The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  Finally the house was painted white, every room. ‘White is the only colour for a house,’ Eva announced. There were polished dark wood floors and green blinds. Heavy wrought-iron black fireplaces were installed once more, to Ted’s irritation, as he’d spent much of his working life tearing out fireplaces so women like my mother didn’t have to get up early on freezing mornings to make up the fire on their knees.

  When Auntie Jean slammed Uncle Ted’s tea on the table at the end of each day – a meat pie and chips, or a nice bit of rump steak and tartar sauce (he hadn’t the nerve yet to go vegetarian) – she sat opposite him with a stiff drink and demanded facts about Eva and Dad.

  ‘So what did you tell her last night, Uncle Ted?’ I’d ask him the next day as we worked. But what was there to tell? I couldn’t imagine Ted contemplating the nature of Eva and Dad’s taut happiness or telling of how they were always trying to pull each other’s tracksuit bottoms down and playing games like seeing who could throw a lolly-stick in a bin the most times out of ten.

  Perhaps he was more specific, speaking of what he usually saw when he came to work in the morning – Eva in her blue silk pyjamas and red robe shouting and laughing and giving orders to me for breakfast, and reading aloud from the papers. In the old days Mum and Dad took the Daily Mirror, that was all. Eva liked to sprinkle the house with about five papers and three magazines a day, skimming over Vogue and the New Statesman and the Daily Express before dumping the lot into the wastepaper basket beside the bed. Perhaps Ted told Jean of the walks the four of us took when Eva got tired of working; and the time Eva’s feet hurt and she hailed a cab – absolute Roman decadence for Dad, Ted and me. We took a two-hour tour of South London with Eva drinking Guinness and hanging out the window cheering as we passed down the Old Kent Road, stopping beside the famous site of Dr Lal’s surgery and the dance hall of love, where Mum met Dad and fell. But I doubted if Ted could say anything about all this joy and good times. It wouldn’t be what Jean would want to hear. It wouldn’t be of any use to her.

  Obviously Ted and I weren’t always around to scrutinize the intricate excitements of this new love, especially as Dad and Eva spent many evenings over the river in London proper, going to the theatre to see controversial plays, to German films or to lectures by Marxists, and to high-class parties. Eva’s old friend Shadwell was starting to make his way as a theatre director, working as an assistant at the Royal Shakespeare Company, running workshops on Beckett and putting on plays by Artaud and new writers at fringe venues. Eva helped Shadwell out by designing one of these productions and making the costumes. This she loved, and it led to her, Dad and Shadwell going to dinners and parties with all kinds of (fairly) important people – not the sort we knew in the suburbs, but the real thing: people who really did write and direct plays and not just talk about it. Eva wanted to do more of this; she discussed furnishings and house decoration with the better-off ones – they were always buying new places in the country, these people, and she knew how to make herself useful.

  How smart and glamorous they looked when they went off to London in the evenings, Dad in his suits and Eva with shawls and hats and expensive shoes and handbags. They glowed with happiness. And I’d walk around the empty house, or ring Mum for a chat; sometimes I’d lie on the floor in Charlie’s attic and wonder what he was doing and what kind of good time he was having. Dad and Eva would come back late, and I’d get up to see them and hear, as they undressed, who’d said what to whom about the latest play, or novel, or sex-scandal. Eva would drink champagne and watch television in bed, which shocked me, and at least once a week she said she was determined to take us all to London for good. And Dad would talk about the play and say how the writer wasn’t a patch on Chekhov. Chekhov was Dad’s favourite all-time writer, and he always said Chekhov’s plays and stories reminded him of India. I never understood this until I realized he meant that his characters’ uselessness, indolence and longing were typical of the adults he knew when he was a child.

  But one subject Jean and Ted must have discussed was money. It was even bothering me. We were haemorrhaging money on the house. Unlike Mum, who took scarcity for granted, Eva bought whatever she wanted. If she went into a shop and something caught her eye – a book of Matisse drawings, a record, Yin and Yang earrings, a Chinese hat – she bought it immediately. There was none of the agonizing and guilt over money we all went through. ‘I deserve it,’ she always said. ‘I was unhappy before with my husband, and I won’t be unhappy again.’ Nothing would stop her. When I mentioned this profligacy to her one day as we were painting side by side, she dismissed me, saying, ‘When we run out of money I’ll get us some more.’

  ‘Where from, Eva?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed, Karim, the world’s full of money! Haven’t you noticed it sloshing around the country?’

  ‘Yeah, I noticed it, Eva, but none of it’s sloshing against our house.’

  ‘When we need it I’ll draw some of it over here.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Dad, somewhat magisterially, when I went to him later and told him what she’d said, trying to make him see how demented it was. ‘You have to be in the correct frame of mind to draw masses of money to you.’

  Coming from someone who’d obviously never been in the right frame of mind magnetically to attach anything but his salary to himself – money Anwar always referred to as ‘unearned income’ – this seemed a bit rich. But love and Eva had unrolled the carpet of Dad’s confidence, along which he now ebulliently danced. They made me feel conservative.

  Dad started doing guru gigs again, once a week in the house, on Taoism and meditation, like before except that this time Eva insisted people paid to attend. Dad had a regular and earnest young crowd of head-bowers – students, psychologists, nurses, musicians – who adored him, some of whom rang and visited late at night in panic and fear, so dependent were they on his listening kindness. There was a waiting list to join his group. For these meetings I had to hoover the room, light the incense, greet the guests like a head waiter and serve them Indian sweets. Eva also insisted on Dad improving the service: she got him to consult esoteric library books early in the morning before work and asked him at breakfast, in a voice which must once have enquired of Charlie if he’d done his technical-drawing homework, ‘And what did you learn this morning?’

  Eva knew a man on the local paper, the same co-operative journalist who got Charlie on the front page of the Bromley and Kentish Times, and he interviewed Dad. Dad was photographed in his red waistcoat and Indian pyjamas sitting on a gold cushion. His commuter companions were impressed by this sudden fame, and Dad told me delightedly how they pointed him out to each other on Platform Two. To be recognized for some achievement in life lifted Dad immensely; before Eva he had begun to see himself as a failure and his life as a dismal thing. But the office, where he was an unelevated lazy Indian who had run away from his wife and children, there was disapproval from the clerks he worked with: there was mockery behind his back and in front of his face. On the picture in the newspaper a bubble was drawn protruding from his mouth saying, ‘Dark mystery of life solved by dark charlatan – at taxpayers’ expense.’ Dad talked about leaving his job. Eva said he could do what he liked; she would support them both – on love, presumably.

  I doubted whether Ted spoke to Auntie Jean of this, or of the other manifestations of love that filled our hours – of Eva, for example, imitating the numerous grunts, sighs, snorts and moans which punctuated Dad’s conversation. Ted and I discovered her once in the ripped-out kitchen running through a symphony of his noises like a proud mother reproducing the first words of a child. Dad and Eva could discuss the most trivial things, like the nature of the people Dad met on the train, for hours, until I had to shout at them, ‘What the fuck are you talking about!’ They’d look at me in surprise, so enthralled had they been. I suppose it didn’t matter what they said; the words themselves were a caress, an exchange of flowers and kisses. And Eva couldn’t leave the house without ret
urning and saying, ‘Hey, Haroon, I found something you might like’ – a book on Japanese gardens, a silk scarf, a Waterman’s pen, an Ella Fitzgerald record and, once, a kite.

  Watching this, I was developing my own angry theories of love. Surely love had to be something more generous than this high-spirited egotism-à-deux? In their hands love seemed a narrow-eyed, exclusive, selfish bastard, to enjoy itself at the expense of a woman who now lay in bed in Auntie Jean’s house, her life unconsidered. Mum’s wretchedness was the price Dad had chosen to pay for his happiness. How could he have done it?

  To be fair to him, it was a wretchedness that haunted him. He and Eva argued about this: she thought him indulgent. But how could it honestly be otherwise? There were occasions when we were watching TV or just eating when waves of regret rippled across his face. Regret and guilt and pain just overwhelmed him. How badly he’d treated Mum, he told us. How much she’d given him, cared for him, loved him, and now he was sitting in Eva’s house all cosy and radiant and looking forward to bed.

  ‘I feel like a criminal,’ he confessed innocently to Eva once, in a moment of forgetfulness, truth unfortunately sneaking through. ‘You know, someone living happily on money he’s committed grievous bodily harm to obtain.’ Eva couldn’t help herself crying out at him, and he couldn’t see how suddenly and cruelly he’d wounded her. She was being unreasonable.

  ‘But you don’t want her! You weren’t right for each other! You stultified each other. Weren’t you together long enough to know that?’

  ‘I could have done more,’ he said. ‘Made more effort to care. She didn’t deserve to be hurt so. I don’t believe in people leaving people.’

  ‘This guilt and regret will ruin us!’

  ‘It is part of me –’

  ‘Please, please, clear it out of your mind.’

  But how could he clear it out? It lay on him like water on a tin roof, rusting and rotting and corroding day after day. And though he was never to make such almost innocent remarks again, and though Eva and Dad continued to want to make love all the time, and I caught her giggling while she did idiotic things with him, like snipping the hair in his ears and nostrils with a huge pair of scissors, there were looks that escaped all possible policing, looks that made me think he was capable only of a corrupted happiness.

  Perhaps it was in the hope of siphoning off this water that she put the beautiful white Ted-decorated house on the market as soon as it was finished. She’d decided to take Dad away. She would look for a flat in London. The suburbs were over: they were a leaving place. Perhaps Eva thought a change of location would stop him thinking about Mum. Once the three of us were in Eva’s car in the High Street and Dad started to cry in the back. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It was her,’ he replied. ‘I thought I saw your mother go into a shop. And she was alone. I don’t want her to be alone.’

  Dad didn’t speak to Mum on the phone, and he didn’t see her, knowing that this was for the best in the long run. Yet he had photographs of her in every jacket pocket, and they fell out of books at the wrong time and upset Eva; and when he asked me about Mum, Dad and I had to go into another room, away from Eva, as if we were discussing something disgraceful.

  In packing up the house and moving us to London, Eva was also in pursuit of Charlie, who was only rarely around now. For him too, it was obviously true that our suburbs were a leaving place, the start of a life. After that you ratted or rotted. Charlie liked to sleep here and there, owning nothing, living nowhere permanent, screwing whoever he could; sometimes he even rehearsed and wrote songs. He lived this excess not yet in despair but in the excitement of increasing life. Occasionally I’d get up in the morning and there he’d be in the kitchen, eating furiously, as if he didn’t know where his next grub was coming from, as if each day was an adventure that could end anywhere. And then he’d be gone.

  Dad and Eva travelled to all Charlie’s gigs, at art colleges, in pubs and at small festivals in muddy fields, Eva writhing and cheering all through them, beer in hand. Dad blinked at the back, disturbed by the noise and the crowd, the wild St Virus dancing over young inert figures comatose in puddles of beer. He was disturbed by the grief, the stinking clothes, the bad trips, the fourteen-year-olds carted off in ambulances, the random unloving fucking and miserable escapes from family to squalid squats in Herne Hill. He’d much rather have advised a disciple – the earnest girl Fruitbat, perhaps, or her relentlessly smiling lover, Chogyam-Jones, who dressed in what looked like a Chinese carpet; their flattery was becoming necessary. But Dad accompanied Eva wherever she needed him. He was certainly enjoying life more than ever before, and when Eva finally announced that we were moving to London he admitted that it was the right thing to do.

  As we packed Charlie’s things in the attic, Dad and I talked about Charlie’s problem: the fact was he knew the band didn’t have an original sound. Their bauble was this striking singer-guitarist with exquisite cheekbones and girl’s eyelashes, who was being asked to model clothes for magazines but not to play at the Albert Hall. Failure made Charlie arrogant. He developed the habit of carrying a book of poetry in his pocket, which he might open at any time for a swig of the sublime. It was an enraging affectation, worthy of an Oxford undergraduate, especially as Charlie might do it in the middle of a conversation, as he had done recently at a college gig: the Union President was talking to him when Charlie’s hands reached into his side pocket, the book was extracted and opened, and the man’s eyes popped in disbelief as Charlie imbibed a beakerful of the warm South.

  What a confused boy he was. But from the start Eva had insisted he was talent itself, that he was beautiful and God had blown into his cock. He was Orson Welles – at least. Naturally, long knowledge of this divinity now pervaded his personality. He was proud, dismissive, elusive and selectively generous. He led others to assume that soon world-dazzling poetry would catapult from his head as it had from those of other English boys: Lennon, Jagger, Bowie. Like André Gide, who when young expected people to admire him for the books he would write in the future, Charlie came to love being appreciated in several high streets for his potential. But he earned this appreciation with his charm, which was often mistaken for ability. He could even charm himself, I reckoned.

  What was this charm? How had it seduced me for so long? I would have done anything for Charlie, and was, in fact, even now sorting out twenty years’ worth of his possessions. I wasn’t alone in this vulnerability to him. Many others would say yes to him before he asked for anything. How did it work? I’d observed the varieties of charm. There were those who were merely ravishing, and they were the least talented. Then there were those who were powerful, but lacked other virtues. But at least power was self-created, unlike exquisite cheekbones. Further on were those who were compelling to listen to; and above them were those who could make you laugh, too. Others made you marvel at their cleverness and knowledge: this was an achievement as well as an entertainment.

  Charlie had a pinch of all this; he was an all-round player. But his strength was his ability to make you marvel at yourself. The attention he gave you, when he gave you attention, was absolute. He knew how to look at you as if you were the only person who’d ever interested him. He asked about your life, and seemed to savour every moment of your conversation. He was excellent at listening, and did it without cynicism. The problem with this was that neurotics flocked to him. No one else would listen to them, but Charlie had done so once, say, and they couldn’t forget him; perhaps he’d fucked them too. But Eva had to keep them away from him, saying if it was very urgent they could leave a note. And he’d escape the house by climbing over the back fence while they waited out the front all day.

  After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie’s charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I a
dmired it tremendously. I made notes on his techniques, for they worked, especially with girls.

  Ultimately none of this was innocuous. No; Charlie was the cruellest and most lethal type of seducer. He extorted, not only sex, but love and loyalty, kindness and encouragement, before moving on. I too would gladly have exercised these master-skills, but there was one essential ingredient I lacked: Charlie’s strong will and his massively forceful desire to possess whatever it was that took his fancy. Make no mistake, he was unusually ambitious. But he was getting nowhere and felt frustrated. He could see that it was getting late, and ultimately he was only in a rotten rock ’n’ roll band called Mustn’t Grumble which sounded like Hawkwind.

  Charlie rarely saw his own father when he’d been a patient and sad character living with his mother. But when Charlie was staying at Eva’s house he spent hours with my father, to whom he told the truth. Together they divined for Charlie’s talent. Dad drew him maps to the unconscious; he suggested routes and speeds, clothing for the journey and how to sit at the wheel when approaching the dangerous interior. And for days and days, under the full moon of high expectation, Charlie laboured to wrench a fragment of beauty from his soul – in my view (and to my relief), to no avail. The songs were still shit.

  It took me some time to work this out, for I still had such sympathy for Charlie that I couldn’t look at him coolly. But when I had recognized his weakness – his desire to join a club called Genius – I knew I had him. If I wanted I could take some revenge on him, which would also – some puny power – be a bitter reproach to my own pointless life.

  Sometimes I told Eva I wanted to be a photographer or an actor, or perhaps a journalist, preferably a foreign correspondent in a war zone, Cambodia or Belfast. I knew I hated authority and being ordered around. I liked working with Ted and Eva, and they let me come and go more or less as I wished. But my aim was to join Mustn’t Grumble as a rhythm guitarist. I could play a little, after all. When I put this to Charlie he almost choked with laughter. ‘But there is a job that’s just right for you,’ he said.