Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

This work having been done, at lunchtime we’d tour the city, visiting Dad’s friends, mostly old men who’d lived through the history of Pakistan, and ending up at my father’s club.

In the evening we’d go to parties where the men wore ties and jackets, and the women jewellery and pretty sandals. There were good manners, heavy drinking, and much competitive talk of favours, status and material possessions: cars, houses, clothes.

Far from being “spiritual,” as Miriam understood it, Karachi was the most materialistic place we had been. Deprivation was the spur. I might have considered my father’s friends to be vulgar and shallow, but it was I who was made to feel shabby, like someone who’d stupidly missed a good opportunity in Britain. I was gently mocked by these provincial bourgeois, with my father watching me carefully to see how I coped. What sort of man, half here and half there, had I turned out to be? I was an oddity again, as I had been at school.

All the same, my father was educating me, telling me about the country, talking all the time about partition, Islam, liberalism, colonialism. I may have been a feisty little British kid with Trot acquaintances and a liking for the Jam, but I began to see how much Dad needed his liberal companions who approved of Reagan and Thatcher. This was anathema to me, but it represented “freedom” in this increasingly Islamised land. Dad’s friends were, like him, already alienated in this relatively new country, and he believed their condition would get worse as the country became more theocratic. As Dad said, “There are few honest men here. In fact, I may be the only one! No wonder there are those who wish to establish a republic of virtue.”

Many of my father’s friends tried to impress on me that I, as a member of the “coming-up” generation, had to do my best to keep freedom alive in Pakistan. “We are dying out here, yaar. Please, you must help us.” The British had gone, there’d been a vacuum, and now the barbarians were taking over. Look what had happened in Iran: the “spiritual” politics of the revolution had ended in a vicious, God-kissed dictatorship with widespread amputations, stonings and executions. If the people there could remove a man as powerful as the shah, what might happen in other Muslim countries?

I learned that Father was an impressive man, articulate, amusing and much admired for his writing. He’d almost gone to jail; only his “connections” had kept him out. He had been defiant but never stupid. I read his pieces, collected at last, in a book published only in Pakistan. In such a corrupt place, he represented some kind of independence, authority and integrity.

If he seemed to have the measure of life, it wasn’t long before I had to put to him the question I was most afraid of: Why hadn’t he stayed with us? What made him come here? Why had we never been a proper family?

He didn’t shirk the question but went at it head-on, as if he’d been expecting it for years and had prepared. Apart from the “difficulties” he had with Mother-the usual stuff between a man and a woman, at which I nodded gravely, as though I understood-there had been an insult, he said. He had liked Mum. He still respected her, he said. It was odd to hear him speaking about her as a girlfriend he’d had years ago but now, clearly, was indifferent to.

I learned, though, that he had had, briefly, at the same time as Mum, another girlfriend, whose parents had invited him to dinner at their house in Surrey. They were eating when the mother said, “Oh, you can eat with a knife and fork? I thought you people normally ate with your fingers.”

This was to a man who’d been brought up in a wealthy, liberal Indian family in colonial Bombay. Among the many children, Father was the prince of the family, inheritor of the family talent. “Isn’t he a magnificent man?” Yasir had said to me. “Your grandfather told me to look after him always.”

Dad had been educated in California, where he’d established himself on the college circuit as a champion debater and skillful seducer of women. He believed he had the talent and class to become a minister in the Indian government, ambassador to Paris or New York, a newspaper editor or a university chancellor. Dad told me he couldn’t face more of this prejudice, as it was called then. He had “got out,” gone home to the country he had never known, to be part of its birth, to experience the adventure of being a “pioneer.”

As we drove around Karachi-him tiny behind the wheel of the car-he began to weep, this clean man in his white salwar kameez and sandals, with an alcohol smell that I got used to and even came to like. He regretted it, he said, the fact that we as a family weren’t together and he couldn’t do his duty as a father. Mother wouldn’t live in Pakistan, and he was unable to live in England.

If he had left us in Britain, it was, he added, as much for our sake as for his. It was obvious we would have more of a chance there. What should have happened, he said, was that his family should never have left India for Pakistan. India was where his heart was, where he’d belonged, where he and Yasir and his sisters and brothers had grown up, in Bombay and Delhi.

He now realised that Bombay, rather than Karachi, was the place where his ideals could have been met, crazy though it might be there. In Pakistan they had made a mess of things. He admitted it could have been predicted by a cursory reading of history. Any state based on a religious idea, on one God, was going to be a dictatorship. “Voltaire could have foretold, boy. You only have to read anywhere there to realise.”

He went on: “Liberals like me are marginal here. We are called the ‘high and dry’ generation. We are, indeed, frequently high, but rarely dry. We wander around the city, looking for one another to talk to. The younger, bright ones all leave. Your cousins will never have a home, but will wander the world forever. Meanwhile, the mullahs will take over. That is why I’m making the library.”

Packages of books from Britain and the US arrived at Papa’s flat a couple of times a week. Dad didn’t unpack them all, and when he did, I noticed that some of them were volumes he already had, in new editions. With Yasir’s money, Papa was building a library in the house of a wealthy lawyer. Such a darkness had fallen upon the country that the preservation of any kind of critical culture was crucial. A student or woman, as he put it, might want access to the little library, where he knew the books would be protected after his death.

Dad insisted I go to meet his older sister, a poet and university lecturer. She was in bed when we arrived, having had arthritis for the last ten years. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said, pinching my cheek. “This will be difficult, but there’s something you need to see.”

We got her up and onto her walking frame, and accompanied her to the university, which she was determined to show me, though it was closed, due to “disturbances.” She, Dad and I shuffled and banged our way through the corridors and open rooms, looking at the rows of wooden benches and undecorated, crumbling walls.

She taught English literature: Shakespeare, Austen, the Romantics. However, the place had been attacked frequently by radical Islamists, and no one had returned to classes. The books she taught were considered haram, forbidden. Meanwhile madrassas, or bomb schools, were being established by President Zia. This was where many poor families sent their kids, the only places they would receive education and food.

When I wondered what it meant for my aunt to teach English literature in such a place, to people who had never been to England, she said, “They’ve gone, the British. Colonialism restrained radical Islam, and the British at least left us their literature and their language. A language doesn’t belong to anyone. Like the air, anyone can use it. But they left a political hole, which others fill with stones. The Americans, the CIA, supported the Islamic revival to keep the Communists out of the Middle East. That is what we English teachers call an irony.” She went on: “It is the women I fear for, the young women growing up here. No ideology hates women more than this one. These fanatics will undo all the good work done by women in the 60s and 70s.”