The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  He took me to a lorry driver’s café next door. I felt elated, especially when he said, ‘I’m looking for an actor just like you.’

  My head rang with cheering bells. We sat down with our coffee. Shadwell put his elbow out half-way across the table in a puddle of tea, resting his cheek on the palm of his hand, and stared at me.

  ‘Really?’ I said enthusiastically. ‘An actor like me in what way?’

  ‘An actor who’ll fit the part.’

  ‘What part?’ I asked.

  He looked at me impatiently. ‘The part in the book.’

  I could be very direct at times. ‘What book?’

  ‘The book I asked you to read, Karim.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘I told Eva to tell you.’

  ‘But Eva didn’t tell me anything. I would have remembered.’

  ‘Oh Christ. Oh God, I’m going mad. Karim, what the hell is that woman playing at?’ And he held his head in his hands.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘At least tell me what the book is. Maybe I can buy it today.’

  ‘Stop being so rational,’ he said. ‘It’s The Jungle Book. Kipling. You know it, of course.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve seen the film.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  He could be a snooty bastard, old Shadwell, that was for sure. But I was going to keep myself under control whatever he said. Then his attitude changed completely. Instead of talking about the job he said some words to me in Punjabi or Urdu and looked as if he wanted to get into a big conversation about Ray or Tagore or something. To tell the truth, when he spoke it sounded like he was gargling.

  ‘Well?’ he said. He rattled off some more words. ‘You don’t understand?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  What could I say? I couldn’t win. I knew he’d hate me for it.

  ‘Your own language!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I get a bit. The dirty words. I know when I’m being called a camel’s rectum.’

  ‘Of course. But your father speaks, doesn’t he? He must do.’

  Of course he speaks, I felt like saying. He speaks out of his mouth, unlike you, you fucking cunt bastard shithead.

  ‘Yes, but not to me,’ I said. ‘It would be stupid. We wouldn’t know what he was on about. Things are difficult enough as it is.’

  Shadwell persisted. There seemed no way he was ever going to get off this subject.

  ‘You’ve never been there, I suppose.’

  ‘Where?’

  Why was he being so bloody aggressive about it?

  ‘You know where. Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Goa, the Punjab. You’ve never had that dust in your nostrils?’

  ‘Never in my nostrils, no.’

  ‘You must go,’ he said, as if nobody had ever been there but him.

  ‘I will, OK?’

  ‘Yes, take a rucksack and see India, if it’s the last thing you do in your life.’

  ‘Right, Mr Shadwell.’

  He lived in his own mind, he really did. He shook his head then and did a series of short barks in his throat. This was him laughing, I was certain. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’ he went. He said, ‘What a breed of people two hundred years of imperialism has given birth to. If the pioneers from the East India Company could see you. What puzzlement there’d be. Everyone looks at you, I’m sure, and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we’ll hear now from him. And you’re from Orpington.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh God, what a strange world. The immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century. Yes?’

  ‘Mr Shadwell –’ I started.

  ‘Eva can be a very difficult woman, you know.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I breathed more easily now he’d changed the subject. ‘The best women always are,’ he went on. ‘But she didn’t give you the book. She’s trying to protect you from your destiny, which is to be a half-caste in England. That must be complicated for you to accept – belonging nowhere, wanted nowhere. Racism. Do you find it difficult? Please tell me.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said defensively. ‘Let’s talk about acting.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he persisted. ‘Don’t you really?’

  I couldn’t answer his questions. I could barely speak at all; the muscles in my face seemed to have gone rigid. I was shaking with embarrassment that he could talk to me in this way at all, as if he knew me, as if he had the right to question me. Fortunately he didn’t wait for any reply.

  He said, ‘When I saw more of Eva than I do now, she was often unstable. Highly strung, we call it. Yes? She’s been around, Eva, and she’s seen a lot. One morning we woke up in Tangier, where I was visiting Paul Bowles – a famous homosexual writer – and she was suffocating. All her hair had dropped out in the night and she was choking on it.’

  I just looked at him.

  ‘Incredible, eh?’

  ‘Incredible. It must have been psychological.’ And I almost added that my hair would probably fall out if I had to spend too much time with him.

  ‘But I don’t want to talk about the past,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  This stuff about him and Eva was really making me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to know about it.

  ‘OK,’ he said at last. I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Happy with your father, is she?’

  Christ, he was a nippy little questioner. He could have slain people with his questioning, except that he never listened to the answers. He didn’t want answers but only the pleasure of his own voice.

  ‘Let’s hope it lasts, eh?’ he said. ‘Sceptical, eh?’

  I shrugged. But now I had something to say. Off I went.

  ‘I was in the Cubs. I remember it well. The Jungle Book is Baloo and Bagheera and all that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Correct. Ten out of ten. And?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And Mowgli.’

  ‘Oh yes, Mowgli.’

  Shadwell searched my face for comment, a flinch or little sneer perhaps. ‘You’re just right for him,’ he continued. ‘In fact, you are Mowgli. You’re dark-skinned, you’re small and wiry, and you’ll be sweet but wholesome in the costume. Not too pornographic, I hope. Certain critics will go for you. Oh yes. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

  He jumped up as two young women carrying scripts came into the café. Shadwell embraced them, and they kissed him, apparently without revulsion. They talked to him with respect. This was my first indication of how desperate actors can get.

  ‘I’ve found my Mowgli,’ Shadwell told them, pointing down at me. ‘I’ve found my little Mowgli at last. An unknown actor, just right and ready to break through.’

  ‘Hallo,’ one of the women said to me. ‘I’m Roberta,’ said the other.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t he terrific?’ Shadwell said.

  The two women examined me. I was just perfect. I’d done it. I’d got a job.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That summer a lot happened quickly to both Charlie and me: big things to him; smaller but significant things to me. Although I didn’t see Charlie for months, I rang Eva almost every day for a full report. And, of course, Charlie was on television and in the newspapers. Suddenly you couldn’t get away from him and his blooming career. He’d done it. As for me, I had to wait the whole summer and into the late autumn for rehearsals of The Jungle Book to begin, so I went back to South London, happy in the knowledge that soon I’d be in a professional production and there’d be someone in the cast for me to fall in love with. I just knew that that was going to happen.

  Allie had gone to Italy with his smart friends from school, looking at clothes in Milan, for God’s sake. I didn’t want Mum to be alone, now she’d left Ted and Jean, and moved back into our old house. Fortunately they’d given her the job back at the shoe shop, and she and I had to spend only evenings and weekends together. Mum was feeling much better, a
nd she was active again, though she’d become very fat at Ted and Jean’s.

  She still didn’t speak much, concealing pain and her wound from voices and trite expression. But I watched her transform the house from being their place – and it had been only a place, child-soiled, functional – into her home. She started to wear trousers for the first time, dieted, and let her hair grow. She bought a pine table from a junk shop and slowly sandpapered it down in the garden, and then sealed it, something she’d never done before, never even thought of doing before. I was surprised she even knew what sandpaper was; but I could be such a fool in not knowing people. There were shaky cane chairs to go with the table, which I carried home on my head, and there Mum sat hour after hour, doing calligraphy – Christmas and birthday cards on squares of lush paper. She cleaned as never before, with care and interest (this wasn’t a chore now), getting on to her knees with a scrubbing brush and bowl of water, behind cupboards and along skirting boards. She washed down the walls and repainted doors smudged with our fingerprints. She repotted every plant in the house and started listening to opera.

  Ted came by with plants. He loved shrubs, especially lilac bushes, which Jean had consequently banned from her garden, so he brought them to our place. He also came by with old radios and plates, jugs and silver candlesticks, anything he picked up on his roaming trips around South London while he waited for Eva to continue work on the new flat.

  I read a lot, proper books like Lost Illusions and The Red and the Black, and went to bed early, in training for love and work. Although I was only a few miles away over the river, I missed the London I was getting to know and played games with myself like: if the secret police ordered you to live in the suburbs for the rest of your life, what would you do? Kill yourself? Read? Almost every night I had nightmares and sweats. It was sleeping under that childhood roof which did it. Whatever fear of the future I had, I would overcome it; it was nothing to my loathing of the past.

  One morning rehearsals started. I said goodbye to Mum sadly, left South London and went to stay with Dad and Eva once more. And every day I ran front the tube to the rehearsal room. I was the last to leave at night. I loved the hard work and being with the ten other actors, in the pub, in the café, belonging to the group.

  Shadwell had obviously spent many weekends on the Continent observing European theatre. He wanted a physical Jungle Book made of mime, voices and bodily invention. Props and costumes would be minimal. The jungle itself, its trees and swamps, the many animals, fires and huts, were to be fashioned from our bodies, movements, cries. Yet most of the actors he’d assembled hadn’t worked in that way before. On the first day, when we all jogged five times around the rehearsal room to warm up, there were many exhausted lungs. One woman had worked only in radio – as a disc-jockey. One actor I became friendly with, Terry, had done only agit-prop before, touring the country in a van with a company called Vanguard in a music-hall pastiche about the miners’ strike of 1972 called Dig! Now he found himself playing Kaa, the deaf snake known for the power of his hug. And Terry did look as if he had a powerful hug. He was going to spend the show hissing and flinging himself across the scaffolding arch which ran up the sides and across the top of the stage, and from which monkeys dangled, taunting Baloo the bear, who couldn’t climb and groaned a lot. Terry was in his early forties, with a pale, handsome face – a quiet, generous, working-class Welsh man-boy. I liked him instantly, especially as he was a fitness fanatic and his body was solid and taut. I decided to seduce him, but without much hope of success.

  I didn’t clash with Shadwell until the second week, at the costume fitting. At the start, everyone was respectful towards him, listening carefully to his soporific explanations. But he soon became a joke to most of us, because not only was he pedantic and patronizing, he was also frightened of what he’d started and disliked suggestions for fear they implied that he was going wrong. One day he took me aside and left me with the designer, a nervous girl who always wore black. She carried a yellow scarf and had a jar of shit-brown cream in her hand, which she was trying to conceal behind her back.

  ‘This is your costume, Mr Mowgli.’

  I craned my neck to examine the contents of her hand.

  ‘Where is my costume?’

  ‘Take your clothes off, please.’

  It turned out that on stage I would wear a loin-cloth and brown make-up, so that I resembled a turd in a bikini-bottom. I undressed. ‘Please don’t put this on me,’ I said, shivering. ‘Got to,’ she said. ‘Be a big boy.’ As she covered me from toe to head in the brown muck I thought of Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, dissimulating and silent for the sake of ambition, his pride often shattered, but beneath it all solid in his superiority. So I kept my mouth shut even as her hands lathered me in the colour of dirt. A few days later I did question Shadwell about the possibility of not being covered in shit for my début as a professional actor. Shadwell was concise for once.

  ‘That’s the fucking costume! When you so eagerly accepted your first-ever part did you think Mowgli would be wearing a kaftan? A Saint-Laurent suit?’

  ‘But Mr Shadwell – Jeremy – I feel wrong in it. I feel that together we’re making the world uglier.’

  ‘You’ll survive.’

  He was right. But just when I was feeling at home in the loin-cloth and boot polish, and when I’d learned my lines before anyone else and was getting as competent as a little orang-utan on the scaffolding, I saw that our conflicts hadn’t ended. Shadwell took me aside and said, ‘A word about the accent, Karim. I think it should be an authentic accent.’

  ‘What d’you mean authentic?’

  ‘Where was our Mowgli born?’

  ‘India.’

  ‘Yes. Not Orpington. What accent do they have in India?’

  ‘Indian accents.’

  ‘Ten out of ten.’

  ‘No, Jeremy. Please, no.’

  ‘Karim, you have been cast for authenticity and not for experience.’

  I could hardly believe it. Even when I did believe it we discussed it several times, but he wouldn’t change his mind.

  ‘Just try it,’ he kept saying as we went outside the rehearsal room to argue. ‘You’re very conservative, Karim. Try it until you feel comfortable as a Bengali. You’re supposed to be an actor, but I suspect you may just be an exhibitionist.’

  ‘Jeremy, help me, I can’t do this.’

  He shook his head. I swear, my eyes were melting.

  A few days passed without the accent being mentioned again. During this time Shadwell had me concentrate on the animal noises I was to make between the dialogue, so that when, for instance, I was talking to Kaa the slithering snake, who saves Mowgli’s life, I had to hiss. Terry and I had to hiss together. When hissing, the thought of Dad lecturing to Ted and Jean at Carl and Marianne’s was an aid. Being a human zoo was acceptable, provided the Indian accent was off the menu.

  Next time it was mentioned the entire cast was present.

  ‘Now do the accent,’ Shadwell suddenly said. ‘I trust you’ve been rehearsing at home.’

  ‘Jeremy,’ I pleaded. ‘It’s a political matter to me.’

  He looked at me violently. The cast watched me too, most of them sympathetically. One of them, Boyd, had done EST and assertion-training, and primal therapy, and liked to hurl chairs across the room as an expression of spontaneous feeling. I wondered if he might not have some spontaneous feeling in my defence. But he said nothing. I looked towards Terry. As an active Trotskyite he encouraged me to speak of the prejudice and abuse I’d faced being the son of an Indian. In the evenings we talked of inequality, imperialism, white supremacy, and whether sexual experimentation was merely bourgeois indulgence or a contribution to the dissolution of established society. But now, like the others, Terry said nothing but stood there in his tracksuit waiting to slide hissingly across the floor once more. I thought: You prefer generalizations like ‘after the revolution the workers will wake up filled with unbelievable joy’ to sta
nding up to fascists like Shadwell.

  Shad well spoke sternly. ‘Karim, this is a talented and expensive group of highly trained actors. They are ready to work, hungry to act, full of love for their humble craft, keen, eager and centred. But you, only you I am afraid, yes, only you out of everyone here, are holding back the entire production. Are you going to make the appropriate concession this experienced director requires from you?’

  I wanted to run out of the room, back to South London, where I belonged, out of which I had wrongly and arrogantly stepped. I hated Shadwell and everyone in the cast.

  ‘Yes.’ I said to Shadwell.

  That night in the pub I didn’t sit at the same table as the others but moved into the other bar with my pint and newspaper. I despised the other actors for not sticking up for me, and for sniggering at the accent when I finally did it. Terry left the group he was sitting with and joined me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘have another drink. Don’t take it so badly, it’s always crap for actors.’ ‘Crap for actors’ was his favourite expression. Everything always seemed to be crap for actors and you just had to put up with it – while the present corruption continued.

  I asked if people like Shitwell, as we called him among other things, would shove me around after the revolution; whether there’d be theatre directors at all or whether we’d all get a turn at telling the others where to stand and what to wear. Terry didn’t appear to have thought about this before and he puzzled over it, staring into his bitter and a bag of smoky bacon crisps.

  ‘There will be theatre directors,’ he said eventually. ‘I think. But they’ll be elected by the cast. If they are a pain the cast will throw them out and they’ll return to the factory they came from.’

  ‘Factory? How will we get people like Shadwell into factories in the first place?’

  Terry looked shifty now; he was on sloping ground.

  ‘He’ll be required to do it.’

  ‘Ah. By force?’

  ‘There’s no reason why the same people should do all the shit work, is there? I don’t like the idea of people ordering other people to do work they wouldn’t touch themselves.’