‘You’re only interested in toilet rolls, sardine tins, sanitary pads and turnips,’ he told Anwar. ‘But there are many more things, yaar, in heaven and earth, than you damn well dream of in Penge.’
‘I haven’t got time to dream!’ interrupted Anwar. ‘Nor should you be dreaming. Wake up! What about getting some promotion so Margaret can wear some nice clothes. You know what women are like, yaar.’
‘The whites will never promote us,’ Dad said. ‘Not an Indian while there is a white man left on the earth. You don’t have to deal with them – they still think they have an Empire when they don’t have two pennies to rub together.’
‘They don’t promote you because you are lazy, Haroon. Barnacles are growing on your balls. You think of some China-thing and not the Queen!’
‘To hell with the Queen! Look, Anwar, don’t you ever feel you want to know yourself? That you are an enigma to yourself completely?’
‘I don’t interest anyone else, why should I interest myself?’ cried Anwar. ‘Get on with living!’
On and on these arguments went, above Anwar and Jeeta’s shop, until they became so absorbed and hostile that their daughter, Jamila, and I could sneak away and play cricket with a broom handle and a tennis ball in the garden.
Beneath all the Chinese bluster was Dad’s loneliness and desire for internal advancement. He needed to talk about the China-things he was learning. I often walked to the commuter station with him in the morning, where he caught the eight-thirty-five to Victoria. On these twenty-minute walks he was joined by other people, usually women, secretaries, clerks and assistants, who also worked in Central London. He wanted to talk of obtaining a quiet mind, of being true to yourself, of self-understanding. I heard them speak of their lives, boyfriends, agitated minds and real selves in a way, I’m sure, they never talked to anyone else. They didn’t even notice me and the transistor radio I carried, listening to the Tony Blackburn Show on Radio One. The more Dad didn’t try to seduce them, the more he seduced them; often they didn’t leave their houses until he was walking by. If he took a different route for fear of having stones and ice-pops full of piss lobbed at him by schoolboys from the secondary modern, they changed their route too. On the train Dad would read his mystical books or concentrate on the tip of his nose, a large target indeed. And he always carried a tiny blue dictionary with him, the size of a matchbox, making sure to learn a new word every day. At the weekends I’d test him on the meaning of analeptic, frutescent, polycephalus and orgulous. He’d look at me and say, ‘You never know when you might need a heavyweight word to impress an Englishman.’
It wasn’t until he met Eva that he had someone to share his China-things with, and it surprised him that such mutual interest was possible.
*
Now, I presumed, on this Saturday night, God was going to meet Eva again. He gave me the address on a piece of paper and we caught a bus, this time towards what I considered to be the country. It was dark and icy when we got off in Chislehurst. I led Dad first one way and then, speaking with authority, in the opposite direction. He was so keen to get there he didn’t complain for twenty minutes; but at last he became poisonous.
‘Where are we, idiot?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Use the brains you’ve inherited from me, you bastard!’ he said, shivering. ‘It’s bloody cold and we’re late.’
‘It’s your fault you’re cold, Dad,’ I said.
‘My fault?’
It was indeed his fault, for under his car coat my father was wearing what looked like a large pair of pyjamas. On top was a long silk shirt embroidered around the neck with dragons. This fell over his chest and flew out at his stomach for a couple of miles before dropping down to his knees. Under this he had on baggy trousers and sandals. But the real crime, the reason for concealment under the hairy car coat, was the crimson waistcoat with gold and silver patterns that he wore over the shirt. If Mum had caught him going out like that she would have called the police. After all, God was a Civil Servant, he had a briefcase and umbrella, he shouldn’t be walking around looking like a midget toreador.
The houses in Chislehurst had greenhouses, grand oaks and sprinklers on the lawn; men came in to do the garden. It was so impressive for people like us that when our families walked these streets on Sunday visits to Auntie Jean we’d treat it as a lower-middle-class equivalent of the theatre. ‘Ahhh’ and ‘oohh’, we’d go, imagining we lived there, what times we’d have, and how we’d decorate the place and organize the garden for cricket, badminton and table tennis. Once I remember Mum looking reproachfully at Dad, as if to say: What husband are you to give me so little when the other men, the Alans and Barrys and Peters and Roys, provide cars, houses, holidays, central heating and jewellery? They can at least put up shelves or fix the fence. What can you do? And Mum would stumble into a pothole, just as we were doing now, since the roads were deliberately left corrugated with stones and pits, to discourage ordinary people from driving up and down.
As we crunched up the drive at last – with a pause for God to put his thumbs together and do a few minutes’ trance practice – God told me that the house was owned by Carl and Marianne, friends of Eva, who’d recently been trekking in India. This was immediately obvious from the sandalwood Buddhas, brass ashtrays and striped plaster elephants which decorated every available space. And by the fact that Carl and Marianne stood barefoot at the door as we entered, the palms of their hands together in prayer and their heads bowed as if they were temple servants and not partners in the local TV rental firm of Rumbold & Toedrip.
As soon as I went in I sported Eva, who had been looking out for us. She was wearing a long red dress which fell to the floor and a red turban. She swooped down upon me, and after twelve kisses she pressed three paperbacks into my hand.
‘Smell them!’ she urged me.
I dipped my nose between the foxed leaves. They smelled of chocolate.
‘Second-hand! Real discoveries! And for your dad, this.’ She gave me a new copy of the Analects of Confucius, translated by Arthur Waley. ‘Please hold on to it for him. Is he OK?’
‘Dead nervous.’
She glanced around the room, which contained about twenty people.
‘They’re a sympathetic lot. Pretty stupid. I can’t see he’ll have any problems. My dream is to get him to meet with more responsive people – in London. I’m determined to get all of us to London!’ she said. ‘Now, let me introduce you to people.’
After shaking a few hands I managed to get comfortably settled on a shiny black sofa, my feet on a furry white rug, with my back to a row of fat books handtooled in plastic – abridged versions (with illustrations) of Vanity Fair and The Woman in White. In front of me was what seemed to be an illuminated porcupine – some kind of clear bulb with hundreds of different coloured waving quills which stuck out of it and shimmered – an object, I’m sure, designed to be appreciated with the aid of hallucinogenics.
I heard Carl say, ‘There are two sorts of people in the world – those who have been to India and those who haven’t,’ and was forced to get up and move out of earshot.
Beside the double-glazed french windows, with their view of the long garden and its goldfish pond glowing under purple light, was a bar. Not many people were drinking on this big spiritual occasion, but I could easily have put back a couple of pints. It wouldn’t have looked too good, though, even I knew that. Marianne’s daughter and an older girl in tight hotpants were serving lassi and hot Indian nibbles, guaranteed, I knew, to make you fart like a geriatric on All-bran. I joined the girl in hotpants behind the bar and found out her name was Helen and she was at the high school.