The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  The actual wedding was to be held the next day, and then Changez and Jamila would stay at the Ritz for a couple of nights. Today there would be a small party to welcome Changez to England.

  Anwar was standing anxiously at the window of Paradise Stores as the Rover turned into the street, stopping outside the library. Anwar had even changed his suit; he was wearing a late 1950s job, as opposed to the usual early 1950s number. The suit was pinned and tucked all over, for he was bony now. His nose and cheekbones protruded as never before, and he was paler than Helen, so pale that no one could possibly call him a darkie or black bastard, though they might legitimately have used the word bastard. He was weak and found it difficult to pick up his feet as he walked. He moved as if he had bags of sugar tied to his ankles. And when Changez embraced him in the street I thought I heard Anwar’s bones cracking. Then he shook Changez’s hand twice and pinched his cheeks. This effort seemed to tire Anwar.

  Anwar had been extraordinarily exuberant about Changez’s arrival. Perhaps it was something to do with his not having a son and now having gained one; or perhaps he was pleased about his victory over the women. Whatever the extent of his self-inflicted frailty, I’d never seen him as good-tempered as he had been recently, or as nervously loquacious. Words weren’t his natural medium, but these days, when I went to help out in the shop, he inevitably took me aside – blackmailing me with samosas, sherbet fountains and the opportunity not to work – for an extended ear-bashing. I’m convinced he drew me aside, away from Jeeta and Jamila, into the store-room, where we sat on wooden boxes like skiving factory workers, because he was ashamed, or at least bashful, about his unsweet victory. Recently Princess Jeeta and Jamila had been in funereal moods, not for a second allowing Anwar to enjoy the pleasure of his tyranny. So all he could do, poor bastard, was celebrate it with me. Would they never understand the fruits of his wisdom?

  ‘Things are really going to change round here with another man about the place,’ he told me jubilantly. ‘The shop needs decorating. I want some boy who can climb a ladder! Plus I need someone to carry boxes from the wholesaler. When Changez arrives he can run the shop with Jamila. I can take that woman’ – he meant his wife – ‘Out somewhere beautiful.’

  ‘Where beautiful will you take her, Uncle, to the opera? I heard there’s a good production of Rigoletto on at the moment.’

  ‘To an Indian restaurant that a friend of mine owns.’

  ‘And where else beautiful?’

  ‘To the zoo, dammit! Any place she wants to go!’ Anwar became sentimental, as unfeeling people often do. ‘She has worked so hard all her life. She deserves a little break. She has given us all so much love. So much love. If only the women could grasp my points of view. They will begin to understand only when the boy gets here. Then they will see, eh?’

  I also learned in the store-room-of-secrets that Anwar was looking forward to having grandchildren. According to Anwar, Jamila would become pregnant immediately, and soon there’d be little Anwars running all over the place. Anwar would attend to the kids’ cultural upbringing and take them to school and mosque while Changez was, presumably, redecorating the shop, moving boxes and impregnating my girlfriend Jamila again. As Anwar and I had these conversations Jamila liked to open the door to the store-room and just point the black barrel-ends of her eyes at me as if I were sitting with Eichmann.

  Upstairs in the flat, Jeeta and Jamila had prepared a steaming, delicious feast of keema and aloo and all, and rice, chapatis and nan. There was Tizer and cream soda and beer and lassi to drink, all of it laid out on white tablecloths with tiny paper napkins for all of us. You wouldn’t have believed from the pristine state of the scrubbed room overlooking the main road to London that a man had tried to starve himself to death in it only a few weeks before.

  It was hell on earth at first, the party, with everyone awkward and self-conscious. In the silence, Uncle Anwar, Oscar Wilde himself, made three attempts to jump-start the conversation, all attempts stalling. I examined the threadbare carpet. Even Helen, who looked around at everything with great sympathetic curiosity and could usually be relied upon for cheer and irritating opinion, said nothing but ‘yum-yum’ twice and looked out of the window.

  Changez and Jamila sat apart, and although I tried to catch them looking at each other, I can guarantee that not a single surreptitious glance was exchanged by the future bed-mates. What would Changez make of his wife when he finally looked at her? The days of tight tops and mini-skirts for women were gone. Jamila was wearing what looked like several sacks: long skirts, perhaps three, one over the other, and a long smock in faded green beneath which the flat arcs of her braless breasts were visible to the slightly interested. She had on her usual pair of National Health glasses, and on her feet a rather unrelenting pair of Dr Martens in brown, which gave the impression that she was about to take up hill-walking. She was crazy about these clothes, delighted to have found an outfit she could wear every day, wanting, like a Chinese peasant, never to have to think about what to put on. A simple idea like this, so typical of Jamila, who had little physical vanity, did seem eccentric to other people, and certainly made me laugh. The one person it didn’t seem eccentric to, because he didn’t notice it, was her father. He really knew little about Jamila. If someone had asked him who she voted for, what the names of her women friends were, what she liked in life, he couldn’t have answered. It was as if, in some strange way, it was beneath his dignity to take an interest in her. He didn’t see her. There were just certain ways in which this woman who was his daughter had to behave.

  Eventually four relatives of Anwar’s turned up with more drink and food, and gifts of cloth and pots. One of the men gave Jamila a wig; there was a sandalwood garland for Changez. Soon the room was noisy and busy and animated.

  Anwar was getting to know Changez. He didn’t seem in the least displeased with him, and smiled and nodded and touched him constantly. Some time passed before Anwar noticed that his much-anticipated son-in-law wasn’t the rippling physical specimen he’d expected. They weren’t speaking English, so I didn’t know exactly what was said, but Anwar, after a glance, followed by a concerned closer study, followed by a little step to one side for a better angle, pointed anxiously at Changez’s arm.

  Changez waggled the hand a bit and laughed without self-consciousness; Anwar tried to laugh too. Changez’s left arm was withered in some way, and stuck on the end of the attenuated limb was a lump of hard flesh the size of a golf ball, a small fist, with only a tiny thumb projecting from the solid mass where there should have been nimble, shop-painting, box-carrying fingers. It looked as if Changez had stuck his hand into a fire and had had flesh, bone and sinew melted together. Though I knew a remarkable plumber with only a stump for a hand who worked for Uncle Ted, I couldn’t see Changez decorating Anwar’s shop with one arm. In fact, had he four Mohammed Ali arms I doubted if he’d know what to do with a paintbrush, or with a toothbrush for that matter.

  If Anwar now perhaps had reason for entertaining minor reservations about Changez (though Changez seemed delighted by Anwar, and laughed at everything he said even when it was serious), this could be nothing compared to Jamila’s antipathy. Did Changez have any idea of the reluctance with which his bride-to-be, now moving across to her bookshelf, picking up a book by Kate Millett, staring into it for a few minutes and replacing it after a reproachful and pitying glance from her mother, would be exchanging vows with him?

  Jamila had phoned me the day after Helen and I fucked in Anerley Park to tell me of her decision. That morning I was so ecstatic about my triumph in seducing the dog-owner’s daughter that I’d completely forgotten about Jamila’s big decision. She sounded distant and cold as she told me she would marry the man her father had selected from millions, and that was the end of it. She would survive, she said. Not one more word on the subject would she tolerate.

  I kept thinking to myself, Typical Jamila, that’s exactly what she would do, as if this were something that happened every d
ay. But she was marrying Changez out of perversity, I was sure of it. We lived in rebellious and unconventional times, after all. And Jamila was interested in anarchists and situationists and Weathermen, and cut all that stuff out of the papers and showed it to me. Marrying Changez would be, in her mind, a rebellion against rebellion, creative novelty itself. Everything in her life would be disrupted, experimented with. She claimed to be doing it only for Jeeta, but there was real, wilful contrariness in it, I suspected.

  I sat next to Changez when we started to eat. Helen watched from across the room, unable to eat, virtually retching at the sight of Changez balancing a plate on his knee, garland trailing in his dal, as he ate with his good hand, nimbly using the fingers he had. Maybe he’d never used a knife and fork. Of course, Jamila would be entertained by that. She’d crow all over the place to her friends, ‘Do you know my husband has never been in contact with cutlery before?’

  But Changez looked so alone – and close up I could see bits of bristle sticking out of his badly shaved face – that even I couldn’t laugh at him in my usual way. And he spoke to me so kindly, and with such innocent enthusiasm, that I felt like saying to Jamila, Hey, he’s not so bad!

  ‘Will you take me on the road here to see one or two things that I might like to see?’

  ‘Sure, whenever you like,’ I replied.

  ‘I also like to watch cricket. We can go perhaps to Lords. I have brought my own binoculars.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘And visit bookshops? I hear there are many establishments in the Charing Cross Road.’

  ‘Yes. What do you like to read?’

  ‘The classics,’ he said firmly. I saw that he had a pompous side to him, so certain he seemed in taste and judgement. ‘You like classics too?’

  ‘You don’t mean that Greek shit? Virgil or Dante or Homo or something?’

  ‘P. G. Wodehouse and Conan Doyle for me! Can you take me to Sherlock Holmes’s house in Baker Street? I also like the Saint and Mickey Spillane. And Westerns! Anything with Randolph Scott in it! Or Gary Cooper! Or John Wayne!’

  I said, to test him, ‘There’s lots of things we can do. And we can take Jamila with us.’

  Without glancing at her, but filling his mouth with rice and peas until his cheeks bulged – he really was a greedy gobbler – he said, ‘That would be much fun.’

  ‘So you two pricks are big mates now,’ Jamila hissed at me later. Anwar had reclaimed Changez and was patiently explaining to him about the shop, the wholesaler and the financial position. Changez stood there looking out of the window and scratching his arse, completely ignoring his father-in-law, who had no choice but to carry on with his explanation. As Anwar was talking Changez turned to him and said, ‘I thought it would be much more freezing in England than this.’

  Anwar was bewildered and irritated by this non sequitur.

  ‘But I was speaking about the price of vegetables,’ said Anwar.

  ‘What for?’ asked Changez in bewilderment. ‘I am mainly a meat-eater.’

  Anwar said nothing to this, but dismay, confusion and anger passed over his face. And he glanced down at Changez’s duff hand again as if to reconfirm that his brother had really sent over a cripple as a husband for his only daughter.

  ‘Changez seems all right to me,’ I told Jamila. ‘Likes books. Doesn’t seem an overwhelming-sexual-urges type.’

  ‘How do you know, clever dick? Why don’t you marry him, then? You like men, after all.’

  ‘Because you wanted to marry him.’

  ‘I don’t “want” anything but to live my life in peace.’

  ‘You made your choice, Jammie.’

  She was furious with me.

  ‘Ah, pah! Whatever happens I’ll be relying on you for support and concern.’

  Thank God, I thought, as just then Dad turned up at the party. He’d come straight from work, and he wore his best bespoke Burton’s suit, a yellow waistcoat with a watch on a chain (a present from Mum), and a striped tie in pink and blue with a knot as fat as a bar of soap. He looked like a budgerigar. Dad’s hair was shining too, as he liked to put olive oil on it, convinced that this lubrication of the scalp banished baldness. Unfortunately, if you got too close to him you were tempted to look around for the source of the odour – perhaps there was an overdressed salad in the vicinity? But lately he’d been concealing this whiff with his favourite aftershave, Rampage. Dad was plumper than he’d ever been. He was turning into a porky little Buddha, but compared to everyone else in the room he was life itself, vibrant, irreverent and laughing. Beside him, Anwar had become an old man. Dad was also being magnanimous today; he reminded me of a smooth politician visiting a shabby constituency, smiling, kissing babies, shaking hands with relish – and departing as soon as he decently could.

  Helen kept saying, ‘Take me away from here, Karim,’ and really getting on my nerves, so soon Dad and Helen and I went downstairs.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Helen. ‘What are you so fed up about?’

  ‘One of Anwar’s relatives was behaving weirdly towards me,’ she said.

  Apparently, whenever she’d gone close to this man he’d shooed her away, recoiling from her and muttering, ‘Pork, pork, pork, VD, VD, white woman, white woman.’ Apart from this, she was angry with Jamila for marrying Changez, the sight of whom made her feel ill. I told her to go to San Francisco.

  Downstairs in the shop Anwar was now showing Changez around. As Anwar pointed and explained and waved at tins and packets and bottles and brushes, Changez nodded like a bright but naughty schoolboy humouring the eager curator of a museum but taking nothing in. Changez didn’t seem ready to take over the running of Paradise Stores. Spotting me leaving, he hurried over and took my hand.

  ‘Remember, bookshops, bookshops!’

  He was sweating, and the way he held on to me indicated that he didn’t want to be left alone.

  ‘And please,’ he said, ‘call me by my nickname – Bubble.’

  ‘Bubble?’

  ‘Bubble. Yes, and yours?’

  ‘Creamy.’

  ‘Goodbye, Creamy.’

  ‘Goodbye, Bubble.’

  Outside, Helen had the Rover roaring and the radio on. I heard my favourite lines from Abbey Road: ‘Soon we’ll be away from here, step on the gas and wipe that tear away.’ To my surprise Eva’s car was also parked outside the library. And Dad was holding the door open. He was buoyant today, but also edgy and more authoritative than I’d seen him for ages, when mostly he’d been gloomy and sulky. It was as if he’d made up his mind about something yet was not sure if it was the right thing to do. So instead of being relaxed and content, he was tenser and less tolerant than ever.

  ‘Get in,’ he said, pointing to the back seat of Eva’s car.

  ‘What for? Where are we going?’

  ‘Just get in. I’m your dad, aren’t I? Haven’t I always taken care of you?’

  ‘No. And it’s like I’m being taken prisoner. I said I’d be with Helen this evening.’

  ‘But don’t you want to be with Eva? You like Eva. And Charlie’s waiting at home. He really wants to discuss one or two things with you.’

  Eva smiled at me from the driver’s seat. ‘Kiss, kiss,’ she said. I knew I was going to be deceived. They’re so stupid, grown-ups, thinking you can’t see through every fucking thing they do.

  I went to Helen and told her that something heavy was happening, I wasn’t sure what it was, but I had to leave her now. She kissed me and drove away. All day I’d felt calm, though aware that everything in Jamila’s life had changed; and now, on the same day, if I was right about the looks on the two faces in the car with me, the same thing was going to happen to me. I waved at Helen’s car, I don’t know why. But I never saw her again. I liked her, we were starting to go out, then all this happened and I never saw her again.

  Sitting behind Eva and Dad in the car, watching their hands constantly fluttering towards each other, you didn’t have to be a genius to see they were
a couple. Here before me were two people in love, oh yes. And as Eva drove, Dad didn’t take his eyes from her face.

  This woman I barely knew, Eva, had stolen my father. But what did I really think of her? I hadn’t even looked at her properly.

  This new part of my life wasn’t a woman who would seem attractive straight-on in a passport photograph. She had no conventional beauty, her features were not exquisitely proportioned and her face was a bit chubby. But she was lovely because the round face with the straight dyed-blonde hair, which fell over her forehead and into her eyes, was open. Her face was constantly in motion, and this was the source of her beauty. Her face registered the slightest feeling, concealing little. Sometimes she became childlike and you could see her at eight or seventeen or twenty-five. The different ages of her life seemed to exist simultaneously, as if she could move from age to age according to how she felt. There was no cold maturity about her, thank Christ. She could be pretty serious and honest, though, explaining hurt and pain as if we were all openly human like her, and not sere wed-up and secretive and tricky. That time she’d told me how lonely and abandoned she felt when she was with her husband, those confessional words, ‘lonely and abandoned’, which usually would have me cringing all over the place, made me shiver.

  When she was ecstatic, and she was often ecstatic, ecstasy flew from her face like the sun from a mirror. She was living outwardly, towards you, and her face was always watchable because she was rarely bored or dull. She didn’t let the world bore her. And she was some talker, old Eva.

  Her talk wasn’t vague approbation or disapproval, some big show of emotion. I didn’t say that. There were facts, solid and chewable as bread, in this feeling. She’d explained to me the origin of the Paisley pattern; I had the history of Notting Hill Gate, the use of a camera obscura by Vermeer, why Charles Lamb’s sister murdered their mother, and a history of Tamla Motown. I loved this stuff; I wrote it down. Eva was unfolding the world for me. It was through her that I became interested in life.