The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  Jamila came outside while I unlocked my bike.

  ‘What are you going to do, Jammie?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you suggest?’

  ‘I don’t know either.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll come up with something.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She started unashamedly to cry, not covering her face or trying to stop. Usually I get embarrassed when girls cry. Sometimes I feel like clouting them for making a fuss. But Jamila really was in the shit. We must have stood there outside Paradise Stores for at least half an hour, just holding each other and thinking about our respective futures.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I loved drinking tea and I loved cycling. I would bike to the tea shop in the High Street and see what blends they had. My bedroom contained boxes and boxes of tea, and I was always happy to have new brews with which to concoct more original combos in my teapot. I was supposed to be preparing for my mock A levels in History, English and Politics. But whatever happened I knew I would fail them. I was too concerned with other things. Sometimes I took speed – ‘blues’, little blue tablets – to keep me awake, but they made me depressed, they made my testicles shrivel up and I kept thinking I was getting a heart attack. So I usually sipped spicy tea and listened to records all night. I favoured the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher. It was easy to get most of the music you wanted from the shops in the High Street.

  During these nights, as all around me was silent – most of the neighbourhood went to bed at ten-thirty – I entered another world. I read Norman Mailer’s journalism about an action-man writer involved in danger, resistance and political commitment: adventure stories not of the distant past, but of recent times. I’d bought a TV from the man in the chip shop, and as the black-and-white box heated up it stank of grease and fish, but late at night I heard of cults and experiments in living, in California. In Europe terrorist groups were bombing capitalist targets; in London psychologists were saying you had to live your own life in your own way and not according to your family, or you’d go mad. In bed I read Rolling Stone magazine. Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I’d throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. Then it was time for my paper-round, followed by school. And school was another thing I’d had enough of.

  Recently I’d been punched and kicked to the ground by a teacher because I called him a queer. This teacher was always making me sit on his knee, and when he asked me questions like ‘What is the square root of five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight and a half?’, which I couldn’t answer, he tickled me. Very educational. I was sick too of being affectionately called Shitface and Curryface, and of coming home covered in spit and snot and chalk and wood-shavings. We did a lot of woodwork at our school, and the other kids liked to lock me and my friends in the storeroom and have us chant ‘Manchester United, Manchester United, we are the boot boys’ as they held chisels to our throats and cut off our shoelaces. We did a lot of woodwork at the school because they didn’t think we could deal with books. One day the woodwork teacher had a heart attack right in front of our eyes as one of the lads put another kid’s prick in a vice and started to turn the handle. Fuck you, Charles Dickens, nothing’s changed. One kid tried to brand my arm with a red-hot lump of metal. Someone else pissed over my shoes, and all my Dad thought about was me becoming a doctor. What world was he living in? Every day I considered myself lucky to get home from school without serious injury.

  So after all this I felt I was ready to retire. There was nothing I particularly wanted to do. You didn’t have to do anything. You could just drift and hang out and see what happened, which suited me fine, even more than being a Customs Officer or a professional footballer or a guitarist.

  So I was racing through South London on my bike, nearly getting crushed several times by lorries, head bent over the dropped handlebars, swiftly running through the ten Campagnola gears, nipping through traffic, sometimes mounting the pavement, up one-way streets, breaking suddenly, accelerating by standing up on the pedals, exhilarated by thought and motion.

  My mind was crawling with it all. I had to save Jamila from the man who loved Arthur Conan Doyle. She might have to run away from home, but where could she go? Most of her friends from school lived with their parents, and most of them were poor; they couldn’t have Jamila with them. She definitely couldn’t stay with us: Dad would get in shit with Anwar. Who could I discuss it with? The only person I knew who’d be helpful and objective and on my side was Eva. But I wasn’t supposed to like her because her love for my father was buggering up our entire family. Yet she was the only sane grown-up I knew now that I could cross Anwar and Jeeta off my list of normals.

  It was certainly bizarre, Uncle Anwar behaving like a Muslim. I’d never known him believe in anything before, so it was an amazing novelty to find him literally staking his life on the principle of absolute patriarchal authority. Through her mother’s staunch and indulgent love (plus the fibbing extravagances of her wonderful imagination), but mainly because of Anwar’s indifference, Jamila had got away with things some of her white counterparts wouldn’t dream of. There had been years of smoking, drinking, sexual intercourse and dances, helped by there being a fire escape outside her bedroom and the fact her parents were always so exhausted they slept like mummies.

  Maybe there were similarities between what was happening to Dad, with his discovery of Eastern philosophy, and Anwar’s last stand. Perhaps it was the immigrant condition living itself out through them. For years they were both happy to live like Englishmen. Anwar even scoffed pork pies as long as Jeeta wasn’t looking. (My dad never touched the pig, though I was sure this was conditioning rather than religious scruple, just as I wouldn’t eat horse’s scrotum. But once, to test this, when I offered him a smoky bacon crisp and said, as he crunched greedily into it, ‘I didn’t know you liked smoky bacon,’ he sprinted into the bathroom and washed out his mouth with soap, screaming from his frothing lips that he would burn in hell.)

  Now, as they aged and seemed settled here, Anwar and Dad appeared to be returning internally to India, or at least to be resisting the English here. It was puzzling: neither of them expressed any desire actually to see their origins again. ‘India’s a rotten place,’ Anwar grumbled. ‘Why would I want to go there again? It’s filthy and hot and it’s a big pain-in-the-arse to get anything done. If I went anywhere it would be to Florida and Las Vegas for gambling.’ And my father was too involved with things here to consider returning.

  I was working on all this as I cycled. Then I thought I saw my father. As there were so few Asians in our part of London it could hardly have been anyone else, but the person had a scarf over most of his face and looked like a nervous bank robber who couldn’t find a bank. I got off my bicycle and stood there in Bromley High Street, next to the plaque that said ‘H. G. Wells was born here’.

  The creature with the scarf was across the road in a crowd of shoppers. They were fanatical shoppers in our suburbs. Shopping was to them what the rumba and singing is to Brazilians. Saturday afternoons, when the streets were solid with white faces, was a carnival of consumerism as goods were ripped from shelves. And every year after Christmas, when the sales were about to begin, there’d be a queue of at least twenty idiots sleeping in the winter cold outside the big stores for two days before they opened, wrapped in blankets and lying in deckchairs.

  Dad normally wouldn’t have been out in such madness, but there he was, this grey-haired man just over five feet tall, going into a phone-box when we had a working telephone in our hall. I could see he’d never used a public phone before. He put on his glasses and read through the instructions several times before putting a pile of coins
on top of the box and dialling. When he got through and began to speak he cheered up as he laughed and talked away, before becoming depressed at the end of the call. He put the phone down, turned, and spotted me watching him.

  He came out of the phone-box and I pushed my bicycle beside him through the crowds. I badly wanted to know his opinion on the Anwar business, but obviously he wasn’t in the mood for it now.

  ‘How’s Eva?’ I asked.

  ‘She sends her love.’

  At least he wasn’t going to pretend he hadn’t been talking to her.

  ‘To me or to you, Dad?’ I said.

  ‘To you, boy. Her friend. You don’t realize how fond she is of you. She admires you, she thinks –’

  ‘Dad, Dad, please tell me. Are you in love with her?’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘Yes, in love. You know. For God’s sake, you know.’

  It seemed to surprise him, I don’t know why. Maybe he was surprised that I’d guessed. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to raise the lethal notion of love in his own mind.

  ‘Karim,’ he said, ‘she’s become close to me. She’s someone I can talk to. I like to be with her. We have the same interests, you know that.’

  I didn’t want to be sarcastic and aggressive, because there were certain basic things I wanted to know, but I ended up saying, ‘That must be nice for you.’

  He didn’t appear to hear me; he was concentrating on what he was saying.

  He said, ‘It must be love because it hurts so much.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then, Dad? Will you leave us and go away with her?’

  There are certain looks on certain faces I don’t want to see again, and this was one of them. Confusion and anguish and fear clouded his face. I was sure he hadn’t thought much about any of this. It had all just happened in the random way things do. Now it surprised him that he was expected to declare the pattern and intention behind it all in order that others could understand. But there wasn’t a plan, just passion and strong feeling which had ambushed him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you feel like?’

  ‘I feel as if I’m experiencing things I’ve never felt before, very strong, potent, overwhelming things.’

  ‘You mean you never loved Mum?’

  He thought for a while about this. Why did he have to even think!

  ‘Have you ever missed anyone, Karim? A girl?’ We must have both been thinking of Charlie, because he added kindly, ‘Or a friend?’

  I nodded.

  ‘All the time I am not with Eva I miss her. When I talk to myself in my mind, it is always her I talk to. She understands many things. I feel that if I am not with her I will be making a great mistake, missing a real opportunity. And there’s something else. Something that Eva just told me.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘She is seeing other men.’

  ‘What sort of men, Dad?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask for specifications.’

  ‘Not white men in drip-dry shirts?’

  ‘You snob, I don’t know why you dislike drip-dry shirts so much. These things are very convenient for women. But you remember that beetle Shadwell?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She is with him often. He is in London now, working in the theatre. He will be a big shot one day, she thinks. He knows those artistic types. She loves all that art-fart thing. They come to her house for parties.’ Here Dad hesitated. ‘She and the beetle don’t do anything together in that way, but I am afraid that he will romantically take her away. I will feel so lost, Karim, without her.’

  ‘I’ve always been suspicious of Eva,’ I said. ‘She likes important people. She’s doing it to blackmail you, I know she is.’

  ‘Yes, and partly because she’s unhappy without me. She can’t wait for me for years and years. Do you blame her?’

  We pushed through the throng. I saw some people from school and turned my head away so as to avoid them. I didn’t want them to see me crying. ‘Have you told Mum all this?’ I said.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m so frightened. Because she will suffer so much. Because I can’t bear to look at her eyes as I say the words. Because you will all suffer so much and I would rather suffer myself than have anything happen to you.’

  ‘So you’ll be staying with Allie and me and Mum?’

  He didn’t reply for a couple of minutes. Even then he didn’t bother with words. He grabbed me and pulled me to him and started to kiss me, on the cheeks and nose and forehead and hair. It was crazy. I nearly dropped my bike. Passers-by were startled. Someone said, ‘Get back in yer rickshaw.’ The day was closing in on me. I hadn’t bought any tea and there was an Alan Freeman radio programme on the story of the Kinks that I wanted to listen to. I pulled away from Dad and started to run, wheeling my bike beside me.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ he shouted.

  I turned. ‘What, Dad?’

  He looked bewildered. ‘Is this the right bus stop?’

  It was strange, the conversation Dad and I had, because when I saw him at home later and over the next few days he behaved as if it had never happened, as if he hadn’t told me he’d fallen in love with someone else.

  Every day after school I rang Jamila, and every day the reply to my question, ‘How are things?’ was always, ‘The same, Creamy,’ or, ‘The same but worse.’ We agreed to have a summit meeting in Bromley High Street after school, where we’d make a decision on what to do.

  But that day I was leaving the school gates with a group of boys when I saw Helen. It was a surprise because I’d barely thought of her since I was fucked by her dog, an incident with which she had become associated in my mind: Helen and dog-cock went together. Now she was standing outside my school in a black floppy hat and long green coat, waiting for another boy. Spotting me, she ran over and kissed me. I was being kissed a lot lately: I needed the affection, I can tell you. Anybody could have kissed me and I’d have kissed them right back with interest.

  The boys, the group I hung around with, had stinking matted hair down to their shoulders and wore decomposing school jackets, no ties, and flares. There had been some acid, some purple haze, going round the school recently, and a couple of boys were tripping. I’d had half a tab at prayers in the morning but it had worn off by now. Some of the boys were exchanging records, Traffic and the Faces. I was negotiating to buy a Jimi Hendrix record – Axis: Bold as Love – from a kid who needed money to go to an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert at the Fairfield Hall, for fuck’s sake. I suspected this fool was so desperate for money that he’d concealed the bumps and scratches on the disc with black shoe polish, so I was examining its surface with a magnifying glass.

  One of the boys was Charlie, who’d bothered to turn up to school for the first time in weeks. He stood out from the rest of the mob with his silver hair and stacked shoes. He looked less winsome and poetic now; his face was harder, with short hair, the cheekbones more pronounced. It was Bowie’s influence, I knew. Bowie, then called David Jones, had attended our school several years before, and there, in a group photograph in the dining hall, was his face. Boys were often to be found on their knees before this icon, praying to be made into pop stars and for release from a lifetime as a motor-mechanic, or a clerk in an insurance firm, or a junior architect. But apart from Charlie, none of us had high expectations; we had a combination of miserable expectations and wild hopes. Myself, I had only wild hopes.

  Charlie ignored me, as he was ignoring most of his friends since he’d appeared on the front page of the Bromley and Kentish Times with his band, Mustn’t Grumble, after an open-air gig in a local sports ground. The band had been playing together for two years, at school dances, in pubs and as support at a couple of bigger concerts, but they’d never been written about before. This sudden fame impressed and disturbed the whole school, including the teachers, who called Charlie ‘Girlie’.

  Charlie brightened at the sight of Helen and came
over to us. I had no idea that he knew her. On tip-toe she kissed him.

  ‘How are the rehearsals?’ she asked, her hand in his hair.

  ‘Great. And we’re doing another gig soon.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘If you’re not, we won’t play,’ he said. She laughed all over the place at this. I intervened. I had to get a word in.

  ‘How’s your dad, Charlie?’

  He looked at me with amusement. ‘Much better.’ He said to Helen, ‘Dad’s in the head hospital. He’s coming out next week and keeps saying he’s going home to Eva.’

  ‘Really?’

  Eva living with her own husband again? That surprised me. It would surprise Dad too, no doubt.

  ‘Is Eva pleased?’ I said.

  ‘As you well know, you little pouf, she nearly died. She’s interested in other things now. Other people. Right? I reckon Dad’ll be getting the bum’s rush to his mum as soon as he steps in our door. And that’ll be that between them.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t like him too much anyway. He’s sadistic. There’ll be room in our house for someone else. Everything in our lives is going to change pretty soon. I love your old man, Creamy. He inspires me.’

  I was flattered to hear this. I was about to say, If Eva and Dad get married you’ll be my brother and we’ll have committed incest, but I managed to shut my trap. Still, the thought gave me quite a jolt of pleasure. It meant I’d be connected to Charlie for years and years, long after we left school. I wanted to encourage Dad and Eva to get together. Surely it was up to Mum to get on her feet again? Maybe she’d even find someone else, though I doubted it.

  Suddenly the suburban street outside the school was blasted by an explosion louder than anything heard there since the Luftwaffe bombed it in 1944. Windows opened; grocers ran to the doors of their shops; customers stopped discussing bacon and turned; our teachers wobbled on their bicycles as the noise buffeted them like a violent squall; and boys sprinted to the school gates as they came out of the building, though many others, cool boys, shrugged or turned away in disgust, gobbing, cursing and scuffling their feet.