Kashmir Rescue. Doug Armstrong

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      There were many kinds of exile. The old man realized that now. In fact, he wondered whether he had been unfortunate enough to experience them all in the course of his long life. As he ambled along the pavement bordering the busy road, the surface glistening with drizzle, he hunched his shoulders into the motionless cold and found himself thinking of his boyhood. That had been the first one. When he had been very small he had never been able to work out why he was exiled from the company of the other boys in his neighbourhood. Of course, he had heard the rumours of his parents, uncles and aunts, all speaking of Hindus and Muslims, and on holy days he saw how his own family went to pray at a different temple from the one attended by the other people in their street.

      A passing lorry sprayed him with a fine film of muddy water as it shot by, heading south for the junction of the M4, which would already be thickening with traffic, even at such an early hour. By 9 a.m. it would have ground to a virtual standstill, clogged like an artery, the flow gradually stiffening to a halt in the moments before his death.

      He hated his new country. He still thought of it as new, even though he had left the land of his birth nearly fifty years before. That had been another exile, more obvious than his boyhood solitude but stifling and bitter nonetheless. He looked around at the grey, sullen landscape of concrete, tarmac and red brick. It was barely light, and every house was closed as tight as a fist. Their owners had made pitiful attempts to differentiate their property from the one next door: a glass panel, the colour of woodwork, a cursory stab at flamboyance with a winding pathway. More noticeable, however, were the similarities, apart from the most obvious one of the houses’ identical design: a front garden concreted over to provide parking for a clutch of cars; burglar alarms to keep at bay the increasing number of have-nots; and СКАЧАТЬ