Free White Teeth by Zadie Smith Page B

shades of yellow and green. One had to admire Ardashir’s business sense. He had taken the simple idea of an Indian restaurant (small room, pink tablecloth, loud music, atrocious wallpaper, meals that do not exist in India, sauce carousel) and just made it bigger. He hadn’t improved anything; everything was the same old crap, but it was all bigger in a bigger building in the biggest tourist trap in London, Leicester Square. You had to admire it and admire the man, who sat now like a benign locust, his slender insectile body swamped in a black leather chair, leaning over the desk, all smiles, a parasite disguised as a philanthropist.
    ‘Cousin, what can I do for you?’
    Samad took a breath. The matter was this . . .
    Ardashir’s eyes glazed over a little as Samad explained his situation. His skinny legs twitched underneath the desk, and in his fingers he manipulated a paperclip until it looked reasonably like an A. A for Ardashir. The matter was . . . what was the matter? The house was the matter. Samad was moving out of East London (where one couldn’t bring up children, indeed, one couldn’t, not if one didn’t wish them to come to bodily harm, he agreed), from East London with its NF gangs, to North London, north-west, where things were more . . . more . . . liberal.
    Was it his turn to speak?
    ‘Cousin . . .’ said Ardashir, arranging his face, ‘you must understand . . . I cannot make it my business to buy houses for all my employees, cousin or not cousin . . . I pay a wage, cousin . . . That is business in this country.’
    Ardashir shrugged as he spoke as if to suggest he deeply disapproved of ‘Business in this country’, but there it was. He was forced, his look said, forced by the English to make an awful lot of money.
    ‘You misunderstand me, Ardashir. I have the deposit for the house, it is
our
house now, we have moved in—’
    How on earth has he afforded it, he must work his wife like a bloody slave, thought Ardashir, pulling out another paperclip from the bottom drawer.
    ‘I need only a small wage increase to help me finance the move. To make things a little easier as we settle in. And Alsana, well, she is pregnant.’
    Pregnant. Difficult. The case called for extreme diplomacy.
    ‘Don’t mistake me, Samad, we are both intelligent, frank men and I think I can speak frankly . . . I know you’re not a
fucking
waiter’ — he whispered the expletive and smiled indulgently after it, as if it were a naughty, private thing that brought them closer together — ‘I see your position . . . of course I do . . . but you must understand
mine
 . . . If I made allowances for every relative I employ I’d be walking around like bloody Mr Gandhi. Without a pot to piss in. Spinning my thread by the light of the moon. An example: at this very moment that wastrel Fat Elvis brother-in-law of mine, Hussein-Ishmael—’
    ‘The butcher?’
    ‘The butcher, demands that I should raise the price I pay for his stinking meat! “But Ardashir, we are brothers-in-law!” he is saying to me. And I am saying to him, but Mohammed, this is
retail
 . . .’
    It was Samad’s turn to glaze over. He thought of his wife, Alsana, who was not as meek as he had assumed when they married, to whom he must deliver the bad news; Alsana, who was prone to moments, even fits — yes, fits was not too strong a word — of rage. Cousins, aunts, brothers, thought it a bad sign, they worried if there wasn’t some ‘funny mental history’ in Alsana’s family, they sympathized with him the way you sympathize with a man who has bought a stolen car with more mileage on it than first thought. In his naivety Samad had simply assumed a woman so young would be . . . easy. But Alsana was not . . . no, she was not easy. It was, he supposed, the way with these young women these days. Archie’s bride . . . last Tuesday he had seen something in her eyes that wasn’t easy either. It was the new way