Stranger to History Page 2

  I didn’t mind drinking milk, but I wasn’t used to the amount drunk at my aunt’s house. I hadn’t brought a mug, and hoped that if I delayed the process I might be able to slip away with my mother before the points from the licence-plate game were counted. So, as the others ran back to the house, I clambered over a small mound and went to the boundary wall. I unzipped my trousers and started to pee. I was concentrating on the small frothy puddle forming before me when I looked up and saw my first cousin similarly relieving himself. He saw me too, and after staring intently in my direction, his face turned to horror. I looked round to see what had alarmed him and began to say something, but he turned his head away, muttering to himself. Then, squeezing out a few last drops, he pulled up his zip and fled. He ran up the mound and down into the garden, screaming, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’

  He had chosen his words well. I felt their embarrassment even before I understood their meaning. ‘Nanga’ meant naked; it was a nanny’s word used to instil in children the shame of running around with no clothes on. It was used in little ditties to make the point clearer and its resonance was deep. Susu was a little boy’s penis. And though I knew each word my cousin had spoken, I couldn’t piece together the meaning of the sentence. Why had he said that my penis was naked?

  I zipped up my trousers and ran down the hill after him in the hope of figuring out what he meant before the others did. I reached the lawn as the news was being broken to the rest of the cousins, who collapsed, coughing and spluttering, when they heard. They were not quite sure what it meant, but the nannies screeched with laughter.

  The commotion was so great that the adults were drawn out on to the veranda. Again, my cousin yelled, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’ This time, seeing all the adults, including my aunt, laughing, I laughed too, louder than anyone else. The cousins, who earlier had been perturbed rather than amused, were now also laughing. The time for explanations had passed and I decided to ask my mother in private about what the nannies had dubbed my hatless willie. Fortunately, amid the disruption the licence-plate game had also been forgotten and when my mother turned up, she found me agitating to leave before the others remembered.

  In the car, as my mother drove from roundabout to roundabout, like in a game of joining the dots, I agonised over the day’s discovery. I could now tell the difference between my susu and my cousin’s, but its implication was impossible to guess.

  The truth turned out to be more implausible than anything I could have invented. If there was a link between the missing foreskin and my missing father, it was too difficult to grasp. My mother had always explained my father’s absence by saying that he was in jail for fighting General Zia’s military dictatorship in Pakistan, but she had never mentioned the missing foreskin until now. My idea of my father was too small and the trauma of the day too great to take in the information that he came from a country where everyone had skin missing from their penises.

  It was a loose, but not disturbing, addition to my life. I felt oddly in on the joke and laughed again. The sun slipping behind Safdarjung’s tomb, the little car climbing up the dividing flyover with my mother at the wheel; it was too familiar a view of the world to change over a susu without a hat.

  I grew up with a sense of being Muslim, but it was a very small sense: no more than an early awareness that I had a Muslim-sounding name, of not being Hindu or Sikh and of the circumcision. In Delhi, my mother had many Muslim friends; we saw them often, and especially for the important Muslim festivals. On these occasions – in them teaching me the Muslim customs and greetings for instance – I felt somehow that they saw me as one of their own. But in Delhi, steeped in Muslim culture, it was hard to pry apart this sense, here related to food, there to poetry, from the shared sensibilities of so many in the city, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

  On the sub-continent religion is patrilineal so it was inevitable that my awareness of religious identity and my father’s absence would arise together. At times, over the years, when the twin birth of that day surfaced again, it was always as a Siamese tangle rather than as distinct questions. My mother didn’t raise me with religion, but my grandmother, though Sikh herself, told me stories from the different faiths that had taken root in India. As a child I made my way through all the sub-continent’s major religions. When I was five or six, I was a devout Hindu, lighting incense, chanting prayers and offering marigolds to the gods; Shiva remained the focus of my devotion until I discovered He-Man. Then, aged seven or eight, I threatened to grow my hair and become a Sikh, but was dissuaded by my mother and my cousins, who had fought their parents for the right to cut their hair. Through all this, I retained my small sense, gained on that hot day, of being Muslim.

  When I was ten a Kuwaiti family, escaping the Gulf War, moved into our building and their three sons became my best friends. One night, sitting on their father’s bed, the subject of religion came up. Either from some buried conviction or just the wish to be included, I told them I was Muslim. Their father seemed surprised and asked whether I had been circumcised, making a whistling sound and a snip of his fingers that reduced us to cackles. And just as it began, the question of the circumcision, and the patrilineal connection to Islam that it stood for, was obscured in confusion and laughter.

  It was only few years later, when Hindu–Muslim riots erupted across India and Hindu nationalist groups drove through Delhi pulling down men’s trousers to see if they were circumcised, that my early memory of the link between my circumcision and my father’s religion acquired an adult aspect. But by then, my desire to know whose son I was had consumed any interest I might have had in knowing which religion I belonged to. I was also on my way to a Christian boarding-school in south India, adding the final coat of paint to a happy confusion that was as much India’s as my own. And it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties, far away from my childhood world in India, that religion surfaced again.

  The Beeston Mail

  The colourful Virgin train that took me north on a low, grey morning in 2005 was heading for Leeds. I was twenty-four and had been living in London for a year. A few days before, a group of British Pakistanis had bombed London buses and trains; most had been from Beeston, a small Leeds suburb.

  Beeston that morning, with its rows of dark brick, semidetached houses, could hardly cope with the attention that had come to it. The world’s press filled its quiet residential streets with TV cameras and outside-broadcast vans. The police were also there in large numbers and the residents, caught between camera flashes, yellow tape and controlled explosions, either hid in their houses or developed a taste for talking to the press. The majority were Punjabis, Muslims and Sikhs, Pakistanis and Indians, re-creating pre-Partition mixtures – especially evocative for me – of an undivided India that no longer existed.

  Walking around Beeston, interviewing its residents, I became aware of a generational divide among its Muslims that I hadn’t noticed in previous trips round England. The older generation could have come straight from a bazaar in Lahore. They wore the long-tailed kameez and baggy salwar of Punjab, their best language was Punjabi, and although they were opposed to Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war and hated America, they were too balanced to be extremists, too aware of their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan.

  Their children were unrecognisable to them and to me. Some were dressed in long Arab robes with beards cut to Islamic specifications. They lacked their parents’ instinctive humour and openness; their hatred of the West was immense and amorphous. One appeared next to his father, carrying a crate into their corner shop. He had small, hard eyes, a full black beard, and wore a grey robe with a little white cap. He seemed almost to be in a kind of fancy dress. I asked him why he was dressed that way.

  ‘It is my traditional dress,’ he answered coldly, in English.

  ‘Isn’t your father in traditional dress?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but this is Islamic dress.’

  His father looked embarrassed.

  An older m
an standing next to me chuckled. ‘I was complaining to my neighbour that my son never did any work and the neighbour said, “You think that’s bad, mine’s grown a beard and become a maulvi [priest].”’ The joke was intended for me especially because the maulvi on the sub-continent is a figure of fun and some contempt.

  Walking around Beeston, it was possible to feel, as I had for most of that year, meeting second-generation British Pakistanis in England, that an entire generation of maulvis had grown up in northern Britain. The short exchange with the men at the corner shop was a view in miniature of the differences between the two generations. Though neither felt British in any real sense, the older generation had preserved their regional identity and an idea of economic purpose and achievement. The younger generation was adrift: neither British nor Pakistani, removed from their parents’ economic motives and charged with an extranational Islamic identity, which came with a sense of grievance.

  A large, solemn man, the owner of a convenience store, who knew the bombers, said, ‘They were born and raised here. We did the work and these kids grew up and they haven’t had a day’s worry. They’re bored. They don’t do any work. They have no sense of honour or belonging.’

  Later that week, on the train home, I considered their story. It began in rootlessness, not unlike my own, and led to the discovery of radical Islam, which was largely unknown to me. I had encountered it for the first time the year before when I had met Hassan Butt, a young British Pakistani who had been a spokesman for the extremist group Al-Muhajiroun and active in recruiting people to fight in Afghanistan. (Butt later recanted these views, although in 2008 he was arrested while boarding a flight to Lahore.) We had sat in an Indian restaurant on Manchester’s Curry Mile. Butt was short and muscular, with a warm but intense manner. He was exactly my age, and took me into his confidence at least in part because he saw me, on account of my having a Muslim father, as Muslim.

  His ambition for the faith was limitless. ‘Fourteen hundred years ago,’ he told me, ‘you had a small city state in Medina and within ten years of the Prophet it had spread to Egypt and all the way into Persia. I don’t see why the rest of the world, the White House, Ten Downing Street, shouldn’t come under the banner of Islam.’ It was Butt’s nearness to me in some ways – in age, in the split worlds he had known, in the warmth he showed me – that drew me to him, and the faith he had found that created distance between us. At last, I said, ‘So what now? You’re as old as I am, where do you go from here?’

  ‘First things first,’ he replied. ‘Fight to the utmost to get my passport back [the British authorities had impounded it]. The quicker I get it, the faster I get my plan of action together that I have with a group of guys who . . . Since leaving Muhajiroun I’m focusing on them. There are about nine of us now and we’re not willing to accept anybody else because we have the same ideas, same thoughts. Each one of us will maybe play a different role from the other, but all collectively to gain a wider picture. Once I get my passport back, I definitely see myself, inshallah, not out of pride, not out of arrogance, not out of ambition, but rather because I believe I have the ability – I pray to Allah to give me more ability – to become a face for Islam in the future, something Muslims have been lacking for a very long time.’

  His answer put still greater distance between us. My small sense of being Muslim, gained so haphazardly over the years, was not enough to enter into the faith that Butt had found.

  Now, travelling back from Leeds to London, I realised how short I was on Islam. I knew that the young men I had met in Beeston, and Butt, felt neither British nor Pakistani, that they had rejected the migration of their parents, that as Muslims they felt free of these things. But for me, with my small cultural idea of what it meant to be Muslim and no notion of the Book and the Traditions, the completeness of Islam, it was impossible to understand the extra-national identity that Beeston’s youth and Butt had adopted. I wouldn’t have been able to see how it might take the place of nationality. My personal relationship with the faith was a great negative space. And despite this, I was also somehow still Muslim.

  So, with only an intimation of their aggression; their detachment and disturbance; and some sense that Islam had filled the vacuum that other failed identities had left, I came back to London and wrote my article. It was an accumulation of my experience with radical Islam in Britain. I wrote that the British second-generation Pakistani, because of his particular estrangement, the failure of identity on so many fronts, had become the genus of Islamic extremism in Britain. The article appeared on the cover of a British political magazine alongside my interview with Hassan Butt and, proud to have written my first cover story, I sent it to my father.

  I received a letter in response, the first he’d ever written to me. But as I read it, my excitement turned quickly to hurt and defensiveness. He accused me of prejudice, of lacking even ‘superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos’, and blackening his name:

  Islamic extremism is poisonous, as is that of the IRA and the RSS [a Hindu nationalist party]. The reason why it is on the rise is because of Palestine and Iraq. If Hindus were bombed, occupied and humiliated you may find the same reaction . . . By projecting yourself as an ‘Indian Pakistani’ you are giving this insulting propaganda credibility as if it is from one who knows it all.

  Cricket, that old dress rehearsal for war on the sub-continent, came up: ‘Look at the way the Lahore crowd behaved after losing a Test match and compare that to the “Lala crowds” in Delhi. It seems the Hindu inferiority complex is visceral.’ A lala was a merchant, and here my father articulated prejudices of his own, textbook prejudices in Pakistan, of Hindus as sly shop-owners, smaller, weaker, darker and more cowardly than Muslims. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you weren’t a little black Hindu,’ my half-sister would laugh, or ‘I hate fucking Hindus, man,’ my half-brother once said. Pakistanis, for the most part converts from Hinduism to Islam, lived with a historical fiction that they were descendants of people from Persia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, who once ruled Hindu India.

  I wasn’t sure which side my father placed me on when he wrote his letter, whether he thought of me as one of them or, worse, as a traitor he had spawned. He did say, ‘Do you really think you’re doing the Taseer name a service by spreading this kind of invidious anti-Muslim propaganda?’ To me, that was the most interesting aspect of the letter: my father, who drank Scotch every evening, never fasted or prayed, even ate pork, and once said, ‘It was only when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran – and I read it back to front several times – that I realised there was nothing in it for me,’ was offended as a Muslim by what I had written. The hold of the religion, deeper than its commandments, of religion as nationality, was something that I, with my small sense of being Muslim, had never known.

  When I came to the end of my father’s letter, I felt he was right: I couldn’t have even ‘a superficial knowledge’ of the Pakistani, but more importantly Islamic, ethos. I had misunderstood what he had meant when he described himself as a cultural Muslim. I took it to mean no more than a version of what I grew up with in Delhi – some feeling for customs, dress, food, festivals and language – but it had shown a reach deeper than I knew. And the question I kept asking myself was how my father, a professed disbeliever in Islam’s founding tenets, was even a Muslim. What made him Muslim despite his lack of faith?

  For some weeks, during a still, dry summer in London, the letter percolated. It prompted a defence on my part in which my back was up. My father responded with silence that turned colder as the weeks went by. His wife and daughter tried to intervene, but I wasn’t willing to apologise for something I’d written. And although I minded the personal attack, I didn’t mind the letter: it aroused my curiosity. Caught between feeling provoked and needing to act, I thought of making an Islamic journey.

  My aim was to tie together the two threads of experience from that summer: the new, energised Islamic identity working on young Muslims and my own late discovery of
my father’s religion. My father’s letter presented me with the double challenge to gain a better understanding of Islam and Pakistan.

  But I wanted a canvas wider than Pakistan. Something deeper than national identity acted on my father, something related to Islam, and to understand this, I felt travelling in Pakistan alone would not be enough. Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947, was a country founded for the faith. But it was also a lot like India, and I felt that unless I travelled in other Muslim countries I would not be able to separate what might be common Islamic experience from what might feel like an unexplained variation of India. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that the whole Islamic world stretched between my father and the place where I read his letter. A strange arc of countries lay on my route: fiercely secular Turkey, where Islam had been banished from the public sphere since the 1920s; Arab-nationalist Syria, which had recently become the most important destination for those seeking radical Islam; and Iran, which in 1979 had experienced Islamic revolution.

  In a classical sense, except for Turkey, the lands that lay between my father and me were also part of the original Arab expansion when the religion spread in the seventh and eighth centuries from Spain to India. I decided on a trip from one edge of the Islamic world, in Istanbul, to a classical centre, Mecca, and on through Iran to Pakistan. The first part of the trip would be an old Islamic journey, almost a pilgrimage, from its once greatest city to its holiest. The trip away, through Iran and Pakistan, was a journey home, to my father’s country, where my link to Islam began, and, finally, to his doorstep.

  ‘Homo Islamicos’

  It was November. The sky was damp and heavy. I waited for Eyup outside a Starbucks on Istiklal. It was an old-fashioned European shopping street, with a tram, in central Istanbul. The road was being resurfaced and rain from the night before spread a muddy layer of water over the newly paved white stone. The youth that filled the street, sidestepping wide, wet patches of sludge and splashing brown sprinklings on the ends of jeans, were of remarkable beauty.