The English capital was cool in the evenings. With a fine mist of pollen in the air, July in London felt like Karachi in winter. They had dinner plans at Novikov, and Papa had called a taxi from his phone, insisting on using Addison Lee instead of Uber. Akbar Ahmed said he didn’t come all the way here just to sit in a Prius, have his identity known to the driver – nearly always called Mohammad – and then have to endure long harangues about fasting in the summertime.
It was just the one time, Monty pointed out, but Papa was still annoyed. Two days ago, arriving via Emirates from Dubai, they had sat in the heavily perfumed car of a cockney-accented Uber driver with two gold teeth and a toothpick dangling from the corner of his lips, which he flicked around with his tongue; he was from, it turned out, Multan.
As salam alaikum, this Mohammad in ripped jeans and a Juve jersey said in a voice dripping with sanctimony as soon as they had shut the doors. Salam, Monty mumbled, while Mummy nodded and Papa rolled his eyes.
The driver watched the Ahmeds in the rear-view mirror, taking his eyes off the road to turn round and look at them as he pulled the car out of the Heathrow parking lot. Khadija, their maid, sat in the front seat, Zahra’s carry-on bag pressed against her knees, holding the family’s four permissible duty-free bottles of Laphroaig in her lap. A plastic silver-painted hung from the mirror, twirling slowly, as they made their way onto the M4. Bismillah, Khadija whispered, reassured, pulling her hijab tighter around her face while trying to stop the bottles from clanking noisily against each other. Mohammad clocked the duty-free bags out of the corner of his eye and exhaled deeply. “Astaghfirallah,” he muttered, as though complaining about the traffic.
Monty had taken a sip of coffee, bought at Caffè Nero while Papa was changing money, and the driver, biting his tongue after hearing the clank-clank of the bottles in the front seat, lifted his toothpick from his lips and shook his head. “Only the first week of Ramzan, mate, couldn’t you wait till iftar?”
Monty laughed nervously. It was a long flight, he replied – you didn’t have to fast while travelling, he thought, not that he kept any rosas anyway. Zahra, who was fasting, flight or not, patted her son’s knee and looked out at the overcast skies, ignoring the young driver.
“It’s not for everyone,” the Uber driver continued in his thick accent, glancing sideways at the maid and then back at the Ahmeds, before sliding the toothpick behind his ear. “Needs real commitment, real understanding of the faith, you know?”
Monty was glad that Khadija couldn’t speak English and would miss this dig at his impious family. Papa rolled down the window, muttering that his suit would smell like a rose-petal factory, but Mohammad carried on.
“Took me mam for Umrah last year,” he smiled in the rear-view mirror. “I work seven days a week, drive an Uber on me off-time. Can’t afford to travel for vay-cay-shun, just to faff around shopping and looking at sights, you know? Took me just five days off last summer and went with the family to Mecca Medina, subhanallah.”
He turned to Khadija, nodding his head, but she wouldn’t understand anything the driver said, especially not the Arabic words mispronounced in his cockney drawl.
“Could you put the radio on?” Papa snapped at the driver, but Mohammad shook his head. “Sorry, mate,” he spoke coldly, “haram to listen to music during Ramzan.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, reaching for his wet toothpick and returning it to his lips. “Thought, from your tags, you’d know better, coming from Pakistan and all.”
Akbar Ahmed thought of complaining to Uber and asking for his money back, but settled for a single-star review of the BBCD driver. British-Born Confused Desi, Papa typed simply, as the justification for his low rating. They may have been civilians here, but Akbar Ahmed’s position, his social standing, required a certain respect. He would not be spoken down to and lectured on religion by some second-generation immigrant from Multan. Not here, not in London.
Papa wanted to be chauffeured by white men, suited and booted, not in ripped jeans. Addison Lee was not ideal, frankly, they used Romanians almost exclusively, but they would do.
The family had been subjected to Papa’s sour lectures on Brexit and the failures of British transport since that first taxi ride – two days of complaints and unhelpful suggestions on hospitality and urban planning. It wasn’t so complicated, Papa said. He wanted to be called “sir”, respectfully be handed a selection of financial newspapers and have his door opened for him. Most of all, though, he wanted an executive car with a driver who would zip him through Knightsbridge and Park Lane without any bak bak on the way to dinner. “How would you like us to go to The Connaught, Mr Ahmed, sir?” his favourite driver, Aleksander, once asked him. “Silently,” Akbar Ahmed replied.
Back home in Pakistan, the Ahmeds never had to struggle for anything. Our people made this country, Akbar Ahmed had told Monty since he was a child. Our people embroidered the dream of Pakistan. We wove it out of the clouds, out of thin air. It was a sacrifice, the Ahmeds believed, that forever insured them against difficulty or hardship of any kind. We birthed a country – our very own – moving millions across this ancient soil, shifting land like mahjong tiles across a board.
As the fires of Partition swept from gully to gully and neighbours plundered each other’s homes, hacking women and children to death, Monty’s grandfather walked off his Deccan army base with nothing in his pocket but his cigarettes and matches, his service pistol holstered to his hip. He walked across Hyderabad and, as the family legend had it, all the way to Bombay, where he boarded a steamer for Karachi.
We are nawabs, Akbar Ahmed often told his scion, his only son. In the draughty haveli that once was the Ahmed abode, thirteen gun salutes met the princes every dawn. In the morning, at a more civilised hour, soldiers and boiled eggs, presented in ruby-encrusted cups, were served on the verandah. Armando, the family Borzoi, lay on the freshly cut grass and waited for breakfast to be over. The dog was nearly one and a half metres tall and wore a shaggy brindle coat. Every morning he sat patiently, resting his long, elegant snout on your grandfather’s polished dress shoes. Every day Armando the Borzoi’s wet shadow had to be wiped off the English leather by one of the Ahmed valets. Some days Nawab Ahmed didn’t even bother, that’s how close master and dog were.
But your grandfather, the romantic, gave up his monogrammed Rolls-Royce and bespoke Cartier leopards. He gave up the shoe-shiners, the egg-boilers, and even, sadly, Armando, who was too old to make the journey to a new country – all for the very idea of Pakistan. He re-joined the military in his new country and fought India. These were the foundation stones of Ahmed family lore.
Monty’s father, Akbar, continued the Ahmed tradition: glorifying and protecting the dream of Pakistan. He did not enlist, but made his money divvying up parcels of the country’s promised land. He had a fine eye for disaster capitalism and, post-Partition, he made a fortune convincing the citizens of the new country to give their land away for a song. Bath Island? No, not a good investment. Place is too near the water. Plus, difficult being a Parsi, now that we’re all Muslims, no? In his Lawrencepur tailored suits and Gram-marian drawl, young Akbar Ahmed preyed on old ladies who set their hair in curlers and wore long, pleated skirts. Looks patriotic, one has to admit, being Muslim. Never know when people will turn on you in your, uh, situation. Do you have a plan regarding your property, if you have to leave in a hurry?
Once the Parsis had packed up and moved out of prime real estate, Akbar set to work fudging the papers of abandoned Hindu homes, one of which he settled his own family into. Next came the business of growing and expanding the Defence Housing Authority, a brainchild of his father’s old chums, who pinched and pocketed land for the Armed Forces until they owned most, if not all, of Karachi’s reclaimed land. Eventually Akbar Ahmed went into high-rise development, Dubai-style. Soon, the Ahmeds would own the sea.
Excerpted with permission from The Runaways, Fatima Bhutto, Penguin.