The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER FOUR

It was clear in other ways that Eva wasn’t going to leave our lives now. She was present when Dad was withdrawn and preoccupied – every night, in fact; she was there when Mum and Dad watched Panorama together; she was there when he heard a sad record or anyone mentioned love. And no one was happy. I had no idea if Dad was meeting Eva on the sly. How could that have been possible? Life for commuters was regulated to the minute; if trains were delayed or cancelled there were always others soon after. There were no excuses to be made in the evenings: no one went out, there was nowhere to go, and Dad never socialized with anyone from the office. They too fled London as quickly as they could after work. Mum and Dad went to the pictures maybe once a year, and Dad always fell asleep; once they went to the theatre to see West Side Story. We didn’t know anyone who went to pubs, apart from Uncle Ted: pubbing was lower class, and where we lived the toothless and shameless tended to sing ‘Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at the old Bull and Bush’ to knackered pianos.

So the only time Dad could have got to see Eva was at lunchtimes, and maybe she did meet him outside his office for an arm-in-arm lunch in St James’s Park, just like Mum and Dad when they were courting. Whether Dad and Eva were making love or not, I had no idea. But I found a book in his briefcase with illustrations of Chinese sexual positions, which included Mandarin Ducks Entwined, the complicated Dwarfed Pine Tree, Cat and Mouse Share a Hole, and the delightful Dark Cicada Clings to a Branch.

Whether the Dark Cicada was clinging to a branch or not, life was tense. But on the surface, at least, it was straightforward, until one Sunday morning two months after I’d visited Gin and Tonic’s house I opened our front door and Uncle Ted was standing there. I looked at him without a smile or greeting, and he looked at me back, getting uncomfortable until he managed to say, ‘Ah, son, I’ve just popped round to look at the garden and make sure them roses have come out.’

‘The garden’s blooming.’

Ted stepped over the threshold and sang, ‘There’ll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover.’ He asked, ‘How’s yer old dad?’

‘Following up on our little discussion, eh?’

‘Keep that to yerself as previously agreed,’ he said, striding past me.

‘ ’Bout time we went to another football match, Uncle Ted, isn’t it? By train, eh?’

He went into the kitchen, where Mum was putting the Sunday roast in the oven. He took her out into the garden, and I could see him asking her how she was. In other words, what was happening with Dad and Eva and all the Buddha business? What could Mum say? Everything was OK and not OK. There were no clues, but that didn’t mean crimes were not being committed.

Having dealt with Mum, still in his businessman mode, Ted barged into the bedroom, where Dad was. Nosy as ever, I followed him, even as he tried to slam the door in my face.

Dad was sitting on the white counterpane of his bed, cleaning his shoes with one of my tie-dyed vests. Dad polished his shoes, about ten pairs, with patience and care, every Sunday morning. Then he brushed his suits, chose his shirts for the week – one day pink, the next blue, the next lilac and so on – selected his cufflinks, and arranged his ties, of which there were at least a hundred. Sitting there absorbed, and turning in surprise as the door banged open, with huge puffing Ted in black boots and a baggy green turtle-neck filling the room like a horse in a prison cell, Dad looked small and childlike in comparison, his privacy and innocence now violated. They looked at each other, Ted truculent and clumsy, Dad just sitting there in white vest and pyjama bottoms, his bull neck sinking into his tremendous chest and untremendous guts. But Dad didn’t mind at all. He loved it when people came and went, the house full of talk and activity, as it would have been in Bombay.

‘Ah, Ted, please, can you have a look at this for me?’

‘What?’

A look of panic invaded Ted’s face. Every time he came to our place he determined not to be manoeuvred into fixing anything.

‘Just glance at one gone-wrong damn thing,’ Dad said.

He led Ted around the bed to a shaky table on which he kept his record-player, one of those box jobs covered in cheap felt with a small speaker at the front and a brittle cream turntable, with a long spindle through it for stacking long-players. Dad waved at it and addressed Ted as I’m sure he used to speak to his servants.

‘I’m heart-broken, Ted. I can’t play my Nat King Cole and Pink Floyd records. Please help me out.’

Ted peered at it. I noticed his fingers were thick as sausages, the nails smashed, the flesh ingrained with filth. I tried to imagine his hand on a woman’s body. ‘Why can’t Karim do it?’

‘He’s saving his fingers to be a doctor. Plus he’s a useless bastard.’

‘That’s true,’ said Ted, cheered by this insult.

‘Of course, it’s the useless that endure.’

Ted looked suspiciously at Dad after this uncalled-for mysticism. I fetched Ted’s screwdriver from his car and he sat on the bed and started to unscrew the record-player.

‘Jean said I should come and see you, Harry.’ Ted didn’t know what to say next and Dad didn’t help him. ‘She says you’re a Buddhist.’

He said ‘Buddhist’ as he would have said ‘homosexual’ had he cause to say ‘homosexual’ ever, which he didn’t.

‘What is a Buddhist?’

‘What was all that funny business with no shoes on the other week up in Chislehurst?’ Ted countered.

‘Did it disgust you, listening to me?’

‘Me? No, I’ll listen to anyone. But Jean, she definitely had her stomach turned queer.’

‘Why?’

Dad was confusing Ted.

‘Buddhism isn’t the kind of thing she’s used to. It’s got to stop! Everything you’re up to, it’s got to stop right now!’

Dad went into one of his crafty silences, just sitting there with his thumbs together and his head humbly bent like a kid who’s been told off but is convinced, in his heart, that he’s right.

‘So just stop, or what will I tell Jean?’

Ted was getting stormy. Dad continued to sit.

‘Tell her: Harry’s nothing.’

This took the rest of the puff out of Ted, who was, failing everything else, in need of a row, even though he had his hands full of record-player parts.

Then, with a turn of speed, Dad switched the subject. Like a footballer passing a long low ball right through the opposition’s defence he started to ask Ted how work was, work and business. Ted sighed, but he brightened: he seemed better on this subject.

‘Hard work, very hard, from mornin’ till night.’

‘Yes?’

‘Work, work, damn work!’

Dad was uninterested. Or so I thought.

Then he did this extraordinary thing. I don’t think he even knew he was going to do it. He got up and went to Ted and put his hand on the back of Ted’s neck, and pulled Ted’s neck towards him, until Ted had his nose on Dad’s chest. Ted remained in that position, the record-player on his lap, with Dad looking down on to the top of his head, for at least five minutes before Dad spoke. Then he said, ‘There’s too much work in the world.’

Somehow Dad had released Ted from the obligation to behave normally. Ted’s voice was choked. ‘Can’t just stop,’ he moaned.

‘Yes, you can.’

‘How will I live?’

‘How are you living now? Disaster. Follow your feelings. Follow the course of least resistance. Do what pleases you – whatever it is. Let the house fall down. Drift.’

‘Don’t be a cunt. Got to make an effort.’

‘Under no circumstances make an effort,’ said Dad firmly, gripping Ted’s head. ‘If you don’t stop making an effort you’ll die soon.’

‘Die? Will I?’

‘Oh yes. Trying is ruining you. You can’t try to fall in love, can you? And trying to make love leads to impotence. Follow your feelings. All effort is ignorance. There is innate wisdom. Only do what you love.’

‘If I follow my fucking feelings I’ll do fuck-all,’ said Ted, I think. It was hard to be sure, what with his nose pressed into Dad and this honking noise come out. I tried tc take up a grandstand position to see if Uncle Ted was in tears, but I didn’t want to jump around all over the place and distract them.

‘Do nothing, then,’ said God.

‘The house will fall down.’

‘Who cares? Let it drop.’

‘The business will collapse.’

‘It’s on its arse anyway,’ Dad snorted.

Ted looked up at him. ‘How d’you know?’

‘Let it collapse. Do something else in a couple of years’ time.’

‘Jean will leave me.’

‘Oh, but Jean’s left you.’

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met, Harry.’

‘Yes, I think I am quite stupid. And you’re suffering like hell. You’re ashamed of it, too. Are people not allowed even to suffer now? Suffer, Ted.’

Ted was suffering. He sobbed generously.

‘Now,’ said Dad, readjusting his priorities, ‘what’s wrong with this fucking record-player?’

Ted emerged from Dad’s room to find Mum coming up the hall with a full plate of Yorkshire puddings. ‘What have you done to Uncle Ted?’ she said, clearly shocked. She stood there as Uncle Ted’s endless legs buckled and he sank down on the bottom of the stairs like a dying giraffe, still holding Dad’s turntable, his head against the wall, rubbing Brylcreem against the wallpaper, the one thing certain to incense Mum.

‘I’ve released him,’ said Dad, rubbing his hands together.

What a weekend it was, with the confusion and pain between Mum and Dad virtually tangible; if it had had physical substance, their antipathy would have filled our house with mud. It was as if only one more minor remark or incident were required for them to murder each other, not out of hatred but out of despair. I sat upstairs in my room when I could, but kept imagining they were going to try and stab each other. And I panicked in case I wouldn’t be able to separate them in time.

The following Saturday, when we were all together again with hours of proximity ahead of us, I cycled out of the suburbs, leaving that little house of turmoil behind me. There was another place I could go.

When I arrived at Uncle Anwar’s shop, Paradise Stores, I could see their daughter, Jamila, filling shelves. Her mother, the Princess Jeeta, was on the till. Paradise Stores was a dusty place with a high, ornate and flaking ceiling. There was an inconvenient and tall block of shelves in the centre of the shop, around which customers shuffled, stepping over tins and cartons. The goods seemed to be in no kind of order. Jeeta’s till was crammed into a corner by the door, so she was always cold and wore fingerless gloves all the year round. Anwar’s chair was at the opposite end, in an alcove, from which he looked out expressionlessly. Outside were boxes of vegetables. Paradise opened at eight in the morning and closed at ten at night. They didn’t even have Sundays off now, though every year at Christmas Anwar and Jeeta took a week off. Every year, after the New Year, I dreaded hearing Anwar say, ‘Only three hundred and fifty-seven days until we can rest freely again.’

I didn’t know how much money they had. But if they had anything they must have buried it, because they never bought any of the things people in Chislehurst would exchange their legs for: velvet curtains, stereos, Martinis, electric lawnmowers, double-glazing. The idea of enjoyment had passed Jeeta and Anwar by. They behaved as if they had unlimited lives: this life was of no consequence, it was merely the first of many hundreds to come in which they could relish existence. They also knew nothing of the outside world. I often asked Jeeta who the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain was, or the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but she never knew, and did not regret her ignorance.

I looked through the window as I padlocked my bike to the lamppost. I couldn’t see Anwar. Maybe he’d gone out to the betting shop. His absence struck me as odd, because usually at this time, unshaven, smoking, and wearing a rancid suit that Dad gave him in 1954, he was nosing around the backs of possible shoplifters, whom he referred to as SLs. ‘Saw two bad SLs today,’ he’d say. ‘Right under my bloody nose, Karim. I chased their arses like mad.’

I watched Jamila, and pressed my nose to the glass and made a range of jungle noises. I was Mowgli threatening Shere Khan. But she didn’t hear me. I marvelled at her: she was small and thin with large brown eyes, a tiny nose and little wire glasses. Her hair was dark and long again. Thank Christ she’d lost the Afro ‘natural’ which had so startled the people of Penge a couple of years ago. She was forceful and enthusiastic, Jamila. She always seemed to be leaning forward, arguing, persuading. She had a dark moustache, too, which for a long time was more impressive than my own. If anything it resembled my eyebrow – I had only one and, as Jamila said, it lay above my eyes, thick and black, like the tail of a small squirrel. She said that for the Romans joined eyebrows were a sign of nobility; for the Greeks they were a sign of treachery. ‘Which will you turn out to be, Roman or Greek?’ she liked to say.

I grew up with Jamila and we’d never stopped playing together. Jamila and her parents were like an alternative family. It comforted me that there was always somewhere less intense, and warmer, where I could go when my own family had me thinking of running away.

Princess Jeeta fed me dozens of the hot kebabs I loved, which I coated with mango chutney and wrapped in chapati. She called me the Fire Eater because of it. Jeeta’s was also my favourite place for a bath. Although their bathroom was rotten, with the plaster crumbling off the walls, most of the ceiling dumped on the floor and the Ascot heater as dangerous as a landmine, Jeeta would sit next to the bath and massage my head with olive oil, jamming her nifty fingers into every crevice of my skull until my body was molten. In return Jamila and I were instructed to walk on her back, Jeeta lying beside her bed while Jammie and I trod up and down on her, holding on to each other while Jeeta gave orders: ‘Press your toes into my neck – it’s stiff, stiff, made of iron! Yes, there, there! Down a bit! Yes, on the bulge, on the rock, yes, downstairs, upstairs, on the landing!’

Jamila was more advanced than I, in every way. There was a library next to the shop, and for years the librarian, Miss Cutmore, would take Jamila in after school and give her tea. Miss Cutmore had been a missionary in Africa, but she loved France too, having suffered a broken heart in Bordeaux. At the age of thirteen Jamila was reading non-stop, Baudelaire and Colette and Radiguet and all that rude lot, and borrowing records of Ravel, as well as singers popular in France, like Billie Holliday. Then she got this thing about wanting to be Simone de Beauvoir, which is when she and I started having sex every couple of weeks or so, when we could find somewhere to go – usually a bus shelter, a bomb-site or a derelict house. Those books must have been dynamite or something, because we even did it in public toilets. Jammie wasn’t afraid of just strolling straight into the Men’s and locking the cubicle behind us. Very Parisian, she thought, and wore feathers, for God’s sake. It was all pretentious, of course, and I learned nothing about sex, not the slightest thing about where and how and here and there, and I lost none of my fear of intimacy.

Jamila received the highest-class education at the hands of Miss Cutmore, who loved her. Just being for years beside someone who liked writers, coffee and subversive ideas, and told her she was brilliant had changed her for good, I reckoned. I kept moaning that I wished I had a teacher like that.

But when Miss Cutmore left South London for Bath, Jamila got grudging and started to hate Miss Cutmore for forgetting that she was Indian. Jamila thought Miss Cutmore really wanted to eradicate everything that was foreign in her. ‘She spoke to my parents as if they were peasants,’ Jamila said. She drove me mad by saying Miss Cutmore had colonized her, but Jamila was the strongest-willed person I’d met: no one could turn her into a colony. Anyway, I hated ungrateful people. Without Miss Cutmore, Jamila wouldn’t have even heard the word ‘colony’. ‘Miss Cutmore started you off,’ I told her.

Via the record library Jamila soon turned on to Bessie and Sarah and Dinah and Ella, whose records she’d bring round to our place and play to Dad. They’d sit side by side on his bed, waving their arms and singing along. Miss Cutmore had also told her about equality, fraternity and the other one, I forget what it is, so in her purse Jammie always carried a photograph of Angela Davis, and she wore black clothes and had a truculent attitude to schoolteachers. For months it was Soledad this and Soledad that. Yeah, sometimes we were French, Jammie and I, and other times we went black American. The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs and nigs and Pakis and the rest of it.

Compared to Jammie I was, as a militant, a real shaker and trembler. If people spat at me I practically thanked them for not making me chew the moss between the paving stones. But Jamila had a PhD in physical retribution. Once a greaser rode past us on an old bicycle and said, as if asking the time, ‘Eat shit, Pakis.’ Jammie sprinted through the traffic before throwing the bastard off his bike and tugging out some of his hair, like someone weeding an overgrown garden.

Now, today, Auntie Jeeta was serving a customer in the shop, putting bread and oranges and tins of tomatoes into a brown-paper bag. Jamila wasn’t acknowledging me at all, so I waited by Auntie Jeeta, whose miserable face must, I was sure, have driven away thousands of customers over the years, none of them realizing she was a princess whose brothers carried guns.

‘How’s your back, Auntie Jeeta?’ I asked.

‘Bent like a hairpin with worries,’ she said.

‘How could you worry, Auntie Jeeta, with a thriving business like this?’

‘Hey, never mind my mouldy things. Take Jamila on one of your walks. Please, will you do that for me?’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Here’s a samosa, Fire Eater. Extra hot for naughty boys.’

‘Where’s Uncle Anwar?’ She gave me a plaintive look. ‘And who’s Prime Minister?’ I added.

Off Jamila and I went, tearing through Penge. She really walked, Jamila, and when she wanted to cross the road she just strode through the traffic, expecting cars to stop or slow down for her, which they did. Eventually she asked her favourite question of all time. ‘What have you got to tell, Creamy? What stories?’

Facts she wanted, and good stories, the worse the better – stories of embarrassment and humiliation and failure, mucky and semen-stained, otherwise she would walk away or something, like an unsatisfied theatre-goer. But this time I was prepared. Spot-on stories were waiting like drinks for the thirsty.

I told her all about Dad and Eva, about Auntie Jean’s temper and how she pressed down on my shoulders, which made me fart. I told her about trances, and praying advertising executives, and attempts in Beckenham to find the Way on garden benches. And I told her nothing about Great Danes and me. Whenever I asked her what she thought I should do about Dad and Mum and Eva, or whether I should run away from home again, or even whether we should flee together to London and get work as waiters, she laughed louder.

‘Don’t you see it’s fucking serious?’ I told her. ‘Dad shouldn’t hurt Mum, should he? She doesn’t deserve it.’

‘No, she doesn’t. But the deed has been done, right, in that Beckenham garden, while you were watching in your usual position, on your knees, right? Oh, Creamy, you do get in some stupid situations. And you do realize it’s absolutely characteristic of you, don’t you?’

Now she was laughing at me so hard she had to stop and bend forward for breath, with her hands on her thighs. I went on. ‘But shouldn’t Dad restrain himself, you know, and think about us, his family? Put us first?’

It was talking about it now for the first time that made me realize how unhappy the whole thing was making me. Our whole family was in tatters and no one was talking about it.

‘Sometimes you can be so bourgeois, Creamy Jeans. Families aren’t sacred, especially to Indian men, who talk about nothing else and act otherwise.’

‘Your dad’s not like that,’ I said.

She was always putting me down. I couldn’t take it today. She was so powerful, Jammie, so in control and certain what to do about everything.

‘And he loves her. You said your dad loves Eva.’

‘Yes, I s’pose I did say that. I think he loves her. He hasn’t exactly said it all over the place.’

‘Well, Creamy, love should have its way, shouldn’t it? Don’t ya believe in love?’

‘Yes, OK, OK, theoretically. For God’s sake, Jammie!’

Before I knew it, we were passing a public toilet beside the park and her hand was pulling on mine. As she rugged me towards it and I inhaled the urine, shit and disinfectant cocktail I associated with love, I just had to stop and think. I didn’t believe in monogamy or anything old like that, but my mind was still on Charlie and I couldn’t think of anyone else, not even Jammie.

It was unusual, I knew, the way I wanted to sleep with boys as well as girls. I liked strong bodies and the backs of boys’ necks. I liked being handled by men, their fists pulling me; and I liked objects – the ends of brushes, pens, fingers – up my arse. But I liked cunts and breasts, all of women’s softness, long smooth legs and the way women dressed. I felt it would be heart-breaking to have to choose one or the other, like having to decide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I never liked to think much about the whole thing in case I turned out to be a pervert and needed to have treatment, hormones, or electric shocks through my brain. When I did think about it I considered myself lucky that I could go to parties and go home with anyone from either sex – not that I went to many parties, none at all really, but if I did, I could, you know, trade either way. But my main love at the moment was my Charlie, and even more important than that, it was Mum and Dad and Eva. How could I think about anything else?

I had the brilliant idea of saying, ‘And what’s your news, Jammie? Tell me.’

She paused. It worked remarkably well. ‘Let’s take another turn around the block,’ she said. ‘It’s seriousness squared, Creamy Jeans. I don’t know what’s happening to me. No jokes, all right?’

She started at the beginning.

Under the influence of Angela Davis, Jamila had started exercising every day, learning karate and judo, getting up early to stretch and run and do press-ups. She bowled along like a dream, Jamila; she could have run on snow and left no footsteps. She was preparing for the guerrilla war she knew would be necessary when the whites finally turned on the blacks and Asians and tried to force us into gas chambers or push us into leaky boats.

This wasn’t as ludicrous as it sounded. The area in which Jamila lived was closer to London than our suburbs, and far poorer. It was full of neo-fascist groups, thugs who had their own pubs and clubs and shops. On Saturdays they’d be out in the High Street selling their newspapers and pamphlets. They also operated outside the schools and colleges and football grounds, like Millwall and Crystal Palace. At night they roamed the streets, beating Asians and shoving shit and burning rags through their letter-boxes. Frequently the mean, white, hating faces had public meetings and the Union Jacks were paraded through the streets, protected by the police. There was no evidence that these people would go away – no evidence that their power would diminish rather than increase. The lives of Anwar and Jeeta and Jamila were pervaded by fear of violence. I’m sure it was something they thought about every day. Jeeta kept buckets of water around her bed in case the shop was firebombed in the night. Many of Jamila’s attitudes were inspired by the possibility that a white group might kill one of us one day.

Jamila tried to recruit me to her cadre for training but I couldn’t get up in the morning. ‘Why do we have to start training at eight?’ I whined.

‘Cuba wasn’t won by getting up late, was it? Fidel and Che didn’t get up at two in the afternoon, did they? They didn’t even have time to shave!’

Anwar didn’t like these training sessions of hers. He thought she was meeting boys at these karate classes and long runs through the city. Sometimes she’d be running through Deptford and there, in a doorway with his collar turned up, his hairy nose just visible, would be Baby Face watching her, turning away in disgust when she blew Daddy a kiss.

Soon after Daddy’s hairy nose had been blown a kiss that didn’t reach its destination, Anwar got a phone installed and started to lock himself in the living room with it for hours on end. The rest of the time the phone was locked. Jamila had to use a phone-box. Anwar had secretly decided it was time Jamila got married.

Through these calls Anwar’s brother in Bombay had fixed up Jamila with a boy eager to come and live in London as Jamila’s husband. Except that this boy wasn’t a boy. He was thirty. As a dowry the ageing boy had demanded a warm winter overcoat from Moss Bros., a colour television and, mysteriously, an edition of the complete works of Conan Doyle. Anwar agreed to this, but consulted Dad. Dad thought the Conan Doyle demand very strange. ‘What normal Indian man would want such a thing? The boy must be investigated further – immediately!’

But Anwar ignored Dad’s feeling. There had been friction between Anwar and Dad over the question of children before. Dad was very proud that he had two sons. He was convinced it meant he had ‘good seed’. As Anwar had only produced one daughter it meant that he had ‘weak seed’. Dad loved pointing this out to Anwar. ‘Surely, yaar, you have potentially more than one girl and one girl only in your entire lifetime’s seed-production, eh?’

‘Fuck it,’ Anwar replied, rattled. ‘It’s my wife’s fault, you bastard. Her womb has shrivelled like a prune.’

Anwar had told Jamila what he’d decided: she was to marry the Indian and he would come over, slip on his overcoat and wife and live happily ever after in her muscly arms.

Then Anwar would rent a flat nearby for the newly-weds. ‘Big enough for two children,’ he said, to a startled Jamila. He took her hand and added, ‘Soon you’ll be very happy.’ Her mother said, ‘We’re both very glad for you, Jamila.’

Not surprisingly for someone with Jamila’s temper and Angela Davis’s beliefs, Jamila wasn’t too pleased.

‘What did you say to him?’ I asked, as we walked.

‘Creamy, I’d have walked out there and then. I’d have got the Council to take me into care. Anything. I’d have lived with friends, done a runner. Except for my mother. He takes it out on Jeeta. He abuses her.’

‘Hits her? Really?’

‘He used to, yes, until I told him I’d cut off his hair with a carving knife if he did it again. But he knows how to make her life terrible without physical violence. He’s had many years of practice.’

‘Well,’ I said, satisfied that there wasn’t much more to be said on the matter, ‘in the end he can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.’

She turned on me. ‘But he can! You know my father well, but not that well. There’s something I haven’t told you. Come with me. Come on, Karim,’ she insisted.

We went back to their shop, where she quickly made me a kebab and chapati, this time with onions and green chillis. The kebab sweated brown juice over the raw onions. The chapati scalded my fingers: it was lethal.

‘Bring it upstairs, will you, Karim?’ she said.

Her mother called through to us from the till. ‘No, Jamila, don’t take him up there!’ And she banged down a bottle of milk and frightened a customer.

‘What’s wrong, Auntie Jeeta?’ I asked. She was going to cry.

‘Come on,’ Jamila said.

I was about to wedge as much of the kebab as I could into my gob without puking when Jamila pulled me upstairs, her mother shouting after her, ‘Jamila, Jamila!’

By now I wanted to go home; I’d had enough of family dramas. If I wanted all that Ibsen stuff I could have stayed indoors. Besides, with Jamila’s help I’d wanted to work out what I thought of Dad and Eva, whether I should be open-minded or not. Now there was no chance of contemplation.

Half-way up the stairs I smelled something rotten. It was feet and arseholes and farts swirling together, a mingling of winds which hurried straight for my broad nostrils. Their flat was always a junk shop, with the furniture busted and fingerprints all over the doors and the wallpaper about a hundred years old and fag butts sprinkled over every surface, but it never stank, except of Jeeta’s wonderful cooking, which went on permanently in big burnt pans.

Anwar was sitting on a bed in the living room, which wasn’t his normal bed in its normal place. He was wearing a frayed and mouldy-looking pyjama jacket, and I noticed that his toenails rather resembled cashew nuts. For some reason his mouth was hanging open and he was panting, though he couldn’t have run for a bus in the last five minutes. He was unshaven, and thinner than I’d ever seen him. His lips were dry and flaking. His skin looked yellow and his eyes were sunken, each of them seeming to lie in a bruise. Next to the bed was a dirty encrusted pot with a pool of piss in it. I’d never seen anyone dying before, but I was sure Anwar qualified. Anwar was staring at my steaming kebab as though it were a torture instrument. I chewed speedily to get rid of it.

‘Why didn’t you tell me he’s sick?’ I whispered to Jamila.

But I wasn’t convinced that he was simply sick, since the pity in her face was overlaid with fury. She was glaring at her old man, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, nor mine after I’d walked in. He stared straight in front of him as he always did at the television screen, except that it wasn’t on.

‘He’s not ill,’ she said.

‘No?’ I said, and then, to him, ‘Hallo, Uncle Anwar. How are you, boss?’

His voice was changed: it was reedy and weak now. ‘Take that damn kebab out of my nose,’ he said. ‘And take that damn girl with you.’

Jamila touched my arm. ‘Watch.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned towards him. ‘Please, please stop all this.’

‘Get lost!’ he croaked at her. ‘You’re not my daughter. I don’t know who you are.’

‘For all our sakes, please stop it! Here, Karim who loves you –’

‘Yes, yes!’ I said.

‘He’s brought you a lovely tasty kebab!’

‘Why is he eating it himself, then?’ Anwar said, reasonably. She snatched the kebab from me and waved it in front of her father. At this my poor kebab started to disintegrate, bits of meat and chilli and onion scattering over the bed. Anwar ignored it.

‘What’s going on here?’ I asked her.

‘Look at him, Karim, he hasn’t eaten or drunk anything for eight days! He’ll die, Karim, won’t he, if he doesn’t eat anything!’

‘Yes. You’ll cop it, boss, if you don’t eat your grub like everyone else.’

‘I won’t eat. I will die. If Gandhi could shove out the English from India by not eating, I can get my family to obey me by exactly the same.’

‘What do you want her to do?’

‘To marry the boy I have selected with my brother.’

‘But it’s old-fashioned, Uncle, out of date,’ I explained. ‘No one does that kind of thing now. They just marry the person they’re into, if they bother to get married at all.’

This homily on contemporary morals didn’t exactly blow his mind.

‘That is not our way, boy. Our way is firm. She must do what I say or I will die. She will kill me.’

Jamila started to punch the bed.

‘It’s so stupid! What a waste of time and life!’

Anwar was unmoved. I’d always liked him because he was so casual about everything; he wasn’t perpetually anxious like my parents. Now he was making a big fuss about a mere marriage and I couldn’t understand it. I know it made me sad to see him do this to himself. I couldn’t believe the things people did to themselves, how they screwed up their lives and made things go wrong, like Dad having it away with Eva, or Ted’s breakdown, and now Uncle Anwar going on this major Gandhi diet. It wasn’t as if external circumstances had forced them into these lunacies; it was plain illusion in the head.

Anwar’s irrationality was making me tremble, I can tell you. I know I kept shaking my head everywhere. He’d locked himself in a private room beyond the reach of reason, of persuasion, of evidence. Even happiness, that frequent pivot of decision, was irrelevant here – Jamila’s happiness, I mean. Like her I wanted to express myself physically in some way. It seemed to be all that was left to us.

I kicked Uncle Anwar’s piss-pot quite vigorously so that a small wave of urine splashed against the overhanging bed-sheets. He ignored me. Jamila and I stood there, about to walk out. But now I was making my uncle sleep in his own piss. Suppose he later clutched that piece of sheet to his nose, to his mouth. Hadn’t he always been kind to me, Uncle Anwar? Hadn’t he always accepted me exactly as I was, and never told me off? I bolted into the bathroom and fetched a wet cloth, returning to soak the pissy sheet until I was sure it wouldn’t stink any more. It was irrational of me to hate his irrationality so much that I sprayed piss over his bed. But as I scrubbed his sheet I realized he had no idea what I was doing on my knees beside him.

Jamila came outside while I unlocked my bike.

‘What are you going to do, Jammie?’

‘I don’t know. What do you suggest?’

‘I don’t know either.’

‘No.’

‘But I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll come up with something.’

‘Thanks.’

She started unashamedly to cry, not covering her face or trying to stop. Usually I get embarrassed when girls cry. Sometimes I feel like clouting them for making a fuss. But Jamila really was in the shit. We must have stood there outside Paradise Stores for at least half an hour, just holding each other and thinking about our respective futures.