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already to edge me out of the area. I suggested we turn into a teashop and reassess the situation.
    Eyup seemed nervous. ‘Something might happen,’ he said ominously, as we entered.
    A young man with a light brown Islamic beard and a matching robe worked behind the counter. His eyes fixed on us as we came in. He seemed weary and irritated when Eyup ordered tea, as if he had been denied the opportunity to tell us we were in the wrong place. His gaze remained on us as we drank our tea and he went about his chores, wiping the counter and working the till. The hot sugary liquid and the smells from the stove were just beginning to act against the odourless cold of the street, when my question to the man gave him his chance. I asked him about his dress. Eyup looked nervous, but then translated.
    The man stopped what he was doing and his face darkened.
    When he had finished speaking to Eyup, I could see that the exchange had not gone well.
    ‘He suggests,’ Eyup began, looking for solace in the change of language, ‘that we don’t try to ask any questions around here as there may be a violent reaction.’
    The words landed cold and hard on me, more menacing for issuing from Eyup’s disinterested lips. The man spoke again and Eyup translated: ‘He says, “Our way of life is personal so it’s not right for others to ask about it. The Prophet Muhammad wore these clothes and that is why we wear them.”’
    There was more conversation between Eyup and the man, but when it was over, Eyup did not translate. I heard Pakistan mentioned.
    ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘Something might happen.’ Eyup’s natural calm was disturbed. He was not easily excitable and I was keen to follow his judgement. We said goodbye and the man walked us to the door of his shop.
    ‘What else did he say?’ I asked Eyup.
    ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. ‘We should go.’
    It was early in the day and the street was still waking up. Shops were opening and the women who hovered down the street in their long robes turned their triangular faces to us in puzzlement. I asked Eyup if I could find a place like this in small towns or in the countryside.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not how they dress.’
    The hidden world of Fatih Carsamba fell away as the road sloped downhill. The rest of the city returned and the subculture vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. It was only a hilltop of radicalism, but before it was gone, we were met with a haunting scene. In this environment of segregation and austerity, on a cemented quadrangle surrounded by a high chainlink fence, a school was breaking between classes. The screams and laughter from dozens of uniformed young boys and girls disturbed the morning pall.
    After the muffled threats from the man in the teashop, the sight of children playing was an unexpected comfort. They were occupied in some variation of catch and mixed teams of boys and girls swept from side to side of the playground. The girls were in skirts and the boys in trousers; they seemed entirely at ease with each other, entirely without inhibition.
    Outside their chain-link world, the last shrouded figure vanished over the crest of the hill. I was struck by the thought that these were the children of this neighbourhood. The shrouded figure might have been one of their mothers or elder sisters. Would she have gone to the school too? And, if so, what a strange passage it must have been from this freedom to the violent purity of her dress and the segregation it stood for.
    Then, as we turned the corner, we saw a self-standing structure whose presence here was at once fierce and absurd. About three feet from the ground, placed dead centre on the extremity of the playground, and lost in children’s games was the unlikely, the implausible, the almost chimeric object: a head-and-shoulders bust of Atatürk in smooth black stone, watching over the cemented playground.
    In the taxi, Eyup recounted the rest of what the man in the teashop had said