One day, Osman Yousefzada’s parents removed him from school for six months and took him back to where they were born, on the banks of the Indus. His father had often returned, but his mother had not, and while Osman gazes at jewellery-laden women, at villages that are a “puzzle of alleyways in permanent shadow”, at rounds of Kalashnikov bullets fired into the air at weddings in these border territories between Pakistan and Afghanistan, she caught up on her dead. Taken to England as a young girl, with only a few hours’ warning, she had not been able to say goodbye. Osman, who in England often wondered at how his vivid mother was intermittently flooded with sadness, watches her at her family’s graves. “My heart was inside hers: finally, I understood the crying.”
One of the many arresting things about this arresting memoir is the way in which Yousefzada manages information: like Leo in the LP Hartley novel that lends his book its title, Yousefzada is, for most of it, a child. He sees what a perceptive child sees, which is not the same as understanding it (though of course the reader understands, and that generates tension). And what he sees is Balsall Heath, Birmingham, in the 1980s, when housing was cheap enough for recent immigrants – West Indians, Rastafarians, Ugandans, Bangladeshis, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Pakistanis, Irish. Ali Campbell from UB40 lives at the end of the street; sex workers tout for custom in front of mosques. Yousefzada’s own orthodox Pathan community is “the most covered and the least integrated in south Birmingham”, the men and women within this separation strictly separated again. But childhood gives him (and us) an all-areas pass. He is a skilled guide, building a rich world of hiding places, of smells, feet at prayer – and clothes.
