Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

The last time he was in France, with his then wife, Yasin said he saw a sign saying ‘Disneyland Paris’ and laughed so much he wished, for the only time, that his father was also around to appreciate it. He had come to dislike the West more as he got older, and had developed a particular animus against the authority of the EU, which he seemed to believe was run by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He said not only was the EU hypocritical, but Europe was ‘risk-free and easy’. Everything was polite and over-careful in its ‘multiculturalism and love for homosexuals’. The brutality was now exported, and the only victims today were Muslims, whom the West had never given up believing were lesser beings.

He said, ‘Our family sacrificed good lives in India to ruin this new country. As you know, we are a wild and self-destructive people who live carelessly. Life is cheap, only alcohol is expensive. Think how direct we are: all the hotels have been attacked with suicide bombs. When I walk out onto the street I like to know the chances are I will be shot at. What other country in the world would hide Osama Bin Laden in the centre of a city while pocketing vast amounts of American money to finance the search for him? Mother, you must agree it takes perverse genius of the highest order to walk through that looking glass.’

‘It’s not comfortable to be so stressed.’

‘You stress us, with your drone bombings of civilians.’ He asked, ‘How is your husband, the man who replaced my father? Do you like him? I can see from your lack of expression that you really don’t mind, but you did hurry into his arms very quickly.’

‘Forgive me, but I was half-dead and stunned. I’m diabetic, and was diagnosed with extreme anxiety. Day by day I sewed my life back together. Michel gets up in the morning with purpose. You lie there like a teenager.’

‘Even if that man’s work is pointless?’

‘He writes about plays.’

‘But what would Hay Fever mean here?’

‘He respects himself. You say you are religious, but you wallow in cynicism. Didn’t you say, in this country the educated have no religion, and the religious have no education?’

‘I am not religious,’ he said. ‘But I am a Muslim.’

‘Yasin, it is this country which has corrupted your imagination. Your father wasn’t like this. He kept saying that without many voices, including the Christian, devotion to one religion will make us autocrats.’

‘Then the fool was begging to be murdered. He would have handed over the country to Jews, colonialists and those who want to bomb us into fundamentalist capitalism. Who here doesn’t think that Osama taught those arrogant imperialists a good lesson?’ He laughed. ‘But are we really to discuss this, Gertrude, Mother?’

‘You are too old to play Hamlet.’

There were no theatres, bars or new restaurants in Karachi, and people went to one another’s houses. At first she accompanied her son on his nightly round of parties. It was an opportunity for her to see the people she’d grown up with, and for them all to notice how much they had aged.

She kept thinking she had been too long in Paris, for the houses she visited looked dusty, run-down and out-of-date, as if they weren’t worth the expense of renovation. Soon she realised that anyone with money, intelligence, education or talent had left, and that the rest were urging their children to escape. They sold their jewellery and ushered them towards the border, saying, ‘Get out and never return.’ Her friends’ children had joined an international class of wealthy but dispossessed people with American accents who now lived in Beijing, Prague or Toronto, working in hospitals or for law firms or banks. Those left behind were the aged, infirm and hopeless, or those with too many dependants.

At the parties there’d be small talk followed by ferocious drinking. It had been a long time since she’d seen people so shamelessly drunk they were lying under tables. Amongst the drunkest would be Yasin, whom she’d help home at four in the morning. In order to gain entry into the house, he made the servants remain awake until he returned. He would either fall asleep then, or demand a woman, and she found herself fighting with him over the age of the servant girls he took. Fourteen, she said, was too young. Soon she stopped accompanying him, and stayed in the house.

There was nothing to do. She began to sit at the ping-pong table in the living room and write about her life, sometimes by candlelight, since the electricity failed at least twice a day. At least the cook and the servant girl took her seriously, creeping in with big smiles, and kebabs, onion bhajis and mango lassi on a tray, while the sweepress with orange teeth, crouching unnoticed for hours, flicked at the dust across the room. In exchange, Farhana made sure to give them little gifts, shawls, underwear, sandals and loose change.

It was three weeks into the month-long visit that, one afternoon, as she wrote, Yasin came into the room yelling, waving his pistol and saying his father’s legacy of watch, pens and cufflinks had been stolen, and he was having the house searched.

‘I expect you just threw it all in a drawer, Yasin. Look again.’

‘They are happening all the time, these thefts. The people are poorer than you can conceive, Mother. But the cook is particularly naughty. My eye has been on him since I noticed he dyed his beard. He has been filling the fridge with meals no human being has the capacity to eat — I suspect he is feeling guilty. He is our George Clooney — the male kingpin — and the neighbourhood servant girls are in and out of the kitchen, a place I never enter, as you know. Being a kind man, I pay for the abortions on a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” basis. After that, the girls are sent to their village, where they are reviled, persecuted and sometimes killed for their shame. Since I’m not a hundred per cent certain it is that exact bastard, I will follow the correct procedures …’

‘Good, thank you. Now put the gun away, you’re frightening me.’

She was reassured, in a place where, increasingly, she realised no reassurance was possible. Her closest friend, an English teacher whom she’d been at school with, was kidnapped while driving to meet Farhana. Her car was sandwiched between two other cars until it could only come to a stop; her driver had been dragged out at gunpoint, beaten and thrown into a ditch. The woman was blindfolded and taken to a house which, when she could see, resembled a waiting room. At least twenty other kidnapees sat on the floor, waiting for their families to provide money, while other victims were brought in.

That afternoon, when Farhana walked around Paris with her husband, she said, ‘My friend has always taught English literature, but more recently wanted to add a post-colonial module so the students might glimpse themselves in an artist’s words. But there was a void in the curriculum because she cannot teach Rushdie, or even mention his name. She went into a shop to buy Midnight’s Children, and the owner shouted, “Get out — how dare you mention these hush-hush matters! You can look at pictures of men having sex with camels, or with children or babies. You can call for the death of the apostate. But promote that writer and this place will be ashes — Mullah Omar said this in 2005! Why can’t you read P. G. Wodehouse like everyone else!”’

Farhana’s husband, when he heard this, said, ‘I am reminded that I saw Milan Kundera the other morning, across the street. He walks to his office every day at the same time. I stop and bow respectfully as he passes. Of course, he pretends not to notice me.’

‘He doesn’t notice you,’ she giggled. ‘Why should he notice every old man who stops on the street?’