Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992,1999fundamental/a. & n. 1MB. adj. i Of or pertaining to the basis or groundwork; going to the rootof the matter. 2 Serving as the base or foundation; essential or indispensable. Also, primary, original;from which others are derived. 3 Of or pertaining to the foundations) of a building. 4 Of a stratum:
lowest, lying at the bottom.
Fundamentalism n. E2,o [f. prec. +ism.] The strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religiousbeliefs or doctrines; esp. belief in the in errancy of religious texts.
The New Shorter Oxford English DictionaryYou must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,A sigh is just a sigh;The fundamental things apply,As time goes by.
Herman Hupfeld, "As Time Goes By' (1931 song)16 The Return ofMagid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal"Excuse me, you're not going to smoke that, are you?"Marcus closed his eyes. He hated the construction. He always wanted to reply with equalgrammatical perversity: Yes, I'm not going to smoke that. No, I am going to smoke that.
"Excuse me, I said you're '
"Yes, I heard you the first time," said Marcus softly, turning to his right to see the speaker withwhom he shared a single armrest, each two chairs being assigned only one between them in thelong line of moulded plastic. "Is there a reason why I shouldn't?"Irritation vanished at the sight of his interlocutor: a slim, pretty Asian girl, with an alluring gapbetween her front teeth, army trousers and a high ponytail, who was holding in her lap (of allthings!) a copy of his collaborative pop science book of last spring (with the novelist Surrey The.
Banks), Time Bombs and Body Clocks: Adventures in Our Genetic Future.
"Yes, there's a reason, arsehok. You can't smoke in Heathrow. Not in this bit of it. And youcertainly can't smoke a fucking pipe. And these chairs are welded to each other and I've got asthma.
Enough reasons?"Marcus shrugged amiably. "Yes, more than. Good book?"This was a new experience for Marcus. Meeting one of his readers. Meeting one of his readersin the waiting lounge of an airport. He had been a writer of academic texts all his life, texts whoseaudience was tiny and select, whose members he more often than not knew personally. He hadnever sent his work off into the world like a party-popper, unsure where the different strands wouldland.
"Pardon?""Don't worry, I won't smoke if you don't want me to. I was just wondering, is it a good book?"The girl screwed up her face, which was not as pretty as Marcus had first thought, the jawline atad too severe. She closed the book (she was halfway through) and looked at its cover as if she hadforgotten which book it was.
"Oh, it's all right, I suppose. Bit bloody weird. Bit of a head fuckMarcus frowned. The book had been his agent's idea: a split level high low culture book,whereby Marcus wrote a 'hard science' chapter on one particular development in genetics and thenthe novelist wrote a twin chapter exploring these ideas from a futuristic, fictional,what-if-this-led-to-this point of view, and so on for eight chapters each. Marcus haduniversity-bound sons plus Magid's law schooling to think about, and he had agreed to the projectfor pecuniary reasons. To that end, the book had not been the hit that was hoped for or required, andMarcus, when he thought of it at all, thought it was a failure. But weird? A head fuck"Umm, in what way weird?"The girl looked suddenly suspicious. "What is this? An interrogation?"Marcus shrank back a little. His Chalfenist confidence was always less evident when he strayedabroad, away from the bosom of his family. He was a direct man who saw no point in askinganything other than the direct questions, but in recent years he had become aware that thisdirectness did not always garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. Inthe outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly ifone was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was; if one was a little old, witheccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speechto make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous.
"No, not an interrogation. I was just thinking of reading itmyself, you see. I heard it was quite good, you know. And I was wondering why you thought itwas weird."The girl, deciding at that moment that Marcus was neither mass murderer nor rapist, let hermuscles relax and slid back in her chair. "Oh, I don't know. Not so much weird, I guess, morescary.""Scary how?""Well, it's scary isn't it, all this genetic engineering.""Is it?""Yeah, you know, messing about with the body. They reckon there's a gene for intelligence,sexuality practically everything, you know? Recombinant DNA technology," said the girl, using theterm cautiously, as if testing the water to see how much Marcus knew. Seeing no recognition in hisface, she continued with more confidence. "Once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular,like, bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo. That's what they're doingto those poor mice. It's pretty fucking scary. Not to mention, like, the pathogenic, i.e."disease-producing, organisms they've got sitting in petri dishes all over the place. I mean, I'm apolitics student, yeah, and I'm like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out?
You've got to be seriously naive if you don't think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on theArabs. Quick way to deal with the fundamentalist Muslims no, seriously, man," said the girl inresponse to a raised eyebrow from Marcus, 'things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit youjust realize how close science is to science fiction."As far as Marcus could see, science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passingeach other in the fog. A science fiction robot, for example even his son Oscar's expectation of arobot was a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yetachieve. While the robots in Oscar's mind were singing, dancing and empathizing with his everyjoy and fear, over at MIT some poor bastard was slowlyand painstakingly trying to get a machine to re-create the movements of a single human thumb.
On the flip side of the coin, the simplest biological facts, the structure of animal cells for instance,were a mystery to all but fourteen-year-old children and scientists like himself; the former spendingtheir time drawing them in class, the latter injecting them with foreign DNA. In between, or so itappeared to Marcus, flowed a great ocean of idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuousnovelists, animal rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalistswho professed strange objections to his life's work. In the past few months, since his Future Mousehad gained some public attention, he had been forced to believe in these people, believe theyactually existed en masse, and this was as hard for him as being taken to the bottom of the gardenand told that here lived fairies.
"I mean, they talk about progress," said the girl shrilly, becoming somewhat excited. "They talkabout leaps and bounds in the field of medicine yada yada yada, but bottom line, if somebodyknows how to eliminate "undesirable" qualities in people, do you think some government's notgoing to do it? I mean, what's undesirable? There's just something a little fascist about the wholedeal... I guess it's a good book, but at points you do think: where are we going here? Millions ofblonds with blue eyes? Mail order babies? I mean, if you're Indian like me you've got something toworry about, yeah? And then they're planting cancers in poor creatures; like, who are you to messwith the make-up of a mouse? Actually creating an animal just so it can die it's like being God! Imean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in thesanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, whenit's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just unnatural."Marcus nodded and tried to disguise his exhaustion. It was exhausting just to listen to her.
Nowhere in the book did Marcus16 The Return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal -1even touch upon human eugenics it wasn't his field, and he had no particular interest in it. Andyet this girl had managed to read a book almost entirely concerned with the more prosaicdevelopments in recombinant DNA gene therapy, proteins to dissolve blood clots, the cloning ofinsulin and emerge from it full of the usual neo-fascist tabloid fantasies mindless human clones,genetic policing of sexual and racial characteristics, mutated diseases, etc. Only the chapter on hismouse could have prompted such an hysterical reaction. It was to his mouse that the title of thebook referred (again, the agent's idea), and it was his mouse upon which media attention had landed.
Marcus saw clearly now what he had previously only suspected, that if it were not for the mousethere would have been little interest in the book at all. No other work he had been involved withseemed to catch the public imagination like his mice. To determine a mouse's future stirred peopleup. Precisely because people saw it that way: it wasn't determining the future of a cancer, or areproductive cycle, or the capacity to age. It was determining the future of the mouse. Peoplefocused on the mouse in a manner that never failed to surprise him. They seemed unable to think ofthe animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality.
The mouse ness of the mouse seemed inescapable. A picture from Marcus's laboratory of one of histrans genic mice, along with an article about the struggle for a patent, had appeared in The Times.
Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the ConservativeLadies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St. Agnes'sChurch, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews. Neena Begum phoned to informhim that he would be reincarnated as a cockroach. Glenard Oak, always acute to a turning mediatide, retracted their invitation for Marcus to come to school during National Science week. His ownson, his Joshua, still refused to speak to him. The insanity of all of it genuinely shook him. The fearhehad unwittingly provoked. And all because the public were three |B steps ahead of him likeOscar's robot, they had already played ,^ out their end games already concluded what the result ofhis 12 research would be something he did not presume to imagine! ;lB full of their clones, zombies,designer children, gay genes. Of *i| course, he understood the work he did involved some elementof moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of futureramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at yourdoor. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting throughhis century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg's hands? What can you hope to achieve?
"But surely," Marcus began, more rattled than he expected himself to be, 'surely that's rather thepoint. All animals are in a sense programmed to die. It's perfectly natural. If it appears random,that's only because we don't clearly understand it, you see. We don't properly understand why somepeople seem predisposed to cancer. We don't properly understand why some people die of naturalcauses at sixty-three and some at ninety seven. Surely it would be interesting to know a little moreabout these things. Surely the point of something like an oncomouse is that we're given theopportunity to see a life and a death stage by stage under the micro '
"Yeah, well," said the girl, putting the book in her bag. "Whatever. I've got to get to gate 52. Itwas nice talking to you. But yeah, you should definitely give it a read. I'm a big fan of Surrey The .
Banks ... he writes some freaky shit."Marcus watched the girl and her bouncing ponytail progress down the wide walkway until shemerged with other dark-haired girls and was lost. Instantly, he felt relieved and remembered withpleasure his own appointment with gate 32 and Magid Iqbal, who was a different kettle offish, or ablacker kettle, or whatever the phrase was. With fifteen minutes to spare, he abandoned hiscoffee which had gone rapidly from scalding to lukewarm, and began to walk in the direction ofthe lower 505. The phrase 'a meeting of minds' was running through his head. He knew this was anabsurd thing to think of a seventeen-year-old boy, but still he thought it, felt it: a certain elation,maybe equal to the feeling his own mentor experienced when the seventeen-year-old MarcusChalfen first walked into his poky college office. A certain satisfaction. Marcus was familiar withthe mutually beneficial smugness that runs from mentor to protege and back again (ah, but you arebrilliant and deign to spend your time with me! Ah, but I am brilliant and catch your attentionabove all others!). Still, he indulged himself. And he was glad to be meeting Magid for the firsttime, alone, though he hoped he was not guilty of planning it that way. It was more a series offortunate accidents. The Iqbals' car had broken down, and Marcus's hatchback was not large. Hehad persuaded Samad and Alsana that there would not be enough room for Magid's luggage if theycame with him. Millat was in Chester with KEVIN and had been quoted as saying (in languagereminiscent of his Mafia video days), "I have no brother." Me had an exam in the morning. Joshuarefused to get in any car if Marcus was in it; in fact, he generally eschewed cars at present, optingfor the environmentally ethical option of two wheels. As far as Josh's decision went, Marcus felt ashe did about all human decisions of this kind. One could neither agree nor disagree with them asideas. There was no rhyme nor reason for so much of what people did. And in his presentestrangement from Joshua he felt more powerless than ever. It hurt him that even his own son wasnot as Chalfenist as he'd hoped. And over the past few months he had built up great expectationsofMagid (and this would explain why his pace quickened, gate 28, gate 29, gate 30); maybe he hadbegun to hope, begun to believe, that Magid would be a beacon for right-thinking Chalfenism evenas it died a death here in the wilderness. They would save each other. This couldn't be faith could it,Marcus? He questioned himselfdirectly on this point as he scurried along. For a gate and a half the question unnerved him.
Then it passed and the answer was reassuring. Not faith, no, Marcus, not the kind with no eyes.
Something stronger, something firmer. Intellectual faith.
So. Gate 32. It would be just the two of them, then, meeting at last, having conquered the gapbetween continents; the teacher, the willing pupil, and then that first, historic handshake. Marcusdid not think for a second it could or would go badly. He was no student of history (and science hadtaught him that the past was where we did things through a glass, darkly, whereas the future wasalways brighter, a place where we did things right or at least righter he had no stories to scare himconcerning a dark man meeting a white man, both with heavy expectations, but only one with thepower. He had brought no piece of white cardboard either, some large banner with a name upon it,like the rest of his fellow waiters, and as he looked around gate 32, that concerned him. How wouldthey know each other? Then he remembered he was meeting a twin, and remembering that madehim laugh out loud. It was incredible and sublime, even to him, that a boy should walk out of thattunnel with precisely the same genetic code as a boy he already knew, and yet in every conceivableway be different. He would see him and yet not see him. He would recognize him and yet thatrecognition would be false. Before he had a chance to think what this meant, whether it meantanything, they were coming towards him, the passengers of BA flight 261; a talkative but exhaustedbrown mob who rushed towards him like a river, turning off at the last minute as if he were theedge of a waterfall. Nomoskdr .. . saldm a lekum .. . kamon dcho? This is what they said to eachother and their friends on the other side of the barrier; some women in full purdah, some in saris,men in strange mixtures of fabrics, leather, tweed, wool and nylon, with little boat-hats thatreminded Marcus of Nehru; children in jumpers made by the Taiwanese and rucksacks of brightreds and yellows; pushing through the doors to theconcourse of gate 32; meeting aunts, meeting drivers, meeting children, meeting officials,meeting sun-tanned white-toothed airline representatives .. .
"You are Mr. Chalfen."Meeting minds. Marcus lifted his head to look at the tall young man standing in front of him. Itwas Millat's face, certainly, but it was cleaner cut, and somewhat younger in appearance. The eyeswere not so violet, or at least not so violently violet. The hair was floppy in the English publicschool style and brushed forward. The form was ever so thickly set and healthy. Marcus was nogood on clothes, but he could say at least that they were entirely white and that the overallimpression was of good materials, well made and soft. And he was handsome, even Marcus couldsee that. What he lacked in the Byronic charisma of his brother, he seemed to gain in nobility, witha sturdier chin and a dignified jaw. These were all pins in haystacks, however, these were thedifferences you notice only because the similarity is so striking. They were twins from their brokennoses to their huge, ungainly feet. Marcus was conscious of a very faint feeling of disappointmentthat this was so. But superficial exteriors aside, there was no doubting, Marcus thought, who thisboy Magid truly resembled. Hadn't Magid spotted Marcus from a crowd of many? Hadn't theyrecognized each other, just now, at a far deeper, fundamental level? Not twinned like cities or thetwo halves of a randomly split ovum, but twinned like each side of an equation: logically,essentially, inevitably. As rationalists are wont, Marcus abandoned rationalism for a moment in theface of the sheer wonder of the thing. This instinctive meeting at gate 32 (Magid had strode acrossthe floor and walked directly to him), finding each other like this in a great swell of people, fivehundred at least: what were the chances? It seemed as unlikely as the feat of the sperm whoconquer the blind passage towards the egg. As magical as that egg splitting in two. Magid andMarcus. Marcus and Magid.
"Yes! Magid! We finally meet! I feel as if I know you already well, I do, but then again I don'tbut, bloody hell, how did you know it was me?"Magid's face grew radiant and revealed a lopsided smile of much angelic charm. "Well, Marcus,my dear man, you are the only white fellow at gate 32."The return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim shook the houses of Iqbal, Jones and Chalfenconsiderably. "I don't recognize him," said Alsana to Clara in confidence, after he had spent a fewdays at home. "There is something peculiar about him. When I told him Millat was in Chester, hedid not say a word. Just a stiff-upper lip. He hasn't seen his brother in eight years. But not a littlesqueak, not a whisperoo. Samad says this is some clone, this is not an Iqbal. One hardly likes totouch him. His teeth, he brushes them six times a day. His underwear, he irons them. It is likesitting down to breakfast with David Niven."Joyce and Me viewed the new arrival with equal suspicion. They had loved the one brother sowell and thoroughly for so many years, and now suddenly this new, yet familiar face; like switchingon your favourite TV soap only to find a beloved character slyly replaced by another actor with asimilar haircut. For the first few weeks they simply did not know what to make of him. As forSamad, if he had had his way, he would have hidden the boy away for ever, locked him under thestairs or sent him to Greenland. He dreaded the inevitable visits of all his relatives (the ones he hadboasted to, all the tribes who had worshipped at the altar of the framed photograph) when theycaught an eye-load of this Iqbal the younger, with his bow-ties and his Adam Smith and his E. M.
bloody Forster and his atheism! The only up-side was the change in Alsana. The A-Z? Yes, SamadMiah, it is in the top right-hand drawer, yes, that's where it is, yes. The first time she did it, healmost jumped out of his skin.
The curse was lifted. No more maybe Samad Miah, no more possibly Samad Miah. Yes, yes,yes. No, no, no. The fundamentals. It was a blessed relief, but it wasn't enough. His sons had failedhim. The pain was excruciating. He shuffled through the restaurant with his eyes to the ground. Ifaunts and uncles phoned, he deflected questions or simply lied. Millat? He is in Birmingham,working in the mosque, yes, renewing his faith. Magid? Yes, he is marrying soon, yes, a very goodyoung man, wants a lovely Bengali girl, yes, upholder of traditions, yes.
So. First came the musical-living-arrangements, as everybody shifted on............