Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds

– The Jews are everywhere, he said, shaking his head.

I had come across Muslim anti-Semitism often enough in the past, but it was disconcerting to find such fear and prejudice in Mir.

– In London everyone is everywhere, I said lightly.

– You don’t think that he might not want to help me because I am a Muslim?

– Of course not! You shouldn’t think of him as Jewish. Think of him as your lawyer.

Mir looked thoughtful and did not reply. We walked on past the shops and restaurants of Upper Street towards the tube station.

– You know I am Ghilzai, he said eventually, naming one of the two main branches of the Pashtun nation. Some people say the Ghilzai are Children of Israel – one of the lost tribes. This is why the Tajiks sometimes call the Talibs ‘Bloody Jews’.

– Well, if you’re Jewish you can’t have a problem with Aaron Stein, can you?

– Personally I do not believe this Ghilzai tradition. It is werry stupid – maybe even Zionist propaganda.

– So what’s your point?

– Only that the Jews are werry clever people, he said.

I did my best to fulfil my side of the bargain with Mir. The initial euphoria of getting him in subsided soon enough. I was uninitiated in British immigration procedures, and the grinding inefficiency of the Home Office machinery was shocking. I began belatedly to read into the subject, snipping out relevant newspaper articles and buttonholing certain lawyers and political types I knew on the drinks and dinner-party circuit. I soon concluded that the Home Office wasn’t being deliberately callous: it was simply overwhelmed. It was obvious too that the situation was getting worse. Asylum seekers were turning up in Britain in ever-increasing numbers – twenty-two thousand in 1993, thirty-two thousand in 1997, and (as it later turned out) forty-six thousand in 1998. No wonder the officials couldn’t cope. Mir was part of a 42 per cent rise in asylum seekers over the previous year alone. In some cases they had been waiting literally years for a final decision. Such people lived in fear of a knock on the door, or perhaps just a formulaic letter that would launch them back to whatever disaster area they had come from. While the civil servants deliberated, these people were forced to live in a terrible limbo, an immigrant half-world whose inhabitants were in constant dread of the future and who had almost no status in the present. It seemed a cruel sort of sanctuary to offer people who had fled for their lives, and it was certainly no foundation for a young man trying to start a new life in the West. I resolved to do one more thing for Mir to make his limbo period as short as possible. I spoke to an uncle, a former Foreign Office Minister.

– Go and see his MP, he advised. It’s amazing what a letter on House of Commons writing paper will do to speed things up. It’s one of the few areas of government where the MP system actually works.

This wasn’t quite the offer of direct intervention I had hoped for. Mir was disappointed too, because where he came from nepotism was not so much the oil in the engine as the motor that drove the entire machine. But it was still a sensible suggestion, so not long afterwards we set off together to visit Tony Banks, the Member of Parliament for West Ham, in his constituency office in Stratford High Street.

We were late as usual for our appointment. Mir, full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of London life and excited by the prospect of the short journey to Stratford, had insisted on procuring a minicab to take us there from Mafeking Avenue.

– I’ll be two minutes, he cried; and disappeared out through the door for thirty. Hamid was out, and I was left alone in the front room, nibbling sugared mulberries and listening to the silence of the suppurating house. Mir returned at last in a dented Toyota driven by a decrepit Pashtun tribesman who spoke no English and had even less idea than I did how to get to Stratford High Street.

– He is a werry good man, Mir explained in a whisper. He lives close to here. I believe he is in need of the work.

It was a wet London evening that slowed the traffic in the tortuous gyratory system of central Stratford to a crawl. I sat low in the collapsed and greasy front seat, swatting irritably at the condensation on the windscreen and trying to match the prismatic chaos in the dark outside to the tattered road map on my lap. Ever deferential, Mir had insisted on sitting in the back. He chattered happily at the deaf old tribesman, who turned out to be an Afridi, from the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.

Tony Banks’s office was in a lone redbrick Victorian building, incongruous amidst the 1970s brutalism that surrounded it. The windows were protected by stout grilles. A large Labour Party banner mounted on the façade seemed defiant, like a Union Jack above some lonely imperial outpost in a foreign land.

We arrived so late that the officious young volunteer on the reception desk almost turned us away. We had missed our slot, he said, and there were many other people wanting to see Mr Banks. From the little waiting room over his shoulder a dozen brown faces silently turned to look at us, upturned white eyes in a small sea of turbans and beards. But the volunteer relented when we pleaded, and eventually we were granted an audience.

I had always admired Tony Banks, and recognised his famous pixie-like face at once. He was a maverick, one of the country’s few true conviction politicians, a left winger of the old school in the mould of Tony Benn or Tam Dalyell. The horde in his surgery waiting room suggested that he looked kindly on the plight of ethnic minorities in his constituency. I felt a spark of hope.

– You look busy tonight, I offered.

– I’m always busy, he snapped. I’ve got very little time. What do you want?

But his crinkled features softened as I rolled out the story once again, his shrewd eyes darting between me and Mir, who sat with pasha-like calm in the corner. He didn’t once question my motivation in helping Mir. If it was unusual for a white man to come pleading an Afghan’s case, he gave no indication of it. He was overworked and irascible, but I knew I had found a valuable ally to the cause. When I had finished he looked down at his desk with his head in his hands and exhaled deeply.

– The Home Office is useless, he muttered, almost to himself. Bloody useless. Take a note, Eileen, he added to a secretary who had slipped into the office. We’ll write to them and see if we can stir them up. He stood and nodded purposefully at Mir who was still watching and smiling pleasantly in the corner. Call me in a month if you haven’t heard from me by then, OK?

I felt elated as we bowed our way out. There was a terrier-like determination about Tony Banks that made me certain he would not let this case languish in a Home Office in-tray for long. Once again, however, it was uncertain how much of the meeting Mir had really understood.

– Is it good? he asked, out in the rain again.

– Good? It’s brilliant. I’d say he’s definitely going to help you.

– He is a nice man, Mir replied with cheerful equanimity. Perhaps I will give him a carpet also.

In the days and weeks that followed I tried to resist the impulse to check up on Mir. Technically I had fulfilled my side of the bargain we had struck in Islamabad. I thought I understood the dangers of meddling, of trying to shape or influence his new life. I had no intention of adopting a protege or, worse, of treating him like some kind of social experiment. This was not Pygmalion. Mir was a real person, not Eliza Doolittle, and I did not see myself as Henry Higgins. Yet at the same time I was deeply curious to know what he made of this alien land. His first impressions of the West might be valuable, and I wanted to record them. Moreover, I had promised to show him where and how I lived, and he kept asking for a ride on the motorbike. So one day I invited him over to my side of town.

He came out of the tube station where we’d arranged to meet, looking shaken.

– A man shouted at me, he explained. I thought he would hit me. It was werry embarrassing.

A racist, I thought immediately. He was bound to bump into one eventually: what a shame that it had happened so soon. It was a warm spring day, but it surely wasn’t the heat that made him mop at his brow with his sleeve.

– It was my fault, he continued. I was staring at his woman.

– James! he protested when I laughed. I could not help it. She was wearing a dress so short that it was…that it was no dress at all!

Later Mir confirmed that the greatest cultural shock, the most astonishing thing he had so far seen in London, was not the shops or the traffic or the size of the place – it was the women. I could understand the difficulty he was having in adjusting. He had grown up in a purdah environment where, with the possible exception of his immediate family, the female form was almost permanently hidden from view. All social activity was sexually segregated. There were no women’s magazines, no advertising hoardings. Under the Taliban, television sets were banned on the grounds that the female shape distracted the citizenry from their pious duties in the mosque. I had experienced the effect of such sensory depravation at first hand, and found that the Taliban probably had a point. Freud, according to a poster I once owned, reckoned that the average red-blooded male thinks about sex every three minutes, but in Afghanistan I hardly thought about it at all. This realisation had only dawned on me when I left the country. My first contact with non-Muslims had been in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where, according to my overtuned antennae, the streets seemed weirdly crammed with blondes in miniskirts. Like Mir in London I found myself staring at these apparitions. It was like seeing green grass again after a long sea voyage. Yet I had been in Afghanistan for just a few weeks. How much more amazing must London have been for Mir, who had been denied the sight of women’s legs for a lifetime?

The attitude towards women had always struck me as the main faultline of misunderstanding between the Islamic world and the West. I’d first experienced it years before, in the newsagent’s around the corner from my parents’ house in Kensington. The shop was run by a Mr Haroun and his family. They were friendly, diligent and always open, as well as charmingly loyal to their regulars, a comparative rarity in that cosmopolitan part of London. We weren’t on first-name terms, quite, yet there was always time to stop and chat. We did not think of them as Muslims, or even as foreigners, particularly. If we ever wondered about their country of origin or how they had come to settle in London, we certainly never asked. We observed that they were Asian, of course, but to us they were really just great shopkeepers, whose longer-than-average tenure in that high-turnover neighbourhood made them a valued focal point for the community. So it was a shock when one day Mr Haroun’s plump, easy-going son was accused of sexual assault by an Australian backpacker. I had gone over to buy a pint of milk, and could not help but notice the backpacker’s girlfriend standing by the door as I entered. She was wearing sandals, cut-off shorts and a spectacularly tight T-shirt, her tanned arms folded protectively across her well-developed breasts. Her beach-blonde hair, however, framed an expression of thunderous self-righteousness. The backpacker had broached sacred ground and gone behind the till. He was wagging his finger viciously at Mr Haroun’s son, who had backed away pathetically into the corner, too astonished and frightened to defend himself.

– And if you ever, EVER touch my girlfriend again, the backpacker was saying, I’ll come back and kill you and I’ll freakin’ torch your pissy little shop, understand? IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?

This was delivered at an antipodean bellow, the antithesis of the ‘quiet word’ that an Englishman would deploy in similar circumstances. There were two or three other customers in the shop, who had been browsing on autopilot like the locals they were, but like me they now stood frozen. Nobody spoke. The backpacker was a big, fit man who seemed even bigger in the cramped space behind the counter. For a moment it looked as though he might punch Mr Haroun’s son, but in the end he withdrew.

– Come on, Charlene. Let’s get out of this shitheap, he said.

He marched towards the entrance, spitefully dashing a handful of confectionery to the floor as he went. Charlene turned on her heel with an audible harumph and followed him out. For a second nobody moved. Then the shoppers simultaneously returned to their ordinary business. Still no one spoke as Mr Haroun’s son shakily emerged from behind the counter, his face pale with shock.

– They’re crazy, he said, looking around desperately at his customers. I didn’t do anything. You saw!

But the customers wouldn’t meet his eye. You could tell they were unsure if he was telling the truth. They hadn’t seen anything. Besides, it was nothing to do with them. They had come in here to buy a newspaper or a bar of chocolate, not to get embroiled in unpleasantness. And now the shopkeeper was asking them to bear witness; what temerity, what an imposition! Hadn’t they endured enough already? Why didn’t he understand that it was much better just to pretend the whole thing had never happened? That was the way things were done in this country. Mr Haroun’s son looked at me then, the last customer to come into the shop. He knew I wasn’t a witness, yet he was beseeching me to believe him.

– Don’t worry, I muttered. That reaction was totally over the top. Totally.

He looked at me in utter bafflement.

– These Australians, you know? I added lamely, turning a finger at the side of my head. What can you do?

He turned away without a shrug or a smile. This wasn’t the validation he sought, and we both knew it. I left the shop as quickly as possible, leaving him alone among the incomprehensible foreigners he had served for half his life, forlornly picking Kit-Kats off the floor.

Mir’s scare on the tube was a useful lesson, and I decided to drive it home by taking him to Soho. We were soon prowling the narrow streets west of Wardour Street. It was barely noon but there were already one or two raddled-looking working girls lurking in the doorways. I pointed one out to Mir, who stared in disbelief, then looked away in confusion as she caught his eye and asked if he was looking for business, luv. He kept close by me after that, but his curiosity soon got the better of him.

– Hohh, what is it? What is it? he whispered, transfixed by the sight of a dildo in a sex-shop window. It was a foot long at least and crafted from solid black latex, its flanks gleaming menacingly in the shop lights like an upended miniature Stealth bomber. I explained its purpose in clinical terms, feeling like a father telling a twelve-year-old son the facts of life.

– But it’s huge! he said, openly dismayed.