Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

As she walked home she thought how much more pleasant life was when you lived among foreigners whose subtexts you couldn’t hear.

Felt

Do you say, ‘Dad, you’re making it okay to stigmatize people for the way they dress’? Do you say, ‘What kind of idiot stands in front of a group of teenagers and tells them to conform’? Do you say, ‘Why didn’t you mention that among the things this country will let you achieve if you’re Muslim is torture, rendition, detention without trial, airport interrogations, spies in your mosques, teachers reporting your children to the authorities for wanting a world without British injustice’?”

LOUDER

“Don’t lie to me.”

I am LIVING for this drama

“Give me enough respect to avoid the ‘From the first time we kissed I fell in love with you’ line. Do that much for me.”

HOHOHO

You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits.

“Our God did, in a roundabout way.” “How’s that?” he said. She was pretty when her face was at rest, wiped clean of the encroachment of anxiety. “For starters, He created Marx.” “So you have a sense of humor too.”