Free White Teeth by Zadie Smith

stairs or into the next room before they relent and retrace their steps. A relationship on the brink of collapse will find one partner two blocks down the road or two countries to the east before something tugs, some responsibility, some memory, a pull of a child’s hand or a heartstring, which induces them to make the long journey back to their other half. On this Richter scale, then, Clara made only the tiniest of rumbles. She turned toward the gate, walked two steps only, and stopped.
    â€œHeads!” said Archie, seemingly without resentment. “It stays. See? That wasn’t too hard.”
    â€œI don’ wanna argue.” She turned round to face him, having made a silent renewed resolution to remember her debt to him. “You said the Iqbals are comin’ to dinner. I was just thinkin’ . . . if they’re going to want me to cook dem some curry—I mean, I can cook curry—but it’s
my
type of curry.”
    â€œFor God’s sake, they’re not
those
kind of Indians,” said Archie irritably, offended at the suggestion. “Sam’ll have a Sunday roast like the next man. He serves Indian food all the time, he doesn’t want to eat it too.”
    â€œI was just wondering—”
    â€œWell, don’t, Clara.
Please.
”
    He gave her an affectionate kiss on the forehead, for which she bent downward a little.
    â€œI’ve known Sam for years, and his wife seems a quiet sort. They’re not the royal family, you know. They’re not
those
kind of Indians,” he repeated, and shook his head, troubled by some problem, some knotty feeling he could not entirely unravel.
    Samad and Alsana Iqbal, who were not
those
kind of Indians (as, in Archie’s mind, Clara was not
that
kind of black), who were, in fact, not Indian at all but Bangladeshi, lived four blocks down on the wrong side of Willesden High Road. It had taken them a year to get there, a year of mercilessly hard graft to make the momentous move from the wrong side of Whitechapel to the wrong side of Willesden. A year’s worth of Alsana banging away at the old Singer that sat in the kitchen, sewing together pieces of black plastic for a shop called Domination in Soho (many were the nights Alsana would hold up a piece of clothing she had just made, following the pattern she was given, and wonder what on earth it was). A year’s worth of Samad softly inclining his head at exactly the correct deferential angle, pencil in his left hand, listening to the appalling pronunciation of the British, Spanish, American, French, Australian:
    Go Bye Ello Sag, please.
    Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks.
    From six in the evening until three in the morning; and then every day was spent asleep, until daylight was as rare as a decent tip. For what is the point, Samad would think, pushing aside two mints and a receipt to find fifteen pence, what is the point of tipping a man the same amount you would throw in a fountain to chase a wish? But before the illegal thought of folding the fifteen pence discreetly in his napkin hand even had a chance to give itself form, Mukhul—Ardashir Mukhul, who ran the Palace and whose wiry frame paced the restaurant, one benevolent eye on the customers, one ever-watchful eye on the staff—Mukhul was upon him.
    â€œSaaamaad”—he had a cloying, oleaginous way of speaking—“did you kiss the necessary backside this evening, cousin?”
    Samad and Ardashir were distant cousins, Samad the elder by six years. With what joy (pure bliss!) had Ardashir opened the letter last January, to find his older, cleverer, handsomer cousin was finding it hard to get work in England and could he possibly . . .
    â€œFifteen pence, cousin,” said Samad, lifting his palm.
    â€œWell, every little helps, every little helps,” said Ardashir, his dead-fish lips stretching into a stringy smile. “Into the Piss-Pot with it.”
    The Piss-Pot was a black