Free Spiral Road by Adib Khan Page A

Najma.’
    ‘You’ll learn to shut out those images of him,’ my brother sympathises quietly. ‘There’s nothing worse than thinking of people as they were. Such memories achieve little. They merely expose our unwillingness to face the reality of time passing.’ Zia invites me up to his study. ‘Later, I’ll take you to Dhaka Club for dinner. You’ll probably run into some of your old friends. One or two might even be sober!’
    We come across Ma crying in a corner of the lounge, with Nasreen trying to console her.
    ‘It’s so embarrassing!’ Ma sobs to the three of us. ‘Your father was never like this! He was a gentleman.’
    We try to comfort her. Abba can’t choose how he behaves in front of people.
    Z IA’S STUDY IS not what I’d expected. It’s a homely mess. In a corner there’s a padded swivel chair and a large timber desk cluttered with papers and stationery. There are expensively framed colour photos of Zeenat and the children, and a faded, black-and-white picture of my parents taken on their twentieth wedding anniversary. There’s one of Nasreen, flanked by Zia and me. It was her fifteenth birthday; my brother and I look bored. A computer and printer, pencil holders, biros and fountain pens, paper clips, scissors, a stapler, containers of whiteout, my grandfather’s lapis lazuli paperweight, notepads, folders and an Oxford English Dictionary, all leave little surface space for working. To the right of the chair is a revolvingglobe of the world on a cast-iron stand. A new television, DVD player and video recorder occupy a trolley in the opposite corner.
    The timber shelves are crowded with books, files, magazines and newspapers. Zia has never been a reader of anything other than work-related material and popular fiction, so I’m perplexed by the titles here. Scholarly works on Islam and the Crusades dominate. Books on Islamic cosmology and Sufism, a collection of atlases and maps of great empires, volumes on prophecies and imperialism. Most of the significant works on terrorism, written immediately after the attack on New York, are stacked on the shelves. Piles of video tapes, labelled with dates and the letters AJ.
    ‘AJ?’ I inquire.
    ‘Al Jazeera. I balance their coverage of the Middle East with what’s on the satellite network. I suppose you watch FOX and CNN?’ He observes me closely.
    ‘I don’t have pay TV.’
    Between two shelves hangs a black-and-white print of a man with finely chiselled features. I had no idea that Zia was interested in the Mughals.
    ‘Shahjehan?’
    He smiles and shakes his head. ‘Wrong era. It’s Saladin.’
    I look at the picture again. A sombre face. The fingers of his right hand appear to be entangled in the white, flourishing beard. The left hand clutches the handle of a sword. He’s wearing a turban topped with a conical hat. It’s not the aggressive face of a warrior, but more like aphilosopher’s. He looks contemplative. The eyes are sad, as though they reflect the harsh wisdom of his years in battle.
    ‘Why him?’
    ‘In so many ways he was the ideal Muslim. A great fighter and a just leader. Have you ever read about his victory at Hattin?’
    ‘No.’
    Zia goes to a shelf and selects a biography of Saladin. ‘Highly inspiring.’
    I accept the offering without enthusiasm.
    I’m more interested in the posters on environmental protection. Below a glossy picture of a flooded village, with children stranded in muddy water, a caption reads: ‘D ON’T DESTROY THEIR FUTURE . C OMBAT GLOBAL WARMING .’ Stark deforestation is portrayed in another photograph of hundreds of tree stumps, like beheaded bodies after a massacre, left to rot on a Himalayan foothill.
    ‘This isn’t like you.’
    ‘It’s very much like me!’ Zia contradicts heatedly. ‘If you’d been here during the floods last year, you’d change too.’
    I listen with grudging respect, fascinated to hear he went on a tree-planting expedition in the north of the country with a