one of the book covers chosen to illustrate The Buddha of Suburbia

mercredi 23 mai 2012

L and ES text 2


For a week after that evening Dad sulked and didn’t speak, though sometimes he pointed at salt and pepper; Sometimes this gesticulation got him into some complicated Marcel Marceau mime language. Visitors from other planets looking in through the window would have thought we were playing a family guessing game as my brother, mum and I gathered around dad yelling clues to each other as he tried, without the compromise of friendly words, to show us that the gutters had become blocked with leaves, that the side of the house was getting damp and he wanted Allie and me to climb up a ladder and fix it, with Mum holding the ladder. At supper we sat eating our curled-up beefburgers, chips and fish fingers in silence. Once Mum burst into tears and banged the table with the flat of her hand. “My life is terrible, terrible!” she cried. “Doesn’t anyone understand?”
We looked at her in surprise for a moment, before carrying on with our food. Mum did the washing-up as usual and no one helped her. After tea we all dispersed as soon as possible; My brother Amar, four years younger than me, called himself Allie to avoid racial trouble. He always went to bed as early as he could, taking with him fashion magazines like Vogue, Harper’s and Queen, and anything European he could lay his hand on. In bed he wore a tiny pair of red silk pyjamas, a smoking jacket he got a t a jumble sale, and his hairnet. “What’s wrong with looking good?” he’d say, going upstairs. In the evenings I often went to the park to sit in the piss-sinking shed and smoke with the other boys who’d escaped from home.
Dad had firm ideas about the division of labour between men and women. Both my parents worked: Mum had got a job in a shoe shop in the High Street to finance Allie, who had decided to become a ballet dancer and had to go to an expensive private school. But Mum did all the housework and the cooking. At lunchtime she shopped, and every evening she prepared the meal. After this she watched television until ten-thirty. The TV was her only area of absolute authority. The unspoken rule of the house was that she always watched what she wanted; if any of us wanted to watch anything else, we had no chance at all. With her last energy of the day she’d throw such a fit of anger, self-pity and frustration that no one dared interfere with her. She’d die for Steptoe and Son, candid Camera and The Fugitive.
If there were only repeats or political programmes on TV she liked to draw. Her hand flew. She’d been to art school. She had drawn us, our heads, three to a page, for years. Three selfish men, she called us. She said she’d never liked men because men were torturers. It wasn’t women who turned on the gas at Auschwitz, according to her. Or bombed Vietnam. During this time of dad’s silence she drew a lot, putting her pad away behind the chair, with her knitting, her childhood diary of the war (“Air-raid tonight”) and her Cartherine Cookson novels. I’d often tried to oppress her into reading proper books like Tender is the Night and The Dharma Bums, but she always said the print was too small.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, chapter 1, pages 19-20

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