Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

She didn’t talk often about him, but if you poked her hard enough at the right time, she might suddenly burst out with something like “Oh, Jamal, you’re so much like him.” “In what way?” “Oh, you know. Dismissive. A man capable of jaw-dropping rudeness and imperious demands. A man used to having servants, or turning women into them. A man who could make you feel stupid and dull.” On other occasions she’d say, “You’ll never know what a fine man your father was when young and sober. Good-looking and intelligent, he had that more-than-witty thing. What do they call it? Class. He had that: he had glamour.” Looking at me, she said, “You don’t entirely lack his arrogance, as I’m sure people will tell you in the future. But unlike you, he absolutely knew he had it. And you know what, he didn’t give a damn!

“I was dazzled,” she said, making me wonder whether she still loved him. She added this wonderful thing, “He was a like a light shining in your eyes. Heaven knows why he was interested in me. I was a suburban girl and always felt sort of low-wattage in front of him. When he wasn’t kissing me, he’d take me to restaurants to meet his brothers and friends. I preferred Pakistanis to English people. I liked their food and their good manners. I was never one of those feminists, I couldn’t afford to be, but I took exception when they expected me to cook and wash up, and stay in the kitchen. But my parents never said a bad word about your dad. I’d told them he was an Indian prince.”

While Dad was studying in London, his eight brothers removed the rest of the family from India to Pakistan, imagining the new country-brutally sliced from the old one like an afterthought, as the British vandal fled, taking a last swipe-would be a new beginning. During this time, although Dad was living in the London suburbs with the family he had made, he began to feel he had no home, as well as no vocation.

As Mum said, “The suburbs weren’t to be his place. We were living in my parents’ house; we’d got engaged; we were married; we made babies. But he was still in transit. What was he doing? Sitting in the pub. Playing cricket out in Kent, wherever he could get a game.

“He would never stop talking to me about politics, sport, his family, while I was feeding you both. In the end I’d say to him ‘This is wasted on me, write it down! Put it in a column!’ He did; he began to write for papers in India and Pakistan. He realised he had to be there, that he wanted to be involved. He was ready to work. He wanted to participate.”

So he went back to the subcontinent. There was no official parting but Mum suspected “something had upset him.”

At home, sitting in front of the TV eating Vesta curries, the closest we came to the subcontinent, we kept him with us by saying things like “Dad wouldn’t like you doing that” or “Dad would laugh at that.” He became a made-up father, a collage assembled from bits of the real one. Each of us had our own notion or fantasy of him, while he stood in the shadows, like Orson Welles in The Third Man, always about to step into our lives-we hoped. If Mother referred to him as “that man” or “your damned father,” this at least kept him in the network. But he could be used for unpleasant purposes.

One time, irate with Mother, Miriam said to her, “You say Dad was an alcoholic and could be badly behaved, insulting and cutting, but he’s had a successful life. Where did taking care ever get anyone?” “I wouldn’t call him successful,” Mum replied. “Deserting your family isn’t successful.” Then Miriam said, “Dad had to leave you.” “What do you mean?” “Because you’re so nasty, stupid and fascistic!”-which made Mother put her hands around Miriam’s throat. When they fought physically, I would run out of the house and sit in the shed in the park, smoking, dreaming of the future and moaning to myself, “There must be some way out of here…”

I had always been unsure of what job I’d get. Dad rarely gave us instructions or prohibitions. You could say he refused to give Miriam his ideas of how he wanted her to be. He gave me more, often pulling me to him and kissing my cheeks, ruffling my hair, physically demonstrating his adoration and telling me I worried too much about everything. I could persuade him to buy me clothes and books; I knew how to get round him. It was passionate and always tender, our love. I guess Miriam had our mother, and sometimes I had Father, but I did feel guilty that he seemed to like me more.

There was another thing he gave me, for which I never thanked him. One time I went alone to Dad’s hotel and, waiting for the lift at his floor, I saw a woman, small and plainly dressed, as if for an interview, in her mid-thirties-not one of the amazing ones. Dad’s door hadn’t yet shut, and pushing into the room, I saw he was asleep or passed out. The smell of her perfume remained.

I rushed downstairs and into the street, calling her. She hesitated before stopping. I thought she might flee, but although surprised by me, she didn’t. Nervous and disappointed, chipped and gin-soaked, like a Jean Rhys heroine in worn-out shoes, she joined me for a drink in the pub across the road, where I asked her one question and then another, until I had her story, told in a low, croaky voice.

When the conversation ran down, I had the cheek to put an adolescent’s direct enquiry: How much did she charge? She laughed and offered me a price. Naturally I had nothing like that kind of money on me, nor did I have anywhere to take her. I couldn’t compete with Dad. Perhaps if I’d had more nerve, I might have enquired about a family discount. Nevertheless, I retained a passion for whores-as they say in the commercials, when in doubt use a professional-though, as with ordinary girls, you were always waiting for the right one, for the one you liked, or who liked you.

Father had once said to me that he’d wanted to be a doctor, like his own father, and wouldn’t object if that’s what I did. Unlike a lot of the early Freudians, who had been physicians, I had no aptitude for biology or chemistry, but I discovered that that didn’t prevent me becoming a surgeon of the soul. “Whatever you do,” Dad said in his backhandedly well-intentioned way, “don’t let me down and turn out to be a bloody fool.” I guess being an analyst solved a lot of problems for me, at least giving me the opportunity to spend time with people who made me think about what a human being was.

Ajita and I were able to see a lot of each other because her aunt had been told that college was a nine-to-five job, with occasional evening lectures. Her father was rarely home; he came back from his factory at ten at night and left early in the morning, six days a week. On Sunday the family visited relatives in Wembley, where Ajita danced with her cousins in their bedroom.

What a pleasant late adolescence it was. Being at university in those days was a mixture of extended holiday and finishing school. Unlike school, there was no bullying or cramming, and there was little of the concern about careers and money there is now. It didn’t matter to me whether I got a third or a two-one; no one would ever ask me about it.

I read more then than I’d ever read before, and with a passion that was new and surprising to me. I was like someone previously sedentary discovering suddenly that they could run or jump. One of my lecturers said, “Write about whatever interests you.” I worked on the first of my favourite Viennese thinkers, Wittgenstein, and the idea of private language. The questions he asked were satisfyingly strange. It would be a while before I reached Freud properly.

When we were not at lectures, which was most of the time, I took Ajita to see Valentin and Wolf. She shopped and cooked us steak and chips. We were a little family. If I say she was my first love, I’d be saying she was the first woman I couldn’t just pull away from; who stayed in my mind when I wasn’t with her, and that I thought about continuously. When she was gone, I minded very much.