The Buddha of Suburbia

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 umbrellas 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.

‘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 look 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.