Polar Star

1974, England

The letter smelled faintly of mustard oil.

Uzair did not notice it at first. The library had too many smells of its own: paper gone soft with age, damp wool drying badly upon radiators, the bitter remains of coffee abandoned in porcelain cups. Beneath all of that sat the particular midday breath of the place, dust and old glue and human exhaustion, as if every student who had ever fallen asleep over a book had left a little of himself behind.

Uzair had contributed more than his fair share that week.

He sat folded into the furthest corner of the reading room, one knee drawn against his chest beneath the table, his coat still buttoned because the heating had surrendered sometime before eleven. A volume of Donne lay open in front of him to preserve appearances. Beside it sat the blue aerogramme Rehman had sent from Lahore and a small glass jar wrapped in three layers of newspaper.

The jar was what smelled of mustard oil.

Rehman’s handwriting leaned aggressively to the right, as though each word were trying to arrive before the one ahead of it.

Naieem walks now.

That was the grand announcement. Not the fall of a government. Not even a particularly interesting neighbourhood scandal.

He takes five or six steps before sitting down very suddenly and looking offended with the floor. Your bhabi says he has your temper. I have defended you and said no child could be so unfortunate.

Uzair laughed when he first read it.

He did not laugh the second time.

By the third, his sight had blurred enough that Rehman’s letters became small black birds drowning in blue paper.

Ulfat had added four lines at the bottom in her rounder hand.

Write more often. Your brother pretends not to worry, which means he is worrying enough for three people. Naieem kisses your photograph when we ask him where Chachu is. I have sent mango achaar. Do not eat it all at once. You never listen, but I must still say it.

There was nothing tragic in the letter. That was the problem. No one was ill. No one had died. The roof had not collapsed, the city had not burned, the earth had not opened beneath the family house. Rehman went to work. Ulfat argued with the vegetable seller. Naieem walked and fell and rose again. His aunt’s old rosebush had begun flowering despite everyone agreeing it was dead.

Home had continued being home without him.

Uzair pressed the heel of his hand beneath one eye. It accomplished very little. The tears had already slid beneath his palm and into the cuff of his shirt, warm for a moment before the London cold took them.

“Bloody embarrassing,” he whispered.

From beneath the radiator came a soft scrape.

Uzair lowered his hand.

The cat watched him from the shadows.

It was a narrow thing, more angles than animal, with one ragged ear and fur the uncertain colour of rainwater. Uzair had first seen it two nights earlier slipping through a window someone had left open for cigarette smoke. Since then it had appeared whenever he was at his most miserable, which suggested either divine intervention or an exceptionally cruel sense of timing.

“Have you come to laugh as well?”

The cat blinked.

Uzair looked at the jar of achaar.

“No.”

The cat continued staring.

“You cannot eat pickle.”

Its tail moved once across the floor.

“You would die.”

No visible concern. 

Uzair sighed and opened the paper parcel beside his elbow. He had purchased plain rice from a café before it closed, telling himself that rice and achaar constituted a meal rather than an admission of defeat. He lifted the jar’s lid.

The smell struck him immediately.

Raw mango. Mustard. Fenugreek. Red chilli. Home.

For one shameful second, he bent his head over the jar and breathed.

Ulfat had packed it herself. He knew because she used too much oil and cut the mango into pieces too large to eat elegantly. His aunt had complained about both habits while alive. Rehman complained about them now. Uzair would have endured a lifetime of inelegant mango pieces to sit between them at the dining table again.

He mixed some into the rice with a plastic spoon.

The first bite hurt worse than the letter.

It tasted of summer afternoons under the fan. Of Rehman stealing mango from Uzair’s plate and denying it with his mouth still full. Ulfat insisting she had not made the achaar too spicy while everyone at the table quietly perspired. Naieem's damp baby fist around his finger before Uzair left for England.

The cat approached in careful increments.

Uzair swallowed around the weight in his throat.

“I said you cannot have any.”

It stopped beside his shoe.

“You do not even like me.”

The cat rubbed once against his trouser leg.

Uzair stared at it.

“Cheap manipulation tactics.”

He found the little bottle of milk he had bought for his tea and poured some into the lid of his food container. The cat inspected the offering, inspected Uzair, and began to drink.

“There. We are both pathetic.”

He ate the rest of the rice slowly. He did not obey Ulfat’s instruction about the achaar.

By half past one, the library had emptied enough that every footstep travelled. Uzair folded the letter along its existing creases and slipped it inside the inner pocket of his coat. The jar went between two shirts in his suitcase, carefully cushioned with the newspaper it had arrived in. He gathered his books, his shaving things and the canvas bag containing nearly everything else he owned.

He had not intended to spend seven nights living at King’s.

The first had simply happened.

He had returned to his lodging in Brixton to find his suitcase on the pavement and the front door bolted. Simon had opened an upstairs window only far enough to tell him why.

Laura said Uzair had put his hand on her breast while passing behind her in the kitchen.

Laura said she had always known there was something wrong with him.

Laura said she did not feel safe sleeping beneath the same roof.

Uzair had stood in the drizzle looking at Simon’s pale face framed by yellow curtains and understood that the truth possessed no useful shape in his mouth. He could not say, I would sooner grope the refrigerator. He could not say, Your girlfriend has nothing I have ever wanted. He could not say the word that would disprove one danger by making him vulnerable to another.

So he had said, “She is lying.”

Simon had shut the window.

The first night, Uzair slept upright in a library chair. The second, he discovered the locker rooms remained unlocked until nearly midnight and washed himself over a basin with soap stolen from a dispenser. By the fourth, one of the porters had begun looking at him too closely. By the sixth, Waseem had cornered him outside a seminar and demanded to know why Uzair had been wearing the same trousers since Tuesday.

Now, at last, he had a room.

Small, Waseem had warned him. Four bedrooms, too many men, and a boiler with the disposition of a colonial governor, but safe.

“The landlord’s Indian,” Waseem had said. “Everyone there is Indian or Pakistani. You won’t have to deal with racist bullshit inside the house, at least.”

It was a remarkably low standard for paradise.

Uzair shouldered the canvas bag and pulled his suitcase behind him. As he crossed the reading room, the cat followed until the boundary of the light. There it sat, tail curled around its paws.

Uzair glanced back.

“Do not become attached. It demeans us both.”

The cat began washing one paw.

“Exactly.”

He left the library before it could abandon him first.

—

The Tesco was still open when Uzair passed it.

He needed toothpaste. Perhaps soap. Something for breakfast that did not require cooking, because arriving at a stranger’s home and immediately burning down the kitchen created a poor first impression.

The supermarket’s fluorescent lights made everyone look recently exhumed. Uzair steered a wire basket down the aisles and performed arithmetic over the price of bread. His stipend had not increased merely because London had decided to eat him alive.

He was comparing two tins of beans when a man began shouting near the entrance. The man shouted with the wholehearted confidence of someone certain that the room belonged to him and everyone inside it existed by temporary permission.

Uzair placed the cheaper beans in his basket and looked over.

The manager was rotund and balding, with a narrow strip of hair dragged across his scalp in an act of optimism bordering on fraud. His cheeks had turned a violent red. A ring of sweat darkened the collar of his white shirt despite the November cold.

In one fist, he held a circular torn from the community noticeboard.

The girl standing before him wore a brown Tesco smock and a cream-coloured hijab pinned neatly beneath her chin. She could not have been older than twenty. Her name badge read ZUBEDA.

“I told you,” the manager said, shaking the paper in her face, “this board is for customers.”

“I am a customer as well,” Zubeda replied.

Her voice was quiet but steady.

The manager’s face reddened further, as though steadiness from her constituted an obscenity.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, Mr. Hargreaves.”

“Oh, don’t get clever with me. I’ve had enough of you lot putting your foreign rubbish everywhere. Every week it’s some meeting, some march, some complaint about how badly you’re treated.”

The baskets and trolleys continued moving.

That was the most English thing Uzair had learned since arriving: cruelty did not stop capitalism. A woman reached between them for a packet of cigarettes. An elderly man examined apples three feet away. Everyone heard. Everyone became fascinated by groceries.

Zubeda’s fingers tightened at her sides.

“It is a poetry evening.”

“Bollocks, it is. You bloody Pakis are all the same. Come here, take our jobs, and then spend every waking hour moaning about the country feeding you.”

Uzair felt something cold climb the length of his spine.

He had heard the word before. On the Underground. Outside pubs. Once from two boys riding bicycles who had shouted it cheerfully, like a greeting. Each time it seemed to strike not only him but everyone he had ever loved, reaching backward through generations to slap his mother across the mouth.

Zubeda looked beyond her manager and for half a second, her eyes met Uzair’s.

He hated himself for remaining where he was.

He could have stepped forward. He could have asked Mr. Hargreaves whether Tesco paid him extra to humiliate young women or if he offered the service freely. He could have made noise. He could have made himself inconvenient.

He also had one suitcase, fourteen pounds in his bank account, no permanent address yet and skin that made innocence a matter of negotiation.

Helplessness was rarely dramatic. It was a hundred small calculations made while someone else suffered.

Mr. Hargreaves ripped the circular in half.

“If I see this filth again, you’re finished. Understand?”

Zubeda’s mouth moved before any sound emerged.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Mr. Hargreaves.”

He threw the paper into the bin and lumbered away, still muttering about gratitude.

Zubeda stood alone beside the board.

Uzair moved toward her before he could reconsider. She saw him coming and immediately looked down, adjusting tins that did not need adjusting.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly.

Her expression became almost amused. “No.”

It was such an honest answer that Uzair had none ready for it.

“I should have said something.”

“You’re just here toothpaste.”

Uzair looked at the tube in his basket. “I suppose my priorities were visible.”

That earned him the faintest curve of her mouth.

Then someone called her name from behind the till. She straightened.

“I must go.”

“I’m sorry.”

Zubeda looked at him again.

This time, there was no accusation in it. That was somehow worse.

“So am I.”

She walked away.

Uzair waited until Mr. Hargreaves disappeared behind the stockroom door. Then he bent over the bin and retrieved the torn pieces.

The cat sat outside the glass entrance.

Uzair recognized it immediately, though that was impossible. This animal had both ears and black fur broken by a white patch over its nose. Still, it possessed the same accusing yellow eyes.

“Not now,” he muttered through the glass.

He fitted the circular together over the handle of his basket.

AN EVENING OF SUFI POETRY

There was an address in Camden, weekly on Tuesdays at seven. Beneath it, in smaller print:

Bulleh Shah. Shah Hussain. Waris Shah. Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Then, almost hidden along the lower edge:

Poetry belongs to the people. So do the streets.

Uzair ran his thumb over the words. It was not merely a poetry evening. He knew that much.

The government did not fear ghazals. Employers did not tear down announcements because they objected to metaphor. Poetry nights had become useful vessels: people arrived for verse and stayed to discuss housing, racist attacks, police harassment, immigration raids and which family’s windows needed replacing after another brick.

Uzair folded both halves and put them in his coat.

Outside, the cat had vanished.

He purchased his toothpaste, bread and beans. At the last moment, he added a bottle of milk.

—

The flat occupied the two upper floors of a narrow brick building above a shuttered tailor’s shop.

The front door required Uzair to lift it slightly while turning the key. The stair carpet had once been burgundy and now resembled the colour of old liver. A smell of fried onions lived permanently in the walls.

It was, after a week in the library, magnificent.

The sitting room contained two mismatched sofas, an armchair whose stuffing emerged through one side, and a television that showed every programme beneath a veil of grey snow. Someone had placed a plastic cloth over the dining table to disguise a burn mark shaped like Sri Lanka. The kitchen was narrow enough that opening the oven prevented access to the sink. Four mugs hung from hooks above the cooker. None matched. One said WORLD’S BEST GRANDMOTHER in pink lettering.

The balcony faced the backs of three other buildings and a lane where rubbish bins overflowed beside a broken bicycle. Washing lines crossed overhead like surrender flags. When the clouds lifted, Uzair could see a thin strip of city sky between chimneys.

His room fit a narrow bed, a wardrobe and a desk if he breathed carefully. The wallpaper bore tiny yellow flowers. A previous tenant had carved LEEDS ARE SHITE into the sill.

More importantly, it had a door.

A door Uzair could close.

Jagjit Singh Rangi, the flat’s owner, had met him there on the first evening. He was a broad, loud Punjabi man from Pathankot whose voice seemed to arrive in each room before the rest of him. He owned an auto repair shop and managed three rental properties with varying degrees of legality and treated silence as a personal insult.

“You are too thin,” he told Uzair within thirty seconds.

“I’m not.”

“You are. Romi will say the same.”

Romi did.

She arrived carrying two steel tiffins, her dupatta slipping from one shoulder and her round cheeks pink from climbing the stairs. She reminded Uzair painfully of Ulfat, not because they looked alike, but because both women regarded an unfilled plate as evidence of insult.

“Eat,” she commanded.

“I already have.”

“Then eat for tomorrow.”

Jagjit and Romi had two daughters. Saloni, the elder, was preparing for her school-leaving examinations and, according to her father, possessed enough opinions to govern a small nation. Molly had just entered seventh standard and reportedly spent her waking hours plotting ways to avoid mathematics. Neither girl came to the flat. Jagjit had explained, with a sudden seriousness beneath his volume, that the neighbourhood had become unpleasant and he preferred them at home.

Uzair’s housemates were easier to catalogue.

There was Devendra Kapoor, called Dev, who was studying accountancy and ironed even his undershirts. He had come from Delhi because his father believed an English qualification could transform an ordinary son into a dynasty. Dev wore his hair in a side part so precise it looked measured with drafting instruments and became inconsolable whenever India lost at cricket.

There was Hanif Qureshi from Birmingham by way of Mirpur, nineteen and employed at a textile warehouse. He had the long lashes of a film heroine, five sisters, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of jokes about everyone’s mothers. He sent most of his pay home and spent the remainder on records he played too loudly.

The third was Balraj Gill, called Bally, who worked nights in a bakery and slept with cotton wool in his ears. He had come to England to join an older brother who had subsequently moved to Canada without telling him. Bally possessed a magnificent moustache and a philosophical acceptance of betrayal.

They welcomed Uzair without ceremony, which was the kindest welcome possible. Dev cleared a kitchen shelf. Hanif offered him half a cigarette. Bally emerged from sleep long enough to tell him which floorboard outside the bathroom would stab his heel.

Only Jaskirat Singh Rangi remained difficult.

Jagjit’s nephew was twenty-six, though he carried himself with the stillness of someone older. He left before sunrise in dark work trousers and returned after most of the flat had gone quiet, smelling faintly of engine oil, metal, and cold night air.

He was not unfriendly.

Unfriendly required active participation.

Jaskirat simply existed around other people as though speech were an expense he had learned to avoid. He answered direct questions. He nodded when Uzair entered a room. Once, when the boiler failed, he repaired it without being asked and disappeared before anyone could thank him.

He was also, to Uzair’s considerable irritation, beautiful.

Not prettily. There was nothing delicate about him. He had the solid build of a man who lifted engines for a living, wide shoulders beneath his worn jumpers and forearms marked with pale scars. His beard never progressed beyond dark stubble. His nose had been broken at least once. His mouth seemed made for expressions he refused to offer.

His eyes were green. Not hazel or a brown that became interesting in sunlight. Green, clear and watchful beneath heavy brows.

Cat eyes.

Jaskirat moved like one as well. Quiet along the landing. Appearing in doorways without warning. Leaving early and returning with the night clinging to him. A creature of alleys and shadows who had decided the flat belonged to him while permitting the rest of them to remain.

Uzair had lived there twelve days before Jaskirat spoke an entire sentence to him.

It happened after midnight.

Uzair returned from King’s with his satchel cutting into his shoulder and loneliness settled beneath his ribs. It had been an ordinary day, which often made the feeling worse. He had attended a seminar on modernist fragmentation, eaten a cheese sandwich, nodded to acquaintances, spent six hours among people and remained entirely untouched by any of it.

The flat was dark. Hanif had left a note threatening murder if anyone finished the milk. Someone had finished the milk.

Uzair changed into an old kurta, unpacked his books and placed Rehman’s letter on the desk. He had meant to answer it every night since moving in.

Dear Bhaiya and Bhabi,

He had written that much.

Then nothing.

How did one describe England without worrying the people at home?

I am well. The city is cold. The literature is excellent. A woman accused me of assault because telling the truth about myself would have endangered me more than her lie. I slept in a library for a week. Please tell Naieem his chachu is thriving.

Uzair closed the notebook.

He wanted a cigarette.

The balcony door stood slightly open. At first he thought someone had forgotten to latch it. Then he saw the ember glowing in the dark.

Jaskirat sat at the little metal table with a cigarette between his fingers and sheets of paper spread before him. A single lamp cast a low circle over his hands. Beyond it, his face remained half shadow.

Uzair stopped.

He should go back to his room. Whatever Jaskirat was doing had the feeling of privacy, even though it occupied communal furniture.

Uzair had already begun turning when green eyes lifted from the page.

Caught.

Jaskirat said nothing.

Uzair raised his cigarette packet in explanation. “I was only—”

Jaskirat nodded toward the empty chair.

That was apparently an invitation.

Uzair stepped onto the balcony and slid the door closed behind him. The cold caught immediately at the opening of his kurta.

He sat and Jaskirat returned to his writing.

Uzair placed a cigarette between his lips and searched his pockets.

Nothing.

He had left his matches beside the bed.

He considered preserving his dignity by pretending he merely enjoyed holding unlit cigarettes in his mouth. Jaskirat’s eyes shifted toward him.

“Have you a light?” Uzair asked.

Jaskirat took his own cigarette from his lips.

He did not hand over the lighter. Instead, he flicked it open and leaned across the table.

“Closer.”

The word was soft.

Uzair moved in.

The flame rose between them.

For one unsteady moment, his face was close enough to Jaskirat’s that the rest of the balcony disappeared. Uzair smelled tobacco and soap and the metallic trace that seemed permanently embedded in Jaskirat’s skin. The lighter’s glow caught in his eyes, turning the green almost gold.

Uzair drew in.

The cigarette lit.

Jaskirat closed the lighter, but neither of them moved immediately.

Then he sat back.

Uzair exhaled smoke into the night.

His heart, embarrassing organ that it was, appeared to have mistaken this mundane exchange for a proposal of marriage.

They smoked in silence.

A black-and-white cat slipped along the wall below, balancing between two garden fences. It stopped beneath the balcony and looked up.

Uzair watched it. “There appears to be one of you everywhere.”

Jaskirat followed his gaze.

“One of who?”

“Cats.”

Jaskirat looked at him.

Uzair realized, too late, that the sentence had sounded deranged.

“In London,” he clarified. “There are cats everywhere in London.”

“There are cats everywhere in the world.”

“Yes, thank you. That was the insight I lacked.”

Something shifted near Jaskirat’s mouth.

Not quite a smile, but the possibility of one.

He returned to his papers.

Uzair attempted not to look.

He failed.

The handwriting was dense and forceful, each line slanting slightly upward. Near the top of the nearest page, he recognized a phrase.

Poetry belongs to the people.

His gaze dropped to the next line.

Jaskirat placed one hand flat over the paper.

“If you’re going to take a peek,” he said, “why don’t you just ask?”

Uzair inhaled smoke and nearly died from it.

He coughed into his fist. “I was not peeking.”

“No?”

“I was looking in the direction of the table.”

“At the writing.”

“The writing happens to be on the table.”

Jaskirat waited.

Uzair lasted three seconds.

“Sorry.”

Jaskirat removed his hand.

Uzair reached into his coat, which he had draped over the chair, and pulled out the torn circular. He unfolded it and set it beside Jaskirat’s papers.

“I saw this at the Tesco near King’s.”

Jaskirat glanced down. His face did not change, but his attention sharpened.

“Where did you get it?”

“The bin.”

“Why was it in the bin?”

“Because the manager tore it down after shouting at the girl who posted it. Zubeda.”

Jaskirat’s jaw tightened.

“He called her—” Uzair stopped. Repeating the word felt like placing the man’s filth into his own mouth. “Several things.”

“Yeah,” Jaskirat said. “She told me about her altercation with her boss.”

The calmness of his tone contained more threat than shouting would have.

“You know her.”

“I know most people who put these up.”

Uzair looked again at the papers. “So the poetry is not the entire purpose.”

“Do you object?”

“No.”

“Do you report people?”

“No.”

“Do you frighten easily?”

Uzair thought of his belongings on the pavement. Mr Hargreaves’s red face. The countless moments when he had lowered his eyes because surviving required swallowing whatever rose into his throat.

“Yes,” he said.

Jaskirat’s gaze lifted.

Uzair tapped ash into an old teacup. “I simply dislike lying about it.”

The silence changed into something more attentive.

Below them, the cat jumped from the wall and disappeared between bins.

Jaskirat smoked for a while longer.

Then he asked, “Do you like Sufi poetry?”

Uzair looked at the circular between them.

Tomorrow was Tuesday.

Jaskirat was not asking about poetry.

Uzair thought of Zubeda standing with her hands clenched at her sides. He thought of the library cat drinking from a plastic lid. He thought of Rehman’s letter against his heart and of how thoroughly England had taught him to make himself smaller.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Jaskirat nodded once.

“I’ll be there,” Uzair added.

This time, the smile appeared.

Small. Brief. Ruinous.

“I know,” Jaskirat said.

—

One month later, Jaskirat kicked a football directly at Uzair’s head.

Uzair ducked. The ball sailed past him and rolled across the frozen grass.

“Are you trying to kill me?” he demanded.

“No.”

“You did not even warn me.”

“I said your name.”

“You said it while kicking.”

Jaskirat waited near the opposite end of the field, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket as Uzair kicked the ball back. The setting sun rested low behind him, burnishing the edges of his neatly trimmed hair.

“Uzair,” he called.

“What?”

He kicked again.

Uzair stopped it badly with the side of his shoe.

“That is not a warning. You’re mocking me.”

Jaskirat’s laugh carried over the field.

Uzair had learned, during the previous month, that Jaskirat’s laughter was rare and startling. It did not suit his face until it appeared. Then it transformed him so completely that Uzair resented every person who had not made him laugh enough.

They were nominally playing football. In practice, they kicked the ball back and forth while discussing Saturday’s meeting.

The field lay ten minutes from the flat, bordered on one side by terraced houses and on the other by an abandoned factory. The grass had thinned into mud near the goals. A grey cat occupied the lowest branch of a leafless tree, watching them with the solemn disgust of a referee.

“You should write it,” Jaskirat said.

Uzair passed the ball. “No.”

“You haven’t heard what it is.”

“The answer remains no.”

“The sit-in at the housing office.”

“I know which sit-in.”

“Then write the statement.”

Uzair trapped the returning ball beneath his shoe. “I am studying English literature. That does not make me a revolutionary pamphlet machine.”

“You wrote the piece after the restaurant attack.”

“Under duress.”

“I asked once.”

“You asked while staring at me.”

“That is duress?”

“With your face? Obviously.”

Jaskirat’s brows rose.

Uzair kicked the ball too hard to prevent himself from considering what he had just said.

Over the month, the poetry evening had expanded into meetings in back rooms, kitchens and borrowed halls. The group called itself the London Asian Workers and Students Collective, though half its members argued weekly that the name was too long and the other half insisted every word was politically necessary.

It included Sikh factory workers from Southall, Pakistani students from central London, Bengali restaurant employees from the East End, Caribbean organizers attached to the emerging Race Today network, two nurses, one solicitor and Zubeda, who had not been dismissed from Tesco because twelve people arrived together to ask Mr. Hargreaves why he objected to poetry.

They discussed racist landlords, attacks outside pubs, immigration controls, workplace discrimination and police who treated every injured Asian boy as the likely cause of his own injuries. They printed circulars. They collected money for broken shop windows. They accompanied families to housing offices and young men to police stations. They argued about Marx, religion, nationalism, political Blackness and who had forgotten to bring tea.

Uzair had intended to attend once.

Jaskirat made that difficult.

He never pressed. He simply knocked on Uzair’s door before each meeting and said, “Coming?”

Uzair always did.

Somewhere between passing out leaflets and composing a statement supporting striking workers, he began to feel the outline of community form around him. Not home. Nothing could be home merely because one wished it hard enough.

But something adjacent.

A place where he did not have to explain why a shouted word could ruin an entire afternoon. A room where India and Pakistan were argued over loudly but never permitted to divide the chairs. People who understood that Britain had invited their labour and resented their lives.

And Jaskirat.

Jaskirat had taken him under his wing without acknowledging that he had wings or that Uzair required shelter.

Uzair now knew he drank coffee with a little milk and no sugar. He smoked Embassy cigarettes unless money was tight, when he bought whatever Hanif had. He picked at his fingernails rather than cutting them and went perfectly still when caught doing it.

He worked ten-hour days at Jagjit’s repair shop and drove a blue Ford Cortina that started only after prayer, profanity, and an intimate knowledge of its wiring. He limped on his left leg when tired. In rain, the limp worsened.

He knew engines, protest routes, and the fastest way out of three different police stations. He could command a room when he chose to speak. Mostly he waited. Watched. Let everyone else exhaust themselves before offering the sentence that made the next step obvious.

He was always coming close to Uzair.

Never touching.

He leaned over Uzair’s shoulder to read drafts, his chest nearly against Uzair’s back. He reached around him for mugs in the kitchen. He stood close in crowded halls even after space opened elsewhere.

But he never touched.

Uzair had begun to think this restraint might kill him.

The closest they had come was in an alley behind a vandalized restaurant in Camden.

Someone had smashed the front windows and sprayed PAKIS OUT across the brickwork. It did not matter that the restaurant’s owner was Bangladeshi. Racists were rarely burdened by taxonomy.

The collective organized a demonstration. The police arrived to supervise the people whose business had been attacked rather than search for those who attacked it.

When a scuffle broke out near the pavement, officers charged the crowd.

Jaskirat caught Uzair by the wrist.

“Run.”

They cut behind the restaurant, turned through a narrow passage, and pressed into the black mouth of an alley while boots thundered past the entrance.

Jaskirat pulled Uzair against the wall.

No—against him.

One hand remained locked around Uzair’s wrist. The other braced beside Uzair’s head. Their bodies fitted into the same sliver of shadow, chests rising too quickly, breath clouding between their faces.

“Are you hurt?” Jaskirat whispered.

Uzair shook his head.

Jaskirat looked him over anyway.

A bruise darkened one cheekbone. There was a fine mark near the edge of his right eyebrow, an old pale line Uzair had noticed before but never from this distance. Stubble shadowed his jaw. His breath touched Uzair’s upper lip.

The police passed without seeing them.

Neither man moved.

Uzair had never felt anything like it: terror racing through his blood, Jaskirat’s hand hot around his wrist, the city hunting them while one human body stood between him and the rest of the world.

Exhilarating was an ugly word for it.

So was safe.

It was the closest Uzair had felt to home since leaving Pakistan.

Then Jaskirat released him.

By the time they returned to the street, his face had closed again.

Now, on the field, Uzair found the little scar near his eyebrow in the sinking light.

Jaskirat kicked the football gently toward him.

“Are you listening?”

“No.”

“I noticed.”

Uzair rested his foot on the ball. “Why me?”

“Because your writing has teeth.”

“My writing does not have teeth.”

“It does. You make a point, then you punctuate it.”

“Poignant,” Uzair corrected automatically.

“What?”

“I assume you mean to say my writing is poignant.”

“No. I mean punctuate. You put a full stop where everyone else keeps apologizing for their words.”

Uzair looked at him.

Jaskirat seemed embarrassed by his own sincerity. He glanced toward the houses.

“You should write it,” he said again.

Uzair passed the ball more softly.

“All right.”

Jaskirat trapped it. “All right?”

“I shall write your statement. But when the police drag me away for producing inflammatory adjectives, I expect legal representation.”

“We’ll get you the best law student we can afford.”

“You cannot afford any.”

“Exactly.”

Uzair smiled.

A car door slammed near the road.

Four white men were climbing over the low fence.

They were young, perhaps Uzair’s age, dressed in heavy jackets and football scarves. One carried a bottle. Another had the red, wet-eyed look of someone drinking faster than his body could follow.

The laughter left Jaskirat’s face.

The men spread as they approached.

“This your field, is it?” the tallest called.

Jaskirat retrieved the football.

“No,” he said.

“Then piss off.”

Jaskirat looked at Uzair. “Come on.”

It surprised him.

Jaskirat, who organized marches. Jaskirat, who stood before police lines and read statements in a voice that could hold a hundred people still. Jaskirat was already turning toward the gate.

Perhaps that was the first thing Uzair had truly learned from him: resistance did not mean fighting every fool who demanded blood. Survival could be strategic. Pride was not worth an ambulance.

But something in Uzair refused.

Perhaps it was Mr. Hargreaves tearing down the circular.

Perhaps it was Simon closing the window.

Perhaps it was every English person who had told him, in one form or another, that his presence required permission.

He remained beside the ball.

Jaskirat stopped.

“Uzair.”

“We’re using the field.”

The tall man stared. “What?”

Uzair’s pulse climbed into his throat. “We were here first.”

One of the others laughed. “Hear that? Paki thinks he owns the place.”

Jaskirat stepped back toward Uzair.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

The man with the bottle moved between them and the gate. “Didn’t say you could leave.”

Jaskirat’s shoulders changed.

It was almost imperceptible. A settling. A calculation.

Uzair recognized it from meetings, from marches, from the instant before Jaskirat chose a course and committed every part of himself to it.

“Move,” Jaskirat said.

“Or what?”

“Or you’ll discover why I asked politely.”

The man shoved him.

Jaskirat barely shifted.

Uzair should have de-escalated. He had words. Words were allegedly his entire value to the movement.

Instead he said, “He may need a smaller sentence.”

The bottle struck his mouth.

There was no graceful transition into violence.

One moment Uzair was standing. The next the ground rose sideways and slammed into his shoulder. Mud filled his palm. Someone kicked him in the ribs before he could draw breath.

Jaskirat hit the man with the bottle.

Uzair saw it in fragments: Jaskirat’s fist, a flash of blood, two men dragging him backward, his injured leg buckling before he drove an elbow into someone’s throat.

Then a boot caught Uzair’s stomach.

He folded around the pain.

“Bloody Paki,” someone spat above him. “Should’ve stayed in your own country.”

Another kick struck his back.

The field pressed cold and wet against his cheek.

Uzair covered his head. A heel crushed his fingers into the dirt. The men’s voices blurred with the rush of blood in his ears.

This, he thought incoherently, was England.

Not Shakespeare. Not stone colleges. Not the clever arguments made over wine about empire having ended.

England was a boot between his shoulder blades telling him to be grateful.

He had returned to the person who had killed him from the inside and called it opportunity. He had crossed half the world toward the hand that had divided countries, emptied treasuries and taught people to mistrust their own neighbours. Then he had thanked that hand for allowing him into its university.

Another kick.

Somewhere, Jaskirat shouted his name.

Uzair tried to answer.

His mouth tasted of iron and grass.

The grey cat had come down from the tree. It stood several yards away, body low, ears flattened. For once, when Uzair stretched his uninjured hand weakly across the mud, it did not hiss.

It came close enough to press its small head beneath his fingertips.

Uzair felt fur.

Then nothing.

—

He woke beneath a ceiling he did not recognize.

A shaded lamp glowed beside the bed. The curtains were patterned with orange flowers. From somewhere below came the low murmur of a television and Jagjit’s unmistakable voice arguing with the newsreader.

Uzair attempted to move.

His body issued a unanimous objection.

Pain spread from his ribs through his back and settled behind his eyes. His lips felt split. One nostril refused to function.

“Don’t.”

Jaskirat sat beside him.

For a moment Uzair did not understand what he was seeing.

Jaskirat’s left eye had swollen nearly shut. Dried blood marked the corner of his mouth. His knuckles were torn and purple. A bandage circled his forehead, partly hidden beneath hair that had come loose across his brow. His shirt was not the one he had worn at the field. This one was white and too large, probably Jagjit’s, with one sleeve rolled higher than the other.

Saloni stood at his shoulder holding a tray of iodine, ointment and clean bandages.

She looked nothing like Uzair had seen in the pictures Jagjit would show the boys. Tall, serious-faced, her thick plait hanging over one shoulder. Her eyes moved between him and Jaskirat with open concern.

“Where—” Uzair’s voice cracked.

“My parents’ house,” she said. “Papa didn’t want to take you to hospital unless necessary. He says police ask too many questions. We’re having a family friend come look you over soon.

Jagjit uncle’s house.

Uzair remembered the field.

He turned to Jaskirat. “Are you all right?”

Jaskirat dipped cotton into iodine.

“Jaskirat?”

He took Uzair’s wrist carefully and began cleaning the cuts across his knuckles.

The iodine burned.

Uzair hissed. “I asked whether you’re all right.”

Nothing.

Jaskirat’s silence was different now. Not his usual reserve. This was something sealed so tightly that Uzair could almost hear it strain.

Saloni watched her cousin.

“Bring him water,” Jaskirat said.

His voice was rough.

Saloni collected the empty glass from the bedside table. Before leaving, she touched Jaskirat lightly between the shoulders.

He did not react.

The door closed.

Uzair watched him wind gauze around his palm.

“What happened?”

Jaskirat tied the bandage.

“After I— Did I pass out?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Several hours.”

“Did they—”

“They ran.”

“Were you hurt badly?”

Jaskirat reached for the ointment.

Uzair pulled his hand back. Pain shot up his arm, but he kept it against his chest.

“Why aren’t you talking?”

“I am.”

“No, you are issuing single-word statements”

Jaskirat’s jaw flexed.

Uzair searched his face. “Are you angry with me?”

No answer.

“You told me to leave.”

Jaskirat looked down.

“I should have listened.”

Still nothing.

“Jaskirat.”

He opened the ointment.

“Will you please say something?”

Jaskirat’s hand stopped.

Uzair’s anger rose because fear had nowhere else to go. He was disoriented, hurting and trapped inside a body that refused even to sit upright. He needed information. He needed Jaskirat to return to being the person who examined a room and made sense of it.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded. “You have looked through me since I woke. If you want to tell me I was an idiot, tell me. I know. If you want me out of the flat, say that as well. But stop sitting there as though I’m already—”

His throat closed around the final word.

Dead.

Jaskirat’s face changed.

Uzair attempted to push himself upright. The room tipped violently. Pain tightened around his ribs until his arms failed, and he fell back against the pillows.

The door opened.

Saloni returned with water and two white tablets. She set both on the table.

“You need these.”

Uzair took the pills because arguing required energy he no longer possessed. Saloni held the glass while he drank. Water touched the split in his lip and stung.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

She looked toward Jaskirat.

“Call if you need anything.”

When she left, Jaskirat stood.

He crossed the room, shut the door and turned the lock.

Uzair’s heart began beating harder.

Jaskirat remained with his back to him.

Outside, a car passed along the road, tires hissing over wet pavement. The television downstairs changed to an advertisement. Pipes clicked inside the wall.

“I was in the Indian Army when I was nineteen,” Jaskirat said.

Uzair did not move.

Jaskirat placed one hand against the door.

“I served for four years in Kashmir. Until a bullet shattered my leg and the doctors decided I was no longer fit.”

He turned.

His face was very still.

“I don’t feel fear often. My father raised me to think clearly. Examine the thing first, he used to say. Know its dimensions before you commit to an emotion you cannot take back. The military taught me much the same.”

Uzair hung on every word.

He always did when Jaskirat spoke. Even now, with his head pounding and the room shifting at its edges, his voice became the one stable line through it.

Jaskirat walked slowly toward the bed.

“I wasn’t afraid when I was shot. I remember being angry because I couldn’t move my leg. I remember thinking the snow beneath me would ruin the Tribanga on my uniform. I remember telling the man beside me not to waste the morphine because we had others worse off.”

He gave a humourless breath.

“I was not worse off. I lived.”

Uzair thought of the limp. The bad days in the rain. Jaskirat’s face closing whenever Dev asked about India.

“I couldn’t serve afterward,” Jaskirat continued. “That hurt more than the bullet. It was the only thing I understood myself to be. My father served. His father served. I thought if I stayed in India, I would spend the rest of my life looking at the country and knowing it had no use for me.”

“That isn’t true,” Uzair said.

“I know.”

Jaskirat’s voice sharpened unexpectedly.

“I know that now. But I didn’t then. So I came here. I told myself I was leaving service behind.”

He looked toward the dark window.

“Then I saw how people lived here. Our people. Six men to a room. Landlords refusing families because curry made the walls smell. Boys beaten outside factories while police asked what they had done to provoke it. Women insulted at work and told to be grateful they were employed at all.”

Zubeda’s face rose in Uzair’s mind.

“I couldn’t stop,” Jaskirat said. “I found another country to serve. Not India. Not England. This one.”

He gestured vaguely, as though the country existed within the room: the flat, the meetings, every brown hand folding circulars beneath bad light.

“The people who have nowhere else to stand.”

Uzair’s chest hurt for reasons that had little to do with the beating.

Jaskirat lowered himself into the chair.

“I would put myself in the line of fire for this work. Gladly. I have. I know what it costs.”

He picked at the edge of one thumbnail.

Then stopped himself.

“But when you stayed on that field…”

Uzair’s breath caught.

“I was proud of you,” Jaskirat said. “God, I was so proud.”

His voice broke over the last word.

Uzair had never heard that sound from him.

Jaskirat looked down at his injured hands. “You stood there because you believed what we had been saying. Because you refused to let them make you smaller. And I—”

He pressed his palms together, then winced as the torn knuckles met.

“I was terrified.”

The word seemed to shame him.

“When they hit you, I could not think. I could not examine anything. There was no strategy, no training. Only fear. Everywhere. In my mouth. In my hands. Beneath my skin.”

“Jaskirat—”

“I couldn’t reach you.”

He looked up.

His good eye was wet. Tears gathered beneath the swollen one and slipped carefully around the bruise.

“I could see them kicking you and I couldn’t reach you. Then you stopped moving.”

Uzair forgot his own pain.

“I thought you were dead,” Jaskirat whispered.

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“I’m here.”

“I know.”

Jaskirat stood too quickly, paced once to the foot of the bed, then returned.

“No one has ever made me feel that. Fear. Anger. Anything like that. I carried you to the car and you wouldn’t wake. I brought you here because I knew Chachu would protect you, but you still wouldn’t wake, and I did not know what was happening inside your head.”

He sat on the edge of the bed.

The mattress dipped beneath his weight.

“I was so scared, Uzair.”

They were close now.

Closer than the balcony. Closer than the alley.

“I was so scared.”

Uzair hated it.

He hated the tremor in Jaskirat’s voice. He hated the tears on that battered face. He hated that he had put fear into a man who had met bullets with irritation.

But beneath the guilt came another thought, fragile and bright enough to frighten him.

What could it mean?

What could Uzair possibly be to him, if losing him could do this?

Jaskirat looked into his eyes.

Uzair lifted the hand that hurt least.

His fingers found Jaskirat’s cheek.

He brushed one tear away, then another. His thumb passed beneath the old mark near Jaskirat’s eyebrow and stopped just before the fresh bruise.

Jaskirat went completely still.

Uzair should have removed his hand.

He did not.

His palm remained against Jaskirat’s face, feeling the roughness of stubble and the warmth beneath it.

Slowly, Jaskirat leaned into the touch.

His eyes closed.

The gesture undid something inside Uzair.

This strong, silent man bent his head into Uzair’s hand as though it were the first safe place he had found in years. Uzair watched the tension leave his mouth. Watched him breathe.

When Jaskirat opened his eyes again, the green looked darker.

He lifted his hand and wrapped his fingers gently around Uzair’s wrist.

For a terrible second, Uzair thought he would move it away.

Instead, Jaskirat turned his face and pressed the smallest kiss into the centre of Uzair’s palm.

Uzair stopped breathing.

Jaskirat lowered their joined hands between them.

He looked at Uzair’s mouth.

“Tell me no,” he whispered.

Uzair’s lips were split. His ribs ached. His head felt full of broken church bells.

He had never wanted anything more.

“That would be a very stupid thing to say.”

Jaskirat leaned in.

The kiss was careful at first.

So careful that it hurt more than force would have. Jaskirat’s mouth touched his as though Uzair remained something breakable, something whose pain he had memorized. His hand came to rest beside Uzair’s hip, bearing none of his weight.

Uzair tilted his face and kissed him back.

Jaskirat made a low sound into his mouth.

The second kiss was deeper, though still gentle around Uzair’s injured lip. Jaskirat’s fingers slid into his hair. Uzair held his jaw, feeling the working muscle beneath his palm, the dampness tears had left against his skin.

The room became impossibly quiet.

Quiet enough to hear cars passing outside.

Crickets hidden in the winter-dark garden.

The television murmuring downstairs.

Jagjit laughing suddenly at something Romi said.

All of England continued beyond the locked door. Its streets, its policemen, its landlords, and shop managers. Every person who would despise them separately and hate them more for what they were together.

When they parted, Jaskirat kept his forehead against Uzair’s.

Their breath mingled.

“You’re still an idiot,” Jaskirat whispered.

“There he is.”

“I told you to leave.”

“And I have admitted you were right. You should enjoy the occasion. It will not recur.”

Jaskirat laughed shakily.

Uzair opened his eyes.

Through the gap in the curtains, he could see movement along the garden wall.

A cat stepped into the yellow spill of a downstairs window. Grey fur. Ragged ear. Narrow body made of shadow and stubbornness.

Perhaps it was the library cat.

It could not be.

Still, Uzair watched it pause and look toward the house, as though checking that he had finally found somewhere to sleep.

Jaskirat followed his gaze.

“Another cat,” he murmured.

“The same one.”

“That is impossible.”

“So is your Cortina, but it continues to move.”

Jaskirat’s mouth curved.

The cat jumped from the wall and disappeared into the alley.

Uzair looked at the bruised man before him: the green eyes, the broken mouth, the quiet strength that had followed him into every dangerous street. The creature who lived at the edge of rooms and came close without touching, until fear finally drove him into the light.

Uzair drew him down for another kiss.

My street cat, he thought.

My alley cat.