The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  ‘You’re only interested in toilet rolls, sardine tins, sanitary pads and turnips,’ he told Anwar. ‘But there are many more things, yaar, in heaven and earth, than you damn well dream of in Penge.’

  ‘I haven’t got time to dream!’ interrupted Anwar. ‘Nor should you be dreaming. Wake up! What about getting some promotion so Margaret can wear some nice clothes. You know what women are like, yaar.’

  ‘The whites will never promote us,’ Dad said. ‘Not an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth. You don’t have to deal with them – they still think they have an Empire when they don’t have two pennies to rub together.’

  ‘They don’t promote you because you are lazy, Haroon. Barnacles are growing on your balls. You think of some China-thing and not the Queen!’

  ‘To hell with the Queen! Look, Anwar, don’t you ever feel you want to know yourself? That you are an enigma to yourself completely?’

  ‘I don’t interest anyone else, why should I interest myself?’ cried Anwar. ‘Get on with living!’

  On and on these arguments went, above Anwar and Jeeta’s shop, until they became so absorbed and hostile that their daughter, Jamila, and I could sneak away and play cricket with a broom handle and a tennis ball in the garden.

  Beneath all the Chinese bluster was Dad’s loneliness and desire for internal advancement. He needed to talk about the China-things he was learning. I often walked to the commuter station with him in the morning, where he caught the eight-thirty-five to Victoria. On these twenty-minute walks he was joined by other people, usually women, secretaries, clerks and assistants, who also worked in Central London. He wanted to talk of obtaining a quiet mind, of being true to yourself, of self-understanding. I heard them speak of their lives, boyfriends, agitated minds and real selves in a way, I’m sure, they never talked to anyone else. They didn’t even notice me and the transistor radio I carried, listening to the Tony Blackburn Show on Radio One. The more Dad didn’t try to seduce them, the more he seduced them; often they didn’t leave their houses until he was walking by. If he took a different route for fear of having stones and ice-pops full of piss lobbed at him by schoolboys from the secondary modern, they changed their route too. On the train Dad would read his mystical books or concentrate on the tip of his nose, a large target indeed. And he always carried a tiny blue dictionary with him, the size of a matchbox, making sure to learn a new word every day. At the weekends I’d test him on the meaning of analeptic, frutescent, polycephalus and orgulous. He’d look at me and say, ‘You never know when you might need a heavyweight word to impress an Englishman.’

  It wasn’t until he met Eva that he had someone to share his China-things with, and it surprised him that such mutual interest was possible.

  *

  Now, I presumed, on this Saturday night, God was going to meet Eva again. He gave me the address on a piece of paper and we caught a bus, this time towards what I considered to be the country. It was dark and icy when we got off in Chislehurst. I led Dad first one way and then, speaking with authority, in the opposite direction. He was so keen to get there he didn’t complain for twenty minutes; but at last he became poisonous.

  ‘Where are we, idiot?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Use the brains you’ve inherited from me, you bastard!’ he said, shivering. ‘It’s bloody cold and we’re late.’

  ‘It’s your fault you’re cold, Dad,’ I said.

  ‘My fault?’

  It was indeed his fault, for under his car coat my father was wearing what looked like a large pair of pyjamas. On top was a long silk shirt embroidered around the neck with dragons. This fell over his chest and flew out at his stomach for a couple of miles before dropping down to his knees. Under this he had on baggy trousers and sandals. But the real crime, the reason for concealment under the hairy car coat, was the crimson waistcoat with gold and silver patterns that he wore over the shirt. If Mum had caught him going out like that she would have called the police. After all, God was a Civil Servant, he had a briefcase and umbrella, he shouldn’t be walking around looking like a midget toreador.

  The houses in Chislehurst had greenhouses, grand oaks and sprinklers on the lawn; men came in to do the garden. It was so impressive for people like us that when our families walked these streets on Sunday visits to Auntie Jean we’d treat it as a lower-middle-class equivalent of the theatre. ‘Ahhh’ and ‘oohh’, we’d go, imagining we lived there, what times we’d have, and how we’d decorate the place and organize the garden for cricket, badminton and table tennis. Once I remember Mum looking reproachfully at Dad, as if to say: What husband are you to give me so little when the other men, the Alans and Barrys and Peters and Roys, provide cars, houses, holidays, central heating and jewellery? They can at least put up shelves or fix the fence. What can you do? And Mum would stumble into a pothole, just as we were doing now, since the roads were deliberately left corrugated with stones and pits, to discourage ordinary people from driving up and down.

  As we crunched up the drive at last – with a pause for God to put his thumbs together and do a few minutes’ trance practice – God told me that the house was owned by Carl and Marianne, friends of Eva, who’d recently been trekking in India. This was immediately obvious from the sandalwood Buddhas, brass ashtrays and striped plaster elephants which decorated every available space. And by the fact that Carl and Marianne stood barefoot at the door as we entered, the palms of their hands together in prayer and their heads bowed as if they were temple servants and not partners in the local TV rental firm of Rumbold & Toedrip.

  As soon as I went in I sported Eva, who had been looking out for us. She was wearing a long red dress which fell to the floor and a red turban. She swooped down upon me, and after twelve kisses she pressed three paperbacks into my hand.

  ‘Smell them!’ she urged me.

  I dipped my nose between the foxed leaves. They smelled of chocolate.

  ‘Second-hand! Real discoveries! And for your dad, this.’ She gave me a new copy of the Analects of Confucius, translated by Arthur Waley. ‘Please hold on to it for him. Is he OK?’

  ‘Dead nervous.’

  She glanced around the room, which contained about twenty people.

  ‘They’re a sympathetic lot. Pretty stupid. I can’t see he’ll have any problems. My dream is to get him to meet with more responsive people – in London. I’m determined to get all of us to London!’ she said. ‘Now, let me introduce you to people.’

  After shaking a few hands I managed to get comfortably settled on a shiny black sofa, my feet on a furry white rug, with my back to a row of fat books handtooled in plastic – abridged versions (with illustrations) of Vanity Fair and The Woman in White. In front of me was what seemed to be an illuminated porcupine – some kind of clear bulb with hundreds of different coloured waving quills which stuck out of it and shimmered – an object, I’m sure, designed to be appreciated with the aid of hallucinogenics.

  I heard Carl say, ‘There are two sorts of people in the world – those who have been to India and those who haven’t,’ and was forced to get up and move out of earshot.

  Beside the double-glazed french windows, with their view of the long garden and its goldfish pond glowing under purple light, was a bar. Not many people were drinking on this big spiritual occasion, but I could easily have put back a couple of pints. It wouldn’t have looked too good, though, even I knew that. Marianne’s daughter and an older girl in tight hotpants were serving lassi and hot Indian nibbles, guaranteed, I knew, to make you fart like a geriatric on All-bran. I joined the girl in hotpants behind the bar and found out her name was Helen and she was at the high school.

  ‘Your father looks like a magician,’ she said. She smiled at me and took two quick sidesteps into the circle of my privacy so she was beside me. Her sudden presence surprised and aroused me. It was only a minor surprise on the Richter surprise scale, a number three and a half, say, but it registered. At that moment my eyes were on God. Did he loo
k like a magician, a wonder-maker?

  He was certainly exotic, probably the only man in southern England at that moment (apart, possibly, from George Harrison) wearing a red and gold waistcoat and Indian pyjamas. He was also graceful, a front-room Nureyev beside the other pasty-faced Arbuckles with their tight drip-dry shirts glued to their guts and John Collier grey trousers with the crotch all sagging and creased. Perhaps Daddio really was a magician, having transformed himself by the bootlaces (as he put it) from being an Indian in the Civil Service who was always cleaning his teeth with Monkey Brand black toothpowder manufactured by Nogi & Co. of Bombay, into the wise adviser he now appeared to be. Sexy Sadie! Now he was the centre of the room. If they could see him in Whitehall!

  He was talking to Eva, and she had casually laid her hand on his arm. The gesture cried out. Yes, it shouted, we are together, we touch each other without inhibition in front of strangers. Confused, I turned away, to the matter of Helen.

  ‘Well?’ she said gently.

  She desired me.

  I knew this because I had evolved a cast-iron method of determining desire. The method said she desired me because I had no interest in her. Whenever I did find someone attractive it was guaranteed by the corrupt laws which govern the universe that the person would find me repellent, or just too small. This law also guaranteed that when I was with someone like Helen, whom I didn’t desire, the chances were they would look at me as she was looking at me now, with a wicked smile and an interest in squeezing my mickey, the thing I wanted most in the world from others, provided I found them attractive, which in her case I didn’t.

  My father, the great sage, from whose lips instruction fell like rain in Seattle, had never spoken to me about sex. When, to test his liberalism, I demanded he tell me the facts of life (which the school had already informed me of, though I continued to get the words uterus, scrotum and vulva mixed up), he murmured only, ‘You can always tell when a woman is ready for sex. Oh yes. Her ears get hot.’

  I looked keenly at Helen’s ears. I even reached out and pinched one of them lightly, for scientific confirmation. Warmish!

  Oh, Charlie. My heart yearned for his hot ears against my chest. But he had neither phoned since our last love-making nor bothered to turn up here. He’d been away from school, too, cutting a demo tape with his band. The pain of being without the bastard, the cold turkey I was enduring, was alleviated only by the thought that he would seek more wisdom from my father tonight. But so far there was no sign of him.

  Eva and Marianne were starting to organize the room. The candle industry was stimulated, Venetian blinds were lowered, Indian sandalwood stinkers were ignited and put in flowerpots, and a small carpet was put down for the Buddha of suburbia to fly on. Eva bowed to him and handed him a daffodil. God smiled at people recognized from last time. He seemed confident and calm, easier than before, doing less and allowing the admirers to illuminate him with the respect that Eva must have been encouraging in her friends.

  Then Uncle Ted and Auntie Jean walked in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There they were – two normal unhappy alcoholics, her in pink high heels, him in a double-breasted suit, dressed for a wedding, almost innocently walking into a party. They were Mum’s tall sister Jean and her husband, Ted, who had a central heating business called Peter’s Heaters. And they were clapped in the eyeballs by their brother-in-law, known as Harry, lowering himself into a yogic trance in front of their neighbours. Jean fought for words, perhaps the only thing she had ever fought for. Eva’s finger went to her lips. Jean’s mouth closed slowly, like Tower Bridge. Ted’s eyes scoured the room for a clue that would explain what was going on. He saw me and I nodded at him. He was disconcerted, but not angry, unlike Auntie Jean.

  ‘What’s Harry doing?’ he mouthed.

  Ted and Jean never called Dad by his Indian name, Haroon Amir. He was always ‘Harry’ to them, and they spoke of him as Harry to other people. It was bad enough his being an Indian in the first place, without having an awkward name too. They’d called Dad Harry from the first time they’d met him, and there was nothing Dad could do about it. So he called them ‘Gin and Tonic’.

  Uncle Ted and I were great mates. Sometimes he took me on central heating jobs with him. I got paid for doing the heavy work. We ate corned-beef sandwiches and drank tea from our thermos flask. He gave me sporting tips and took me to the Catford dog track and Epsom Downs. He talked to me about pigeon racing. Ever since I was tiny I’d loved Uncle Ted, because he knew about the things other boys’ fathers knew about, and Dad, to my frustration, didn’t: fishing and air rifles, aeroplanes, and how to eat winkles.

  My mind was rapidly working as I tried to sort out how it was that Ted and Jean had turned up here, like characters from an Ealing Comedy walking into an Antonioni film. They were from Chislehurst too, but worlds away from Carl and Marianne. I concentrated until things started to get clear in my mind. How had all this happened? I began to see. What I saw didn’t cheer me.

  Poor Mum must have fallen into such unhappiness that she’d spilled out Dad’s original guru exploit in Beckenham to her sister. Jean would have been apopleptic with outrage at her sister’s weakness in allowing it to happen. Jean would have hated Mum for it.

  When God had announced – or, rather, got me to announce, just a few hours before – that he was making a comeback as a visionary, Mum would have rung her young sister. Jean would have tautened, turning into the steely scheming knife she really was. Into action she went. She must have told Mum she knew Carl and Marianne. Their radiators had perhaps been installed by Peter’s Heaters. And Ted and Jean did live in a newish house nearby. That would be the only way a couple like Carl and Marianne would know Ted and Jean. Otherwise Carl and Marianne, with their books and records and trips to India, with their ‘culture’, would be anathema to Ted and Jean, who measured people only in terms of power and money. The rest was showing off, an attempt to pull a fast one. For Ted and Jean, Tommy Steele – whose parents lived round the corner-was culture, entertainment, show business.

  Meanwhile, Eva had no idea who Ted and Jean were. She just waved irritably at these late and oddly respectable intruders.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ she hissed.

  Ted and Jean looked at each other as if they’d been asked to swallow matchsticks.

  ‘Yes, you,’ Eva added. She could be sharp, old Eva.

  There was no choice. Ted and Jean slid slowly to the floor. It must have been years since Auntie Jean had been anywhere near the ground, except when she fell over drunk. They certainly couldn’t have expected the evening to be this devout, with everyone sitting admiringly around Dad. We would be in big trouble later, no doubt about that.

  God was about to start. Helen went and sat down with the others on the floor. I stood behind the bar and watched. Dad looked over the crowd and smiled, until he discovered himself smiling at Ted and Jean. His expression didn’t change for a moment.

  Despite calling Ted and Jean Gin and Tonic, he didn’t dislike Jean and he did like Ted, who liked him in return. Ted often discussed his ‘little personal difficulties’ with Dad, for although it was perplexing for Ted that Dad had no money, Ted sensed that Dad understood life, that Dad was wise. So Ted told Dad about Jean’s heavy drinking, or her affair with a young local councillor, or how his life was beginning to seem futile, or how unsatisfied he felt.

  Whenever they had these truth sessions Dad took care to take advantage of Ted. ‘He can talk and work at the same time, can’t he?’ said Dad as Ted, sometimes in tears, inserted rawl-plugs into brick as he made a shelf for Dad’s Oriental books, or sanded a door, or tiled the bathroom in exchange for Dad listening to him from an aluminium garden chair. ‘Don’t commit suicide until you’ve finished that floor, Ted,’ he’d say.

  Tonight Dad didn’t linger over Gin and Tonic. The room was still and silent. Dad went into a silence too, looking straight ahead of him. At first it was a little silence. But on and on it went, becoming a big silence: not
hing was followed by nothing, which was followed quite soon by more nothing as he sat there, his eyes fixed but full of care. My head started to sweat. Bubbles of laughter rose in my throat. I wondered if he were going to con them and sit there for an hour in silence (perhaps just popping out one mystical phrase such as, ‘Dried excrement sits on the pigeon’s head’) before putting his car coat on and tramping off back to his wife, having brought the Chislehurst bourgeoisie to an exquisite understanding of their inner emptiness. Would he dare?

  At last he started out on his rap, accompanying it this time with a rattling orchestra of hissing, pausing and gazing at the audience. And he hissed and paused and gazed at the audience so quietly the poor bastards had to lean forward to hear. But there was no slacking; their ears were open.

  ‘In our offices and places of work we love to tell others what to do. We denigrate them. We compare their work unfavourably with our own. We are always in competition. We show off and gossip. Our dream is of being well treated and we dream of treating others badly …’

  Behind Dad the door slowly opened. A couple stood there – a tall young man with short, spiky hair dyed white. He wore silver shoes and a shiny silver jacket. He looked like a spaceman. The girl with him was dowdy in comparison. She was about seventeen, wearing a long hippie smock, a skirt that trailed to the ground, and hair to her waist. The door closed and they were gone; no one was disturbed. Everyone listened to Dad, apart from Jean, who tossed her hair about as if to keep him away. When she glanced at Ted for a sign of support she received none: he was absorbed too.