Orphan of Islam. Alexander Khan
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Everyone woke up. Ayesha chucked a pillow in his direction and pulled her eiderdown over her head. Tamam leaned under the bed and unplugged something. Immediately the noise stopped. Then he pulled at the sheet on top of the mattress and from underneath it yanked out a thick grey blanket with an ominous dark stain spread right across it.
‘I piss the bed,’ he said simply. ‘I do it every night. If you’ve got a problem with that, lie on the floor. Otherwise shut up.’
I hadn’t said a word. Ayesha leaned over and clicked the light off. The mattress was soaked through and I could feel cold pee all over my legs. Horrible, but not so bad if it’s your own. If it isn’t – disgusting. I turned to the wall and started to cry. Was this what life was going to be like at Aunty Fatima’s?
In the days and weeks that followed, I discovered that the answer was ‘yes’. 97 Nile Street was cramped, chaotic, often violent (when Fatima delivered the slaps she’d promised on that first night) and always noisy. It’s the noise I remember most – the screaming, shouting, bickering, pushing and shoving that inevitably goes on when too many people are packed into a small space. Nile Street was less of a home and more of a crowd, especially when the daily procession of ‘aunties’ and their children came knocking on the door. True to his word, Tamam pissed the bed every night and mostly slept through the terrible wake-up call of his blanket alarm. Fatima was occasionally woken by it and would come into the bedroom screeching and shouting at us all to get up while she changed the sheets. Every night involved some kind of disturbance. Within a few days I went from a happy, playful child to a withdrawn creature with dark rings around his eyes who craved his own space and spent hours loitering in the alley behind Fatima’s backyard.
That said, Tamam wasn’t the bully I had him down for on that first night. He turned out to be a nice enough lad, and although he was a couple of years older than me, he didn’t resent me being in the house and even seemed to be pleased to have someone to knock around with.
I didn’t bother much with the younger girls; they did their own thing and that was fine by me. Ayesha was kind to both Jasmine and me, but seemed to be spending more and more time in the kitchen or sweeping the backyard. There was talk of marriage to a man from Pakistan. Ayesha would go ‘home’ for the wedding, then come back to live here with her new husband. Her British-born status guaranteed his residency. Was she happy about this? Being so young, I found it hard to know, but I do recall that she would regularly stand on the windowsill in the front bedroom, talking through the unlatched window to other teenagers – boys included – on the street. Sometimes Fatima caught her at it and gave her a big dressing-down in front of the whole family. Talking to boys was ‘shameful’, she insisted, and was bringing dishonour on their good name around Hawesmill.
‘Do you want to get married,’ she screeched, ‘or are you going to stay on the shelf forever? Because that’s the way you’re going!’
Ayesha was 15 at the time – stupidly young by Western standards for any talk of marriage, or even engagement. But in Pakistan it wasn’t uncommon to find girls half her age in that position. Besides, Yasir was 17 and he was due to get married soon. It was only right that Ayesha should be next.
The front room of the house was Dilawar’s little kingdom. He used it as a kind of storeroom for the shop, particularly for valuable and easily-stolen items like cigarettes, and we were never allowed in. Often he would take in his Pakistani newspaper and lock the door behind him, pleased to be away from the noise. He couldn’t escape the smell of curry, though, which percolated every room. There was always something bubbling away in a pan on the stove – just as well, given the number of visitors the house received and the odd times of day or night that Dilawar and Yasir would arrive home.
Generally, Dilawar was a kind and quiet man who would only flare up when Tamam was misbehaving. Then he’d beat him severely, leaving the rest of us in no doubt that he would do the same to us if we played up.
One of the highlights of the week was when Dilawar and Yasir came home from the shop with bags full of loose change. They’d pour it all over the low table in the back living room and ask us children to help count it. My cousins were surprisingly good at this, given their age and the fact that attending school wasn’t high on the list of priorities in Nile Street. They’d count out piles of coppers and silver, putting them to one side when they’d reached a pound’s worth. Yasir or Dilawar would then bag them up, £10 per bag. As far as I could tell, they didn’t have a bank account (it’s considered un-Islamic to trade with high street banks that have interest rates) and so all the money was kept in the locked front room. That’s what passed for family entertainment in that house.
As time went on and Dad’s visits became fewer, Fatima took less trouble to disguise her feelings towards us. She’d never been what you might describe as ‘warm’, but she definitely got worse. She screamed and shouted endlessly and it always seemed to be me who provoked it. Many times she raised her hand, and while she never hit me or Jasmine, the threat was clear. Perhaps she was afraid that we’d tell Dad and she’d get in trouble. Her problem was that she couldn’t see us simply as her brother’s kids. We also belonged to ‘that Englishwoman’, the woman who’d entered this close-knit family and taken her brother away. That he’d betrayed his Western wife and taken her kids abroad didn’t count; Fatima seemed to believe we were tainted with kuffar blood and would always remain outsiders. So why didn’t she and the family set us free? The logical decision would’ve been to return us to our mum. But there was something about this family that made it impossible for them to let go. We would have to stay among them until all traces of Western influence were removed.
But if we were out of sight, we were out of mind. So Fatima created a special punishment for Jasmine and me. If we’d been naughty we were marched upstairs, pushed into the back bedroom and locked in. Occasionally it was both of us, but more often than not, I was alone. I think Fatima knew that Jasmine was young enough to be ‘re-educated’ effectively. She was also female, which carries its own status in Muslim culture. I was a different matter. Perhaps Fatima saw that I would not be so easily moulded. Whatever her reasons, I found myself spending hours in that locked room, staring out over the grey slate rooftops of Hawesmill and wondering what I’d done that was so wrong.
There were times when Jasmine and I clearly hadn’t done anything wrong, but were locked in the bedroom anyway. One minute we would be playing with our cousins, the next Fatima would be whisking us upstairs as the whole house erupted in frenzied activity, children and adults running and shouting everywhere. As we were rushed up, I was sometimes certain I could hear the sound of the letterbox flapping at the front door, accompanied by a woman’s voice yelling through it. When this happened, the door was never, ever opened, and yet normally a constant stream of visitors walked over that threshold at all times of the day. What was so wrong with this particular visitor that they could not be admitted?
We ourselves weren’t allowed out of the house very much. A walk to Dilawar’s shop with Fatima or Ayesha was as far as we got. There were no trips to the park, the playground or the seaside. We didn’t go into the town. Our whole life was 97 Nile Street and a couple of streets around it. We didn’t even go to school. Now I wonder why no school inspectors were on Fatima’s tail, but maybe back then they didn’t care whether Asian kids attended or not. However, we were getting an education of sorts at a house at the back of Nile Street that had been knocked through into the house next door and converted into a mosque.
Sebastopol Street was the home of the local imam and his wife. The mosque itself was only for men and older boys, so, with Jasmine, Tamam and Maisa, plus a handful of other little kids from around Hawesmill, I went along several times a week to sit in a side-room and learn the basics of Arabic, making a start on the 114 chapters of the Qu’ran. The imam’s wife took the lessons, handing out simple little textbooks which taught the ‘ABC’ in Arabic, plus other key words and phrases. As we made our first clumsy attempts at this complicated language she listened to us in silence, constantly playing with a set of worry beads. She taught us sentences that form the cornerstones of the Holy Book, for example:
Bismill
