Hanif Kureishi - Love + Hate - Stories and Essays

‘I know he notices me. As I say, he prefers not to look up since he is thinking creatively.’ He went on, ‘At the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, if I remember correctly, a Czech politician, Clementis, soon to be accused of treason and hanged, is erased from a photograph, leaving only the hat he passed to Gottwald on the day. They are doing the same in your country.’

‘They despair, and cling to the old certainties because they think the writer tears them apart.’

‘Though it is unbearable, they should be grateful, since he has done them the favour of speaking their disloyalty. The artist chews and digests the world for us, and then presents us with evidence of our humanity. What stands between us and barbarism?’

‘Your tie.’

‘Apart from my tie, Farhana, there is the complexity of literature. If they cannot see that, they are lacking in the civilisation you see around you. Anyone here could tell you that extreme religion can only create sacrilege and perversion — like Catholic France producing the Marquis de Sade.’

‘Please, you go too far, Michel.’

‘But how is the boy?’

‘The conditions in which he lives have put a jinn inside him.’

‘What a massive human effort it must have been to make such a wasteland!’

‘And you cannot go onto the street without seeing people carrying rifles and machine guns. When I look around here — at this city — at the people walking peacefully, and the hundreds of years of accumulated achievement, I wonder how it’s done.’

‘Thank God you have seen that, Farhana. I never thought you noticed where you were. What you describe is not achieved by driving out the Jews, Hindus, Catholics, and anyone who adds to the character and creativity of a city, until you have a monotonous monoculturalism — a new puritanism. If you let the pleasure-haters do that, there will be nothing living.’ He stood and looked around at the city as if he had built it himself. ‘The careful preservation of the past is the basis of culture. After the Second World War we learned how destructiveness stalks us, and how fragile civil society is.’

She said, ‘Everywhere around the world the young are rising up, but in Pakistan they are going to the airport. I’ve never before been to a place without hope, nor anywhere without one beautiful thing in it, apart from the orchids in my son’s garden.’

Michel said, ‘This door — to the West — is shut now. In here it is an exclusive spa. Farhana, we are glad to have you, provided you respect our liberality.’

‘I do!’

‘Count yourself lucky to have slipped inside.’

‘Thank you for reminding me, husband.’

‘Now tell me, how is it you made such a boy?’

‘I will think about that — in my writing.’

‘Writing, did you say? Farhana — no!’

Yasin had the house searched several times. ‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘We can’t find any of it. The only things Father left me. I want you to know, Mother, that I let my servants eat meat, which is like caviar to them. I give them food which is not rotten. And of course they steal from me, and only rarely, when I am really wild, do I whip them. They would never be treated so well elsewhere, and this is how they reward me.’

‘It is mislaid, please, believe me,’ she said. ‘I have come here and seen that you are a victim awaiting a murderer. Please look more — behind the sofa, for instance — before you follow the procedures.’

She called it work now, her writing. Hadn’t her life been more interesting than most? An arresting opening had occurred to her: she would begin with her two husbands, and compare Parisian men, their world and methods of love, to that of the men of Pakistan.

She began to get down to it as soon as she woke up, hunched over the ping-pong table, with some rotis on a plate and two standing fans turned full on. It was the only time Farhana felt content and safe in this country, and she had begun this work away from Paris since she knew that, far from encouraging her, Michel would condemn her work as ‘a waste of effort’. It was his job to condemn the bad stuff. ‘Even before it is written?’ she enquired, when discussing the idea with him. ‘That would be confinement — and premature.’

Now she said, ‘I feel as if I have had two men, you and my son, chattering and bullying me in the ear.’

‘Bullying?’

‘Don’t you see you are beginning to operate more like a big fat censor than a critic. I will resist you,’ she said. ‘I will even mention to your friends and perhaps to the concierge that I am writing! How the filthy foreign woman stains the quartier with her amateur words!’

‘Please. Not that.’

‘If you don’t announce it to them next time at dinner, there will be a fuss. Look at my cut lip — there is evidence.’

She saw, when she said this, that he was afraid; she might stand up to him and, in time, gain an advantage.

One evening in Karachi she returned from a visit to her friend to find the gates locked. The guard, who sat on a chair outside with his rifle, didn’t come to her car. Instead her driver had to get out of their vehicle to let her into the house. Inside, it was silent, and it was never silent: there were more staff than family.

She called her son. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘I’ve had enough. I’m following the procedures.’

‘What procedures?’

‘I set a deadline for the return of my possessions but they were not recovered. I ordered the police to take everyone away. You will see how soon, inshallah, my belongings will come back.’

‘How?’

‘It is tragic, Mother, but you and I will have to get our own food tonight. The servants are hanging upside down on meat hooks in the police station. They will be there for a few hours, in their own urine and faeces, until they begin to feel uncomfortable. Meanwhile, I am waiting for the Security Expert to become available.’

‘Security Expert? What is that?’

‘The torturer. This service has now been privatised. We are following your example in the West. He is available by the hour, and I will tip him if the result is positive. What is a fingernail here or there? This is not Downton Abbey. Let’s say it is more like your Guantanamo.’

‘No, Yasin.’

‘Mother, you will see how efficiently we can do things, after your determination to find nothing good in this ravishing country.’

The bell rang. Before she went to her room to think, Farhana saw Yasin and the torturer taking whisky in the living room. She pictured the servants, with whom she’d been friendly — asking for their stories — in the police station.

When she heard the car start in the yard, and the two men got up and went outside, blood and fury rose to her head, and she went to her son before he drove away.

‘I am outraged by this. You must not do it. I forbid it absolutely.’

‘You don’t live here.’

‘I said I forbid it.’

‘Excuse me.’

‘I do not excuse you. He can tear my body instead.’ She turned to the torturer. ‘Open your bag and start on me! Tear out my heart, bastard! It was me who stole the things! Okay? I don’t care if I live or die!’ She began to expose her upper body. ‘Begin here!’

‘You’re making a fool of yourself, Mother. Leave the man alone. I have paid him and can’t afford to waste money.’

‘I attacked Yasin then,’ she said to Michel. ‘I went for his eyes with my nails, I was so outraged by what he had become. Then I ran into my room, took the sheet from the bed, tied one end around my neck and threw the other over the propellers of the fan. I was beginning to die when they came in. They chased me, and Yasin pulled me across the floor. I was screaming so much, it was a nightmare for them. He struck me, but still I insisted he bring the servants back.’