In the great tradition of English education, Marcus and Magid became pen pals How theybecame pen pals was a matter of fierce debate (Alsana blamed Millat, Millat claimed Me hadslipped Marcus the address, Me said Joyce had sneaked a peek in her address book the Joyceexplanation was correct), but either way they were, and from March '91 onwards letters passedbetween them with a frequency let down only by the chronic inadequacies of the Bengal postalsystem. Their combined output was incredible. Within two months they had filled a volume at leastas thick as Keats's and by four were fast approaching the length and quantity of the trueepistophiles, St. Paul, Clarissa, Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells. Because Marcus made copies ofall his own letters, Me had to rearrange her filing system to provide a drawer solely devoted to theircorrespondence. She split the filing system in two, choosing to file by author primarily, thenchronologically, rather than let simple dates rule the roost. Because this was all about people.

　　People making a connection across continents, across seas. She made two stickers to separate thewads of material. The first said: From Marcus to Magid. The second said: From Magid to Marcus.

　　An unpleasant mixture of jealousy and animosity led Me to abuse her secretarial role. Shepinched small collections of letters that wouldn't be missed, took them home, slipped them fromtheir sheaths, and then, after close readings that would have shamed F. R. Leavis, carefully returnedthem to their file. What she found in those brightly stamped airmail envelopes brought her no joy.

　　Her mentor had a new protege. Marcus and Magid. Magid and Marcus. It even sounded better. Theway Watson and Crick sounded better than Watson, Crick and Wilkins.

　　John Donne said more than kisses, letters mingle souls and so they do; Irie was alarmed to findsuch a commingling as this, such a successful merging of two people from ink and paper despitethe distance between them. No love letters could have been more ardent. No passion more fullyreturned, right from the very start. The first few letters were filled with the boundless joy of mutualrecognition: tedious for the sneaky mailroom boys of Dhaka, bewildering to Irie, fascinating to thewriters themselves:

　　It is as if I had always known you; if I were a Hindu I would suspect we met in some former life.

　　- Magid.

　　You think like me. You're precise. I like that. Marcus.

　　You put it so well and speak my thoughts better than I ever could. In my desire to study the law,in my longing to improve the lot of my poor country which is victim to every passing whim of God,every hurricane and flood in these aims, what instinct is fundamental? What is the root, the dreamwhich ties these ambitions together? To make sense of the world. To eliminate the random. -Magid.

　　And then there was the mutual admiration. That lasted a good few months:

　　What you are working on, Marcus these remarkable mice it is nothing less than revolutionary.

　　When you delve into the mysteries of inherited characteristics, surely you go straight to the soul ofthe human condition as dramatically and fundamentally as any poet, except you are armed withsomething essential the poet does not have: the truth. I am in awe of visionary ideas and visionaries.

　　I am in awe of such a man as Marcus Chalfen. I call it an honour to be able to call him friend. I thank you from thebottom of my heart for taking such an inexplicable and glorious interest in my family's welfare. -Magid.

　　It is incredible to me, the bloody fuss people make about an idea like cloning. Cloning, when ithappens (and I can tell you it will be sooner rather than later) is simply delayed twinning, and neverin my life have I come across a couple of twins who prove more decidedly the argument againstgenetic determinism than Millat and yourself. In every area in which he lacks, you excel I wish Icould turn that sentence around for a vice versa effect, but the hard truth is he excels in nothingapart from charming the elastic waistband off my wife's knickers. Marcus.

　　And finally, there were the plans for the future, plans made blindly and with amorous speed,like the English nerd who married a nineteen-stone Mormon from Minnesota because she soundedsexy on the chat line:

　　You must get to England as soon as possible, early '93 at the very latest. I'll stump up some ofthe cash myself if I have to. Then we can enrol you in the local school, get the exams over and donewith and send you off post-haste to whichever of the dreaming spires tickles your fancy (thoughobviously there's only one real choice) and while you're at it you can hurry up and get older, get tothe bar and provide me with the kind of lawyer I need to fight in my corner. My FutureMouse(c)needs a staunch defender. Hurry up, old chap. I haven't got all millennium. Marcus.

　　The last letter, not the last letter they wrote but the last one Me could stomach, included thisfinal paragraph from Marcus:

　　Well, things are the same round here except that myfiks are in excellent order, thanks to Irie.

　　You'll like her: she's a bright girl and she has the most tremendous breasts .. . Sadly, I don't hold outmuch hope for her aspirations in the field of' hard science', more specifically in my ownbiotechnology, which she appears to have her heart set on ... she's sharp in a way, but it's the menialwork, the hard grafting, that she's good at she'd make a lab assistant maybe, but she hasn't any headfor the concepts, no head at all. She could try medicine, I suppose, but even there you need a littlebit more chutzpah than she's got.. . 50 it might have to be dentistry for our Irie (she could fix herown teeth at least), an honest profession no doubt, but one I hope you'll be avoiding .. .

　　In the end, Irie wasn't offended. She had the sniffles for a while, but they soon passed. She waslike her mother, like her father a great reinventor of herself, a great make-doer. Can't be a warcorrespondent? Be a cyclist. Can't be a cyclist? Fold paper. Can't sit next to Jesus with the 144,000?

　　Join the Great Crowd. Can't stand the Great Crowd? Marry, Archie. Irie wasn't so upset. She justthought, right: dentistry. I'll be a dentist. Dentistry. Right.

　　And meanwhile Joyce was below deck trying to sort out Millat's problems with white women.

　　Which were numerous. All women, of every shade, from midnight-black to albino, were Millat's.

　　They slipped him phone numbers, they gave him blow jobs in public places, they crossed crowdedbars to buy him a drink, they pulled him into taxis, they followed him home. Whatever it was theRoman nose, the eyes like a dark sea, the skin like chocolate, the hair like curtains of black silk, ormaybe just his pure, simple stink it sure as hell worked. Now, don't be jealous. There's no point.

　　There have always been and always will be people who simply exude sex (who breathe it, who sweat it).

　　A few examples from thin air: the young Brando, Madonna, Cleopatra, Pam Grier, Valentino, a girl called Tamara who livesopposite the London Hippodrome, right slap in the middle of town; Imran Khan, Michelangelo'sDavid. You can't fight that kind of marvelous indiscriminate power, for it is not always symmetry orbeauty per se that does it (Tamara's nose is ever so slightly bent), and there are no means by whichyou can gain it. Surely the oldest American sentence is relevant here, pertinent to matters economic,politic and romantic: you either got it or you don't. And Millat had it. In spades. He had the choiceof the known world, of every luscious female from a size 8 to a 28, Thai or Tongan, from Zanzibarto Zurich, his vistas of available and willing pussy extending in every direction as far as the eyecould see. One might reasonably expect a man with such a natural gift to dip into the tun-dishes ofa great variety of women, to experiment far and wide. And yet Millat Iqbal's main squeezes werealmost all exclusively size 10 white Protestant women aged fifteen to twenty-eight, living in andaround the immediate vicinity of West Hampstead.

　　Initially this neither bothered Millat nor felt unusual to him. His school was full of girls whofitted the general description. By the law of averages as he was the only guy worth shagging inGlenard Oak- he was going to end up shagging a large proportion of them. And with Karina Cain,the present amour, things were really quite pleasant. He was only cheating on her with three otherwomen (Alexandra Andrusier, Polly Houghton, Rosie Dew), and this was a personal record.

　　Besides which, Karina Cain was different. It wasn't just sex with Karina Cain. He liked her and sheliked him, and she had a great sense of humour, which felt like a miracle, and she looked after himwhen he was down and he looked after her too, in his own way, bringing her flowers and stuff. Itwas both the law of averages, and a lucky, random thing that had made him happier than he usuallywas. So that was that.

　　Except KEVIN didn't see it that way. One evening, after BKarina had dropped him of fat a KEVIN meeting in her mother'sRenault, Brother Hifan and Brother Tyrone crossed Kilburn townhall like two man-mountains, determined to deliver themselvesat the feet of Muhammed. They loomed large.

　　"Hey, Hifan, my speed, Tyrone, my man, why the long faces?"But brothers Hifan and Tyrone wouldn't tell him why the long faces. Instead they gave him aleaflet. It was called: Who is truly free!1 The Sisters ofKE VIN or the Sisters of Soho Millatthanked them cordially for it. Then he stuffed it in the bottom of his bag.

　　How was that? they asked him the following week. Was it a good read, Brother Millat? Truthwas, Brother Millat hadn't got round to reading it (and to be honest, he preferred leaflets calledthings like The Big American Devil: How the United States Mafia Rules the World or Scienceversus the Creator: No Contest), but he could see it seemed to matter to Brother Tyrone and BrotherHifan, so he said he had. They looked pleased and gave him another one. This one was called:

　　Lycra Liberation? Rape and the Western World.

　　"Is light broaching your darkness, Brother Millat?" asked Brother Tyrone eagerly, at thefollowing Wednesday's meeting. "Are things becoming clearer?""Clearer' didn't seem to Millat to be exactly the right adjective. Earlier in the week he had setaside some time, read both leaflets and felt peculiar ever since. In three short days Karina Cain, adarling of a girl, a real good sort who never really irritated him (on the contrary, who made him feelhappy! Chuffed!), had irritated him more than she had managed in the whole year they'd beenshagging. And no ordinary irritation. A deep unsettle able unsolvable irritation, like an itch on aphantom limb. And it was not clear to him why.

　　"Yeah, man, Tyrone," said Millat with a nod and a wide grin. "Crystal, mate, crystal."Brother Tyrone nodded back. Millat was pleased to see helooked pleased. It was like being in the real life Mafia or a Bond movie or something. Themboth in their black and white suits, nodding at each other. I understand we understand each other.

　　"This is Sister Aeyisha," said Brother Tyrone, straightening Millat's green bow-tie and pushinghim towards a tiny, beautiful black girl, with almond eyes and high cheekbones. "She's an Africangoddess.""Really?" said Millat, impressed. "Whereabouts you from?""Clapham North," said Sister Aeyisha, with a shy smile.

　　Millat clapped his hands together and stamped his foot. "Oh, man, you must know the RedbackCafe?"Sister Aeyisha the African goddess lit up. "Yeah, man, that was my place from way back when!

　　You go there?""All the time! Wicked place. Well, maybe I'll see you round them gates sometime. It was nice tomeet you, sister. Brother Tyrone, I've got to chip, man, my gal's waiting for me."Brother Tyrone looked disappointed. Just before Millat left, he pressed another leaflet into hishand and continued holding his hand until the paper got damp between their two palms.

　　"You could be a great leader of men, Millat," said Brother Tyrone (why did everybody keeptelling him that?), looking first at him, then at Karina Cain, the curve of her breasts peeping overthe car door, beeping her car horn in the street. "But at the moment you are half the man. We needthe whole man.""Yeah, wicked, thanks, you too Brother," said Millat, looking briefly at the leaflet, and pushingopen the doors. "Laters.""What's that?" asked Karina Cain, reaching over to open the passenger door and spotting theslightly soggy paper in his hand.

　　Instinctively, Millat put the leaflet straight in his pocket. Which was weird. He usually showedKarina everything. Now just her asking him grated somehow. And what was she wearing? Samebelly top she always wore. Except wasn't it shorter? Weren't the nipples clearer, more deliberate?

　　He said, "Nothing." Grumpily. But it wasn't nothing. It wasthe final leaflet in the KEVIN series on Western women. The Right to Bare: The Naked Truthabout Western Sexuality.

　　Now, while we're on the subject of nakedness, Karina Cain had a nice little body. All creamychub and slender extremities. And come the weekend she liked to wear something to show it off.

　　First time Millat noticed her was at some local party when he saw a flash of silver pants, a silverboob-tube, and a bare mound of slightly protruding belly rising up between the two with another bitof silver in the navel. There was something welcoming about Karina Cain's little belly. She hated it,but Millat loved it. He loved it when she wore things that revealed it. But now the leaflets weremaking things clearer. He started noticing what she wore and the way other men looked at her. Andwhen he mentioned it she said, "Oh, I hate that. All those leery old men." But it seemed to Millatthat she was encouraging it; that she positively wanted men to look at her, that she was as TheRight to Bare suggested 'prostituting herself to the male gaze'. Particularly white males. Becausethat's how it worked between Western men and Western women, wasn't it? They liked to do it all inpublic. The more h............