‘D’you want me to leave you two together?’ Helen asked.
I quickly said no and asked Jammie if I could tell Helen what was happening.
‘Yes, if you want to expose our culture as being ridiculous and our people as old-fashioned, extreme and narrow-minded.’
So I told Helen about the hunger-strike. Jamila butted in to add details and keep us up to date. Anwar hadn’t compromised in the slightest, not nibbling a biscuit or sipping a glass of water or smoking a single cigarette. Either Jamila obeyed or he would die painfully, his organs failing one by one. And if they took him to hospital he’d just do the same thing again and again, until his family gave in.
It was starting to rain, so the three of us sat in a bus shelter. There was never anywhere to go. Helen was patient and attentive, holding my hand to calm me. Jamila said, ‘What I’ve agreed with myself is that it’s going to be tonight, at midnight, when I decide what to do. I can’t carry on with this indecision.’
Every time we talked about Jamila running away from home, where she could go and how we could get money to help her survive, she said, ‘What about my mother?’ Anwar would blame Jeeta for everything Jamila did. Jeeta’s life would be living death and there was nowhere she could escape to. I had the brilliant idea that both Jamila and Jeeta should run away together, but Jeeta would never leave Anwar: Indian wives weren’t like that. We went round and round until Helen had a brain-wave.
‘We’ll go and ask your father,’ she said. ‘He’s a wise man, he’s spiritual and –’
‘He’s a complete phoney,’ said Jamila.
‘Let’s at least try it,’ Helen replied.
So off we went to my house.
In the living room, with her almost translucent white legs sticking out of her dressing-gown, Mum was drawing. She closed her sketch-book quickly and slipped it behind her chair. I could see she was tired from her day in the shoe shop. I always wanted to ask her about it but could never bring myself to say something as ridiculous as, ‘How was your day?’ Consequently she never discussed her work with anyone. Jamila sat down on a stool and stared into space as if happy to leave the subject of her father’s suicide to others.
Helen didn’t help herself or increase the possibility of peace on earth by saying she’d been at Dad’s Chislehurst gig.
‘I didn’t see it,’ said Mum.
‘Oh, what a shame. It was profound.’ Mum looked self-pitying but Helen went on. ‘It was liberating. It made me want to go and live in San Francisco.’
‘That man makes me want to go and live in San Francisco,’ said Mum.
‘But then, I expect you’ve learned everything he has to teach. Are you a Buddhist?’
It seemed pretty incongruous, the conversation between Mum and Helen. They were talking about Buddhism in Chislehurst, against a background of mind-expansion, freedom and festivals. But for Mum the Second World War was still present in our streets, the streets where she’d been brought up. She often told me of the nightly air-raids, her parents worn out from fire-watching, houses in the familiar streets suddenly plunged into dust, people suddenly gone, news of sons lost at the Front. What grasp of evil or the possibilities of human destruction could we have? All I materially knew of the war was the thick squat block of the air-raid shelter at the end of the garden which as a child I took over as my own little house. Even then it contained its rows of jam-jars and rotten bunk-beds from 1943.
‘It’s simple for us to speak of love,’ I said to Helen. ‘What about the war?’
Jamila stood up irritably. ‘Why are we discussing the war, Karim?’
‘It’s important, it’s –’
‘You idiot. Please –’ And she looked imploringly at Mum. ‘We came here for a purpose. Why are you making me wait like this? Let’s get on with the consultation.’
Mum said, indicating the adjoining wall, ‘With him?’
Jamila nodded and bit her fingernails. Mum laughed bitterly.
‘He can’t even sort himself out.’
‘It was Karim’s idea,’ Jamila said, and swept out of the room.
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ Mum said to me. ‘Why are you doing this to her? Why don’t you do something useful like clearing out the kitchen? Why don’t you go and read a school book? Why don’t you do something that will get you somewhere, Karim?’
‘Don’t get hysterical,’ I said to Mum.
‘Why not?’ she replied.
When we went into his room, God was lying on his bed listening to music on the radio. He looked approvingly at Helen and winked at me. He liked her; but then, he was keen for me to go out with anyone, as long as they were not boys or Indians. ‘Why go out with these Muslims?’ he said once, when I brought a Pakistani friend of Jamila’s home with me. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Too many problems,’ he said imperiously. ‘What problems?’ I asked. He wasn’t good at being specific; he shook his head as if to say there were so many problems he didn’t know where to begin. But he added, for the sake of argument, ‘Dowries and all.’
‘Anwar is my oldest friend in the world,’ he said sadly when we told him everything. ‘We old Indians come to like this England less and less and we return to an imagined India.’
Helen took Dad’s hand and patted it comfortingly.
‘But this is your home,’ she said. ‘We like you being here. You benefit our country with your traditions.’
Jamila raised her eyes to heaven. Helen was driving her to suicide, I could see that. Helen just made me laugh but this was sober business.
I said, ‘Won’t you go and see him?’
‘He wouldn’t listen to Gandhi himself,’ Jamila said.
‘All right,’ said Dad. ‘You come back in ninety-five minutes, during which time I will have meditated. I’ll give you my answer at the end of this thought.’
‘Great!’
So the three of us left the cul-de-sac which was Victoria Road. We walked through the gloomy, echoing streets to the pub, past turdy parks, past the Victorian school with outside toilets, past the numerous bomb-sites which were our true playgrounds and sexual schools, and past the neat gardens and scores of front rooms containing familiar strangers and televisions shining like dying lights. Eva always called our area ‘the higher depths’. It was so quiet none of us wanted to hear the sound of our own embarrassing voices.
Here lived Mr Whitman, the policeman, and his young wife, Noleen; next door were a retired couple, Mr and Mrs Holub. They were socialists in exile from Czechoslovakia, and unknown to them their son crept out of the house in his pyjamas every Friday and Saturday night to hear uncouth music. Opposite them were another retired couple, a teacher and his wife, the Gothards. An East End family of birdseed dealers, the Lovelaces, were next to them – old Grandma Lovelace was a toilet attendant in the Library Gardens. Further up the street lived a Fleet Street reporter, Mr Nokes, his wife and their overweight kids, with the Scoffields – Mrs Scoffield was an architect – next door to them.
All of the houses had been ‘done up’. One had a new porch, another double-glazing, ‘Georgian’ windows or a new door with brass fittings. Kitchens had been extended, lofts converted, walls removed, garages inserted. This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status – the concrete display of earned cash. Display was the game. How many times on a visit to families in the neighbourhood, before being offered a cup of tea, had we been taken around a house – ‘The grand tour again,’ sighed Dad – to admire knocked-through rooms, cunning cupboards and bunk-beds, showers, coal bunkers and greenhouses.
In the pub, the Chatterton Arms, sat ageing Teddy Boys in drape coats, with solid sculpted quiffs like ships’ prows. There were a few vicious Rockers too, in studded leather and chains, discussing gang-bangs, their favourite occupation. And there were a couple of skinheads with their girls, in brogues, Levi’s, Crombies and braces. A lot of them I recognized from schooclass="underline" they were in the pub every night, with their dads, and would be there for ever, never going away. They were a little startled to see two hippies and a Paki walk in; there was some conversation on the subject and several glances in our direction, so I made sure we didn’t eyeball them and give them reason to get upset. All the same, I was nervous they might jump on us when we left.