The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  Dad, I reckon, was slightly intimidated by her. Eva was cleverer than he was, and more capable of feeling. He hadn’t encountered this much passion in a woman before. It was part of what made him want and love Eva. Yet this love, so compelling, so fascinating as it grew despite everything, had been leading to destruction.

  I could see the erosion in the foundations of our family every day. Every day when Dad came home from work he went into the bedroom and didn’t come out. Recently he’d encouraged Allie and me to talk to him. We sat in there with him and told him about school. I suspected he liked these ink-stained accounts because, while our voices filled the room like smoke, he could lie back concealed in its swathes and think of Eva. Or we sat with Mum and watched television, braving her constant irritation and sighs of self-pity. And all the time, like pipes dripping, weakening and preparing to burst in the attic, around the house hearts were slowly breaking while nothing was being said.

  In some ways it was worse for little Allie, as he had no facts about anything. For him the house was filled with suffering and fluffed attempts to pretend that suffering didn’t exist. But no one talked to him. No one said, Mum and Dad are unhappy together. He must have been more confused than any of us; or perhaps his ignorance prevented him from grasping just how bad things were. Whatever was happening at this time, we were all isolated from each other.

  When we arrived at her house, Eva put her hand on my shoulder and told me to go upstairs to Charlie. ‘Because I know that’s what you want to do. Then come down. We have to discuss something important.’

  As I went upstairs I thought how much I hated being shoved around all over the place. Do this, do that, go here, go there. I would be leaving home pretty soon, I knew that. Why couldn’t they get down to the important stuff right away? At the top of the stairs I turned for a moment and found out. Eva and my father were going into the front room, hand-in-hand, and they were reaching for each other low down, and clutching, tongues out, pressed against each other even before they’d got through the door. I heard it lock behind them. They couldn’t even wait half an hour.

  I poked my head through Charlie’s trap-door. The place had changed a lot since last time. Charlie’s poetry books, his sketches, his cowboy boots, were flung about. The cupboards and drawers were open as if he were packing. He was leaving and altering. For a start he’d given up being a hippie, which must have been a relief to the Fish, not only professionally but because it meant the Fish could play Charlie soul records – Otis Redding and all – the only music he liked. Now the Fish was sprawled in a black steel armchair, laughing as Charlie talked and walked up and down, pouting and playing with his hair. As Charlie paced, he picked up an old pair of frayed jeans or a wide-collared shirt with pink flowers on it, or a Barclay James Harvest album, and tossed it out of the skylight and into the garden below.

  ‘It’s ridiculous the way people are appointed to jobs,’ Charlie was saying. ‘Surely it should happen at random? People in the street must be approached and told that they are now editor of The Times for a month. Or that they are to be judges, or police commissioners, or toilet attendants. It has to be arbitrary. There can be no connection between the appointment and the person unless it is their utter unsuitability for the position. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Without exception?’ enquired the Fish, languidly.

  ‘No. There are people who should be excluded from high position. These are people who run for buses and put their hands in their pockets to ensure their change doesn’t jump out. There are other people who have sun-tans that leave white patches on their arms. These people should be excluded, because they’ll be punished in special camps.’

  Charlie then said to me, though I thought he hadn’t noticed me, ‘I’ll just be down,’ as if I’d announced that his taxi was waiting.

  I must have looked wounded, because Charlie broke a little.

  ‘Hey, little one,’ he said. ‘Come here. We might as well be mates. From what I hear we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’

  So I clambered up through the hole and went to him. He bent forward to put his arms around me. He held me fondly, but it was a characteristic gesture, just as he was always telling people he loved them, using the same tone of voice with each of them. I wanted to smash through all that crap.

  I reached round and got a good handful of his arse. There was plenty of it, too, and just perky enough for me. When, as predicted, he jumped in surprise, I whipped my hand through his legs, giving his whole beanbag a good tug. He was laughing and wincing even as he threw me across the room into his drum-kit.

  I lay there, half crying and pretending not to be hurt, as Charlie continued to pace, flinging flowered clothes into the street below and discussing the possibility of a police force being set up to arrest and imprison rock guitarists who bent their knees while they played.

  A few minutes later, downstairs, Eva was next to me on the sofa, bathing my forehead and whispering, ‘You silly boys, you silly boys.’ Charlie sat sheepishly opposite me and God was getting cranky next to him. Eva’s shoes were off and Dad had removed his jacket and tie. He’d planned this summit carefully, and now the Zen of the entire thing had gone crazy, because just as Dad opened his mouth to start talking blood had started to drip into my lap from my nose as a result of Charlie chucking me into his drum-kit.

  Dad started off in statesman-like fashion, as if he were addressing the United Nations, earnestly saying he’d come to love Eva over the time he’d known her and so on. But soon he took off from the earthly tediousness of the concrete for a glide in purer air. ‘We cling to the past,’ he said, ‘to the old, because we are afraid. I’ve been afraid of hurting Eva, of hurting Margaret, and most of hurting myself.’ This stuff was really getting on my nerves. ‘Our lives become stale, they become set. We are afraid of the new, of anything that might make us grow or change.’ All this was making my muscles feel slack and unused, and I wanted to sprint up the street just to feel myself alive again. ‘But that is living death, not life, that is –’

  This was enough for me. I interrupted, ‘D’you ever think how boring all this stuff is?’

  There was silence in the room, and concern. Fuck it. ‘It’s all vague and meaningless, Dad. Hot air, you know.’ They watched me. ‘How can people just talk because they like the sound of their own voices and never think of the people around them?’

  ‘Please,’ Eva begged, ‘don’t be so rude as to not let your father finish what he’s started.’

  ‘Right on,’ Charlie said.

  Dad said, and it must have cost him a lot to say so little after he’d been put down by me, ‘I’ve decided I want to be with Eva.’

  And they all turned and looked at me compassionately. ‘What about us?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, you’ll be provided for financially and we’ll see each other whenever you like. You love Eva and Charlie. Think, you’re gaining a family.’

  ‘And Mum? Is she gaining a family?’

  Dad got up and put his jacket on. ‘I’m going to speak to her right now.’

  As we sat there, Dad went home to end our lives together. Eva and Charlie and I had a drink and talked about other things. I don’t know what. I said I had to piss, but I ran out of the house and walked around the streets wondering what the fuck to do and trying to imagine what Dad was saying to Mum and how she was taking it. Then I got into a phone-box and made a reverse charges call to Auntie Jean, who was drunk and abusive as usual. So I just said what I intended to say and put the phone down. ‘You might have to get over here, Auntie Jean. God – I mean, Dad – has decided to live with Eva.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Life goes on tediously, nothing happens for months, and then one day everything, and I mean everything, goes fucking wild and berserk. When I got home Mum and Dad were in their bedroom together and poor little Allie was outside banging on the door like a five-year-old. I pulled him away and tried to get him upstairs in case he was traumatized for life, but he kicked me in the balls.
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  Almost immediately the heart-ambulance arrived: Auntie Jean and Uncle Ted. While Uncle Ted sat outside in the car Jean charged straight into the bedroom, pushing me aside as I tried to protect my parents’ privacy. She shouted orders at me.

  Within forty minutes Mum was ready to leave. Auntie Jean had packed for her while I packed for Allie. They assumed I’d go to Chislehurst with them, but I said I’d turn up later on my bike; I’d make my own arrangements. I knew I’d be going nowhere near them. What could be worse than moving to Chislehurst? Even for two days I wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of Auntie Jean first thing in the morning, without her make-up on, her face blank as an egg, as she had prunes, kippers and cigarettes for breakfast and made me drink Typhoo tea. I knew she’d abuse Dad all day too. As it was, Allie was crying and yelling, ‘Bugger off, you Buddhist bastard!’ as he left with Mum and Jean.

  So the three of them bundled out, their faces full of tears and fear and pain and anger and shouting. Dad yelled at them, ‘Where are you all going? What are you leaving the house for? Just stay here!’ but Jean just told him to shut his big gob.

  The house was silent, as if no one had been there. Dad, who had been sitting on the stairs with his head in his hands, went into action. He wanted to get out too. He stuffed his shoes and ties and books into every plastic bag I could find before stopping himself, as he realized it was undignified to disfigure the house before deserting it.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Let’s take nothing, eh?’

  I liked that idea: it seemed aristocratic to me, just walking out empty-handed as if we were above all objects.

  Eventually Dad phoned Eva to say the coast was clear. She came tentatively into the house, as warm and gentle as anything, and she took Dad out to the car. Then she asked me what I was going to do and I had to say I wanted to go with her. She didn’t flinch as I expected her to. She just said, ‘OΚ, get your things, it’ll be lovely to have you. We’re all going to have a terrific time together, you know that, don’t you?’

  So I got about twenty records, ten packets of tea, Tropic of Cancer and On the Road, and the plays of Tennessee Williams, and off I went to live with Eva. And Charlie.

  That night Eva put me in her clean little spare room. Before getting into bed I went into the large bathroom beside her bedroom, where I hadn’t been before. The bath was in the centre of the room, with an old-fashioned brass spigot. There were candles around the edge of it and an old aluminium bucket beside it. And on the oak shelves were rows of lipsticks and blushers, eye-make-up removers, cleansers, moisturizers, hair-sprays, creamy soaps for soft skin, sensitive skin and normal skin; soaps in exotic wrappings and pretty boxes; there were sweet-peas in a jam-jar and an egg-cup, rose-petals in Wedgwood saucers; there were bottles of perfume, cotton wool, conditioners, hair-bands, hair-slides and shampoos. It was confusing: such self-attention repelled me, and yet it represented a world of sensuality, of smell and touch, of indulgence and feeling, which aroused me like an unexpected caress as I undressed, lit the candles and got into the bath in this room of Eva’s.

  Later that night she came into my room in her kimono, bringing me a glass of champagne and carrying a book. I told her she looked happy and luminous, which made her look even more happy and luminous. Compliments were useful tools of the friendship trade, I told myself, but in her case it was true. She said, ‘Thank you for saying that. I haven’t been happy for a long time but now I think I’m going to be.’

  ‘What’s that book?’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to read to you,’ she said, ‘to help you appreciate the sound of good prose. And because you’ll be reading to me in the next few months when I’m cooking and doing chores. You’ve got a good voice. Your dad said you’ve mentioned being an actor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s think about that, then.’

  Eva sat down on the edge of the bed and read me The Selfish Giant, dramatizing all the characters and imitating a smug vicar at the sentimental end of the story. She didn’t try overhard, she just wanted to let. me know I was secure with her, that the break-up of my parents’ marriage wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened, and that she had enough love to cover us all. She was strong and confident now. She read for a long time, and I had the bonus of knowing my father was waiting impatiently to fuck her again on this night of nights which was really their honeymoon. I thanked her gratefully, and she said, ‘But you’re beautiful, and the beautiful should be given everything they want.’

  ‘Hey, what about the ugly ones?’

  ‘The ugly ones.’ She poked her tongue out. ‘It’s their fault if they’re ugly. They’re to be blamed, not pitied.’

  I laughed at this, but it made me think of where Charlie may have inherited some of his cruelty. When Eva had gone and I lay for the first time in the same house as Charlie and Eva and my father, I thought about the difference between the interesting people and the nice people. And how they can’t always be identical. The interesting people you wanted to be with – their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition. I longed to know what Eva made of things, what she thought of Jamila, say, and the marriage of Changez. I wanted her opinion. Eva could be snobby, that was obvious, but if I saw something, or heard a piece of music, or visited a place, I wouldn’t be content until Eva had made me see it in a certain way. She came at things from an angle; she made connections. Then there were the nice people who weren’t interesting, and you didn’t want to know what they thought of anything. Like Mum, they were good and meek and deserved more love. But it was the interesting ones, like Eva with her hard, taking edge, who ended up with everything, and in bed with my father.

  When Dad moved in with Eva, and Jamila and Changez moved into their flat, there were five places for me to stay: with Mum at Auntie Jean’s; at our now empty house; with Dad and Eva; with Anwar and Jeeta; or with Changez and Jamila. I finally stopped going to school when Charlie did, and Eva arranged for me to go to a college where I could finish my A levels. This college seemed as if it was going to be the best thing that happened to me.

  The teachers looked the same as the pupils and everyone was equal, ha, ha, though I made a fool of myself by calling the male teachers sir and females miss. It was the first time, too, that I’d been in a classroom with girls, and I got in with a bad bunch of women. The ceremony of innocence was well drowned as far as they were concerned. They laughed at me all the time, I don’t know why; I suppose they thought I was immature. After all, I’d only just stopped doing my paper-round and I heard them talking about headlong stuff I never knew about before: abortions, heroin, Sylvia Plath, prostitution. These women were middle class but they’d broken away from their families. They were always touching each other; they fucked the lecturers and asked them for money for drugs. They cared little for themselves; they were in and out of hospital for drug addiction and overdoses and abortions. They tried to take care of each other and sometimes of me. They thought I was sweet and cute and pretty and everything, which I liked. I liked it all, because I was lonely for the first time in my life, and an itinerant.

  I had a lot of spare time, and from leading a steady life in my bedroom with my radio, and with my parents downstairs, I now wandered among different houses and flats carrying my life-equipment in a big canvas bag and never washing my hair. I was not too unhappy, criss-crossing South London and the suburbs by bus, no one knowing where I was. Whenever someone – Mum, Dad, Ted – tried to locate me, I was always somewhere else, occasionally going to a lecture and then heading out to see Changez and Jamila.

  I didn’t want to be educated. It wasn’t the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn’t. Dad was still convinced I was trying to be something – a lawyer, I’d told him recently, because even he knew that that doctor stuff was a wind-up. But I knew there’d have to come a time when I broke the news to him that the education system and I had split up. It would break his immigrant heart, too. But the spirit of the
age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn’t want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State. And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn’t want to work in a place where I couldn’t wear my fur coat.

  Anyway, there was plenty to observe – oh yes, I was interested in life. I was an eager witness to Eva and Dad’s love, and even more fascinated by Changez and Jamila, who were, can you believe, living together in South London.

  Jamila and Changez’s flat, rented by Anwar, was a two-room box affair near the Catford dog track. It had minimal busted furniture, yellow walls and a gas fire. The one bedroom, which contained a double mattress covered by an Indian bedspread with swirling colours, was Jamila’s room. At the end of the bed was a small card-table which Changez bought for her as a wedding present; I’d carried it back from a local junk shop. There was a Liberty-pattern tablecloth over it, and I bought Jamila a white vase in which there were always daffodils or roses. She kept her pens and pencils in a peanut-butter jar. Also on the table and piled up around her on the floor were her post-Miss Cutmore books: the ‘classics’ as she called them – Angela Davis, Baldwin, Malcolm X, Greer, Millett. You weren’t supposed to stick anything on the walls, but Jamila had pinned up poems by Christina Rossetti, Plath, Shelley and other vegetarians, which she copied out of library books and read when she stretched her legs by taking a few steps around the tiny room. On a sticking-out piece of board nailed to the windowsill was her tape-recorder. From breakfast until the three of us cracked late-night beers, the place grooved to Aretha and the other mamas. Jamila never closed the door, so Changez and I drank and looked through at our Jamila’s concentrating-so-hard profile, head bowed, as she read and sang and wrote in old school exercise books. Like me, she’d run right out on all that ‘old, dull, white stuff’ they taught you at school and college. But she wasn’t lazy, she was educating herself. She knew what she wanted to learn and she knew where it was; she just had to shovel it all into her head. Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn’t stop me wishing I’d been born into the first.