Kashmir Rescue. Doug Armstrong

       1

      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 the satellite dish clinging under the miserly eaves like an extraterrestrial orchid, its brainwashing duties long completed but still reflexively cleansing the occupants of original thought.

      The bench he usually rested on had been vandalized in the night. He stood before it, surveying the efforts of the mental giant who had spray-painted a swastika and racist slogans across the seat.

      ‘If only I could go home,’ he muttered to himself as he read the misspelt words. ‘If only I could.’

      He tested the paint with one cautious fingertip, and finding it dry, eased himself down, feeling a stab of satisfaction as his buttocks pressed into the swastika. He wondered briefly if the youth had been aware of the symbol’s Indian origins. He smiled at the irony and took out a cigarette.

      Against the background noise from the motorway he could hear the car alarms starting to go off around the district, each one welcoming its owner with the faithfulness of a dog, bleating an answering toot as a keyring was fired at it. Soon their drivers would be sitting