Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Author:Kamila Shamsie
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

||||||||||||||||||

And so it began. At some point mid-morning, every morning, Farooq would text with a location: sometimes a kabab shop, sometimes a street corner—but more often than not, a betting shop on the High Road. That was usually where he was when Parvaiz finished work. Regardless of location, they’d talk and talk. Or Farooq would talk and Parvaiz would listen to those stories of his father for which he’d always yearned—not a footloose boy or feckless husband but a man of courage who fought injustice, saw beyond the lie of national boundaries, kept his comrades’ spirits up through times of darkness. Here was Abu Parvaiz, the first to cross a bridge over a ravine after an earthquake despite continuing aftershocks, to deliver supplies to those stranded on the other side; here was Abu Parvaiz using the butt of his Kalashnikov as a weapon when the bullets ran out; here was Abu Parvaiz dipping his head into a mountain stream to perform his ablutions and coming up with a beard of icicles, which lead to dancing on the riverbank as if he were Adil Pasha at a discotheque rather than Abu Parvaiz in Chechnya, whose every shake of the head produced the sound of wind chimes. Of all the stories this was the one that most clearly evoked the father he’d never known: the rushing stream, the dancing icicles, the men around him similarly braving the cold water so they could provide the jester-warrior Abu Parvaiz with an accompanying orchestra.

“The father every son wishes he had,” Farooq said.

“But I never had him as a father,” Parvaiz replied, tracing the lines of his own palm with the grenade pin—was it really?—Farooq had brought along to the kabab shop.

“Do you think he wanted the world to be as it is? No. But he saw it for what it is. And having seen it he understood that a man has larger responsibilities than the ones his wife and mother want to chain him to.”

To help Parvaiz understand those responsibilities, Farooq talked to him of history: the terror with which Christendom had watched the ascent of Islam, the thousand years of Muslim supremacy, which was eventually squandered by eunuchlike Ottomans and Mughals who had lost sight of the moral path, and then the bloodlust with which the Christians had avenged themselves for their centuries of humiliation; imperialism, with its racist underpinnings of a “civilizing mission,” followed by the cruel joke of pretending to “give” independence when really they were merely changing economic models via the creation of client states, their nonsensical boundaries designed to cause instability. There didn’t seem to be any part of the Muslim world Farooq didn’t know about—Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and Algeria and Egypt and Jordan and Palestine and Turkey and Chechnya and Kashmir and Uzbekistan. If ever Parvaiz started to lose his concentration, Farooq would swerve the conversation toward football (he supported Real Madrid, Parvaiz Arsenal, but they agreed on the greatness of Özil) or the tiniest details of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.