A Week in December Page 7

  ‘Right. Then open up Stegwriter. Click on File manager and then Decrypt. Follow the prompts. My problem was that in order to hide data of any size I had to find a file that was proportionate. Eventually I found a 650-kilobyte WAV file would carry a five-byte text file. Stegwriter has the whole kit.’

  Seth coughed. ‘Is it right to be looking at these pictures? I know that in the name of the Prophet ...’

  Salim looked at Seth sorrowfully. ‘There is nothing in life that is moral or immoral, there is only the command of God. If Allah has forbidden something, then it is wrong. I am not aware that he has forbidden us to look at women. In fact, there is an early scriptural source in which devout men look at the reflection of a naked woman as she is preparing to bathe. Another authority tells us a man may inspect his wife before marrying her, to make sure she is without blemish that might harm their children.’

  ‘But I don’t intend to marry Olya,’ said Elton.

  ‘But you can still look. Some scholars of Arabic have argued that the word means very much more than “look” in English.’

  ‘I think I’d feel uneasy.’

  ‘Islam does not recognise “feeling uneasy”, it only cares about what God has commanded. You’re talking like a Christian, some ridiculous Catholic. In any event, Seth, the important issue is not whether your eyes have rested for a moment on a naked woman, but whether you can play your part in ushering in the new caliphate.’

  When it was his turn to leave the house and walk back to the Tube station, Hassan also felt ‘uneasy’. There were a large number of Muslim girls at his college and when some of them took to wearing the hijab, he supported them, as did the other serious male students. What he didn’t dare admit was that he found the black covering attractive, particularly with girls he had previously seen in Western clothes. Rania, for instance, used to wear grey skirts and leather boots, so her dress was modest, revealing only her knees, shiny beneath navy blue tights, when she sat down in the lecture hall. On her upper half she wore a white blouse, buttoned high, and a cardigan or jacket. There was nothing to distress her parents in all this. But in her eyes ... She applied a thin line of black and a trace of mascara in the Ladies after she’d arrived in the morning, and her lashes were long. The grey skirt, though knee-length, did cling to her hips, and if Hassan happened to be watching when she innocently crossed her legs, he glimpsed for a moment the deep blue thighs and the darkness beyond. He had the contours of Rania’s body so deeply etched in his mind that when she took to wearing the hijab it wasn’t, to begin with, any hardship for him. He saw through it. The clean white bra and underpants that he could picture beneath, the thighs presumably still in the same navy blue nylon, the curve of the hips and the smallish, firm breasts ... Now the eyes had no trace of liner or mascara, but when the long lashes were lowered over the dark brown iris there was still a message of invitation.

  The scriptural reference to ‘looking’ was one that had been popular among his friends, as it seemed to excuse so much. One of them pointed out to Hassan a passage from a Koranic scholar that read: ‘The dual nature of what is shown and what is concealed is fundamental to the understanding of God; and this double aspect is explicitly linked in at least one place to sexuality, where the female genitals are identified with the concealed aspect of the divine. There are no Islamic monks. The Prophet had many wives, and we are urged to copulate and procreate. Many scholars have seen orgasm as a foretaste of paradise, where the sensation will not be brief, but eternal.’

  One of the boys at college, who had a large collection of topshelf magazines, told Hassan it was fine if the girls in the pictures were kafirs. Hassan thought this was making a virtue of necessity, since Muslim women simply didn’t pose nude. His own aesthetic taste was always for dark-haired women of his own background; leaving aside his sinful thoughts about Rania’s body, he simply liked the elegance and colouring of these women, their femininity.

  It was a torment that seldom let up. At the age of nineteen, before he became religious, he had had a kafir girlfriend, a white Londoner called Dawn who was in the same year at college. It seemed to be just his luck that he had found the only sexually reticent kafir in London. Parts of the West End were no-go zones on Friday and Saturday nights with drunken girls in tiny skirts showing their breasts to passers-by before they threw up in the gutter. Friends of his at college told awed tales of the licentiousness of ever-willing kafir girls. But Dawn, for some reason she couldn’t properly explain, allowed Hassan only limited access. He could put his hands beneath her clothes and touch her between the legs, but that was all. She refused to reciprocate. It was only when he (to his self-admitted shame) suggested to her that her reluctance was due to some atavistic racial prejudice that she tearfully relented. It was in a flat she shared with three other girls in Stamford Hill, with the thump of noisy dance music coming from the lounge. Dawn was rigid with resistance, then with cold, in her unheated bedroom as she lay naked at last beneath the duvet. Hassan was scared they might be interrupted by one of the flatmates, all of whom, this being a Friday night, were stupefied with drink. It wasn’t at all how he had hoped it might be. Dawn insisted on turning out the bedside lamp, depriving him of the stimulus of sight. When he lay down on top of her, she seemed to shudder a little; he thought perhaps she was crying. He told her that they didn’t have to go ahead, but she replied that now they had got this far he might as well finish it off. Hassan felt the pent desires of seven years since puberty compressing to a hard explosive point. Then as Dawn’s cold hands stroked his back without enthusiasm, the moment seemed to pass him by. After twenty minutes or more of fumbling and apology and desperate measures, he managed something – a sort of end point without any preceding sensation. He was too ashamed of himself to see her again.

  A few weeks later, he found his attention increasingly focussing on a tall and amusing Iranian called Shahla Hajiani, and it seemed to him that his interest was reciprocated. But by then he’d found religion, or a political version of it. When, after a student party, Shahla placed a modest but flirtatious hand on his arm, he explained to her that he must lead a pure life. She looked at him with sad eyes, in which there was still laughter, but also a little hurt and bafflement. ‘I’ll be your friend, then,’ she said. ‘If that’s allowed?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  And she had been a good friend, too, he had to admit. Shahla’s father was a Westernised Tehran businessman who had left the country with the fall of the Shah; her mother was English, of part Jewish descent. Shahla, though nominally Muslim, didn’t understand or approve of Hassan’s mosque life; but she had been solicitous and kind at college, generous with her time and company, swinging through the canteen on her long legs, shoulder bag flying, to settle down beside him over lunch. Sometimes Hassan thought he could still see a glimmer of hope, or lust, or something, in her deep brown eyes. Mostly, she asked him innocent questions or told him what play or film she’d been to see and gave an animated account of it.

  Thinking of the eternal fires that waited for the unbeliever, particularly an apostate like Shahla, Hassan felt he should ignore her. Yet her friendliness was so unassuming that he found himself, against his better judgement, absorbed by what she said.

  Although his understanding of Islam forbade Hassan physical contact, no amount of prayer could quell his twenty-one-year-old desires.

  The kafir press and media were degraded by images of sex. On quiz shows, talk shows, game shows, the most highly paid and respected presenters, with millions of taxpayers’ pounds in their back pockets, talked of masturbation, genital size and sodomy. They did so with a twinkle, with a laugh, slapping their guests on the thigh, as though that made it all right.

  On the commercial channels, products were sold to the credulous kafirs in the ad break by women mimicking fellatio or commenting with breathy voiceovers. A cheap shampoo was flogged to the sound of a female orgasm; so was a breakfast cereal, with a series of kafir women howling on their backs, and this was suppose
d to be ‘fun’ or ‘saucy’ or something. In a way, Hassan didn’t mind; it merely convinced him that he was right.

  What troubled him more were the subtler insinuations of girls and women into his consciousness. There was a half-breed, perhaps Eurasian, presenter who seemed to crop up on almost all channels at about eight o’clock. She didn’t go in for the filthy talk, but her skirts were short and Hassan found her wholesomeness unsettled him. Sometimes he felt the world was just too full of women, girls, females of every kind who’d been put on earth by God to test his resolve. The black-haired waitress in the Italian café, Barbara, whom he saw having her cigarette break when he went past, puffed insolently, returning his stare. Or take the young mothers at the school gates in Walworth, chattering as they waited for their children to come out: he could sense the hormonal activity coming off them, their marriages now eight or ten years old, love handles swelling gently at the hip, but so alive and keen and not wanting to let their youth go by. Notice me, their body poses said, I’m married but you can still want me.

  In April, Hassan’s father, Farooq al-Rashid, had received a letter in an envelope marked ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. Assuming it was from the taxman, he opened it cautiously. He had to read it several times before he understood its astonishing contents. From 10 Downing Street, someone who was his ‘obedient servant’ told him ‘in strict confidence’ that the Prime Minister had it in mind on the occasion of the forthcoming list of Birthday Honours, to submit Mr al-Rashid’s name to the Queen for ...

  For what? He had to start again, blinking. Queen, Empire, Prime Minister ... He thought for a moment that he was being crowned king. At last it became clear: he was, if it was ‘agreeable’ to him, to be appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Surely, he thought, this was something normally given to TV comedians or Olympic winners. He had seen their pictures in the newspaper, holding a medal on a ribbon and wearing a top hat. And the great British honour was to be granted him for ...

  ‘Lime pickle,’ he said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  Nasim stood up and kissed her husband on the cheek. He hugged her close.

  Farooq al-Rashid had started his first factory at Renfrew in Scotland twenty-two years ago, in the month of Hassan’s birth. He himself had come to Britain as a thirteen-year-old in 1967. His parents had left the Mirpur Valley in Pakistan-administered Kashmir when their smallholding was flooded during the construction of the Mangla Dam, and, like many others from the region, they had at first found work in the textile mills of Bradford. After leaving school at sixteen, Farooq had studied for a diploma in business studies and decamped to Glasgow, where he found a clothing company run by the grandfather of a Mirpur friend. Farooq was called ‘Knocker’ because in his early days in the city he would go round people’s houses, knocking on their doors, looking for fellow Muslims with whom he could pray at the Oxford Street Mosque.

  His business interest, however, was not in textiles but in provisions, and he quickly saw that food from the subcontinent might be sold not only in cheap restaurants but through supermarkets to a population becoming interested in strong-tasting, foreign dishes. It took him more than ten years of hard work and saving to assemble the money, the staff and the ideas. At the age of thirty-four, he left the clothing company, where he was second in command, bought a lease on an old factory in Renfrew, then borrowed money for industrial weights and scales, giant cauldrons and sterilising equipment. He had alterations made to the production line so it could carry cartons of glass jars instead of boxed vests, and travelled to Mexico, Brazil and Iran to find the best fruit. He devised, in consultation with three local chefs, a recipe in which the taste of ginger, chilli, salt and garlic was eased into the savour of lime with the aid of brown sugar. It fired up the blandest dish; the citrus skins remained soft and digestible while the sweetness mitigated the heat. He could hardly produce it fast enough for the Glaswegian palate. Within ten years he was a millionaire. He had married the most beautiful girl in Bradford, sticking to Mirpur traditions by choosing a bride whose parents were from the same village as his own, and they had a dark-eyed handsome son – the apple, or the lime as Farooq put it, of his father’s eye.

  Farooq al-Rashid made friends in Glasgow; his demeanour appealed to the old Scots. He couldn’t join them in the pubs, where the true intimacy was forged, but he wasn’t squeamish about their profanity, their football or their godlessness, and they found his devotion to Islam easy enough to ignore.

  ‘Does this mean we have to call you Sir Farooq?’ asked Nasim, looking up with worried eyes.

  ‘No, don’t be silly. You just call me Knocker like before.’

  ‘But on letters, do they—’

  ‘That is if you’re a knight. Then I would be Sir Farooq al-Rashid. But as it is, I am Farooq al-Rashid, OBE.’

  ‘It’s quite ironic, isn’t it?’ said Hassan. ‘That you should be an officer of the empire that conquered and partitioned your homeland.’

  ‘That was a long time ago, Hassan. As you know. We are friends now.’

  ‘The British have their pet dictator in power, who—’

  ‘Stop it, for goodness’ sake,’ said Nasim. ‘Don’t spoil your father’s day.’

  ‘Do I have to wear a penguin suit?’ said Hassan.

  ‘I shall buy a new dress,’ said Nasim.

  ‘And I,’ said Mr al-Rashid, ‘shall think of something to say to the Queen. Do you think she reads many books?’

  One of Knocker al-Rashid’s secrets was that he himself could barely read. His family had been illiterate on both continents and had no books in the house. At the secondary modern school he had attended near Manningham Lane, the Yorkshire boys were destined for manual jobs in factories or in building trades, so didn’t care about lessons. The children in the small immigrant class in which he was placed were too busy learning how to speak English to have much time to read it. A teacher called Mr Albrow gave him books by Winifred Holtby and Emily Brontë, but he couldn’t understand them. Farooq left school with exam passes in maths and science only. At night school, he forced himself to read the newspaper and found he could understand balance sheets and company reports, but their language was specialised and, because there were relatively few terms, easy to grasp. When at about this time he first heard of something called ‘dyslexia’, he wondered if that was a condition he might be suffering from – as well as from the natural difficulty of working in a foreign language. But once he’d gained his diploma, with distinction, he worried less about reading and concentrated wholly on business, for which he seemed to have a talent that needed no words.

  The thought of meeting the Queen, however, reawoke some old anxieties. Knocker al-Rashid imagined he would have to spend some time with her in the throne room and that once they’d talked about his journey – ‘Have you come far?’ – and the weather, she would ask him, conversationally, if he’d read any good books lately. That’s what smart English people always asked. Had he, the Queen would enquire, read the winner of the latest book prizes – the Allied Royal or the Pizza Palace, for instance? He hadn’t; he’d just seen the names in the newspaper. Or she might ask if he knew Sir V. S. Naipaul or Sir Salman Rushdie; but he’d never read a word of either, not because he didn’t like the sound of them, but just because he couldn’t read properly.

  He might have a quiet talk with the imam at the mosque in Chigwell. He was a wise man and would give good advice. If he was tongue-tied, Her Majesty would consider him dull, which would be wounding to his family and his faith. From what he understood, he had two months before the announcement and then it could be another six before he went to the palace, so he had time enough to do a crash course in English literature. No one – not even Queen Elizabeth – should say that Knocker al-Rashid was not a cultured man.

  All day long he found himself picturing the scene that must have prompted the letter from the ‘obedient servant’.

  Her Majesty, on the occasion of her approaching birthday, sat upon her throne,
raised on a platform. Below her, also seated, the Prime Minister pored over a sheaf of papers.

  ‘We come now, Your Majesty, to the case of Mr Farooq al-Rashid.’

  ‘Ah yes, indeed,’ the Queen replied. ‘It is high time we recognised his services to our country and ourselves.’

  ‘An Officer of the Order of the British Empire, perhaps?’ The Prime Minister looked up over his spectacles.

  ‘At the very least,’ said Her Majesty. ‘Send for the Obedient Servant and command him to despatch a letter.’

  Knocker’s pleasure at the thought of the OBE was tempered by his anxiety at looking foolish when he came to meet the Queen. He had very little time in which to get an education. Sitting in the back of his car one day on his way to Dagenham, he had a sudden, clever thought. A year earlier, at a political fund-raising dinner, he had met a man called ... What was it? Knocker may have had trouble with what was written down, but spoken words and names lodged easily in his sober memory ... Tranter. That was it. Sophie Topping, the hostess that night, whose husband was hoping to be elected an MP, had given a party to show off potential donors like Knocker to the party grandees. Among the guests had been this man Tranter. He was a book reviewer or critic (Knocker was not certain of the distinction) who once a month was paid to ‘moderate’ the discussions of Sophie Topping’s book-reading group. Tranter was neither a politician nor a potential backer, just someone Mrs Topping was proud to know and who, she clearly thought, would raise the tone of her gathering.

  In the course of the evening, Tranter had revealed a wide knowledge of books, talking confidently about living and dead authors (he seemed to prefer the latter). So far as Knocker could understand, he was someone who was able to exist by reading books and having views on them. A newspaper hired him to give his opinion and others paid to read it. This was so far from any way of earning a living Knocker had previously encountered that he had to talk himself through the logistics of it a few times to make sure it all made sense. In the end, he decided, the cash flow and productivity, the supply and the demand, didn’t really matter; what counted was that this man Tranter was the one to help him in his destined meeting with the Queen of England.