-upmanship, leaving everybody stunned with the sheer amount of superfluous cash figures splattered all about the living room.

And still, it seemed to Jaya now, that although the oddballs of society had had their platform to perform in the Chakkarbatti living room, this Boy, number 43, that most insignificant of numbers, inconsequential to anything meaningful, just missing out on The Meaning of Life, sucked in to the vacuum left in its aftermath; this odd number, seemed to unfortunately seep in to the gentleman sat before her, staring at his feet.

She attempted to ask a few questions since he looked as though he was about to burst in to a ball of sweat, but after his monosyllabic answers, she got bored of hearing even her own voice.

Later that night... 'Daughter, they have proposed to bring over the gold ring tomorrow.'

She looked at her dad, and in a rare moment of unity, they both burst out laughing (a stunted, quick-to-finish laugh whipped in to submission over lifetimes of quiet poetic solitude started by Mikhaeel Chakarbatti in the 1600's).

'Wife, tell the middleman that we have found a relative mutual to both sides, who is too closely related for the marriage to be Decent.'

Mrs Chakarbatti nodded and pulled out the small phonebook from the waist of her sari. She was glad.

The Mother stated she put coconut milk in her curries. That was far too outlandish for her liking.

Jaya survived, as she suspected everyone did, on melancholy. Partially because she had lost the ability to believe in the Impossible, which was quite the opposite in her youth, but since she had obtained her hoosh, the burning ambition had simmered in to a dense ocean of Adult Rationale, and an almost insurmountable sense of Counting Down the Days prevailed as soon as she hit her twenty-first birthday (only she and her immediate family knew her birth date; she would eye-growl if anybody else dared ask her for it). The thing was, Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty couldn't remember the last time she had burst the Keatsian grape against the roof of her mouth. Slowly but surely, she had stopped the suspension of belief; belief had come crashing down around her ears.

After she had momentarily stared at it, open mouthed, she lit a cigarette and attempted to forget about it (it, as metaphorical demons habitually did, would often return to taunt her). The abyss which she could once fill -with the imagination of someone who was an intersection- was interrupted, had its Infinity cut off and the end was twisted shut. It soon started filling up.

The eyebrows of her mind would furrow; where to keep the new thoughts?

...And in time, she stopped looking to fill the void. In moments, an Impossible would cheekily come out from the crevices of creation in her mind (from behind a Bangladesh palm tree, a slum, a family eating on the floor, a beautiful girl, the jawline of Gavin from her English seminars, the chocolate-smooth sexyandwise accent of her sari'd Calcuttan lecturer), but in a perilous move of self-denial, Rationale would shoot out til it scurried back From Whence It Came.

It was consequential, then, that death wasn't a taboo for her. She often sat in her room and ran her fingers over the strings of her sitar, and thought about her afterlife. Jaya Chakarbatti did not want to go to hell. Not because of the images her mother would paint –of eternal damnation and hooks through cheeks and being skinned alive, of being force-fed bacon rashers bathing in alcohol, of drinking cups of blood and puss, or having the first layer of skin burnt off, only for it to grow again and have it burnt again and again and again... No, Jaya was not afraid of that. Jaya, her blood thick with the lineage of the Great and Wise, was afraid of feeling helpless. It was, she had realized after growing out of the times of no-hoosh, the biggest tragedy of them all. Of course, loneliness, she thought she could entertain. There was too much beauty on earth that would make her heart ache, and that was enough to fill a thousand lifetimes of loneliness. But helplessness...

A tremor went through her body. She had heard once that when a person shivered, it was their soul being scared at the passing of the Angel of Death. Her eyelids slowly dropped and Jaya hung her head; if it was indeed the Angel of Death simply passing by because it was not her Time yet, she did, in her darkest moments, wish he'd stop by for longer. She wished, shamefully and helplessly, to the dismay of her Don Giovanni, he would redeem her of the burden of her life, which she could not do herself because, alas, the right had been taken away from her by Allah. Anybody committing suicide would go to Hell. And where was the romance in that?

No, it would not have done. Besides, the difficult business of writing a suicide note, she assumed, would jar far too much with her emotional constipation. Fearful of the demons she could sense creeping closer around her, Jaya stood up and turned to stare in to the corner of her room. At the furthermost corner stood her Quran. It Bore Witness that she, Jaya Chakarbatti, was sticking by her flight path. There would be no diversions, no out-of-ordinary communication. If it recorded the messages of her heart, it would see, she thought defiantly, see see SEE that Jaya Lubaba Chakarbatti standing in her jeans and with her heavied historical blood running through her veins, that she, of wars and estates and moving rocks and saris and turmeric, was, to all intents and purposes, the leader of her own life, the Unmoving pilot of her plane -perhaps with a few dodgy bits of cargo and some unruly passengers-, the Defier of the Inner Self and the Evil Whisperings of Man; the pusher-downer of the ultimate sin, Getting Carried Away.

Her blood ran warm through her veins as she stared unblinkingly at the Quran. This was, Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty realized, a mental outburst designed to snap all those little daily Sins in to place. She felt satisfaction at them withdrawing, reluctantly but surely, to the small corners of her mind, whimpering.

She sat by the sitar and closed her eyes to make sure they were put in check.

She didn't notice her own fist clutching the bedsheet til her knuckles were almost bursting out of her skin.

# Chapter 5

Kulsuma had managed to corner herself in to a situation at work where the ignorant likes of Laura were asking about her culture. In the way many Unlearned Types –as her father called them- often did, her questions were direct and purposeful and left no room for explanation.

'What, so women have to cover their faces and men don't?'

Kulsuma fidgeted with a roll of cotton, pulling it off the shelf and placing it on another.

'Pretty much,' she said meekly.

Laura wiped off the smear of cheese from her bottom lip and placed her ham sandwich back in to its Tupperware. 'I'm not being racist or anyfin, but isn't that a bit out of order? Like, who's to say a woman won't find a man attractive with his face on display an' everyfink?'

'I think it's because women have more self control.'

Laura thought for a few seconds.

'Yea man, I hear that. Don't even aaks me about what Spliffy done to me last night.'

'What did he do?'

Laura leaned forward, her bra-less chest spilling over the buttons on the till, her almost translucent skin suddenly aflush with pink. She waggled the well-fingered ham sandwich about her as she spoke.

'He tried puttin' it in my ear, man,'

Kulsuma stopped what she was doing, confused. 'What? But it wouldn't fit, right?'

'Bloody hell, he tried.'

Kulsuma looked at Laura's ears, thrust outward from the force with which she tied back her hair.

'What happened?'

'What d'you mean?', as though she expected this to be an everyday occurrence which elicited no explanation.

'How did it end?'

'Well, he jizzed in my ear, didn't he.'

'Won't that mess up your hearing?'

'O god yea, didn't fink about that.' She stopped for a second. 'Nah, allow, it'll be fine. Took me ages to clean out the cock cheese though. Dirty bastard needs to clean more often. O, maybe I should tell him to go to one of your lot. You'd chop it off, wouldn't ya?'

'Yea. Quick snip, all done.'

'Makes it smaller though, yea?'

'Nah, just makes it look smaller. I heard its more hygienic too.'

Kulsma mentally kicked herself as she realised just what a string of questions she'd subjected herself to.

'You ever seen one then? Or you waiting to get married an' that?'

'Well...'

Laura looked at her expectedly. How to explain to a ham sandwich wielding council estate girl with one GNVQ the complicated existential philosophies of being both the victim and the judge of your sexual perpetrations? As Laura squeezed out a pore from her cheek, and examined it before wiping it on her tracksuit bottoms, Kulsuma wondered if the fervent castings of her cranium could ever be expounded to somebody who had the luxury of asking such direct questions with the innocence of a child. The years of prime-time cultural sketch shows and Oscar winning films depicting palatable bedraggled Indian kids that didn't threaten any feelings of colonial superiority had paved a false pathway to her culture. She knew it would probably upset Laura to know that Kulsuma wasn't actually a Punjabi, with loud and colourful aunties and Bacardi-laden conversations deep in to the night. But nor was she the type to be sipping teas on verandas with crickets chirping and soliloquising about globalisation and eastmeetswest atop wicker chairs (although the latter type hadn't quite found its way in to the mainstream so Laura was possibly less corrupted with both polarised stereotypes, and therefore under less of an illusion about a limited faux variety of her community).

As though her inner monologue was making Laura impatient, a bombardment of questions ensued.

'Do Asians eat curry for, like, every meal? Why do your families have rhyming names? Is it true that you have an actress called Poo-Jar Butt? Is it true your men can have four wives? And oh, my, god,' she stood upright and shook her hands as though she was drying her nail varnish, 'is it true one of your gods has eight arms?'

Although Kulsuma was actually impressed by Laura's apt social observations, words were forming and unforming themselves in the back of her throat, failing to come out, tumbling around in a vortex in her brain saying 'go go go, this is it, this is your chance, this is all it would take, just quip one sentence to reiterate to Jaya and she'll be yours, all yours!'

The many faces heritages partitions branchesandroots should, under all circumstances, have prepared her for this somewhat menial conversation. But Laura's barrage of questions and their sheer sharp-tipped inquisitiveness left Kulsuma's brain gasping for breath. She didn't want to trivialise the issues; Mr Begum would have disapproved, Jaya would find it laughable, and her Lassi Lesbians would expect some Brummie gusto to projectile itself from her smokey mouth. But it remained in a state of half-open contemplation. She could see Laura wanted something juicy, and she wished she had something interesting to tell her about; something about loud music and hairy chested brother in laws, about the many stories of different gods, about Shiva and Hanuman and mysterious plants and evil rulers and holy men and bags of oil, about karma and yoga and hot bikram yoga, something that was exposed and overexposed to the Englishes, some over-psyched hyper-orthodox ethnic habit that had become so farcical and caricatured that it had won their hearts.

But no: all she could think of was the quiet and simple sunni Muslim culture of moderation. The monotheistic, panacean homograph of the Islam which most Englishes, it seemed, had come to mean something stone-cold and alien (even though Patel's halal meat was already in their pies by the 60's).

She couldn't tell them of randy cousins trying it on at weddings (men and women sat separately), nor of half-dressed first cousins (modesty was the core staple of all dressage), nor of raucous drunken behaviour (alcohol was seen as an evil disease), and certainly not of loud music and colourful ceremonies (the quiet and contemplative nature meant prayer was always what people turned to in extremities); she couldn't even talk about honour killings (usually the preserve of the lower classes, dad would say; and for the rest, murder and disownment were Forbidden). And even the infamous obsession with 'shame on the family name' was struck in to insignificance with the rising Asian middle class sense of pioneering relations (and on a different note, bringing a non-Asian in to the family meant another conversion and more trees in heaven). At the very least, Kulsuma though, there was always Terrorism to bank on; something Tom Dick and Hari was an expert on, that was something they could universally discuss... but even that was a no-go, since the general consensus was that they were a bunch of hormonal misguided miscreants... and the views that they were the forerunners of the fight against Western imperialism was a boundary that Kulsuma let Jaya fight, while they sat on her car bonnet sipping mango lassi looking up at the dull stars...

No, while Laura's taste buds were intolerant of any form of spice besides chipshopcurrysauce, her appetite for bold flamboyant titbits of media-perpetuated caricatured cultural phoenixes was big. The inaudible mendacity of The Average would throw her in to confusion; wouldn't give her the comfortable distancing characteristics of The Other. The mystery would be gone. Laura, Allah forbid, might realise that the two girls were actually more alike than she wanted to admit.

Or perhaps, Kulsuma thought, her dad the armchair philosopher, was being too tough on the Lauras of Britain. On their walks through the paved over parks with swings wound tight around the top of the metal frame, while Kulsuma would marvel at the graffiti and dodge huge blobs of phlegm on the rubber turf and shield her nose from the piss-soaked bark under the peeling splintered see-saw, her dad would talk for hours about how the Englishes had an agenda. He'd rub the skin on his hand and look at her wryly.

'Look at the colour of your skin. You will always be the black man.' (She was seven years old, so this came as a shock to her at the time.)

As the lenses of her colour-blind youth eventually wore thin, she began -reluctantly- to understand her dad's extroverted lassitude; he had resigned to sighs of dejection and tortured statements of rejections; always, always tinted with pain and helplessness. For a man whose oral expressions were all he had, left with the crappy end of the linguistic stick and consigned to master a dialect which had no written form, his Sylheti profundities aimed at the Englishes were what he clung to. He would often watch Kulsuma write (he had no time to learn the tongues of Elizabeth amidst making a new life and holding the reins of his motherland tightly); effortlessly construct squiggles translated from sounds and pictures from her brain. He marvelled quietly, before returning to the business of crossing metaphorical seas and negotiating prayer time and funds for the heritage he could see slipping away from under his feet (one of which was still firmly ground in to the streams of District 24, Sylhet, Bangladesh).

'Do you know about Hitler?' He had asked her on one of their walks to the Cash & Carry. Kulsuma nodded.

'I tell you. These Englishes, they call him evil. I call him fagol. But you know,' he ran a hand absentmindedly down the front of his dark green wool vest and pulled down his tunic, as though smarting up for a lecture, 'he helped the Indians achieve their independence.'

'If you speak any louder you'll get us jumped, Abba.' He looked at her, confused. 'People will kill us.'

'O, yes yes. Well,' he continued to chew on his miswak, 'when Hitler was fighting with the Englishes, they did not have enough manpower to fight him back. So they called back many of their men from the colonies. You know what this means?' Kulsuma shook her head and lowered her gaze as a group of softly spoken men floated by with Qurans in their hands, knocking on people's doors. 'This meaning, their presence in India was downing.' He rolled his head from side to side as though he had masterminded this occurrence, 'And then! Their grip on the colonies weakened. And eventually of course they had to do the releasing of India to our people.' He scoffed. 'Independence had nothing to do with India rising up in a 'brave' struggle.'

Kulsuma didn't think it was fruitful to address the potential paucity of his words at the time (there was a group of young bridesmaids with capacious bosoms and glowing cheeks marvelling over an Asian glossy in Nirpal's Newsagents); but now, as Laura began fiddling with the sequins lying near the til, Kulsuma wished she had. She wished she had understood everything her father had told her; gleaned every morsel of knowledge he expounded on a daily basis, every tainted, racist, forlorn and pitiful comment he made, so that she could weave it in to the fabric of her being and obtain her hoosh -which he so lamented the lack of- in order to Fully Understand and construct some palliative answers to this girl stood in front of her, pink from eating nothing but pork every day of her life, who'd never watched the sun set anywhere beyond Lewisham Underground Station.

Kulsuma Begum, born in 1989 on a dull day in Hope Hospital, Birmingham, in to the clinical surroundings of Ward 43 and taken home to a family who believed men should eat copiously and women should have a different gold set for every occasion in life, felt like an insignificant blip at this moment in her life. Here she was, face to face with an English, the epitome of everything she was taught to believe was wrong with Britain, who probably didn't change her knickers on a regular basis, who Had No Heritage, who bought things from Argos on finance, whose most prized qualification was an ASBO... Here she was, Kulsuma, who had quite frankly been taught she was better than that any White Type, struggling to find even one answer to her questions.

All recapitulations fled from her brain, as Laura continued to watch her, waiting, her deadpan face losing its flush and her cheeks waxing and waning with each chew of her gum.

'Well,' she started, and quickly picked up a roll of 100% Batik Cotton with fish prints on it, when the owner of the shop waddled in. Beads of sweat clung to the hairs on her upper lip and her grey hair was oiled down over her scalp. Her metallic blue polyester salwar kameez was bobbling at the crotch (but she didn't care; her Time was almost up; she was 54) and she clutched her cholesterol monitor in her podgy hand.

'O kully,' she said lazily, rolls of fat around her neck stifling her vocal chords, 'read my sugar levels.'

As Kulsuma watched the small blob of blood form on the tip of Mrs Paisa's finger, she was overcome with an overwhelming sense of assiduity; the need to continue, hurtle forwards in to an oblivion of godknowswhat, the relentless pursuit of Perfection that seemed, right now, to come out of nowhere. She knew that from now on, no matter what, she would make her life flow. No more jarring encounters with people's questions, no more sense of bewilderment; no more crises of thought.

Kulsuma Begum was going to move out of the bright lights of her own interrogation room and in to the forestry undergrowth of Life. O yes! She could already feel the music; she had to take life by the proverbials and show Laura and Jaya and the Lassi Lesbians that she, she from the confusing household of unkempt rooms and cluttered bric-a-brac could answer all of life's questions no matter how fast they came. She wouldn't be put in to a coma by off-guardianship of her perimeters. She would round up her Lassi Lesbians and become Queen of the Scene!

(She knew the time approached fast when she would eventually have to bow to the invasion of cock in to those perimeters, but by all that was mischievous in this world, she was going to enjoy every fucking second of whatever came before it.)

In the same way that Asif wanted to wash off the halcyon of indifference The West had spritzed themselves with, his mother, living in the penumbra of his Islamic reverence, endeavoured to scrub off the blobs of damp growing in the cracks of her house. The council had refused to do anything about it for weeks, and now, as she hitched up her sari, got down on her hands and knees and wiped the floor with a j-cloth and some water (mops, she found, were bizarre things), she wondered if the blobs were ever going to go.

She'd seen the great Damp Disease spread like a plague on the walls of Bangladesh houses, but there it was ok; just like it was normal to have geckos residing around the tube light.

Here, she'd heard it devalued homes and, like an oversalted korma, was forever destined to the resigned wastage that outwardly looks fine but will forever be unusable.

It did bother her that the glut of disease from the outside was seeping it's way through her (apparently impenetrable) walls, and although she had watched it grow bigger and more obvious, she was helpless to do anything about it. She could not find her way through books or speak English well enough to really explain to the authorities how bad it was and unless they uprooted and moved elsewhere, there was no way she could do anything about the walls that seemed to her, particularly at night, to be caving in.

The bits in between that were supposed to hold the household together then, had turned on her.

But she knew she could still take care of the foundation; so she scrubbed the floor religiously and with pride, until the j-cloth was tattered and her hands were raw. Yes, she knew, the foundation was what she could help. Lay it down, and polish it; make sure its there because even if everything else caved in, the foundation was still there to re-build.

Upstairs, Asif was reciting. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. The Nine Inch Nails CD lay decrepit in the CD case he had made in GCSE Woodwork lessons, and the well thumbed Kerrang magazines were piled and propped underneath the leg of his chest of drawers. He sat, cross legged and in contemplation, at the top of his bunk bed, his Quran closed, as he held it hovering above his lap, wondering if he should finalise the details of his plan before his 3 hour long recital before evening prayer.

He laughed at himself.

'The Devil will disguise himself as good deeds,' he said out loud. While Asif did consider the idea that talking out loud to oneself may have been a sign of madness, he quickly checked himself, remembering the Prophet ('What a dude', he would often think) had once said 'Practice your religion until others think you are mad.'

There was no doubt that homosexuality was haraamforbidden, as Amma would say. It was so haraamforbidden that in hell, red hot pokers would be shoved up the arses of batty boys. It was, of course, something the Westerners did to distract themselves, something the government had spread the idea of to decrease the population. It was the New World Order paving the way for Dajjaal, the one eyed heretic, who would rise and confuse the Believers and non-Believers alike. Those Kuffaar, Asif would pray, his inner monologue stunted with pity and hatred and anger and apology and confusion, Uff! The Kuffaar! The Heathens!

And when Isa, Jesus, whatever they called him, would rise again, they'd know. They'd thank Asif and his Brothers for warning them. They would look to the perished nations, the people of Sodom who were frozen in unspeakable positions, forever to feel the pain in their souls like the preserved body of Pharoah...

It was too much for Asif sometimes. He laughed at The West; their whimsical transient ideas that had no beginning or end.

He could See. Asif could see that the powers of The West were gaining momentum and one by one, their Freemasonic powers would take their elitist ideology to a new level and bring the world to its knees. It was already happening; there was no cash anymore, all of it was electronic, kept as meaningless digits on screens Somewhere. It was, of course, so that nobody had any cash anymore, no powers to trade, so that one day, all of their money could be seized and the people would be powerless...

Or at least that was what Junaid at Primrose Hill Mosque was saying. Although the technicalities didn't really make sense to Asif, something did. It was the anger he carried around inside him. It happened one day (his memory failed him much nowadays; it may have been on his way to buy computer cables from PC World), out of the blue; it dawned on him that every menial quotidian thing in his life was politicised beyond sense.

He went to school and was laughed at when he talked about God, because it was the State which determined how religion was taught. In meaningless, bitesize shit-all morsels that were made in to hoops to jump through in a three hour exam. What kind of a bullshit joke was an exam on Islam when the likes of Asif –who read Quran and studied Shari'ah law as a past time for four hours a day- only managed to scrape a pass mark?

And why, when he had shaken his head in the dinner queue to reject the haraamforbidden beef burger, had the dinner lady given him disapproving tuts?

Not to forget the look of hysteria that sweeped across the classroom when he declared his self-imposed disqualification from performing in a talent show to raise money for British troops coming home from the War in Iraq.

Like blind sheep, they followed the Rules of Conformity. The girls who wore miniskirts thought they were 'free' but really they were like ugly bulls in china shops who trampled all over the concept of Modesty. If they wanted to be free, why didn't they just walk around in trackies all day? If they wanted to be free, why did they take away the civil liberties of those in Afghanistan? Why did they mock the concept of the burkha and tear it up and pin pieces to their lapels like trophies? Why did they bind themselves to haraamforbidden loans with sky-high interest repayments of 12.5% APR?

Asif closed his eyes and saw the plans imprinted inside his eyelids. He was careful not to write anything down. His Brothers, he, and Allah. A calm peace descended on him, and he opened his Quran and recited and prayed until the birds started twittering at dawn.

The next few days flew by and he felt invincibility lay like dew over his every action. They visited the Bargain Corner and Cheema's Pharmacy, Sandhu's Auto Parts and Select 'n' Save; all for some cut price Salvation. And they drank masala chai, slurping and sipping deep in to the night, as Amma scrubbed away at the floor and pretended she saw nothing from the corner of her eye, while Abba drove his taxi and got the Immodest West on its drunken way.

'Brother Asif,' said Junaid one night, adjusting his testicles under the full length kurta he wore, 'we'll feel minimal pain right? Like, I don't want to hurt or nothing'.

'I'm sure it'll be over pretty quick. But just think man, think about what we're gonna get after all this,'

The boys looked at each other and grinned. They'd gone over this bit; more than anything else. They'd thought about the fast cars and the Ferraris and the wide open roads; they'd thought about the copious amounts of video games and unending abilities to run and run for miles upon miles, the expanses of green fields, the rivers of gold, the skunk and endless death metal concerts, the infinite supply of whey protein and batteries.

'Yea man. What's the point of hangin' round if we can go up there?' Junaid looked at the sky. 'Wonder why everyone doesn't do it.'

'Cuz they're all fools. They're too busy racing their egos and listening to black people rap about tits and ass. If they listened to some Lowkey man, some Flying Lotus, heard our Palestinian brothers and stopped falling in to the Zionist trap, man they'd be where we are,'

'Blowin' themselves up?'

'Nah man,' Asif tapped his temple, 'in here, bruv. They'd be on our level and wouldn't go around doin' no batty business.'

'But man, I was thinking: who declared this jihad?'

'The West.'

'When man?'

'It's been going on for years, we just had our eyes closed. When they snuck pig's blood in to our Pepsi and opened up Marks & Spencers to fund the Israeli war. When they started instigating the Signs of The Day of Judgment. Y'know man, they turn everything inside out and upside down. Live their lives, like, diametrically opposite to the way of Islam.'

'What ya mean man?'

Asif thought for a while. 'Y'know how Muslim men are supposed to wear their trousers just above their ankles yea? Well look how these men wear long trousers that drape over the top of their shoes. And you know how our guys are told to keep a beard, at least a fistful on their chins? Well look how The West promote this weird unnatural, feminine clean-shaven look. And man,' he tutted, 'you know how we're told to look after our elders yea? Look at them lot, dumping them in old people's homes,' he spat the words, 'gettin' raped by carers and pissing themselves.' He shook his head. 'All the wrong way round man.'

'Yea man. I don't think its no coincidence that the day the British soldiers got their first so called victory in Afghaanistan,' (the word came from his throat, over emphasised like an zealous student) 'and the men started shavin' off their beards and that,' he gave Asif a knowing look, 'It ain't no coincidence that God gave 'em an earthquake right after,'

'Praise be to Allah, man, right there, ya hear me man?' Asif shook his head in awe. 'They got it all wrong man. Democracy, yea right. They say they're in there to promote fucking democracy when their own government are corrupt, with immorality and pissing taxpayers money up the wall on porn an' that. They're in there to steal oil man. They can't bear to see an Arab have more money than them. They're sucking Saudi's dick right now man, ya geh me?'

Junaid laughed. 'Yea man, batty bwoi's,'

'We're gona fucking show them man. Them and their pork. You seen them? So pink from all that pig,'

'Man, that's just racist.'

'Yea man, that is. Although, I've been called a burnt chapatti before,'

'Mate, I've been called everythin' under the son. Paki, sister-fucker, shopkeeper...'

'We just gotta do sabr man. Have patience. We'll wipe this disease, send a message to the Zionists and let The West know what's goin' down, man. Proper.'

'Yea man.'

And it seemed that Little Asif from No. 13 and his motley Brotherhood and assortment of household cleaning acids etc etc, was sent hurling forwards to a kingdom which they could only conceive in their heads. And for all the strong foundations and theories of rebuilding, Amma could not ignore that the walls which seemed to cave in and crumble around her would probably crack the foundation upon their demise.

The weeks followed in the reliable chronological order that only they can manage to do; monotonously, self-importantly and with utter disregard for anything or anyone. It was this abstract theory that guided the sheer bloody-minded (albeit sketchy) plans of the Brotherhood to impose an attack with the aim of Punishment and Redemption and Wisdom and Guidance and the excellence of their monotheistic deity, on a community of homosexuals in Central London.

'I can't help but feel this is all a bit, y'know, predictable,' said Brother Munir one day after congregational Friday prayer. They weaved their way out of the crowd of men with wrinkled faces, smelling of itr, talking in hushed tones to one another about how good the Imam was.

'There's no other way though,' replied Junaid, 'This is the only way to get through the veil on their heads, and in front of their eyes, and in their-'

'This is the cheapest and quickest way to do it,'

'But Brother Asif, can we just stop and think for one second: what if we blow up someone innocent, someone who's not batty? Even someone who's a practising Muselmaan?'

Asif sighed. 'Munir, I understand your point. But as in every battle, there will be collateral damage.'

'But what if that Muslim is destined to do good?'

'No god-fearing Muslim would be in that cesspit of a place.'

'We're going though.'

'Only Allah can know. We can do only what we know. The rest is up to Him.'

They arrived at Asif's house, smelling of freshly cooked curry. Abba was helping Amma peel some ginger. They stood next to each other, Abba's itr filling the kitchen with its scent, mixing with the curry to create an acrid but comfortably familiar Friday feeling for Asif. He smiled. He would miss them. He missed them even now. He had always missed them, since they day he had opened his eyes as a baby, since he could sense who they were. There was fear and too much Distance, an unshakeable unfamiliarity with his parents that nobody could vocalise.

'Amma, is there any ice-cream?'

Amma pointed in the direction of the garage, where the industrial sized freezer held half-year supplies of frozen raw chicken, blocks of whole fish and pre-cooked curry bases, frozen samosas and kebabs. To his dismay, he discovered that the various ice-cream tubs contained nothing but spinach curries or potato bhaji, so the boys went up to Asif's room and continued to plot.

'It's gotta be simple but effective, and BBC News has got to dedicate more time to it than to dead troops in Afghanistan,' Asif said, his voice calm, contemplative and lazy.

'And someone else apart from us lot has to die.'

'And how about I hold pages of the Quran and they're scattered everywhere when we go?'

'No. The pages will fall on the floor, that's just disrespectful man.'

'How about pages from the Ahadith telling them how wrong it is?'

'They won't listen to that stuff.'

'Punishments of hell?'

'They probably don't believe in the afterlife.'

Junaid's predilection for panache was grating on Asif.

'Brother, we don't need any extra frills. Our action of sacrifice alone will suffice.'

'But shouldn't we be teaching them a lesson? Isn't this to stop them from being batty?'

'No. The larger message is to The West.'

'O right, yea man. I get it.' Junaid picked his nose, rolled the resulting extraction between his thumb and forefinger and absentmindedly threw it somewhere on the floor. 'Man, I got the munchies.'

'You need to stop doing ganga man. You need to be clear headed as we do this thing.

'Yea, yea man. I know. I will be.'

'You'll get a neverending supply Up There once we're done man.'

Junaid nodded. 'I hear that man.'

The paradigm of bombing gays had a temerity to it that made Asif bubble with excitement. All the while, as the Brotherhood sat about his bedroom, he fantasised about blowing the Unnaturals in to oblivion.

Junaid's asinine recommendations ceased to annoy him once they were in full swing: they would get the 20.52 train to London tomorrow, they would carry the home-made explosives in their rucksacks, dressed in jeans and t-shirts to blend in; it would be evening and they'd have the darkness on their side; this wasn't a schoolboy fantasy anymore, where they would make all the tools and lose interest by dinnertime. They had nothing but anger to guide them and that was the most powerful fuel they had (also, it was misleading and clouded judgement, thought Asif, but that added to the adrenaline rush).

They'd seen it on the news several times before, and they'd YouTube'd the shit out of How To Execute A Military Plan. They'd been to underground talks about Freedom To Palestine! And The Evils of The West and they'd watched the Disney Channel enough times to see the young Zionists be pushed up through the ranks regardless of talent. They'd spend –what? Hours? Days?- reaching a state of mind, Back In The Day, of total peace, high on all sorts of mind-altering herbs, feeling a little peace of heaven. But those day of Ignorance gave birth to a bitter resolve by the Brotherhood. They saw all the Tory-voting anti-Islamist paraphernalia being spewed through their letterboxes and churned out by the media, aimed at hoodwinking the public.

'They're everywhere!' Asif suddenly said, and the boys jumped. 'They're bloody everywhere! Everything you do, everything you watch. Even The Simpsons has freemasonic subliminal messages in it. All the people in the top ranking jobs and media –all Jews, man!'

'Shakespeare got it right.' Munir said quietly. The Brotherhood looked at him, confused. 'The Merchant of Venice, mate. There was a money-grabbing, interest-charging, hook-nosed, flesh-eating Jew-boy in there.'

'Have you guys ever met a jew?'

'No, but I see them everywhere I bloody well look. They blend in so well. Do you know Jews are encouraged to be hypocrites if they feel that people might hate them for their religion?'

Junaid sat bolt upright. 'Yeeeea?!' He threw down his lollipop. 'That's it, man. That is IT. They gotta get the message; if they don't back down man, that's it....'

The Brotherhood sat and mapped out the events to every minute detail; tonight was going to be the last night in the life of three boys, who'd lived every day in this city and (o the shame!) its mascot of a naked lady on a horse. In keeping with the defiance of government-imposed authority, Asif, Junaid, Hanif and Munir from Coventry were going to take a stance against (what they thought was) The West.

Often, Jaya would feel she simply echoed the white noise of the modern world. The gloom of this thought hung over the ghettos of her mind like fog. Was she doing enough to subvert mainstream thinking? Did she really see through the bullshit? (In the eventuality that a point of view sat too comfortably with her,) Was she defiant enough? It was a fear that her opinions were not rooted correctly and originated only from touting her ethnicity and it was simply a case of East v West.

She wanted to be significantly more multi-faceted than that, a bit more omniscient. Maybe even a tad more holistic, she dared herself to think.

But often it was difficult to be all-encompassing when life was so bloody subjective. It was her aim to understand and explain without snobbery or malice every point of view that existed in the world (because to explain meant to explain away, surely) and therefore, by setting up and cutting down and undercutting every possible facet of every possible thing in the world, maybe she could come to terms with the idea of marrying a bloke. After all, it was the human bond that was important, and that was sexless... (?) And in any case, there were some relationship that started as great big exciting boulders but time would slowly chip away at them until they eroded in to resentment or, for those still bothered, divorce. While others started as small snowflakes and snowballed and grew bigger with time.

She was under no illusion that 'love' was violins and flowers, or its symbiotic partner: pleasurable self-imposed possesive, savage jealousy. Mr Chakkarbatti said to her (It Was Said That The Prophet Said, would begin his sentences, belieing the hundreds of years collecting these words of Prophetic wisdom): 'Love is like a seed. If you water it, it will grow. If you leave it, it will wither and die.'

The effervescent warnings contained in such a deceitfully simple sentence did, then, have the effect on Jaya much as cracking eggs would; fairly understandable in its attempt at demystefying a miracle of nature in to a pallatable portion of the matter.

She knew that by the loud fanfare showered with extra dosings of 'iloveyou' leaving quivering lips like verbal diarrhoea and copious amounts of honeymoonperiodsex, the Westerners didn't fool anyone but the party (or parties) involved.

She knew there were connections between people that were transcendental; and although questions could be posed about the plain of its existence, the long lasting lifelong partnerships of her parents and the Elders in general, although missing the more palpable 'signs' of 'love', were ironically the ones that matched the Utopia which the Englishes so fervently sang about. Perhaps her parents did have love; but when the love wasn't there, duty got them through; which she noticed was an idea the Englishes would scoff at. In their labored attempt to diminish the worth of domestic stability, Jaya thought perhaps Englishes misidentified infatuation, and lust, as love. It may all have been semantics (since in the absence of a conclusively significant body of unending relationships, the Englishes phrased, paraphrased, personified and poeticised with words their ideas of love), but Jaya contended that perhaps they had mistaken the many ephemeral relationships floating around in the Englishes lives, as love.

The question of marrying (a man) therefore was never really up for debate, in Jaya's mind. Her mother had alway said 'High thinking, clean living'. Teamed with dad's militarily precise planning and his ability to soldier on in the face of Things Going Wrong, the emotial constipation instilled in Jaya was a seared and quartered exterior that kept in all the juicy musings that proliferated in the inner sanctums of her (preposterously over-sexed) mind.

It struck at random times, these ethereal postulations; but she mocked them. She mocked them like insolent pretence-conscious public school educated middle-aged white men did, their appetite for deprication destroying anything in its path. She laughed inwardly whenever she went on a binge of self-important over-hypothesised Eastern philosophising, masturbating the illusion of grandeur that many heavy-blooded thick-haired South Asian international students gave themselves.

It wasn't that Jaya didn't see herself as astute; but she felt that transposition was more of a desirable quality than a complex surfeit of Thought. It was still important though; she was definitely more of an observer than a co-operator. To watch something and understand it, she was content. Unless it was sex or drugs, in which case she was willing to fully co-operate.

And there it was; the glut of Thought ramming itself in to her head as she got up from the toilet and almost kicked over the water jug on the floor.

Eleven o clock had been texting her for a few days and the bubbling cauldron of unspoken female desire between two unrestricted girls had begun to take place. It hung in the air that the two wanted to eat each others faces off, but they were Teasing; they were mutually addicted to the Forming Phase of a relationship and this one made a steady and heady direct line in their brains and groins. The unashamed use of double entendres ('curry' was cum, 'saag aloo' was pussy, and 'aata' was bum) made for raucous late night conversations that lasted hours. One conversation has lasted 7 hours; but it was normal; yes it was one of those unspoken intensities that lay below the skin of two women trapped in a minority within a minority.

Eleven was a Safe Place (she was occupied emotionally with her three children and thick husband) and allowed Jaya to pay obeisance to the transcendental no-strings-attached kind of love she had extracted and formed in her head (she often wondered if this was cop-out for the likes of casual polygamists but she knew that wasn't the case because the sheer amount of mental capacity needed to not get emotionally involved took this to another level). She was beautiful and a little bit stupid, and quite frankly didn't give a flying fuck about Jaya's white noise or the pretentious quips she would make and Jaya knew this and wanted to fuck her brains out (hypothetically speaking; it was the hunt they were both interested in). Both convincingly gave the illusion of being an open book.

So now, as Jaya fluffed up her hair and pulled on a pair of jeans and chunky bangles (with two chipped glass ones from Bangladesh) and wound a sitar string above around her wrist above her pink watch, smeared kohl roughly around her eyes and glossed her lips til they were almost dripping, she thought how appropriate it would be if Eleven turned out to be the last fling before her inevitable Marriage To A Bloke. On some preposterous level, Jaya knew that she needed to ask someone honest questions about married life; it wasn't that she needed answers, it was more the therapeutic mediation that questions brought to the territory of the mind.

Eleven clanged about in her head like a new pop song that sat uncomfortably on scratchy vinyl. She made her think in Hinglish. She made her feel like an uncomfortably sexual being.

On the train to Birmingham, temporarily leaving behind the terraced houses and sorry patches of green, approaching the glorious zinc-disced blob of a shopping mall nestled like a brooding pup on Birmingham's sky line, she could feel the tension building in her muscles. She felt the adequacy of somebody who was desired by someone else who was themselves highly desirable; not some opportunistic pervert. Somebody who didn't care to distinguish the charm of a girl from her bodily beauty, but who didn't devour the entire package as obliterate it altogether in to a steaming pulp of materialised guitar-riffing mad bad heap of groaning pleasure.

Eleven was stood nonchalantly leaning against the pole of a Tense-a-Barrier; a bemused smile sliced itself across her face and she lifted her head by the tiniest of angles and looked down her nose at Jaya as she approached, in this station of departure boards, yellow floors, blinking adverts; the landing pad of many a Coventrian runaway.

'Salaam Alaikum, whore.' Eleven smirked.

'Afternoon, adulterer,'

And feeling (proverbially) emasculated, Jaya sat in the passenger seat of Eleven's car feeling eyes burn in to her whenever they turned left.

Why gay bars played bass-heavy electronica at lunch time, Jaya could never quite figure out, but it became an appropriate soundtrack to their psychedelic evening where (despite fingering menus) neither ate anything all day and smoked until their voices became hoarse with carcinogens and lust. It was embarrassing because the transparency of their physical restriction was so palpably floating in the space between them; goodness, they were Mirroring.

Eleven's hair was glossy and made Jaya's fingertips itch. As though she had made a covenant with some follicular dark force, it fell at perfect angles, rough and choppy at times, oil-advert-perfect at others. It being an important icon of femininity, Jaya wanted to talk about it; the handling of it, the symbolism of it, how it was taken care of; but Eleven would shoot her down and laugh at her obsession with the tiny cracks of life. She, Eleven, strode atop the solid ground and used it as was proper: as a stepping stone to get her to the next big piece of land.

But they both clung to the forever-nascent promise of a happy ending; the strange whimpering of a flailing Closure that was stifled with the dreams of the road that led to it. The road was wide and just like any other, and they trod it with confident steps, convincing themselves it was innocuous (inwardly the irresolute whisperings were never given appropriate airtime). Simultaneously though, for Jaya at least, there was no romanticising of pain; she knew there were age old stories of Those That Could Never Be, the bonds that were never allowed to grow. Asides from the fact that being forced apart was actually quite a fun notion (better than the comfortable numbness of Happiness) and the passing joy of a fleeting relationship was actually thoroughly underrated, the fear of the unknown gripped her in a bitch-vice sometimes. She wondered what effect it would have on her psyche; for somebody who, for the majority of the time, thought in English –the language of the colonised, the language of frenetically enthused ephemeral lovers- was it possible that she would eventually give in to their tracing-paper ideologies? Would she become mixed up in the trivialising of the ephemera?

Because right now, as Jaya Chakarbatti watched the light from the window hit Eleven's face and she looked so picturesque and superior that Jaya never wanted her to know that she farted and masturbated to images of fat hairy Indian men sometimes, Jaya knew that however fleeting the physical plane of this relationship may have held, she didn't want to grow up, because the guileless adolescent indecisions made her think that things could never seem as beautiful as they did right now.

It didn't take either girl too long to figure out that making the first move would be a constipated decision; so today, while they were already on a roll, the day stretched out (according to the time-space compendium; in their minds it seemed to fly by as the Lovers Watch has a knack of doing). They were lying on the bonnet of Eleven's car; the night was balmy –strange for a city full of municipal mills and discarded warehouses- and the evening was dark and full of distant shouts and drunken yells. Eleven was indulging Jaya's musings. The kids were being fed by the live-in mistress, her mobile was turned off, and Home seemed a pleasurably non-existent place. She was with an exotic creature whom she could never have conceivably come across unless the Gods were on her side; the type she'd only heard about from the Distant Educated Relatives who had laminated floors and could afford to ignore practicalities in their households. Jaya had one knee up and the other leg muscles rippled gently under her jeans as she rocked her foot side to side. And for once, Eleven could put aside being a mother and school rota's, and talk about some numbness-inducing topic that put her completely out of her depth and in to the realms of Jaya's existence. They were talking about how slowly immigration was progressing:

'Well, we don't live in a utopian society of universal knowledge yet. It still stands that a brown person can talk about brown issues, and I'm brown so I'll be interested. In an ideal world, I suppose,' she stopped rocking her foot from side to side, 'a white could make a film or write a story about being a slave and I'd be convinced.'

'Well, what about Asians who talk about stuff other than spices and palm trees?...'

She thought for a moment. '....Are you convinced by them?'

'Not for shit, mate.'

'I am, sometimes. Very rarely.' She took a long drag of her cigarette. 'But we're still making our way out of the pile of labels they buried us under. And maybe,' her voice became soft, 'there's still a lot more work to be done, to address all of those labels and scoop the shit off our heads before we can get to ground level and breathe the same air as them.'

'How long will that take?' She rolled her head to look at Jaya, her hair falling about her shoulders, strands of softness falling on the cold glass of the windscreen. Her eyes were half open looking absentmindedly in to somewhere in the sky. She laughed quietly.

'I don't know, man. Not too long for the superficial stuff. Our kids will probably fill in all the subtle, hard-to-reach cracks of white knowledge. You know, about bird life in the humber and all that. And then, if our generation harp on about it enough, the whites'll start taking in stuff by osmosis and start talking about identity crises and shit.'

'I already have kids.'

'Do they know about bird life in the Humber?'

'No.'

'They're shafted then.'

'Fuck you.'

'Please do.'

Eleven thumped her in the side. 'You're an obnoxious cow.' She watched as Jaya smiled fleetingly, dismissively, as though she was laughing more at a fatuous stray thought. 'Why do you have a sitar when you can't even play it?'

'It looks nice. It sounds nice. It makes me feel Asian. The Beatles, John Lennon; all those quintessentially White boys that took it universal, they added another layer to our cultural pizza base.'

'"Our" cultural base? You're a bengy. Sitars are Indian.'

'Aah same thing. We're all brown. In fact, we're still pretty much black.'

'I'm bloody well not. I don't have any Indians or blacks or bengali goose's in to my house.'

'Ha! A bona fide Paki you are then. And it's geese.'

'Screw you. And anyway, how can you say that? Most of your friends are white, you went to a private school full of all whites, you talk like a white girl, your uni class are all ghoriye. Of all people, I thought you'd be the one to say we're all, you know, assimilated or whatever.'

'They're the first ones to exoticise me. I used to think I was like them until at school one day, the teacher said to me 'So Jaya, what do you eat at home?' I said 'curry and rice'. She said 'ooooh', as though it was something different. And that was it. She lay the barrier down.' Jaya sighed. 'I know people should acknowledge difference; ignoring them doesn't do anyone any good. For school projects I played up to them I suppose; they were voyeurs of the East, them lot. I even wrote a project called 'Welcome to the Saffron Revolution'. That really made 'em jizz their pants. I fed 'em so much crap about arranged marriages and self harm and religious fundamentalism and fucking Bhangra music. I didn't understand any of it. Jesus I don't even understand Bollywood or Bhangra.'

'Why do you listen to it now then?'

'Cuz it sounds nice. But then, man, all of those things were their views of what was going on with browns; it was probably happening, but I perpetuated it even thought I didn't come across any of it. I used to tell them about my yearly holidays to Bangladesh, feed em stories about mud huts and wiping my ass with leaves.' She laughed. 'There were no fucking mud huts in my life. Our house has English toilets and is made of white marble for fucks sake. And all that malarkey about arranged marriages, well, Dad says I'm not allowed to get married til I'm 26 and settled in to a career and that he'd rather I stay unmarried for the rest of my life than marry somebody I don't want to.'

Eleven looked at her from the corner of her eye. She spoke of straight marriage with such ease that it was confusing.

'I used to tell them I felt sorry for the limbless beggars on the streets in Sylhet. Which I did. But I didn't tell them we had servants in the house, that'd piss them right off. Start saying it was barbaric and call for emancip-... freedom and rights, wouldn't they?'

'I don't think they realise that if these kids weren't house servants, they'd be prostitutes.'

'But they don't get that. Their money buys them a stake in the moral high ground. They're so comfortable. They don't do sacrifice. Some dick was on about Primark the other day, saying people should boycott them and stop the child labour they employ, y'know, in those sweatshops back home. They don't realise that sewing is the only skill these kids have. They'll resort to thuggery if they lose their sewing jobs.' She threw the cigarette and it flew in an arc shape and hit the ground. They watched the orange glow falter and fade. 'I suppose there are a few alternatives set up; you know, to take them out of the sweatshops and educate them. But can you do that on a national level? The bastards are starving British students of an education, cutting their bloody funding, raising fees, and they think they can solve the educational problems of the whole of Asia.' Her voice became bitter. 'They go there for two weeks 'to find themselves' and 'walk barefooted like the natives' and 'eat dry-fish off the street stalls', being overcharged till they're bleeding out of their arseholes on their 'gap yah's' and they think they can solve everything. Their money is welcome, I suppose, but I wish they'd stop being so fucking smug about the whole thing. I can capitalise on my heritage but when they do it, its just annoying.'

'And you reckon you can solve the problem back home?'

'We invest back home; we have long term commitments; we build houses in Sylhet. So many massive houses there, made from money our lot sent back. Big sprawling vulgar bangladesh-style houses with those cheap faux-mosaic floors you get in upmarket village service stations. We don't attempt to change the fucking culture, man. We do it their way. We don't preach to them. If you go to Sylhet, there's shitloads of development, theme parks, family stuff. Not a single major nightclub, no KFC's, no McDonalds; we're not trying to make it a mini-London. Its done with our money, but on their terms.'

She pushed herself up the bonnet a little, her face gently strewn with the disgust afforded only to an insider marvelled at from both sides of the glass wall. 'Yes, the Sylheti's probably resent us for it, but the rest of Bangladesh resent us for it too. The people from Dhaka have always thought Sylheti's are shit; I suppose maybe they're jealous, or maybe Sylheti's have become smug about themselves and it gets Dhaka's back up. I don't know.'

'It's a shame you're Bengali, y'know.'

Jaya laughed. 'You're so racist.'

'Well I thought they were all short and dark and, y'know, a bit thick and that. Chewing paan and stuff. Eating fish and rice all the time.'

'Jesus. If our own type can't figure out the different classes, the whites have no chance.'

'No, shut up a minute. You're not like that though, are you?'

'And what if I was?'

'Then I wouldn't want anything to do with you. Although, you do have those Chinese-y eyes that Bangladeshi people have.'

'That's so cruel. Look at you; you're a typical Paki and I don't mind.'

'No I am not! I am a homosexual. And an adulterer. And I speak English. And I don't cook curry all the time.'

'Gosh, really pushing the boundaries there, aren't you?'

'I'm not.'

'You keep telling yourself that.'

'When I walk out of the house, the neigbours look, cuz I don't wear Salwar Kameez and I go out and have a good time.'

'Maybe in your world you're not, but in my world, you're just the same as every other bored Pakistani housewife.' Jaya stuck out her tongue.

'You really are a piece of work, aren't you?'

And in the secure knowledge that the truth is very rarely what comes out of people's mouths, Eleven and Jaya threw caution to the acrid Birmingham winds and begun what, in anybody's world, would become a bizarre relationship that seemed to last only minutes in the general timescale of things, but as History showed through Her ignorance of all things Substantial, became the focal point of almost any thread of thought either women had in their futures.

Eleven uhm'd and ah'd her way through life, the frontline of which was held up by the impenetrable force of her three children. They were cleaned, fed and sent regularly to the local Leisure Centre, averting the prying eyes and probing questions of her in-laws and the prick of her husband (what he did on his overnight taxi rounds was his business, while her live-in mistress (a relative from Pakistan they were accommodating while her visa application pended) was her business).

She woke up in the mornings and dropped the children off at school, and picked them up on time, and they did their homework on time, and she sent them to bed at the prescribed time, and she cooked for her family on time, and helped the local women fill in their benefit forms on time, and ordered a new dining table on time, and rang Back Home in time, and put the copper highlights in her hair in time, and started her period on time, and sowed the spinach seeds on time, and kneaded the chapatti dough on time.

Her home was an open forum for all manner of visitors while the picture file on her mobile phone and online profiles were restricted with impenetrable security measures. Her leather wristbands and khaki baggies were under lock and key to prevent any collision with her militarity arranged collection of salwaar kameezes and dupattas; paralleling the situation one storey below where the Elephant atta sat innocently unaware of the packets of Marlborough Lights and Absynthh locked in the cupboard beside it.

And then, under the damp-blackened carpet underlay, beneath a loose rotting floorboard in her lank bedroom with its flowery textured wallpaper, was her secret collection of films.

FIRE! screamed one, I Can't Think Straight, claimed another, Chutney Flavoured Popcorn, joked the other... they slunk around, like contraband; or the equivalent of a teenage boys porn stash...

Like the left-behind social movement, pushed underground, they uncomfortably sported three problem areas; they were about coloured gay women (the kind of cause that sent middle classes in to ecstatic furors of 'equality!' and bored the shit out of everyone else). Peeking out from the corners of their muslin cloths (for effect, she'd gleefully think to herself), the brown faces were either glamourised for the merciless braying mobs of commercialism or grainy unkempt women with dark skin and unstraightened hair. Earthy, she'd heard Jaya say once; with that knack of anchoring everything with a vocal pin (Eleven called them ugly but she realised that didn't encompass the multitude of meaning behind a woman who chose to openly appear un-groomed).

And there she was. Jaya Chakarbatti. With her mocking raised eyebrow and her lips curled up at one corner, sharp and savvy, with her edgy words that cut like razor blades through the mendacity of Eleven's existence; there she walked with cheekbones and the jawline of a Bollywood femme fatale, her outline slightly blurred, her milky, pale skin -the cursed fantasy of any Pakistani housewife. Even the fact that she was Bangladeshi (generally considered to be at the bottom of the pecking order) didn't put her off; Eleven thought it was cute when Jaya repeated Urdu words after her (profanities, of course) in her stunted, Englishified accent.

Through the quiet heartbroken sighs of malcontent as she watched the masala bubble away on the hob, Eleven knew that nobody really listened to her inner monologues or the quiet narrative than went on quietly in the background of her life, all jostling for space within her head, babbling away like the blub blub hotpot of potatoes and tomatoes and paneer floating about in front of her eyes (every Thursday right after the children settled to watch TV).

The indignant polyglot of Mutterings would strike in whatever linguistic weaponry was fit for the purpose; Urdu if she was peaceful, Mirpuri if she felt vulgar, Hindi if she felt filmi, and Punjabi if she was really pissed off, with its tirade of consecutive consonants and intimidating sets of tongue rolling and nasal squawks. And when the in-laws would stride superciliously in to her living room demanding family albums and tea and bay leaves and cinammon sticks and enquire after the children, they would talk to her in whatever mish-mash they felt like and she, always, respectfully thank you-ji, replied in Mirpuri, hiding behind its safe insulated free falling diction that had no written form, knowing she could never slip up about her co-marital affairs in a language that didn't even have a word for girlfriend.

It was a quiet refuge then, her sexuality. In places that were always dark (clubs generally always were; she didn't have time for the bars, like all refuges, hers were quickquick stopovers used for emergency relief); full of whispers and desirous looks and the ineffable bond of forbidden perpetrations, she would hunt for the next item on her extra-curricular syllabi by following the trail of poppers and BO and the raucous laughter of the crowd who were enjoying themselves far too much to be regulars; far too loud and savouring every moment far too much, overflowing with enthusiasm for every passing moment and lapping up the badly mixed pop music too too much because they weren't allowed out often enough to distinguish tasteful music from non...

And she would watch as the drag queens performed their rusty dance routines copied from pirated Bollywood DVD's, hips rolling and wrists twisting, fake eyelashes fluttering and their wide jaws looking odd as their midnight shadows sprouted through the layers of liquid foundation, their botoxed lips like swollen vaginas as a replacement for their prick and balls squeezed tucked and bound flat between their legs, the sweat patches seeping through the scratchy net of their shiny Pathiala blouses.

These acrimonious subversions of gender were, Eleven knew, the only expression left for these poor boys who had been squeezed out of the Asian patriarch and fallen between the cracks, fucking perversely in the margins like a mirage on the peripherals of society's vision. Forced to be part of the world's sexual deviants, they were the unwanted T of the LGB's, struggling like the bottomless basket for independence but leeching off the comfort that comes with sharing the value of the lowest common denominator.

The multicoloured lights would momentarily flicker over those sitting on the sidelines, wary and unsure as to why they were there, lugged with the burden of being the Opposition to possibly the strictest heterocentric nation on earth, where men were so secure in their superiority that they were even allowed to hold hands without being questioned. They all sat in these hidden coves, after-hours, with thumping bass and mangled sitar blaring out on to the dancefloor attempting to bring something upbeat to a sodden state of mind.

There was Kalvinder Ramakrishnan (alter ego Kareena Rani) who wore his hair in cane rows and dressed like a homophobic rapper, but his eyebrows were far too neat to pass if off as authentic. And there was Rafique, painfully skinny and teeth reddened and chipped from chewing so much pan, newly arrived from Bangladesh and looking to pick up a sugar daddy who could help him support his wives and children Back Home. Sliding his way up and down a hand railing on the stage was Haich, 17 and HIV Positive, mindlessly spreading his venom towards the world by depositing his seeds in the anal caverns of various men he met at the gay sauna without saying a word, squinting in hateful pleasure when could feel his own passages ravaged by an overenthusiastic father of three... And young Bob Singh, who would ask for forgiveness every morning during puja, for the ungodly lustings that would take over in dark alleyways with Raja Singh from next door... and poor young Noreen, forever consigned to helping her single mother live vicariously through her by meeting cousin after cousin hoping for marriage, but who came to these nights in the hope of some female affection without an agenda, even if it meant giving up her virginity... And Sam Sumaira ('o yea, I live in Central London') who was determined plug her degree and superiority and penchant for caviar and fling it in the face of all these sorry specimens of people whom she felt owed her something for gracing their scene...

It seemed then, that the only hope lay on the shoulders of the few who positively revelled in their sexually subversive existence; although few and far between, they weren't there to Head Fuck, they weren't Asian Psychos.

Some wore their sexuality like a political identity; Joshua Kerala who, after years of sex-and-drug fuelled youth and trawling online sites for somebody whose profile picture was not a set of abs or an erect penis, had found a husband and lobbied hard for the 2004 Civil Partnership Act, and celebrated that December by making his man honest in the student union bar. And the two women from India, Reena and Heena, who had crossed religious boundaries and finally took the last train to Mumbai and fled to a life in the UK, stunned that it seemed to be a hyper-orthodox version of India in the 1970's which the immigrants had brought along and stagnated in the dewey surroundings of the city...

Yes, the variegated surface of the gaysian existence had many things stuck in its ridges, from which Eleven licked and picked to continue her day to day life. And it floated obdurately in the pithy prosaic surroundings of the immigrant cities, divided and subdivided in the way that torn clouds usually seem to do in the face of changed winds.

Eleven would sit with Jaya and watch, as only a mother and lover could, the struggle in her face. The lines that would form on her forehead, the twitching feet as she regaled Eleven with tales of some bygone era, opening doors which Eleven didn't care to know existed. A world so distanced from either of their lives that it was a wonder the lines of history had even thought to make them cross. How bizarre that a girl so young was weighed down with the fights of the past and, as the hours clocked up and their watches ticked on (onwards, to Their inevitable demise) it didn't seem to matter that there was no agenda. Eleven, who had gotten by in life not concerned about anything beyond her own stomach, and whose sun rose and set on her children and whose nights were filled with mistresses and taxis, was amused and afraid to be moved by Jaya's damp eyelashes as she forgot to blink sometimes as they spoke.

'There's so much our people don't know about, Eleven... There was Rosa Parks who refused to give up her bus seat to a white... And the tattoo'd Holocaust survivors who saw their own killed like animals...There was Emily Davidson and the Suffragettes who won the vote for women-'

'Was she a dyke?'

'Who cares? They were amazing, they did something for nothing... and we struggle to fight back at a few words... paki, or dyke, no matter what, we just sit passively and don't care about the class wars thinking our people will naturally become considered equal over the years... and we fall for the governments Equality Bills and all the bullshit bureaucracy they weigh everyone else down with... and before it's even had a chance to mature we've got idiot Asians who side with the Whites and say 'o you're just playing the race card' thinking that's enough to be considered assimilated. You know we're still second class citizens,'

'I know. But you can make a life for yourself without getting in to theirs,'

'We need to fight for the option. We can't pull the rug out from under our own people. Think of those of us who could potentially become great, actually do something for this country's history, who'll be starved of the options just because the rest of us were too incestuous, too lazy to make a life outside our colonies.'

'You know most people don't care about this stuff.'

'Most people are stupid. They're not the problem. It's the ones who harbour hatred and think of us as inferior. And even then, there are those who think they're totally colourblind but don't realise the subconscious prejudices they have, they see a brown face amongst lots of job candidates and distance themselves without even realising. The figures show it, Eleven. They show that those in high places aren't brown.'

'Maybe that's cuz we haven't been here long enough.'

'We've had just as much training and experience in the same job.' She pulled out a newspaper and pointed at an article. 'It's here in black and white. In like for like job positions, browns get paid the least. Just because they've pulled the wool over your eyes, don't fall for it. You think you can just get on with it and everything will be ok. No. Even though some of us speak better English than them, we're overlooked.'

'Maybe it's cuz you have a chip on your shoulder.'

'But I haven't. And even if I did, they wouldn't know. I'd just be working as hard as everyone else, with the same can-do attitude and 'managerial synergy' that they teach me and everyone else. Look,' she turned to face her, 'if you were a white man working with a group of white men and one Asian person, naturally you'll grow an affinity to the whites. So naturally you'll pull him up for promotion. Asians do it; most of our businesses are family run and there's plenty of nepotism,'

'So...? What's the problem?'

Jaya laughed. 'There is a huge problem. Why should anybody be held back?'

'O now you're just being spoilt.'

'You shut your face.'

'And anyway, how about you fight your own battles. You go on about freedom and stuff, but you haven't told your parents about you yet.'

'I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. You married a guy...'

'I'm not the one with all the fighting talk.'

'Look right, I'm just an adaptable person. Just because someone has an opinion one way, doesn't mean they have a blanket, one-shoe-fits-all attitude to life.'

'O right, yea. There's a word for that? What is it, erm...' Eleven mockingly scratched her head. 'O yea. Hypocrite.'

'Piss off. What am I supposed to do? Marry a girl? No way, that'd hurt my family, there'd be a problem having children, I'd lose everyone in my life for what? One woman who isn't even guaranteed to last. The trade off's not worth it.'

'Are they going to be the one having sex with him? Are they the one's who're going to be there in 30 years when you're unhappy?'

'You assume I can't be happy with a guy. There's more to marriage than sex, y'know.'

'And there's more to sexuality than sex, you know. You're attracted to women for more than just how they look.'

'Am I? Isn't sexuality just a difference in who you shag?'

'No you twat. First of all, it's about the pleasures of community, innit? There's a whole different lifestyle, being gay an' that. And then there's the natural understanding a girl gives you; something sweet about them, that a guy can't match for shit.'

'I don't know, Eleven. I think all the emotional stuff is universal....'.

'If that was true, there'd be no difference between men and women at all, and everything would be equal. You of all people know it's not.'

'Maybe it is. Maybe men and women just like to forge differences and think they're more different than they actually are...'

Eleven looked incredulous. 'You live on a different planet, you do.'

Jaya sighed. She watched Eleven's movement from the corner of her eye. She was too embarrassed to look her in the face for too long; they hadn't reached that point yet. But she wanted to look! She wanted to stare and stare and pretend that there was no pride or pretence, no inhibitions to the Full Surrendering of The Soul to somebody else. Then she realised how boring that would be, so she whetted her appetite watching but not watching; using the superior female gift of peripheral vision (o the graceful and understated qualities of the femme!). They were sitting right next to each other but the surreal feeling of Eleven's presence was (and would always be) unsatisfactory. She still missed her; and she couldn't quite believe she was there.

There was moment of silence that either could have picked up to do whatever they wanted; as if incapable of tailoring so much freedom, neither said anything and the moment simmered. Eleven (consciously revelling in the heaviness of the air between them and chose to keep Jaya at arms length by dismissing it –it was a skill she learned in the face of a husband whose very existence she practiced passively detesting) decided to ask a few dud questions –dud, because the answers were already written in manual of all sexual deviants; an unwritten wisdom the Straights would never quite be willing to come to terms with:

'So you think you can be Muslim and gay then?'

'Yes.' Jaya sighed, and, as though reciting from a script: 'I'm not trying to justify my sexuality with my religion; I know Islam says it's forbidden and I accept that. But everyone is allowed their indulgences, right?'

Eleven laughed under her breath.

Jaya turned around and looked at her. 'Are you just taking the piss now?'

'Yes! You dick. 'ooo justify Islam and sexuality', you prick. God, don't you ever shut up?'

They were both caught off guard as they made fully frontal nude eye contact.

Occasionally, in a country where self-deprecation and criticism was a way of life –so much so that it debilitated one's own brain in to becoming a self-reductive machine- great gluts of inner monologue were harangued by the ostentatious tittering of realism. Trains of Thought were stunted, cut short, diverted because of signal failures, leaves and trees all over the track, refusing to let it run its distance. As though it were some anti-Self campaign, and contradicting its great traditions of letting wine mature, one's own thoughts were rarely allowed to marinate. In the Bangladeshi tradition of pickling almost anything –from lemons to cow's heads- the lines of Jaya's blood ran thick and came across the occasional British clot that found it's way in her system until her blood (and along with it, her thoughts) ran thin.

But having her ancestry weighted in Sylhet ('Rock, move!'), there was something of a habit of moving boulders with mere thoughts.

With a few unsightly spurts, there would come forth a Kind of Thinking that would coarse through her veins til she could feel them dangling off the keratin on the tips of her fingers and toes and split ends; a kind of rip roaring riveting sense of passion that defied all stoical sagacity or emotional constipation that had poured in from both sides of the Atlantic and meandered in to her being. With all the dichotomous resonances of a philosophically (open) minded, critical thinking prone, bullshit chatting, inquiry-driven nature of a Lofty Lesbian, Jaya Chakra-BORty felt the gushing forth of all the things she tried hard not to feel (which somehow gave her the illusion that she did, indeed, not feel); it was a bizarre feeling that left her lost.

Because, for a fleeting moment, there was, in the surrounding area of Eleven's eyes, a flicker of being completely off-guard; caught in the glare, sheer confused I-Don't-Know-Where-To-Go-ness. And when Jaya stared helplessness in the eyes, the oblivion looked in to her. It wasn't an intangible sense of overwhelming profundity that made the world comb through her being or any sense of romanticised undergrowth that was best left in the bowels of vacuous Euro pop; it was something shared between two women who were, in all senses of the word, pulled together by an attraction that was dependant on nothing but. Not a transient jiffy that once moved on from, would fizzle out in the ether of Forever, but a free-floating moment of clarity and solidarity that was so rude in its starkness that again, Jaya found herself embarrassed that she had left her perch as the Purveyor of all things Confusing and was suddenly clapped humbly and purposefully in the face by something which she had always mocked.

And from then on, every awkward moment the two shared, every empty space between speech and thought, every inquiring breath that would prefix every question, was somehow, someway, just an attempt at realising exactly what this moment meant.

(And always the inevitable end.)

# Chapter 6

Ruby Ansari Khan was fully aware that she may have been perceived as racist, but she was knew that was the type of sweeping judgement preferred by the programmatic thinking that arose out of a fallen Labour government. People, as sheep, just went with it. Where along the way people began to discard fashionable xenophobia -after estate agents tried so hard to kettle away the Windrush generation- she didn't know. Now, as the sunlight shone through her window and hit her right foot, she sat wondering if there was any other schoolgirl like her.

She had read Paul Gordon's text last night and daydreamed til she fell asleep about how desired she had felt when he had called her 'babe'.

He was weak; he couldn't be sure that her skin colour didn't penetrate beyond her dermatological peripherals, but he, as the rest, Went With It. Ruby sat awake, and nobody dared disturb her. School was unimportant today, her and Paul needed to plan their attack tomorrow night. He was giving her the present of the Double Whammy (he said it til it became a noun and all emotion had vanished from it; in quick succession 'doublewhammy', like it was officiated military jargon) and would provide for her, tomorrow, a theatre of sorts.

She felt groggy this morning (it was the morning after the night she had watched a quadruple bill of The Simpsons, surfed some second rate porn on the internet, masturbated and fallen asleep cradling a can of cider). The kind where she was tossing and turning under the duvet which was lank from her body rub-offs but too tired to do anything productive. Her head was simmering with the over bubbling anticipation that preceded Action! and was tucked away waiting for the trigger, holding back the frontline that was chomping away, slowly, at the tethers that held it in.

Ruby was sick of political correctness. She was so two dimensional in her hatred which lacked any angles whatsoever, that often she would leave herself gasping for air as it overwhelmed her in its own self-destructive resentment. There WERE differences in DNA; there WERE differences for fuck's sake, and they needed to GO BACK HOME. The freshies, the fobs, the perverts who would spit on the roads and undercut prices and labour charges, clutter up the streets with bullshit street boards and open cockroach infested restaurants and make entire streets smell of curry. The strange fair skinned dark haired new ones that hung around their shops practically living on pavements, smoking and jeering, jumping like fleas from city to city to feed off whatever open sore they could dig their hooks in to.

She hated them and their volatile thick temperaments and inconsistent behaviour and their bloody arrogance; their grand ideas and overblown sense of self, their completely offensive inability to adapt to their surrounding and their parasitic pursuit of sex. They trudged the streets thinking a spare bit of road was there to be filled with their rubbish or their person, talking in garbled tones and feeling like they owned the place. They took liberties, they made everyone else feel guilty and they raped the social welfare system and Ruby's beloved NHS of all it was worth. They killed each other for the most trivial of reasons and burdened the taxpayer with court cases and police costs. They had crap diets full of oil and spice and pulled on doctors' time, and there was uproar if they were even asked to learn English against their will. Their literacy levels were low; they never bothered pulling out the carrier bag from the branches in tree-lined streets.

And god, they stank.

She kicked off the duvet and stomped to the toilet. She scrubbed her face rigorously and gargled several times with Listerine Total Care, before scooping out any foreign substances from every crevice of her body in the shower. She dried, and in the process got sweaty all over again. Her hair was straightened and mascara was put on; she put on a pair of baggy khaki trousers, some shocking red lipstick, smeared foundation on that was two shades lighter than her natural skin colour, pulled on a black t shirt and around her neck, a loop of rusty chain she had found on the street outside a burnt down mosque; she pulled on a pair of canvas pumps and roughly painted her nails black.

The walk to Paul Gordon's house flew by. It was 40 minutes, and she listened to the various noises on the way there and wondered how much of it was from the immigrants; the beeping of a reversing truck, yelps of delight as a girl was pulled in for a kiss, rustling of paper bags, wheels on tarmac, hushed chatter at the bus stops, mobile phones ringing, the clanging of loose scaffolding, the friction in the joints of the cranes.

By the time Paul had opened his door to her, her face was already creased with the ignorant obnoxious stupidity of a soldier ready for battle. Paul grinned and pulled her in, controlling himself and waiting to fuck her until after their attack.

Neon signs, cocaine and Boost energy drink were assaulting Jaya's every sense. She had hoped to get high, but planned not to. The tugging of the two added to the tail-chasing punk-high that made her constantly run her fingers though her hair; the strategically placed diagonal fringe was all but gone and a dull pain was ebbing in her shoulders. She thought her eyes were wide open and made a conscious effort to blink every now and again, but concentrating on what should have been a reflex was taking up so much brain capacity that all she wanted to do was lie down and chatter bullshit with her eyes closed.

Kulsuma walked alongside her, with the rest of the Lassi Lesbians stumbling behind, like a bastardised group of ducklings:

'Mate, I'm pissed outta my fuckin' bastard face right now,' Kully burped, and the rest of the girls laughed; it rolled along the narrow side streets of the Birmingham gay scene and seemed to stir the slumber of the various Vauxhall Corsas and Peugeots sitting dejectedly in the car park. A few drag queens hanging between the cars pretended not to notice them.

As was the way of certain narcotics, Jaya suddenly became hyper-interested in everything, and very responsive (for Kulsuma, the half-glass of lemonade she sipped on was in anticipation of bathing in the waves of an enhanced version of her beloved without any clouding); it seemed to be a state of mind that was completely oblivious to the swathes of accumulative white noise and bueraucracy that filled the world when nobody was looking and irritated every space between almost everything (and, Jaya thought, ate away at the isles of the Higher Pleasures til they were sinking and scientists could have, if they wanted, predicted its demise in less than 13 years).

They were walking up the backstreets of industrial, commercialised, sterile buildings that attracted only the whiffs of people and left their essences at the doorstep; the Ibis hotel, Legs 11 Strip Club, Chung Ying Gardens that seemed so stereotypically named that Jaya wondered if it actually meant anything in reality; skinned ducks hung in the windows and the acrid aroma of fagsandbooze and latex hit them in the face when they turned the corner and felt the bass vibrate through the concrete, making their eyelashes dance.

High pitched laughter and pump soles scratching the ground, glasses clinking and cash machines bleeping formed the hyperpolyglot of sounds that filled the night air; cars beeped (to either scarper or beckon) and curb crawled; bearded taxi drivers with half-chewed cigarettes hanging out of their mouths eyed the fun-boys with a distant curiousity.

Everything was so loud! There seemed to be no consistency with anything; the lights were too dull and some street lamps shone so brightly she was forced to squint! O the concoction of sex in the air and alcohol in the nostrils and the biting winter evening rolling over her skin and pinching her cheeks was so liberating! She felt so restless and stared for far too long at passing strangers, her smile seemed to have a life of its own and her slim waist was rising and falling in short sharp increments as her heels assaulted the pavement; her hips rolled and snapped and sent slivers of excitement through Kulsuma (the aggression that built up in her with every one of Jaya's steps made her want to eat her own tongue; but nobody wanted to preserve the masterpiece more than her).

Whenever Raj or Smeeta or Mira came across another gaysian they would hoot; and it was the kind of night where they'd get a similar response back. They dry humped and stumbled and hitch hiked rides on various strangers' backs all the way to The Loft Lounge which transformed from being a pretentious sterile place with whitewashed walls and leather couches in the day, to becoming a sparkling haven for gays who pronounced their t's and ordered drinks other than beer and mojitos in the evening.

In the schoolyard tussle that was the scene on a Saturday night, pickings were as rich as they came. For most of the girls, they were blind to looking at anybody a shade darker than them. For Kulsuma, everybody was just an obstacle to Jaya. And for everybody else, whose eyes usually flickered over the crowd, Jaya was a settlement of the gaze for just a few seconds longer.

She wasn't oblivious to this, but thoughts of Eleven intoxicated her tonight. She was going to be the one who revelled in her crowd-induced loneliness tonight.

'Bradley Simmons!' Jaya squealed (Kulsuma rolled her eyes) and threw her arms around the neck of what seemed to be a certified Muscle Mary.

'Jaya the Play-a!' He air kissed her and put an arm around her waist; his bright blonde quiff and bulky arms swallowing her subtlety with their robust ripplings. 'Goddamn I love rhyming your name. Jaya the Slayer. Jaya the Mayor. Jaya the Payer!' He clapped his hands. 'Not tonight though darling, I'm paying. What can I get you?'

And in the way that Jaya often did, she consumed Bradley with her diluted pupils, and wrapped him the way that only females could. Kulsuma and the girls ordered drinks (Apple Sourz, Cherry Sourz, Bacardi Breezer, Corona and tonic water) and aimed for the only piece of free floor space there was, Kulsuma leading them as they squeezed their way through the laughing, oblivious, jovial punters who were probably talking inconsequential bullshit about bullshit upon the shit of the bull.

'Kully, you on the pull tonight?' Raj leaned over and her indelible signature scent of hair oil plundered Kulsuma's nostrils.

Her eyes flickered to Jaya involuntarily. 'I'm always on the pull man, you know it!', with a wide and patronising smile intended to startle and distance drunks.

'If anyone catches your eye, you let me know.' Raj was slurring her words already. 'You lemme know.' One of her eyeballs seemed to stray slowly to the left.

Kulsuma's logic maintained that on a night where pernicious whisperings haunted her (she looked again at Jaya and Bradley laughing; what the hell did they have to laugh about so loud?), it was best to drink up and meet Jaya on her cloudy level of false joviality.

But in her failings of recent times, she knew she was not the best conversationalist (inherited through years of second-guessing everything she had ever been taught; a tradition that spanned from the first utterance of a Begum in the year 1666 where oppression obliterated any sense of self worth for Shahanara on her tiny island as her sari was unwound forcefully, sending her twirling and twitching in a violated heap on the floor). The unrestrained growth of the naysayers maintained their survival within their geographical boundaries, unmoving, illiterate, forever the patient stander-bys and gorging on unrequited love and opening their desperate mouths to catch any trickle of wisdom that dripped from Those Up Above.

Which is why, as she stood being shoved this way and that in the middle of a crowd of people who should have been on her side, Kulsuma Begum, with her humble roots, suddenly felt irrationally angry. No, she did not feel as though the world owed her anything, but why were there so many barriers indicated in the area around people's eyes? Why was it not possible to just walk up to somebody and start talking to them? When did that particular trend end? And why did she have to judge somebody before making a certain type of joke? And why the fuck did nobody let her know that the world was so closed up? It was clear that everybody just tolerated each other. The entire world was just in a perpetual sphere of tolerance; embracing had stopped long, long ago, where it had faded so much in to the distance that to evoke would attract cries of insanity! Desperation!

She was no heterophobic, she had straight friends (in the same vein as every straight person's defence against homophobia: 'I have gay friends!') but why did they start separating the sexual deviants from themselves? Who even specified that that was a difference that even needed to be noticed? On which plane of humanity did somebody say 'where you put your mouth is what divides you from us?' Who suddenly made that a criterion?

She momentarily stopped thinking when she heard a man talk a hundredmilesanhour in a high pitched voice, throwing about his wrists, a group of pursed-lipped businessmen standing around him holding beers and nodding.

Ok , so there were some differences. But surely they were just caricaturing themselves because the pre-requisite criterion had separated them in the first place? In the hotly pursued human quality of relativism, the need for balance presented itself and these gays, these ones who pilfered away their money and lived for the weekend, could easily be out-gayed by any heterosexual who was willing to take up the cause. So why didn't they? Why was gay marriage only introduced a few years ago in the 2000's, (which still didn't seem that far away) and why was Kulsuma, who watched in the distance, completely sidelined by her own minority? In an effort to cool-hunt and turn what is authentic and genuine in to a trend for mass consumption, They had sub-marginalised her in the margins. They had Carried The One and forgot to add it in later.

(O Explainer and Seer of all that is worthy in existence!) Jaya, was becoming docile and floppy. If only Kulsuma could reach her, it would be an easy strike to get her head to rest on her shoulder. It was all the warmth Kulsuma needed to last her for a few weeks.

The Lassi's were yabbering, talking in loud tones about god only knew what, overcome by the desire to foam words from their mouths as the contagiousness for Bullshit spread about the room. Kulsuma wasn't falling for it. She wanted to be a miserable soliloquising bitch tonight and she was allowed the indulgence. This whole scene was a joke; a superficial, over sexed, under-informed, misled, venomous pit of a joke. And in an age where those who granted you your rubric then used it against you, only resignation was possible.

But she knew they didn't grant her her identity; Jaya knew where it was, but she was over there being lived through vicariously as one of the Beautifuls. Abba, who had always lived in a state of permanent resignation, throbbed in her head.

The ultimate meme of cynical inaction temporarily set in and she, that night, resigned herself, in the fashion of her ancestry, to watch from the sidelines.

'This weekends gonna be massive man.' Mira shouted in her ear. 'Saathi tonight, London G-A-Y bar tomorrow.' She put up her hand for a high five. Kulsuma floppily responded. She was exhausted, but (as people with mixed blood often did, with that knack of sixth dimensionality) her sense of time and consciousness was tied, like a cluttering empty can on a string, to Jaya, and her watchful eyes didn't leave her for a minute.

In the face of the UK smoking ban (which was so militarily stamped out by the government that it seemed strange to think once such a preposterous thing was allowed), people needed other things to do with their hands. None more so than the punters of Saathi night who kept their fingers preoccupied with typing, masturbating, holding protest banners, cooking, driving, holding alcopops (disco piss, tart fuel etc) and tucking their testicles in; it was an aspect of common humanity that they shared with almost everybody else (but the similarities didn't run further than this).

It wasn't a coincidence that the outdoor smoking phenomenon had burgeoned and sexual deviance had seemed to decrease amongst the gaysians of Great Britain ('where did they all go?' Bradley would lament, 'they're not online, they're not in the clubs?'). It has to be remembered that the various beer gardens and outdoor drinking parlours where people were then forced to smoke, had significantly more light than indoors. Patio heaters and solar powered outdoor lamps (and even a stolen floodlight from the Aston Villa football ground, in the case of Saathi) all reflected a rude kind of revelation on to the irises of the innocent punters who thought they had done well for themselves. And there was something about a club being filled with the blue smoke of communal cigarette consumption; something positive, as though a spectrum had been created through which Anything Goes, that worked in good symbiosis with the fuzzy feeling of alcohol.

So it was no wonder that when the spectrum is lifted and everyone has to be outdoors, suddenly sobered up by the bright lights and cold, that nobody got off with anybody anymore. The less that happened, the less people came.

Yes in some perverse inverted way –although the smoking ban's contribution in this was debatable- the declining state of the gaysians happened at precisely the same point in history as the increasing of the straights coming to the club. Suddenly, boom pow pow! there appeared in the outgoing puffs of smoke a series of people who looked and did things exactly as you saw on the street; they pointed and laughed at two muscly 6 ft cain-rowed basketball vest-wearing men tonguing each others ears and couldn't rip their eyes away from two mini-skirted, be-heeled femme fatales holding each others waists. They had suddenly become spectacles in their own homes.

The lesbians were the first to go in this conveyor belt of meat-crunching nihilistic consumerist cynicism:

"Over recent years Saathi Night has started to attracted [sic] a very large number of asian clubbers who are straight. This has had a very mixed response from our regular clubbers understandably.

Therefore we have decided to launch a new club night. My Man is a men only club night aimed at Asian Gay and Bi men."

So for the gaysian girl who already felt she didn't quite fit in to the British class system and had adopted a new community, it was to the highest degree a humiliating bite in the arse. She'd been publicly shamed, spewed out and left to ebb in the public spectacle of pointing fingers and burning looks. Thrown to the dogs, etc etc. Unable to stop and reflect on the (un?) fairness of this situation because of the forceful effort needed to either sink or swim, she was caught in an unenviable limbo period against which resistance was futile, for the moment.

This knotted muscle in the anatomy of the chequered-shirt wearing, fat suede booted gaysian wasn't so much a problem –it was an opportunity since they held on actively to the apron strings of past feminists- but to the quiet quivering long haired femme who had been conned in to thinking that the feminist cause was no longer needed, it caused a series of twitches; and teamed with being on the slush pile of Office Friends because of their brow-furrowing sexual deviancy, the femmes of Britain were having a hard time massaging out the difficulty of this predicament.

Jaya, like most of the femmes who simply chose to retain her dignity and ignore it, found it best not to bring up in conversation the shame this rejection had on her. In the pursuit of young society's illusion of a good quality of life it was a necessary omission.

But of course for Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty the idea grated against her utilitarian ideologies. The short statement on the Saathi website made her head spin (but like somebody caught picking their nose chose to quickly move on and pretend there was nothing to see here) and like a rejected lover, roll around in a succession of why's and wherefore's. Like any good social climber, it was best to ignore one's original roots lest somebody should suddenly feel obliged to apologise –the ultimate acknowledgement of fault. So she continued having drinks and laughing with Bradley and skulking in the corners of booths having half-coherent conversations in the semi-dark of Saathi (which ironically meant 'friendship'), quietly coming to the realisation that the interim ground had become just that.

The most pernicious of misapplications of this new revelation was whether this would force the women to integrate in to society at a faster pace. But that wasn't the issue; Jaya, as always, wanted the option to not integrate.

So, like the bowing-out act at a circus, the Lassi Lesbians continued their fumbling half-baked joy on the dancefloor among the drag queens and the fun boys talking Punjabi, Hinglish and a myriad of other neither-here-nor-there languages, smelling of cologne and cum, perfume and pussy, listening to badly mixed bhangra musich and third floor Bhangra and Urban Fusion or even Middle Eastern Bad Boi Beats in the basement, Management Reserve the Right To Refuse Entry Concessions Available, and laughing; always laughing...

'O my god, you guys, there's a huge fight going on outside.'

Still reeling from the outgoing pulls of cocaine and the lulling withdrawal of alcohol in her body, Jaya looked enquiringly at Kulsuma. It was the end of the night, Kumar Sanu was warbling through the speakers and the sticky dance floor was emptying. Kulsuma, worried that the fight might somehow affect the unending peripherals of the far-scoping Jaya and reluctant to let her see the ugliness of true humanity, grabbed her by the wrist and beckoned the rest of the Lassi's to follow. They were leaving right now and not partaking in any further spectacles.

But cries of 'Shit! It's Ajay! He's one of ours!' stopped them at the threshold.

The audacity of extremities to impinge on the borders of The Average took shape in front of them; a skinhead boy whose fast, robust movements disturbed the rest of the slow moving Saturday night post-club ambience, drew his fist back, his arm outstretched behind him, and brought it hurtling down on to the slim jaw of Ajay. There was no scuffle, it was a one-way battering; the bottom half of Ajay's body lay on the floor, legs askew, his feet rolled outwards at an awkward angle in the middle of the road, and the upper half of his body was held up by the white boy, like a rag doll.

There was a dull thump as his knuckles met that weak jawline, a crack as it became dislocated and hung off his face, and droplets of blood fled from the split lip. The force threw Ajay' face to the side, and in a glorious finale that could have been set to the jaunty beats of Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus', he released a torrent of repeated kicks and punches, one after the other in quick and fast succession thwackhisscrack, alternating between fists, bending over and beating the lump of meat in front of him like a gorilla tenderising his meal. The punches bit at every inch of available torso, and the rhythm became faster; the white boy's teeth were clenched and his lips drew back, taut and thin, his brow creased in concentration as spittle dripped from his chin.

Relentlessly the hits came down hard; his glowing white trainer flew in to Ajay's sides and stamped on his stomach, making his body wobble and settle before the next blow. There were small pools of blood gathered in the tarmac on either side of Ajay's head, which resembled a bruised kiwi.

In the few moments of pause while the skinhead panted with his tongue resting on his bottom teeth and his eyes opened and focused menacingly on Ajay's pathetically flat crotch, a swathe of people ran from the club in to darkness, and the rest stayed put inside. A defiant line of people stood outside, tutting and looking disapproving; the Lassi Lesbians tacked on to the end of that line, looking drunk, shocked and awed.

But Jaya wasn't watching the bruised pulp of a body lying on the ground; her eyes followed to the area behind the skinhead, to the dented silver car parked hurriedly half on the curb, where the skinhead's eyes had occasionally flickered mid punch.

Ruby Ansari Khan was shaking with delight in her seat. She felt like she was the VIP at a special showing by History and her hands were clapping and her smile was wide and her red lips looked venomous encircling her white teeth. Her chest rose and fell as she was overwhelmed with victory, and with her stunted internal vocabulary leaving her mind unable to express the superlatives of what she was feeling, in the face of a complete lack of any concise or precise way of expounding the sheer oomph she was feeling RIGHT now (and because there was nobody else in the car), Ruby Ansari Khan the honorary white girl baptised by a boy so incredibly White he was practically transparent, shook with glee and vengeance.

The camp boy who was being decimated by Paul was the embodiment of all that was wrong with Britain; these confused kids were pissing all over natural rules of selection, and doing it in packs like they were back home! Who were they kidding when they gathered like this? Why did they think there was any purpose to gathering like this?

She was already planning their next attack; it would be in Manchester and they'd smack the jaw of that one too –no! In fact, what they would do is castrate the motherfucker. And maybe even do it to one of the girls too! The media would have a field day! And all it would take is a few nights, a spray can, and Paul's fist.

She trembled at the ambiguity of the words.

They would ruin an entire community. They would stamp out GAY ASIANS, a term so embarrassingly ugly that she felt humiliated just saying it. Twice removed from normality, these insects crawling around in the fissures of Britain made her skin crawl. And the loyalty, the straightforward non seditious ploughing-ahead of Paul Gordon made her so horny she almost wanted to call out to him right now.

But o! Look at that pathetic doll of a guy lying in the street! That was definitely going to be a lasting image in the journey of Ruby Ansari Khan's history of empowerment.

And look, see the girls! See them! Look at the state of them! The rug-munching lettuce-licking pubic-hair-out-of-teeth picking dykettes of Britain's scummy scummety scum!-

And suddenly she stopped mid-clap. A glowing face was staring at her through the crowd.

It emerged slowly as she focused on it a bit more; it was a subtle look; a girl, her hair ruffled, her arms folded in the cold, her head facing the fight but her eyes looking point blank at Ruby, a small, confused line disturbing her forehead.

Ruby's mind dislocated from Paul and the boy, in the split second of realization that her privacy had just been severely violated, and she withdrew an inch away from the window. The Kashmiri flower which had blossomed on the mountain of a teeming population of an immigrant herd, finally seemed to lose a petal. The small hairs on her stem stood rigid; a chill passed down her spine.

Often all it took was a look to check somebody; not a look with an agenda, but a look of disappointment from somebody who can make someone else think they should know better, an elevating look that interlocked its fingers and invited a leg-up. But it wasn't the distancing qualities of that look that shook Ruby to the core. It was an understanding that they were the _same_.

It was a vacuuming suction to the past of a hundreds of years ago when, in a parallel point of history, in a marble palace or a desert plain or a paddy field somewhere, two girls who were practically sisters were sitting in cotton or silk clothes on elaborate chez lounges or squatting in a field, talking about something non-consequential without the need of back-talk because they _understood_ each other.

But the line of confusion in the girl with the glowing white face's brow, a vertical line hovering above the bridge of her nose, between her eyes, was a valley of Ruby's (could it be? Had The Fear taken hold of her?) discontent, gathered over the years as they tricked down from the prominent peaks, to form this micro-valley of-

What was it? Ruby's eyes scanned the gay pakis to remind herself. _What_ was it? What was it that was nestled in that line that scared Ruby so much?

The surrounding areas were of affinity, that was sure. The girl didn't look disgusted; possibly mildly confused, but nothing else. But the sheer force of the iron grip of the girls gaze bore in to Ruby's own –they made eye contact for a millisecond- and the image was emblazoned in to her memory like the white hot image of the sun on the eyelids.

Effectively caught with her pants down, Ruby had had a snap shot taken of what she always guarded as a bitterly private part of her life, which was only allowed to flourish within the confines of a mutual hatred, with one person in her life. And he wasn't even fully in; he bounced off the edges and the resonating sounds were what made it to the core.

A year she had taken to fully form her egg, squatting over it as the shell hardened from it malleable soft outer layer in to hardened alligator's capsule it was today. And she grew with it, deferential to the right people to make sure they wouldn't eat alive the only thing she knew how to nurture. For years she had nestled comfortably on this little blob of comfort, thinking it would be her key to empowerment.

But now as it burst open, it seemed a shuffling rippling blanket of spiders emerged, beginning to eat her alive. Now, as all of her mothering materialized in front of her, leaving in its wake temples trickling with blood, it was another type of glowing white face that violated her spawn (which had already begun eating her. Ruby Ansari Khan it seemed, had fallen to the bottom of the pecking order).

As often life would surprise people with pounds in sofa bottoms and good-lookers at the local old-man-pub or a sunny day in the middle of January, it was a simple look that surprised Ruby. For all the silly-billy minutiae of life which had surpassed Ruby in her Great Big Quest, it seemed that they had secretly been gathering like an army of ants, and now nestled in the furrow of the glowing white face, unleashing their stealth attack at the moment where she thought the empire would fall.

And suddenly, the image of her mum, and all her empty shallow wrinkles that had never affected Ruby, floated through her mind, with the elusiveness of a shadow but the definitiveness of a full stop: she was sat in her wicker rocking chair with the fan heater at her feet, the corners of her mouth turned down in concentration and her head slightly raised, like her brows, her eyes pointing down at a torn salwaar of Ruby's which she was sewing up... a bright green, silk pair of trousers that Ruby had stopped wearing 6 years ago... preserving for the sake of preserving, a present which had been gifted by the only surviving member of Mum's family, the only link to a maternal Other, being mended by Mum despite its uses having petered out years ago...

The car shook as Paul slammed the door shut and the engine spluttered to life; he smelt of rain and concrete.

'Faarkin' 'ell mate! Sheeet,' the wheels screeched as the car started moving and they had turned the corner within a matter of seconds and were speeding down the dual carriageway while hotels and casinos and Caribbean restaurants blurred past.

'Fuck yes!' Paul boomed, shuffling his bottom back and forth in his seat, sometimes pushing his chest in to the steering wheel, sometimes pushing back in to his seat. 'Babe, did you see that? We proper Paki bashed just then!' He was smiling maniacally, red splodges appearing on his cheeks, down his neck, like a raw spanked turkey, goosebumps on his skin as though he'd just been de-feathered. Spit and blood were smeared across his boots. The bright orange lining of his black puffa jacket was torn, and beige fluff peeped out. He was breathing heavily, as they speeded, clumsily crossing lanes, towards the motorway.

She was expressionless.

'Shit, Paul, pull over. I'm guna be sick.'

'Just do it out the window man. Lotsa paki's live round these ends, it'll be something nice for them to wake up to.'

Ruby Ansari Khan spewed out what seemed days worth of rice pudding-like vomit, yellow with green lumps, heaving her upper body out of the window just in time for it to explode out of her mouth and hit the wind. It trailed in the air behind them for a few moments like an over exposed picture. Bits of it streaked across her cheek and slid along her hair before disappearing in to the night. The cold air slammed in to her face and forced her to shut her eyes as she retched, over and over, until it was only bile dripping from her lip when they stopped at a traffic light. It was all gone. Out. Exorcised. She had over indulged. It seemed Ruby had forgotten that the hunt was better than kill.

Paul chewed his lip in anxiousness. 'You alright babe?' He pushed a bottle of water in to her hand. Her head rested floppily out of the window, as though she was on a guillotine.

'What are we doing?' She half whispered.

'We're going back to mine and getting you to bed.' He sniffed up a load of phlegm and swallowed. 'We can talk about things in the morning. You get better.'

Ruby never did retract her head from the cold air during that car journey; as though she could no longer stand the stench inside the car, it hung derelict outside, wobbling at every pothole, rolling side to side with every jerky gear change.

And as she lay awake that night in Paul's bed ignoring his erection pushed up against the crack of her bottom, on the brink of fulfilling every fantasy she had ever had about him, the realization sank in that perhaps, perhaps maybe, Ruby had just been slapped in the face and taught about her lineage by the very people who seemed to be defying theirs.

There was no sudden empathizing, no epiphany, no cry for help, no doubling over in pained confusion, no dark recesses of her mind that became a darkened gothic refuge for pain-laden ill conceived thoughts of anguish.

And sleep crept upwards from her toes tonight, as though for the first time, things were working their way up from the foundations.

# Chapter 7

How does a young boy come to terms with the approaching hours of his death?

Is there a feeling of subsiding? Is he sad? Does the feeling of finalisation set in, and does a film of Final Understanding cover everyone and everything? Does tunnel vision set in and things slow down like in Hollywood films? Or is there an overwhelming need for a stuttering summation and prediction on life? Do you end up looking with a forlorn fondness at every child that skips by?

Or does he think about endless, optimally sun-dried marijuana?

And what are the thought processes of four boys who have collectively decided that they were the ones to right the wrongs of the West? Asides from the light sprinkling of anger, there was resentment that had marinated their organs. And that didn't come from the West. It came from all the countless Browns of Britain who simply paid lip service to their religion and only touted it when it suited them; ultimately weaving their ways in to echelons of Middle England and finally solidifying their place there with a trophy white wife after a token splish-splash of 'o, but my heritage' but ended up with white pussy anyway. And there was no need to convert her to Islam no, because happiness is all that matters. ( _o but my heritage_ ...) and I'll bring my children up to believe what they want to ( _but of course I respect my religion_ ...) and they're living in England and I don't care if they never learn the language and can't communicate with their grandparents ( _but of course I love my parents_ ...) and of course it's ok to be gay, Allah is all inclusive and has no boundaries for his people ( _of course I know what I'm talking about_ ...).

Asif placed his hand over his rucksack and felt the outline of his Improvised Explosive Device. The single minded barbarism of the West was one thing, but the hypocrisy of his own was what really pissed him off. There they acted and wrote and spoke in these ostentatious middle-class frenzies letting others like them bask in the warmth of their familiar unfamiliarity; selling them tidbits of culture like street food, skewed and chopped to bitesized oblivion. And suddenly when these types found themselves in a terraced house with sticky floors and half-eaten jalebis lining the mantelpiece, Bengali songs blaring from the lips of a diabetes-ridden grandma, the hypocrite brown would put on a special kind of snobbery they reserved only for their own kind. The kind of resentment that can only be given to something that you understood, a familiar kind of inferiority that the hypocrites narrowly missed out on. Them and their middle class looseness could easily have ended up Just Another Smelly Asian, so the venom directed to those that ended up in this slush pile of life had extra significance. Yet they'd go away and write another project or another article in another paper about the sloping grey rooftops and smell of masala and snot-nosed malnourished children, with some feigned authenticity. What the shit did they know? Shit all, that's what. They were tourists.

Asif had had once purchased a plastic pistol when he was eight. It was one of those with a revolving magazine, and a small round of red plastic gunpowder filled pods which could be loaded, and made a small but resounding 'pap' sound when triggered. He would wrap it up in several socks and have it in the drawer underneath his bed. The gun wasn't dangerous –a mere toy- but he treated it with so much mystique that in his mind, it was his weapon against the world. When Miss pissed him off at school or humiliated him for not answering some inane useless question about Magnesium or the Theme of Women, he would go to school the next day with the pistol in his pocket. And when she would again try and humiliate him, and the same scene played out again, this time he would remain calm, still not knowing the answers, but content in the knowledge that –even though Miss didn't know it- he could have scared the shit out of her and gotten his revenge. That was all; so long as in his mind he was in control, it was enough. What was this world if not simply a formation of what was in his head?

But slowly it tiptoed out of his head. The world had stopped lending itself to the scenes contained there. It defied him and went to bed with someone else's thoughts, leaving him like an ousted lover, its attentions elsewhere with not a care towards him. Gone were the inane days of waiting in line at the cashier in Londis where the shopkeeper sold Mr Govinda a samosa and a lottery ticket but refused to serve Asif a lighter because he was wearing a skull cap; he wasn't going to stand by and watch some fucking white slut push in the dinner queue and take the last Apple Tango can, and no way was he prepared to watch another bullshit Channel 4 documentary about mosques teaching extremism, or hear about another Imam raping a boy student. What was the world coming to? It was obvious that the signs of The Day of Judgement were upon them and if the world thought he was sticking around to watch it all go to pot, it could go and fuck itself.

Like celebrity obsessions, his attachment to his resentments waxed and waned depending on what was in the papers. He had met these boys and it was easier to fit in to their mould (he thought it was temporary, just to get the resentment out of his system), but then he'd forgotten what he'd done to fit the mould and couldn't retrace his footsteps. And with the kind of pitiful appeasement he had usually reserved for subjugated Western Women, he himself had begun the process of simply sticking to the sides. It had stopped becoming a survival technique and turned in to Main Attraction.

So, calling it progress, he found himself stepping off the train with the rest of the boys, knowing that they'd never be caught. Ever. An action without one single negative consequence at all. And perhaps it was that idea that was more intoxicating that anything else; perhaps death was the ultimate pleasure because after that, all earthly consequences, flawed and unfair, would never have to be tolerated. Why every atheist didn't commit suicide was beyond him.

'You guys all ready yea?'

They all nodded, and with the vague smell of spinach curry and incense about them, The Brotherhood shuffled through the crowds of Euston train station, emerged from underneath the colossal black and orange departure boards that featured in many a news report about delayed trains, and on to the Underground. There was no shuffling of feet or flickering eyes as they stepped on to the crowded carriage; just foreign languages filling the stifled air, bored commuters staring blankly out of the window and hugging the poles, the mysterious looking woman who, void of having a book or a paper or a music player, had her eyes darting around hoping to avoid looking anyone else in the eye, eventually settling to stare at her reflection in the opposing window.

The boys consciously kept their facial expressions flat, feigning boredom; but simmering in their bellies, the adrenaline and nerves mixed in their guts, giving them a feeling of indigestion. The kind of arsehole-burning post-3am-kebab kind of gurgling that threatened to spill down the anal passages in liquid spurts; it made the brotherhood clench their buttocks in tension, only to release them once they'd made it over ground and on to the breezy pavements of Tottenham Court Road, its cavalcade of neon lights and American-style 10 foot dynamic advertisements lighting up the night air. It seemed like a good place to die.

'Brother Asif, I was watching a YouTube video where Bin Laden was talking. He said that to kill an American was to honour Allah.'

'Did he Munir?'

Munir stared blankly, struggling to walk alongside Asif amidst the barrage of oncoming shoulders.

Asif casually tucked his hands in to shoulder straps of his rucksack. 'Do you believe him?

'Well...yea. American's are, like, twats ennit? Their government were the ones who support Israel in the war, and kill our lot in Afghanistan and Iraq. They're the ones waging war on our Muslim brothers and sisters.'

'Yes. But it was our Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia who gave the Americans a base to fight from.' Asif's eyes flickered to a billboard sporting the pink London 2012 Olympics logo, which was now infamous for looking like Lisa Simpson giving a blow job, and he wished the best of luck to any brother hoping to attack the Games and wishing he could be around to see if any of them passed security. 'And you know, Bin Laden and his words are all very good and that, but his arguments against Israel are a bit flakey. He said killing an American –any American- was to honour Allah, because they supported Israel. But by that token, you could say killing any taxpayer is honourable cuz our money goes towards the Defence budget, which helps fund soldiers continue murdering brothers and sisters in Israel, Iraq, Pakistan. You can't go around killing everybody now.'

'...Yea man. I get it.' Munir looked satisfied. 'So this operation,' he tapped his own rucksack, 'this is our own idea ennit?'

Asif nodded, half smiling. 'Now killing every gay on the gay scene is perfect. Cuz that way, you know they're practicing, and you're allowed to kill em cuz they actively go against the rules.'

But of course, that wasn't the point. No; as they walked through the crowds, drizzle beginning to fall from the dead skies, Asif knew that killing gays wasn't the point. He'd had enough. He was through with this mundane Life on Earth; it was one insult after another. School had failed him, girls weren't lovable, neighbours didn't care, playgrounds weren't fun and food wasn't halal. He drank from a mug that read 'I Wish I Were Dead.' To the world that was a bad thing; to Asif, it was a declaration of success, a paradise of eternal joy. The Eternal Flames of the Hell Fire had already scalded him while he was on earth; he wanted out before he gave them an excuse to engulf him. A black Ferrari whizzed by. He'd be driving that before midnight.

Munir, meanwhile, had a secret. A few weeks ago he had left a comment on a porn clip he'd watched on the internet (he had remained anonymous and begged Allah for forgiveness due to fear of reprisals from the Forces of Righteousness). He hadn't felt forgiven though, and he was worried for the punishment he would have to suffer before finally being allowed to rest in Ily'een, the Most Gracious of Waiting Rooms for The Good, where the dead basked in pleasance of Heaven's open door until Judgement Day arrived. He was sure his Brothers would forgive him when they met on The Other Side, but still, the niggling feeling of such a sin weighed him down all the way to Old Compton Street.

Asif floated a cola cube in a pool of saliva contained in his mouth. He was in the mood for a slow and reflective dissolving of the sweet tonight, not the fervent cracking and fast crunching that he usually subjected it to. His mind was grey and brown; colours of the miserable, the misled, the aggrieved. There was nothing else he wanted to with his life. For the first time in his life, he felt sure. He felt sure in that way that adolescent boys usually do; steamrolling through without looking left or right, just hoping to reach some reprieve at the end. That was all he knew; it was all he thought he cared to know. He had subjected his world view to the filter of religion and could see it for its kaleidoscopic deception and he didn't fall for its bullshit. There was so much floating about, especially in London where people wore sunglasses at night. They were all going nowhere.

They all momentarily stopped when they turned the corner on to Old Compton Street. They looked at one another, eyeing the trickle of punters making their way to the big loud larger than life crowd of barflys gathering outside each of the doorways; laughing, always laughing, with a dead hysteria around their eyes. And the Brotherhood stood there, beginning to recite under their breaths, the testament of faith. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.

A man in a blonde wig smacked the bottom of a skinny boy wearing tight white jeans who screeched gleefully.

There is no God but Allah.

Two girls sat caressing each others faces and whispering in to one another's ears.

And Muhammad is his messenger.

Kulsuma was sat on a bench on Broad Street, on the infamous Slag Stretch, where 13 nightclubs and four burger joints, along with a classy Indian restaurant, stood quivering, awaiting the army of binge drinkers and police who would inevitably descend upon them tonight, as they did every night. It was morning. Grey, bitterly cold, damp, and polluted. All the eye could see was stone, brass, iron, and concrete. The Hyatt Regency looked embarrassed hanging out on the corner.

She pulled her jacket tighter around her. The wind nipped at her cheeks and the grease in her hair conducted the chill and gave her mild scalp-freeze. Her teeth almost began chattering. Shit it was freezing.

She did this every once in a while. When her room became too big, too all encompassing, too mighty a vessel, too stark a gallery of her thoughts, she took refuge outside. It was cosier here. Things made sense, they related to one another; they were contextualised. Cars went on the road. People went on the pavements. Pigeons went on the buildings. Tramps sat in the cracks. Asians sat in Roccoco's. Whites sat in O'Neills. Everything had its place.

And more importantly, things happened. There was no stifling stasis, as there was in her room. History hadn't perched itself over the premises and parked its fat arse there.

She was pissed off. Physical pain reverberated through her gums, and the left side of her face was still semi-paralysed. She had had a root canal operation that had hurt so bad, her explosion of expletives left the dentist in fear as he wondered again why he chose to practice in an area where solid gold veneers were more common than fillings.

Ah, how her roots had betrayed her. She had overestimated their strength; for years they had given her a set of gnashers so strong that she sat down yesterday cracking open walnuts while she created another slideshow of Jaya jpegs. And suddenly the pain shot up through her skull. Turns out that those roots that had anchored for so long were rotting away from the inside; festering with infection, teeming with unwelcome bacteria (which annoyingly, apparently, she had invited) and then suddenly one night had caused the most hurtful case of dislodging.

So she sat on the bench welcoming the numbing cold of Birmingham's polluted winds on her face, letting the cold seep in to her brain. How lonely her lands were today. Usually spilling over themselves, they would haemorrhage like a ruptured ulcer and take grip of her brain, debilitating it, so thoughts of only Jaya and her meteoric social mobility would haunt Kulsuma. Jaya and her subtle cultural references, her appreciation of diced shallots, her consumption of Italian sun-dried tomatoes (not sun-blushed), her dismissal of salted Sprite as a digestive aid, and her disgust at outwardly labelled designer garments.

But at home, Kulsuma festered with her belongings; her history in all it's itemised indexing that was lined up along her walls, along with their smell which had endured several train journeys through dusty continents. No, it wasn't festering. Or maybe it was. Can one enjoy festering? She thought she did. She enjoyed her home; there were external things that made her feel like she shouldn't. That she shouldn't be happy with her cum-stained pillows and period-marked bed sheets, and the trinkets of other people's live she had collected that sat on her desk –a clock face here, a key (to god knows what) there. She thought it was bad but she carried on doing it; (not unlike the bacteria in her roots) she invited these bits of other people in, she kept around her these items of the past –granted, they were placed there by her parents for lack of storage space- but now she couldn't imagine a décor without them.

What was it to be, then? A cluttered existence which she knew was unhealthy, or a clean path that led somewhere, like Jaya? The answer wasn't black and white. There were shades of grey that hung about tauntingly, the bastards. Did she want Jaya, or want to be Jaya?

Italian sun-dried tomatoes were expensive.

Drops of rain hung off a railing, reflecting the landscape through them, upside down. The rain too had made its journey across continents via glorious skies, and ended up beside her, in this shit hole. And despite the rain and cold, girls were still walking around in stilettos, and skirts as short as belts, and boob tubes, with their hair either plastered to their scalps or layered with hair extensions so high they looked like baby apes. And boys with baseball caps on sideways still kerb-crawled, with that gormless look on their face that some video somewhere had told them was sexy.

Her phone rang.

'Hey Meera. My face hurts, make it quick.'

'We've decided on a plan for London. We're catchin' the train at five-ish, and goin' to a club called Shunt. We're meeting Jaya there. Then we're going to G-A-Y bar. I need pussy. I need capital pussy.'

'Farking sket, ha. Why is Jaya meeting us there?'

'Cuz she's going a bit earlier with some kuri she met at Saathi.'

Kulsuma's blood ran cold.

'Who?'

'O you know, her Eleven O Clock from last time. She's fit tho. Anyway, that's the plan, go sort out ya face, and I'll chat to ya tomorrow.'

The Eleven O Clock girl whom Kulsuma was about to stop Jaya from talking to but didn't have the guts to, was now going to London early with Jaya outside of her usual allocated Lassi Lesbian time? What the fuck was this?

Forced in to the context of the outside, Kulsuma couldn't whimper as she would have in her room. So what was one to do when forced to adopt and take on the rules of someone else?

She began chain smoking and walked, walked far, past the canal, past the Visa Debit using bar crowds, past the posh fish and chipperies, past the pasta shops and fake Italian creperies, past the supermarkets the radio stations the galleries, past the permanently anchored barge until she reached the head of the canal. The end of the canal, this unassuming calm sea of gravy coloured water that culminated like the crack of an arse.

She smoked and walked. Her eyes were cast down like the permanently pre-occupied water girls she had seen in Indian films, walking miles every day but still finding thoughts to pass their time. Strapped to sidelines, she was a failure. A mute failure, that was letting the one person who made any sense to her slip through her tar-stained fingers. She felt like she was in a game she had watched, some budget demo disc Abba had got in a bundle of 20 from the car boot sale when they'd first bought the Sony Playstation. The game was Kurushi. And with each failing, the edge of the platform would crumble away a few inches, bringing the big fall closer to the character's toes. But Kulsuma already felt like she'd lost, like something had just shattered, and this time it wasn't the kebab shop window.

Thoughts of Jaya were pleasurable because they were full of so much potential.

She had one weekend to make Jaya realise; she had to challenge her self-imbibed status quo. And if the dislocating shadows of London's gay scene weren't the perfect platform for her misty lustings to be put on display, then the world could go and fuck itself right up its own sister-sleeping arse.

The water in Jaya's cup had become black from her putting out so many cigarettes in it. Being in a pseudo-relationship was proving to be much more uninspiring than she had initially thought. The smell of curry being reheated wafted up the stairs and crept under her door, the hoarse yells of a single mother carried themselves through her window, berating her tearaway 5 year old son who probably smelt of cabbage for throwing batteries at the neighbours' barbed wire gates. There were far too many people walking the streets for this to be the kind of area the local council bothered about; it was 3pm, but the great bored and unemployed chased cats down the street and kerb-crawled til their hubcaps cracked, til the endless waves of distorted oversized speakers in various boots just meshed in to a permanent incoherent neighbourhood sound track. Polish vocals, hip hop bass, hindi warblings, pathan guitar and the dhol all clambered for the attention of somebody, anybody.

And to add to the many streams of unending, inconsequential consciousness that lay behind each door in this dragged down area of Coventry, Jaya Chakarbatti smoked and sniffed poppers. Eleven was arriving to see her in two hours. Having the room smell of human detritus wasn't what Jaya had planned, but something was in the air today. It was a day that lent itself to laziness.

Britain's Fourth Estate lay in tatters on her bed; magazines, red tops blaring unnamed sources, biased commentaries on Libya and Iraq, neo-conservative pieces on the Japan tsunami thinly masked as tributes from Liberals. It was no longer 'soldiers invading', it was 'boots on the ground'. The English Defence League weren't racist this year –they were 'anti-Islamification'. The Tories suddenly weren't xenophobic; they were pro-Britain. And suddenly radio commentators were jumping on the bandwagon of the great unwashed and saying the protests in Central London this weekend were going to be 'unheard' and 'useless'. Petrol prices had gone up, the budgetary axe seemed to be falling willy nilly on British life with almost as much randomness as Auntie Shamina's attacks on Hinduism. The pound in the pocket was being squeezed and people were having to change the way they spent their income on crap like novelty lighters and agas and tax. Like the student protests, like the Iraq War protests, the government cuts protest was just going to fuel the egos of the parliamentarians; they were going to fling shit in to the eyes of the public regardless.

But something had to be done to restore the status quo. In Bangladesh, every individual took it upon themselves to shout at the servants and underpay the rickshaw wallah's lest they set off a chain up upward bound social improvement for the lower layers of the social biryani. There seemed to be no such sense of that kind of social philanthropy in England, so this government, welcomed by a Treasury note telling them there was no money left, decided enough was enough. Cut cut cut. Like so many angry adolescents in bathtubs, cut cut cut.

And so, Jaya Chakarbatti was paying more tax on her cigarettes and valuing each drag just that little bit more. It seemed ok to chain smoke; she was paying for any potential treatment she might need on the NHS via the higher tax, and if statistics were to be believed, Bangladeshi and Pakistani women were still the worst paid people in the country -so she was inevitably going to end up poor, fat and apathetic. Smoking fell neatly in line with the government's Big Society plans –each to their fucking own.

Pandering to the Great Big Bully -America- the UK had just interfered in Libya (the strangeness of an intertwined history between England and the Middle East struck Jaya as being even weirder than her mother's penchant for Midsomer Murders) and suddenly the Masses had become stirred to stake their claim in the public budget. 'How?!' They cried, 'How can the government afford to spend on an unwanted interference in Libya, but cut education budgets in their own country?'

O the par-boiled biryani...

She stubbed out the last of her cigarettes and began the long and laborious process of female-for-female grooming: the usual dynamic of the-bitch-and-the-butch didn't quite take form for Jaya and Eleven; instead, a hyper-femme approach where one always needed to be slightly more feminine that the other took on an exhaustive dimension. Manicure's had to immaculate, facial hair had to look lasered, cheekbones had to look like they were about to overlap the eyes, and hair had to be razor sharp. It was a game they liked to play: who could look straighter.

It wasn't extreme then, that Jaya took 5 hours to achieve a kind of understated perfection only seen on the likes of female newsreaders, without the dead look in the area around her eyes. In fact, today her eyeballs themselves were positively twinkling. It was why when Eleven eventually arrived at her house, she didn't let her parents see her face; a single facial muscle placed even a miniscule amount higher than usual would have attracted suspicion.

'Are we supposed to have sex while your parents are downstairs?' Eleven looked at Jaya, trying not to look her in the eye (it was easier this way).

'You might as well get used to the idea that these things happen. Your kids'll be doing it too.'

Eleven looked devastated.

'And anyway, who said we're going to have sex?' Jaya raised an eyebrow.

'O right. I suppose I came all the way here on the bastard motorway to have a cup of tea, did I?'

Jaya feigned shock. 'Why, Eleven, I feel positively objectified.'

'I'll objectify your arse in a minute. Now shut up and fetch me some custard creams.'

The weather was dreary, and soon enough, it began to rain. Spats of it came down in sheets, small tiny droplets, that darkened the concrete and weighed down the weeds. The sky turned a dark shade of grey. Eleven sat watching the small TV, aware of Jaya's every movement from the corner of her eye. Being the object of female affection –a university educated one who didn't pretend to like white people because she actually did like white people- seemed to be natural to Jaya. It was a comfortable one she naturally fit in to. The mould was snug on her; Eleven's eyes didn't put her off. For a bored adultering lesbian housewife from Manchester to not constantly be on edge was a high achievement, but as Jaya plopped on the bed next to her, Eleven's standards were suddenly raised. This was what her body was made for. This comfort, this soothing existence. This annoyingly intelligent bright young thing that wanted nothing but her company and didn't mind having big chunks of her personality being bitten in to. Jaya, little Jaya who browsed art galleries didn't feel the need to talk about them. Innocent, funny, hurt Jaya who gifted her a little piece of heaven off Junction 3 on the M46.

She smelt of apple shampoo and her hair was soft like feathers. Time slowed down and both were engulfed in only the sound of a room, and the pinging of droplets on the window.

It was only pain. It had only ever been pain. There was longing, there was struggle, but every day was strenuous and the pain had stagnated in their bodies. Pain and shame was on their faces and in every touch that ensued in that room. They hovered and teetered at the door of Refuge but refused to surrender and walk in because the Refuge was too real and held too many consequences. Outside the Refuge there were both their families, there were angels and there were gods, and there were sisters and sons. There was a gushing river that had a delicate eco system that needed every piece to keep going and to replenish everything around it, by its very nature needing to be nurtured in order to survive.

They lay in silence later on that night, side by side, looking in some distance somewhere. Jaya slowly got up, and walked to the bathroom, the cold biting at her skin, the blue-ish energy saver bulb making even the fluffy bright red toilet mat look clinical. She washed her face and looked in the mirror, hoping to catch any tell tale signs of sex in her face, before walking back in to her room.

Eleven was sat up on the bed, naked, cross legged, cradling the sitar in her lap. Curls of her hair lapped at its strings. The headstock towered above her head. She looked up.

'I think I get why you keep this,' she plucked a few strings, 'it sounds gorgeous.'

Jaya's heel-toe motion had temporarily stopped (the image in front of her was to haunt her for the rest of her life); Eleven grinned in bemusement with each pluck. 'Yea man, it's nice isn't it?'

'Have you ever played one before?' Jaya sat behind her on the bed and leaned against the headrest.

'Nope.'

But she carried on exploring the instrument, as Jaya's breaths deepened and she slowly stroked her fingers through Eleven's dishevelled hair.

'You're not very good at this...' were the last words to leave her lips tonight, as she drifted off in to a long sleep, listening to the clumsy, inexperienced, keen music of a naked married woman insolently playing with her most prized possession.

Nothing could have been as depressing as a British train station. The waves of onion smells hit Jaya and Eleven as soon as they stepped off the clunky train, and on to the platform of Southall, West London, There were rows and rows of terraced houses; narrow one-way roads and cracked pavements; meagrely stocked newsagents with stalls of rotting vegetables outside, cash machines with cracked screens and scratched out buttons; a pool of vomit was splattered on the floor near a dilapidated bus shelter and the pert boobs of the girl on page 3 were soaked with whatever discoloured fluid had oozed out of a discarded condom. The air smelt of wet concrete and frying oil, the iron bars across a shop window where torn out and rubbish bags were ripped open, fish bones, milk bottles and Final Notices strewn about. The only feet that trudged along the street were people over 60 or under 5; everybody in between, the hipandhappening commuters drug dealers social fodder, had deserted this place long ago. Time here had been stifled. Sikh men dragged their sandals along the pavement, hands behind their backs, hunched, looking straight ahead, only ever either coming or going from the Sri Guru Singh Sabha gurdwara. Once they had boasted; boasted that Southall had the biggest Sikh population outside India. But looking around at the deadness of these streets, the hustle bustle deafening Punjab bore no resemblance to this grey vacuum punctuated with blobs of green phlegm and a few unboarded windows. Gates hung off their hinges, peeling paint and rubbish made up half of the ground and abandoned gardens ate away at everything. Crumbling houses hid behind waist height front walls lined with empty lager cans and plastic bags. Everything was cramped, packed tightly like the packets of tamarind collecting dust in the cobwebbed corners of various cash and carrys. Broken trollies lay miserably on their sides in the grey parking lots, filled with dented, battered, rusting cars.

The only sound as they walked along the pavement was that of crunching leaves and the distant thud of bollywood bass; they passed a pile of stacked tyres (a set of which belonged to Tariq Munir who made it his duty to uphold feminine empowerment by kerb crawling unloved teenage daughters) and a mound of discarded toasters (a local meeting point), before turning the corner -where an explosion of noise, smells and people traffic almost brought them to a halt, because sugary syrup from freshly made jalebis stuck to the bottom of their shoes.

The strange grey figures of local media were gathered like confused flies, swarming in and out of the rows of people not even trying to not look at the cameras and mics and self-important metal and plastic devices. One man holding a camera –wearing the skinnyjeansconverseandscarf getup- spoke about creating a montage. The crew nodded.

Inevitably the happy montage set to upbeat Bhangra music would show women in saris and trainers fingering fruit in Southall or eating pakoras in Brick Lane (of course this was a mythical image; Jays's recent game of 'Spot The Brown Person' on Brick Lane ended abruptly after there were no brown persons in the vicinity). There were cameras assaulting people, talking about it being an 'auspicious' occasion (always, always auspicous), which they celebrated with 'zeal' and 'yearned' for every year (words which had become part of their default vocabulary bank after decades of reading quran translations in after-school mosque lessons). The camera person wouldn't go near the lesbian-looking dungaree'd and mohawk'ed youngster with a nose piercing; nor the stern looking single mother of 3 who had clearly initiated the divorce; or the shifty eyed youngster with bloodshot corneas and hands shoved deep in to his grey kurta; or the young ones with the judgmental eyes and no asian signifier (a gold-edged scarf with the sharp blazer or at least a gold ring to identify yourself, surely!).

The straight-backed sharp-suited shiny-shoed crews were bolting about trying not to look uncomfortable as Mr Singh from the unpronouncable Gurdwara talked in lengthy growling sentences about the history of India and Sikh equality and kindness and craftmanship-in-the-blood when all they asked him for was his favourite mittai.

The greasy haired children with missing front teeth were fiddling with their grandmothers' beards, the men walked with hands behind their backs, a respectable distance from their wives, and everyone under 25 was trying to hide the fact that they were staring at each other. Women in full niqab and burkha chatted with hushed tones but no no, there were no stares or yells of terrorist or 'off the bus'; just the age old resentment from turbaned Sikh men which spanned from the Mughal era of the 1700's, simmering conspiring hatred in his belly of sweet sticky jilebi's, his scorn rendered silent by the New Generation's cries of 'Back Home Politics, be gone!'

Of course, the Emo kids and Goth kids showed signs of being far too integrated to pass as a juicy 'authentic' soundbite (but oh! If they knew the torrential war inside), and the well-spoken graduates who were far too informed were going to launch in to a politically correct diatribe of social cohesion... and the alert, goatee'd checkquered scarf keffiyeh wearers with their South London twang and overly confident Banglish would start rapping about Palestinian liberation and bleat about racism when they didn't make the edit...

'That kid over there,' Jaya pointed to an overweight Indian boy whose mother was shovelling more samosas off her plate on to his, 'has been brought up to think he's better than anyone else in the whole world. He clearly gets bullied at school and smells of fried onions. He's never heard of places like Windsor or Marlow and when he grows up he'll go to India to find a wife under the pretence that all British Asian girls are slags. But it's actually because he does, indeed, smell of fried onions,'

'But he'll never leave his mother's side, right?' Eleven said absentmindedly.

'Too right. And that girl over there?' Jaya nodded towards a girl stooped with low self confidence after an undue amount of attention given to her upper anatomy, 'she's wearing jeans and her brothers look clean-cut and all modernshodern, yah? In their 30's yea? Well: she still cleans their bedrooms and gets shouted at if she doesn't do their washing after them, and isn't allowed to go to the cornershop without prior permission.'

Eleven laughed. 'And what does she smell like?'

'Of washing powder, of course. Her mum's got a cleaning OCD to escape the fear of Husband chasing after skirt at Raj's restaurant!'

'You're a twat,'

'It's true though!'

'I'd hate you if I didn't fancy you so much,'

'O bhen-ji, these are the true words of a one uppity bitch who has a skewed sense of humanity, forgive me my tresspassings,'

'Screw you.' Eleven laughed and tugged Jaya's jacket to bring her closer. The girl was cold; cold and distant with the only warmth coming from her expressive eyebrows which could contort almost vertically across her forehead in cases of extreme disgust. Eleven decided it was best to avoid that circumstance; Jaya's biting judgement scared the shit out of her and already made her feel inadequate. But that was the risk of playing out of her community-college league (one which paid off in 1972 when the water-carrying Asifa woo'd the Big British Businessman in to making her his third wife..)

Distorted Bollywood, Lollywood and Dallywood skipped out of Poshiba and Harisonic stereos ('Will you be my lubbly jubbly?'... 'You are my garam masala'... 'Why for you leave me, I'm just coming') and men who seemed to be completely unassociated with the shops sat on stools at the entrance, their legs tucked in, arms folded, thick black hair peeking out from under their wool hats, their eyes opening wide and head tracking anything that went by. A teenage girl, blushing from repressed flattery, arrogantly walked by and looked deflated as an even younger specimen was eyed-up next. The conveyer belt of people leaflets hot corn food steam spices chatter oil contraband two-for-one first class blockbuster haanji no-ji was strangely devoid of the Hare Krishna's who only ever seemed to appear on High Streets (in any case, here, they would be chased away by the bright orange turban-clad sword-wielding Swami's of Southall).

A group of Hindu leafleteers advocating the deity of the Cow didn't notice their younger members slunk off to the McDonald's on the corner; a stone-cold brother failed to notice the cuts on his sister's wrists; a fluffy moustachio'd Husband failed to see his soggy-haired wife with her scarf falling off her head, trudging behind with her ripped sandals and polyester salwaar kameez peeking out from beneath her long grey coat, looking pathetically as they passed yet another stall selling odd shoes...in fact, he hadn't seen her in about 10 years...

The afternoon passed in a flurry of frying and varying shades of orange.

Jaya inwardly celebrated as she handed over 74p for a sheekh kebab; surely Southall was the only place where things weren't sold in increments of the pound? She attracted glares from a small group of protestors who were protesting against The Cruelty of Halal Meat.

'I wonder if they know that research actually shows halal slaughter is less painful to animals than stunning?' She bit in to the kebab and watched as one of the protestors looked away in disgust.

'They're making me feel guilty about enjoying this stick of carcass.' She swallowed and saw one of the news crew go to buy one after seeing the steam from her little stick of meat-poo. She sighed.'Perhaps the ignorant are better for us than the misinformed.'

'Yes. I'm sure that's what terrorist leaders around the world said too.' Eleven grabbed the remaining half.

'Salee kutti kebab-stealing bitch tits,'

Eleven laughed through a mouthful of meat. Jaya smiled and looked around as they walked back towards the train station, marvelling at how many people could fit in to one square inch of pavement. Big Mercedes and white vans filled the roads, creeping along slowly, some blasting bhangra, sporting seats full of boys with the Sikh Beard (a think line of hair feigning a jaw line) and crew cuts. Girls would sneak a look through the windows hoping guardians wouldn't see, the slaggier ones outright staring. Parents looked on oblivious, chomping on street food and squinting to read the myriad of signs and notices and maal.

'Hmm, after all that curry, I feel like some sushi...' Eleven smirked.

'What? O my god, I've expanded your pallet beyond fried chicken and chips!'

'Well, yes. Although this whole business of 'going out to dinner' is stupid.' Eleven's thick Northern drawl tickled Jaya's ears, 'why would you want to just sit around a table talking and getting fat.' She thought. 'Unless it's sushi...'

'Jesus Christ, you're turning the world upside down. Look at you, you cultural revolutionary. Soon we'll be living in a world where India is outsourcing to America. Where parents want their children to study History of Art instead of Medicine. Where Kabaddi has become an Olympic sport.' She gasped and opened her eyes wide, 'Where teachers will stop looking with understanding eyes at all Asian students who plead 'family problems'!'

'You know what? You're a dickwad.' She looked at the Heathrow Express to London Paddington pull up to the platform. 'I should get going before it gets dark.' She kissed Jaya's cheek. 'The kids needs to be fed.'

Jaya sighed. 'Ok. I'm-' she looked down. 'I'm far too emotionally constipated to say how much I've enjoyed myself.'

'Then don't. I'll see you soon.'

'Yea.' They looked at each other, before being seperated by the swelling line of aunts and turbans that passed between them.

# Chapter 8

Central London wasn't feeling like itself tonight. The narrow roads crammed with five star hotels and overpriced rickshaws resembled the back passages of Old Dhaka; beggars sat at the entrance of the Ritz hotel and drunkards waved half-empty bottles of beer around, stumbling on the pavements like the bacteria that swarmed in the intestines. Cars creeped along at 5 miles an hour, never more than an inch away from each other. The sound of car horns polluted the air.

But gathered like ants were 250,000 people, averaging 4 people per square metre (BBC News) and anger simmered in the air, placards of all shapes and sizes floating above the masses (Sky News). There was the low hum of voices and mute faces everywhere. It was a rippling sea of people. All marching as slowly as the cars towards somewhere; maybe anywhere.

Kulsuma marched with them. She was a Protester today. Jaya had said that Martin Luther... Actually, fuck Jaya, thought Kulsuma, fuck Jaya and her incessant picking away at life, her cumbersome contemplations and her false sense of culture. Fuck her inner monologue and rambling. Tonight Kulsuma was doing something on her own agenda. She had read that Martin Luther King had said 'A riot is the language of the unheard.' And Kulsuma was unheard; nobody cared about her; yes, her actions tonight may be cathartic but futile, but who ever cared about the aftermath? Who but fools ever looked to consequences? Confined by history to stand aside, her love of fences bubbled away in her blood. But today, by god, she was going to tear that fence up from its roots and fuck the shit out of it.

Her eyes flickered from side to side; she had read on Facebook the violent rioters from the splinter group would be making their entrance as soon as the crowd got to Oxford Street. She needed a clear path to quickly follow them, tag on the end of their line and Smash Shit Up. At this rate, walking the 400 yards to Oxford Street would probably take an hour.

She looked around; riot police were dotted around, but a clean line of hard-hatted bobbies strode at the front of their crowd, dehumanised, fluorescent jackets punctuated with the clean, dark blue rectangle on their backs: POLICE. She'd generally had only good experiences with the white shirted ones that frequented her road. But these ones; she didn't need to see their faces; she could predict what they looked like just by looking at their backs. Bastards; sheepish, smug, straight-laced, conformist, egomaniacal bastards. They continued to march in front, back straight, leading this mob of people who could have lynched them in an instant and thrown the country in to chaos. But on they walked, black shoes on the ground; thump, thump, thump. Kulsuma's heartbeat steadied to the sound of their boots. The silence in between each thump was agonising. She was an Unheard. She was allowed to live in her head, allow it to fuel her, turning her in to a little missile of Anger. The rest of the world may have thought her struggle was stale, that the market had been over saturated with her complaints; they'd hushed her and tried to silence her, telling her she wasn't fashionable anymore. But they'd only driven her underground and today she was emerging, probably walking with a whole bunch of those people who were sick of hearing the complaints of those like her (but never quite completely her): the inimitable Kulsuma marched today, not like a troop, but a trooper. A dissident, breakaway anarchist.

They approached Oxford street, and as though a switch had been flipped and the historical resonances of Old London was too much to bear, the crowd erupted in to a complete mess.

'All hell has broken loose!' A news reporter yelled in to a camera, 'The crowd has divided in to several groups, each taking a different avenue. The peaceful marchers have gone that way. A younger group are going over there,' his voice was breaking, panic was in his face, the top buttons of his shirt had suddenly become undone and his sleeves were rolled up, he bent down to keep his face in the lense, 'oh my goodness the riot police have emerged from the waiting vans and are forming a ring around the protestors. It's incredible! They're already starting to kettle the smaller breakaway groups!' Red bloches appeared on his cheeks and he was swallowed up by the oncoming crowd.

Kulsuma frantically looked around wondering which crowd to go with. She needed to get to the cluster of banks; that's where they were going to emerge from.

Shit, she thought, no, not this time. I'm not missing my opportunity this time, history. She found several cars which had foolishly parked on the pavement and jumped on to a bonnet, then stepped up to the roof. She scoped the swathes of people. From this viewpoint, everything looked slow; she could see some flurry of activity in small pockets: a young dumpy girl wearing an oversized cardigan puffed away on her cigarette while repeatedly hitting one of the riot police on the head (he remained still, rendered farcical against the gentle tappings on his helmet); a cluster of youth in chequered scarves spray painited the visors and shields of the dark-blue force; another set of older men pushed and shoved their way through the line of the yellow jacketed police and ran towards-

Topshop! There it was! Kulsuma jumped off the car and began running towards the men running away from the police and running towards the gaping doors of the shop through the throngs of the crowd tapping stomping beating their chests and stretching their vocals and pumping their fists and flaring their nostrils and creasing their brows. But bollocks! Everything at ground level was so confusing and overcrowded; there were too many people rubbing against her and stopping her from taking even a step forward; her shoulders were pushed forward and she was almost crushing herself.

The police line had reformed at the front and the riot police were protecting the sides. She felt the need to break something, quickly, before it gave way to the inevitable feeling of futility.

Then a collective jeering ensued to the left of her; a man had fallen in to the springy arms of the crowds; she saw the police truncheon withdraw just in time and there, a tiny window of opportunity presented itself, as the officer's back was still bent over the injured protestor; three seconds and he'd snap back up. She needed to ride that bent back.

Her ankle jolted her body forward and she leaped over the injured man, landed just to the side of his head, and saw the gap closing between the bent officer and the rest of the upright line. It was just big enough for her to squeeze through. She made the final leap and sailed through the air, arms flayed, legs targeted at the tiny space, hair flying behind her, and landed on the other side with a thud, the road coming to meet her. She rolled over a couple of times, slapped her palms on the ground and snapped upright; and with a quick look over her shoulder she caught a flash of yellow coming after her. But she was gone! She ran fast and hard, pounding the pavement and running as fast as her joints could snap in and out of place; the sound of the hooves of the huntsman scuffling across the ground followed her for all of 30 seconds, but they gave up quickly. She could hear him talk in to the radio, before he went to rejoin the official line.

She slowed to a walk, her lungs violently pumping air any which way. She could see the entrance to Topshop. It was silent here. The area hadn't been pentrated by anyone else but the men that broke away. She could hear the shouts of the crowd, only just, above the blood coarsing through her body. It seemed something had been awoken from its slumber.

She smiled; one corner of her lips curled up, and she scoped the few roads ahead of her. Where the hell was the cluster of banks? Shit was she going the wrong way?

She had read they would emerge here where it was the quietest because the police would be protecting this zone. Hai Muhammad, what was she doing? Did she have any idea what she was doing?

Then she heard it. A quiet, creeping crackling sound around one of the many corners, bits of wood scraping along the floor, the blub-blub of cardboard.

'Hello?' She said, stopping.

A face with a balaclava on popped around the corner. They stared at each other for a few seconds. It disappeared.

She cautiously followed. A yelp from someone from the baying crowds let her know they were moving closer to the centre.

'Who are you?' A male voice demanded. Another masked man suddenly approached her, moving so close to her face that she couldn't see behind him.

'I wanted to join the Anarchists. I read about you guys on the internet.

The man looked behind him, and after a few seconds stepped aside. There were four people, all wearing black balaclavas, tattered jeans and cotton t-shirts. One was bent over a pile of broken placards, neatening up the pile, while another doused pink liquid over it from a jerry can.

The one bent over looked her up and down, then looked at the man standing in front of her and nodded.

'Here's a mask. Put it on.' He threw her a black balaclava. 'Who you with?'

'Just me.'

He scoffed. 'No, which party?'

'I'm working for myself.'

The men all laughed, and one beckoned her to the pile. She pulled on the balaclava and everything changed. In that way that change creeps up or just slips in neatly like a pair of test lenses in the dentists chair, everything changed. From the view of Kulsuma's height, to the perception of the precisely sculpted white arches on Oxford Street, to her retrospective -usually bitter- look back at her history and its comatose inability to do shag all about its surrounding events, filled with the stories of filthy beggars riding in on the wheels of somebody else's success; this balaclava changed all that. She had on a skin darker than her own, as faceless as her own, as unidentifiable as she had always felt. They'd created political correctness for the likes of her, and from it had burgeoned the weeds of discrimination, pushing up from under the ground, budding and blossoming and spraying its pollutants all over her. So here she was, reclaiming her dark skin and her facelessness, reclined so deep in to her own ugliness that it had turned in to a beast.

Here's to you, Jaya, you fucking bitch, and she took the box of matches from the bent over man, lit one, and threw it with venom and force on to the soggy pile of wood and cardboard. The flame surged high, high! above them all, towered in a bright glowing triangle, crackling and seething and spewing chunks in to the surrounding air. She'd just committed arson.

'There's a line of bins outside HSBC and Natwest. We're going to dislodge those and throw them in to the windows. Once that's done, its each to their own. We need to run. Now.'

They didn't so much run as glide. The buildings were a blur as they passed them. A line of five. She even pretended her arms were wings and put them out to the side of her for a little while. They arrived at the line of bins. The windows of the banks were big, huge, gaping, like they were asking to be bashed in. She felt the anger surge inside her like the frustration when Jaya would talk about something and it mingled with lust and craving and the feeling of distance coupled with the idea of never being allowed to touch something and now it gushed forth like bile. One of the men pushed a flame in to her palm and without needing any promts, she chucked it in to the nearing crowds (Mona Begum had thrown a candle in to a pile of clothes belonging to her housemaster, Colonel Dickinson after he had banned open air meetings between Muslims, which stopped her from meeting her distantly beloved Charun). It landed in a ring of police men who momentarily stepped back from it, then turned around and spotted Kulsuma and the masked men. Five riot police and four yellow police began ranning towards them quickly covering the 200 yards between them.

It took 60 yards for the four masks to dislodge the bins.

It took 1 yard for one of the bins to roll to Kulsuma's feet.

It took 10 yards for her to pick up the bin and hoist it above her head.

And it took 1,012 years and three months for a member of Kulsuma Begum's blood line to forever embed itself in any kind of history.

The black and gold barrel flew from her hands, as though helped by the thousands of forces loitering around her shoulders: the angels Kiraman Katibeen and the discontent souls of all the unheard women of her past, recorded and done –respectively- all witnessed this surge of activity by a faceless young girl in jeans and a chequered shirt and a pair of pumps with illegal love pumping through her capillaries. Like the battles where the guardians of God helped those on the battlefield, killing the opposers before the soldiers of the Good had even touched them, it seemed the glass shattered in to thousands of pieces before the bin had even impacted it. She had a second to contemplate what she had done, before turning her face to the left and seeing a helmet and visor just inches away from her nose.

She jumped to the side and he stumbled right past her. She grinned.

'Come on you crazy bitch!' One of the men yelled.

One of the yellow police men made a grab for her but she was already far gone, physically and spiritually, rolling through the back alleys of Oxford Street and towards the open air of Carnaby Square, where a few photographers were gathered.

And for the last time in her short life, she leaped over one final obstacle before she disappeared in the Underground: it was a black ball, that came up to her knee, made of marble, and placed there for presumably artistic reasons. It had no relation to anything around it; it was smooth, and finite, sitting there in the middle of Carnaby Square, perhaps a passing fancy of somebody somewhere. It could have been stepped around, walked around, not touched, but certainly noticed. Just for fun's sake, she jumped over it, and at the peak of her air-arch, she splayed out her arms and legs and smiled for the cameras. Flash flash flash.

For a long time afterwards, people looked at this picture of a smiling masked anarchist, where strangely enough, only the area in front of her was blurred, while behind her, the world lay crisp and cleared.

Jaya was messaging Eleven:

JC: Poop?

11: Yep?

JC: Why do I love you so much?

11: Because I'm your sitar.

JC: O yea *hug*

11: You're in love with the idea of me, not me actually. That's why.

11: ...

11: *shocked face* this means you're in love with your mind!!!

JC: *shocked face* Busted!!!!! *slaps forehead*

11: Truly busted mrs!

JC: hehe. No. I *heart icon* you for you.

JC: Nothing in my mind could have dreamed up something as perfect as you.

11: *shy face*blush*shy face*

11: Baby?

JC: Mmmm?..

11: Please don't love me so much *sad face*

JC: *sad face*

11: Because its scary and its hard.

JC: I understand why you'd want that, but I can't help it.

11: If you love me too much, how are we supposed to break away from each other? I really don't know.

JC: Maybe we don't have to break away from each other.

JC: I was talking to an imam yesterday

11: *shocked face* whoa! You were actually speaking to an imam? Wow!!

JC: lol yea

JC: But I asked him: if two same sex couples love each other, and are physically attracted to each other, and they hang out a lot, is it a sin?

JC: And he said:

JC: No, not at all. It's the physical acts of homosexuality that are condemned by Allah. So long as they never have sex, they're fine. But he did say that hanging around with someone you're attracted to can lead to sex, so they have to make sure that that doesn't happen.

JC: Simply feeling love isn't a sin.

JC: Do you understand why I asked that?

11: Why?

JC: Think.

11: Because you were trying to find a way for you and I to stay together forever without it being a sin.

JC: Lol, yea, exactly. So technically when we're married we can still hang out *party face*

11: hehehe

JC: *smiley face* Does that make you happy?

11: That would be awkward and hard.

JC: Yea I don't know how feasible it is cuz we'd be sleeping with another guy

11: But I'm willing to give it a go *smiley face*

JC: Yea. We'll see.

11: I don't think my jealousy would remain silent on the day I hear you've slept with him for the first time.

JC: Well you can deal with it.

11: brb...

11: Ok, I got so horny at the fact that I couldn't have sex with you, that I just masturbated over us breaking the rules...

11: And no, I don't regret it because my climax was lovely!

JC: *shocked face* *shocked face*

JC: You were masturbating over breaking the rules when we were talking about having no sex!!

11: *shy face* sorry. I'm sorry. Please don't hate me.

JC: lol

11: It was a physical act with myself, so it wasn't a sin.

11: I didn't break the rules.

JC: *hug*

11: ...

11: I climaxed twice btw.

JC: *slap*

The Lassi Lesbians were at a needle show. The kind of show that someone with a sirname like Chakarbatti has no business being at. A 70 year old woman that had lost a battle against gravity strode in 7-inch stilletos, a corset and a pair of knickers, across a huge raised perspex platform. With shocking red lips and layers of blue eyeshadow, she had a bored look on her face. Her sequence was repetitive: she would staple a long sheet of transparent plastic to an upright piece of cardboard, walk to the corner of the stage, roll around in a pile of glitter, soil and water, and sit down on a chair placed in another corner. A mixed race woman in a pair of black skinny jeans and a black shirt with her sleeves rolled up, wearing thick leather military boots and blue latex gloves, would then come and pin a rose to the 70 year old's bare chest, forming part of a heart shape. Then the sequence would start again. It went on until, presumably, the shape was finished, but Jaya found it hard focusing in the near darkness, her eyes drawn to the glitter, the glint of the needle as it slid through the balmy leaves of the rose and penetrated the skin with minimum effort. The sweet taste of Jaegermeister tickled the back of her throat, the lights were hazy, and people were quiet. From the corner of her eye, she could see Kulsuma's chest rising and falling. They were sat next to each other –as they always seemed to be. Meera sat to her left, her glossy hair resting like some sort of domestic animal, the red sole of her painfully high heels breaking up the blackness of the rest of her outfit.

People sat all around the stage; it looked like a watering hole for pretentious ponderers, the gaping pores of their skin like open mouths under the bad yellow spotlighting. The old saggy woman looked tired; the piece lacked the purposeful edge of contemporary art, the illusion of aloofness; it was far too urbane to weave its way in to halls of Somerset House. So it had ended up here; in the bowels of a discarded tobacco house frequented by art students and gays who loved telling their friends that they sat deep in to the night watching alternative art pieces man so boho right really playful, and thumping alternative electric body music.

There were three huge floors, winding metal staircases, and generally a lot of space that the darkness filled and magically disappeared if somebody walked in to it. The lack of human voices made everything seem surreal; as though everything was about to melt.

'Who did you go and meet today Kully?' Jaya asked.

'An old friend. Waste of time. We don't have much in common anymore. Used to know him from primary school.'

'Do you like this place?'

Kulsuma looked around, at the pockets of huddled people. She thought about the concept of perceived popularity. While most people lived in their heads, perception was perfectly justifiable as a theory to live by. But popularity by definition meant calculating external masses, figured and numbers, was impossible to be judged internally. These people, who had their eyes narrowed as they looked at each other, their smiles for show, their faces bland –they had gotten it wrong. They were only perceived. There was nothing popular about them.

She looked at Jaya, just an inch taller, lights shining from behind her, lips moist and pouted, eyes with no judgement (was she thinking about Eleven right now?), looking expectantly at her.

'You know what? No. I don't. Let's get to G-A-Y bar. It's going to be pretty rammed, we'd better get there quickly.'

So they left Shunt and its space behind, heading towards Old Compton Street. Meera and Raj giggled about girls, eyed up passers-by and laughed incessantly. Kulsuma was quiet, like Jaya.

There was something Jaya had noticed tonight, in Kulsuma's face. It was pre-occupation; the kind Jaya knew came from the queasy feeling of something internal being dislodged. It was different from the kind of attention she usually got from Kulsuma; the innocent listening of somebody easy-going and honest. Was Kulsuma too surrendering to the false consciousness of a twentysomething Lassi Lesbian? Had Jaya missed it? Was she supposed to say something? They had known each other for years and been the default setting for one another, the best type of friend there was (though certainly not best friends; Jaya's best friend was an Irish Jewish via South African girl from North London). And why did Jaya feel inferior in the face of Kulsuma's preoccupation (was there something on her face?)?

By the time they had arrived at G-A-Y bar, Kulsuma's restlessness had evaporated. She was here; she was at the mecca of gay bingo: an Asian on stage playing an Asian instrument in a gay venue. Her existence didn't get any more appropriate than this; she would knock back a few vodka and lemons, spill a few drinks over a few boobs and stop inner monologing.

The place was heaving with people; loud music, gays who certainly weren't an affront to their stereotype, and moody emo kids trying to hide delight in their faces with their sweeping fringes. Thumping bass (as standard) and a long playlist of Pussycat Dolls, Kylie Minogue and Jessie J lined the TV screens. The public messaging service was sporting its usual clouds of futile pulling lines: 'Hey you in the corner booth with the yellow trainers; wanna get it awn? BoyWithRedVestxxx'.

They bought drinks and squeezed in with a few other punters who were already pissed, on a purple sofa. Meera was already beaming, her eye on a few girls already. Raj bore her usual look of a startled schoolgirl allowed out for the first time, not knowing where to start. The magazine with pictures of penises in the back ('Boys, want some hot love in your ear? Dial 0800...') seemed a good idea until the page titled 'Cock Pit' –which sported home photos of dicks from all over the country- showed a shrivelled one riddled with warts which almost made Raj cry.

The different voices rose above the bodies and it didn't matter anymore. Whether it was a South London accent or the Irish or the Caribbean or the gentle warblings of an Arabian; they were being joined and fractured then glued again then broken with the joining still there until they were so fragmented that everyone became tiny little islands of individuality and were once again re-unified by their island-ness. There was the natural ebb and flow of sexuality which was, by simple evolutionary statutes of extending gene pools for survival, colourless and void of all accents, and there was no discrimination agains the baritones of the girls or the squeaks of the boys –or in this case, vice versa.

Kulsuma looked at the crowd, her arms folded, not touching her drink.

Jaya leaned over. 'What's wrong Kully?'

Kulsuma, who for one night actually felt like a Kully; part of something, some contempo-casual being that was rooted for by her own, smiled. It was a superficial smile for a superficial joy: Jaya's black hair falling neatly forward because of Kulsuma; because she wanted to talk to Kulsuma Begum of the Unheard. She could confidently say that tonight she had changed the course of some of Jaya's molecules.

She shook her head slowly. 'Absolutely nothing, I-'

'Bullshit. There's something wrong. You've been quiet all day. That display at Shunt would have got your juices flowing on any other day. Seriously, what's up?'

'I feel good, honestly. Work is good, Abba's healthy, it's all hot shit.'

Jaya held a straight face. 'Yea right. I'll get it out of you pretty soon.'

Kulsuma grinned. 'If you say so. Anyway, who's this new skirt you've been chasing?'

Jaya laughed. 'O she's chased. She's chased down, mate.' She took a long swig of her drink. 'It's amazing. There's no pretence at all. No baggage.'

'Apart from the kids and the husband?'

'That's even better, man. Seriously, it's awesome; she's not guna let anything slip cuz she has to stay with them –she's not exactly going to leave them for me, I'd run a mile- but I get to have fun beforehand.' Beforehand.

'Ok, sounds cool. But like, is she, you know, all right downstairs?'

'What do you mean?'

'She's had three kids an' that. You know: she a bit stretched, like?'

Jaya's eyes opened wide. 'Compared to what? Your Thames barriers?'

'Ha! Piss off!...no seriously. Do they hang down, the layers?'

'...A bit.'

'Haa! Mate that is weird. How much.'

'Not enough to notice, but if she hadn't had kids I suppose they'd be a bit less stretched.'

'Mate, do Paki birds shave down there? Sikh girls don't, you know. I was picking at my teeth for ages after Sukhi,'

'Yea she does. She's Muslim ennit? It's all good. Regular check ins at Minge Maintenence.'

And it didn't bother Kully one bit. She didn't want to know how the girl looked in daylight; going straight for the image of an ugly vagina was all she needed to calm the torrents of jealousy that whipped away at her insides. She withdrew from the conversation quickly (which Jaya noticed, wondering how to make somebody -whose already segmented sense of belonging (to several different postcodes) -open up). The noise of the crowd lulled, the loud music stopped, and everyone sat down. The lights were dimmed. Jaya sat back and put down her drink, and the first few strums of the sitar were heard.

Anoushka Shankar sat cross legged on the stage, her sitar nestled in her lap, eyes closed, head bent. She barely made a crumple in the gold-edged sari that was laid out like a carpet across the platform. Her fingers plucked, one by one, dreary movements that moved over the strings as they kicked about on familiar terrain.

Jaya's ears felt like they were weeping. Each note was slow and deliberate, there seemed to be no connection between them; they could easily have been removed and placed neatly in to another composition. The silence between each strum was full of fear. But then, each twang started becoming higher than the one before. Slowly, really really gently, the notes came closer and closer together, faster, building up speed, the twangs weren't allowed to run their full cycle of vibrations before they were hit again and again in a different way with a different sound and a different rythm and a new determination. A flick of a wrist would send forth another layer of another kind of song. She built it and built it and was soon plucking the sitar strings with such speed and precision that her hand became a blur; god! How fast was she! Boom twick twee twang faster than the brain could process and soon she was flipping between so many different notes that the music sounded like it was having a conversation within itself: a high pitched string of notes would immediately give way to a low bass which would be repudiated by a disjointed melody which was then interrupted by a pernicious jaunty baritone.

Her hands sprinted across the sitar and gave birth to golden notes; they leaked in to every crevice of the room; behind the sofas, inside the plastic straws, in to the creases of bandanas hanging out of back pockets, stuck to the links of gold chains on wrists, resting in the dip of the free condom packets at the bar, rolling along the grooves of car keys on tables, sliding down the necks of empty bottles and even leaking through peoples' eyelashes.

Why, and how, do certain things strike more of a chord with certain people? And why did Jaya think of this music as full bodied? Words floated through her consciousness, along with pictures and mists and ambiences and people; they seeped in to her mind and saturated it like a sponge. She couldn't explain it even to herself, gorger of Thought that she was, this was beyond her fathom. Which strange forces made her, who had never had any reason whatsoever to like sitar music; the music of the old and boring black and white Indian films which she didn't understand or care about; the thoughtless background music of A-level film pieces on culture? Did she believe her own theories of transcendental appeal to the senses?

She didn't care what she believed. She knew what she didn't believe –most of the time- and she felt just a few levels below divinity, basking in the relaxing sound of the sitar. For all she cared, everybody else could have been bored shitless, but Jaya CHAKARBATTI felt solid and defined and anchored right now. There were few situations where she felt in complete control; that there may have been Histories or Forces or some enigmatic lull behind the scenes that tugged this way and that; but in this moment, there were no blushing secrets, no hidden nooks in to which she couldn't reach. There was contentment indelibly tied to all encompassing knowledge -nobody else needed to know.

Eyeballs were glued to Anoushka Shankar; some faces had smiles on them, some looked mildly confused, and others looked at their shoes, heads cocked a little. Were they genuinely appreciating this music? This strange music that had no place in their lives at all? Or was it a show, a polite toleration borne from years of conforming to political correctness? Were they too afraid to say 'well actually, that was a bit shit'? Had these poor white folk been beaten in to submission? Because (Jaya thought woefully) that would be the biggest disaster of all (asides from third world poverty, rape and manslaughter): denying the White folk from the very freedom which they advocated for the Windrushers and the Indians? The Freedom of Speech? Jaya suddenly became conscious; she found it tough to get in to the consciousness of a white man; or a white woman... did they make racist jokes amongst themselves as she did with her family? When dad suddenly said 'All Englishes are bastards I tell you; racialists', did white people also have their equivalent? It was ok to be racist against the whites at their dinner table; had racism in English households also passed the dinner table test? Would they appreciate the sitar music they listened to tonight and talk about it at the table? Or would they jokingly say something they would never repeat in public?

As these thoughts had a way of sneaking up on her, Jaya took a deep breath. It was difficult to live in the here and now sometimes; she'd been struggling with it since birth. She tracked her thoughts back to the sitar music, just as it ended.

The room erupted in to applause. Not a polite, token kind of applause –a shameless, individual applause that didn't need to be checked or verified by the neighboring body. The decimal level of the room was astounding and for a minute blocked out any other kind of sound. It was the only time Jaya was happy to be part of something so large, although these things were difficult to monitor in the larger scheme of things.

And the evening went on in the kind of blur that university weeknights did; some things happened, the one thing you wanted didn't.

Jaya didn't want to a Moment Person; swooping in and draining Kulsuma's feelings, getting a temporary high and then reclining. She kept an eye on Kulsuma, but in doing so, notice she was being watched herself. In that way that awkward moments continually keep passing between two train passengers who attempt to ignore each other even though they've taken the same commute for the last three years, Jaya and Kulsuma too didn't know what to say when their eyes snagged on the other's vision. It was a strange sensation, not knowing what to say to someone whom you've know for years and for a minute, their colliding gazes made Jaya miss Eleven. Of course, surrounded by Clubbers' Lust and pumping music was the most alienating of feelings, depression waiting just behind waiting to pounce at any moment but Jaya, Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty was in check with her public face. If it got too much, she went to the toilet and looked at the scrawlings on the wall or sat on the toilet lid for a while (when there was one), recuperated and joined the party; given, after each emergence her smile went down a notch, but that was how everyone felt even if they didn't know it. That was why people got worn out. Not dancing or drink. It was mental wear and tear.

But she missed Eleven's holding gaze, her smug smile, her ear nips, her chauvenistic degradation disguised as femme fatality but immediately followed up by a look that said she was only testing the waters; the constant teasing, the hugs that were rare but so sure of themselves, the kicks under the table and the unexpected kisses after a few moments of neglect on a mobile phone; the inability to make any decision without consultation, and the ability to switch major plans after just one sentence from Jaya. The absentminded creation of a dip in her shoulder to accomodate Jaya's head when they sat next to each other and the bored look of despondency when Jaya trilled about money or politics or identity. The feigned yawns when Jaya wanted to watch something on TV and rejected her sexting; there was, effectively, nothing about Eleven that was theoretically consistently right, but nothing she could do wrong.

And as if momentarily caught off guard by herself, she walked to Kulsuma.

'What's wrong?'

Kulsuma blinked. 'I've been thinking a lot recently.'

Jaya grabbed her wrist and led her to the sofa. Kulsuma felt like royalty and a peasant at the same time. 'Look yea, Kully, I knew something was wrong. You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but I suggest you do. Like, it's unnerving. You look miserable.'

'I don't mean to be. I've just had a rough couple of days.'

'Why?'

'Mate, things aren't going very well. I hate my job, I don't know what I like anymore, I'm sick of hanging around. I think I just need a re-evaluation.'

'O god not you as well,'

'What?'

'You're turning straight aren't you?'

Kulsuma's eyed widened. 'What the hell? No!'

'Everyone else is!'

'Not me!'

'Look, if you were, it's fine. We're all going to have to do it anyway, I just didn't expect everyone to be doing it so soon,'

'I know. We will have to do it soon but my parents aren't pushing me yet. How about yours?'

'Seen a few guys, just to keep the peace, y'know. But don't really see it happening for a few years, really-'

'What are you waiting for?'

'Just not ready yet. Need to meet someone first,'

'O right. Need a few years do you?'

'Yes.'

'To fall in love with him?'

'Well when you put it like that...Actually no. I just don't want to get married yet. I have to first turn straight, or try to, just, y'know, get mentally prepared at having to marry a bloke, then get all the gay out of my system-'

'You don't believe that for a minute, Jaya.'

'I do. Sexuality is fluid.'

'Not yours. You love pussy way too much. I can't picture you with a guy at all, the world will turn upside down, you're way too gay, man,'

Jaya became irritated. 'What do you expect me to do then? Stay lonely for the rest of my life, like the rest of the idiots in here? What kind of future do you think we have? Gay women can't have kids together yet, you still need a sperm donor, the female-female baby thing is probably centuries away; gay men still cheat the most and still have the highest rates of HIV and still think it's ok to stick your dick in anything that comes your way.'

'You think straight men are any better?'

'That's not the point Kulsuma, I'm not after his loyalty-'

'So you're ok if he shags around then?'

'No of course not; I'd get an MOC then-'

'So you want to have a genuine marriage yet you're telling me you're not after his loyalty?'

'When did this turn in to an interrogation?' Jaya's brow creased in defensive confusion.

'You don't make any sense Jaya. You were always the one campaigning for equality and waving those big boards with the crowds at uni. I think everyone's a bit confused as to what you're doing.'

'What I'm doing?'

'Yea; like, everyone's confused.'

Of course, it had never occured to Jaya that people felt ownership over the processes of her living. Were they finding it hard to look at her and see plurality? Had she, instead of being adaptable, just become spineless? Had Jaya Chakra-Borty's long line of bloodline heritage tradition become such an entity unto itself that it's wisdom had become so all-encompassing that it became self absorbed and obliterated itself by imploding? Was she self-annihilating?

There was a shift between them then; Kulsuma and Jaya looked at each other in that way that two people deep in thought accidentally end up staring at each other without realising. Was Jaya being humiliated or exhalted?

Kulsuma shrunk back in to her seat. 'Listen, I know you're going through the same stuff as everyone else. But no one else goes on about equality and empowerment. No one else is as publicly out as you are. Plus, you didn't exactly sound disapproving when Harsha, the biggest dyke of us all, ended up pulling a guy the other day,'

'Listen yea, going straight is the biggest taboo for gaysians cuz we're all guna have to do it at some point; I'm no different –I didn't want to comment because I'm going to end up doing it-'

'Are you?'

'Kully is this what's on your mind? Is this why you're miserable tonight? Because of the fact that I'm going to marry a guy?' Jaya took a long swig of her drink, falling in to the big, bold movements of a rowdy Coventrian –it was a role she occasionally took on when her foundations were being inspected. 'Because it's unfair that I'm the one being called up to answer when the rest of us will end up doing the same thing. A bit of sympathy wouldn't go amiss.'

Like somebody walking in to a Birmingham subway past midnight after reading statistics in the local rag, Kulsuma knew there was a high chance some social violation may take place tonight but couldn't be bothered to back track. She could see Jaya's defences torn; Kulsuma's usual method of placation didn't offer its vastness any more and the ripples of rejection began to push Jaya slowly outwards towards the shore. Kulsuma was bemused inside at seeing Jaya startled; perhaps Kulsuma had rocked her boat (that would be a first) but it was ok to piss off people who were superior to you; it was comical, endearing even. Only when it's the other way around, The Truth Hurt.

So Jaya thought for a little while whether or not to humour Kulsuma's taunts, or to pish-posh them away with a grin. It hurt, being poked like this. Asides from the idea that somebody was attempting to poke a hole in her ego, there was also the possibility that somebody was nibbling away at the inside canvas (the self-assuring idea that she was flexible and adaptable and made allowances for every school of thought), exposing the real inner tube that kept her inflated: an irrational default wagon by way of Islam (depending on the time of day; and race and girls and having something to kick against and something as vague and precipitative as freedom of thought and speech, but never clueless liberalism). She had to claw back ownership of her actions.

'Kully, I understand that things are tough being us; a lot of people say it's tough being Christian and gay but they're just trying to muscle in on our death ground. It's extra hard for us; but if we keep on torturing one another over how bad the other is then it will only be more difficult. When I'm married, I-'

'Look, you don't have to justify anything to me, or us. I'm just worried about, you know, our lifespan.'

'What?'

'Like, how long we're guna stay together. Inevitably we'll have to go our seperate ways at some point.'

'Why?'

'Well we can't stay in touch when we're married, can we?'

'What, why?'

Kulsuma laughed. 'You look so hurt, bless you.' She touched Jaya's knee in what was possibly one of bravest things she'd done in her life. 'Well we'd constantly be reminding ourselves of the past,'

'And?'

'Stop being silly. You can't have lesbian friends when you're married...'

'Why? I'm not friends with you because you're a lesbian, I'm friends with you because I enjoy your company.'

'...Really?'

Jaya nodded, watching Kulsuma carefully when she looked at the floor digesting this.

Kulsuma looked up and was swallowed, wholly and completely, by Jaya's stare. Off guard, she was knocked over and sucked in to the chasm that was Jaya's face. Her straight back, her erect posture, the delicate hands, the hollowed cheeks of some Manga character and the long neck. It made her think of God. It made her want to suggest that Jaya begin wearing the niqab. It made her want to scream to the world 'Stop mining us for morals!' because she feared what they may find; a world as chaotic and full of resentment as the digger himself; a hollow place which turned out just to be a reflective mirror, perhaps murkier from being kept underneath for so long. They had their own victories (India, Cricket World Cup 2011) and their losses (ban on Islamic face veil, France, 2011) and they had their rewards (Equality Act 2010) and their punishments (everything towards Muslims post 9/11). And it was this that made Kulsuma withdraw from Jaya when her toes were so close to the edge: this idea that perhaps Jaya was nothing but a reflector of Man, like Suskind's Jean-Baptiste –fated only for the self indulgent nihilistic people who would become obsessed by their reflection til they gorged on their own desire and died.

'Would you never tell your parents, Jaya?'

Jaya looked at her and shook her head slowly, regretfully, but absolutely. 'There's no question about it, never. I'd never do that to them.'

'If you did it, you'd be happy. I know you'll scoff at that, but in 50 years time when you've been longingly staring at women for so long but you're stuck in this marriage... I mean, what kind of life is that?'

'In 50 years time, I'd be in love with him by then... surely?'

'Maybe. But imagine if that was a girl, something that comes naturally to you. You wouldn't be looking at other men would you? You'd be in love with a girl, and you'd be making a life with that girl, and that's who you are.'

Jaya looked in to her lap. 'I've always held the conviction that I can change.'

'You've tried haven't you? You shagged that Chris geezer. And it hurt you, and you went in to the toilet and cried your eyes out and you never cry you cold bitch. And you tried stopping thinking about women and it almost drove you mad. You do some crazy things sometimes Jaya, but going the whole hog will destroy you.'

'This goes beyond obeying parents Kully.' She looked up. 'I don't want to go to hell.'

And even though she didn't mean to, Kulsuma from the line of God-fearing maids and mullahs, spat out her drink in an explosion of laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed til she had to sit back to stretch out her stomach muscles as they cramped from each wheezy exortation. She bounced up and down and held her stomach, then jerked forward til her head hung over her knees and her hair was splayed over them. Her eyes had begun to water. She looked up.

'Jaya, are you taking the piss?'

'No. And you didn't have to laugh for that long, it wasn't even funny..'

'That is the funniest thing I've heard. You eat pussy, you drink, you're shaggin a married bird, you smoke, you watch porn, you don't pray, and yet you're afraid of going to hell?'

'Yes. You make it sound like it's something you've never heard one of us say before.'

Kulsuma wiped her eyes and sat back, her stomach muscles throbbing. 'No, mate, I have heard it before. But that's why you don't want to marry a girl? Because you're afraid of going to hell?'

'That's pretty much the long and short of it, yea.'

'So you're going to subject yourself to a lifetime of misery just so you don't go to hell?'

'Listen you twat, you're making me feel like I'm KoKo the fucking clown. It's a perfectly legit point of view,'

'No it isn't Jaya. What about everything else you do? Aren't those things going to send you to hell? Yes they will. So you might as well go the whole hog and make your time on earth completely haraam,'

'I don't see the point in digging myself in any deeper. Marriage is so permanent, so deliberate. If I do it right –to a man- then eventually I'll go to heaven. And for the rest of the stuff, well, I can repent for that when I eventually get my hoosh and stop it.'

Kulsuma shook her head, took a sip of her drink and looked around the club slowly. 'You know, for a rational person, you do talk a load of shit sometimes.'

'You know you feel the same way I do Kully.'

'No Jaya. I don't. If I love somebody and that love is pure and I don't hurt anybody else and I build a future with somebody and read my namaaz and give my zakaat, I'm good. I don't feel that means I'll get hot pokers rammed up my vag in the hereafter.'

'That's a load of shit. It's fish hooks that'll get torn through your cheeks.'

'O yea, course.' She brought her gaze back to Jaya. 'You're in for a miserable time.'

'There's no other way Kully. It's life.'

And Jaya Chakarbatti shrugged her shoulders and sat back. No, perhaps her salvation wasn't in the stars alongside her hoosh acting like some celestial middle man. Perhaps she was kidding herself that she would ever get to heaven with the horses and the trees and the all-knowing New York Times journalists and cotton sari'd Bangladeshi poetry teachers reclining on layers of fluffy cloud. But she knew that going all out anti-Muhammad wasn't the right way to live her life; she knew there had to be some strife for Salvation. It was just too easy to give in to the the Nafs, the evil Inner Being who made out all wrongs as rights. Yes, yes, perhaps she was willing to accept some suffering in her Present to make allowances for the Future. What you reap today, you sow tomorrow, go make me a cup of tea, I'll give you 20p. Dad had always cleared the playground for her. He had always been there. And Mrs Chakarbatti, who was always in shawls and flowing sari's because things sewn in a body shape offended her and she had never worn a cardigan in her life, was always watching her and shielding her like the gently swaying and rustling branches of a tree. Nothing but thinking was ever required of Jaya, the daughter of the peaceful and calm parents whose unspoken love was enough to fill the canyons of the universe and whose worries were enough to shatter the earth. Yes, they held back the walls of the world to give Jaya her space to obliviously assemble her blocks so that she could one day stand up and make the walls run away just with her clarity and wisdom of thought and would not have to break her back holding them at bay as her parents had done.

Jaya knew she would go home and not cook a curry (she didn't know how, she'd never needed to cook one and the last time her mother had tried to make her had erupted in a violent scuffle between her parents as her dad said their daughters' time to study and 'think' was more important). She knew she would be allowed to stay in her room for days on end without anybody interrupting her serenity (save a few shouts for prayer) and she knew she wouldn't be asked to do the housework. Instead, she was expected to report on the progression of her post-University prospects, her reflections on life, and whether or not she wanted to take driving lessons. She knew that all legal matters and property purchases her father would make would be professionally photocopied and all letters typed up by her father's assistant (the trusty Mr Mujib who stepped about the office as delicately as a shadow so as not to intrude on their lives and had respectfully only said about four or five hushed words to Jaya over the 30 years of his tenure at Chakkarbatti & Co Chartered Accountants, Coventry). And she knew that even though she stressed about her future, the space of her present was cleared by the organization and labours of her father's loyal Hunter Gatherer instincts and robust approach to his client accounts. For a man to spend his lifetime dedicated to the mendacity of fiscal figures for the sake of a steady income and the maintenance of his family even though a creative beast roared inside him was something that almost bought tears to Jaya's eyes.

But yes, Kulsuma and many others like her would have to deal with the shackles of the present which included being asked to do the hoover and Mr Sheen the TV and Blu the loo. How long, Jaya thought, would it take for somebody to break out of that cycle, and how long, she thought, in the final trailing whispers of thought that night before the whiskey silenced her mind, would it take for her to confess to Kulsuma that tonight, Jaya Chakarbatti knew that Kulsuma Begum wanted to kiss her on the lips.

Transpiring across borders was an enormous task, thought Asif. He hoped the media treated his memory kindly and gave it its due before the fashion passed, and filled his own lacunae with poignant soundbytes from his friends and family. He hoped Amma and Abba wouldn't be afraid of the cameras gathering at their doorstep. He hoped they understood. He knew that they would be happier if he didn't have to die, but the bigger picture, the martyrdom, giving them the credit they deserved: yup, he had it all down.

There were a few things that he noticed when they emerged from their little nook on Old Compton Street after praying to Allah; firstly, he quietly ackowledged Him for the fortune that he was bombing the streets on the same day as the government cuts protest only a few roads away: the media was already out in force and it was added publicity. He gave a knowing mental nod towards the skies for that one. Secondly, he was shocked that there were still people gathering at the bars even though there was chaos so close by. He was disgusted that these people still wanted to have fun amidst all the serious shit that was going down in Central. How far removed must these people have been to not care about anything but socialising on a day like this?

He didn't need any more fuel, but these factors added to his List of Reasons to Bomb the Gays. Anchored by the moral certainties gifted by religion, his Five Pillars were reinforced. Just a few more minutes (they had to find the biggest crowd) and 1, 2, 3, push.

And even here where the libertarians (or 'librarians' as Brother Munir pronounced it) were supposed to be at their finest, Asif could hear hateful things:

'I'm updating my Grindr profile. Here 'avalook,'

'Ok, wassit say? Oooh: "I want you to suck my ass long and hard. No Asians: sorry guys but you just don't do it for me." Yea I know wha' ya mean maaaaate,'

Or: "You ever tried a bit of chocolate?" "Yea, no, not for me like" came the nasal reply. "A bit of brown? No? Not even a little bit? Not even a little bit of spiiiiice? Noooo?"

It was everywhere: groups of young Indian students being rejected for not being 'regulars', not 'having membership' or 'reserved party only I'm afraid' before letting in older white couples or younger white couples or straight white couples or young gay white couples etc. It was a frothing sea of white with the brown people bashing away at the shore before thrown back in to the sea. Asif watched with a scowl on his face. There was no reprise from it; this was modern Britain at it most modern. Skewed, discriminatory and foul.

'Let's hurry this up guys.'

They all snapped in to action. Asif seethed; his teeth were clenched and his feet hit the ground with every step, his anger bubbling away in his stomach as it had done all these years, spitting away. The acid was enough to double the explosion of his body tonight. He was highly flammable material.

They moved towards the centre of the street and had all of about 30 seconds to quickly get to middle of the crowds before they would notice the boys with their rucksacks and their floor skimming kurtas.

'Bismillahirahmaaniraheem.'

In the name of Allah, the most merciful.

'Brother Asif,' whispered Munir as they marched, 'do we do this together? Will there be a countdown?'

'Yes Brothers, there will be a sign. We will stand in a circle facing inwards and I will shout 'Allahu Akbar', then we will push the buttons in our rucksacks.'

'But brother mine is a string I have to pull it!'

'Pull it then.'

Munir sighed in relief.

'Oh my gosh Brother Asif I can't reach all the way in to the rucksack while it's still on my back,' Junaid had begun to squeak as the nerves tightened his throat.

Asif rolled his eyes and slowed his pace. 'Then bring the rucksack round to your front.'

'O yea,' he whispered. 'Allah is the Greatest.' His eyes rolled around the entrance of G-A-Y bar. 'There's a lot of Asians comin' out of that place.'

'Pray, Brothers. Do your final prayers.'

And with those final words, Asif took the final twenty steps before they all arrived at the entrance of a bar where squeaking boys and booming girls and beaming transsexuals spilled out on to the street, tripping over the velvet roped barriers and stumbling off the kerb, getting their heels stuck in the drains and vomiting over others' boots.

It took all of about three seconds for the whole of Old Compton Street to suddenly realize that these four boys were not in fancy dress.

Asif, Junaid, Munir and Hanif stood in a circle, their rucksacks nestled on their chests, puffed with pride, their right hands disappearing inside the small holes where the zip had carefully been opened by four inches. They looked at each other. The rain fell on them slowly, spitting and soaking their shoulders, seeping through their skull caps.

Asif nodded.

'ALLAHU-AKBAR!'

'O God Asif I can't find the button!' Junaid yelped, sudden panic creasing his face.

'Junaid!' Hanif's usually serene face looked thunderous. He leaped forward and tore open the front of Junaid's rucksack.

Two girls saw the mesh of wires, dropped their bottles and ran in separate directions.

'It's here, it's here!' Hanif savagely pointed at the bright pink button.

Sweat was pouring down Junaid's face. Asif looked around and saw a crowd of people coming to the slow realization that they were about to get the shit bombed out of them.

'Hurry!'

Hanif returned to his place in the circle. Junaid looked skywards, his finger on the button.

'ALLAAAAAHU-'

'Asif?'

A soft voice called out from behind him. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes bounced to the right.

He could only see long black hair from the corner of his eye.

One second of deafening silence.

Jaya slowly walked up to him, curiousity on her face.

She poked her head around his shoulder, looked him in the face, and smiled.

Asif's chest visibly deflated.

The boys' mouths were all open in expectation, their hands still in position, eyes darting between the girl and Asif.

'O- o- o, hey,' his cracked voice resonated along the whole street.

'What are you doing here?' She was still smiling.

She hadn't seen Junaid's exposed wires yet.

'We- we got a bit lost.'

His hand slid out of the rucksack and flopped by his side.

She chuckled softly. 'Oh, ok. Where were you supposed to be?'

Asif beckoned for Junaid to zip up his rucksack.

'It's ok Jaya. We have to run and catch that cab. Give my salaam to your parents.'

The boys' heads darted from side to side, looking at one another in confusion.

'Come on you lot!'

And Asif leaped away from the crowds, the Brothers in tow, hearts collectively beating at over 1000 per minute.

They ran and ran, in to the darkness of the winding and messy streets of the centre of London.

'What the fuck was that about?!! WHAT THE FUCK?!!' Junaid was crying, his voice broken, rain drops mingling with the sweat on his face.

They slowed to a stop. Asif doubled over, his palms cupped his knee caps.

'No way man, I can't do that.' He panted, shaking his head, his lips and cheeks hanging heavily towards the ground. His skull cap fell on to the wet pavement. His voice cracked.

'No way, man. I can't kill someone I know.'

# Chapter 9

Jaya wanted to speak to her dad. As was (possibly) the habit of somebody who had been moments away from a potentially life-endangering battering (it was actually two –she could have been the one Paul had picked that day, but as was the mysterious ways of the cosmos, she didn't know about the second), she was itching to get some form of relief from the chaotic murmerings in her head. She needed catharsis.

So, as Mr Chakarbatti turned on the radio in his office (previously the front room lounge; Mrs Chakarbatti made it perfectly clear in 1976 that she did not want him working away from home) and closed his accounting books for the day at 8.30pm, Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty was feeling distanced and needed an excuse to disturb him.

She made a cup of tea and brought it to him. Speech radio quietly fluffed up the room, with the droning voice of the presenter; the kind of voice that personified cold rainy lonely Sunday mornings:

"Multiculturalism has failed, they say, as though we care, as though it is our fault, as though it should matter... They are indebted to us and cannot afford such criticisms. People from the Indian subcontinent lost three million lives from the communal conflicts engineered by British colonialism and their agents during the partition in 1947. EDL, the BNP and other racist agents of the British state will not be allowed to spread their poison and create communal conflicts in Britain. Their 'divide and conquer' strategy will not work on the Sikhs and Muslims."

Another throaty voice responded: "In India, every five miles the language changes, the religions morph, yet they're still one people. Look at Britain, struggling to integrate despite having English as a common foundation. You don't hear anyone saying multiculturalism has failed in India, do you?"

'What else do you call the Mumbai Oberoi Hotel attack as?' Jaya scoffed. Mr Chakarbatti looked up at her. Either he would dismiss her or humour her.

'Now you're confusing culture with religion. Islam is different to fundamentalism.'

_Success_! 'Why can't our people control our own? We have these high folluted ideas of community and family values, so where did these terrorists come from?'

'They're not one of us. They've been infiltrated by the Middle Easterners. Our people are mainly Sunni; far too moderate for this kind of violence.'

'So why didn't their mothers or 'family' spot what was happening to poor little Tariq or teenager Usman as they were brainwashed by the terrorists?'

'Because the West has instilled in them something which our youth hasn't faced before. Anger.'

'Anger is hardly a Western concept.'

'Look: have you ever been faced with a threat to your identity? You're plodding along nicely in your life, with your classmates, all happy and then suddenly, boom. Literally. And everybody turns on you. When you're faced with that kind of threat to who you are, you're going to strike out. You're lumped in to the same category as the ignoramus. Naturally, there's an element of role-fulfillment in there for the immature ones. And the rest, well, you know how it is. They adopt this hyper-orthodox stance to who they are. That's why so many 'Asian colonies' exist in Britain. These immigrants have faced a threat to their Asian-ness, in the face of racism or whatever, and they introvert more and more in to themselves til they're practically living a caricatured version of who they were back home. Although for some, when they left back home, time stood still; they get so busy with their lives here, they forget to see the progression in their home countries and think things are still the same as when they left them in the 70's.'

'It seems that we're always victims of the circumstances.'

'Yes; but isn't that what makes the world go round?'

'No; why can't we become the instigators and control what happens to us?'

Mr Chakarbatti sighed. 'We are a weak people. Who knows why; perhaps after years of having our land plundered and our people confused, whatever it is. But look at India, the fastest growing economy in the world, it is. There is a tremendous amount of manpower that will learn to get mobilised.'

'Learn from who? What system will they follow? The Englishes, I suppose?'

'They do not own capitalism, or systems. They don't even own the English language. They do not exclusively belong to them. They have a bloody good PR system and a great pomp about what they do. Look at these greatly coloured cereal boxes, and look at the plain ones in Bangladesh. Who is making more profit? Who has the least expenditure? Back home, there is great wealth in the land; untapped gas resources, petrol, such and such. The problem is, they just need to organise themselves, and not bow to these age old colonial inferiority complexes. Most of London is owned by Arabs and Chinese, anyway. We have a long way to go; it is not a battle between the brown and the white. We are so insular sometimes.' He looked out of the window. 'Although, the richest man in the world is a brown. And you know,' he looked pained, 'sometimes our people can be so vulgar sometimes.'

'So can every other culture.'

He laughed. 'No, that is a cop-out of an excuse. If you don't learn the value of sweeping generalisations, you'll never win a debate. We have certain characteristics that are very specific to us. They're not in our blood, but they are what we have evolved with. Some idiots say that poverty and disorganisation is in our blood -there are some things that are in the blood, but that is too highly philosophical for most to understand- but these things aren't in the blood. You see, when people live together for years and years within the same boundaries, they develop the same moral code, the same rules of survival. These are superficial things that change as we cross boundaries. Some people mistake these rules as 'nationality'. They think, that when you come to another boundary, you can survive with these rules; they don't adapt. They cling on to it, and call these superficial rules their 'heritage'.' He sighed. 'I have a heritage; I have an ancestry, yes, so do you. That is unchanging, and you can learn a lot from the past. But these other things, well, people confuse them, don't they?'

Jaya looked up, questioning, confused, attempting to weave the fray of threads forming in her thoughts.

'Some people think heritage is doing what your forefathers did. They call it tradition, or culture, or whatever. But that idea is more universal; a lot of people naturally do what their parents did, because they want to make their parents _happy_. And you keep your parents happy and bide your time til they die, and then you beckon in what makes you and your children happy. See? We are all living half in half out. My father was not happy that I was coming to England to be educated; he wanted me to look after the hardware shops. But I came here, but sent him money, and I balanced them both while he was still alive. I didn't have the patience to wait til he died.' He chuckled. 'Yes, we were different, but you know what is the same?' He adjusted his skull cap. 'This. We lived together in Islam. That was our father-son unifying theme.'

'And they're even trying to take that away from you.'

He waved his hand, dismissing her; she felt pathetic for attempting to sympathise.

'Everybody tries to take something away from the newbies. Even the most moderate of our factions are being accused of fundamentalism; mosques aren't allowed to be built because they say it encourages isolation, that its like a magnet for similar people and creates ghettos. They will get bored of it one day. You don't worry about being the mouthpiece for somebody else. Look inside your head and act out of kindness, and forgiveness. But don't be a walkover. And remember to make money, or you'll end up on your arse with nowhere to go when your husband kicks you out.' His body bounced gently in a silent laughter.

'It's tough when they generalise.'

'This is the thing with you young people. You think everybody is out to get you.'

'I know what's going through their heads; they feel resentment towards us. Once a seed is planted in their heads, it's there forever. And our people have so much to lose, but don't speak out enough. And only when it builds up, then they get angry and start stomping and shouting...and that just perpetuates it...'

'Yes; our Bengali people didn't have much to start with, that's why they get defensive. They didn't even have a language to write in. Now those people, they have a reason to get angry, when people attempt to take something away from them. The only way to preserve their part in history is what is written about them in other languages; in English, Urdu, Italian, whatever. So you see, when you are new somewhere, and the memoirs, articles, films written about you show you in a negative light, you will get defensive. You only get one first impression. Our community feel that people have surpassed their core values, ignored the majority of their goodness, and skipped straight to all the modern stuff, all the 'cool' stuff like philandering and discontent and rebelliousness. When a community has had its majority values established, that is fine, but somebody who came in and read literature and watched films in English about our peoples, this brand new generation, they'd think we were all malcontent. You know that's not true. I'm happy and get on with it; you see Mr Ashik, he has his accountancy business? Him too. And Mr Nawaaz, with his big restaurant. We are loaded. We have children who are the new generation and yes, you lot have various issues. But we are all tarnished with the same brush.' He took a deep breath. 'So you see, this is why when you lot wield the tool of your newly acquired language in such a loud and brash way, we worry that everybody else will think we are the same. We are afraid to lose _our_ identity. So that is why we get defensive. We haven't developed enough confidence to laugh at ourselves yet.'

'We've been here long enough.'

'It's not the number of years, Jaya. It's the quality of life.'

Jaya stirred in the sweetener in his tea, quietly and without tapping the spoon on the rim of the mug ('quietly and discreetly or people will think you are seeking attention'), and walked to her room. Again, as seemed to be permanently the case recently, her head was heavy with the mist of a jigsaw-like confusion; the pieces were there, she understood them, but didn't know where they fit.

Pluralism was something she had denied herself (although it did squeeze it's slippery head out occasionally) and it seemed that relativism was skewed. Pathos, Ethos and Logos, Adaptation and all sorts of other theories cummed out by the Intellectuals, which she had savoured til her mouth literally watered, were increasingly chuckling at themselves and making a fool out of her.

Wounded, she began to induce boredom. Boredom, which was stifled out the by the other shit and crap that people occupied themselves with. Boredom, which harboured creativity but seemed to be facing a losing battle in the face of noise: clicks, yibberyabber, coffee machines, flickering screens, r 'n' b videos, rustling broadsheets, car doors, tin bins, bleeps, bloops... an avalanche of noise and images the Englishes distracted themselves with. But here in their household, there was quite. It was the default setting for their home. The room stood quietly. It was in the quiet that prayers could be perceived as real; that history had a perfect platform and it was where the future timidly unfolded itself. Simple living, high thinking, Mr Chakkarbatti would say, his eyes closed, his head bobbing from side to side, a content smile on his face, in his armchair, his legs not quite long enough to reach the floor. Yes, it was the silence in their home that really gave birth to the grandiose knack their family had of talking less and sweeping people off their feet. There was no collective hobby they did together as a family –nothing as vulgar as watching TV shows together or reading together or singing together or even sharing the same life philosophy. No thread joined them, no bizarre notion of an interlocking thread that they wove together. Just silence. It was a bliss they lived in and protected, and occasionally granted to visitors who always somehow had a heavy heart when they left at night, trademarked by the few seconds they would hover on the straw 'Welcome' mat outside the door.

Sat on her bed, her knuckles brushing the sitar lightly, she manipulated the silence and lay a platform in her mind, which immediately became crammed with several things –the restlessness of youth took shape.

Being comfortable with the ambiguous nature of her own existence and with a knack for web-thinking, Jaya Chakra-Borty often thought she placated the world with her forgiving, contexualising thought, rather than using her special knack to negotiate with it. This was something she had to confront with Kulsuma that night. There were times when she couldn't remember the last time she'd changed someone's mind, and found herself simply weaving her way in to those minds instead, becoming a fixture. Was she simply being a walkover? Or was being part of the furniture a good thing?

Wishy washy didn't sit with her, and she became intent on turning her confusing thoughts in to something decisive, until the hours ticked onwards, the cigarette butts mounted and she'd been resting her head on the sitar strings for so long that seven finely grooved lines appeared on her face. Dawn broke; but on this morning where she couldn't sleep and the birds had annoyingly started tweeting at 4am, she wondered where all the introspection was leading her. She still had no idea what to do after graduation and was weighed down with the fact that studying an art left her tragically short of any negotiating power in to a true profession (of which, of course, there were only two).

(Had the next day passed or was she imagining it? But) She lay next to her sitar all night, not getting under the covers, as though something was supposed to happen; as though inspiration was supposed to ooze in to her from the dead piece of wood and its living threads. Was there something wrong with her? Why did some call her too Asian and some too white? She was quintisentially neither, the bastards. So she didn't identify with street wise cockney Balti Boys who had obsessions with Bruce Springsteen and other random pop icons, or the trendy short-back-and-sides Samosa Suzies who had Andy Warhol-style posters of Asha Bhosle on their walls; so what? She hadn't grown up in the 70's. Why did she feel guilty about not identifying with her heritage in the same way others did theirs?

The situation had reached critical mass and fiddling about on her mobile phone and the impotent presence of the sitar wouldn't help. She stood up and paced her room. The laminate floor almost froze her soles.

Everything seemed so bloody naff. She looked around her room, at the books, the photos. These stupid remnants of somebody else's history she attempted to claim as her own.

What the fuck did she care about the Southall Riots for? The boy in Leeds who had 'Holy Smokes' tattood on his arm for some reason had felt that she'd be interested in his story and she, like the sponge she was, had conned herself in to thinking she was part of that history (she wasn't to know that the police officer who truncheoned a man to death was to occupy lots of her time as she read comments on an anti-fascist march). Why did she spend money on books that sat on her shelf, chronicling the lives of other peoples' histories, which she hunted and gathered like pieces of somebody else's jig saw?

Did she still think the browns had a collective identity? That didn't seem to cut it anymore. Things were much more subtle; garish generalisations didn't work. But then nor did outright rejection. Had the shift changed? Was it because her generation had learnt to pick and choose what they liked about their outgoing heritage, that no outsiders could possibly predict exactly what to stereotype anymore?

What was the future of this generation? White couples were now allowed to adopt Black and ethnic minority children; inter racial marriage was thrown about willy-nilly, Muslim gays were getting nikahs, some Asian kids, despite having immigrant parents, didn't know how to speak the Mother tongue...

And in the back of her mind, none of it mattered. Her father had said the rules didn't stay the same when the barriers were different. Perhaps it was natural. Perhaps finally, having brown skin didn't matter, didn't govern the way somebody acted.

But still...the unending pathos in her mind could have easily finished on the idea that being a brown was more part of life's nuance than the whole picture, and the idea that everyone had different parts that governed different lives was just the ultimate namby pamby conclusion.

She took a deep lungful of tobacco and thought of the way Eleven's hair had mingled with the strings on the sitar. There was another sacrifice that was inevitable. Another shadow that would have to eventually recline in to the creases of her mind. Another self sacrifice.

Self sacrificing occured to achieve an ideal. Whose ideal? was the question for Jaya. When the needed sacrifice to achieve one's personal ideal isn't achieved, you have to sacrifice to fill someone else's ideal. At least there's be one happy party. It was win-win. The recyling of happiness at least stayed in the family.

So Jaya, too scared, unwilling and afraid of the hellfire to sacrifice her family for the sake of her sapphic ideal, decided that she woud have to sacrifice her sapphic ideal for the sake of her family. It was a neat switch which karmic theory supported as coming full circle, no energy lost, optimum result achieved –at least (seemingly) in the bigger picture of things.

So that was it: she would have a voluntary marriage. Not a freefalling taken-in-the-stride-of-life kind of marriage, which existed in and for itself, but a voluntary marriage: suffixed and proactively shoehorned in to her life because it wasn't a natural fit. A liaison that would last 50 or so years and pinch together two different families at one point in time, forever changing the course of both dynasties.

As preperations began for the Chakkarbatti family to go on their yearly holiday to Bangladesh in the middle of the summer monsoon –as they did every year no questions asked- this time, Jaya would pack the salwaar kameezes made of soft schiffon, and crushed silk, and plunging necklines. The ones with the huge cascading scarves that hid nothing but her real intentions. She would go back to university and finish off her Finals and spend the last few days of her University life as she had promised she never would; not deep in thought about post-graduation or putting the finishing touches on her soon-to-be rank of 'Educated Girls.' No. She would push out all thoughts of anything and watch endless videos on YouTube, indulge in marathons of House and Daria and South Park. She would tune in to the television and tune out of the world, detoxing her brain of the need for substance. She would numb her mind to things that would distract her from fulfilling what she was meant to do; to carry on the bloodline heritage and the dusty palaces and desert plains and tea-gardens. She would leave behind this world, as she signified every so often in prayer, putting her hands up to her ears, palms frontwards, shunning the world behind her with the backs of her hands. She would effectively turn her whole life in to a prayer.

Jaya wore a beanie hat, jeans and a black t shirt to visit Eleven today. For maximum lesbian effect, she contemplated hangin a bandana from her pocket or even wearing a hoodie but thought this was going a bit too far. Just as the government had stigmatised smoking, they'd almost outlawed hoodies, so this too was out of the question. She thought she ended up looking nondescript and decided that this was really the best way to end the relationship to the love of one's life. Unpretentiously and without vanity.

She got a taxi to Birmingham this time, and met Eleven inside the Coachcard Warehouse, full of discarded boxes and plastic packaging, shutters open wide, the last building on the long stretch of Birmingham's gay scene, people not quite sure whether it qualified as being a gay building or not.

Eleven was sat atop one of the empty upturned brown boxes, watching people pass on the street outside. Her long legs were crossed, her hair wild. She looked up as Jaya walked in, hands in her jacket pockets.

Eleven sighed. 'You want to talk about something serious, don't you?'

Jaya couldn't bring herself to smile. Her insides suddenly felt dry.

'Jaya, what is it?' Eleven stood up.

'I'm going to Bangladesh.'

'Don't you go to Bangladesh every year?'

'Yes, I do... But this time it's amidst... well, you know. The whole marriage thing.'

Eleven nodded. 'Yea, I know, I was expecting that to come along at some point, but you're not gunna get married when you go this time, are you?'

'Well...'

'O come on Jaya, I expected more from you. You're going for a maximum of, what, five, six weeks? You can't meet a guy to marry in such a short space of time. And what about us?'

Jaya looked up. 'What about us?'

Eleven scoffed, suddenly angry. 'Jesus, I know you don't like telling the world about us, but I thought at least you knew what 'us' meant.' She started pacing. 'I bet you haven't even told anyone about this, have you?'

'I don't need the world to see this; they wouldn't understand.'

'Do you even know what this is?

'Yes; I'm in it, if you hadn't noticed. On paper I know this seems wrong, but in black and white, most stuff seems wrong.' She looked nervous; her cheeks were red, she was rubbing the pads of her thumb against her index finger like she was twirling around a piece of string; but there was nothing there.

Eleven sat down. 'What is it to everyone else anyway? It's not like we're affecting them, so just chill out.'

'I'm chilled. But it's not me who's freaking out over this; it's everyone else.'

'Trust me, that's guna continue no matter what you do or who you end up with, you might as well get used to it.'

Jaya sighed, rubbing her temples. 'This was never supposed to get this serious.'

Eleven looked up.

'No? Doesn't quite fit in to your master plan then?'

'Don't be petty.'

'You need to control what comes out of your mouth.'

'I'm sorry. It just came out.'

'You're an adult; get a filter.'

'Well anyway, nice to know this was a productive conversation.' She turned to go.

'Walking away isn't going to solve anything.'

'I don't think we should bother anymore.'

'With what?'

'With us.'

'You know that's not going to work, although you can try. But you know when you're faced with your demons late at night, or when you're bored, you're going to give me a text message and come crawling back.'

'You can keep on flattering yourself. You're delusional. Do you honestly think you can start a relationship with another woman while you're still married? Do you genuinely believe that's even possible?'

'Do you genuinely believe that you could either, when you're headed towards marrying a bloke?'

'No, but I don't think this is a real relationship and I fully acknowledge that.'

'Then how do you propose to end something that didn't even exist in the first place?'

Jaya walked on to the pavement.

'I don't want you to go.'

'This conversation isn't going anywhere,' Jaya said, without turning around.

'No, I mean to Bangladesh.' Eleven spoke quietly, her head bowed, her eyes closed. Jaya turned around and walked back in to the room.

The futility of the situation was never, at any point in their liaison, too tightly tucked away in their minds; but now it danced about in the air between them. For all her binge thinking, Jaya Chakarbatti from a line of cane wielding peer-sahibs knew wisdom was best done post-event.

She cleared her throat. 'I understand. There's nothing I can do, though. It's only six weeks.'

'That's six weeks too much. We have very little time before you-' Eleven shuffled her feet, an awkward motion on somebody who could have strangled an interfering in-law with a single stare, 'you know,'

'Yes. But that doesn't mean we should put our lives on hold until then. It'd probably end up doing more damage to us anyway.'

Eleven didn't look up.

'Are you seeing anybody else?' She looked up, but immediately shook her head. 'No, actually, I don't want to know.' She sighed. 'Look, do what you need to do. You're a good girl, and I know you'd do anything for your parents. Just go to Bangladesh, and have a good time-'

'Ok you don't have to feed me meaningless lines,'

Eleven chuckled, her brows set low, her eyelids almost closed, her back hunched, her usually full pout downturned. 'Go, then.'

Jaya stood for a minute, looking at her. She didn't blink; if there was one image she wanted to burn in to her memory forever, it was this one; the sum of all her decisions. A moment of panic flared up; had she retained enough? Did she remember enough to last her for the rest of her life? Had she taken enough pictures and kept the letters and notes written on pakora wrappers, full of sweet nothings? Did she remember her smell, of white flowers and soft cotton? Would she remember the way Eleven's hair would feel around her face as they lay in bed biting each others' teeth? What about her feet; what was her shoe size? How did she like her coffee? What were her childrens' names?

She looked down, as the thoughts almost overwhelmed her. The retention of memories –the kind of things wars were fought for- was ruining this, her last moment with the quiet breeze that had filled her lungs when everything else was crushing her (for this was the last time they would ever meet). She took a deep breath, stepped out, and closed the door behind her.

# Chapter 10

Official farewells consisted of a crude mix of genuine goodbyes and chorous ones. Jaya decided that she would need to visit Ms Datta today, even though it was minus two degrees outside, and she could see that water had frozen mid-fall from outside pipes, and the leaves on the ground were stiff from frost, the Sri Lankan shopkeeper had actually pulled his stall selling calling cards in to the shop (Mr Navanayagam, generally in all weathers, could be seen sitting at his steel stall outside his shop, protecting his wads of rubber-banded 'Banana Rama: Call India for half a penny', or 'Hurry Hari: Call India for free!' or 'Bangla Blower: make money by calling home!'); even the skulking young boys seemed to be vandalising the bus stop slowly.

Mrs Datta was good friends with Auntie Shamina (even though Shamina never ate anything from the house ('smelling of their strange Hindu-pindu masalas, not for me! For the sake of Hazrat Fatima and her bur-gin daughters!) and would later phone Bangladesh to talk about the quaint Hindu widow whose daughter couldn't speak a word of Gujrati ('Devilry! That is why God makes them smell of rotting flowers; because they do not care for their heritage! O the plains of Saudi Arabia and their holy dynasties!'); nor did she even dare to look at the small statue of Ganesh on the windowsill ('Idolatry! O Allah!')). It made sense therefore, that Jaya should visit Mrs Datta and her daughter one last time before Bangladesh, which in it's own way, was persecuting both of them.

'Oh salaams to you, pretty one,' Mrs Datta smiled as Jaya took off her shoes in the hallway (How her in-laws would scoff at how low she had stooped, forced to be amicable to this Daughter of Traitors with the blood of the Mughals in her!).

'Mrs Datta,Can you PLEASE tell Auntie Shamina to stop coming over every Thursday with her tub of samosas and telling me that my womb is drying up and I need to pop out a baby soon?'

Mrs Datta nodded slowly, sympathetically. Jaya sighed.. 'Where is Ananya?'

'She is in there playing Sitar Hero or such-such,' she signalled to the living room.

Ananya was looking at the television screen, rolling her hips and twitching her hands, singing to the twang twang of a sitar parodying a pop song, and pointing to the bindi on her forehead... 'If you like it then you gotta put a dot on it, if you like it then you need to put a dot on it, ung thung thung, ungh mungh mungh,' She pumped her hands in the air and lowered her body in increments, 'All the single desis, now throw your rice up... Up in the mandir, eyein' up my Bindi, turned my back, yea it's like that, cuz he don't speak no Hindi...ung thung mungh...'

Jaya coughed politely.

Ananya gasped and stood upright in the middle of the living room.

Her bindi, dislodged by her sudden jolt, was now hanging off her eyelash.

'Hello Jaya.' Ananya forced a smile and turned off the TV. She gestured for Jaya to sit down.

'Hey. Just thought I'd see you before I go to Bangladesh.'

Ananya gasped. 'Again? Don't you go, like, every year?'

'Yea...'

There were a few moments of silence, while Ananya scoped Jaya's face. Her brow slowly fell, and she nodded.

'I get it. Listen-' She looked at Jaya, 'just give me a call if... you know... you need anything. Anything.'

Jaya nodded. 'Thank you.'

'And whatever you do on your... holiday... just make sure it's what you want.' She watched Jaya's face carefully.

The girls hugged, and Jaya left, the bindi still hanging off Ananya's eyelashes.

This deep voice that had been aquired, this language of the lettered, these gob-filling vowels and deliberate stutter were not self-taught. They seeped in by accidental osmosis. In an area where 'ma' and 'yea' and 'yaa mee' punctuated every sentence til they had become default conjunctives, Jaya, being more of a Balancer than a Reflector, ended up somehow, from nowhere, becoming a breath of insolent fresh air. It wasn't intentional. It just happened.

And like so many things that startle people who vie for singularity, the colliding metamorphosing voiceaccentlanguage of an area that spat out something as anomolous as Jaya Chakra-Borty, made them feel anxious (disguised as concern). These types who used these morphers as an intellectual plaything. There was something going on that they didnt know about; it was hidden in their strange phonemes and tendency to drop great steaming superlatives in the middle of mild-mannered sentences, their pepperings of spirituality on discussions about share prices. So the onlookers would talk in didactics, hoping to gain the upper hand in expounding their newly discovered People to their own (it was ok to do this when a contrasted anomoly emerged; it served as a bridge), while keeping an eye on the crowd behind them who were growing disgruntled at being explained by an outsider. Anarchy brewed. The Explainer was out before the bridge was reclaimed by the swathes of home-made philosophisers, empowered by the twice diluted bumber sticker psychologies of Channel 4's Big Brother and capitalisms ongoing cool-hunt to find the next insurgent lot of underdogs who are easily led by a false sense of empowerment and easily quashed when they became a liability.

And as the shitted out detritus floating about on the streets of Britain, post-Enlightenment, just having missed the train of the cultural Pioneers, forced to make their mark only by attempting to improve on the last attempt (which is much harder than being the first at doing something), but pushed down by all the higher-ups who've gone through the over-inflated positive discrimination phase so now think it's ok to judge only on merit, without realising that this godforsaken shit-fed generation haven't matched the standards of Everyone Else yet and have been through so much over exposure by various Explainers that nothing seemed authentic anymore (and with no authenticity, the feeling of belonging was always assigned to somebody else to administer and do as they please with it). There was no sense of pride or shame about a choice of genetics in which they had no active part in, and when they were treated both in England and Back Home with the wry sense of hospitality given only to royalty, the interim ground became difficult to balance on. To survive meant to split yourself in two and, in the ever changing progression and degression and mish-mashing of the two up in the air having a scuffle and tearing each others hair out, it was impossible to know which side was which.

And who said any of it was bad? Living only in one culture and existing in a single dimension, doomed to only ever be an onlooker (or a leech) while people teemed and spilled over with mushroom cloud thinking and a personal attachment to more than one string of consciousness, borne from the loins of old Indian vinyls in Southall, Top Class Number One saffron from Brick Lane, rollie smoking quiff wielding leather jacketed Pakistani Teddy boys and the general anarchy of sari clad housewives who defiantly continued to cook stinky curries and, knowing only a few words of English, used them like a rebellious artist making haphazard sentences that made sense to nobody but others like them.

The bright colours and caricatures had ebbed away now, and things were almost monotonous. The occasional loop of an emotional rollercoaster made an appearance but it was temporary; a few wisps of a crisis and a religious dilemma here and there, yes; but other than that, they were a downtrodden bunch. Their parents were worried about mortgages or Housing Benefit, angina, and the dangers of the library staying open til 3am...

And they, the young minstrels, shuffled on, shouldering the crudely constructed ideas of their community from the bygone era of the 70's which unfortunately for them, had gone from being a superficial adornment to a memory. Something had seeped deeper than their skin, and it went beyond the clothes they wore or the tramp stamps some of the girls dared to sport.

Watching illegally downloaded programmes on their mobile phones (they were happy to take the plastic films off them now) where it was now ok for a white man to black up to play a Pakistani, but a Pakistani still couldn't white up unless it was for political reasons (and possibly realism), they yawned and daydreamed their way through class after class, occasionally absorbing a sentence and paying Gurmeet to do their homework, because the hours they spent at the library were for flirting and school didn't teach any real life skills anyway.

Ruby Ansari Khan was one of the many this morning, trudging through the corridors of Balsall Heath Grammar School, her heels squeaking against the buffered floor, quite obviously a mere ghost of her former self, her head hung, her hands in her pockets. This time last week she would stomp through the corridors in her big black boots, her hair bouncing, shoving the freshies out of the way. But the hook she had chosen to hang her life on had had its double sided tape weakened and now it was only just hanging on.

The world had suddenly stopped revolving. It was swivelling on some other axis now, one that belonged to other people (whose existence she hadn't really noticed before). She didn't make her usual beeline towards Paul's room, hoping he wouldn't notice because she couldn't bear to question his kindness. When life got so debilitating that all she wanted to do was lie in bed with the covers pulled over her because she had no idea what was happening to her, she had pulled out of the vacuum and arrived here, in school, where one more absence would see her on Report. But _here_ wasn't _here_ anymore. Here was a series of empty yellow rooms that had miscarried and wasn't full of potentially life-changing decisions. The world had stopped its express courier delivery of meaning.

Why was it that one look was enough to crumble the foundation of someone's belief? A girl Ruby had never met had changed the very fabric of all the construed ideas she had in her head. She couldn't quite shake the feeling that her tell-tale brain was fibbing about the possible meaning of that look; but of course it didn't even matter. Why had it affected Ruby so much? She didn't WANT to be affected. She was perfectly happy being a bigoted racist, thank you very much.

She fiddled with the chain around her neck and thought about how pleasurable it had felt when all that vomit slid up her esophagus last night. She was in a crisis. Her own empire had crumbled. She had built it on the foundations of failed Britain; failed by the courts, the media, the parliament. Structurally Britain's democracy had worked to the disadvantage of the likes of her; democracy had become fused with free-market capitalism and hollowed out til there was only a useless vacuum, which she had filled with her own hatred of the establishment and, with the help of Paul, she was doing fucking well. She woke up burning with hatred for foreign students. Now she felt fractioned from the dispossessed. All those cock-wielding white bastards she was so willing to get on her knees for just seemed like pasty Turdy Toms. But was she one of the blackbitch lefties now? She felt ill. She felt as though she'd eaten too much junk food and it was swilling about in her stomach. She felt weak. But most of all, she felt like a loser. One of those that didn't belong. She hadn't burnt her bridges, no, she was far too discreet for that. But her mind hadn't seen the bridge in the first place and the fog hadn't lifted enough for her to take her first step. And why the fuck couldn't she stop thinking about wheat fields? All she could picture was sitting in a wheat field with that girl. The Valley Girl. The girl with the valley of something etched in to her brow and free-flowing towards Ruby.

It hurt, the racism that had fallen off her body. Like a phantom limb, she could still feel the pangs. It began as a dull ache at the beginning of the day but by the time double-History rolled by it was aflame with anguish. She was squirming. Mrs Grant had asked her why she was so quiet and why her brow was tightened with pre-occupation, but she withered in to the whiteboard when all she got was a scrunched up threatening face in reply.

Who knew the anguishes of an ex-racist Pakistani schoolgirl? The sky was sepia-tinted for Ruby today, and the ground was crumbling. The council-issued grass didn't put up a fight as she walked over it; even it had lost its springiness. Her chunky black boots today carried her over the concrete playground and the grassy fields and she came to rest in the last stretch of grass behind the Maths block. She dumped her cracked and ripped rucksack on the ground and sat on it, knees up, head hung, hands tucked under her buttocks.

The process of rehabilitation could happen overnight, contrary to the weak-minded pycho-babblers of today's society. These same idiots had fallen for the 'You cannot fool all the people all of the time' ideal, skipping along in their multicultural Britain false utopia, not knowing about the rot that had started beneath it all. The moist, hot undergrowth that had become a breeding ground for fat white skinheads with pierced cocks and irrational anger problems. She had been of them; fearful and resentful; but most of all, powerful. They snatched it. They fabricated it, they put it in bottles and threw it in to windows, and they sprayed it all over walls. They had pissed all over the happy inter-breeding millennial neighbourhoods with their libraries full of Czechs and Poles and Indians and Africans and the occasional White; the 'cosmopolitan' vibe of the early 2000's was, to Ruby only yesterday, a fragment of the imagination of some artist somewhere, of some ignorant idealistic persons who had taken a freak microcosmic look at one or two neighbourhoods and proclaimed that multiculture was a success but oh! How they weren't prepared for the uprising of the underground bacteria!

Ruby and Paul had tittered in knowingness when Jack Straw had said that Paki boys saw white girls as easy meat; how true it was! Ruby had thought that it was true; Paul had questioned why the public debates centred around whether or not Pakistani boys _did_ believe that; when it should have centred around whether or not White girls _were_ easy. And then Angela Merkel and David Cameron had said multiculturalism wasn't working and too much ghettoisation was occurring -yes, yes, yes, Ruby had said yesterday.

But today her phantom racist limb burnt. It itched and scratched and stung. It was gone, but in its place were a thousand unanswered questions. A few answers emerged. She had read today that in Britain, a Muslim was more likely to marry a non-Muslim, than a Christian was to marry a non-Christian. And, as the day went on, she became accustomed to finding answers in the same way she had found anger hidden in secret places within.

Economic progression and money -those two hefty symbiotic estates that relied on each other so desperately and starved laymen out- were best encouraged by immigrants. Cheap labour, good work ethic –these things could only come in abundance from the oppressed. From those that had fled hot climates, and persecution. Only someone who knew what they didn't want anymore, could give Britain what it knew it did want. Ruby wondered about it all; about how she still knew the lies existed, and how there were always forces working behind the scenes waiting to crush the underdog. She listened, for the first time in a long while, to what was going on in her own head, and not to the diatribe of bollocks that she was fed by everyone else. She, like many others, had forgotten to listen to her gut instinct. Not the animal instinct which had made want to lynch Blacks and Asians; but the gut, human instinct that made her look at the bigger picture, not at the distraction placed in front.

She played with the grass for a while; the girl with the valley brow still on her mind. Perhaps the girl represented something that should have existed in the future; a girl who looked at Ruby wondering what she was doing cheering on a racist attack. Maybe valley girl had expected Ruby to be over it –to be over the racially-profiled resentment that had erupted since the 70's. To move on from the tension over the small matter of race. Perhaps the girl expected Ruby to be more sophisticated, more discreet, more elegant.

She smiled. Goodness; there was an idea. Valley girl, most likely a lesbian, teaching her about sophistication. About inclusiveness. After all her years calling them barbarians and savages and leeches, here she was imposing a completely opposing idea on to a girl who Ruby didn't even know at all. And perhaps, somewhere along the line, Ruby had gotten so carried away with perception, given it so much credence, that here was the backlash.

As she had thought, rehabilitation happened overnight. This morning, she had come to school with a completely different perspective. Now she knew she was a fighter; but now her fight had evolved. She was looking at lifting boundaries now, she was going to take away those niggling distractions that fucked up everyone's vision. And Paul; well, she's suspected he was far too nice to carry on being a thug. No self-respecting skinhead would befriend a brown girl anyway, unless he was curious about the Others. And she had faith that his curiousity would lead him to the same place as she had found.

She sighed, deep and long, and opened her eyes. She thought of her mother. Her mother who was scared of her own daughter.

Ruby Khan stood up, flung her rucksack over her shoulder, and finished off the day at school.

The evening she spent at home that night, talking to her parents, entertaining guests and avoiding making trays of tea, was one of thousands.

'They haven't killed Osama Bin Laden; Bin Laden didn't exist in the first place.' Asif sucked on his cola cube and watched the TV screen intently.

'Brother Asif, they have killed him, it has been all over the TV.'

Asif rolled his eyes. 'Yes I know that. But I'm talking metaphorically.'

Munir looked confused.

Asif took a deep breath. 'Bin Laden was a creation of the US; he was a symbol. The experts said so themselves, he was no longer operationally important. So why was the US military still hunting him? Would they spend all that money on shooting down a symbol? Probably not; otherwise they'd shoot down every Muslim icon. They created all this hype around him, and they used him as a figure to whip up anti-Muslim hatred around the world. And now that everyone hates the Muslims, they've discarded of him. He was a Frankenstein they created.'

'Well to be honest, even though he wasn't operationally important, they needed him dead. They don't care about these practicalities; it seems nobody cares about the truth anymore. The French frogs banned the niqab even though there's only about 3 people in the country who wear it. They banned a symbol; they sent out a message saying 'we hate the Muslims'.

Munir sat back, satisfied. He and the Brotherhood had been upset when news had gotten out that Bin Laden had been killed. They hadn't prayed for him, because they had their doubts about who he was, but they were upset that somebody who could plan a mean bombing strategy could die after running for so long.

'This is all the excuse they need to tear up Pakiland, bro,' Hanif shook his head.

Junaid's eyes were bloodshot. 'Yea man. Eh, you know what brother Asif? You know how you said the US would chop down every Muslim icon or leader they could? Well if you thing about it, they have haven't they? Bin Laden; dead. Gaddaffi; dying. Mubarak... well I'm sure something happened to him. And all that shit in Syria; all that war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Look at the people on the US's top Most Wanted list man; they all got beards ennit!'

Hanif piped up. 'I heard Bin Laden wasn't even a proper Muslim. And some one even said he was paid by the US to pose as this terrorist. You know, money and weapons and safety and all that; he got all these promises.'

'Cha man; how'd you know that?'

'Coz yea: Bin Laden was _allegedly_ a Wahabi ennit?' Hanif dramatically scoped his eyes around each of them. 'But did you know that Wahabi's are so strict that they not even allowed to take _pictures_ ennit? And have you seen the amount of home videos Bin Laden has of himself?' Hanif shook his head. 'Something dodgy agwan there bro,'

'You know, after all that,' Asif exhaled smoke from their hookah pipe, 'Bin Laden never did admit to doing those twin tower attacks.'

The brothers nodded, and continued watching Al Jazeera play the same 30 seconds of footage over and over again, as an 'expert' continually droned on and on and journalists were live-linked from several different countries explaining what link they had with the deceased nomad. Of course, none of them believed anything they heard in the media. They were busy trying to figure out why the US had so hastily disposed of the body without a post mortem or without public closure; they refused to believe that no member of Bin Laden's own family in Saudi Arabia would accept his body. And they believed that the family was paid blood money to shut up about it. The Brotherhood also believed that the Saudi's were a bunch of white-arse licking cunts and, while they were at it, thought it apt to spend the morning of the 29th April 2011 watching the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, in case there were any signs of Freemasonic powers present at the ceremony. They spotted several, actually.

So yes, being in the home of one of the Brothers would have caused a media field day; but they were upset at his death. They were upset when they heard any Muslim had died.

'You know Brother Hanif, you're right. The US military will take this as an excuse to tear up Pakistan; they've been saying he's been hiding there for ages but the Paki's denied it. But you know what? The US will take this as an excuse to tear up anywhere. They've egged themselves on; they've got the world feeling triumphant about being anti-Muslim.'

'But brother Asif, why are they so against the Muslims in the first place?'

'Who knows? Maybe it's because of all the fact that Muslims have all the oil; that they own all this art, all the buildings, all the powerful establishments. Because they're fighting for Palestine.'

'But the jews are surely more powerful?'

'Maybe. But they don't have their hands on oil, do they?'

The brothers again nodded slowly in consensus.

'There's more at work here than we see, brothers. Allah give theme guidance.'

They sat in silence nowadays, when they weren't talking about Freemasons, or watching Al Jazeera. None of them talked about what happened in London, and none of them felt the need to every bring it up again. In a strange way, failure had brought them together. A failed mission usually humiliated those involved and broke groups up, not wanting to be constantly reminded of their shortcomings. But this group, they had come together. They gave each other consolation; that this was not the end of the line. That Islam would be heard. And with Bin Laden gone, they felt strangely free to take their own direction now. Perhaps the pressure to bomb had disappeared from their own psyche now. Perhaps, after Bin Laden had been shot down, and Jaya had appeared from nowhere, the Brotherhood had been wise enough to see the signs Allah had given them to change their ways of protest.

Junaid had given up smoking marijuana, Hanif was reading more books and Munir was watching less porn. Asif had gotten a job and was helping Amma pay bills, and had finally taken over the washing and re-plastering of the kitchen. He helped her with everything now; she had even applied for a computer course. So far, she had missed 3 lessons but, she beamed with her pan-stained teeth, she knew Asif would read the modules and translate them in to Bengali after dinner.

Asif had decided that the 2012 Olympics would be his next platform for protest, but nowadays, he preferred sit-ins, banner protests, and even the occasional stink bomb through letterboxes.

Munir cocked his head, his brow furrowed. 'Obama's the good guy though, right?'

Asif looked at him, wondering how Munir had every managed to get himself involved with the Brotherhood, knowing as little as he did, and even isolating them from the white boys at school through his over-zealous assertion of their unity ('Why can't I call him brother? You lot go around calling each other squire').

Asif took a deep breath and shook his head: 'Look at Guantánamo. With a stroke of a pen, the day after Obama took the oath he should have said, "We're getting the hell out of here." Same thing with Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no reason for them to be in a war. "They'll all come here if we don't go there." That is bollocks. Go halfway around the world to kill and die? Why? Now the veterans can't get jobs. I see stories every day about soldiers being liberated from Iraq only to end up unemployed. Yea the fucking tools deserve it in my opinion, but where is Obama? How can he continue Bush policies that were so mean? People reckoned Obama would be a peaceful president, but there he is, as evil as any of them. Not a liberal at all, man. They're all just puppets. Even I thought he'd be cool, just cuz he's black an' that. But no.'

'Awww shit, man, so even Obama's fucked?' Munir looked incredulous. 'So... who can we trust then?'

'Well, no president has ever told the truth about why we're in the wars. I think oil has a lot to do with it. I think there's an Israel connection. British government feels compelled to protect Israel, ennit. That's why they're so busy fuckin' up Muslim leaders man. Like, I think it was wrong to hang Saddam Hussein. He should have been put before an international court for war crimes and everything else. But for us to just bypass the law and have him hanged was wrong. And the same with Bin Laden; why just ditch him like that man? No trial, no nothing. Fucking bullshit. We're funding a war that's illegal and we keep on ploughing our money in to it, man. That's how Israel was created, aided and abetted by U.S. money and weapons. To steal an occupied people's country is illegal under international law. The Israelis know that, but their massive military force has always overwhelmed the poor Palestinian people. And those Jews, man: they own most of the world. Did you know they most of Brick Lane? Yea, man. And in America they own Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street –all owned by the Zionists.'

Munir piped up. 'Yea man! And they're all Freemason's and shag their own sisters an' that, ennit bro?'

'Well I don't know about that...'

'Yea man, I'm talking propa knowledge, bro. They do some sick shit man, you don't know.'

'Hold on a minute bro,' Hanif sat up. 'Do you know that some Palestinian behavior over the years, including hijacking and suicide bombing, has been wrong and has added to the problem?'

There was silence. Asif coughed. 'Brother Hanif, in an ideal world, passive resistance and world disarmament would be great. Unfortunately we don't live in that world. But who wouldn't fight for their country? What would any American or Briton do if their land was being taken? Remember Pearl Harbor. The Palestinian violence is to protect what little remains of Palestine. The suicide bombers act out of despair and desperation. Three generations of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes—by Israelis—and into refugee camps.'

'But brother, a Muslim should be the first to call peace.'

'They have, several times.'

'Yea, but the Freemason's keep on shagging their sisters.'

They all looked at Munir.

'Brother, tell us more about these Freemasons...' Asif leaned forward.

'Ok. You see right, they're everywhere; everyone who's a powerful leader is a 'mason; like, the president, and the Queen. And they got, like, this secret handshake an' that. And they're pavin' way for the new world order.'

'And how do you fight them?'

'Wiv intellect,' Munir tapped his nose, corrected himself and then tapped his temple. 'You got to know where they hide, where they meet, where they have power, what their _ways_ are of spreading their secret message. They're making way for the Dajjaal, man -the One Eyed Heretic.'

The boys drew back and inch, suddenly afraid.

'So you're saying, Brother Munir, that the way to fight this fight, is through intellect?'

Munir nodded regally.

'Well then: we best get started ennit.'

# Chapter 11

Swathes of people were pushed and shoved out of the exit at Dhaka's Zia International airport in the heart of Bangladesh. The humidity was intense, the sand in the air settled in the cracks of teeth and lent the quotidian crunch most of the country's people had become accustomed to. Clustered around the entrance of the airport were groups of the spluttering-engined Baby Taxis: bright yellow material stretched over and forming the roof of a vehicle that resembled a love child between a motorbike and a rickshaw. The Chakkarbatti's from London ignored the pleas of the hundreds of crowded beggars wearing clothes at various stages of raggedness. They headed straight for smiling Uncle Manzoor who bundled them in to the 9-seater Lite Ace with air conditioning and they started the long journey to Sylhet by road. Mr Chakkarbatti had decided that this year, they would minimise their plane journeys after Mrs Chakkarbatti had read in Surma newspaper that planes were the second biggest risk to life (she had forgotten to come back to the paper after frying kebabs to read the next part of the article, which said cars were the first biggest risk).

It was seven hour ride after which a rub of the eyeballs would yield all manner of Nature on to one's finger; dust, soil, bits of twig. The miles of paddy fields, bright forests, hip-clinging babies and armoured highway police all blurried in to one. Bottles of mineral water did nothing to wash down the dust that settled in the back of the Chakkarbatti sisters' throats. Daisy Chakkarbatti sat elegantly back, reading 'Reconstructive and Plastic Surgery of the External Genitalia: Vol II', uninterested in the clambering rolling yelling country that flew by her half-open window.

They left behind the pokey flats of Dhaka and the tumbleweeded neglect of Old Dhaka and arrived in mini-London –Sylhet- where the only thing hungrier than a beggar were the stares of the local population. The smart college kids strode the streets, the street sellers worked out their cash-flows and the dry-fish sellers nowadays packaged their goods.

In Sylhet, cattle was tolerated on the roads, free to moo simply because it wanted to moo, and not because it was about to be run over, as in Dhaka. In Sylhet, everything smelt as it was suppose to smell; coconuts smelt like coconuts, whereas in Dhaka, everything smelt of smog and dirt. In Sylhet, it was the right of everyone to stare at everyone else, not suppress it, as they did in Dhaka. It wasn't the Sprawling Metropolis, so extreme in its extremities that it could be aired on the 10 o' Clock news without anyone blinking. It wasn't a Mumbai where even the beggars could have their own blockbusters. It didn't welcome foreigners, despite this Bangladeshi minority making up the majority of British Bengalis.

Strange Sylhet had somehow managed to surpass the phase of industrial development where high blocks of flats arose, and gone straight to huge mansions that spilled out, made as homes were meant to be; spacious, with verandahs and porches, nobody batting an eyelid if someone's conservatory jutted out on to the main road; everybody here built illegally past their borders. Great houses, still painted with suna –lime paste (although as things became modernised, things had pushed forward to coloured suna; mainly pastel pink or green). Huge windows and elaborately designed air vents; mosaic floors and geckos on walls, impressive Air Conditioning contraptions and heavily padlocked fridges that were rarely used because of the nightly loss of electricity (and when the 'current had gone', the servants were called to fan).

In Sylhet, women didn't shower naked; they left their petticoats on their bottom half while they washed their top half, and vice versa.

These parts of Sylhet housed the small concentration of 'townies'. Away from the insolent tiny builds made for university students and those who came to the city with no heritage, the 'townies' weren't village dwellers, nor were they neuveux riche. They were the discreet string pullers who were as deep rooted as the five rivers of Bangladesh. And as the Lite Ace approached the Chakkarbatti Estate, the pull of heritage and blood could be felt. The road quietened and all they could see were acres of land owned by their family. Just before the gates opened, they saw the hefty ideals of their dynasty around them, the weighty responsibilities that were shaping the country: the Chakkarbatti Abdul Ghaffur Islamic School, the shining million-windowed Sylhet Women's Medical College and it's multi-milion dollared vast array of rooms nestled inside along cold, hard clinical medical equipment that was void of dust or sand; there was the box-making factory, the poor people's colony, a herd of goats, and miles and miles of empty green and yellow land. Fertility made the earth springy and the Lite Ace bounced around lazily. The huge gates opened and they rolled in to the middle of the Estate, encircled by a coliseum of a housing estate; continuous and non-segmented. It contained every other surviving member of the Chakkarbatti bloodline.

Daisy and Jaya were absorbed for the first few days, their every need attended to, ogled by the servants who genuinely thought they had arrived from the Heavens, and that London was in the sky, for that was where it's citizens came from. Jaya spent the first few days sweating and feeling uncomfortable around the ever-present handmaids and 'boys', staring mutely wherever they went. But soon enough, the novelty of the Londonis wore off, along with the awkwardness the sisters felt at ordering about yet another set of new servants (the household staff turnover was high, such was the affluence of Sylheti underdogs). They spent the first four weeks doing the rounds with relatives, being overfed, judged, scrutinised, smiled at, pitied, revered, desired and uncomfortable, and unsettled, having to hop between their maternal and paternal homes, each side regarding the other much as a divorced couple would see one another –maintaining a solid distance but respectfully ushering the children over at the due time.

It was during her time at the paternal Chakkarbatti estate that Akram Kashif -who had already carved Jaya a refuge in the form of a sitar- again put himself in a position to shelter her from the onslaught of familial pro-marriage harassment. He was waiting on the porch one night, handing a pan of his mother's famous pilao rice to Grandma Chakkarbatti (their acquaintance had begun 10 years ago in the way that all Sylheti townsfolk knew each other). He watched Jaya walk straight past him, her eyeliner smudged and her hair messy as she ended the day warring in the battlefield of familial networking. He watched many of these foreign girls come to Bangladesh, fill themselves with resentment, give up, and take the next flight back home, not to return until they were married. He had heard about the Londoni Chakkarbatti summer visits and was curious to see why these educated girls submitted to these visits here in the middle of monsoon season, where even the locals could hardly stand the weather.

He watched a mass of hair and a highly stylized Indian suit walk by him and flop straight on to bed inside, kicking off her heels so they slid across the polished stone floor, raise her head and exclaim dramatically 'O Allah! Somebody sort out my Death Prayer! I can't handle this heat!', before collapsing theatrically in to stillness. The servants laughed and ran to her, massaging her calves and legs and forehead. She tittered; Akram smirked. She was probably ticklish.

(Grandma Chakkarbatti was watching this, as she had watched many men before look upon girls of a marriageable age, and she deemed that this was a worthy one. The flicker of his eyes was respectable; veiled, but curious.)

'Allah bless you, soldier,' she said, and ran a hand over his head. 'Go; and come back tomorrow.'

Akram didn't question the request and as the words of Elders was, effectively, gospel in this estate of Sylhet, he cancelled all of his military appointments the next day to oblige.

At home, his big frame settled on the prayer mat. His lips were still, his mind cautiously curious. Above his head were the words of Rabindranath Tagore roughly printed on a cheap poster over a blurry picture of a forest somewhere and a waterfall: "Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of habit".

Akram Kashif, his conscious clear, his strategic thinking in place, smiled to himself. He was not one for melodrama. His wide jaw covered in a shadow that he had to shave twice a day became loose now, the tension of the day gone. He folded his hands in front of him after he finished off his prayer and sat in front of Allah.

'If she is right for me, and I for her, give us the guidance to follow your will.'

And he wiped the prayer over his face, down to his chest, and hoped that the Rifle Division would have enough practice weaponry to continue their schedule without him, and that Grandma Chakkarbatti would enjoy the vat of korma he was taking her tomorrow.

Jaya paced the lamba kuta –The Long Room- which seemed to have been purpose built for the hereditary habit of pacing in this family. She felt tense; the result of her degree was out tomorrow. Although it seemed that the vast strength of the estate was enough to absorb any potential disappointment, the endless sound of the weak ceiling fan and repetitive barking dog in the distance reminded her of the mendacity of routine British life which was –although safe and tangible- full of these everyday stresses that made her break out in to aortic rashes.

She walked through the curtain in to her cousin's room (there were no doors needed for the unmarried members of the family) and watched as she began her weekly ritual of clearing the precious steel wardrobe. The 'Steelor Almari' made by the famous 'Malik Metal Steel Co'. Those unforgettable ones that had so many locks, one could be forgiven for thinking they had millions of pounds in them; but when opened, turns out they're just clothes meticulously folded, with full deodorant bottles from foreign countries (as opposed to the empty ones in the showcase cupboard. The showcase sported a titillating variety of family heirlooms, consisting of empty deodorant bottles from 10 years ago and other relics of the 50's which were given as treasured presents from Londoni visitors -obviously bought in bulk from Poundland.)

The comforting smell of stiff cotton and mothballs wafted out of the steel casket. The sound of thick hollow tin clanging and scraping as each drawer was meticulously and preciously cleaned filled the room. Jaya watched carefully. A chicken strolled through the room, and stopped in the middle, cocking its head as though chartering its domain and watching what the girls were doing, before slowly strolling back out. The heat beat down on the estate and the multifarious teems of Colony Children dipped their toes in the meek stream outside the gates, getting empty packets of Lays stuck between their toes. The mechanical whir of the tube light filled the air, permeated only by the occasional squeaking of a gecko.

Jaya sighed. What was there to do but loll? Loll, and build resentment from the locals over how inactive they could afford to be, adding to their already tainted image of the Lazy Londoni's? She couldn't bear the staring whenever she left the gates, and was already outstaying her welcome by floating in and out of everyone's houses so often.

So joining Daisy sunbathing on the roof seemed to be the worst idea (her aunties would pinch her in disapproval every time she got a shade darker here).

Daisy lay on a bamboo mat, still as a corpse, wearing a salwaar kameez with her sleeves rolled up only to the elbow, and trousers rolled up, respectfully stopping at the knee. Her Ray Ban sunglasses reflected a fat white sun and palm trees, a bright blue sky and a few vultures.

Jaya blinked, sighed, rolled up her trousers and lay next to her.

'Dad's going to an Islamic congregation for a few days with all the boys. This place is going to be so empty.'

'Mmm. Dadu Chaks has invited a boy round to come see you.'

'I know.'

'Good.'

'What do you think of him?'

'Asides from the fact he has a forehead big enough to land a plane on, he seems fine. Unintrusive, but capable of looking after Abba's estate and providing when he's called upon.'

'Thought so. Listen: do you think Abba and them lot are going to extremist terror camps?'

'Yes.'

'Shut up. No seriously; maybe they are.'

'They're going to a 40-day Islamic excursion like they have been doing every year for the last 30 years, whereafter they come back in optimum mental health, soft as pussies, which is when we always identified was the perfect moment to ask for some pocket money. They are far too lazy to plot anything even as remotely at militant as upturning the soil in the small patch of unpaved garden we have,' Daisy adjusted her Ray Bans. 'Why are they taking so long with my coconut?'

'All these years we've thought they just go and do this congregational invitation to Islam, you know. But maybe it can be a meeting point for extremists...'

'Not any more than your average shopping centre.'

'I bet you some of them are extremists... Tablighi Jamaat are organising it. I bet you some, right, meet up at these places and start plotting together.'

'They'd get outpreached by the rest of the hippy Muslims at that place. Tablighi Jamaat are criticised for being too modern by us, and we're so laid back we practically blend in with every other British nonce. God forbid. You know,' Daisy flicked a butterfly off her knee, 'what's actually happened is that we've had our religion hijacked by the ignorant, and our cultural identity not so much hijacked, but raped, by the intellectuals.'

'Things change, you know. Maybe back in the day it was all peaceful but now, everyone's a terrorist and it's slowly giving ideas to everyone else.'

'And you have that on whose authority? The emotionally constipated ignoramus smooth talkers on the TV? Jesus, I wish they would just get a proper job. They're making us doubt our own people.' She sat up and viciously puller her glasses on top of her head. 'Aiii Russell!'

'He's probably siphoning off some of the juice for himself,'

Russell hurried out and presented the coconut. Daisy took it, bounced it about in her hands for a while, and realised it was half empty.

Jaya smirked. 'Poor guy. Tell him not to do it again; if he does that with Dad he's going to get laid off.

Daisy dismissed the servant with a wave. 'I think it's best to not address the issue; hugely vulgar situation if you ask me.' She pulled her glasses back on and retracted to her favourite position of a comatose upturned salamander. Jaya sighed and lay back too. The palm trees rustled in the afternoon wind, which brought with it a new wave of polluted pungency. The cobwebs on the bananas quivered, lines of red ants marched up and down the trunks and bright orange furry caterpillars stuck to the leaves. Cars beeped in the distance, the 'peeech' of people spitting out pan which hit the pavement with a smack filled Jaya's ears... 'peeech' 'poooosch' 'shmoch' 'thlump'... everbody was excreting something; pan, phlegm, piss, poo... all joining the open sewers which skirted around the city's roads, accompanying everybody's route to work or relatives or lovers or cafes. The Azan echoed out across the skies, and the slow sluggish movements of men in lunghis could be seen from the Chakarbatti roof; masses of men moving towards the mosques, winding through the alleyways, stumbling out of colonies, cycling out of the university, skipping out of college doorways, pulling themselves out of dirt ditches, and in the few squares of empty sand, they were climbing out of the many piles of hand made red bricks and sliding down pipes of bamboo and clumsily clambering down stacked sheets of corrugated tin in a city that was eternally Under Construction...

A vast sea of torn vests, saggy lunghis, safari suits, nylon satchels, rubber sandals and tufts of jet black hair made their way in to the doorways of the mosques but even then, the penniless and godforsaken few tringed on in the streets, looking for patrons, madams, customers and fools. The roads were never quite empty, there were no such things as pavements so the traffic and pedestrians were constantly in each others ways, interloping, colliding and parallel. There was, in all, a scruffy existence in Sylhet, where there was no order, where adolescents had no time pull swooping fringes in front of their faces and adults couldn't spend time putting on public displays to validate their existence to the world. Jaya sat on the rooftop looking down thinking she had betrayed Britain, by enjoying this city that was so diametrically opposed in every sense –from the width of the blades of grass to the smell of the air- to the country her consciousness had climbed in to bed with.

Bangladesh was a definite kind of place: if you were born in the colonies, you would stay there; if you were a girl born on the streets, you would get raped and prostitute yourself; if you were poor, you would beg and steal and go from house to house asking for rice grains and be happy when someone local would die to feast on the culinary alms the family would distribute; if your daddy was a clerk, you too would be forced to sit through hours of extra-school tutoring only to become a clerk and disappear in to the teeming crowds on the streets, if you were educated at a local university you would become a corrupt politician or an honest judge, and if you were highly educated and spoke any other language, you would go abroad. Yes, the system was safe and secure. Everybody knew the status quo, whether or not to address people as afne, tumi or the lowest tui. It was written in people's faces; social mobility was like jelly and people were stuck in it; even if the entire structure wobbled, people would still be there, floating in exactly the same place.

Nothing but nothing could piss off the masses more than being preached to and the sniggers behind the backs of self-righteous rehabilitated ex-pats was short-lived entertainment. Nobody had time to fix anything here –survival was an unforgiving occupation. The Moneyed Moralists from far away lands would always, always, go back home at some point.

The afternoon sun became cooler, and Jaya slunk inside and slunk in front of the computer:

'Kully,

Hope everyone's ok. B'desh is cool, not as bad as last year. You should totally come here soon; the electricity only goes for about 20 mins a night so it's not all bad. We came from Dhaka to Sylhet by road; my god, what a difference. You know how the Dhakiyan people think all Sylheti's are tramps? I know why now.

There are still shitloads of rickshaws, whereas in Dhaka there are none. You should see these new road signs in Dhaka, lol, they're the red triangular signs and there's a silhouette of a rickshaw saying 'no allowed'! lmfao! So funny man.

Not much had changed about Sylhet other than electricity. The roads still have that knack of the fast movement, bikes and goats darting everywhere, but slow progress of traffic in general. Still see the usual sights of a poor skinny black little rickshaw driver carrying ten fat Bengali women shouting at the driver for not avoiding the breaks in the road cuz it irritates their fat rolls... ha!

We got some posh Dhakhaiya bloke renting one of dad's flats; everybody acts really conscious around him. He says he can't sleep cuz he can hear rain on the tin roofs at night; don't think there are any tin-roofed houses left in Dhaka. Snobs.

What I like about Sylhet is that servants are still servants; they still walk about in trampy clothes and play cards with us on the car roofs. In Dhaka the servants ride motorbikes and have their own mobile phones; some of them even have a uniform. It's weird.

I'm so fucking bored. You don't understand. Even went shopping yesterday; hailed down a baby taxi –you know one of those with the loud farting engine that vibrates all the way up your vag, ha ha!- and you feel like its going 100 miles an hour but actually you're only going at 5. Cost us 50 taka for a 25 minute ride; getting a bit expensive these ends.

And then of course there are our friends the mosquitos, who don't seem to follow the rule that mosquito repellent is supposed to repel them. All our aunties still maintain that Daisy and I get bitten more because British blood is sweet, and that Bangladeshi blood is salty, which is why they don't get stung. Bitches.

You know what I like most though? Everyone's stopped asking us to bring stuff for them from England. No more requests for Primark sandals. People wear their Bata sandles with pride now; for some reason they've stopped hankering after bideshi goods which is pretty cool. The sewers, on the other hand; they're still open and men are still squatting and peeing in to them openly. So disgusting. I've been on the look out at the Plaza for the gay prostitues in colourful lunghis; I think I spotted one guy; he was standing against the wall of the 100 taka store, itching his balls and chewing pan. He was really skinny and had perfectly groomed hair, a bit girly looking, and his lunghi was made of satin. Must've been gay. His shirt was all open and he was sweating, and wearing thick sandals, so I thought maybe he has to wear something a big straight-looking or he'd just get beaten up right?

Anyway, I'll tell you what was a proper experience here: the clothes shopping. The girls keep on staring at us funny, really patronising, cuz we've been wearing these clothes which they can tell are ready-made and that shit doesn't go down well here, lol. Honestly, Sylheti girls and their clothes.

I'm going to the Plaza now, will try and spot some more gays.

O, and by the way, you know what we spoke about at G-A-Y? Well, you're probably not surprised, buy my grandma has already invited a guy round for me to meet. Daisy approves. Will let you know how it goes. He'll probably just be another freak of nature though. Although, tbh, after things finished with Eleven, I don't really see any point in stalling getting married.

I miss you guys, and the weather, the roll-ups, and Long Island Iced Teas. Mmmm!

J xxx'

Akram decided to wear trousers to the Chakarbatti estate today. He wore his badge of Army Service on the right lapel of his blazer, cringed, and instead wore a thin cotton v-neck jumper which he thought was respectable but also showed an effort. He wasn't interested in looking like those types on American TV; they all looked like homosexuals. This girl (the very thought of her made him shy) probably wasn't in to men who straightened their hair or looked effeminate. Perhaps she wouldn't appreciate the fact that he was a masterful rifle shooter, or that thousands of the Bangladesh National Army took his word as their command. But that wasn't important; he hoped she could see his character. He hoped she was respectful of his humble family. He sighed and hoped that he could aquire her father as his own. He missed a paternal role model.

Akram Kashif who once spilled saffron over a tree stump had hardened himself to the loneliness only a breadwinning son could understand. But like an ache that had long been neglected, a day of rest reminded him of the pains. The girl he had seen humorously collapse on to a bed and treat servants as though they were friends, who had springy limbs and a lazy walk... she wouldn't demean his penchant for Bruce Springsteen, Chomsky or Top Gear. No; she would probably find them predictable, but she wouldn't make him feel bad for them. She was a Chakkarbatti; she would judge, but accomodate. It was in her bloodline.

# Chapter 12

There were four generations living on the Chakarbatti estate; the largest house belonging to the Chakarbatti brothers of whom Jaya's father was the eldest, and resided in now by the paternal but mischievous Imran Chakarbatti of Mastermind Metals & Co, Hardware Store (toilets and padlocks), whose wife was a jolly fat woman who spent most of her time lying on her side, propped up on her elbow on the king size falong overseeing the sweeping, cleaning and scrubbing of her vast domain with a look of passive amusement.

Their three children, who bore the permanent paunch the Chakarbatti genes rightfully commanded, spread their own brand of vastness in their given quarters: the eldest, Shawqat Malik Chakarbatti, spotty faced, bespeckled and never wearing anything besides beige military shirts and courduroy trousers with chunky leather sandles, would spend his evenings drinking tea in his father's shop, and his evenings in front of his computer Photoshopping pictures of himself outside the Big Ben or the Statue of Liberty. He looked like a bookish boy, but did not waste his time substantiating the image.

The middle child, Shimu, waddled about the house wearing the trademark loose fitting cotton salwar kameez with mismatching scarf draped across her chest, her eyelids lazily drooped across her nondescript dark brown eyes, a freak mess of tightly frizzed black hair sprouting from her scalp which no number of foreign imported straighteners could discipline. She could barely be bothered to speak and only grunts would leave her throat should the situation elicit it –she was mainly left to go on educational trips to the local and highly respected Shah Jalal University premises to meet with cousins, where she would wile away long nights smoking hashish with college friends and taking bets on what would be the frivolous cause for the next national strike (yesterday it was the death of a banker's clerk, before that it was the injured ankle of a ricksha-wallah).

And the youngest who was shockingly fat for an 11 year old, one of the few caught by the obesity epidemic which had managed to cross the waters. Egged on by the various grandparents and in-laws who thought a child who had never seen his own toes was cute, Iqbal Chakarbatti lolled about in front of the flickering television, demanding cups of raw eggs and salted shrimp, which he elegantly consumed after being informed through various international cooking programmes that these would turn him in to a big, strong man. The layers of blubber choking his vocals made him a gently spoken boy, whose favoured spot in the house was equidistant from his mother and the kitchen.

The presence of two neatly tucked-in-at-the sides British girls arriving at the Chakkarbatti campus every summer, therefore, always caused a ruffle. Simmering away beneath the squashed eyes and layers of thin cotton sari's there was a resentment that it was Imran Chakarbatti who was left to oversee the estate and its affairs in Bangladesh. The question had been whispered in the past; why couldn't Imran switch his 40 acres of land, his domestic palace and an unlimited supply of toilet cisterns for a terraced house in Coventry?

But the kind charm and naturally entrepreneurial pizzazz of the chosen Londoni Saahib Mr Abdul Chakarbatti kept any evil eyes at bay; during his stay, he would buy all the grocery shopping for the entire colony of Chakarbatti's: everything from fresh fruit to peanuts, from ilish fish to gaggot, from hutki to hatkhora. Unfortunately, he thought that the consumption of lobsters was a luxury in the country and like an out-of-touch parent, commanded the servants to curry it with their best spices. Unbeknownst to him however, the shellfish (which was two-a-penny at the local fishmongers) was received by the family with bafflement as a foreign bottom-feeding luxury which, unlike Pringles and Corn Flakes, were not catching on in the same fashion.

The verandah this evening was being used a sort of middle-man's purgatory, where relatives were gathering not to confess their own sins, but those of their neighbours. Old men sat in their vests and lunghis, one knee hitched up, draping their arms across their knees and slowly chewing on pan like a cow slowly chewing grass, the inevitable and consistent movement of their jaws seemingly detached from the rest of their face which animatedly reacted to the unfolding gossip. The heat of the evening was heavy, and insects gathered in clumps around candles or lamps placed outside the gates so the only light getting through cast a dim light on the crowd. The women chattered away a few feet further away, under the stars, in a cluster of chairs in the middle of the estate, being fanned by the servants who were weighed down with sleep. Even the mosquitos were drained by the evening heat, resting lazily in the wet nooks of the onsite abattoir.

Tea was being served; oversweetened, made from a special concoction which included fresh cows milk and raw egg white. Served in frustratingly tiny cups which kept the servants awake from their necessity of needing to be constantly refilled, it was the lifeblood of this estate. Any familial issues, any scandal, any adolescent dramas –all would be responded to in the same way: Let us sit down over a cup of tea and not talk about it.

But today, there were tantalising snippets of another type: the Chakarbatti's, the landowning overfed religious humble gritty Chakarbatti bloodline was gathered on this night to talk about a marriage. A young, fledgling romance that was so brand new and so utterly approved of by every generation that no amount of naughtiness could match the serotonin levels that surged in their minds as they giggled and grunted and reminisced: it was the marriage of the young Londoni, Jaya Chakarbatti, 21 years old, BA educated, with a fair complexion and a slim build and a keen interest in cookery and prayed her five times namaaz, of course what did you expect she is a Chakarbatti how can they say no.

What started off as trickles of a conversation about a potential attraction between Jaya and a vague idea of a boy who lived somewhere, soon turned in to a fully blown, all-out raucous hind-leg-kicking negotiation of marriage rites and who should buy which presents and whether or not the bride should wear a sari or a lehnga. Would they serve curried fish-balls, as was the townie tradition, or would that make Mr Ahmed the villager from the rice-stall uncomfortable?

'It should be done in the most religious way of all; just two witnesses?'

'But a better religious way is to invite everybody, that way they get the most prayers,'

'But Baba, that is unnecessarily ostentatious,'

'The town expects nothing less from us,'

'And Dada would have disapproved, being the thrifty genius he was, Allah rest his soul!'

'And who from them will buy our girls the presents? Isn't he from a poor family?'

'So much the better, we can accept only humble types in to our estate, no vulgar-'

'No, no he is not poor he is a rich man, better for us, no loss to the enterprise,'

'Do we know what he does?'

'A military man,'

'What what? A man of fighting?'

'Yes, none of this sitting in front of a desk rotting away, he will be fit to protect the estate, we need more of those types,'

'Won't he be hot headed?'

'Who can beat us at the boiling blood? Ha! But no one!'

And on and on they went, planning and cutting down and scissoring out and razoring away and hacking at the idea of Akram and Jaya's marriage and how to accommodate a new person in their chain-linked heritage, full of stone-anchored community figures and men who still wore skullcaps and did business in their kurta's and bought land for their servants, and savagely guarded their rights to do so, and for whom any business deal was not worth doing if it delayed prayer time.

Mrs Chakarbatti sat back with her feet nestled inside the layers of her sari, watching with a satisfied smile as the duty was taken over by the family of her husband who, it seemed, after all these years, had finally accepted her.

Mr Chakarbatti felt uneasy watching the fits of passion people were having over a girl they barely knew; his daughter; his little girl who questioned the world and sought advice from him, even though he had always felt inadequately educated for any of her queries. His little girl whose tiny hands had poked around his nose in fascination when she was born. His youngest daughter who had seemed so distant from the world, so preoccupied with thoughts in her mind and the broken links of society and the confusing trail paths of emotional integrity. And when she was older, even though he could say with absolute certainty which position the sun would be in for an accurate prayer time, he could not say the same for the wherabouts of his teenage daughter. But she would return; every weekend from university, not falling for the fleeting fakery of her peers and curious about her heritage with no prompting needed from him. Her pain which he daren't ask about, which seeped in to the tea she made him, surely could not be fixed by this A-Team of marital organisers swarming about in front of him, who had no idea that she couldn't wear a lengha because of the uncomfortable scratchy bits which she always picked off?

Shouts emanated from the majestic coliseum of bungalows and soon enough, the servants carried the gossip to the neighbouring colonies where whispers began too. They servants came outside to take their meals tonight, squatting against the limestone walls that were pock-marked with the dark green spots of humidity and cracks of ageing, that made Sylheti houses look hundreds of years old when in actual fact most had only been built in recent years.

Fevered whispers pinged off the walls the next day, and the day after, and it was when Akram came for his tenth visit to the house that he was finally allowed within a 10 foot distance of Jaya. He had been sitting politely taking tea with the family while they all strained the wicker furniture and she emerged quietly with her head bowed and bent down to put a tray of Bombay mix on the table. Their eyes caught and she smirked. He smirked back. It was a quick exchange and suitably futile given the number of barriers they were facing, and because it was another set of 12 visits before he was finally allowed to take her out (which wasn't orthodox or even allowed; but Abdul Malik Chakkarbatti wasn't about to allow his daughter to marry a military fellow without seeing how good he was in the outside world). So they were allowed, after all manner of risk assessment and moral symposiums, to go shopping for an hour at the Plaza, accompanied by an escort, to buy some material of Jaya's choice.

The escort sat po faced between them in the baby taxi as they looked out not saying a word (luckily baby taxi's had no doors). Akram was taken by her insistence that they take a taxi and not use the chauffeur he had hired for the day. Jaya say admiring the setting sun, the balmy evening and the random snippets of English-but-not-quite-English spoken at every corner of Sylhet. She wished desperately that she could have enjoyed all of this with Eleven. Her forearms missed her.

Young girls had arrived at the market in droves, crammed in to every tiny textile shop they could manage to squeeze in to; small shops with rolls and rolls of every possible combination of shapes and colours. Akram and Jaya were beckoned in to each one as they passed –'Come Sir, Madam please! Hundred per cent cotton!'- and lured with offers of cold drinks –'coldinx coldinx coldinx'.

Akram looked at Jaya.

'I hope you don't think this is terribly forward of me,' he politely started in barely audible Bengali, 'but-'

'Please sir come come come!' Three boys tugged at the couple and led in to a heavily air conditioned room with stools placed in front of a stage that was laid thick with layers of material, surrounded by a wall that seemed to be made entirely of fabric rolls.

Two bottles of sweating cold Sprite were pushed in to their hands and three men –who seemed to materialise out of all the material- beamed at them.

'A-yes madaaam, you liking the clothing's? What clothing's please?'

Akram laughed and looked at Jaya.

'Well,' she spoke back in Bengali, 'I really just wanted some plain white cotton please-'

'Of coursings madaaam! We have all types of cottons, here-' and within a few seconds he had unravelled and thrown out on to the platform a shocking pink silk roll, a luminous green cotton roll, a peach polyester roll ('marble schiffon, madaaam') and a blue satin roll.

Amused, Akram sat back.

Jaya looked shocked. 'Well, a white-'

'Simple madaaam of course we have simple clothing's-' and he triggered a cascade of unrolling more fabrics –crème, off-white, yellow, magnolia.

'Something white, preferably-'

'White? Pure white? Blue-white shadings or green-white shadings?' The beaming man looked back at her with teeth bright enough to be used as a shade comparer.

Without waiting for a reply, he continued bombarding her with a cavalcade of printed silk fabrics. They came one after the other, roll after roll, blotch after flower after stars after tie-dye... endlessly they were chucked and pushed and tugged and picked at in front of the couple, assaulting their eyes.

Jaya and Akram sighed in polite exhaustion.

'It's weird,' Akram said, 'I did a lot of my training in London and I noticed it's a luxury over there to get tailor made clothes. It's the complete opposite here.'

She nodded. 'I think it's because of the amount of time it takes to measure someone up. Plus the cost of material; and the idea of being felt up...' She looked at him quickly (levels of appropriate conversation were usually best tested as quickly as possible, Abba had advised).

Akram laughed, handed over 50 taka to the men ('sorry for wasting your time, bhaiya', said with complete sincerity) and the two left to eat lentil paste in poppadom thimbles (Sylheti's refused to call it what it was –fushka- for fear of evoking its true Dhaka roots).

Walking around the Number One American-style Air-Conditioned International Cosmopolitan Plaza (that wasn't really any of those things at all) and eating 'Chinese' food for dinner (heavily laden with naga chilli and jeera), Jaya and Akram spent the evening hurtling towards the end of the hour. They spend the latter part of it browsing a book store, marvelling at the effort it must have taken for a team of people to photocopy such huge anthologies and make a an open business out of it. Entire encyclopedia's and famous textbooks were squashed tightly on to bookshelves, their spines sewn, not glued.

They decided to walk the route home, Akram showing Jaya the route to avoid the beggars (who had now learnt how to beg in English –onepowpliz, onepowpliz (one pound please)). Instead they walked along Housing Street occupied by the slow moving trains of exhausted school children moved along slowly, all with shiny creamed faces, freshly oiled hair, girls with two pony tails, in blue and white uniform, the older girls signifying modesty by wearing a white scarf that went in a neat 'V' down their fronts, covering each tit, anchored securely at their waist by a belt.

The street vendors were out in force, queues at those selling cones of Bombay Mix that was moistened with mustard oil, pepper, lemon juice, chilli, and whatever else the seller could find, children eating feverishly, knowing the vendor probably didn't wash his hands after going to the toilets but eating his goods anyway, hoping the copious amounts of chilli would somehow kill any remaining bacteria, unable to tell the difference between the salt and the dust...

Peppered along the route home were relatives whom neither had seen before; Jaya touched the feet of the elderly ones (Shanyn: Why did you just touch your uncle's feet? Jaya: Cuz he's over 50, it's kind of a default greeting for people that age). And it was these relatives who later entertained the couple and fed them til they were unable to move... who cooked dish after dish for their family and fed both the Kashif's and the Chakkarbatti's until year after year, the men's stomach's stretched an inch more while their hairlines receded correspondingly, and the women grew older and wiser and smelt more and more of mothballs and the insides of closets. And the youngsters would have to accept the food and destroy their figures and suffer indigestion for a while because in Bangladesh, allowing an elder to feed you was an act of giving, and their copious generosity was an act of them taking; taking some morsel of enjoyment from watching their youngsters flourish, multiply, in the hope that the arrogant fucks would do something useful with their names.

Two weeks went by, and it was Friday evening when Jaya Chakarbatti sat on the balcony smoking her single-purchase Gold Leaf cigarette (3 pence) looking out and appreciating the pouring monsoon, when she received a text message from Akram:

'Hey. I swear its raining much more at your house than anywhere else. I'm soaking. I can hear all your family on the porch so I sneaked in through the back gate. Do you want to come out and give me my jacket back?'

She laughed and threw the cigarette through the flower shaped grills. A spray of rain hit her face, and for a second she closed her eyes, not because of the dirt in the water, but for that moment, she felt light. University and debt and restrictions and insurance and pretence seemed non-existent. She grabbed Akram's jacket (it smelt of aftershave and smoke) and ran swiftly out of the back door, in to the pouring swathes of rain and down the concrete stairs, across the yard, where he was waiting, beaming, every inch soaked, his hair plastered to his forehead.

'Hey you!' He shouted; the rain was loud and constant.

She laughed, looking at him. It was the first genuine laugh she felt she had had in a long, long time.

'Well if this helps!...' and she reached up and held the jacket over his head. His huge hands floated around her waist, and their smiles faltered. It was always a point of confusion later on as to who initiated this first kiss, which happened just then, but Jaya knew that if it wasn't for the weather conditions it would have ended up a dry and awkward one. But there was something about monsoon weather that swelled the senses; the moistening heat, the crowded sound of rain, the blurry vision, the numb, droplet-pelted skin, not being able to feel one's cold feet...

It was there that Akram Kashif from Bangladesh and Jaya Chakarbatti from Coventry shared their first liaison secretly for fear of being called insolent by the Elders, who sat on wicker chairs on the large coloured concrete porch with a flower pattern in the middle, enjoying the weather and remembering obscure relatives. The cogs of history, as was a habit on this estate –despite members living in far flung corners of the world- always started turning only a few feet away from the rest of the family.

A rickshaw bell rang outside the concrete walls.

'My friends are waiting.' Akram looked down at her, drops falling off his brow. He touched her face. 'I'll see you.'

She nodded gently, and he turned around and ran in to the rain and out of the estate boundary. She heard the crunching of thin tyres on the wet ground dissolve until all she could hear was rain and frogs.

Sometimes the oddest of decisions are made at the rightest of times. Kulsuma's future sat around her: 34 year old Husna Begum and her three little children –Reena, Beena and Heena- all with bald heads ('shave shave shave! Its makes their hair grow back thicker!') and snot pouring from their noses, their cotton t-shirts lank from dirt and sweat and with the vague smell of piss about them; 26 year old Ambiya Begum who sat mute and expressionless in the corner, numb from the anti-depressants and unable to process any more disappointed grumblings about being unmarried. Then there was the botanically exalted Shazna Begum who preached about how fat and hairy her lady fingers were while her 6 children, ranging from 30 to 7, occupied whatever nook they could find in the living room, bored to tears unable to say anything for fear of receiving an ear-twist. 24 year old Dilara Begum was primped and premed and frying samosas in the kitchen, wanting nothing more than the opportunity to be show cousin Jamaal that she could be the perfect wife. Staring resolutely in to his phone, away from the crowd, bottom lip jutting out and white foam gathering in the corners of his mouth, Nobil sat, disassociating himself from everyone else, breathing nasally, hating any girl, demeaning any peers and intent on proving to the cyber world that he and he alone could destroy 50 zombies in one Power-Up Punch, too afraid to let the phone screen dim to it's usual black for fear of being confronted with his own reflection.

They were all a bunch of inconsequential, below-average, mundane, missed-the-mark citizens, rotting away in their decrepit shells. Nothing exciting would ever happen to them. This was it; they'd get together and eat some biscuits and tea –this was as high as any of them would ever get. They were the failures of life. Their blood was bitter.

Kulsuma sat quietly perched on the edge of the sofa, cradling her cup of tea, elbows tucked in, head scarf half-on-half-off. Her eyes scanned the room. It was a perfectly normal scene in her life, and it made no sense that in that moment, amongst all these heterosexual failures, Kulsuma Begum made the decision that she wanted out.

There was no change in her face, no hoo ha, and as was the case with most major changes in history, it was a quiet decision resolutely made in her mind. For all the fuss the government had made about social mobility, there was no chance at all that being a Bengali lesbian working in a textile shop in the middle of a Pakistani-majority city, would ever be an identity that could be shed, or climbed out of. And for all the lofty lectures Jaya made to her about fighting for her rights, the ugly fat limp Begums were stuck in their ways and caught irrevocably in the net of Time, tangled and opening and closing their mouths like dying fish.

(Yes, perhaps a member of her family had played their part in the guerrilla revolution of 1971, using his bayonet to carve out the intestines of one of the opposition, but it was down more to a moment of madness than a conscious decision.)

'Mai, will you gather the plates and put them in the sink?' Amma looked in to her tea cup as she said it, deep in thought over why her tomatoes weren't growing as juicy as her sisters.

Kulsuma did as instructed, catching a glimpse of a text Nobil was sending. Boring. It was a boring, useless text about what he had downloaded. A stupid game for a stupid family.

She washed the dishes. The walls around her were grey and yellow. Everything smelled of onions. A brown canvas sack of Tollyboy EasyCook Rice 20kg peeped out from a gap between the cupboards, shoved in with the Henry Hoover, an orange net bag half full of onions, and an indeterminate number of empty Tupperware containers and Flora tubs. Thick blobs of limescale on the tap meant the lukewarm water tricked out on to the dishes, unable to penetrate the thick layer of ghee that was slathered on to them; it came off on her hands, under her fingernails, in the creases of her skin. Of course, by this time, she had already decided that she needed to get out of this life, so the ghee simply added insult to injury. It clung to her like the unshakeable odour of dairy.

Her face was mute, and her eyebrows were set straight. Her lips didn't open. She blinked slowly. The theme tune of Hollyoaks blasted out of the living room and the washing up liquid refused to foam. She was breathing slowly and deeply, as though her body had already gone to sleep. She could hear somebody pissing in the toilet upstairs, interjected by the thin sound of some drops hitting the lino floor.

Jaya. Blissful Jaya. O, how privileged they were to know one of the greatest thinkers in life... How resigned Kulsuma Begum felt when thoughts of her would float across her mind... How taken aback she would get with thoughts of Jaya that she had to stop what she was doing and rest, take deep breaths. Yes... Kulsuma was tortured. Tortured by somebody who had managed to beautifully balance the pulls of Britain and the pulls of Bangladesh; she hadn't ended up a vocally-challenged heavy-accented home-bred-freshie, nor had she ended up a bona fide coconut; no, she had done something that few had ever managed –in fact, no! She had added to that already difficult balance, she was juggling another aspect -she was gay. She was something so incredibly novel, so beautiful in its harmonic dealings that it made Kulsuma's brain swell like an aroused clitoris. How could anybody be so enlightened? How could anybody smell so nice all the time? How did anybody have such a command over life? How could anybody articulate so beautifully what the rest of the world was thinking? And how could someone be so in tune with the world that everything she said sounded so familiar, so right?

Kulsuma dropped the dishes in to the drainer. She placed the raggedy sponge back in its place on the windowsill, and she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs and in to her room and closed the door and sat on the bed and wept. Her body shook with each wave of sobs, her tears falling in big droplets down her face and jumping off her chin. Snot clogged up her nasal passages. She sniffed and sniffed, and cried more as she heard herself, so helpless, so depressed and so angry.

It took only one generation of immigrants to push the boat so far out that there were bound to be a few casualties. She knew she would forever be stuck in this area; the graffiti on the wall would probably be the last thing she'd ever see, the alleyway here would be the death of her. She was stuck in this cycle and there was no chance at all that she would ever break out –no misguided, ill informed newspaper reader that was born in to a free-thinking family could persuade her otherwise. Their shit-for-brains hippy consensus with their sympathetic eyes and false sense of intellectual anarchy would, after all said and done, come to fuck all in her day to day life. Having a father who was concerned about nothing but his own survival, and a mother who knew, quite frankly, absolutely nothing and didn't care about anything, at all, ever, other than minor things like her family and her husband and...

Kulsuma stopped crying. Wait a minute, she thought: what was wrong with the fact that her family were concerned with their own survival? Isn't that what every group had to do at some point? Who told her it was wrong to be selfish about survival? Wasn't it a rite of passage, embedded in to the immigrants' psyche during the transition period, that they take care of themselves before looking outwards?

Yes; that was it. But she was being dragged back in to the transitional period when she was mentally graduated of it, forced to bear the shackles of the generation before her, bound to be a representative for those with whom the rest of the world could not communicate and alas, the messenger was being lined up for the killing. And she, and maybe even her children, would forced to live here, in this economic dumping ground, laughed at by the pasty white faces and looked pitifully down on by the tanned ones. Some of the messengers would probably cash in on their status, like she saw so many did, abused like a foreign plaything, chained to the bed and fed at regular intervals and fucked at will. And all she could see for the course of her lifetime was the fight between perceptions: the duty-bound brown skinned barbarians with their strange smells Vs the morally inferior, pasty skinned drunkards who slept around a lot.

Stuck in the middle was she; being drip-fed the crap that dripped off the higher-ups in each of her specialties; the racism from general society; the depravity of her locality, and the rejection from the gays for having the wrong skin colour and for not buying in to the commercial, monopolised crap they touted in the gay magazines full of effeminate men with baby soft chins or short-haired man-hating militant bra-burning dykes.

Or perhaps she had unwittingly bought in to it; perhaps, as she started sobbing again, she had formed an image of a glossy, exotic lifestyle that may have been consciously blocked out, but formed a silhouette on her real life; a strong outline of what could have been –a hole shaped like Jaya and magazines and parliamentary debates that she didn't understand. She had chased it as far as she could without even realising; she had done her time sitting in fashionable bars and she had gotten pissed and kissed roughly in a toilet cubicle; hell, she had even indulged in some underground pretentious London cocktailery.

Is this all there is? ran through her mind over and over again, clambering around in her head. She had seen the lies; she had read internet forums, she had even read books and YouTube'd deep in to the night watching the little-known academics and social anarchists warn her of the monopolistic news barons who starved out the truth from the public memory. She had seen the bullying tactics of the American Islamophobes on the British government and she had seen the helpless coalition couple, Cameron and Clegg -who looked to her like two gay antiques dealers- pander to the US's every whim and echo every meaningless statement made over any aspect of international importance. They had ignored protest after protest, just like the Prime Ministers before them, and the whole country seemed to be run by a bunch of pretentious knobs who had only the gift of the gab and nothing else. Smoke and mirrors; masters of deflection. Perhaps they had succeeded in something: making the public apathetic. An apathetic public whose support they claimed had gotten them in to power.

So here she was, in her room, part of three different 'publics' who didn't give a fuck about what she needed. She didn't feel indignation; she felt anger. She couldn't voice how she felt; she didn't know the avenues. And the world could fuck off if they thought she was about to spend time and energy in finding those avenues, which she knew would only lead to a dead end. The world had a right to treat her like shit; she had a right to walk away.

There was no place in this world for someone like her.

Jaya Chakkarbatti from Coventry, London, partook in a mutual betrayal to one of her forged heritages –leaving behind the crop-haired dykes and the Lassi Lesbians, she married Akram Kashif in an unpretentious ceremony in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He would now have pride of place in her bed.

Muting her thoughts, Jaya did not talk much on the day of her wedding. Her eyes remain downcast and, as prescribed, she did attempt to cry, but nothing fell from her eyes. It was no matter; later that evening, she was asked to perform the small meeting of families who had gathered to watch the transferral of her duty from her father, to her new husband.

Burdened with the weight of her red and gold sari, that evening, after the wedding guests had gone, sucked the jelly out of the curried bones and bitten the marrow out of the chicken, Jaya stood facing her father, Abdul Malik Chakarbatti, and Akram Kashif. She would be required to touch her fathers feet, to show him gratitude and respect, as They had said, for his servitude. Then, after a quiet show of tears, she would touch the feet of her husband, to show that it was now his duty, his responsibility, his privilege, to serve her, as They had said. It seemed that They had said much, thought Jaya, as the instructions were repeated to her over and over again in the beauty parlour as they powdered her face with a foundation three shades lighter than her natural colour.

Refusing to look her father in the face, Jaya bent down and placed her palms on his feet. In years to come she could always pinpoint this moment as the one where she left her soul. It crashed through the polished stone floor, bent in humility and shame, that evening. Her head deeply bowed and covered by the headscarf of the sari and the gold head dressings, Jaya took a deep breath and clasped her father's feet hard, as she clenched her teeth and concentrated on the sequins digging in to her shoulders.

Without standing up, Jaya –who had gotten lost in the lulls of cocaine and existentialism only a few weeks ago- was confronted with a pair of feet with hairy toes and gently cut nails. Without feeling them, she touched them, and as instructed, Akram feigned reluctance of the gesture of his wife's humility, and pulled her up.

'Shaabaash! Alhamdulillah!' Claps and cheers come lightly from the crowd, as Akram hugs her, and she buries her face in to his shoulder.

Kulsuma Begum committed suicide in a warm bath, comfortably slipping in to a haze on the evening of Jaya Chakarbatti's marriage. It was a trivial decision she had made and seemed, to all intents and purposes, to be the best one; a brave one, she had thought. This thought came just after her wonderment over Jaya's hypocrisy, her cunning masquerade. She had said in her email -as an afterthought, slipped right in at the end- that marrying was her solution. Kulsuma had chuckled to herself as she died –yes, she thought: that was Jaya alright. Pulling out at the last minute, playing the game and putting up the pretence until the final moments; in the game til the 11th hour, in bed with 11 o clock.

It wasn't with resentment that Kulsuma Begum left the world, but resignation, effective immediately, from a job she had never wanted in the first place, amongst people who had never really understood why she was there at all.

Ten years of marriage had seeped in to the bones of Jaya Chakkarbatti who sat looking in to her mirror silently. Akram Kashif lay asleep on the bed behind her. The room was cold, the morning sun bringing with it no warmth at all. Her hair was perfect, her eyes were dead, and her full mouth was still. In the corner of the room was a bookshelf, crammed with all sorts of books now, but in the reflection, her eyes rested on the little black Quran pushed in to the corner of it. She watched it, as it seemed to watch her. She lay her brush down carefully and stood up, rushing to the window and breathing quickly; she often had these small episodes in the privacy of her own demons. It had been ten years, and she had been faithful; faithful to the years of blood that raged and boiled within her; the roots which seemed to her sometimes fetid but carried the heavy burdens of continuation, survival, estates. Vivid smells plucked the sides of her nostrils –smells of Eleven's hair; thoughts of stolen looks and lassi's on car bonnets.

She squeezed her eyes shut and ran her hands over face, breathing deeply. She opened the curtains and daylight flooded in.

Akram moaned quietly, but remained undisturbed, oblivious to anything that was going on around him. It seemed her episode, her murmurings, her movements, her slight episode of panic which encapsulated years of disturbance, had gone unnoticed. She had succeeded in maintaining the course of history, free to continue along its path, undisturbed.

