I began to see that Anwar’s unhappiness wasn’t only self-induced. There was a campaign against him. Since his attempt to starve himself to death, Princess Jeeta was, in her own way, starving her husband to death, but subtly, month by month. There was very definite but intangible deprivation. For example, she spoke to him, but only occasionally, and made sure not to laugh. He started to suffer the malnutrition of unalloyed seriousness. Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency. Jeeta cooked for him as before, but provided only plain food, the same every day, and long after the expected time, bringing it to him when he was asleep or about to pray. And the food was especially prepared to ensure constipation. Days went by without hope of relief. ‘I am full of shit,’ Anwar said to me. ‘I feel as if I’m made of bloody concrete. Shit is blocking my ears, boy. It’s shutting up my nose, it’s seeping out through the pores of my fucking skin.’
When he spoke to Jeeta about the shit problem she said nothing, but the menu changed that day. His stomach was released, oh yes. And for weeks Anwar’s shit didn’t touch the sides of the toilet bowl; it would have shot through the eye of a needle. Princess Jeeta continued to ask Anwar’s masterful advice, but only on the smallest things, like whether to stock sour cream or not. (Anwar said no, as their cream was usually sour anyway.) One day three men Jeeta had hired came in and ripped out the central block of shelves, thus creating more space in Paradise Stores. The men installed three low, long refrigerators, which stocked large quantities of frozen and chilled food, including sour cream; and Jeeta told Anwar nothing about this innovation until it happened. He must have walked downstairs into the shop and thought he was going mad when he saw it transformed.
At least once a week Princess Jeeta made slighting remarks about Changez, saying as she lifted a box, ‘A good son-in-law would be doing this, instead of an old woman.’ Or she pointed out babies and children to Anwar, and kissed them and gave their mothers free food, because she’d never have grandchildren now, so outstanding had been the choice of son-in-law by Anwar’s brilliant brother in Bombay. To make things worse, once in a while, perhaps for a whole morning, she would be kind, loving and attentive to Anwar, and then, as the smiles returned to his face, she’d cut him dead for a week, until he had no idea where he stood or what was happening to him.
One day, on his way back from the mosque, Anwar descried through the snowstorm of his pain someone he only vaguely recognized, so long had it been since he’d seen him (and so fat had the person become), though mentally he stoned this figure to death every day, and referred to him, in front of me, as ‘that fucking, bald, useless cripple’. It was Changez, and he was out shopping with Shinko, one of his favourite pastimes. They’d been to the Paperback Exchange and then to Catford’s largest sex shop, the Lounge of Love, and Changez carried in his good arm a brown parcel containing newly acquired instruments of desire: red slitted knickers, stockings and suspenders, magazines called Openings for Gentlemen and Citizen Cane, and the star item, a large knobbly pink penis which, for a price, he intended to press into Shinko’s jade gate as she called out ‘Fuckmefuckmefuckmebigboybigboybigboy!’
On this unforgettable day Shinko carried with her a pineapple and a grapefruit, which she was intending to eat for her tea, had they not, later, rolled into the road and rotted forgotten in the gutter. As they plodded along in the English drizzle, Changez and Shinko, both loquacious and slow, discussed their respective homelands, India and Japan, which they missed desperately, but not enough to get on a plane and go there. And Changez, if I knew my Changez, would be abusing any Pakistanis and Indians he saw in the street. ‘Look at that low-class person,’ he’d say in a loud voice, stopping and pointing out one of his fellow countrymen – perhaps a waiter hurrying to work or an old man ambling to the day centre, or especially a group of Sikhs going to visit their accountant. ‘Yes, they have souls, but the reason there is this bad racialism is because they are so dirty, so rough-looking, so bad-mannered. And they are wearing such strange clothes for the Englishman, turbans and all. To be accepted they must take up the English ways and forget their filthy villages! They must decide to be either here or there. Look how much here I am! And why doesn’t that bugger over there look the Englishman in the eye! No wonder the Englishman will hit him!’
Suddenly a yell was heard all over Lewisham, all over Catford, and in Bromley. Changez, in the midst of a diatribe, and wearing unlaced Hush Puppies, turned as quickly as he could, which was not quickly at all, rather like a lorry in a cul-de-sac. But when he had manoeuvred from east to west he saw that his father-in-law, the man who had brought him to England, to Shinko, to Karim, to a camp-bed and Harold Robbins, was shuffling down the street towards him, his stick aloft, curses released from his mouth like mad dogs from a kennel. Changez immediately realized that these toothy dogs were not warnings or idle threats. No; the disappointed father-in-law was intending to crack his son-in-law over the loaf right now – and possibly club him to death. Shinko noticed that, surprisingly, Changez remained calm throughout. (And it was at this moment that her love for him was born.)
As Anwar smacked downwards with his stick, Changez lumbered to one side, just in time, withdrew the knobbly dildo from its paper-bag sheath, and with a Muslim warrior shout – at least, Shinko said it was a Muslim shout, but what would she know? – whacked my uncle smartly over the head with it. Uncle Anwar, who’d come from India to the Old Kent Road to lodge with a dentist, to jangle and gamble, to make his fortune and return home to build a house like my grandfather’s on Juhu Beach, could never have guessed all those years ago that late in life he would be knocked unconscious by a sex-aid. No fortune-teller had predicted this. Kipling had written ‘to each his own fear’, but this was not Anwar’s.
Anwar collapsed moaning on the pavement.
Shinko ran to a phone-box in which three boys had freshly urinated and called an ambulance. Later that day Changez was interviewed by the police and called immigrant, Paki, scum, wog, bastard and murderer, with the offending dildo on the table before him, as an aide mémoire. Changez’s first impulse was to say that he was innocent, that the dildo had been planted on him by the police, since he knew such crimes occurred frequently. But even he knew better than to try to suggest to a white English jury that Constable McCrum had slipped a large pink sex-toy into the accused’s pocket. Changez was held under consideration for assault.
Meanwhile Anwar, with a bandage around his head that made him look like the dying Trotsky, was in intensive care for a week. He’d had heart failure. Jamila and I and occasionally Princess Jeeta were at his bedside. But Jeeta could be cruel. ‘Why do I want to see that black man?’ she said one night, as we were on our way there on the bus.
I didn’t know why, but Dad wouldn’t go and see Anwar at all. Perhaps I felt more sentimental about Dad’s past than he did himself, but I wanted to see the two men together again. ‘Please go to the hospital,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to give myself depression,’ Dad replied fastidiously.
Dad had seriously fallen out with Anwar. They weren’t speaking at all now. It was over the fact that Anwar thought Dad should never have left Mum. It was a corrupt thing to do. Have a mistress, Anwar said, and treat both women equally well, but never leave your wife. Anwar insisted that Eva was an immoral woman and that Dad had been seduced by the West, becoming as decadent and lacking in values as the rest of the society. He even listened to pop music, didn’t he? ‘He’ll be eating pork pie next,’ Anwar said. Naturally, all this infuriated Dad, who accepted the decadence and corruption line – he started using the word ‘immoral’ all the time – but not with reference to himself.
Only Eva could have got Dad out to see Anwar, but she was rarely at home anyway. Eva was working non-stop. They were a terrific couple, and good for each other, because Dad, with his ignorance of the world and plain arrogance, his ‘You can do anything’ approach, uninhibited by doubt or knowledge, gave Eva the support and confidence she’d always required. Bu
t of course, as she flourished she moved away from him. Eva was always out, and I knew Dad was thinking of Mum more than ever, and was probably idealizing her. He hadn’t seen her, but they’d started to talk on the phone, whereas before I’d managed all their mutual business.
Anwar died, mumbling about Bombay, about the beach, about the boys at the Cathedral school, and calling for his mother. Jamila insisted he should be buried in a place she loved, a small grassy place where she often went to read, and gays to sunbathe and cruise. Anwar’s body was washed by his friends at the nearby mosque, and five Indians in bright and clashing clothing brought the coffin to the graveside. One of the five men was simple, with a harelip; another had a little white beard. They opened the coffin lid and I went forward to join the queue filing past, always eager not to miss anything; but Dad held my arm as if I were a little boy, and refused to let me go as I pulled against his hand. ‘You’ll never forget it,’ he said. ‘Remember Uncle Anwar in other ways.’
‘Which ways?’
‘In his shop, for instance.’
‘Really?’
‘Stacking shelves,’ he said sarcastically.
There was a minor row when one of the Indians pulled out a handy compass and announced that the hole hadn’t been dug facing in the right direction, towards Mecca. The five Indians shifted the coffin a little and murmured verses from the Koran. All this reminded me of the time I was thrown out of a class at school for asking what people would be wearing in heaven. I thought I was one of the first people in history to find all religion childish and inexplicable.
But I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now – the Indians – that in some way these were my people, and that I’d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and as if I’d been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be like them. Partly I blamed Dad for this. After all, like Anwar, for most of his life he’d never shown any interest in going back to India. He was always honest about this: he preferred England in every way. Things worked; it wasn’t hot; you didn’t see terrible things on the street that you could do nothing about. He wasn’t proud of his past, but he wasn’t unproud of it either; it just existed, and there wasn’t any point in fetishizing it, as some liberals and Asian radicals liked to do. So if I wanted the additional personality bonus of an Indian past, I would have to create it.
When they lowered the coffin into the earth, and there seemed no crueller thing than life itself, Jamila staggered to one side, as if one leg had given way, fainting and almost collapsing on to the disappearing box. Changez, who had not taken his eyes from his wife all day, was instantly beside her, his feet plunging ankle-deep into mud, but with his arms around his wife at last, their bodies together, an ecstatic look on his face and, down below, I noticed, an erection. Rather inappropriate for a funeral, I thought, especially when you’d murdered the victim.
That night, when Jamila had put her mother to bed – and Jeeta had wanted to start work right away on reorganizing Paradise Stores – I raided the shop downstairs for the Newcastle Brown ale the three of us had recently taken to, and lugged the thick bottles upstairs to the flat. The place still contained, naturally, Anwar’s possessions, as if he were away somewhere and would soon return. Pathetic possessions they were, too: slippers, cigarettes, stained waistcoats and several paintings of sunsets that Anwar thought were masterpieces and had left to me.
The three of us were tired but we weren’t ready for sleep. Besides, Jamila and I had to look after the constantly weeping Changez, whom we referred to privately as the Dildo Killer. Outwardly the Dildo Killer was the most upset of us all – being the least English, I suppose – even though the victim, Anwar, had hated him and had got himself killed trying to reduce Changez’s brain to mashed potato. Looking at Changez’s regularly puckering and shuddering face, I could see that really it was Jamila he was upset about. The old man he was glad to be rid of. Changez was only terrified that Jamila would blame him for whacking her dad over the head and therefore love him less than she did already.
Jamila herself was quieter than usual, which made me nervous, because I had to do all the talking, but she was dignified and contained, vulnerable without crying everywhere. Her father had died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an unco-operative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realize that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.
Wearing an inside-out sweatshirt and jeans once more, lying back on the rough orange sofa, Jamila put a bottle of Brown to her lips. Changez and I passed a bottle between us. Big Muslim he was, drinking on the day of a funeral. It was only with these two that I felt part of a family. The three of us were bound together by ties stronger than personality, and stronger than the liking or disliking of each other.
Jamila spoke slowly and thoughtfully. I wondered if she’d taken a couple of Valium. ‘All of this has made me think about what I want in my life. I’ve been tired for a while of the way things have been. I’ve been conservative in a way that doesn’t suit me. I’m leaving the flat. It’s being returned to the landlord unless you’ – she glanced at the Dildo Killer – ‘want to pay the rent. I want to live somewhere else.’
The Killer looked terrified. He was being abandoned. He looked frantically between his two friends. His face was appalled. This, then, was how things happened. A few simple words were exchanged, and ever after it would all be different. One day you were in clover in your camp-bed, the next in shit up to your neck. She was being straightforward, Jamila, and the straightforward was not a method I preferred for myself. Changez had never accustomed himself to it either.
‘Elsewhere where?’ he managed to say.
‘I want to try and live in another way. I’ve felt isolated.’
‘I am there daily.’
‘Changez, I want to live communally with a bunch of people – friends – in a large house they’ve bought in Peckham.’
She slid her hand over his as she broke the news. It was the first time I’d seen her touch her husband voluntarily.
‘Jammie, what about Changez?’ I asked.
‘What would you like to do?’ she asked him.
‘Go with you. Go together, eh? Husband and wife, always together, despite our difficult characters, eh?’
‘No.’ She shook her head firmly, but with some sadness. ‘Not necessarily.’
I butted in. ‘Changez won’t be able to survive alone, Jammie. And I’m going on tour soon. What’ll happen to him, d’you think?’
She looked forcefully at both of us, but she addressed Changez.
‘But that’s for you to think about. Why don’t you go back to your family in Bombay? They have a house there, you’ve told me. There is space, there are servants, chauffeurs.’
‘But you are my wife.’
‘Only legally,’ she said gently.
‘You will always be my wife. The legal is nothing, I understand that. But in my heart you are my Jamila.’
‘Yes, well, Changez, you know it’s never been like that.’
‘I’m not going back,’ he said flatly. ‘Never. You won’t make me.’
‘I wouldn’t make you do anything. You must do what suits you.’
Changez was less of a fool than I’d imagined. He’d observed his Jamila for a long time. He knew what to say. ‘This is too Western for me,’ he said. I thought for a moment he was even going to use the word ‘Eurocentric’ but he decided to keep it up his sleeve. ‘Here, in this capitalism of the feelings no one cares for another person. Isn’t that so?’
‘Yes it is
so,’ Jamila admitted.
‘Everyone is left to rot alone. No one will pick up another person when they are right down. This industrial system here is too hard for me. So I go down. All right,’ he said loudly. ‘I will try to make it alone.’
‘What is it you really want, then?’ she asked him.
He hesitated. He looked at her imploringly.
She said quickly, fatally, perhaps without thinking it through: ‘Would you like to come with me?’
He nodded, unable to believe his hairy ears.
‘Are you sure that’s possible?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Of course it’s possible,’ he said.
‘Changez –’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Excellent.’
‘But I haven’t thought about it.’
‘We’ll talk it over in time,’ he said.
‘But I’m not sure, Changez.’
‘Jamila.’
‘We won’t be husband and wife – you know that’ll never happen, don’t you?’ she said. ‘In this house you’ll have to take part in the communal life of the place.’
‘I think he’ll be superb communally, ol’ Changez,’ I said, since the Dildo Killer was weeping again, this time with relief. ‘He’ll help with washing the people’s plates. He’s a whizz with crockery and cutlery.’
She was stuck with him now. There was no way out. She said: ‘But you’ll have to pay your way, Changez. That’s how I don’t see it happening. My father paid the rent on our flat, but those days are gone. You’ll have to support yourself.’ And she added tentatively, ‘You might have to work.’
The Buddha of Suburbia Page 25