Shaheed!

Chapter 3: Parathas

Jahangir watched his sister Patasa shake chocolate pellets the same size as rabbit excrement into an off-white ceramic bowl. After pouring in full-fat milk, she shovelled them into her mouth with a large spoon. The cartoon character on the cereal packet he thought he saw on television as a small child. Was it a rabbit? He was still studying the cereal packet when his mother slid a plate of freshly made parathas onto the antique-effect pine table. Pan-fried in ghee barely a minute ago it was probably the best bread on the planet at that moment. Hot to the touch, they tore like cotton wool, revealing a steaming pale interior.

"I made them just for you, my boy," his mother said.

Jahangir felt disappointed he wouldn't be able to try the chocolate pellets. Though, he didn't think he could enjoy eating anything that morning, not after his interrogation at the airport last night. He watched his sister, wondering whether she would say something to him. Instead, she spoke with their mother.

"Jahangir might want to watch TV. He probably hasn't even seen a TV in years. Did you check with him before you decided to eat in here?" Patasa asked, but couldn't properly follow up this promising line of approach because her phone beeped.

Jahangir watched as she gazed into her lap, smiling to herself after reading what was on the screen. Abandoning her food, she began entering text with both thumbs.

Admiring the dexterity of her typing, Jahangir burned to know what could have been so amusing. He wondered how you went about getting a phone. Maybe, if he gave his mother his uncle's money she would buy him one. Or, most of the money. His mother appeared not to have noticed Patasa's texting expertise and might have hit her across the head if she wasn't busy pouring tea. Instead, she screamed, "Put that thing away!"

"All right. All right. Keep your shirt on." Patasa rolled her eyes.

Jahangir saw his mother wasn't wearing a Western shirt but a dark brown kurta. The words, he realised, were similar: "shirt" and kurta. There was also the English word "skirt". He would have liked to discover what the connections were between these words, but it was likely a mystery, like gravity, that no-one knew much about for certain.

"I will smash it! It is evil!" His mother lunged for Patasa's phone, leaning over the wooden table yet wasn't quite able to reach it.

"You will not! I need it for my safety. It not safe around here, yeh?"

Jahangir wondered how a mobile phone could keep you safe. Could you call someone if you were mugged? The mugger would likely have stolen your phone, so you couldn't call the police afterwards. Could you use it as a weapon? Possibly, but there were far better weapons. The weapon the mugger had, for example.

He helped himself to another warm paratha, washing down a mouthful with sweet, black tea. His mother would know that this was the same breakfast he had eaten for most of the two years he had been in Mohmand Agency, but these parathas were better than the one's made on Bazir's farm. The flour in England was white and soft. In the mountains, Bazir's two wives and their daughters ground the wheat between two large stone disks, rotating the one on top with an upright handle, which sometimes left a trace of fine sand in the wholemeal flour. Only when mountain climbing with his uncle, or hunting, had he eaten a different breakfast: old army rations cooked on an antique paraffin stove.

"Do you even understand anything I say?" Patasa asked him, slurping chocolate-coloured milk from the edge of her spoon. "I mean, you're a proper foreigner now, aren't you?"

The verbal tennis match across the kitchen table, his mother speaking in Pakhto and his sister in London-English, he found hard to follow. Especially who was scoring the points.