The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  Jamila received the highest-class education at the hands of Miss Cutmore, who loved her. Just being for years beside someone who liked writers, coffee and subversive ideas, and told her she was brilliant had changed her for good, I reckoned. I kept moaning that I wished I had a teacher like that.

  But when Miss Cutmore left South London for Bath, Jamila got grudging and started to hate Miss Cutmore for forgetting that she was Indian. Jamila thought Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign in her. ‘She spoke to my parents as if they were peasants,’ Jamila said. She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her, but Jamila was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony. Anyway, I hated ungrateful people. Without Miss Cutmore, Jamila wouldn’t have even heard the word ‘colony’. ‘Miss Cutmore started you off,’ I told her.

  Via the record library Jamila soon turned on to Bessie and Sarah and Dinah and Ella, whose records she’d bring round to our place and play to Dad. They’d sit side by side on his bed, waving their arms and singing along. Miss Cutmore had also told her about equality, fraternity and the other one, I forget what it is, so in her purse Jammie always carried a photograph of Angela Davis, and she wore black clothes and had a truculent attitude to schoolteachers. For months it was Soledad this and Soledad that. Yeah, sometimes we were French, Jammie and I, and other times we went black American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it.

  Compared to Jammie I was, as a militant, a real shaker and trembler. If people spat at me I practically thanked them for not making me chew the moss between the paving stones. But Jamila had a PhD in physical retribution. Once a greaser rode past us on an old bicycle and said, as if asking the time, ‘Eat shit, Pakis.’ Jammie sprinted through the traffic before throwing the bastard off his bike and tugging out some of his hair, like someone weeding an overgrown garden.

  Now, today, Auntie Jeeta was serving a customer in the shop, putting bread and oranges and tins of tomatoes into a brown-paper bag. Jamila wasn’t acknowledging me at all, so I waited by Auntie Jeeta, whose miserable face must, I was sure, have driven away thousands of customers over the years, none of them realizing she was a princess whose brothers carried guns.

  ‘How’s your back, Auntie Jeeta?’ I asked.

  ‘Bent like a hairpin with worries,’ she said.

  ‘How could you worry, Auntie Jeeta, with a thriving business like this?’

  ‘Hey, never mind my mouldy things. Take Jamila on one of your walks. Please, will you do that for me?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Here’s a samosa, Fire Eater. Extra hot for naughty boys.’

  ‘Where’s Uncle Anwar?’ She gave me a plaintive look. ‘And who’s Prime Minister?’ I added.

  Off Jamila and I went, tearing through Penge. She really walked, Jamila, and when she wanted to cross the road she just strode through the traffic, expecting cars to stop or slow down for her, which they did. Eventually she asked her favourite question of all time. ‘What have you got to tell, Creamy? What stories?’

  Facts she wanted, and good stories, the worse the better – stories of embarrassment and humiliation and failure, mucky and semen-stained, otherwise she would walk away or something, like an unsatisfied theatre-goer. But this time I was prepared. Spot-on stories were waiting like drinks for the thirsty.

  I told her all about Dad and Eva, about Auntie Jean’s temper and how she pressed down on my shoulders, which made me fart. I told her about trances, and praying advertising executives, and attempts in Beckenham to find the Way on garden benches. And I told her nothing about Great Danes and me. Whenever I asked her what she thought I should do about Dad and Mum and Eva, or whether I should run away from home again, or even whether we should flee together to London and get work as waiters, she laughed louder.

  ‘Don’t you see it’s fucking serious?’ I told her. ‘Dad shouldn’t hurt Mum, should he? She doesn’t deserve it.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. But the deed has been done, right, in that Beckenham garden, while you were watching in your usual position, on your knees, right? Oh, Creamy, you do get in some stupid situations. And you do realize it’s absolutely characteristic of you, don’t you?’

  Now she was laughing at me so hard she had to stop and bend forward for breath, with her hands on her thighs. I went on. ‘But shouldn’t Dad restrain himself, you know, and think about us, his family? Put us first?’

  It was talking about it now for the first time that made me realize how unhappy the whole thing was making me. Our whole family was in tatters and no one was talking about it.

  ‘Sometimes you can be so bourgeois, Creamy Jeans. Families aren’t sacred, especially to Indian men, who talk about nothing else and act otherwise.’

  ‘Your dad’s not like that,’ I said.

  She was always putting me down. I couldn’t take it today. She was so powerful, Jammie, so in control and certain what to do about everything.

  ‘And he loves her. You said your dad loves Eva.’

  ‘Yes, I s’pose I did say that. I think he loves her. He hasn’t exactly said it all over the place.’

  ‘Well, Creamy, love should have its way, shouldn’t it? Don’t ya believe in love?’

  ‘Yes, OK, OK, theoretically. For God’s sake, Jammie!’

  Before I knew it, we were passing a public toilet beside the park and her hand was pulling on mine. As she rugged me towards it and I inhaled the urine, shit and disinfectant cocktail I associated with love, I just had to stop and think. I didn’t believe in monogamy or anything old like that, but my mind was still on Charlie and I couldn’t think of anyone else, not even Jammie.

  It was unusual, I knew, the way I wanted to sleep with boys as well as girls. I liked strong bodies and the backs of boys’ necks. I liked being handled by men, their fists pulling me; and I liked objects – the ends of brushes, pens, fingers – up my arse. But I liked cunts and breasts, all of women’s softness, long smooth legs and the way women dressed. I felt it would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I never liked to think much about the whole thing in case I turned out to be a pervert and needed to have treatment, hormones, or electric shocks through my brain. When I did think about it I considered myself lucky that I could go to parties and go home with anyone from either sex – not that I went to many parties, none at all really, but if I did, I could, you know, trade either way. But my main love at the moment was my Charlie, and even more important than that, it was Mum and Dad and Eva. How could I think about anything else?

  I had the brilliant idea of saying, ‘And what’s your news, Jammie? Tell me.’

  She paused. It worked remarkably well. ‘Let’s take another turn around the block,’ she said. ‘It’s seriousness squared, Creamy Jeans. I don’t know what’s happening to me. No jokes, all right?’

  She started at the beginning.

  Under the influence of Angela Davis, Jamila had started exercising every day, learning karate and judo, getting up early to stretch and run and do press-ups. She bowled along like a dream, Jamila; she could have run on snow and left no footsteps. She was preparing for the guerrilla war she knew would be necessary when the whites finally turned on the blacks and Asians and tried to force us into gas chambers or push us into leaky boats.

  This wasn’t as ludicrous as it sounded. The area in which Jamila lived was closer to London than our suburbs, and far poorer. It was full of neo-fascist groups, thugs who had their own pubs and clubs and shops. On Saturdays they’d be out in the High Street selling their newspapers and pamphlets. They also operated outside the schools and colleges and football grounds, like Millwall and Crystal Palace. At night they roamed the streets, beating Asians and shoving shit and burning rags through their letter-boxes. Frequently the mean, white, hating faces had public meetings and the Union Jacks were paraded through the streets, prote
cted by the police. There was no evidence that these people would go away – no evidence that their power would diminish rather than increase. The lives of Anwar and Jeeta and Jamila were pervaded by fear of violence. I’m sure it was something they thought about every day. Jeeta kept buckets of water around her bed in case the shop was firebombed in the night. Many of Jamila’s attitudes were inspired by the possibility that a white group might kill one of us one day.

  Jamila tried to recruit me to her cadre for training but I couldn’t get up in the morning. ‘Why do we have to start training at eight?’ I whined.

  ‘Cuba wasn’t won by getting up late, was it? Fidel and Che didn’t get up at two in the afternoon, did they? They didn’t even have time to shave!’

  Anwar didn’t like these training sessions of hers. He thought she was meeting boys at these karate classes and long runs through the city. Sometimes she’d be running through Deptford and there, in a doorway with his collar turned up, his hairy nose just visible, would be Baby Face watching her, turning away in disgust when she blew Daddy a kiss.

  Soon after Daddy’s hairy nose had been blown a kiss that didn’t reach its destination, Anwar got a phone installed and started to lock himself in the living room with it for hours on end. The rest of the time the phone was locked. Jamila had to use a phone-box. Anwar had secretly decided it was time Jamila got married.

  Through these calls Anwar’s brother in Bombay had fixed up Jamila with a boy eager to come and live in London as Jamila’s husband. Except that this boy wasn’t a boy. He was thirty. As a dowry the ageing boy had demanded a warm winter overcoat from Moss Bros., a colour television and, mysteriously, an edition of the complete works of Conan Doyle. Anwar agreed to this, but consulted Dad. Dad thought the Conan Doyle demand very strange. ‘What normal Indian man would want such a thing? The boy must be investigated further – immediately!’

  But Anwar ignored Dad’s feeling. There had been friction between Anwar and Dad over the question of children before. Dad was very proud that he had two sons. He was convinced it meant he had ‘good seed’. As Anwar had only produced one daughter it meant that he had ‘weak seed’. Dad loved pointing this out to Anwar. ‘Surely, yaar, you have potentially more than one girl and one girl only in your entire lifetime’s seed-production, eh?’

  ‘Fuck it,’ Anwar replied, rattled. ‘It’s my wife’s fault, you bastard. Her womb has shrivelled like a prune.’

  Anwar had told Jamila what he’d decided: she was to marry the Indian and he would come over, slip on his overcoat and wife and live happily ever after in her muscly arms.

  Then Anwar would rent a flat nearby for the newly-weds. ‘Big enough for two children,’ he said, to a startled Jamila. He took her hand and added, ‘Soon you’ll be very happy.’ Her mother said, ‘We’re both very glad for you, Jamila.’

  Not surprisingly for someone with Jamila’s temper and Angela Davis’s beliefs, Jamila wasn’t too pleased.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ I asked, as we walked.

  ‘Creamy, I’d have walked out there and then. I’d have got the Council to take me into care. Anything. I’d have lived with friends, done a runner. Except for my mother. He takes it out on Jeeta. He abuses her.’

  ‘Hits her? Really?’

  ‘He used to, yes, until I told him I’d cut off his hair with a carving knife if he did it again. But he knows how to make her life terrible without physical violence. He’s had many years of practice.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, satisfied that there wasn’t much more to be said on the matter, ‘in the end he can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.’

  She turned on me. ‘But he can! You know my father well, but not that well. There’s something I haven’t told you. Come with me. Come on, Karim,’ she insisted.

  We went back to their shop, where she quickly made me a kebab and chapati, this time with onions and green chillis. The kebab sweated brown juice over the raw onions. The chapati scalded my fingers: it was lethal.

  ‘Bring it upstairs, will you, Karim?’ she said.

  Her mother called through to us from the till. ‘No, Jamila, don’t take him up there!’ And she banged down a bottle of milk and frightened a customer.

  ‘What’s wrong, Auntie Jeeta?’ I asked. She was going to cry.

  ‘Come on,’ Jamila said.

  I was about to wedge as much of the kebab as I could into my gob without puking when Jamila pulled me upstairs, her mother shouting after her, ‘Jamila, Jamila!’

  By now I wanted to go home; I’d had enough of family dramas. If I wanted all that Ibsen stuff I could have stayed indoors. Besides, with Jamila’s help I’d wanted to work out what I thought of Dad and Eva, whether I should be open-minded or not. Now there was no chance of contemplation.

  Half-way up the stairs I smelled something rotten. It was feet and arseholes and farts swirling together, a mingling of winds which hurried straight for my broad nostrils. Their flat was always a junk shop, with the furniture busted and fingerprints all over the doors and the wallpaper about a hundred years old and fag butts sprinkled over every surface, but it never stank, except of Jeeta’s wonderful cooking, which went on permanently in big burnt pans.

  Anwar was sitting on a bed in the living room, which wasn’t his normal bed in its normal place. He was wearing a frayed and mouldy-looking pyjama jacket, and I noticed that his toenails rather resembled cashew nuts. For some reason his mouth was hanging open and he was panting, though he couldn’t have run for a bus in the last five minutes. He was unshaven, and thinner than I’d ever seen him. His lips were dry and flaking. His skin looked yellow and his eyes were sunken, each of them seeming to lie in a bruise. Next to the bed was a dirty encrusted pot with a pool of piss in it. I’d never seen anyone dying before, but I was sure Anwar qualified. Anwar was staring at my steaming kebab as though it were a torture instrument. I chewed speedily to get rid of it.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me he’s sick?’ I whispered to Jamila.

  But I wasn’t convinced that he was simply sick, since the pity in her face was overlaid with fury. She was glaring at her old man, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, nor mine after I’d walked in. He stared straight in front of him as he always did at the television screen, except that it wasn’t on.

  ‘He’s not ill,’ she said.

  ‘No?’ I said, and then, to him, ‘Hallo, Uncle Anwar. How are you, boss?’

  His voice was changed: it was reedy and weak now. ‘Take that damn kebab out of my nose,’ he said. ‘And take that damn girl with you.’

  Jamila touched my arm. ‘Watch.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned towards him. ‘Please, please stop all this.’

  ‘Get lost!’ he croaked at her. ‘You’re not my daughter. I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘For all our sakes, please stop it! Here, Karim who loves you –’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ I said.

  ‘He’s brought you a lovely tasty kebab!’

  ‘Why is he eating it himself, then?’ Anwar said, reasonably. She snatched the kebab from me and waved it in front of her father. At this my poor kebab started to disintegrate, bits of meat and chilli and onion scattering over the bed. Anwar ignored it.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ I asked her.

  ‘Look at him, Karim, he hasn’t eaten or drunk anything for eight days! He’ll die, Karim, won’t he, if he doesn’t eat anything!’

  ‘Yes. You’ll cop it, boss, if you don’t eat your grub like everyone else.’

  ‘I won’t eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get my family to obey me by exactly the same.’

  ‘What do you want her to do?’

  ‘To marry the boy I have selected with my brother.’

  ‘But it’s old-fashioned, Uncle, out of date,’ I explained. ‘No one does that kind of thing now. They just marry the person they’re into, if they bother to get married at all.’

  This homily on contemporary morals didn’t exactly b
low his mind.

  ‘That is not our way, boy. Our way is firm. She must do what I say or I will die. She will kill me.’

  Jamila started to punch the bed.

  ‘It’s so stupid! What a waste of time and life!’

  Anwar was unmoved. I’d always liked him because he was so casual about everything; he wasn’t perpetually anxious like my parents. Now he was making a big fuss about a mere marriage and I couldn’t understand it. I know it made me sad to see him do this to himself. I couldn’t believe the things people did to themselves, how they screwed up their lives and made things go wrong, like Dad having it away with Eva, or Ted’s breakdown, and now Uncle Anwar going on this major Gandhi diet. It wasn’t as if external circumstances had forced them into these lunacies; it was plain illusion in the head.

  Anwar’s irrationality was making me tremble, I can tell you. I know I kept shaking my head everywhere. He’d locked himself in a private room beyond the reach of reason, of persuasion, of evidence. Even happiness, that frequent pivot of decision, was irrelevant here – Jamila’s happiness, I mean. Like her I wanted to express myself physically in some way. It seemed to be all that was left to us.

  I kicked Uncle Anwar’s piss-pot quite vigorously so that a small wave of urine splashed against the overhanging bed-sheets. He ignored me. Jamila and I stood there, about to walk out. But now I was making my uncle sleep in his own piss. Suppose he later clutched that piece of sheet to his nose, to his mouth. Hadn’t he always been kind to me, Uncle Anwar? Hadn’t he always accepted me exactly as I was, and never told me off? I bolted into the bathroom and fetched a wet cloth, returning to soak the pissy sheet until I was sure it wouldn’t stink any more. It was irrational of me to hate his irrationality so much that I sprayed piss over his bed. But as I scrubbed his sheet I realized he had no idea what I was doing on my knees beside him.