‘Was dat?’

‘I said, what d’you think of this bloke Samad wants up? It’s his grandfather.’

‘Great-grandfather,’ corrected Samad.

‘You kyan see me playing dominoes? You tryin’ to deprive an ol’man of his pleasure? What picture?’ Denzel grudgingly turned to look at it. ‘Dat? Hmph! I don’ like it. He look like one of Satan’s crew!’

‘He a relative of you?’ squeaked Clarence to Samad in his woman’s voice. ‘Dat explain much, my friend, much! He got some face like a donkey’s pum-pum.’

Denzel and Clarence exploded into their dirty laughter. ‘Nuff to put my belly off its digesting, true sur!’

‘There you are!’ exclaimed Mickey, victorious, turning back to Samad. ‘Puts the clientele off their food – that’s what I said right off.’

‘Assure me you are not going to listen to those two.’

‘I don’t know…’ Mickey twisted and turned in front of his cooking; hard thought always enlisted the involuntary help of his body. ‘I respect you and that, and you was mates with my dad, but – no disrespect or nuffin’ – you’re getting a bit fucking long-in-the-tooth, Samad mate, some of the younger customers might not-’

‘What younger customers?’ demanded Samad, gesturing to Clarence and Denzel.

‘Yeah, point taken… but the customer is always right, if you get my drift.’

Samad was genuinely hurt. ‘I am a customer. I am a customer. I have been coming to your establishment for fifteen years, Mickey. A very long time in any man’s estimation.’

‘Yeah, but it’s the majority wot counts, innit? On most other fings I defer, as it were, to your opinion. The lads call you “The Professor” and, fair dues, it’s not without cause. I am a respecter of your judgement, six days out of every seven. But bottom line is: if you’re one captain and the rest of the crew wants a bloody mutiny, well… you’re fucked, aren’t you?’

Mickey sympathetically demonstrated the wisdom of this in his frying pan, showing how twelve mushrooms could force one mushroom over the edge and on to the floor.

With the cackles of Denzel and Clarence still echoing in his ears, a current of anger worked its way through Samad and rose to his throat before he was able to stop it.

‘Give it to me!’ He reached over the counter to where Mangal Pande was hanging at a melancholy angle above the stove. ‘I should never have asked… it would be a dishonour, it would cast into ignominy the memory of Mangal Pande to have him placed here in this – this irreligious house of shame!’

‘You what?’

‘Give it to me!’

‘Now look… wait a minute-’

Mickey and Archie reached out to stop him, but Samad, distressed and full of the humiliations of the decade, kept struggling to overcome Mickey’s strong blocking presence. They tussled for a bit, but then Samad’s body went limp and, covered in a light film of sweat, he surrendered.

‘Look, Samad,’ and here Mickey touched Samad’s shoulders with such affection that Samad thought he might weep. ‘I didn’t realize it was such a bloody big deal for you. Let’s start again. We’ll leave the picture up for a week and see how it goes, right?’

‘Thank you, my friend.’ Samad pulled out a handkerchief and drew it over his forehead. ‘It is appreciated. It is appreciated.’

Mickey gave him a conciliatory pat between the shoulder blades. ‘Fuck knows, I’ve heard enough about him over the years. We might as well ’ave him up on the bloody wall. It’s all the same to me, I suppose. Comme-See-Comme-Sar, as the Frogs say. I mean, bloody hell. Blood-ee-hell. And that extra turkey requires hard cash, Archibald, my good man. The golden days of Luncheon Vouchers is over. Dear oh dear, what a palaver over nuffin’…’

Samad looked deep into his great-grandfather’s eyes. They had been through this battle many times, Samad and Pande, the battle for the latter’s reputation. Both knew all too well that modern opinion on Mangal Pande weighed in on either side of two camps:

Again and again he had argued the toss with Archie over this issue. Over the years they had sat in O’Connell’s and returned to the same debate, sometimes with new information gleaned from Samad’s continual research into the matter – but ever since Archie found out the ‘truth’ about Pande, circa 1953, there was no changing his mind. Pande’s only claim to fame, as Archie was at pains to point out, was his etymological gift to the English language by way of the word ‘Pandy’, under which title in the OED the curious reader will find the following definition:

Pandy /’pandi/n. 2 colloq. (now Hist.) Also -dee. M19 [Perh. f. the surname of the first mutineer amongst the high-caste sepoys in the Bengal army.] 1 Any sepoy who revolted in the Indian Mutiny of 1857- 9 2 Any mutineer or traitor 3 Any fool or coward in a military situation.

‘Plain as the pie on your face, my friend.’ And here Archie would close the book with an exultant slam. ‘And I don’t need a dictionary to tell me that – but then neither do you. It’s common parlance. When you and me were in the army: same. You tried to put one over on me once, but the truth will out, mate. “Pandy” only ever meant one thing. If I were you, I’d start playing down the family connection, rather than bending everybody’s ear twenty-four hours a bloody day.’

‘Archibald, just because the word exists, it does not follow that it is a correct representation of the character of Mangal Pande. The first definition we agree on: my great-grandfather was a mutineer and I am proud to say this. I concede matters did not go quite according to plan. But traitor? Coward? The dictionary you show me is old – these definitions are now out of currency. Pande was no traitor and no coward.’

‘Ahhh, now, you see, we’ve been through this, and my thought is this: there’s no smoke without fire,’ Archie would say, looking impressed by the wisdom of his own conclusion. ‘Know what I mean?’ This was one of Archie’s preferred analytic tools when confronted with news stories, historical events and the tricky day-to-day process of separating fact from fiction. There’s no smoke without fire. There was something so vulnerable in the way he relied on this conviction, that Samad had never had the heart to disabuse him of it. Why tell an old man that there can be smoke without fire as surely as there are deep wounds that draw no blood?

‘Of course, I see your point of view, Archie, I do. But my point is, and has always been, from the very first time we discussed the subject; my point is that this is not the full story. And, yes, I realize that we have several times thoroughly investigated the matter, but the fact remains: full stories are as rare as honesty, precious as diamonds. If you are lucky enough to uncover one, a full story will sit on your brain like lead. They are difficult. They are long-winded. They are epic. They are like the stories God tells: full of impossibly particular information. You don’t find them in the dictionary.’

‘All right, all right, Professor. Let’s hear your version.’

Often you see old men in the corner of dark pubs, discussing and gesticulating, using beer mugs and salt-cellars to represent long-dead people and far-off places. At that moment they display a vitality missing in every other area of their lives. They light up. Unpacking a full story on to the table – here is Churchill-fork, over there is Czechoslovakia-serviette, here we find the accumulation of German troops represented by a collection of cold peas – they are reborn. But when Archie and Samad had these table-top debates during the eighties, knives and forks were not enough. The whole of the steamy Indian summer of 1857, the whole of that year of mutiny and massacre would be hauled into O’Connell’s and brought to semi-consciousness by these two makeshift historians. The area stretching from the jukebox to the fruit machine became Delhi; Viv Richards silently complied as Pande’s English superior, Captain Hearsay; Clarence and Denzel continued to play dominoes while simultaneously being cast as the restless sepoy hordes of the British army. Each man brought the pieces of his argument, laid them out and assembled them for the other to see. Scenes were set. Paths of bullets traced. Disagreement reigned.