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iii.
A phone call went through to the police station: hold Kamal on
suspicion of murder – a large knife, practically a machete, had been
found, flung cockily and without apparent fear of discovery, on his bed
in the dead man’s house, covered in blood. Kamal, naturally, protested:
“I didn’t do it! I was at work! He was my friend!” The police dismissed
the other men who had been collected from outside the masjid, but
Ghulam stayed behind, trying, to no avail, to back up Kamal’s story.
The police considered the case over, solved, sewn up. A neat conclusion
it was, too: Kamal, practically an apostate, was out of the way, and
Pooja and her sons couldn’t possibly stay, now – not after this.
Another set of Hindus soon to be heading back to India where they
belong. And then the phone rang again…
Karim ran, stumbling,
into the street, and kept running until he could run no more. He looked
at his hands – covered in blood, one of them still clutching the
penknife he had used to commit the terrible deed. He had no idea if his
assailant had died; that didn’t matter too much, as he would be in deep
trouble anyway. He thought a moment about the day of judgement: even if
it wasn’t homicide, GBH would still carry a heavy punishment. He
stopped his thoughts in their tracks – that wasn’t the day of
judgement, that was a day in court. Why was he worrying about what the
law would say? He looked up from his hands and saw where he had
stopped: outside the al-Jummah mosque on Brixhall Lane, where it had
all started. He looked down at his hands again, and saw the blood and
the knife. These weren’t the hands of a good Muslim: these were the
hands of a killer. He continued to stare, then heard a cry. The
brothers – no, the men – were coming out of the mosque again; the asr prayers were over.
“Karim brother! What have you done?”
In
reply, Karim dropped to his knees, the bloody knife scattering away
from him, and wailed. He touched his forehead to the cold paving
stones, as if in prayer, and swore loudly. An ambulance sped past,
sirens blaring. A moment later, a police van pulled up outside the
mosque.
“Our colleagues in Hyderabad apprehended a man at the
train station. He had dried blood on his hands and was gibbering about
killing his own father. It was the Hindu lad, Ramesh’s son Manoj. He
even said he tried to frame you for it, chummy. It looks like it’s your
lucky day.”
Kamal felt relieved that he wasn’t going to be accused
of a murder he would never have committed, after all. He even felt a
desire to thank God.
“It seems,” the policeman continued, “that
Allah is being good to you. Not that you deserve it, everyone knows you
don’t even pray, but at least you’re not a Hindu, eh? Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Kamal
was released, then, to go home, but, considering the circumstances and
the location of home, he decided to spend the night at his parents’
house, and to look for somewhere new to stay in the morning. Before
going to his parents, though, he made a detour to Abdullah Omani Road,
and slipped into the al-Jummah masjid, just in time for isha prayers – the last ones of the day, and, today, marking the end of another Friday.
A
tabloid reporter hoping secretly for some anti-Muslim venom from the
mother of the murdered lad was disappointed to find that she was a
level-headed woman who didn’t blame Karim’s religion, nor did she
really blame Karim himself – she knew what her son had been like, so
she knew that Karim had probably been driven to madness. The police had
told her that her son and his friends had beaten the poor young man to
a pulp earlier that same day, and she wasn’t really surprised at all.
Karim
was clearly full of remorse and self-pity, so his personal day of
judgement was not nearly as bad as he had feared: only seven years in
prison. When offered the chance to share in regular prayer times with
his fellow Muslim prisoners, he declined and preferred to stay in his
cell: he didn’t believe in praying for forgiveness, especially not for
something as terrible as he had done. Often, he didn’t even pray at
all, but when he did, he was asking for forgiveness: not from
Allah, but from the five people who had helped him that day: the woman,
the Christian, the Jew, the banker and the Sikh. He had failed their
kindness and their tolerance, and he had failed himself, and he had
failed Islam itself. Murder can never be justified or forgiven.
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Two Fridays © 2005 Eline
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