White Teeth: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

It is Thursday, December 31, 1992, New Year’s Eve. The consequences of what Joshua is about to do on this day have escaped him, given his obsession with Joely; he is seated in a bright red minibus with the other FATE members, driving toward Trafalgar Square. Kenny is reading a press release about the FutureMouse event, which describes the event apolitical. Minnie, a brand-new FATE convert who flirts openly with Crispin, shows the group a tabloid paper with a satirical cartoon of Marcus Chalfen. Crispin says that Marcus looks “more fucking Chalfenist than ever”; Joshua regrets telling Crispin about the term “Chalfenist,” and he begins to feel as if he has betrayed his father.

Joely asks Joshua if he is scared about the night and his “conflict of loyalties,” complimenting him for remaining so calm. Joshua isn’t sure whether he should act so passively, or whether he should be more “proactive” about shaping the future. He remembers thinking about “end-of-the-world” scenarios as a 12-year-old, and realizing that instead of doing anything rash or exciting, he would return to his room and continue building with Leogs. Joshua is terrified of consequences, and what he is about to do to his father is so enormous that the consequences seem inconceivable to him; he feels strangely detached. Joshua believes that “the world happens to you [...] you don’t happen to the world,” while Marcus believes the opposite.

 Gathered at the Willesden Green Station, KEVIN—including Millat, Hifan, Tyrone, Mo, Shiva, Abdul-Colin, and Abdul-Jimmy—realize that there are no southbound Jubilee Line trains from Baker Street, which disrupts the route KEVIN are planning to take to the FutureMouse event. Millat is stoned: he has been smoking all day, and Shiva, concerned, asks him what he has been doing to himself. Millat says that he is preparing himself for action. Brother Ibrahim was arrested recently on charges of tax evasion and civil disobedience, and KEVIN soon realized that the police might be tracking their activity: they decided against “Plan A” and improvised a Plan B, which involves the seven KEVIN members standing up during the FutureMouse press conference and reciting Sura 52 from the Qur’an.

Millat is disappointed by Plan B, since the KEVIN members are obsessed with finding the right translation for the Qur’an passage: Millat thinks that they are focused on words, not action, but Plan B has stuck nonetheless. Shiva tries to convince him to follow through with the plan. Twenty minutes later, the group gets off in Trafalgar Square. Looking around at the statues of men in the square, Abdul-Colin says that the English build their statues “with their backs to their culture and their eyes on the time”—the statues face Big Ben—because the English “look to their future to forget their past.”

Millat hangs back as the group walks away from the square and toward Chandos Street, where the conference is. He walks over to a bench and finds the word IQBAL scrawled between one leg of the bench and the other: Samad wrote this a few months after arriving in England, after cutting his thumb open in the kitchen of the curry restaurant. He used his own dribbling blood to write IQBAL on the bench, then went over the word with a penknife. Samad explained to Millat that he was ashamed of writing his name there, since it meant that he “wanted to write [his] name on the world,” like the Englishmen who “named streets in Kerala after their wives.” Millat, though, thinks that it means that Samad is “nothing” compared to the statues of men in the square. But Millat believes that he—unlike Mangal Pande—is capable of turning this history around, and that he will write his name all over the world bigger than Marcus Chalfen’s. Millat believes that decisions that are made come back, that “we live in circles.”

Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall’s Thought for the Day desk calendar for 1992, and for December 31, he included the following Bible citation: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” He believes that the citation is an apt warning for this day, and he drives Hortense in his motorcycle toward Trafalgar Square. Ryan has a skill for fixating closely on just one idea, and he finds that this makes him suited for the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, since he relishes facing evil and asking it to prove itself. He hopes to do the same to Marcus Chalfen, since he believes “the right to be the good guy” in the face of evil.

While getting a ticket on the bus from Willesden Lane to Trafalgar Square, Archie realizes that the tickets seem different now. He asks Samad why the tickets might have changed, and Samad looks tense: everyone is on edge, since Neena has demanded that the Iqbal and Jones families attend the “mouse thing” in order to support Magid and Irie. Archie would have preferred to be alone on New Year’s, just to avoid all of the drama. Horst Ibelgaufts sent him a “prophetic” letter the day before about his cat, Gabriel, who sits on top of the shed and watches Horst’s other cats battling each other in the garden; Archie wonders if he should have acted like Gabriel. In the end, Alsana convinces all of them to go.

Samad replies irritably to Archie’s question about the changes in bus tickets, and Neena tells him to stop being a “bully.” Clara and Alsana chime in, and Irie tells all of them to “shut up”: some families, she says, are quiet all of the time, and “they’re not constantly making the same old mistakes.” Happy families are not concerned with the past; they are content instead to live out their lives in the present. Irie is now eight weeks pregnant and knows it; she doesn’t know the identity of the father, however. Her child seems to be a ”perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates”—since it is not “somebody’s child,” it is “nobody’s child.” 

Irie tells Archie that the bus tickets now include more information in order to deter people from paying less than they should for their journey—so that inspectors can check that people are paying enough. Archie wonders if fewer people cheated in the past, and he thinks that people need to hear that England “was once a green and pleasant land.”

The Iqbals, Joneses, Chalfens, FATE, KEVIN, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are all headed for the same room in the Perret Institute. It is a “neutral” space, covered in posters that read MILLENIAL SCIENCE COMMISSION in a variety of fonts and colors: the room has been designed to be a “space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space.” The narrator says that people can finally give the answers required when a space is being designed, since they know what is meant by: “national identity? symbols? paintings? maps? music? air-conditioning? smiling black children […] ?” Those who have lived this century, forced from one space to another, know what they want: “nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space.”