Capital

mosque. Then prayers were over, and the congregation spilled out onto the street outside the mosque for Shahid’s second- favourite part of the ritual, the milling and chatting afterwards. During the service it had become night: this was after all the shortest day of the year, December the 21st. It was clear, and looking straight up Shahid could just see a star or planet, he didn’t know which, and a winking, moving light which must be a plane at cruising height.
    ‘How’s your fat brother?’ asked Ali, who’d been a loud but friendly contemporary of Ahmed at school, a pack leader. He now owned a chain of electronics shops through Croydon, Mitcham, Eltham and points beyond, and was said to be minted. He had recently given up smoking and it showed in his new soft podginess and also in the way he couldn’t stop fidgeting, jangling his car keys in his pockets and looking round the crowd as he talked.
    ‘No thinner,’ said Shahid. ‘Your lot all well?’
    ‘Another baby on the way,’ said Ali. ‘Gave up the fags just in time.’
    Shahid slapped him on the arm and turned to some faces he knew. ‘Wasim! Kamran! Ali’s gone and done it again! A seventh on the way!’
    The men came and began joshing Ali, who looked pleased. Ali used to joke that he wasn’t going to stop until he had enough for a five-a-side football team. But that was a few years ago. Was he trying for eleven a side? What was the view of Mrs Ali, whom Shahid had never met? Was she having any say in this? If you have seven children, Shahid wondered, does that mean you’re keen on sex, keen on your wife, or keen on children? Or just shit at contraception? Or all four of those things?
    ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice with a European accent, ‘Shahid Kamal?’
    Shahid turned and found himself talking to a North African man, about his age, with a narrow intent face and a well-trimmed beard. He wore a leather jacket and jeans and was looking expectant.
    ‘That’s me,’ said Shahid.
    ‘Iqbal,’ said the man, with a salesman’s air, ‘Iqbal Rashid. From Brussels to Chechnya? With the Udeen brothers? 1993?’
    It came back to Shahid: this was one of the Belgian guys with whom he had gone on his great adventure. Shahid would not have been able to put a name to him for a million pounds, but now that he was standing here in front of him it came back. That’s right. The two Algerians, Iqbal and Tariq. Iqbal had been both cooler and angrier than Tariq, hipper in his personal style, a big rap music fan, and also very very steamed up about the condition of Muslims everywhere. Well, they all were, they talked the talk and they were all walking the walk by virtue of going to fight for Chechnya, and Iqbal was the same only more so; there had been a personal edge to his anger. And now here he was, and Shahid had a flash of how he had aged himself by looking at him, because the guy he remembered as a skinny twenty-year-old kid was now unmistakably an only-just-young man, with a few streaks of grey in his beard and hair. Did he look that much older himself? That was a scary thought.
    ‘Of course, of course,’ said Shahid. ‘Wow. What are you doing here? That’s quite a memory for faces you have.’
    ‘I often think of those days,’ said Iqbal. ‘Some events in one’s life seem a long time ago, and yet as close as yesterday, don’t you find?’
    That’s right: when Iqbal wasn’t ranting, he was always taking the direct route to some general philosophical point. It was the same Iqbal for sure.
    ‘How’s Tariq? You still see each other?’
    ‘People lose touch,’ said Iqbal, making it quickly clear that that particular old friend was not his favourite subject, and then brightening to add: ‘But then they sometimes find each other again! Listen, let’s swap numbers. I’m in town, it would be good to see you, talk about old times, talk about new times.’ He had taken a mobile out of his pocket and was standing with it open, ready to take down Shahid’s number. It was important to live without too many barriers, Shahid felt. Go with the flow. What will happen will happen. You’re only young once. Let things be as Allah wills. And so on. You had to go with what came to you. So Shahid, despite a feeling that something was slightly off about his old companion in jihad, his too-intent face perhaps, his not entirely casual attempt at casualness, gave him the number. The Belgian nodded and said his farewells and was gone.
    Shahid thought: what was