On this unforgettable day Shinko carried with her a pineapple and a grapefruit, which she was intending to eat for her tea, had they not, later, rolled into the road and rotted forgotten in the gutter. As they plodded along in the English drizzle, Changez and Shinko, both loquacious and slow, discussed their respective homelands, India and Japan, which they missed desperately, but not enough to get on a plane and go there. And Changez, if I knew my Changez, would be abusing any Pakistanis and Indians he saw in the street. ‘Look at that low-class person,’ he’d say in a loud voice, stopping and pointing out one of his fellow countrymen – perhaps a waiter hurrying to work or an old man ambling to the day centre, or especially a group of Sikhs going to visit their accountant. ‘Yes, they have souls, but the reason there is this bad racialism is because they are so dirty, so rough-looking, so bad-mannered. And they are wearing such strange clothes for the Englishman, turbans and all. To be accepted they must take up the English ways and forget their filthy villages! They must decide to be either here or there. Look how much here I am! And why doesn’t that bugger over there look the Englishman in the eye! No wonder the Englishman will hit him!’
Suddenly a yell was heard all over Lewisham, all over Catford, and in Bromley. Changez, in the midst of a diatribe, and wearing unlaced Hush Puppies, turned as quickly as he could, which was not quickly at all, rather like a lorry in a cul-de-sac. But when he had manoeuvred from east to west he saw that his father-in-law, the man who had brought him to England, to Shinko, to Karim, to a camp-bed and Harold Robbins, was shuffling down the street towards him, his stick aloft, curses released from his mouth like mad dogs from a kennel. Changez immediately realized that these toothy dogs were not warnings or idle threats. No; the disappointed father-in-law was intending to crack his son-in-law over the loaf right now – and possibly club him to death. Shinko noticed that, surprisingly, Changez remained calm throughout. (And it was at this moment that her love for him was born.)
As Anwar smacked downwards with his stick, Changez lumbered to one side, just in time, withdrew the knobbly dildo from its paper-bag sheath, and with a Muslim warrior shout – at least, Shinko said it was a Muslim shout, but what would she know? – whacked my uncle smartly over the head with it. Uncle Anwar, who’d come from India to the Old Kent Road to lodge with a dentist, to jangle and gamble, to make his fortune and return home to build a house like my grandfather’s on Juhu Beach, could never have guessed all those years ago that late in life he would be knocked unconscious by a sex-aid. No fortune-teller had predicted this. Kipling had written ‘to each his own fear’, but this was not Anwar’s.
Anwar collapsed moaning on the pavement.
Shinko ran to a phone-box in which three boys had freshly urinated and called an ambulance. Later that day Changez was interviewed by the police and called immigrant, Paki, scum, wog, bastard and murderer, with the offending dildo on the table before him, as an aide mémoire. Changez’s first impulse was to say that he was innocent, that the dildo had been planted on him by the police, since he knew such crimes occurred frequently. But even he knew better than to try to suggest to a white English jury that Constable McCrum had slipped a large pink sex-toy into the accused’s pocket. Changez was held under consideration for assault.
Meanwhile Anwar, with a bandage around his head that made him look like the dying Trotsky, was in intensive care for a week. He’d had heart failure. Jamila and I and occasionally Princess Jeeta were at his bedside. But Jeeta could be cruel. ‘Why do I want to see that black man?’ she said one night, as we were on our way there on the bus.
I didn’t know why, but Dad wouldn’t go and see Anwar at all. Perhaps I felt more sentimental about Dad’s past than he did himself, but I wanted to see the two men together again. ‘Please go to the hospital,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to give myself depression,’ Dad replied fastidiously.
Dad had seriously fallen out with Anwar. They weren’t speaking at all now. It was over the fact that Anwar thought Dad should never have left Mum. It was a corrupt thing to do. Have a mistress, Anwar said, and treat both women equally well, but never leave your wife. Anwar insisted that Eva was an immoral woman and that Dad had been seduced by the West, becoming as decadent and lacking in values as the rest of the society. He even listened to pop music, didn’t he? ‘He’ll be eating pork pie next,’ Anwar said. Naturally, all this infuriated Dad, who accepted the decadence and corruption line – he started using the word ‘immoral’ all the time – but not with reference to himself.
Only Eva could have got Dad out to see Anwar, but she was rarely at home anyway. Eva was working non-stop. They were a terrific couple, and good for each other, because Dad, with his ignorance of the world and plain arrogance, his ‘You can do anything’ approach, uninhibited by doubt or knowledge, gave Eva the support and confidence she’d always required. But of course, as she flourished she moved away from him. Eva was always out, and I knew Dad was thinking of Mum more than ever, and was probably idealizing her. He hadn’t seen her, but they’d started to talk on the phone, whereas before I’d managed all their mutual business.
Anwar died, mumbling about Bombay, about the beach, about the boys at the Cathedral school, and calling for his mother. Jamila insisted he should be buried in a place she loved, a small grassy place where she often went to read, and gays to sunbathe and cruise. Anwar’s body was washed by his friends at the nearby mosque, and five Indians in bright and clashing clothing brought the coffin to the graveside. One of the five men was simple, with a harelip; another had a little white beard. They opened the coffin lid and I went forward to join the queue filing past, always eager not to miss anything; but Dad held my arm as if I were a little boy, and refused to let me go as I pulled against his hand. ‘You’ll never forget it,’ he said. ‘Remember Uncle Anwar in other ways.’
‘Which ways?’
‘In his shop, for instance.’
‘Really?’
‘Stacking shelves,’ he said sarcastically.
There was a minor row when one of the Indians pulled out a handy compass and announced that the hole hadn’t been dug facing in the right direction, towards Mecca. The five Indians shifted the coffin a little and murmured verses from the Koran. All this reminded me of the time I was thrown out of a class at school for asking what people would be wearing in heaven. I thought I was one of the first people in history to find all religion childish and inexplicable.
But I did feel, looking at these strange creatures now – the Indians – that in some way these were my people, and that I’d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I felt ashamed and incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and as if I’d been colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be like them. Partly I blamed Dad for this. After all, like Anwar, for most of his life he’d never shown any interest in going back to India. He was always honest about this: he preferred England in every way. Things worked; it wasn’t hot; you didn’t see terrible things on the street that you could do nothing about. He wasn’t proud of his past, but he wasn’t unproud of it either; it just existed, and there wasn’t any point in fetishizing it, as some liberals and Asian radicals liked to do. So if I wanted the additional personality bonus of an Indian past, I would have to create it.