Novel
Artists of our misery
SHREEKUMAR VARMA
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Something... is a racy compendium of little tales, characters, viewpoints and ideologies.
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Something To Tell You, Faber & Faber, p.345, Rs. 495.
When a raw edge of London is hung out to dry during the 1970s, it actually mutates, gathering and discarding, weaving and leaving political identities. This is the period in his life that Jamal, a settled and successful psychoanalyst, revisits and must confront.
“Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living,” he says, beginning Hanif Kureishi’s latest book Something To Tell You. Jamal’s own secret has to do with a murder, and it stays safely secret for a while as he begins his story within a story, the memory of now-contented, now-consuming days lived boisterously in the company of his feisty friends Wolf and Valentino, and his first and only real love, Ajita. His father has left the family and returned to Pakistan, his mother institutionalises her habits — TV, shopping and walking — and his sister Miriam tries to drown her despair in excess.
Kureishi’s concern with the socio-political identities of his ethnic minority protagonists in most of his stories, screenplays and novels are very much in evidence here as well. His main characters are Muslims troubled by their shaky roots in the Western soil of their (or their parents’) choice, and they overcome this by giving in to the excesses of that soil. A cameo character’s uncle advises him “to run out of the ghetto in pursuit of money, which had no colour or race.” The alternatives to the rigidly religious ghettoisation as well as the scourge of racism as presented by Kureishi are sex, petty crime, rebellion, casual flings with Leftism, S & M, music, keen partying…
Soon, Thatcherism takes over, and all that angst is consumed in the new desire to make money and reach somewhere.
Alive in the past
And yet, the period of the 1970s, where Jamal’s random remembrance takes us as he pays homage to an unfulfilled, and still looming, past, is where we see him touching base with life. Again, the sojourn in Pakistan with its dissatisfactions, concealed intellectualism and barely suppressed sensuality of Jamal’s cousins is another briefly throbbing vein in the book.
The present is more sanitised. All those excesses have now become routine. He has a marriage behind him and a son who visits. His best friend Henry is a theatre and film director, a grand visionary whose visions are talked away endlessly. (He ogles his son’s girlfriends; one of them sashays in during breakfast, and her “red satin dressing gown falls open as I am about to penetrate my egg”.) Henry falls madly in love with Jamal’s sister Miriam, and she with him. Their courtship includes experimenting with S&M and visiting sex clubs.
Jamal remains true to his profession, observing and sometimes advising, yet untouched by the parade of relationships, as if it’s just another day, patient after patient, story after story.
The only quick is in his past, and that’s where most of the enthusiasm of Kureishi’s prose lies too. Ajita is always waiting to reappear. She’s the core of the story and of Jamal’s interest. We also know that the murder, another highpoint, is linked with her.
Catching up
And then she does. Reappear.
The threesome attend a Rolling Stones concert, and end up having a tête-À-tête with Jagger himself. As the night rolls on, the past suddenly rolls up. He is introduced to a musician who is none other than Ajita’s brother Mustaq in another avatar. (These avatars are things to watch out for. Besides characters from Jamal’s past who turn up, we also get a couple of spruced-up characters from Kureishi’s past stories.) It seems Ajita is married and has children and is living in New York. And she’s due to visit London later in the year. The downside is that the murder in which Jamal was involved may be raked up.
Something To Tell You is a racy compendium of little tales and characters, viewpoints and insights, ideologies and facets. It is held together by Jamal and his preoccupation with Ajita. Jamal’s professional philosophy probably offers us a clue to the plight of humanity as found in the book: “Patients are unconscious artists of their own misery, and what they call their symptom is in fact, their life, and they’d better love it!”
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