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Chapter 5 – Parvaiz
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Home Fire, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Islam, Nationality, and Identity.
Familial Love, Protection, and Betrayal
Fathers, Sons, and Inheritance
Stereotypes vs. Individuality
Summary
Analysis
Parvaiz pays the man in the electronics store in Istanbul, and then, after a moment, he buys a phone that can make international calls. He walks out the shop’s back door, towards the cars, and when he hears the door close behind him he sets the equipment that he has bought down on the side of the road, along with his traceable cell phone, and starts to run.
While Parvaiz’s first chapter tracks the circumstances that led him to this path, this chapter charts his realization of the enormous mistake he has made. Here is the first moment where he tries to escape the situation he’s put himself in.
Themes
Six months earlier, Parvaiz arrived in Raqqa with excitement and terror. Farooq takes him to a villa where the media unit stays, a sprawling and luxurious home. They address Parvaiz by his nom de guerre, Mohammad bin Bagram, which Farooq chose while also giving away Parvaiz’s passport at the first checkpoint—though he told him he could get it back if Parvaiz ever needed it.
The description of Parvaiz’s arrival is full of symbolic actions. In giving up his passport, he gives up one of the only things that still ties him to his life in Britain and his homeland. It is a tangible sign of the idea that he is choosing his faith over his nationality. And having name Bagram chosen for him is another way of tying himself to his father, who was imprisoned in Bagram.
Themes
Parvaiz meets other members of the media unit, who reveal that they’ve only been there two months, and who also discuss the future wives that they have been talking to—women from France and England whom they are convincing to come join the cause. Farooq reveals that he’ll be going to the front lines to fight.
The discussions of the women that these men are luring foreshadows the eventual revelation that this is the media unit’s primary work. So while Parvaiz isn’t directly involved in the violence associated with terrorism, he isn’t completely innocent either, as he helps to uproot other lives in irrevocable ways, just as his own life as been uprooted.
Themes
Parvaiz is shocked to hear that Farooq won’t be staying, as he thought that Farooq would help find people who knew Adil. Farooq says that Parvaiz will meet old jihadis at the training camp and he can ask them about Adil. Parvaiz is also surprised to hear about training camp: ten days of Shariah camp and six weeks of military training, followed by another month of media training. Parvaiz realizes how little he had asked Farooq about the life he was planning to enter.
Parvaiz’s lack of knowledge about the life that he is about to enter illustrates that his motivations for joining have largely been based on a desire to be connected to his father, more than a real desire to join the cause. This is why he is so surprised that Farooq will not be joining him, as Farooq not only represents Parvaiz’s tie to Adil but also serves as another kind of father figure for Parvaiz.
Themes
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Farooq also suggests that Parvaiz tell Aneeka and Isma the truth about where he is, now that he has arrived. He calls Aneeka on Skype, and she picks up demanding to know where he is, as she heard that he had gone with someone named Farooq to Raqqa. Suddenly Isma appears, saying “you selfish idiot” and showing him that two policemen are in their living room. Parvaiz tells the policemen that his sisters didn’t know anything, before Farooq takes the phone and ends the call. Parvaiz is panicked.
Shamsie illustrates clearly the ramifications of Parvaiz’s betrayal on his family back home. In this way, he is mirroring what his father did to his mother and Isma two decades earlier, which is what informs Isma’s own comparisons between the two and why she in particular feels betrayed. In showing the police—whom, the reader already knows, Isma called preemptively—Shamsie also emphasizes how Parvaiz’s decision laid the groundwork for more betrayals between the sisters and created irreversible divides between the siblings.
Themes
Months later, Parvaiz is still panicked after running away from the electronics shop. He shaves his beard, cuts his hair, and buys new clothes. He calls Aneeka briefly while sitting in café. He feels very homesick, even looking forward to sparring with Isma. Aneeka texts, saying she’s already gotten a ticket and is rushing to the airport for a flight in three hours. He feels some relief, knowing that he will at least reach the British consulate and return home, no matter what awaits him there. He then receives another text: “You’re a dead man, my little warrior.”
In contrast to the betrayal that his sisters felt in the moment he revealed that he had joined ISIS, here Parvaiz recognizes the love that had been a part of his life and his family, and which he had forsaken. Even the arguments that he had with Isma, he recognizes in hindsight, still came from a place of love. This is what makes their family’s ultimate deterioration all the more tragic.
Themes
Three months prior, in March, Parvaiz had survived Shariah classes and military training, and he had been accepted into the media unit officially. He learned that men in Adil’s generation who fought jihad in Bosnia all went home to their families for the winter months. This made him weep at night, because “he finally saw that he was his father’s son in his abandonment of a family who had always deserved better than him.”
It is here that Parvaiz acknowledges how trying to emulate his father and reconstruct his life has actually been to his detriment, because he realizes that the only thing he has truly been able to live up to is the abandonment of his family. Parvaiz finally recognizes the severity and the pointlessness of his betrayal. He was searching for love and fulfillment from a dead father, when in reality he could have found it in his living sisters.
Themes
Parvaiz is then taken out for his first important field recording, but he quickly realizes with horror that he is about to watch a beheading. As he sets up the video cameras and the microphones, his hands start to shake uncontrollably. He says he’s not feeling well, and the head of the media unit, Abu Raees, tells him to lie down in the car. Parvaiz can’t help but imagine what is happening outside.
This incident illuminates the complexity of Parvaiz’s character and situation. After Parvaiz’s eventual death, many people assume he is a violent terrorist, but here Shamsie emphasizes that Parvaiz has not been a part of any violence up to this point, and that he is in fact deeply disturbed by and opposed to it.
Themes
In the present, Parvaiz leaves the café, keeping watch for Farooq’s car. He destroys the phone he just bought and changes into new clothes. He knows the British consulate is just down the street. He wonders if he should just go there, rather than wait for Aneeka, and admit he made a mistake. But he knows that if he goes, he will simply be treated as “the terrorist son of a terrorist father.” He doesn’t know how to “break out of these currents of history.”
Parvaiz recognizes here how trying to define himself through his father has ultimately led him to the same mistakes his father made. He also foresees what will eventually happen after his death: that people will make assumptions about him based on an idea of him and because of his history, rather than understanding him as an individual and trying to empathize with him.
Themes
The narrative flashes back again, to a time when bombs have been dropped close to the media unit’s villa. Parvaiz takes a recorder and drives in the direction of the bombs to capture footage of the damage. He drives around until he finds a collapsed section of a wall, and a woman pinned beneath it crying out for help. As Parvaiz approaches the woman, a man from the Hisbah (the morality police) tells Parvaiz that he can’t help the woman, as she has taken off her face veil.
In addition to seeking a connection to his father, Parvaiz has also been motivated by the idea that he doesn’t feel fully accepted in Britain; that’s part of why he chose to go to a place where his faith wouldn’t define him as an outsider. But here, that idea is tested, because the adherence to religious law is so much more extreme—being a practicing Muslim, he now sees, doesn’t mean he’ll feel at home here either.
Themes
Parvaiz is pained to hear the woman call out—she is speaking English, and she is from London. She sounds his age, Aneeka’s age. Parvaiz argues with the man, saying that leaving her is a greater sin than helping her. The man replies that she is being left to suffer because she removed her face veil. Parvaiz knows that protesting further will get him killed, and he thanks the man for correcting him. As he leaves, the woman continues to call after him.
Shamsie depicts Parvaiz’s disillusionment with the society that he has chosen. Even though he shares a common religion with the people there, he recognizes here that he doesn’t agree with their moral interpretations of that faith. It is the injustice of being forced to leave the woman that ultimately shows Parvaiz that this society is not any more just than the one he left behind.
Themes
When Parvaiz returns to the car, he immediately logs on to Skype and calls Aneeka for the first time in a long time. He is amazed to realize “how it feels to hear someone speak to you with love.” He tells her that they’ve taken his passport, but that he just wants to come home. She tells him to find a way to get to Istanbul and go to the British consulate. Parvaiz says he worries that they’ll torture him. She assures him that what happened to Adil won’t happen to him—that she’s “making sure of things here.” She says that she thought she was doing something for him, but that it’s “turned out nice for [her] too.”
Parvaiz’s thoughts again highlight the importance of love in the family. This scene depicts the other side of the conversation that Eamonn half-overheard in Chapter 3. What ended up being a betrayal for Eamonn is, in Aneeka’s mind, simply a way for her to try and help her brother, who is desperate to return home.
Themes
In the present, Parvaiz grows more and more anxious, as Aneeka should have him texted back. But then, he realizes that she would never be allowed to board a flight to Istanbul. He texts her that she doesn’t need to come hold his hand. Parvaiz walks to the consulate, with its red, white, and blue flag. He thinks of “Mo Farah at the Olympics, Aunty Naseem’s commemorative cake tin from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. London. Home.”
Even though Parvaiz never actually makes it back to Britain or even to the consulate, his final thoughts are reminders for himself of the place where he actually came from. They illustrate the idea that London, for all its faults and oppressions, was the only home he ever truly had. His thoughts here also highlight the tragedy of his believing that he didn’t really belong there, as this led directly to his death. The mention of Mo Farah, a real-life British Muslim Olympian, hints at Parvaiz’s thwarted hope that he might someday be able to reconcile his identity as a Muslim person with his identity as a British person.
Themes
