The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER THREE

There they were – two normal unhappy alcoholics, her in pink high heels, him in a double-breasted suit, dressed for a wedding, almost innocently walking into a party. They were Mum’s tall sister Jean and her husband, Ted, who had a central heating business called Peter’s Heaters. And they were clapped in the eyeballs by their brother-in-law, known as Harry, lowering himself into a yogic trance in front of their neighbours. Jean fought for words, perhaps the only thing she had ever fought for. Eva’s finger went to her lips. Jean’s mouth closed slowly, like Tower Bridge. Ted’s eyes scoured the room for a clue that would explain what was going on. He saw me and I nodded at him. He was disconcerted, but not angry, unlike Auntie Jean.

‘What’s Harry doing?’ he mouthed.

Ted and Jean never called Dad by his Indian name, Haroon Amir. He was always ‘Harry’ to them, and they spoke of him as Harry to other people. It was bad enough his being an Indian in the first place, without having an awkward name too. They’d called Dad Harry from the first time they’d met him, and there was nothing Dad could do about it. So he called them ‘Gin and Tonic’.

Uncle Ted and I were great mates. Sometimes he took me on central heating jobs with him. I got paid for doing the heavy work. We ate corned-beef sandwiches and drank tea from our thermos flask. He gave me sporting tips and took me to the Catford dog track and Epsom Downs. He talked to me about pigeon racing. Ever since I was tiny I’d loved Uncle Ted, because he knew about the things other boys’ fathers knew about, and Dad, to my frustration, didn’t: fishing and air rifles, aeroplanes, and how to eat winkles.

My mind was rapidly working as I tried to sort out how it was that Ted and Jean had turned up here, like characters from an Ealing Comedy walking into an Antonioni film. They were from Chislehurst too, but worlds away from Carl and Marianne. I concentrated until things started to get clear in my mind. How had all this happened? I began to see. What I saw didn’t cheer me.

Poor Mum must have fallen into such unhappiness that she’d spilled out Dad’s original guru exploit in Beckenham to her sister. Jean would have been apopleptic with outrage at her sister’s weakness in allowing it to happen. Jean would have hated Mum for it.

When God had announced – or, rather, got me to announce, just a few hours before – that he was making a comeback as a visionary, Mum would have rung her young sister. Jean would have tautened, turning into the steely scheming knife she really was. Into action she went. She must have told Mum she knew Carl and Marianne. Their radiators had perhaps been installed by Peter’s Heaters. And Ted and Jean did live in a newish house nearby. That would be the only way a couple like Carl and Marianne would know Ted and Jean. Otherwise Carl and Marianne, with their books and records and trips to India, with their ‘culture’, would be anathema to Ted and Jean, who measured people only in terms of power and money. The rest was showing off, an attempt to pull a fast one. For Ted and Jean, Tommy Steele – whose parents lived round the corner-was culture, entertainment, show business.

Meanwhile, Eva had no idea who Ted and Jean were. She just waved irritably at these late and oddly respectable intruders.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ she hissed.

Ted and Jean looked at each other as if they’d been asked to swallow matchsticks.

‘Yes, you,’ Eva added. She could be sharp, old Eva.

There was no choice. Ted and Jean slid slowly to the floor. It must have been years since Auntie Jean had been anywhere near the ground, except when she fell over drunk. They certainly couldn’t have expected the evening to be this devout, with everyone sitting admiringly around Dad. We would be in big trouble later, no doubt about that.

God was about to start. Helen went and sat down with the others on the floor. I stood behind the bar and watched. Dad looked over the crowd and smiled, until he discovered himself smiling at Ted and Jean. His expression didn’t change for a moment.

Despite calling Ted and Jean Gin and Tonic, he didn’t dislike Jean and he did like Ted, who liked him in return. Ted often discussed his ‘little personal difficulties’ with Dad, for although it was perplexing for Ted that Dad had no money, Ted sensed that Dad understood life, that Dad was wise. So Ted told Dad about Jean’s heavy drinking, or her affair with a young local councillor, or how his life was beginning to seem futile, or how unsatisfied he felt.

Whenever they had these truth sessions Dad took care to take advantage of Ted. ‘He can talk and work at the same time, can’t he?’ said Dad as Ted, sometimes in tears, inserted rawl-plugs into brick as he made a shelf for Dad’s Oriental books, or sanded a door, or tiled the bathroom in exchange for Dad listening to him from an aluminium garden chair. ‘Don’t commit suicide until you’ve finished that floor, Ted,’ he’d say.

Tonight Dad didn’t linger over Gin and Tonic. The room was still and silent. Dad went into a silence too, looking straight ahead of him. At first it was a little silence. But on and on it went, becoming a big silence: nothing was followed by nothing, which was followed quite soon by more nothing as he sat there, his eyes fixed but full of care. My head started to sweat. Bubbles of laughter rose in my throat. I wondered if he were going to con them and sit there for an hour in silence (perhaps just popping out one mystical phrase such as, ‘Dried excrement sits on the pigeon’s head’) before putting his car coat on and tramping off back to his wife, having brought the Chislehurst bourgeoisie to an exquisite understanding of their inner emptiness. Would he dare?

At last he started out on his rap, accompanying it this time with a rattling orchestra of hissing, pausing and gazing at the audience. And he hissed and paused and gazed at the audience so quietly the poor bastards had to lean forward to hear. But there was no slacking; their ears were open.

‘In our offices and places of work we love to tell others what to do. We denigrate them. We compare their work unfavourably with our own. We are always in competition. We show off and gossip. Our dream is of being well treated and we dream of treating others badly …’

Behind Dad the door slowly opened. A couple stood there – a tall young man with short, spiky hair dyed white. He wore silver shoes and a shiny silver jacket. He looked like a spaceman. The girl with him was dowdy in comparison. She was about seventeen, wearing a long hippie smock, a skirt that trailed to the ground, and hair to her waist. The door closed and they were gone; no one was disturbed. Everyone listened to Dad, apart from Jean, who tossed her hair about as if to keep him away. When she glanced at Ted for a sign of support she received none: he was absorbed too.

Like a stage-manager pleased that his production is going well and knowing there is no more to be done, I slipped out of the room through the french windows. The last words I heard were, ‘We must find an entirely new way of being alive.’

It was Dad’s presence that extracted the noise from people’s heads, rather than anything in particular he said. The peace and calm and confidence he exuded made me feel as if I were composed of air and light as I drifted through Carl and Marianne’s silent, perfumed rooms, sometimes sitting down and staring into the distance, other times just strolling around. I became more intensely aware of both sounds and silence; everything looked sharper. There were some camellias in an art nouveau vase, and I found myself staring at them in wonderment. Dad’s repose and concentration had helped me find a new and surprising appreciation of the trees in the garden as I looked at objects without association or analysis. The tree was form and colour, not leaves and branches. But, slowly, the freshness of things began to fade; my mind speeded up again and thoughts crowded in. Dad had been effective and I was pleased. Yet the enchantment wasn’t over: there was something else – a voice. And the voice was speaking poetry to me as I stood there, in Carl and Marianne’s hall. Every word was distinct, because my mind was so empty, so clear. It went:

‘ ’Tis true, ’tis day; what though it be?

Ο wilt thou therefore rise from me?

Why should we rise? because ’tis light?

Did we lie downe, because ’twas night?

Love which in spight of darkness brought us hither,

Should in despight of light keepe us together.’

It was a rich, male voice, which came, not from above me, as I first thought – I was not being directly addressed by an angel – but from one side. I followed it until I came to a conservatory where I could see the boy with the silver hair sitting with the girl on a swing seat. He was talking to her – no, he was reading to her, from a small leather-bound book he held in one hand – and leaning into her face, as if to press the words into her. She sat impassively, smelling of patchouli, twice pulling a strand of hair out of her eyes while he went on:

‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise.

The wounded deer must seek the herb no more

In which its heart-cure lies …’

The girl, bored to death, became more lively and nudged him when she saw me, always the voyeur, peeping at them.

‘Sorry,’ I said, turning away.

‘Karim, why are you ignoring me?’

I could see now it was Charlie.

‘I’m not. I mean, I don’t want to. Why have you gone silver?’

‘To have more fun.’

‘Charlie, I haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been doing? I’ve been worried and everything, about you.’

‘No reason to worry, little one. I’ve been preparing for the rest of my life. And everything.’

This fascinated me.

‘Yeah? What kind of thing is the rest of your life going to be? D’you know already?’

‘When I look into the future I see three things. Success. Success –’

‘And success,’ the girl added, wearily.

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Right on, man.’

The girl looked at me wryly. ‘Little one,’ she giggled. Then she nuzzled her lips in his ear. ‘Charlie, can’t you read to me some more?’

So Charlie started up again, reading to both of us, but I didn’t feel too good by now. To be honest, I felt a fool. I needed a fast dose of God’s head-medicine right now, but I didn’t want to leave Charlie. Why had he gone silver? Were we entering a new hair era that I’d completely failed to notice?

I forced myself back into the living room. Dad’s gig consisted of half an hour’s sibilant instruction plus questions, half an hour’s yoga and some meditation. At the end, when everyone had got up and they were chatting sleepily, Auntie Jean said hallo, pretty curtly. I could see she wanted to leave, but at the same time she had her eyes fixed on a relieved and smiling Dad at the other side of the room. He had Eva beside him, and several people wanted more information about his teaching. Two of them asked if he’d go to their house and hold sessions there. Eva had become proprietorial, leading him away from bores while he nodded regally.

Before I left, Helen and I exchanged addresses and phone numbers. Charlie and the girl were arguing in the hall. Charlie wanted to take her home but she insisted on going her own way, the little fool. ‘But why don’t you want me?’ he said. ‘I really want you. I love you now.’

What was he being so uncool for? Yet I wondered if, when the day came that I wanted someone and they didn’t want me, I’d be able to remain indifferent. I snorted in derision in his direction and waited outside for Dad and Eva.

So there it was. Helen loved me futilely, and I loved Charlie futilely, and he loved Miss Patchouli futilely, and no doubt she loved some other fucker futilely. The only unfutilely loving couple were God and Eva. I had a bad time just sitting in the car with them, with Eva putting her arms around Dad everywhere. Dad had to raise one authoritative finger to warn her away – which she bit. And I sat there like a good son, pretending not to exist.

Was Dad really in love with Eva? It was difficult for me to accept that he was, our world seemed so immutable. But hadn’t he gone public? At the end of the gig he had given Eva a smacking kiss that sounded as if he were sucking an orange, and he’d told her he could never had done it without her. And she’d had her hand in his hair while Carl and Marianne were in their hands-together praying position, and Ted and Jean just stood there watching, in their stupid coats, like under-cover police. What was wrong with Dad?

Mum was waiting for us in the hall, her face partly hidden in the telephone. She was saying little, but I could hear the tinny sound of Jean on the other end. No time had been wasted. Dad scarpered into his room. I was about to run upstairs when Mum said, ‘Wait a minute, smart-arse, someone wants to talk to you.’

‘Who?’

‘Come here.’

She shoved the phone at me and I heard Jean say just one thing. ‘Come and see us tomorrow. Without fail. Do you understand?’

She always shouted at you, as if you were stupid. Fuck you, I thought. I didn’t want to go near her in that mood. But, of course, I was the nosiest person I’d ever met. I’d be there – that I knew for sure.

So the next morning I cleaned my bike and was soon bumping along the unmade roads, following the route Dad and I had taken the previous evening. I rode slowly and watched the men hoovering, hosepiping, washing, polishing, shining, scraping, repainting, discussing and admiring their cars. It was a lovely day but their routine never changed. Women called out that dinner was on the table. People in hats and suits were coming back from church and they carried Bibles. The kids had clean faces and combed hair.

I wasn’t quite ready to be brought down by Ted and Jean, so I decided to drop in and see Helen, who lived nearby. Earlier that morning I’d popped into Dad’s room and whipped one of his dusty Durex Fetherlites – just in case.

Helen lived in a big old place set back from the road. Everyone I knew, Charlie and the rest, seemed to live in big places, except for us. No wonder I had an inferiority complex. But Helen’s place hadn’t been painted in aeons. The bushes and flowerbeds were overgrown, there were dandelions coming out of the path. The shed had half collapsed. Uncle Ted would have said it was a crying shame.

I parked the bike outside, chaining it to the fence. When I tried to open the gate I discovered it was jammed. I couldn’t fiddle about; I climbed over. In the porch I pulled the bell and heard it ring somewhere deep in the house. It was spooky, I can tell you. There was no reply, so I strolled around the side.

‘Karim, Karim,’ Helen said quickly, in an anxious voice, from a window above my head.

‘Hiya,’ I called. ‘I just wanted to see you.’

‘Me too, yeah?’

I got irritated. I always wanted everything to happen immediately. ‘What’s wrong, then? Can’t you come out? What’s this Juliet business you’re doing?’

At this her head seemed to have been jerked back into the house. There was some muffled arguing – a man’s voice – and the window banged down. Then the curtains were drawn.

‘Helen, Helen!’ I called, suddenly feeling quite attached to her.

The front door opened. Helen’s dad stood there. He was a big man with a black beard and thick arms. I imagined that he had hairy shoulders and, worst of all, a hairy back, like Peter Sellers and Sean Connery. (I kept a list of actors with hairy backs which I constantly updated.) And then I went white, but obviously not white enough, because Hairy Back let go of the dog he was holding, a Great fucking Dane, and it padded interestedly towards me, its mouth hanging open like a cave. It looked as though a jagged wedge had been ripped from the lump of its head to form its yellow-toothed, string-spittled mouth. I put my arms out in front of me so the dog wouldn’t rip my hands off. I must have looked like a sleepwalker, but as I wanted my hands for other purposes I didn’t care about this Baroque pose, though as a rule I cared fanatically about the way I looked, and behaved as if the entire world had nothing better to do than constantly observe me for slips in a very complicated and private etiquette.

‘You can’t see my daughter again,’ said Hairy Back. ‘She doesn’t go out with boys. Or with wogs.’

‘Oh well.’

‘Got it?’

‘Yeah,’ I said sullenly.

‘We don’t want you blackies coming to the house.’

‘Have there been many?’

‘Many what, you little coon?’

‘Blackies.’

‘Where?’

‘Coming to the house.’

‘We don’t like it,’ Hairy Back said. ‘However many niggers there are, we don’t like it. We’re with Enoch. If you put one of your black ‘ands near my daughter I’ll smash it with a ’ammer! With a ’ammer!’

Hairy Back slammed the front door. I took a couple of steps back and turned to go. Fucking Hairy Back. I badly wanted to piss. I looked at his car, a big Rover. I decided to let his tyres down. I could do it in a few seconds, piss in the window, and if he came out I’d be over the fence quicker than a cat through a window. I was moving towards the Rover when I realized that Hairy Back had left me alone with the dog, which was sniffing at turds only a few yards away. It started to move. I stood there pretending to be a stone or a tree until, gingerly, I turned my back on the dog and took a couple of steps, as if I were tip-toeing across a dangerous roof. I was hoping Helen would open the window and call my name, and call the dog’s name too. ‘Oh, Helen, Helen,’ I murmured.

My soft words obviously affected the dog, for suddenly there was a flurry and I felt something odd on my shoulders. Yes, it was the dog’s paws. The dog’s breath warmed my neck. I took another step and so did the dog. I knew by now what the dog was up to. The dog was in love with me – quick movements against my arse told me so. Its ears were hot. I didn’t think the dog would bite me, as its movements were increasing, so I decided to run for it. The dog shuddered against me.

I flew to the gate and climbed over, catching my pink shirt on a nail as I jumped. Safely over, I picked up some stones and let the dog have a couple of shots. One cracked off its nut but it didn’t seem bothered. As I climbed on to my bike I took off my jacket and discovered dog jissom.

I was fucking bad-tempered when I finally pedalled up Jean’s front path. And Jean always made everyone take off their shoes at the front door in case you obliterated the carpet by walking over it twice. Dad said, when we went in once, ‘What is this, Jean, a Hindu temple? Is it the shoeless meeting the legless?’ They were so fastidious about any new purchase that their three-year-old car still had plastic over the seats. Dad loved to turn to me and say, ‘Aren’t we just in clover in this car, Karim?’ He really made me laugh, Dad.

That morning when I set off I’d been determined to be suave and dismissive, a real Dick Diver, but with dog spunk up the back of my tonic jacket, no shoes, and dying for a piss, I found the Fitzgerald front an effort. And Jean led me straight into the living room, sat me down by the innovative method of pressing on my shoulders, and went out to find Ted.

I went to the window and looked out over the garden. Here, in the summer, in the heyday of Peter’s Heaters, Ted and Jean had magnificent parties, or ‘do’s, as Ted called them. My brother Allie, Ted and I would put up a big marquee on the lawn and wait breathlessly for the arrival of all South London and Kent society. The most important builders, bank managers, accountants, local politicians and businessmen came with their wives and tarts. Allie and I loved running among this reeking mob, the air thick with aftershave and perfume. We served cocktails and offered strawberries and cream and gâteaux, and cheese and chocolates, and sometimes, in exchange, women pinched our cheeks, and we tried to stick our hands up their daughters’ skirts.

Mum and Dad always felt out of place and patronized on these grand occasions, where lives were measured by money. They were of no use to anyone and there was nothing they sought from any of the guests. Somehow they always seemed to wear the wrong clothes and look slightly shabby. After a gallon of Pimms Dad usually tried to discuss the real meaning of materialism, and how it was thought that we lived in a materialistic age. The truth was, he said, we didn’t genuinely appreciate the value of individual objects, or their particular beauty. It was greed our materialism celebrated, greed and status, not the being and texture of things. These thoughts were not welcomed at Jean’s parties, and my mother would covertly mouth and flap at Dad to shut up: he became rapidly depressed. Mum’s ambition was to be unnoticed, to be like everyone else, whereas Dad liked to stand out like a juggler at a funeral.

Ted and Jean were a little king and queen in those days – rich, powerful, influential. Jean excelled in the business of introductions, both business and romantic. She was a local monitor of love, mediating in numerous affairs, warning, advising, cajoling and shoring up certain marriages while ripping unsuitable liaisons to shreds. She knew what was happening everywhere, on account sheets and under bed-sheets.

Jean seemed invulnerable until she pursued and started an affair with a pallid twenty-eight-year-old Tory councillor from an old and well-regarded middle-class Sevenoaks family. He was a virtual virgin, naïve and inexperienced, and with bad skin, but she was far outclassed. Oh yes, his parents stomped on it within six months and he never saw her again. She mourned for two years, Ted day by day seeming the more wretched in comparison with her long-gone Tory boy. The parties stopped and the people went away.

Now Auntie Jean came into the room with Uncle Ted. He was a born coward, and nervous as hell. He was shit-scared of confrontations or arguments of any kind.

‘Hallo, Uncle Ted.’

‘Hallo, son,’ he said miserably.

Auntie Jean started up right away, ‘Listen, Karim –’

‘How’s football?’ I asked, overriding her and smiling at Ted.

‘What?’ he asked, shaking his head.

‘Spurs doing well, aren’t they?’

He looked at me as if I were mad. Auntie Jean had no idea what was going on. I clarified. ‘About time, isn’t it, that we went to another match, eh, Uncle Ted?’

Ordinary words indeed, but they did the trick with Uncle Ted. He had to sit down. I knew that after I mentioned football he would at least be neutral in this dispute about Dad, if not entirely on my side. I knew this because I had some serious shit on Ted that he would not want Auntie Jean to hear, just as I had the garden bench incident locked in my mind against Daddio.

I began to feel better.

This is the dirt.

At one time I really wanted to be the first Indian centre-forward to play for England and the school sent me for trials with Millwall and Crystal Palace. Spurs were our team, though, and as their ground was far away in North London, Ted and I didn’t get to see them often. But when they were at home to Chelsea I persuaded Ted to take me. Mum tried to stop me going, convinced that the Shed boys would ensure me a sharpened penny in the skull. Not that I was too crazy about live matches. You stood there in the cold with icicles on your balls, and when someone was about to score the entire ground leapt in the air and all you could see were woolly hats.

The train took Ted and me and our sandwiches up through the suburbs and into London. This was the journey Dad made every day, bringing keema and roti and pea curry wrapped in greasy paper in his briefcase. Before crossing the river we passed over the slums of Herne Hill and Brixton, places so compelling and unlike anything I was used to seeing that I jumped up, jammed down the window and gazed out at the rows of disintegrating Victorian houses. The gardens were full of rusting junk and sodden overcoats; lines of washing criss-crossed over the debris. Ted explained to me, ‘That’s where the niggers live. Them blacks.’

On the way back from the match we were squashed into the corner of the carriage with dozens of other Spurs fans in black and white scarves. I had a football rattle I’d made at school. Spurs had won. ‘Tottenham, Tottenham!’ we chanted.

The next time I looked at Ted he had a knife in his hand. He jumped on to his seat and smashed the lightbulbs in the carriage. Glass flew into my hair. We all watched as Ted carefully unscrewed the mirrors from the carriage partitions – as if he were removing a radiator – and lobbed them out of the train. As we moved around the carriage to make way for him – no one joined in – Ted stabbed the seats and tore the stuffing out of them. Finally he thrust an unbroken lightbulb at me and pointed at the open window.

‘Go on, enjoy yerself, it’s Saturday.’

I got up and flung the lightbulb as far as I could, not realizing we were drawing into Penge Station. The lightbulb smashed against a wall where an old Indian man was sitting. The man cried out, got up and hobbled away. The boys in the train jeered racist bad-mouth at him. When Ted brought me home Mum pointed at me and asked Ted if I’d behaved myself.

Now Auntie Jean fixed the full searchlight of her eyes on me.

‘We’ve always quite liked your dad, and we never had no objections to him marrying Margaret, though some people didn’t like her marrying a coloured –’

‘Auntie Jean –’

‘Duck, don’t interrupt. Your mum’s told me all about what a caper your dad’s been leading over in Beckenham. He’s been impersonating a Buddhist –’

‘He is a Buddhist.’

‘And carrying on with that mad woman, who everyone knows – because she’s told them – is disfigured.’

‘Disfigured, Auntie Jean?’

‘And yesterday, well, we couldn’t believe our eyes, could we, Ted. Ted!’

Ted nodded to indicate that he couldn’t believe his eyes.

‘ ’Course, we presume this madness is going to stop right now.’

She sat back and waited for my reply. I tell you, Auntie Jean really knew how to give you frightening looks, so much so that I found myself struggling to suppress a fart that needed to be free. I crossed my legs and pressed down into the sofa as hard as I could. But it was no use. The naughty fart bubbled gaily out of me. Within seconds the rank gas had risen and was wafting towards Auntie Jean, who was still waiting for me to speak.

‘Don’t ask me, Auntie Jean. It’s none of our business, what Dad does, is it?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not just his bloody business, is it? It affects all of us! They’ll think we’re all bloody barmy. Think of Peter’s Heaters!’ she said, and turned to Uncle Ted, who was holding a cushion over his face. ‘What are you doing, Ted?’

I asked as innocently as I could, ‘How will Dad’s behaviour affect your livelihood, Auntie Jean?’

Auntie Jean scratched her nose. ‘Your mum can’t take no more,’ she said. ‘It’s your job to stop the rot right now. If you do that nothing more will be said. God’s honour.’

‘ ’Cept at Christmas,’ added Ted. He loved to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, as if some self-respect came from rebellion.

Jean got up and walked across the carpet in her high heels. She opened a window and sniffed the fresh garden air. This tonic turned her thoughts to Royalty.

‘Anyway, your dad’s a Civil Servant. What would the Queen say if she knew what he was up to?’

‘Which queen?’ I murmured to myself. Aloud I said, ‘I don’t answer rhetorical questions.’ and got up and went to the door. As I stood there I realized I was trembling. But Jean smiled at me as if I’d agreed with everything she said.

‘There’s a good boy, duck. Now give me a kiss. And what’s that mess on the back of your coat?’

I heard nothing more from either Gin or Tonic for a few weeks, and during that time I didn’t run to Dad and urge him, on my knees, to give up the Buddha business just because Jean didn’t like it.

As for Eva, there was no word from her. I began to think the whole affair was over, and I rather regretted this, as our life returned to dull normalcy. But one evening the phone rang and Mum answered it. She immediately replaced the receiver. Dad was standing at the door of his room. ‘Who was it?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ said Mum, with a defiant look.