Capital

my husband is fat and my daughter is filthy. What a fortunate daughter-in-law I am!” I’m supposed to be just enough aware to hear the sting in what she says, but not enough to say anything back to her. I’m supposed to collaborate in putting myself down! I lend her the use of my own brain to get the point of the barbs she sticks into me!’
    Ahmed chuckled, which made the bed gently bounce.
    ‘What do you mean, well-fed?’ he said.
    ‘Fat boy,’ said Rohinka, poking him in the side with her finger. ‘It’s the way she can say ten critical or negative things in a row. You can actually count them, add up the sequence. She’s a machine for denigrating people.’
    ‘She lives in Lahore.’
    ‘Not for the next few weeks she doesn’t,’ said Rohinka, and rolled away to her other side.
    The next morning there was a family summit meeting, prior to setting out for the airport. All three brothers, Rohinka, and the two children sat around the kitchen table while a friend of Shahid minded the counter. It had been decided that the whole family would turn out to meet Mrs Kamal. The last time, Ahmed had gone to meet the 8 a.m. flight on his own – which wasn’t so unreasonable, he felt. He had to get up at six to make sure he was there on time, and he went on his own because Rohinka was fully engaged with Mohammed who had just been born, and because somebody was needed to look after the shop. Mrs Kamal was still referring to her ‘unenthusiastic’ reception when she set off back to Pakistan a month later. (‘I’ll make my own way to the airport, I know how inconvenient it is for all of you to make the effort.’)
    ‘Shock and awe,’ said Shahid. He was in a good mood. He had been able to use the fact of his mother’s arrival to get rid of the Belgian, Iqbal, whose ability to ignore hints and suggestions and open but polite requests to leave had gone from being annoying to borderline psychotic. Seven months!
    ‘Moving on soon’ was what he would say when Shahid brought it up. ‘Moving on soon.’
    But the imminent arrival of Mrs Kamal had done for him. Shahid was proud of his own brilliance here. He knew that Iqbal knew that the whole family was genuinely frightened of her – or maybe frightened was the wrong word; maybe they just dreaded her. Whichever it was, Iqbal knew that she was a living terror. Shahid didn’t have to lie about that. All he had to do was lie about where she was going to stay when she came to London, and stick to the lie – and that’s what he had done. As soon as Mrs Kamal had said she was coming to visit, Shahid had gone steaming straight to his flat, told Iqbal he had to get out, and given him the date. Iqbal, amazingly, had had the front to complain, and to act as if it wasn’t fair. The Belgian had more front than Selfridges. With bad grace, he had eventually conceded that he had to go. And then, yesterday, most amazing thing of all – he had gone! Moved out! Vamoosed! Iqbal was out of there! Elvis had left the building! The fat lady had sung! Mandela had been freed! Shahid had his life back! He could lie on the sofa watching his own TV programmes, surfing his own websites, breathing the smell of only his own socks and farts! They think it’s all over! It is now!
    ‘We will overwhelm her with our love and devotion,’ Shahid went on, to the family breakfast table. ‘She won’t know what hit her.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound like Mamaji,’ said Usman. This was hypocritical, since he was Mrs Kamal’s favourite, for no reasons the other brothers could understand except that he was the youngest – the bad-tempered, sulky, charmless, semi-fanatical youngest. Ahmed gave Usman a warning look: he and Rohinka were careful not to speak ill of Mrs Kamal in front of her grandchildren. They had a strict no-badmouthing policy about her. This was partly to set a good example for their old age, and partly because they were worried that Fatima would pass on anything they said.
    ‘We’ll love-bomb her,’ said Shahid. ‘It’ll be like the Moonies.’
    ‘Lub bob!’ said Mohammed.
    ‘Everybody ready?’ asked Ahmed. Rohinka slid around the table, attending to their breakfast plates so briskly and efficiently she might have been a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms, clearing and stacking and sweeping and racking, and then bumping the dishwasher door closed with her hip before setting it going. Fatima was in a bright green dress – a clean bright green dress – and