Unlike them, Dad was sent to England by his family to be educated. His mother knitted him and Anwar several itchy woollen vests and waved them off from Bombay, making them promise never to be pork-eaters. Like Gandhi and Jinnah before him, Dad would return to India a qualified and polished English gentleman lawyer and an accomplished ballroom dancer. But Dad had no idea when he set off that he’d never see his mother’s face again. This was the great undiscussed grief of his life, and, I reckon, explained his helpless attachment to women who would take care of him, women he could love as he should have loved the mother to whom he never wrote a single letter.
London, the Old Kent Road, was a freezing shock to both of them. It was wet and foggy; people called you ‘Sunny Jim’; there was never enough to eat, and Dad never took to dripping on toast. ‘Nose drippings more like,’ he’d say, pushing away the staple diet of the working class. ‘I thought it would be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding all the way.’ But rationing was still on, and the area was derelict after being bombed to rubble during the war. Dad was amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England, though. He’d never seen the English in poverty, as roadsweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He’d never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him the English didn’t wash regularly because the water was so cold – if they had water at all. And when Dad tried to discuss Byron in local pubs no one warned him that not every Englishman could read or that they didn’t necessarily want tutoring by an Indian on the poetry of a pervert and a madman.
Fortunately, Anwar and Dad had somewhere to stay, at Dr Lal’s, a friend of Dad’s father. Dr Lal was a monstrous Indian dentist who claimed to be a friend of Bertrand Russell. At Cambridge during the war, a lonely Russell advised Dr Lal that masturbation was the answer to sexual frustration. Russell’s great discovery was a revelation to Dr Lal, who claimed to have been happy ever after. Was his liberation one of Russell’s more striking achievements? For perhaps if Dr Lal hadn’t been so forthright about sex with his two young and sexually rapacious lodgers, my father wouldn’t have met my mother and I wouldn’t be in love with Charlie.
Anwar was always plumper than Dad, with his podgy gut and round face. No sentence was complete without the flavouring of a few noxious words, and he loved the prostitutes who hung around Hyde Park. They called him Baby Face. He was less suave, too, for as soon as Dad’s monthly allowance arrived from India, Dad visited Bond Street to buy bow-ties, bottle-green waistcoats and tartan socks, after which he’d have to borrow money from Baby Face. During the day Anwar studied aeronautical engineering in North London and Dad tried to glue his eyes to his law books. At night they slept in Dr Lal’s consulting room among the dental equipment, Anwar sleeping in the chair itself. One night, enraged by the mice running around him, by sexual frustration too, and burning with the itching of his mother’s woollen vests, Dad dressed himself in Lal’s pale blue smock, picked up the most ferocious drill and attacked Anwar as he slept. Anwar screamed when he awoke to find the future guru of Chislehurst coming at him with a dentist’s drill. This playfulness, this refusal to take anything seriously, as if life didn’t matter, characterized Dad’s attitude to his studies. Dad just couldn’t concentrate. He’d never worked before and it didn’t suit him now. Anwar started to say of Dad, ‘Haroon is called to the Bar every day – at twelve o’clock and five-thirty.’
Dad defended himself: ‘I go to the pub to think.’
‘No, not think – drink,’ Anwar replied.
On Fridays and Saturdays they went to dances and smooched blissfully to Glenn Miller and Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. That is where Dad first laid eyes and hands on a pretty working-class girl from the suburbs called Margaret. My mother told me that she loved him, her little man, from the first moment she saw him. He was sweet and kind and utterly lost-looking, which made women attempt to make him found-looking.
There was a friend of Mum’s whom Baby Face walked out with, and apparently even walked in with, but Anwar was already married, to Jeeta, a princess whose family came on horseback to the wedding held in the old British hill station of Murree, in the north of Pakistan. Jeeta’s brothers carried guns, which made Anwar nervous and want to head for England.
Soon Princess Jeeta joined Anwar in England, and she became Auntie Jeeta to me. Auntie Jeeta looked nothing like a princess, and I mocked her because she couldn’t speak English properly. She was very shy and they lived in one dirty room in Brixton. It was no palace and it backed on to the railway line. One day Anwar made a serious mistake in the betting shop and won a lot of money. He bought a short lease on a toy shop in South London. It was a miserable failure until Princess Jeeta made him turn it into a grocer’s shop. They were set up. Customers flocked.
In contrast, Dad was going nowhere. His family cut off his money when they discovered from a spy – Dr Lal – that he was being called to the Bar only to drink several pints of rough stout and brown ale wearing a silk bow-tie and a green waistcoat.
Dad ended up working as a clerk in the Civil Service for £3 a week. His life, once a cool river of balmy distraction, of beaches and cricket, of mocking the British, and dentists’ chairs, was now a cage of umbrellas and steely regularity. It was all trains and shitting sons, and the bursting of frozen pipes in January, and the lighting of coal fires at seven in the morning: the organization of love into suburban family life in a two-up-two-down semi-detached in South London, life was thrashing him for being a child, an innocent who’d never had to do anything for himself. Once when I was left with him all day and I shat myself, he was bewildered. He stood me naked in the bath while he fetched a cup from which, standing on the other side of the bathroom as if I had the plague, he threw water at my legs while holding his nose with his other hand.
I don’t know how it all started, but when I was ten or eleven he turned to Lieh Tzu, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu as if they’d never been read before, as if they’d been writing exclusively for him.
We continued to visit Baby Face and Princess Jeeta on Sunday afternoons, the only time the shop closed. Dad’s friendship with Anwar was still essentially a jokey one, a cricket-, boxing-, athletics-, tennis-watching one. When Dad went there with a library copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower Anwar snatched it from him, held it up and laughed.
‘What’s this bloody-fool thing you’re playing with now?’
Dad promptly started up with, ‘Anwar, yaar, you don’t realize the great secrets I’m uncovering! How happy I feel now I’m understanding life at last!’
Anwar interrupted, stabbing at Dad with his roll-up. ‘You bloody Chinese fool. How are you reading rubbish when I’m making money! I’ve paid off my bastard mortgage!’
Dad was so keen for Anwar to understand that his knees were vibrating. ‘I don’t care about money. There’s always money. I must understand these secret things.’
Anwar raised his eyes to heaven and looked at Mum, who sat there, bored. They both had sympathy for Dad, and loved him, but in these moods love was mixed with pity, as if he were making some tragic mistake, like joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The more he talked of the Yin and Yang, cosmic consciousness, Chinese philosophy, and the following of the Way, the more lost Mum became. He seemed to be drifting away into outer space, leaving her behind; she was a suburban woman, quiet and kind, and found life with two children and Dad difficult enough as it was. There was at the same time a good chunk of pride in Dad’s Oriental discoveries, which led him to denigrate Anwar’s life.