Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

She would return to the university when the time was right, though she doubted that she’d live to see it. “A student said to me, ‘We will kill 10,000 people, which will destroy this country’s institutions and create a revolution. Then we could attack Afghanistan and go upwards…There will be the believers and there will be the dead. The West will defeat Communism but not Islam-because the people believe in Islam.’”

Meanwhile my aunt was content to remain in her room and write poetry. She had published five volumes, paying for the printing costs herself, the Urdu on one page, the English on the other. She adored the Saint Lucia poet Derek Walcott, who was her light. “His father, I’m sure, was a clerk in the colonial administration, like so many of our educated.” He had taught her that she could write from her position-“cross-cultural,” she called it-and make sense. Other local poets met at her house, to read their work and talk. They wouldn’t be the first poets, nor the last, to have to work “underground.”

“I envy the birds,” she said. “They can sing. No one shuts their mouths or imprisons them. Only they are free here.”

Language; poetry; speaking; freedom. The country was wretched, but some of the people were magnificent, forced into seriousness. Dad would have known the effect this would have on me.

Our lives had been so separate. Dad had never visited our schools or even our house when he was in Britain; there’d been no everyday affection. But as he drove about Karachi, he did ask me, “What is it you really do?”-as though he needed to know the secret I’d been keeping from the anxious enquirers at the dinner parties.

I didn’t have much of a reply: I said I was going to do a Ph.D. on the later work of Wittgenstein. I’d say this to anyone who enquired about my choice of career, and I did so to Papa. He could show me off or at least shut the questioners up. I had, after all, graduated with honours-whatever they are-in philosophy.

My claim, though, was only for the benefit of others, and Dad knew it. When, in private, he called me a “bum,” which he did from time to time, often appending other words, like “useless” or “lazy” or, when he was particularly drunk, “fucking useless lazy stupid,” I tried to defend myself. I was not bringing shame on the family. I did want to do some kind of intellectual work and had even considered doing an M.A. But really I considered philosophy only as the basis of intellectual engagement, a critical tool, rather than anything that seemed worth pursuing for itself. Who can name a living British philosopher of distinction? Later, psychoanalysis came to interest me more, being closer to the human.

This was all too vague for Papa, and the “bum” taunts didn’t stop. He’d say, “Your other cousins, what are they doing? They’re training to be doctors, lawyers, engineers. They’ll be able to work anywhere in the world. Who the fuck wants a philosophy Ph.D.? Yasir was like you, doing nothing, sitting in pubs. Then our father, who was in Britain, kicked his arse, and he opened factories and hotels. So: you can consider your arse to be kicked!”

How could I put pleasure before duty? What could be more infuriatingly enviable than that? Papa had kicked my arse. Where had he kicked it to? I felt worthless, and glad he hadn’t been around in London: one of us might have killed the other.

As I considered the serious side of Papa’s attack, I drifted around Yasir’s house wondering what to do with myself. I’d already learned how difficult it was to find solitude in this country. The price of an extended and strong family was that everyone scrutinised and overlooked one another continuously; every word or act was discussed, usually with disapproval.

One day I discovered that my uncle also had a library. Or at least there was a room called “the library,” which contained a wall of books, and a long table and several chairs. The room was musty but clean. No one ever used it, like front parlours in the suburbs.

I took in the books, which were hardbacks. Poetry, literature, a lot of left-wing politics, many published by Victor Gollancz. They’d been bought in London by one of my uncles and shipped to Pakistan. The uncle, who lived in Yasir’s house but now “roamed around all day,” had developed schizophrenia. In his early twenties he’d been a brilliant student, but his mind had deteriorated.

I sat at the library table and opened the first book, the contents crumbling and falling on the floor, as though I had opened a packet of flour upside down. I tried other volumes. In the end my reading schedule was determined by the digestion of the local worms. As it happened there was, by chance, one book less fancied by the worms than others. It was the Hogarth edition of Civilisation and Its Discontents, which I had never read before. It occurred to me, as I went at it, that it was more relevant to the society in which I was presently situated than to Britain. Whatever: I was gripped from the first sentence, which referred to “what is truly valuable in life…”

What was truly valuable in life? Who wouldn’t have wanted to know that? I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. Of course, I was maddened by the fact that whole sentences had been devoured by the local wildlife. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to return to London was that I wanted to read it properly. In the end, the only way to satisfy my habit-if I didn’t want to ask my father for books, which I didn’t-was to read the same pages over and over.

Often, my only companion was my schizophrenic uncle, who would sit at the end of the table, babbling, often entertainingly, with a Joycean flow. The meaning, of course, was opaque to me, but I loved him and wanted to know him. There was no way in. I was as “in” as I was going to get.

While I settled into a daily routine of carefully turning the medieval parchment pages of old books, I noticed a movement at the door. I said nothing but could see Najma, at twenty-one the youngest female cousin, watching me. She waited for me to finish, smiling and then hiding her face whenever I looked at her. I had played with her in London as a kid. We had met at least once a year, and I felt we had a connection.

“Take me to a hotel, please,” she said. “This evening.”

I was mad with excitement. The bum also rises.

This advent of heterosexuality surprised me a little. I had already been made aware of the broad sensuality of Muslim societies. The women, for instance, who slept in the same room, were forever caressing and working one another’s hair and bodies; and the boys always holding hands, dancing and giggling together in someone’s bedroom, playing homoerotically. They talked of how lecherous the older men were, particularly teachers of the Koran, and how, where possible, you had to mind your arse in their presence. Of course, many of my favourite writers had gone to Muslim countries to get laid. I recalled Flaubert’s letters from Egypt: “Those shaved cunts make a strange effect-the flesh is hard as bronze and my girl had a splendid arse.” “At Esna in one day I fired five times and sucked three.” As for the boys, “We have considered it our duty to indulge in this form of ejaculation.”

I had been introduced to young men of my age, and went out with them a few times, standing around brightly decorated hamburger and kebab stalls, talking about girls. But compared to these boys, after what happened with Ajita, I had little hope. They seemed too young, I was alienated and had no idea where I belonged, if anywhere now. I would have to make a place. Or find someone to talk to.

It took Najma three hours to get ready. I’d never waited so long for a girl before and hope to never again. I was reminded, unfortunately, once more of Ajita, who was inevitably late for classes, giving the excellent excuse that she didn’t want the lecturer to see her with bad hair.