A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks Page B

when he went past, puffed insolently, returning his stare. Or take the young mothers at the school gates in Walworth, chattering as they waited for their children to come out: he could sense the hormonal activity coming off them, their marriages now eight or ten years old, love handles swelling gently at the hip, but so alive and keen and not wanting to let their youth go by. Notice me, their body poses said, I'm married but you can still want me.
    In April, Hassan's father, Farooq al-Rashid, had received a letter in an envelope marked 'On Her Majesty's Service'. Assuming it was from the taxman, he opened it cautiously. He had to read it several times before he understood its astonishing contents. From 10 Downing Street, someone who was his 'obedient servant' told him 'in strict confidence' that the Prime Minister had it in mind on the occasion of the forthcoming list of Birthday Honours, to submit Mr al-Rashid's name to the Queen for ...
    For what? He had to start again, blinking. Queen, Empire, Prime Minister ... He thought for a moment that he was being crowned king. At last it became clear: he was, if it was 'agreeable' to him, to be appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Surely, he thought, this was something normally given to TV comedians or Olympic winners. He had seen their pictures in the newspaper, holding a medal on a ribbon and wearing a top hat. And the great British honour was to be granted him for ...
    'Lime pickle,' he said. 'Who'd have thought it?'
    Nasim stood up and kissed her husband on the cheek. He hugged her close.
    Farooq al-Rashid had started his first factory at Renfrew in Scotland twenty-two years ago, in the month of Hassan's birth. He himself had come to Britain as a thirteen-year-old in 1967. His parents had left the Mirpur Valley in Pakistan-administered Kashmir when their smallholding was flooded during the construction of the Mangla Dam, and, like many others from the region, they had at first found work in the textile mills of Bradford. After leaving school at sixteen, Farooq had studied for a diploma in business studies and decamped to Glasgow, where he found a clothing company run by the grandfather of a Mirpur friend. Farooq was called 'Knocker' because in his early days in the city he would go round people's houses, knocking on their doors, looking for fellow Muslims with whom he could pray at the Oxford Street Mosque.
    His business interest, however, was not in textiles but in provisions, and he quickly saw that food from the subcontinent might be sold not only in cheap restaurants but through supermarkets to a population becoming interested in strong-tasting, foreign dishes. It took him more than ten years of hard work and saving to assemble the money, the staff and the ideas. At the age of thirty-four, he left the clothing company, where he was second in command, bought a lease on an old factory in Renfrew, then borrowed money for industrial weights and scales, giant cauldrons and sterilising equipment. He had alterations made to the production line so it could carry cartons of glass jars instead of boxed vests, and travelled to Mexico, Brazil and Iran to find the best fruit. He devised, in consultation with three local chefs, a recipe in which the taste of ginger, chilli, salt and garlic was eased into the savour of lime with the aid of brown sugar. It fired up the blandest dish; the citrus skins remained soft and digestible while the sweetness mitigated the heat. He could hardly produce it fast enough for the Glaswegian palate. Within ten years he was a millionaire. He had married the most beautiful girl in Bradford, sticking to Mirpur traditions by choosing a bride whose parents were from the same village as his own, and they had a dark-eyed handsome son - the apple, or the lime as Farooq put it, of his father's eye.
    Farooq al-Rashid made friends in Glasgow; his demeanour appealed to the old Scots. He couldn't join them in the pubs, where the true intimacy was