The Buddha of Suburbia

by Hanif Kureishi

  This was too much. Changez looked at me anxiously.

  ‘Exciting, huh?’ I said.

  We sat there, talking it over. He would go with her. She couldn’t get out of it now.

  As I watched Jamila I thought what a terrific person she’d become. She was low today, and she was often scornful of me anyway, the supercilious bitch, but I couldn’t help seeing that there was in her a great depth of will, of delight in the world, and much energy for love. Her feminism, the sense of self and fight it engendered, the schemes and plans she had, the relationships – which she desired to take this form and not that form – the things she had made herself know, and all the understanding this gave, seemed to illuminate her tonight as she went forward, an Indian woman, to live a useful life in white England.

  As I had some spare time before rehearsals started again I borrowed Ted’s van and helped install Jamila and the Dildo Killer in their new house. Turning up with a truckful of paperbacks, the works of Conan Doyle and various sex-aids, I was surprised to see a big, double-fronted and detached place standing back from the main road, from which it was concealed by a thick hedge. There were rotting tarpaulins, old baths, disintegrating free magazines and sodden debris all over the garden; the stately house itself was cracking like an old painting. A pipe poured water down the walls. And three local skinheads, as respectable as Civil Servants, though one had a spider’s web tattooed on his face, stood outside and jeered.

  Inside, the place was full of the most eager and hard-working vegetarians I’d ever seen, earnest and humorous, with degrees in this and that, discussing Cage and Schumacher as they dragged out the cistern in their blue dungarees and boiler suits. Changez stood in front of a banner which read ‘America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?’ He looked like Oliver Hardy in a roomful of Paul Newmans, and was as frightened as a new boy at school. When someone hurried past him and said, ‘Civilization has taken a wrong turn,’ Changez looked as if he’d rather be anywhere than Utopia. I saw no tarot cards, though someone did say they were intending to ‘make love to the garden’. I left Changez there and rushed home to add new touches to his character.

  There were few jobs I relished as much as the invention of Changez/Tariq. With a beer and notebook on my desk, and concentrating for the first time since childhood on something that absorbed me, my thoughts raced: one idea pulled another behind it, like conjurer’s handkerchiefs. I uncovered notions, connections, initiatives I didn’t even know were present in my mind. I became more energetic and alive as I brushed in new colours and shades. I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through. This was worth doing, this had meaning, this added up the elements of my life. And it was this that Pyke had taught me: what a creative life could be. So despite what he’d done to me, my admiration for him continued. I didn’t blame him for anything; I was prepared to pay the price for his being a romantic, an experimenter. He had to pursue what he wanted to know and follow his feelings wherever they went, even as far as my arse and my girlfriend’s cunt.

  When I went back to the commune a few weeks later, to gather more ideas for Changez/Tariq and to see how Changez had settled in, I found the front garden had been cleared. There were piles of scaffolding ready to be erected around the house. There would be a new roof. Uncle Ted was advising on the renovation and had been over several times to help out.

  I enjoyed seeing the vegetarians and their comrades working together, even if they did call each other comrade. I liked to stay late and drink with them, though they did go in for organic wine. And when he could persuade them to take off Nashville Skyline, Simon – the radical lawyer with short hair, tie and no beard, who seemed to run the place – played Charlie Mingus and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He told me what jazz I might like because, to be frank, I’d become deadly bored with the new music I was hearing.

  As we sat there they talked about how to construct this equitable society. I said nothing, for fear of appearing stupid; but I knew we had to have it. Unlike Terry’s bunch, this lot didn’t want power. The problem, said Simon, was how to overthrow, not those presently in power, but the whole principle of power-over.

  Going home to Eva’s, or back to Eleanor’s for the night, I wished I could have stayed with Jamila and Changez. The newest ideas were passing through their house, I thought. But we were rehearsing a play, and Louise Lawrence had managed to compose a third of it. The opening was only weeks away. There was plenty to be done, and I was frightened.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was while watching Pyke as he rehearsed in his familiar blue tracksuit, the tight bottoms of which hugged his arse like a cushion cover and outlined his little dick as he moved around the room, that I first began to suspect I’d been seriously let down. That prick, which had fucked me up the arse while Marlene cheered us on as if we were all-in wrestlers – and while Eleanor fixed herself a drink – had virtually ruptured me. Now, I began to be certain, the fucker was fucking me in other ways. I would look into it.

  I watched him closely. He was a good director, because he liked other people, even when they were difficult. (He saw difficult people as puzzles to be solved.) Actors liked him because he knew that even they could discover for themselves the right way through a part if he gave them room. This flattered them, and actors love flattery. Pyke never got angry or shoved you in a direction you didn’t want to go; his manipulations were subtle and effective. All the same, these were painful days for me. The others, especially Carol, often became angry, because I was slower and more stupid than they were. ‘Karim’s got all the right qualifications for an actor,’ Carol said. ‘No technique, no experience, no presence.’

  So Pyke had to go over every line and move of the first scene with me. My greatest fear was that when the final script was delivered Lawrence and Pyke would have allowed me only a small part, and I’d be hanging around back-stage like a spare prick. But when Louise delivered the play I saw to my surprise that I had a cracker of a part. I couldn’t wait to exhibit it.

  What a strange business this acting is, Pyke said; you are trying to convince people that you’re someone else, that this is not-me. The way to do it is this, he said: when in character, playing not-me, you have to be yourself. To make your not-self real you have to steal from your authentic self. A false stroke, a wrong note, anything pretended, and to the audience you are as obvious as a Catholic naked in a mosque. The closer you play to yourself the better. Paradox of paradoxes: to be someone else successfully you must be yourself! This I learned!

  We went north in winter, touring the play around studio theatres and arts centres. We stayed in freezing hotels where the owners regarded their guests as little more than burglars, sleeping in unheated rooms with toilets up the hall, places without telephones where they refused to serve breakfast after eight. ‘The way the English sleep and eat is enough to make you want to emigrate to Italy,’ Eleanor said every day at breakfast. For Carol, all that mattered was playing in London; the north was Siberia, the people animals.

  I was playing an immigrant fresh from a small Indian town. I insisted on assembling the costume myself: I knew I could do something apt. I wore high white platform boots, wide cherry flares that stuck to my arse like sweetpaper and flapped around my ankles, and a spotted shirt with a wide ‘Concorde’ collar flattened over my jacket lapels.

  At the first performance, in front of an audience of twenty, as soon as I walked out on stage, farting with fear, there was laughter, uncertain at first, then from the belly as they took me in. As I continued, gusts of pleasure lifted me. I was a wretched and comic character. The other actors had the loaded lines, the many-syllabled political analysis, the flame-throwing attacks on pusillanimous Labour governments, but it was me the audience warmed to. They laughed at my jokes,
which concerned the sexual ambition and humiliation of an Indian in England. Unfortunately, my major scenes were with Carol, who, after the first performance, started to look not-nicely across the stage at me. After the third performance, in the dressing room, she yelled, ‘I can’t act with this person – he’s a pratt, not an actor!’ And she ran to ring Pyke in London.

  Matthew had driven back to London that afternoon. He’d gone all the way from Manchester to London to sleep with a brilliant woman barrister who’d defended bombers and freedom fighters. ‘This is a superb opportunity, Karim,’ he told me. ‘After all, I’ve got the hang of the police, but the formal law, that pillar of our society, I want it beside me, on my very pillow.’ And off he sped, leaving us to audiences and rain.

  Perhaps Pyke was in bed discussing the fate of the Bradford Eight or the Leeds Six when Carol rang him. I imagined him being careful in his love-making with the barrister; he’d think of everything – champagne, hash, flowers – to ensure she thought highly and passionately of him. And now Carol was saying persuasively down the phone that I seemed to be in a different play to the others, a farce, perhaps. But, like most talented people who are successful with the public, Pyke was blessed with a vulgar streak. He supported me. ‘Karim is the key to this play,’ he told Carol.

  When we arrived in London after visiting ten cities, we started to re-rehearse and prepare for previews at an arts centre in West London, not far from Eva’s flat. It was a fashionable place, where the latest in international dance, sculpture, cinema and theatre was displayed. It was run by two highly strung aesthetes who had a purity and severity of taste that made Pyke look rococo in comparison. I sat around with them in the restaurant, eating bean-shoots and listening to talk of the new dance and an innovative form called ‘performance’. I saw one ‘performance’. This involved a man in a boiler suit pulling a piece of Camembert across a vast floor by a piece of string. Behind him two boys in black played guitars. It was called Cheesepiece. After, I heard people say, ‘I liked the original image.’ It was all an education. I’d never heard such venom expressed on subjects which I’d only ever considered lightly. To the aesthetes, as with Pyke (but much worse), the performance of an actor or the particular skill of a writer whose work I’d seen with Eleanor and thought of as ‘promising’ or ‘a bit jejune’, was as important as earthquakes or marriages. ‘May they die of cancer,’ they said of these authors. I also imagined they’d want to get together with Pyke and discuss Stanislavsky and Artaud and all, but they hated each other’s guts. The two aesthetes barely mentioned the man whose show was rehearsing in their theatre, except in terms like ‘that man who irons his jeans’ or ‘Caliban’. The two aesthetes were assisted by a fleet of exquisitely dressed middle-class girls whose fathers were television tycoons. It was an odd set-up: this was the subsidized theatre, and these were radical people, but it was as if everyone – the people who worked there, journalists, fans of the company, other directors and actors – wanted the answer to only one question: Is this play going to be successful or not?

  To escape the mounting tension and anxiety, one Sunday morning I went to visit Changez at his new place. They were great people, the vegetarians, but I was nervous of how they would react when they found that Changez was a fat, useless bum, and that they would have to carry him.

  At first I didn’t recognize him. It was partly the environment in which he was now living. Old Bubble was sitting in the all-pine communal kitchen surrounded by plants and piles of radical newspapers. On the wall were posters advertising demonstrations against South Africa and Rhodesia, meetings, and holidays in Cuba and Albania. Changez had had his hair cut; his Flaubert moustache had been plucked from under his nose; and he was wearing a large grey boiler suit buttoned up to the throat. ‘You look like a motor-mechanic,’ I said. He beamed back at me. Among other things he was pleased that the assault case against him had been dropped, once it was certain that Anwar had died of a heart attack. ‘I’m going to make the most of my life now, yaar,’ he said.

  Sitting at the table with Changez were Simon and a young, fair-haired girl, Sophie, who was eating muffins. She’d just returned from selling anarchist newspapers outside a factory.

  When Changez offered, to my surprise, to go out to the shops for milk, I asked them how he was doing, whether everything was all right. Was he coping? I was aware that my tone of voice indicated that I thought of Changez as a minor mental patient. But Simon and Sophie liked Changez. Sophie referred to him once as a ‘disabled immigrant’, which, I suppose, the Dildo Killer was. Maybe this gave him credence in the house. He’d obviously had the sense not to talk at length about being from a family who owned racehorses. And he must have cut the many stories he used to tell me about the number of servants he’d been through, and his analysis of the qualities he reckoned were essential in a good servant, cook and sweeper.

  ‘I love the communal life, Karim,’ Changez said, when we went for a walk later that day. ‘The family atmosphere is here without nagging aunties. Except for the meetings, yaar. They have them every five minutes. We have to sit time after time and discuss this thing and that thing, the garden, the cooking, the condition of England, the condition of Chile, the condition of Czechoslovakia. This is democracy gone berserk, yaar. Still, it’s bloody amazing and everything, the nudity you see daily.’

  ‘What nudity?’

  ‘Full nudity. Complete nudity.’

  ‘What kind of full and complete nudity?’

  ‘There are five girls here, and only Simon and I representing the gentlemen’s side. And the girls, on the communist principle of having no shame to hide, go completely without clothes, their breasts without brassieres! Their bushes without concealment!’

  ‘Christ –’

  ‘But I can’t stay there –’

  ‘What, after all that? Why not, Bubble? Look what I’ve fixed you up with! Think of the breasts without brassieres over breakfast!’

  ‘Karim, it breaks my heart, yaar. But Jamila has started to yell with this nice boy, Simon. They are in the next room. Every night I hear them shaking the bed around. It blasts my bloody ears to Kingdom Coming.’

  ‘That was bound to happen one day, Changez. I’ll buy you some ear plugs if you like.’ And I giggled to myself at the thought of Changez listening to the love of his life being shafted next door night after night. ‘Or why don’t you change rooms?’

  He shook his head. ‘I like to be near her. I like to hear her moving around. I am familiar with every sound she makes. At this moment she is sitting down. At that moment she is reading. I like to know.’

  ‘You know, Changez, love can be very much like stupidity.’

  ‘Love is love, and it is eternal. You don’t have romantic love in the West any more. You just sing about it on the radio. No one really loves, here.’

  ‘What about Eva and Dad?’ I countered jauntily. ‘That’s romantic, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s adultery. That’s pure evil.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  I was pleased to find Changez so cheerful. He seemed glad to have escaped lethargy into this new life, a life I’d never have imagined suiting him.

  As we loafed around I saw how derelict and poor this end of the city – South London – really was, compared with the London I was living in. Here the unemployed were walking the streets with nowhere else to go, the men in dirty coats and the women in old shoes without stockings. As we walked and looked Changez talked of how much he liked English people, how polite and considerate they were. ‘They’re gentlemen. Especially the women. They don’t try to do you down all the time like the Indians do.’

  These gentlemen had unhealthy faces; their skin was grey. The housing estates looked like makeshift prison camps; dogs ran around; rubbish blew about; there was graffiti. Small trees had been planted with protective wire netting around them, but they’d all been snapped off anyway. The shops sold only inadequate and badly made clothes. Everything looked cheap and shabby, the worse for trying to be
flash. Changez must have been thinking the same things as me. He said, ‘Perhaps I feel at home here because it reminds me of Calcutta.’

  When I said it was time for me to go, Changez’s mood changed. From broodiness he snapped into businesslike attack, as if he’d worked out in advance what he wanted to say, and now was the time to deliver it.

  ‘Now, tell me, Karim, you’re not using my own character in your play, are you?’

  ‘No, Changez. I told you already.’

  ‘Yes, you laid your word of honour on the line.’

  ‘Yes, I did. Right?’

  He thought for a few seconds. ‘But what does it stand for, ultimately, your word of honour?’

  ‘Everything, man, every fucking thing, for God’s sake! Christ, Changez, you’re becoming fucking self-righteous, aren’t you?’

  He looked at me sternly, as if he didn’t believe me, the bastard, and off he went to waddle around South London.

  A few days later, after we’d started previewing the play in London, Jamila rang to tell me that Changez had been attacked under a railway bridge when coming back from a Shinko session. It was a typical South London winter evening – silent, dark, cold, foggy, damp – when this gang jumped out on Changez and called him a Paki, not realizing he was Indian. They planted their feet all over him and started to carve the initials of the National Front into his stomach with a razor blade. They fled because Changez let off the siren of his Muslim warrior’s call, which could be heard in Buenos Aires. Naturally he was shocked; shit-scared and shaken up, Jamila said. But he hadn’t been slow to take advantage of the kindness shown him by everyone. Sophie was now bringing him his breakfast in bed, and he’d been let off various cooking and washing-up duties. The police, who were getting sick of Changez, had suggested that he’d laid down under the railway bridge and inflicted the wound on himself, to discredit them.