This performance, which was embarrassing her, seemed to go on for a long time, with everyone watching. How much clothing, perfume, hair, jewellery and other frills could there be on the relatively small surface of a girl? A lot.
Suddenly philosophy and the search for “truth,” which until that moment I had adored, seemed a dingy thing. The grimacing professor in a wrecked pullover and corduroy trousers, old to us (my age now, or perhaps younger) and in a Valium stupor, as he insisted on informing us, seemed like a clown. We smirked at one another whenever he said, with emphasis, “Cunt!”, which he assured us was the correct pronunciation for Immanuel Kant. And to think, only the other day the university was at the centre of intellectual ferment, dissent and even revolution!
Truth was one thing, but beauty, beside me now, was clearly another. Though this girl’s arms were full, she wasn’t carrying any accessory as routine as a notebook or a pencil. I had to lend her some writing paper and my pen. It was the only pen I had on me. I pretended I had more in my bag. I’d have given her all the pens and pencils I had or, indeed, anything she asked for, including my body and soul, but that was to come later.
After the seminar, she was sitting alone in the refectory. I needed to retrieve that pen, but did I dare speak to her? I’ve always preferred listening. Tahir, my first analyst, would say: people speak because there are things they don’t want to hear; they listen because there are things they don’t want to say. Not that I thought I had a talent for listening then, or realised you could make a profession of it. I was just worse at talking. I spoke all the time, of course, but only to myself. This was safe.
For years I perplexed women with my listening habit. Several of them were tired out by it, talking until they were shattered by the strain of trying to find the words which would do the trick. I remember one girl screaming I had listened to her all afternoon before she ran for the door: “You’ve been ripping me off! I feel utterly stolen from!”
I didn’t realise, until my first analyst told me, that it was my words rather than my ears they wanted. But with Ajita, I could not even sit down next to her and say, “Can I listen to you?” I still find it difficult to sit down with strangers, unless I’m analysing them. People have such power; the force field of their bodies, and the wishes within them, can knock you all over the place.
Playing for time, and perhaps hoping she’d go away forever, I went to get some coffee. When I turned back, I saw that my closest friend, the handsome tough guy Valentin, had followed me in. He had gone to sit down right next to her with his coffee. God knows what the coffee tasted like in those days. It was probably instant, like the mashed potatoes and puddings we consumed: all you did was add water. There wouldn’t have been much else about, but we always had water. My father liked to point out, having experienced British power as a child in occupied India, the war had been over for thirty years, but Britain still seemed to be recovering from an almost fatal illness—loss of power, depression and direction-lessness. “The sick man of Europe,” our country was called. The end of empire was not even tragic now but squalid.
It was lucky for me, and unusual for Valentin, to be there that morning. He didn’t turn up much for lectures. They began too early for him, particularly if he’d been working in the casino the night before. He did come into college eventually, to meet girls and to see me, but mostly because the refectory food was cheap.
Valentin was Bulgarian. Often I asked him to describe his escape from Bulgaria, and he would tell me more details each time. I’d heard no other “real life” story as exciting. He’d done National Service and been on the Olympic cycling team; he could fence and box too. He’d conformed so well that he was able to become an air steward, one of the few jobs in the Eastern Bloc in which ordinary people were allowed to travel. He’d worked on the airline for a year, telling no one of his plans to escape. But someone had become suspicious. Intending to flee to America, his last trip was to be to London. As he and the rest of the crew were boarding the plane to Sofia, he turned and fled, running wildly through the airport until he found a policeman. Various refugee organisations helped him. A woman who worked for one of these organisations was married to a philosophy professor to whose house he went, which was how he turned up in my college class.
Valentin could never return home, could never see his parents, siblings or friends again. The trauma rendered him incapable of the success he could have had. In England, where he was supposed to be studying, he was just hanging around, mostly with me and our German pal, Wolf, all of us trying to get into interesting trouble.
It was within my abilities to sit with Valentin and Ajita; and even to hear him boasting, as he liked to, about how close his room was to the college, how it only took him five minutes to get to a lecture. In comparison, I had to take a bus, an overground train and a tube. It took an hour and a half, but courtesy of British Rail, I did get to read Philosophical Investigations and The Interpretation of Dreams. It was during this time that I began to read properly for the first time, and it was like finding a satisfying lover you’d never part from.
With Valentin’s assistance, Ajita and I had begun to talk. She was an Indian who, it turned out, didn’t live far from Miriam, Mum and me, in the suburbs. Apparently Ajita’s mother hadn’t approved of England, which she considered a “dirty place,” sexually obsessed, corrupt, drug-ridden, the families broken. Six months ago, she had packed her numerous trunks and gone to Bombay, my father’s original home, leaving her husband and two children to be looked after by an aunt, the father’s eldest sister. Ajita’s mother didn’t like living in the white suburbs without servants or friends. In Bombay she lived in her brother’s house. He owned hotels; there were movie stars all around; help was cheap.
Ajita said, “There it is like being on holiday all the time. But my father is a proud man. He could never live off others.” The mother had lovers, Ajita seemed to think, but would return, she implied, if circumstances were more to her liking. As a result, Ajita pitied her lonely father, who owned sweatshops somewhere in North London and was rarely at home.
After coffee, Ajita offered me a lift back to the suburbs. Although I wasn’t intending to go home, indeed I’d just arrived in London and was intending to spend the rest of the day with Valentin and Wolf, I would have gone anywhere with her. This girl had many virtues: money, a car—a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk—a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked “What does your boyfriend do?” she replied, “But I don’t have one, really.”
What more could anyone want?
“She’s yours,” Valentin whispered as I left.
“Thank you, my friend.”
He was generous like that. Or maybe it was because he had so many women buzzing around him, one more or less didn’t matter. He took them for granted. Or perhaps he was indifferent to most human exchange. He could sit for hours, just staring, smoking, hardly moving, without any of the anxious shifting about and intermittent desiring that I, for instance, was prone to.
This stable attitude, I imagined, would be an asset. The other night I was talking with a screenwriter friend who is working on a “tough guy” film, about why men like gangsters. Strong guys aren’t exercised by the subtleties; they’re not moved, or bothered by guilt. They’re narcissists, in the end, and as ruthless about their rights as children. To me they were as self-sufficient, complete and impermeable as someone reading a book forever.
That was what I wanted then. Why? Perhaps it was because as a kid, when Miriam and I fought, or when she tickled me—she was heavier, rougher and altogether meaner than me; she liked to punch or hit me with sticks, something, now I think of it, which Josephine liked to do—I felt I was the girl and she the male. As so many others have discovered in their own case, my particular body didn’t appear to quite coincide with my gender. As I was thin and slight with wide hips, I believed my form to be that of a small, weak, presexual girl. Mother called me “beautiful” rather than handsome. I suffered
from extreme emotional states—screaming inside—which left me low, depleted, weeping on the bed. Often I dreamed I was Michelin Man, full of air rather than grandeur or gravity; one day I might float away, unanchored by male weight. What did “men” do? They were gangsters, making their way in the world with decision and desire. With Ajita now, didn’t I have that?
Ajita and I talked all the way through South London. The closer we came to my “manor,” as we called it then, the more anxious I became. I was delighted when she asked if I wanted to see her house.
“There it is,” she said a little later, turning off the engine.
If I always thought of Ajita’s house as being American, it was because it was in a new close and was the sort of thing you might see on I Love Lucy.
The building was low and light and open, with large areas of glass. To the side there was a wide garage and, out front, a crew-cut lawn surrounded by a low picket fence. Inside, there were Indian carpets, wall hangings and tapestries, wooden elephants, bowls, latticed furniture. Otherwise there wasn’t much there. They might just as well have been renting it, complete with “ethnic” fittings, though they had, in fact, bought the place four years before, after leaving Uganda with few possessions.
I liked her house and wanted to be there not only because of her but because the houses in the suburbs I knew were old: the furniture was ancient, from before the war. It was heavy brown stuff, from which, as a child, I would scrape brown varnish with my fingernails. My maternal grandfather, who left his house to Mum, had owned a secondhand furniture shop, or junk shop as Miriam and I called it, from which we had filled our house. There were fireguards, clocks that ticked and chimed, ruched curtains, picture rails and pelmets, chamber pots and narrow beds, over which Mother had begun to overlay, after she met Dad, dozens of Eastern pictures, swirly cloth and lacquered objects.
As a child and young man, I was left often in the care of my grandfather, who wore, apart from a hat, which was conventional then, long white underwear, a tie, voluminous trousers held up by braces and huge boots, which he cut into with razor blades to give his corns “space.” He never tried to think of what I might be entertained by but just took me along with him. When he had the shops, I’d play there all day, jamming screwdrivers into clocks. Later, I got to spend a lot of lunchtimes sitting with him in the pub—his club and office—as he “studied form” in the newspaper, drank Guinness, smoked roll-ups and ate steak-and-kidney pie, usually at the same time.
For entertainment I would be handed the Daily Express or The People. My newspaper addiction has never diminished. But that wasn’t all: we would go to Epsom for the races, to Catford for the dogs and to Brighton by “charabanc” to see someone about a pigeon. On Saturdays we visited football grounds in the vicinity. The nearest was Crystal Palace, but Mill-wall—“The Den”—was the most feared. As we walked about the neighbourhood, Grandad pointed out bombsites where his former school friends had been killed, and bomb shelters where he’d hidden with Mum as a child.
Pubs, for me, particularly if they had a piano player, always had a Dickensian exaggeration: overdressed, perfumed landladies pinching your cheek and giving you crisps and lemonade; red-faced men in ties in the “private” bars, and always a frisson between Grandad and some waiting woman, a subtle acknowledgement of available pleasure that made me wonder when it might be my turn.
You might consider my later penchant for the low life an affectation, but most days I’ve popped into some pub or other, hoping to find the characters from my childhood, the original white working class of London.
When I was with my grandfather, I more or less passed for white. Sometimes people asked if I were “Mediterranean”; otherwise, there were few Asian people where we lived. Most whites considered Asians to be “inferior,” less intelligent, less everything good. Not that we were called Asian then. Officially, as it were, we were called “immigrants,” I think. Later, for political reasons, we were “blacks.” But we always considered ourselves to be Indians. In Britain we are still called Asians, though we’re no more Asian than the English are European. It was a long time before we became known as Muslims, a new imprimatur, and then for political reasons.
Being so far the only dark-skinned student in the philosophy class, I thought Ajita and I would be a fine fit. She was thin and small, with a compact, boyish body not unlike mine. Her hair was long and dark, and she wore expensive clothes with jewellery, handbags and high heels. She might have been Indian, but she dressed like an Italian girl, sprinkled with gold. She loved Fiorucci, whose shop was near Harrods. Every Saturday she went shopping with her female cousins.
Ajita was no wild girl, feminist, hippy or mod. I could imagine her running a business. But it didn’t take me long to grasp from her sighs, helpless looks and moody pouts that she would have trouble with metaphysics. I thought I could help her with that, along with epistemology, ontology, hermeneutics, methodology, logic and, maybe, some other things, but not as much as I thought she could help me.
I was starting to become fond of money, too, having learned from the media what good use pop stars put it to. Ajita’s family appeared wealthy to me, while we’d always struggled. If Mum bought us a present, we knew what an effort it represented, and we tried to use it for longer than its interest merited. Apparently my father, in Pakistan, had a driver, a cook, a guard. But he gave us nothing; it didn’t occur to him.
Now Ajita went off to fetch some records, and on this, my first day with her, I strolled about the spaces, trying them out, like I was about to buy the place and have it redecorated. Her father and brother were not there, but I could smell onions frying in oil and spices, and then I glimpsed a nose and a brown eye, which must have belonged to her beaky aunt, who was side-on to an almost closed door.
Ajita said with sudden nervousness, as she put the music on, “If anyone asks, say you’re a friend of my brother. You’ve come to see him.”
“What is your brother’s name?” Ajita muttered something. “What?” I said, not catching it. “What did you say?”
“He’s called Mustaq. Some of us call him Mushy—or Mushy Peas. I think you’re going to like each other a lot. You want to like him too, don’t you? He is so much needing to be liked right now.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You don’t have to whisper. She is not speaking English.”
“But my family is similar,” I said eagerly. “Many of my aunts and cousins come to London in the summer. The rest have never left Pakistan.”
“Haven’t you been there?”
“Dad has been inviting us, and Mum thinks Miriam and I should go. But Miriam can hardly get to the end of the street without tearing it up. You’ll see, when you meet her. Ajita, can’t you and I go to Pakistan together?”
“Not unless we’re married.”
“Already?”
“They’re very old-fashioned there. Anyway, my mother is busy finding me a husband in India. My brother takes the piss. ‘How is your lovely new hubby doing?’ he asks. Come, Jamal, you want to step out with me, my new friend?”
We danced to her favourite disco records, watching one another’s feet, holding hands and touching each other’s hair. Later, after we’d kissed and I didn’t know what to do next—it seemed too soon to go further, like eating all the chocolates at once—I said, “Do you want to see Last Tango in Paris or go for a drive to Keston Ponds for a walk? Or we could go to my house. It’s ten minutes away.”
“Your house.”
As we went, I hung out of the window, hoping people I knew would see me in the car with a girl. But they were at work, or at college or school. At least Ajita wanted to see my house; she wanted to know me. I needed Miriam, too, to know I had a real girlfriend, to see me as a grown-up, not a baby brother.
Yet I was nervous of them meeting. Not that I knew whether my sister was at home. Her bedroom door was always closed, and I was forbidden, on pain of having my berries come into unwilling contact with a cheese grater, to press ag
ainst it in any way. Often, the only way to find out whether Miriam was in was to get down on your knees and try to smell roll-ups, dope or joss sticks drifting out from under her door. If I was feeling brave, after she’d left the house, I’d nip in, take a couple of records from their covers—Blood on the Tracks and Blue and Split were my favourites, but I liked Miles too—and listen to them in my room, over and over, until I believed I had them inside me.
You might also find in Miriam’s room a college lecturer, a couple of neighbourhood boys, a pickup or her latest girlfriend. If Miriam was indeed there, she’d be in bed until Mother returned from work at five. Mother worked, at that time, in a bakery, wearing a kooky little white hat. We always had plenty to eat at home, even if it was a little stale.
That day Ajita and I didn’t get as far as my house but stopped in a quiet street nearby, where we kissed in her car, something we liked a lot and were unable to stop doing, as though we were glued together.
It wasn’t until the following morning that we drove to some woods not far away, near my old school, and made love for the first time, though her jeans and boots were so tight we thought for a while we’d never get them off without seeking help. Then we did it in the car in a secluded street near her house.
Something important had started. She was all mine, almost. She was not my first girlfriend, but she was my first love.
CHAPTER FOUR
My girl and I began to see one another all the time; mostly in London, at college or in Soho. Or we would meet at a bus stop near my house and drive into the city together.
I don’t think I’ve ever stopped seeing London like a small boy. The London I liked was the city of exiles, refugees and immigrants, those for whom the metropolis was extraterrestrial and the English codes unbreakable, people who didn’t have a place and didn’t know who they were. The city from the point of view of my father.