The Buddha of Suburbia Read online

  ‘Make up a bed for me in the front room,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep next to that man stinking of sick and puking all night.’

  When I’d made the bed and she’d got herself into it – and it was far too narrow and short and uncomfortable for her – I told her something.

  ‘I’ll never be getting married, OK?’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, turning over and shutting her eyes.

  I didn’t think she’d get much sleep on that couch, and I felt sorry for her. But she angered me, the way she punished herself. Why couldn’t she be stronger? Why wouldn’t she fight back? I would be strong myself, I determined. That night I didn’t go to bed but sat up listening to Radio Caroline. I’d glimpsed a world of excitement and possibility which I wanted to hold in my mind and expand as a template for the future.

  For a week after that evening Dad sulked and didn’t speak, though sometimes he pointed, as at salt and pepper. Sometimes this gesticulation got him into some complicated Marcel Marceau mime language. Visitors from other planets looking in through the window would have thought we were playing a family guessing game as my brother, Mum and I gathered around Dad yelling clues to each other as he tried, without the compromise of friendly words, to show us that the gutters had become blocked with leaves, that the side of the house was getting damp and he wanted Allie and me to climb up a ladder and fix it, with Mum holding the ladder. At supper we sat eating our curled-up beefburgers, chips and fish fingers in silence. Once Mum burst into tears and banged the table with the flat of her hand. ‘My life is terrible, terrible!’ she cried. ‘Doesn’t anyone understand?’

  We looked at her in surprise for a moment, before carrying on with our food. Mum did the washing-up as usual and no one helped her. After tea we all dispersed as soon as possible. My brother Amar, four years younger than me, called himself Allie to avoid racial trouble. He always went to bed as early as he could, taking with him fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s and Queen, and anything European he could lay his hands on. In bed he wore a tiny pair of red silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket he got at a jumble sale, and his hairnet. ‘What’s wrong with looking good?’ he’d say, going upstairs. In the evenings I often went to the park to sit in the piss-stinking shed and smoke with the other boys who’d escaped from home.

  Dad had firm ideas about the division of labour between men and women. Both my parents worked: Mum had got a job in a shoe shop in the High Street to finance Allie, who had decided to become a ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school. But Mum did all the housework and the cooking. At lunchtime she shopped, and every evening she prepared the meal. After this she watched television until ten-thirty. The TV was her only area of absolute authority. The unspoken rule of the house was that she always watched what she wanted; if any of us wanted to watch anything else, we had no chance at all. With her last energy of the day she’d throw such a fit of anger, self-pity and frustration that no one dared interfere with her. She’d die for Steptoe and Son,Candid Camera and The Fugitive.

  If there were only repeats or political programmes on TV, she liked to draw. Her hand flew: she’d been to art school. She had drawn us, our heads, three to a page, for years. Three selfish men, she called us. She said she’d never liked men because men were torturers. It wasn’t women who turned on the gas at Auschwitz, according to her. Or bombed Vietnam. During this time of Dad’s silence she drew a lot, putting her pad away behind the chair, with her knitting, her childhood diary of the war (‘Air-raid tonight’) and her Catherine Cookson novels. I’d often tried to oppress her into reading proper books like Tender is the Night and The Dharma Bums, but she always said the print was too small.

  One afternoon, a few days into the Great Sulk, I made myself a peanut-butter sandwich, put the Who’s Live at Leeds under the needle at full volume – the better to savour Townshend’s power chords on ‘Summertime Blues’ – and opened Mum’s sketch pad. I knew I would find something. I flipped through the pages until I came to a drawing of my father naked.

  Standing next to him, slightly taller, was Eva, also naked, complete with one large breast. They were holding hands like frightened children, and faced us without vanity or embellishment, as if to say: This is all that we are, these are our bodies. They looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. How could Mum be so objective? How did she even know they’d fucked?

  No secrets were safe from me. I didn’t restrict my investigations to Mum. That’s how I knew that although Dad’s lungs were quiet his eyes were well exercised. I peeped into his briefcase, and pulled out books by Lu Po, Lao Tzu and Christmas Humphreys.

  I knew that the most interesting thing that could happen in the house would be if the phone rang for Dad, thereby testing his silence. So when it rang late one evening at ten-thirty, I made sure I got there first. Hearing Eva’s voice, I realized that I too had been very keen to hear from her again.

  She said, ‘Hallo, my sweet and naughty boy, where’s your dad? Why haven’t you called me? What are you reading?’

  ‘What do you recommend, Eva?’

  ‘You’d better come and see me, and I’ll fill your head with purple ideas.’

  ‘When can I come?’

  ‘Don’t even ask – just show.’

  I fetched Dad, who just happened to be standing behind the bedroom door in his pyjamas. He snatched up the receiver. I couldn’t believe he was going to speak in his own house.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said gruffly, as if unaccustomed to using his voice. ‘Eva, if s good to talk to you, my love. But my voice has gone. I suspect bumps on the larynx. Can I ring you from the office?’

  I went into my room, put the big brown radio on, waited for it to warm up and thought about the matter.

  Mum was drawing again that night.

  The other thing that happened, the thing that made me realize that ‘God’, as I now called Dad, was seriously scheming, was the queer sound I heard coming from his room as I was going up to bed. I put my ear against the white paintwork of the door. Yes, God was talking to himself, but not intimately. He was speaking slowly, in a deeper voice than usual, as if he were addressing a crowd. He was hissing his s’s and exaggerating his Indian accent. He’d spent years trying to be more of an Englishman, to be less risibly conspicuous, and now he was putting it back in spadeloads. Why?

  One Saturday morning a few weeks later he called me to his room and said mysteriously, ‘Are you on for tonight?’

  ‘Tonight what, God?’

  ‘I’m appearing,’ he said, unable to reduce the pride in his voice.

  ‘Really? Again?’

  ‘Yes, they’ve asked me. Public demand.’

  ‘That’s great. Where is it?’

  ‘Location secret.’ He patted his stomach happily. This was what he really wanted to be doing now, appearing. ‘They are looking forward to me all over Orpington. I will be more popular than Bob Hope. But don’t mention anything to your mother. She doesn’t understand my appearances at all, or even, for that matter, my disappearances. Are we on?’

  ‘We’re on, Dad.’

  ‘Good, good. Prepare.’

  ‘Prepare what?’

  He touched my face gently with the back of his hand. ‘You’re excited, eh?’ I said nothing. ‘You like all this getting-about business.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, shyly.

  ‘And I like having you with me, boy. I love you very much. We’re growing up together, we are.’

  He was right – I was looking forward to this second appearance of his. I did enjoy the activity, but there was something important I had to know. I wanted to see if Dad was a charlatan or if there was anything true in what he was doing. After all, he’d impressed Eva and then done the difficult thing – knocked Charlie out. His magic had worked on them and I’d given him the ‘God’ moniker, but with reservations. He wasn’t yet fully entitled to the name. What I wanted to see was whether, as he started to blossom, Dad really did have anything to offer other people, or if he would turn out to be m
erely another suburban eccentric.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dad and Anwar lived next door to each other in Bombay and were best friends from the age of five. Dad’s father, the doctor, had built a lovely low wooden house on Juhu beach for himself, his wife and his twelve children. Dad and Anwar would sleep on the veranda and at dawn run down to the sea and swim. They went to school in a horse-drawn rickshaw. At weekends they played cricket, and after school there was tennis on the family court. The servants would be ball-boys. The cricket matches were often against the British, and you had to let them win. There were also constant riots and demonstrations and Hindu-Muslim fighting. You’d find your Hindu friends and neighbours chanting obscenities outside your house.

  There were parties to go to, as Bombay was the home of the Indian film industry and one of Dad’s elder brothers edited a movie magazine. Dad and Anwar loved to show off about all the film-stars they knew and the actresses they’d kissed. Once, when I was seven or eight, Dad told me he thought I should become an actor; it was a good life, he said, and the proportion of work to money was high. But really he wanted me to be a doctor, and the subject of acting was never mentioned again. At school the careers officer said I should go into Customs and Excise – obviously he thought I had a natural talent for scrutinizing suitcases. And Mum wanted me to go into the Navy, on the grounds, I think, that I liked wearing flared trousers.

  Dad had had an idyllic childhood, and as he told me of his adventures with Anwar I often wondered why he’d condemned his own son to a dreary suburb of London of which it was said that when people drowned they saw not their lives but their double-glazing flashing before them.

  It was only later, when he came to England, that Dad realized how complicated practical life could be. He’d never cooked before, never washed up, never cleaned his own shoes or made a bed. Servants did that. Dad told us that when he tried to remember the house in Bombay he could never visualize the kitchen: he’d never been in it. He remembered, though, that his favourite servant had been sacked for kitchen misdemeanours; once for making toast by lying on his back and suspending bread from between his toes over a flame, and on a second occasion for cleaning celery with a toothbrush – his own brush, as it happened, not the Master’s, but that was no excuse. These incidents had made Dad a socialist, in so far as he was ever a socialist.

  If Mum was irritated by Dad’s aristocratic uselessness, she was also proud of his family. ‘They’re higher than the Churchills,’ she said to people. ‘He went to school in a horse-drawn carriage.’ This ensured there would be no confusion between Dad and the swarms of Indian peasants who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and of whom it was said they were not familiar with cutlery and certainly not with toilets, since they squatted on the seats and shat from on high.

  Unlike them, Dad was sent to England by his family to be educated. His mother knitted him and Anwar several itchy woollen vests and waved them off from Bombay, making them promise never to be pork-eaters. Like Gandhi and Jinnah before him, Dad would return to India a qualified and polished English gentleman lawyer and an accomplished ballroom dancer. But Dad had no idea when he set off that he’d never see his mother’s face again. This was the great undiscussed grief of his life, and, I reckon, explained his helpless attachment to women who would take care of him, women he could love as he should have loved the mother to whom he never wrote a single letter.

  London, the Old Kent Road, was a freezing shock to both of them. It was wet and foggy; people called you ‘Sunny Jim’; there was never enough to eat, and Dad never took to dripping on toast. ‘Nose drippings more like,’ he’d say, pushing away the staple diet of the working class. ‘I thought it would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding all the way.’ But rationing was still on, and the area was derelict after being bombed to rubble during the war. Dad was amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England, though. He’d never seen the English in poverty, as roadsweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He’d never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him the English didn’t wash regularly because the water was so cold – if they had water at all. And when Dad tried to discuss Byron in local pubs no one warned him that not every Englishman could read or that they didn’t necessarily want tutoring by an Indian on the poetry of a pervert and a madman.

  Fortunately, Anwar and Dad had somewhere to stay, at Dr Lal’s, a friend of Dad’s father. Dr Lal was a monstrous Indian dentist who claimed to be a friend of Bertrand Russell. At Cambridge during the war, a lonely Russell advised Dr Lal that masturbation was the answer to sexual frustration. Russell’s great discovery was a revelation to Dr Lal, who claimed to have been happy ever after. Was his liberation one of Russell’s more striking achievements? For perhaps if Dr Lal hadn’t been so forthright about sex with his two young and sexually rapacious lodgers, my father wouldn’t have met my mother and I wouldn’t be in love with Charlie.

  Anwar was always plumper than Dad, with his podgy gut and round face. No sentence was complete without the flavouring of a few noxious words, and he loved the prostitutes who hung around Hyde Park. They called him Baby Face. He was less suave, too, for as soon as Dad’s monthly allowance arrived from India, Dad visited Bond Street to buy bow-ties, bottle-green waistcoats and tartan socks, after which he’d have to borrow money from Baby Face. During the day Anwar studied aeronautical engineering in North London and Dad tried to glue his eyes to his law books. At night they slept in Dr Lal’s consulting room among the dental equipment, Anwar sleeping in the chair itself. One night, enraged by the mice running around him, by sexual frustration too, and burning with the itching of his mother’s woollen vests, Dad dressed himself in Lal’s pale blue smock, picked up the most ferocious drill and attacked Anwar as he slept. Anwar screamed when he awoke to find the future guru of Chislehurst coming at him with a dentist’s drill. This playfulness, this refusal to take anything seriously, as if life didn’t matter, characterized Dad’s attitude to his studies. Dad just couldn’t concentrate. He’d never worked before and it didn’t suit him now. Anwar started to say of Dad, ‘Haroon is called to the Bar every day – at twelve o’clock and five-thirty.’

  Dad defended himself: ‘I go to the pub to think.’

  ‘No, not think – drink,’ Anwar replied.

  On Fridays and Saturdays they went to dances and smooched blissfully to Glenn Miller and Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. That is where Dad first laid eyes and hands on a pretty working-class girl from the suburbs called Margaret. My mother told me that she loved him, her little man, from the first moment she saw him. He was sweet and kind and utterly lost-looking, which made women attempt to make him found-looking.

  There was a friend of Mum’s whom Baby Face walked out with, and apparently even walked in with, but Anwar was already married, to Jeeta, a princess whose family came on horseback to the wedding held in the old British hill station of Murree, in the north of Pakistan. Jeeta’s brothers carried guns, which made Anwar nervous and want to head for England.

  Soon Princess Jeeta joined Anwar in England, and she became Auntie Jeeta to me. Auntie Jeeta looked nothing like a princess, and I mocked her because she couldn’t speak English properly. She was very shy and they lived in one dirty room in Brixton. It was no palace and it backed on to the railway line. One day Anwar made a serious mistake in the betting shop and won a lot of money. He bought a short lease on a toy shop in South London. It was a miserable failure until Princess Jeeta made him turn it into a grocer’s shop. They were set up. Customers flocked.

  In contrast, Dad was going nowhere. His family cut off his money when they discovered from a spy – Dr Lal – that he was being called to the Bar only to drink several pints of rough stout and brown ale wearing a silk bow-tie and a green waistcoat.

  Dad ended up working as a clerk in the Civil Service for £3 a week. His life, once a cool river of balmy distraction, of beaches and cricket, of mocking the British, and dentists’ chairs, was now a cage of umbrel
las and steely regularity. It was all trains and shitting sons, and the bursting of frozen pipes in January, and the lighting of coal fires at seven in the morning: the organization of love into suburban family life in a two-up-two-down semi-detached in South London, life was thrashing him for being a child, an innocent who’d never had to do anything for himself. Once when I was left with him all day and I shat myself, he was bewildered. He stood me naked in the bath while he fetched a cup from which, standing on the other side of the bathroom as if I had the plague, he threw water at my legs while holding his nose with his other hand.

  I don’t know how it all started, but when I was ten or eleven he turned to Lieh Tzu, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu as if they’d never been read before, as if they’d been writing exclusively for him.

  We continued to visit Baby Face and Princess Jeeta on Sunday afternoons, the only time the shop closed. Dad’s friendship with Anwar was still essentially a jokey one, a cricket-, boxing-, athletics-, tennis-watching one. When Dad went there with a library copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower Anwar snatched it from him, held it up and laughed.

  ‘What’s this bloody-fool thing you’re playing with now?’

  Dad promptly started up with, ‘Anwar, yaar, you don’t realize the great secrets I’m uncovering! How happy I feel now I’m understanding life at last!’

  Anwar interrupted, stabbing at Dad with his roll-up. ‘You bloody Chinese fool. How are you reading rubbish when I’m making money! I’ve paid off my bastard mortgage!’

  Dad was so keen for Anwar to understand that his knees were vibrating. ‘I don’t care about money. There’s always money. I must understand these secret things.’

  Anwar raised his eyes to heaven and looked at Mum, who sat there, bored. They both had sympathy for Dad, and loved him, but in these moods love was mixed with pity, as if he were making some tragic mistake, like joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The more he talked of the Yin and Yang, cosmic consciousness, Chinese philosophy, and the following of the Way, the more lost Mum became. He seemed to be drifting away into outer space, leaving her behind; she was a suburban woman, quiet and kind, and found life with two children and Dad difficult enough as it was. There was at the same time a good chunk of pride in Dad’s Oriental discoveries, which led him to denigrate Anwar’s life.