SHORT STORY
Halal
VIKRAM KAPUR
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A story that looks at what typecasting does to one’s sense of the self.
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That Friday I was at lunch in the staff cafeteria. On Fridays, the cafeteria services specially cooked halal dishes for Muslim students and staff. There was a new girl behind the counter.
“I’ll have the pork chops,” I told her.
She looked puzzled. “But that’s not halal.”
I started to say it was okay, I wasn’t Muslim. But a tight knot had settled in my stomach. So I merely asked her to give me some vegetables, instead.
After paying, I looked around for a familiar face. John Banerjee was sitting alone at a table. He taught computer science at the university, while I was in the school of development studies.
John’s face hovered over his food like a dark cloud.
“Immigration gave my parents hell at Heathrow yesterday,” he said.
His parents had come from India for a visit.
“But your parents have been coming here for years,” I said. “Then they are Christian.”
“That doesn’t matter — Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh… In England we are all part of a type. When you are a type no one cares who you are. Previously no one feared our type; so no one bothered about us. But after the bombs went off last week in London, everyone’s scared.”
He took a deep breath. “Now I know how blacks must have felt for generations.”
I remembered what had just happened at the food counter. The knot in my stomach tightened. I stared at my food. Suddenly, I had no desire to eat. With a sigh, I pushed my plate aside.
II
Over the next few weeks, the unease inflated, as bad news flowed like an irrepressible flood of hot air. Rinky Sharma’s boy returned from school in tears, saying his classmates were calling him a terrorist. Then it was Parveen Vakeel’s boy, followed by Shoaib Yusuf’s…Inderjeet Bhullar was waylaid by a gang of white youths. While he lay unconscious in the hospital, his wife Parmindar went to pieces, “They have made absolute halal of him. Couldn’t they see he was a Sikh? Now what am I to do? I have two children under five. And we just took out a loan on the house.”
If the news was bad at home, the news from elsewhere wasn’t that much better. The media was swarming with bomb threats, people being harassed and offloaded from airplanes…The London metropolitan police shot a Brazilian man, thinking he was a suicide bomber. American sky marshals turned an international flight around, assuming 12 Indian passengers wanted to blow it up… Even the movies and TV shows had caught the fever. Everywhere guns were going off, bombs were being planted, people were being hunted down…
My stomach, in the meanwhile, had bloated so much that I was having difficulty eating. Every now and then, I caught myself gasping after stabs of pain. I went to the doctor. He tapped it with his fingers.
“It feels like you are carrying a football in there,” he announced.
III
The doctor’s medicines failed to provide any relief. Rather, my stomach bloated further, as the news got worse. Inderjeet Bhullar died. Two Asian students were attacked at the university. Parents were alarmed, not least of all because the children were talking gangs and payback. Rinky Sharma spoke for everyone when she stated at a community meeting, I didn’t come here to raise a goonda.
Everywhere I went, eyes fastened on to me like iron filings to a magnet. It was little old ladies, fatherly men, adolescents, small children…Conversations stopped when I entered, heads turned, eyes followed my every move… I began to fret over every little thing. Could flicking a smudge off my shirt be seen as some sort of signal? Was the fact I was looking right and left a sign of nervous tension? Would someone notice my hands in my pockets and conclude I was pressing a switch?
I strove to be invisible. I stopped using main doors, opting for side exits and entrances. Instead of lifts, I went up and down stairs. I didn’t budge out of the house at night or on weekends. Rather than use the main road, I walked back and forth from work through deserted bylanes.
You’ll get yourself mugged, John told me.
Well, three days later, I actually did. I was on my way home when a figure stepped out of the gathering gloom of the evening. I started to panic, then sighed upon seeing that he was an Asian.
“Do you have a light?” he waved a cigarette.
I nodded. As I leaned forward to light his cigarette, I didn’t notice the second man who had crept up behind me. He hit me hard in the back. As I doubled in pain, the first man’s knee caught me in the groin. Screaming, I collapsed on the ground. The first man grabbed a handful of my shirtfront.
“Give us everything you’ve got,” he snarled, “otherwise we will make complete halal out of you.”
IV
They emptied my pockets and wallet and left me lying on the path. I lay there for several minutes. Then I got up and, somehow, dragged myself to the main road. A motorist halted to take me to the hospital, where they admitted me for the night.
The next morning, I woke up, feeling the best I had in weeks. I was bruised and aching all over. But my stomach was fine. The beating I had received, while knocking the stuffing out of me, had also discharged the dread accumulated inside. It was as if the cloud looming above my head had finally burst, and I, despite being bruised and battered, had survived the downpour.
I left the hospital later that day, after which I recuperated at home for a week, before going back to work. After the morning’s classes, I went to lunch at the staff cafeteria. The same girl was there. She was talking to another server, as I approached with my tray.
“They just evacuated the City Centre in Manchester,” she was saying. “Some Mus…”
My stomach knotted, as she stopped, biting her tongue.
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