Things went well for Patuk. His father had found a job in his cousin’s workshop. They could rent a house. A little house on an access road to the motorway—and finally Patuk’s mother could put out some things and mess around with the feather duster, and Patuk had more time for his new friends. There were an astonishing number of young Pakistani men in this little town. They had shared interests, knew what a good family was, and were interested in girls. Not the girls they met in family circles or through acquaintances, since they were taboo, but the pretty, blonde, new-homeland girls who were very exotic and uninhibited. So to speak. Something had to be possible there.

Even later

Patuk had made money delivering various packets of drugs, and he had bought himself his first-ever Gucci shirt at Selfridges in Manchester. His lucky shirt. Because right afterwards he got a job with a relative. He would become a tailor. It wasn’t necessarily what he had imagined for himself. What kind of young man, other than a weirdo, passionately wanted to sew clothes? But it was better than going to school forever, and it was possible with a tailoring business to be self-employed. That’s what Patuk pictured. Something with autonomy, a car, and a house. And perhaps not here. London. Why not. No idea what London looked like, but since the whole world talked about how great London was, there must be something to it. Patuk had, like most of his friends, no clue about the kind of country he lived in, about the unwritten rules and the questionable traditions. He didn’t know what colonies besides India had been exploited by the crown, he didn’t know that the government of the country had for all eternity been made up of graduates of just two universities, he didn’t understand oatmeal or twinsets. Winter, rain, hunting, all that crap, the quiet background music that in the past accompanied the people of any country from birth on and socialized them, had as a result of globalization and concomitant immigration become unimportant. For more and more people it was just about somehow scraping by. Surviving. The concept of homeland had been gutted. It was, if at all, artificially instilled, overstretched by empty statements that nobody inhaled anymore. Patuk was indifferent to all of that. He was young, he had a future, and he had met a girl.

Right, so

DON