Capital

Mohammed was wearing his smartest red jumpsuit. He was carrying his favourite Power Ranger. The two younger brothers were dressed as if for manual labour, and Ahmed was wearing pressed jeans and a smart leather jacket. They piled out into the people carrier, Ahmed’s huge VW Sharan, and set off for Heathrow, the traffic predictably rubbish, the weather predictably rubbish.
    As they crawled out through West London, Ahmed was reminded of how his world had contracted around work and the children. The shop, the kids – it felt at times as if that was all there was. Even though the big car was full of his family, he felt a sense of the bigger city around him as they struggled past the amazing size and variety of London, the feeling that everything had a history, and the press of the present too: roadworks, billboards, a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane, as well as that good old favourite, ‘sheer weight of traffic’. Sheer weight – how much of life was sheer weight of something? Then the traffic eased and they were out towards the elevated section of the M4, and the road rose and curved through office buildings that had once looked like someone’s idea of the future. It was a different London from the one Ahmed knew, and he liked it.
    Shahid decided to make his own entertainment.
    ‘Let’s have a bet on what she’ll say first.’
    Usman scowled: gambling was unIslamic.
    ‘Not a real bet, dip—’ and then remembering Mohammed and Fatima and cutting himself off before he could say ‘dipshit’, ‘stick. Dipstick.’ Ahmed tried to give a silencing glare via the rear-view mirror, but Rohinka spoiled everything by chuckling, which Shahid took as permission to go ahead. ‘I’ll go first. It’ll be: “Ahmed, you are fatter than ever.”’
    ‘Daddy fatty!’ said Mohammed.
    ‘The flight was a horror,’ said Rohinka, adding some Lahore and deepening her voice half an octave and, it had to be said, sounding unsettlingly like Mrs Kamal.
    ‘Hello!’ said Fatima. ‘She’ll say hello!’ There was applause, and it was agreed that she was a clever girl – and Shahid realised that he had better be careful what he said.
    Heathrow, never a pleasure to visit, was even worse than usual, thanks to a combination of roadworks and increased security measures. Ahmed could feel his stress levels rising as they sat immobile, moved ten yards, then sat immobile again. The smells emanating from the very back of the car indicated that Mohammed, who seemed entirely content and was looking out the window from his child seat with a certain lordly calm, had nonetheless had an incident in his nappy.
    ‘We’re going to be late,’ said Usman. The unhelpfulness of this observation was compounded by its truth. They had allowed two hours to get to Heathrow, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Ahmed could feel their mother’s visit sliding towards disaster before it had even begun – because if there was ever a person capable of spending four weeks punishing you for turning up late to meet her at the airport, that person was Mrs Ramesh Kamal of 29 Bandung Street, Lahore. Ahmed tried to imagine what he could do; but they weren’t even through the Heathrow access tunnel yet – they weren’t even at the roundabout where there used to be a model of Concorde, before the plane crashed and was withdrawn from service – and they’d never make it on time on foot, even if they were allowed through the tunnel on foot, which Ahmed didn’t think people were. He could turn around and go home and pretend to have got the day wrong . . . no, what was he thinking?, the others would never keep that secret. And then suddenly, in its mysterious way, the traffic eased. The brake lights of the cars in front went out, the cars first bumbled, then crawled, then they were actually, genuinely moving. Allah be praised. The policemen with machine guns standing at a checkpoint were, for whatever policemen’s reason, now letting all the traffic through. Ahmed turned into the short-stay car park, a little too briskly so the near front wheel rode up on the divider, took the ticket, parked, shooed his family out of the car, helped Rohinka unfold the pushchair and load it with Mohammed, who took all this fussing with great equanimity, and hurried everybody over the concrete walkway, following the signs, rushing, Ahmed pushing the pushchair, Rohinka pulling Fatima by the hand, the two