Page 93 of Babel

Ramy’s family bid him farewell at the docks. He hadn’t packed much; he would outgrow any clothes he brought in half a year.

His mother clasped the sides of his face and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Make sure to write. Once a month – no, once a week – and make sure to pray—’

‘Yes, Amma.’

His sisters clung to his jacket. ‘Will you send presents?’ they asked. ‘Will you meet the King?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And no, I don’t care to.’

His father stood a little way back, observing his wife and children, blinking hard as if trying to commit everything to memory. At last, when the boarding call sounded, he hugged his son to his chest and whispered, ‘Allah hafiz.* Write to your mother.’

‘Yes, Abbu.’

‘Forget not who you are, Ramiz.’

‘Yes, Abbu.’

Ramy was fourteen then, and old enough to understand the meaning of pride. Ramy intended to do more than remember. For he understood now why his father had smiled that day in the sitting room – not out of weakness or submission, and not out of fear of reprisal. He’d been playing a part. He’d been showing Ramy how it was done.

Lie, Ramiz. This was the lesson, the most important lesson he’d ever been taught. Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart.

And what an act Ramy put on. He had no trouble navigating English high society – Calcutta had its fair share of English taverns, music halls, and theatres, and what he saw in Yorkshire was no more than an expansion of the elite microcosm he’d grown up in. He thickened and thinned his accent depending on his audience. He learned all the fanciful notions the English held about his people, elaborated on them like an expert playwright, and spat them back out. He knew when to play a lascar, a houseboy, a prince. He learned when to flatter and when to engage in self-deprecation. He could have written a thesis on white pride, on white curiosity. He knew how to make himself an object of fascination while neutralizing himself as a threat. He fine-tuned the greatest of all tricks, which was to swindle an Englishman into looking at him with respect.

He grew so good at this that he almost began to lose himself in the artifice. A dangerous trap indeed, for a player to believe his own stories, to be blinded by the applause. He could envision himself as a postgraduate fellow, dripping with distinctions and awards. A richly paid solicitor on Legal. A highly acclaimed spontaneous interpreter, sailing back and forth between London and Calcutta, bringing riches and gifts for his family every time he returned.

And this scared him sometimes, how easily he danced around Oxford, how attainable this imagined future seemed. Outside, he dazzled. Inside, he felt like a fraud, a traitor. And he was just starting to despair, to wonder if all he would ever accomplish was to become a lackey of empire as Wilson had intended, for the avenues of anticolonial resistance seemed so few, and so hopeless.

Until his third year, when Anthony Ribben appeared back from the dead and asked, ‘Will you join us?’

And Ramy, without hesitating, looked him in the eyes and said, ‘Yes.’