The Buddha of Suburbia Read online

  HANIF KUREISHI

  The Buddha of Suburbia

  Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE: In the Suburbs

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO: In the City

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  In the Suburbs

  CHAPTER ONE

  My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. Or perhaps it was being brought up in the suburbs that did it. Anyway, why search the inner room when it’s enough to say that I was looking for trouble, any kind of movement, action and sexual interest I could find, because things were so gloomy, so slow and heavy, in our family, I don’t know why. Quite frankly, it was all getting me down and I was ready for anything.

  Then one day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen.

  On this day my father hurried home from work not in a gloomy mood. His mood was high, for him. I could smell the train on him as he put his briefcase away behind the front door and took off his raincoat, chucking it over the bottom of the banisters. He grabbed my fleeing little brother, Allie, and kissed him; he kissed my mother and me with enthusiasm, as if we’d recently been rescued from an earthquake. More normally, he handed Mum his supper: a packet of kebabs and chapatis so greasy their paper wrapper had disintegrated. Next, instead of flopping into a chair to watch the television news and wait for Mum to put the warmed-up food on the table, he went into their bedroom, which was downstairs next to the living room. He quickly stripped to his vest and underpants.

  ‘Fetch the pink towel,’ he said to me.

  I did so. Dad spread it on the bedroom floor and fell on to his knees. I wondered if he’d suddenly taken up religion. But no, he placed his arms beside his head and kicked himself into the air.

  ‘I must practise,’ he said in a stifled voice.

  ‘Practise for what?’ I said reasonably, watching him with interest and suspicion.

  ‘They’ve called me for the damn yoga Olympics,’ he said. He easily became sarcastic, Dad.

  He was standing on his head now, balanced perfectly. His stomach sagged down. His balls and prick fell foward in his pants. The considerable muscles in his arms swelled up and he breathed energetically. Like many Indians he was small, but Dad was also elegant and handsome, with delicate hands and manners; beside him most Englishmen looked like clumsy giraffes. He was broad and strong too: when young he’d been a boxer and fanatical chest-expander. He was as proud of his chest as our next-door neighbours were of their kitchen range. At the sun’s first smile he would pull off his shirt and stride out into the garden with a deckchair and a copy of the New Statesman. He told me that in India he shaved his chest regularly so its hair would sprout more luxuriantly in years to come. I reckoned that his chest was the one area in which he’d been forward-thinking.

  Soon, my mother, who was in the kitchen as usual, came into the room and saw Dad practising for the yoga Olympics. He hadn’t done this for months, so she knew something was up. She wore an apron with flowers on it and wiped her hands repeatedly on a tea towel, a souvenir from Woburn Abbey. Mum was a plump and unphysical woman with a pale round face and kind brown eyes. I imagined that she considered her body to be an inconvenient object surrounding her, as if she were stranded on an unexplored desert island. Mostly she was a timid and compliant person, but when exasperated she could get nervily aggressive, like now.

  ‘Allie, go to bed,’ she said sharply to my brother, as he poked his head around the door. He was wearing a net to stop his hair going crazy when he slept. She said to Dad, ‘Oh God, Haroon, all the front of you’s sticking out like that and everyone can see!’ She turned to me. ‘You encourage him to be like this. At least pull the curtains!’

  ‘It’s not necessary, Mum. There isn’t another house that can see us for a hundred yards – unless they’re watching through binoculars.’

  ‘That’s exactly what they are doing,’ she said.

  I pulled the curtains on the back garden. The room immediately seemed to contract. Tension rose. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house now. I always wanted to be somewhere else, I don’t know why.

  When Dad spoke his voice came out squashed and thin.

  ‘Karim, read to me in a very clear voice from the yoga book.’

  I ran and fetched Dad’s preferred yoga book – Yoga for Women, with pictures of healthy women in black leotards – from among his other books on Buddhism, Sufism, Confucianism and Zen which he had bought at the Oriental bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. I squatted beside him with the book. He breathed in, held the breath, breathed out and once more held the breath. I wasn’t a bad reader, and I imagined myself to be on the stage of the Old Vic as I declaimed grandly, ‘Salamba Sirsasana revives and maintains a spirit of youthfulness, an asset beyond price. It is wonderful to know that you are ready to face up to life and extract from it all the real joy it has to offer.’

  He grunted his approval at each sentence and opened his eyes, seeking out my mother, who had closed hers.

  I read on. ‘This position also prevents loss of hair and reduces any tendency to greyness.’

  That was the coup: greyness would be avoided. Satisfied, Dad stood up and put his clothes on.

  ‘I feel better. I can feel myself coming old, you see.’ He softened. ‘By the way, Margaret, coming to Mrs Kay’s tonight?’ She shook her head. ‘Come on, sweetie. Let’s go out together and enjoy ourselves, eh?’

  ‘But it isn’t me that Eva wants to see,’ Mum said. ‘She ignores me. Can’t you see that? She treats me like dog’s muck, Haroon. I’m not Indian enough for her. I’m only English.’

  ‘I know you’re only English, but you could wear a sari.’ He laughed. He loved to tease, but Mum wasn’t a satisfactory teasing victim, not realizing you were supposed to laugh when mocked.

  ‘Special occasion, too,’ said Dad, ‘tonight.’

  This was obviously what he’d been leading up to. He waited for us to ask him about it.

  ‘What is it, Dad?’

  ‘You know, they’ve so kindly asked me to speak on one or two aspects of Oriental philosophy.’

  Dad spoke quickly and then tried to hide his pride in this honour, this proof of his importance, by busily tucking his vest in. This was my opportunity.

  ‘I’ll come with you to Eva’s if you want me to. I was going to go to the chess club, but I’ll force myself to miss it if you like.’

  I said this as innocently as a vicar, not wanting to stymie things by seeming too eager. I’d discovered in life that if you’re too eager others tend to get less eager. And if you’re less eager it tends to make others more eager. So the more eager I was the less eager I seemed.

  Dad pulled up his vest and slapped his bare st
omach rapidly with both hands. The noise was loud and unattractive and it filled our small house like pistol shots.

  ‘OK,’ Dad said to me, ‘you get changed, Karim.’ He turned to Mum. He wanted her to be with him, to witness him being respected by others. ‘If only you’d come, Margaret.’

  I charged upstairs to get changed. From my room, the walls decorated ceiling to floor with newspapers, I could hear them arguing downstairs. Would he persuade her to come? I hoped not. My father was more frivolous when my mother wasn’t around. I put on one of my favourite records, Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’, to get me in the mood for the evening.

  It took me several months to get ready: I changed my entire outfit three times. At seven o’clock I came downstairs in what I knew were the right clothes for Eva’s evening. I wore turquoise flared trousers, a blue and white flower-patterned see-through shirt, blue suede boots with Cuban heels, and a scarlet Indian waistcoat with gold stitching around the edges. I’d pulled on a headband to control my shoulder-length frizzy hair. I’d washed my face in Old Spice.

  Dad waited at the door for me, his hands in his pockets. He wore a black polo-neck sweater, a black imitation-leather jacket and grey Marks and Spencer cords. When he saw me he suddenly looked agitated.

  ‘Say goodbye to your mum,’ he said.

  In the living room Mum was watching Steptoe and Son and taking a bite from a Walnut Whip, which she replaced on the pouf in front of her. This was her ritual: she allowed herself a nibble only once every fifteen minutes. It made her glance constantly between the clock and the TV. Sometimes she went berserk and scoffed the whole thing in two minutes flat. ‘I deserve my Whip,’ she’d say defensively.

  When she saw me she too became tense.

  ‘Don’t show us up, Karim,’ she said, continuing to watch TV. ‘You look like Danny La Rue.’

  ‘What about Auntie Jean, then?’ I said. ‘She’s got blue hair.’

  ‘It’s dignified for older women to have blue hair,’ Mum said.

  Dad and I got out of the house as quickly as we could. At the end of the street, while we were waiting for the 227 bus, a teacher of mine with one eye walked past us and recognized me. Cyclops said, ‘Don’t forget, a university degree is worth £2,000 a year for life!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad. ‘He’ll go to university, oh yes. He’ll be a leading doctor in London. My father was a doctor. Medicine is in our whole family.’

  It wasn’t far, about four miles, to the Kays’, but Dad would never have got there without me. I knew all the streets and every bus route.

  Dad had been in Britain since 1950 – over twenty years – and for fifteen of those years he’d lived in the South London suburbs. Yet still he stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat, and asked questions like, ‘Is Dover in Kent?’ I’d have thought, as an employee of the British Government, as a Civil Service clerk, even as badly paid and insignificant a one as him, he’d just have to know these things. I sweated with embarrassment when he halted strangers in the street to ask directions to places that were a hundred yards away in an area where he’d lived for almost two decades.

  But his naïveté made people protective, and women were drawn by his innocence. They wanted to wrap their arms around him or something, so lost and boyish did he look at times. Not that this was entirely uncontrived, or unexploited. When I was small and the two of us sat in Lyon’s Cornerhouse drinking milkshakes, he’d send me like a messenger pigeon to women at other tables and have me announce, ‘My daddy wants to give you a kiss.’

  Dad taught me to flirt with everyone I met, girls and boys alike, and I came to see charm, rather than courtesy or honesty, or even decency, as the primary social grace. And I even came to like people who were callous or vicious provided they were interesting. But I was sure Dad hadn’t used his own gentle charisma to sleep with anyone but Mum, while married.

  Now, though, I suspected that Mrs Eva Kay – who had met Dad a year ago at a ‘writing for pleasure’ class in an upstairs room at the King’s Head in Bromley High Street – wanted to chuck her arms around him. Plain prurience was one of the reasons I was so keen to go to her place, and embarrassment one of the reasons why Mum refused. Eva Kay was forward; she was brazen; she was wicked.

  On the way to Eva’s I persuaded Dad to stop off at the Three Tuns in Beckenham. I got off the bus; Dad had no choice but to follow me. The pub was full of kids dressed like me, both from my school and from other schools in the area. Most of the boys, so nondescript during the day, now wore cataracts of velvet and satin, and bright colours; some were in bedspreads and curtains. The little groovers talked esoterically of Syd Barrett. To have an elder brother who lived in London and worked in fashion, music or advertising was an inestimable advantage at school. I had to study the Melody Maker and New Musical Express to keep up.

  I led Dad by the hand to the back room. Kevin Ayers, who had been with Soft Machine, was sitting on a stool whispering into a microphone. Two French girls with him kept falling all over the stage. Dad and I had a pint of bitter each. I wasn’t used to alcohol and became drunk immediately. Dad became moody.

  ‘Your mother upsets me,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t join in things. It’s only my damn effort keeping this whole family together. No wonder I need to keep my mind blank in constant effortless meditation.’

  I suggested helpfully, ‘Why don’t you get divorced?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t like it.’

  But divorce wasn’t something that would occur to them. In the suburbs people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness. It was all familiarity and endurance: security and safety were the reward of dullness. I clenched my fists under the table. I didn’t want to think about it. It would be years before I could get away to the city, London, where life was bottomless in its temptations.

  ‘I’m terrified about tonight,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t know anything. I’m going to be a fuck-up.’

  The Kays were much better off than us, and had a bigger house, with a little drive and garage and car. Their place stood on its own in a tree-lined road just off Beckenham High Street. It also had bay windows, an attic, a greenhouse, three bedrooms and central heating.

  I didn’t recognize Eva Kay when she greeted us at the door, and for a moment I thought we’d turned up at the wrong place. The only thing she wore was a full-length, multi-coloured kaftan, and her hair was down, and out, and up. She’d darkened her eyes with kohl so she looked like a panda. Her feet were bare, the toenails painted alternately green and red.

  When the front door was safely shut and we’d moved into the darkness of the hall, Eva hugged Dad and kissed him all over his face, including his lips. This was the first time I’d seen him kissed with interest. Surprise, surprise, there was no sign of Mr Kay. When Eva moved, when she turned to me, she was a kind of human crop-sprayer, pumping out a plume of Oriental aroma. I was trying to think if Eva was the most sophisticated person I’d ever met, or the most pretentious, when she kissed me on the lips too. My stomach tightened. Then, holding me at arm’s length as if I were a coat she was about to try on, she looked me all over and said, ‘Karim Amir, you are so exotic, so original! It’s such a contribution! It’s so you!’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Kay. If I’d had more notice, I’d have dressed up.’

  ‘And with your father’s wonderful but crushing wit, too!’

  I felt that I was being watched, and when I looked up I saw that Charlie, her son, who was at my school in the sixth form and almost a year older, was sitting at the top of the stairs, partly concealed by the banisters. He was a boy upon whom nature had breathed such beauty – his nose was so straight, his cheeks so hollow, his lips such rosebuds – that people were afraid to approach him, and he was often alone. Men and boys got erections just being in the same room as him; for others the same effect was had by being in the same country. Women sighed in his presence, and teachers bristled. A few days ago, during the school assembly
, with the staff sitting like a flock of crows on the stage, the headmaster was expatiating on Vaughan Williams. We were about to hear his Fantasia on Green-sleeves. As Yid, the religious-education master, sanctimoniously lowered the needle on to the dusty record, Charlie, standing along the row from me, started to bob and shake his head and whisper, ‘Dig it, dig it, you heads.’ ‘What’s going down?’ we said to each other. We soon found out, for as the headmaster put his head back, the better to savour Vaughan Williams’s mellow sounds, the opening hisses of ‘Come Together’ were rattling the speakers. As Yid pushed his way past the other teachers to re-take the record deck, half the school was mouthing the words ‘… groove it up slowly … he got ju-ju eyeballs … he got hair down to his knees …’ For this, Charlie was caned in front of us all.

  Now he lowered his head one thirty-secondth of an inch in acknowledgement of me. On the way to Eva’s I’d deliberately excluded him from my mind. I hadn’t believed that he would be at home, which was why I’d gone into the Three Tuns, in case he’d popped in for an early-evening drink.

  ‘Glad to see you, man,’ he said, coming slowly downstairs.

  He embraced Dad and called him by his first name. What confidence and style he had, as always. When he followed us into the living room I was trembling with excitement. It wasn’t like this at the chess-club.

  Mum often said Eva was a vile show-off and big-mouth, and even I recognized that Eva was slightly ridiculous, but she was the only person over thirty I could talk to. She was inevitably good-tempered, or she was being passionate about something. At least she didn’t put armour on her feelings like the rest of the miserable undead around us. She liked the Rolling Stones’s first album. The Third Ear Band sent her. She did Isadora Duncan dances in our front room and then told me who Isadora Duncan was and why she’d liked scarves. Eva had been to the last concert the Cream played. In the playground at school before we went into our classrooms Charlie had told us of her latest outrage: she’d brought him and his girlfriend bacon and eggs in bed and asked them if they’d enjoyed making love.