Soraya hustled onto the packed PIA plane. It was full of workers coming in to Britain, to provide cheap labour because there weren’t enough workers there, in return for wages that would go back by postal order and transform their families’ lives. And then, in due course, their families would join them, and work harder than the Brits who felt entitled, achieve more, and end up running the country. These workers, too, were entitled to to their place at the table to feast on the fatted calf of the English labour market, Soraya always felt. Such, she thought, is the trade-off of empire.
A man pushed past Soraya, his bony shoulders sharp against hers, gold flashing from his teeth browned by betel nut, his face thin and his beige shalwar dark with sweat under his armpits. Soraya felt revulsion mixed with her compassion, then guilt about feeling it. She resented these people, these workers - she felt that they, in their unattractive, their base presence in her motherland, had defined her, had caused her to be reviled, even though they did not recognise her as their own. It was their fault that the children had called her “Paki”; their fault that that name had become an insult, a slur.
And then, even those who were established, who had already fought their way up through adversity through sheer grit and ability and achieved independence and commercial success, even those Soraya resented, for defining her as someone she was not, for getting her lumped in with people with whom she did not share anything, for dragging her down in a country that was as utterly defined by its concept of class as America was by its concept of race. Soraya remembered a time, chatting with the manager in a smart hotel in London, when he had asked where she was from, and when she mentioned Pakistan, he asked her “oh, so do your parents run a corner shop?”. And she knew he meant the shops that she had heard the students in Oxford, the friends she had made through acting, living in shared houses in Iffley and Cowley call “the Paki shop”, as in “I’ll just pop out and get some fags from the Paki shop”. Soraya winced. She was going home to a place that was not home, because nowhere was home.
She sat on the plane, in economy, squashed by the window, next to a fat, sleeping businessman in a brown suit, thinking back to the cold, formal goodbye at the airport with Asma and Sikander. She started for a moment to think about what Sikander had got her to do, then tried to shut it out. She remembered the hard form pressing against her back in the night and the moment she had realised what it was. She remembered the agonising awkwardness of being asked to straddle him for his supposed tutorial and being too embarrassed about calling out the perversion to say no. Her face screwed up involuntarily with shame and disgust.
Suddenly Soraya felt a tingling in her left arm, like an acute pins-and-needles - it ran up her arm and she couldn’t move it, it gripped her chest and her face and she couldn’t move at all, frozen, unable to move her mouth, trying to cry for help but unable to summon sound, terrified that she was having a heart attack, dying.
Soraya tried to push her arm out, to signal. She was completely conscious, but locked into a form of paralysis. Her eyes were open, she saw the stewardess approaching, she managed to get her arm out slightly and made a sound from the back of her throat. The stewardess came to her, put her hand on her arm, spoke to her - “are you all right? can you speak? can I get you water?” then with increasing panic “what are you feeling? do you have pain in your chest? Please move, Sir, so I can get to her. Please MOVE!”. Soraya felt fussing around the neck of her shirt and saw the stewardess’ face close to hers. This went on for an indefinite period. She couldn’t keep track.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the tingling subsided and she was back to normal, as if nothing had happened. It was all gone. She made profuse apologies for causing bother, reassured the stewardess that she was fine, she had no underlying conditions, it must just have been the heat, she confirmed she would get everything checked out back home, drank the water, handled the repeated checking in on her and passed through the fuss, desperately relieved that the paralysis had stopped.
Back in England the doctors ran a 24 hour ECG on her and her heart was perfect, unhurt, ready for anything. They said it had to have been a panic attack. And that the one she had had before, in her aunt and uncle’s house when she learned that Sikander was coming back, would have been too. She was not damaged, she was just afraid.
When Soraya got back to England there was chaos in the passport hall. It had an infernal quality. There were all the people from her plane, and the people like them, and there were all the Brits as well, greyer, greasier of skin, spottier, angrier, fatter, better teeth, make-up, more chemical smells. A small, stout woman was shouting loudly, repeatedly, at the people from her plane to round them up into the right queues, and Soraya felt very keenly the clash between them, and the sense that she was completely alone.
Blanche was there at arrivals to welcome her daughter, her arms open. She had missed her so much. She had so feared that she would be forgotten, that she would fade, the paler parent, into obscurity next to Sikander’s fiery charisma, the richness of what he could offer. Feeling Soraya wrapped in her arms, she knew she had not lost her daughter, and Soraya felt, at last, safe and loved and secure. They drove back, and everything in the house felt good, familiar; just seeing the old things, the china horses, the Japanese bowl, a pair of framed prints of nineteenth century ladies in grey dresses, her mother’s things, gave her joy.
Soraya didn’t call Julian. She didn’t want to see her boyfriend. He hadn’t known she’d be back so early, and she kept him in the dark. He wasn’t a big letter writer, and she’d kept things newsy and basic. So he wasn’t expecting any big conversations. She felt distant, and that she couldn’t face explaining why. Soraya spent her time quietly at home, reading her books for Cambridge and doing exercise videos in the night when she couldn’t sleep. Eventually, though, the phone rang, she picked it up and it was Julian. He had heard on the grapevine via friends of her mother’s that Soraya had come home.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back?” Julian was baffled, not angry.
“I don’t know. I just needed some time to think.”
“To think about what?”
“Look, I’m sorry” Soraya felt flat, cold, hard, “I don’t think this is going to work out. I don’t think it makes sense with me going off to Cambridge in a few months. I’ve been away, we’ve got used that that, and it makes sense not to pick up again. It’ll just make it harder.”
There was a bit of back and forth, but as Soraya knew, once you get to that point it’s all over bar the shouting. And they had no shouting. Only once, Julian cried out, “But why do we have to break up? I don’t understand!” and Soraya had nothing much to say, only that this was what she felt, and it wasn’t his fault, but she couldn’t help it. They were kind, decent, to each other. They wished each other well. They never saw each other again.
Soraya didn‘t know why she felt so cold. She only knew that she didn’t want to have sex, and seeing Julian would definitely, in his reasonable expectation, given the state of play when she had left, mean having sex. She was indifferent. Bored. She just didn’t want to be bothered with him. She entered a world of books - No Name, The Eustace Diamonds, Middlemarch, A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady - big fat, engrossing nineteenth century novels that were hard to get into but once she did they were immersive, compelling, they took over her world entirely. Finishing these books felt like a real loss, like losing a friend, like ending an exciting phase of life. She slept in the day and read and exercised at night when everyone else was sleeping. She created an entirely solitary world. In the day she was exhausted, she needed to sleep, at night she was wired and needed to burn her energy, to calm her racing mind.
At one of those times she wrote to her father. She had been reading psychology. A bit of Freud, a bit of Jung. She had theories. She wrote that she believed he didn’t care what happened to anyone, how he hurt anyone, because his super ego, his frame of moral and human reference, was corrupt. And with his corrupt super ego, he sought only his own pleasure, his own convenience - he felt no empathy, no compassion. She sent it, and she received no reply. She hadn’t expected one.
Blanche caught her one day staring into space, frowning and angry. She got her to talk, and Soraya told her all about it. Blanche didn’t seem shocked. More exasperated.
“Ugh, he’s unbelievable. He can’t restrain himself even with his own daughter. I knew he was obsessed with sex but I didn’t imagine he’d extend that to you. I’m so angry that he put you through that. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.” And then she moved on to talking about how badly he had treated her, Blanche, and her view on his many failings as a person.
Soraya was faintly surprised that her revelation had not engendered more outrage, more fury. Maybe she was making too big a deal of it. Maybe she was exaggerating it in her mind. Maybe this was an unusual, but not an entirely untoward, way for fathers to behave. How would she know?
It was weeks later, sharing a room with Lizzie, when the softness of night brought an inclination to confide, that Soraya spoke of this again. She described what had happened, to Lizzie, and asked her,
“That’s not normal, is it? that’s not what fathers do? your father wouldn’t have been that way with you?”
“No!” Lizzie was quick to assure her. “No, never! this was not normal, not normal at all! That’s dreadful!”
Soraya thanked her, calmly, and turned to sleep, and it was then that the hot tears ran from her closed eyes to wet her pillow, without sobbing, silent, as if the confusion of the weeks since those brief but epochal moments was at last flowing out of her as salt walter. The salt water cleaned her green eyes, made them clear as emeralds again, flooding like melted ice, dissolved from her frozen tension. She was freed of not knowing whether ignorance had caused her to make a fuss about nothing. She was freed of the guilt of fearing she had been wrong to see darkness in those fatherly actions, freed of the dread that she had misjudged. It was not normal. It was dreadful. The horror she had felt, that she still felt when she thought about it, was not misplaced, imagined. It was real. It was good to know it was real.
It was hard, though, to accept that she was not loved as a daughter. Never to have been enough. Enough for someone to want to be with her, to spend time with her, just to be. It was hard to have that confirmed. To know that she was valued by her father only when there was sex on the menu - from the childhood visits when her mother had provided it, to the latter days when she herself had become a dainty dish.
Soraya realised, with an acute pang, that as a daughter, as a person, she had never been compelling at all. And she formed, in her nineteen-year-old mind, the firm conclusion that if she was to be loved, through her life, it would be for her sexuality. She herself, her wit, her thinking, her warmth, her capacity to love, none of that was enough. She needed to seduce, not just to be. Her sexuality defined her, it was her draw. She needed to be magnetic. She needed to make men want her. She needed to bring them to the bedroom and enslave them to their desire. And maybe, that way, she would find a person with whom she could connect. She could love and be loved in return.
This was the route that Soraya identified. She had watched Madonna and Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot. She knew how to be bold, assertive, deliberately sexy. And she knew, instinctively, her own way to seduce - to laugh, to be funny, but then to bring it down, to be quiet, to look into the eyes of a man, to hold his gaze a little too long, until the moment pushed past embarrassment into connection, into a secret understanding, and he would fall into her eyes and the rest was easy. She had a plan. She had a way to be, to get the love that she wanted.
In school Soraya had studied Plato, who had quoted a speech by Aristophanes, the great comic playwright of the ancient world, recounting that human beings had once been double what they are now, but having rebelled against the gods, the gods had weakened them by splitting them in half. Every individual now is just a half of their former selves. And somewhere, out there, is the other half. The greatest gift that an individual can receive is to be reunited with this other half, to become parts of the same whole, and never to separate, day or night, joined into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of them are made into one. Then the two of them will share one life, as long as they live, because they will be one being, and when they die, they will be one and not two in Hades, having died a single death.
“And everyone wants this, to come together and melt together with the one he or she loves, so that one person emerges from two. Because we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
Soraya wanted this. She was very clear that she was not whole, she was not, herself, enough. And she was determined, determined, to fix that.
End of Book 1.