9 Mutiny -2

It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indic kids, wide-boys, ravers, rude-boys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories.

Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: A&ahfeatured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power

(as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaa ass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani. People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks.

People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teacher's comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. People had even fucked with Millat, with his tight jeans and his white rock.

But no one fucked with any of them any more because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in stereo. Naturally, there was a uniform. They each dripped gold and wore bandanas, either wrapped around their foreheads or tied at the joint of an arm or leg. The trousers were enormous, swamping things, the left leg always inexplicably rolled up to the knee; the trainers were equally

spectacular, with tongues so tall they obscured the entire ankle; baseball caps were compulsory, low slung and irremovable, and everything, everything, everything was Nike(tm); wherever the five of them went the impression they left behind was of one gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval. And they walked in a very particular way, the left side of their bodies assuming a kind of loose paralysis that needed carrying along by the right side; a kind of glorified, funky limp like the

slow, padding movement that Yeats imagined for his rough millennial beast. Ten years early, while the happy acid heads danced through the Summer of Love, Millat's Crew were slouching towards Bradford.

"No trouble, yeah?" said Millat to the security guy.

"Just going' began Hifan.

"To Bradford," said Rajik.

"For business, yeah?" explained Dipesh.

"See-ya! Bidayo!" called Hifan, as they slipped into the train, gave him the finger, and shoved their arses up against the closing doors.

"Tax the window seat, yeah? Nice. I've blatantly got to have a fag in here, yeah? I'm fuckin' wired, yeah? This whole business, man. This fuckin' geezer, man. He's a fuckin' coconut I'd like to fuck him up, yeah?"

"Is he actually gonna be there?"

All serious questions were always addressed to Millat, and Millat always answered the group as a whole. "No way. He ain't going to be there. Just brothers going to be there. It's a fucking protest,

you chief, why's he going to go to a protest against himself?"

"I'm just saying," said Ranil, wounded, "I'd fuck him up, yeah? If he was there, you know. Dirty fucking book."

"It's a fucking insult!" said Millat, spitting some gum against the window. "We've taken it too long in this country. And now we're getting it from our own, man. Rhas clut! He's a fucking bad or white man's puppet."

"My uncle says he can't even spell," said a furious Hifan, the most honestly religious of the lot.

"And he dares to talk about Allah!"

"Allah'll fuck him up, yeah?" cried Rajik, the least intelligent, who thought of God as some kind of cross between Monkey Magic and Bruce Willis. "He'll kick him in the balls. Dirty book."

"You read it?" asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park.

There was a general pause.

Millat said, "I haven't exackly read it exackly but I know all about that shit, yeah?"

To be more precise, Millat hadn't read it. Millat knew nothing about the writer, nothing about the book; could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books; could not pick out the writer in a line-up of other writers (irresistible, this line-up of offending writers: Socrates, Protagoras,

Ovid and Juvenal, Rad clyffe Hall, Boris Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flashbulb). But he knew other things.

He knew that

he, Millat, was a Paid no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexualidentity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a foot baller or a

film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshipped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly

people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands.

"So .. . you ain't read it?" asked Ranil nervously.

"Look: you best believe I ain't buying that shit, man. No way, star."

The neither," said Hifan.

"True star," said Rajik.

"Fucking nastiness," said Ranil.

"Twelve ninety-five, you know!" said Dipesh.

"Besides," said Millat, with a tone of finality despite his high rising terminals, 'you don't have to read shit to know that it's blasphemous, you get me?"

Back in Willesden, Samad Iqbal was expressing the very same sentiment loudly over the evening news.

"I don't need to read it. The relevant passages have been photocopied for me."

"Will someone remind my husband," said Alsana, speaking to the news reader 'that he does not even know what the bloody book is about because the last thing he read was the bloody AZ."

"I'm going to ask you one more time to shut up so I can watch the news."

"I can hear screaming but it does not appear to be my voice."

"Can't you understand, woman? This is the most important thing to happen to us in this country, ever. It's crisis point. It's the tickle in the sneeze. It's big time." Samad hit the volume button a few times with his thumb. "This woman Moira whateverhernameis she mumbles. Why is she reading news if she can't speak properly?"

Moira, turned up suddenly in mid-sentence, said, '.. . the writer denies blasphemy, and argues that the book concerns the struggle between secular and religious views of life."

Samad snorted. "What struggle! I don't see any struggle. I get on perfectly OK. All grey cells in good condition. No emotional difficulties."

Alsana laughed bitterly. "My husband fights the Third World War every single bloody day in his head, so does everybody '

"No, no, no. No struggle. What's he on about, eh? He can't wangle out of it by being rational.

Rationality! Most overrated Western virtue! Oh no. Fact is, he is simply offensive he has offended '

"Look," Alsana cut in. "When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers."

"Hardly the same thing, Mrs. Iqbal, hardly the same kettle with fish in it."

"Oh, passions are running high at the Women's Committee shows how much Samad Iqbal

knows. But I am not like Samad Iqbal. I restrain myself. I live. I let live."

"It is not a matter of letting others live. It is a matter of protecting one's culture, shielding one's religion from abuse. Not that you'd know anything about that, naturally. Always too busy with this Hindi brain popcorn to pay any attention to your own culture!"

"My own culture? And what is that please?"

"You're a Bengali. Act like one."

"And what is a Bengali, husband, please?"

"Get out of the way of the television and look it up."

Alsana took out baltic-brain, number three of their 24set

Reader's Digest Encyclopedia, and read from the relevant section:

The vast majority of Bangladesh's inhabitants are Bengalis, who are largely descended from Indo-Aryans who began to migrate into the country from the west thousands of years ago and who mixed within Bengal with indigenous groups of various racial stocks. Ethnic minorities include the Chakma and Mogh, Mongoloid peoples who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District; the Santal, mainly descended from migrants from present-day India; and the Biharis, non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from India after the partition.

"Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans... it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show," said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, 'you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale!"

"You don't know what you're talking about. You're out of your depth."

Alsana held up the encyclopedia. "Oh, Samad. Miah. You want to burn this too?"

"Look: I've no time to play right now. I am trying to listen to a very important news story.

Serious goings on in Bradford. So, if you don't mind '

"Oh dear God!" screamed Alsana, the smile leaving her face,

falling to her knees in front of the television, tracing her finger past the burning book to the face she recognized, smiling up at her through light tubes, her pixilated second-son beneath her picture-framed first. "What is he doing? Is he crazy? Who does he think he is? What on earth is he

doing there? He's meant to be in school! Has the day come when the babies are burning the books, has it? I don't believe it!"

"Nothing to do with me. Tickle in the sneeze, Mrs. Iqbal," said Samad coolly, sitting back in his armchair. "Tickle in the sneeze."

When Millat came home that evening, a great bonfire was raging in the back garden. All his secular stuff four years' worth of cool, pre- and post-Raggastani, every album, every poster, special-edition t-shirts, club fliers collected and preserved over two years, beautiful Air Max

trainers, copies 20-75 of 2000 AD Magazine, signed photo of Chuck D." impossibly rare copy of Slick Rick's Hey Young World, Catcher in the Rye, his guitar, Godfather I and II, Mean Streets, Rumblefish, Dog Day Afternoon and Shaft in Africa- all had been placed on the funeral pyre, now a smouldering mound of ashes that was giving off fumes of plastic and paper, stinging the boy's eyes that were already filled with tears.

"Everyone has to be taught a lesson," Alsana had said, lighting the match with heavy heart some hours earlier. "Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people's things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what's coming, sooner or later."

10 November 1989

A wall was coming down. It was something to do with history. It was an Historic occasion. No one really knew quite who had put it up or who was tearing it down or whether this was good, bad or something else; no one knew how tall it was, how long it was, or why people had died trying to cross it or whether they would stop dying in future, but it was

educational all the same; as good an excuse for a get-together as any. It was a Thursday night, Alsana and Clara had cooked, and everybody was watching history on TV.

"Who's for more rice?"

Millat and Me held out their plates, jostling for prime position.

"What's happening now?" asked Clara, rushing back to her seat with a bowl of Jamaican fried dumplings, from which Irie snatched three.

"Same, man," Millat grumbled. "Same. Same. Same. Dancing on the wall, smashing it with a hammer. Whatever. I wanna see what else is on, yeah?"

Alsana snatched the remote control and squeezed in between Clara and Archie. "Don't you dare, mister."

"It's educational," said Clara deliberately, her pad and paper on the arm rest, waiting to leap into action at the suggestion of anything edifying. "It's the kind of thing we all should be watching."

Alsana nodded and waited for two awkward-shaped bhajis to go down the gullet. "That's what I try and tell the boy. Big business. Tip-top historic occasion. When your own little Iqbals tug at your trousers and ask you where you were when'

Till say I was bored shitless watching it on TV."

Millat got a thwack round the head for 'shitless' and another one for the impertinence of the sentiment. Irie, looking strangely like the crowd on top of the wall in her everyday garb of CND badges, graffiti-covered trousers and beaded hair, shook her head in saddened disbelief. She was

that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty.

Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.

That's totally your problem, Mill. No interest in the outside

world. I think this is amazing. They're all free! After all this time, don't you think that's amazing?

That after years under the dark cloud of Eastern communism they're coming into the light of Western democracy, united," she said, quoting Newsnight faithfully. "I just think democracy is man's greatest invention."

Alsana, who felt personally that Clara's child was becoming impossibly pompous these days, held up the head of a Jamaican fried fish in protest. "No, dearie. Don't make that mistake. Potato peeler is man's greatest invention. That or Poop-a-Scoop."

"What they want," said Millat, 'is to stop pissing around wid dis hammer business and jus' get some Semtex and blow de djam ting up, if they don't like it, you get me? Be quicker, in nit

"Why do you talk like that?" snapped Irie, devouring a dumpling. That's not your voice. You sound ridiculous!"

"And you want to watch dem dumplings," said Millat, patting his belly. "Big ain't beautiful."

"Oh, get lost."

"You know," murmured Archie, munching on a chicken wing, "I'm not so sure that it's such a good thing. I mean, you've got to remember, me and Samad, we were there. And believe me, there's a good reason to have it split in two. Divide and conquer, young lady."

"Jesus Christ, Dad. What are you on?"

"He's not on anything," said Samad severely. "You younger people forget why certain things were done, you forget their significance. We were there. Not all of us think fondly upon a united Germany. They were different times, young lady."

"What's wrong with a load of people making some noise about their freedom? Look at them.

Look at how happy they are."

Samad looked at the happy people dancing on the wall and felt contempt and something more irritating underneath it that could have been jealousy.

"It is not that I disagree with rebellious acts per se. It is simply that if you are to throw over an old order, you must be sure that

you can offer something of substance to replace it; that is what Germany needs to understand.

As an example, take my great grandfather Mangal Pande '

Me sighed the most eloquent sigh that had ever been sighed. "I'd rather not, if it's all the same."

TheI' said Clara, because she felt she should.

Me huffed. And puffed.

"Well! He goes on like he knows everything. Everything's always about him and I'm trying to talk about now, today, Germany. I bet you," she said, turning to Samad, "I know more about it than you do. Go on. Try me. I've been studying it all term. Oh, and by the way: you weren't there. You and Dad left in 1945. They didn't do the wall until 1961."

"Cold War," said Samad sourly, ignoring her. "They don't talk about hot war any more. The kind where men get killed. That's where I learnt about Europe. It cannot be found in books."

"Oi-oi," said Archie, trying to diffuse a row. "You do know Last of the Summer Wine's on in ten minutes? BBC Two."

"Go on," persisted Me, kneeling up and turning around to face Samad. "Try me."

"The gulf between books and experience," intoned Samad solemnly, 'is a lonely ocean."

"Right. You two talk such a load of sh '

But Clara was too quick with a slap round the ear. TheI'

Me sat back down, not so much defeated as exasperated and turned up the TV volume.

The 28-mile-long scar the ugliest symbol of a divided world, East and West has no meaning any more. Few people, including this reporter, thought to see it happen in their lifetimes, but last night,

at the stroke of midnight, thousands lingering both sides of the wall gave a great roar and began to pour through checkpoints and to climb up and over it.

"Foolishness. Massive immigration problem to follow," said Samad to the television, dipping a dumpling into some ketchup. "You just can't let a million people into a rich country. Recipe for disaster."

"And who does he think he is? Mr. Churchill-gee?" laughed Alsana scornfully. "Original

whitecliffsdover piesnmash jelly eels royal variety british bulldog hell?"

"Scar," said Clara, noting it down. "That's the right word, isn't it?"

"Jesus Christ. Can't any of you understand the enormity of what's going on here? These are the last days of a regime. Political apocalypse, meltdown. It's an historic occasion."

"So everyone keeps saying," said Archie, scouring the TV Times. "But what about The Krypton Factor, I TV? That's always good, eh? "Son now."

"And stop sayin' "an historic"," said Millat, irritated at all the poncey political talk. "Why can't you just say "a", like everybody else, man? Why d'you always have to be so la di da?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" (She loved him, but he was impossible.) "What possible fucking

difference can it make?"

Samad rose out of his seat. TheI This is my house and you are still a guest. I won't have that language in it!"

"Fine! I'll take it to the streets with the rest of the proletariat."

"That girl," tutted Alsana as her front door slammed. "Swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter Millat sucked his teeth at his mother. "Don't you start, man. What's wrong with "a" encyclopedia? Why's everyone in this house always puttin' on fuckin' airs?"

Samad pointed to the door. "OK, mister. You don't speak to your mother like that. You out too."

"I don't think," said Clara quietly, after Millat had stormed up to his room, 'that we should discourage the kids from having an opinion. It's good that they're freethinkers."

Samad sneered, "And you would know .. . what? You do a

Samadl984, 1SS7

great deal of free-thinking? In the house all day, watching the television?"

"Excuse me?"

"With respect: the world is complex, Clara. If there's one thing these children need to understand it is that one needs rules to survive it, not fancy."

"He's right, you know," said Archie earnestly, ashing a fag in an empty curry bowl. "Emotional

matters then yes, that's your department '

"Oh women's work!" squealed Alsana, through a mouth full of curry. Thank you so much,

Archibald."

Archie struggled to continue. "But you can't beat experience, can you? I mean, you two, you're young women still, in a way. Whereas we, I mean, we are, like, wells of experience the children can use, you know, when they feel the need. We're like encyclopedias. You just can't offer them what we can. In all fairness."

Alsana put her palm on Archie's forehead and stroked it lightly. "You fool. Don't you know you're left behind like carriage and horses, like candle wax Don't you know to them you're old and