Necesidades básicas en los espacios de trabajo

‘You do nothing,’ said Dad. ‘You’re a bloody bum. You’re destroying yourself wantonly, d’you know that? It sickens my whole heart.’

‘Don’t shout at me, I can’t stand it.’

‘I’ve got to, boy, to get it into your thick head. How did you manage to fail all those exams? How is it possible to fail every single one?’

‘It’s easy. You don’t show up for any of them.’ ‘Is that what you did?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why, Karim, especially as you pretended to me you were going off to take the damn exams. You left the house so full of the confidence I gave you. Now I see why,’ he said bitterly. ‘How could you do it?’

‘Because I’m not in the right mood for studying. I’m too disturbed by all the stuff that’s happening. You leaving Mum and all. It’s a big deal. It affects my life.’

‘Don’t blame me if you’ve ruined your life,’ he said. But his eyes filled with tears. ‘Why? Why? Why? Don’t interfere, Eva,’ he said, as she came into the room, alarmed by our shouting. ‘This boy is a complete dead loss. So what will you do, eh?’

‘Think, you bloody fool! How can you think when you haven’t got any brains?’

I knew this would happen; I was almost prepared for it. But this contempt was like a typhoon blowing away all my resources and possessions. I felt lower than I’d ever felt before. And then Dad ignored me. I couldn’t sleep at Jamila’s place any more for fear of having to face Changez. So I had to see Dad every day and have him deplore me. I don’t know why he took it so fucking personally. Why did it have to bother him so much? It was as if he saw us as having one life between us. I was the second half, an extension of him, and instead of complementing him I’d thrown shit all over him.

So it was a big cheering surprise when I opened the front door of Eva’s house one day to find Uncle Ted standing there in his green overalls, a bag of tools hanging from his fist, smiling all over his chopped face. He strode into the hall and started to peer expertly at the walls and ceiling. Eva came out and greeted him as though he were an artist returning from barren exile, Rimbaud from Africa. She took his hands and they looked into each other’s eyes.

Eva had heard from Dad what a poet among builders Ted was. How he’d changed and refused to go on and now was wasting his talent. This alerted Eva, and she arranged for them all to go out for supper. Later they went to a jazz club in the King’s Road – Uncle Ted had never seen black walls before – where Eva slyly said to Dad, ‘I think it’s about time we moved to London, don’t you?’

balls,’ said Dad, thinking that that was the end of the matter, as it would have been had he been talking to Mum.

But business was going on. Between jazz sets Eva made Ted an offer: come and make my house beautiful, Ted, we’ll play swing records and drink margheritas at the same time. It won’t be like doing a job. Ted jumped at the chance to work with Eva and Dad, partly out of nosiness – to see what freedom had made of Dad, and could perhaps make of Ted – and partly out of the returning appetite for labour. But he still had to break the news to Auntie Jean. That was the difficult bit.

Auntie Jean went into turmoil. Here was work, paid work, weeks of it, and Ted was delighted to do it. He was ready to start, except that the employer was Jean’s enemy, a terrible, man-stealing, mutilated woman. Jean pondered on it for a day while we held our breath. Finally she solved the problem by agreeing to let Ted do it provided none of us told Mum and as long as Ted gave Jean a full report at the end of each day on what precisely was going on between Dad and Eva. We agreed to these conditions, and tried to think of salacious things for Ted to tell Jean.

Eva knew what she wanted: she wanted the whole house transformed, every inch of it, and she wanted energetic, industrious people around her. We got down to it immediately. With relief, I abandoned any pretence at being clever and became a mystic assistant labourer. I did the carrying and loading and smashing, Eva did the thinking, and Ted ensured her instructions were carried out. Dad fastidiously avoided the whole muck of building, once

spitting an Arab curse at us: ‘May you have the builders.’ Ted replied with an obscurity he thought would delight Dad. ‘Haroon, I’m kissing the joy as it flies,’ he said, laying into a wall with a hammer.

The three of us worked together excellently, elated and playful. Eva had become eccentric: when a decision was needed Ted and I often had to wait while she retired upstairs and meditated on the exact shape of the conservatory or the dimensions of the kitchen. The way forward would emerge from her unconscious. This was not wildly different, I suppose, to what went on in a book I was reading, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, in which the father would pray before any crucial decision and await God’s direction.

Before lunch Eva had us traipse out into the garden, where we bent and stretched, and sat with our backs straight, and breathed through alternate nostrils before we ate our salads and fruit. Ted went in for it all with great, childlike alacrity. He took to the Cobra position as if it had been designed for him. Unlike me, he seemed to enjoy appearing foolish, thinking he had become a new, open person. Eva encouraged us to play, but she was a shrewd boss too. We laboured for her because we liked her, but she tolerated no lazy work: she was a perfectionist and she had taste, insisting on only the best materials, which was unusual in the suburbs, where Victorian or Edwardian houses were generally smashed open and stripped bare, only to be filled with chipboard and Formica.

is the only colour for a house,’ Eva announced. There were polished dark wood floors and green blinds. Heavy wrought-iron black fireplaces were installed once more, to Ted’s irritation, as he’d spent much of his working life tearing out fireplaces so women like my mother didn’t have to get up early on freezing mornings to make up the fire on their knees.

When Auntie Jean slammed Uncle Ted’s tea on the table at the end of each day – a meat pie and chips, or a nice bit of rump steak and tartar sauce (he hadn’t the nerve yet to go vegetarian) – she sat opposite him with a stiff drink and demanded facts about Eva and Dad.

‘So what did you tell her last night, Uncle Ted?’ I’d ask him the next day as we worked. But what was there to tell? I couldn’t imagine Ted contemplating the nature of Eva and Dad’s taut happiness or telling of how they were always trying to pull each other’s tracksuit bottoms down and playing games like seeing who could throw a lolly-stick in a bin the most times out of ten.

Perhaps he was more specific, speaking of what he usually saw when he came to work in the morning – Eva in her blue silk pyjamas and red robe shouting and laughing and giving orders to me for breakfast, and reading aloud from the papers. In the old days Mum and Dad took the

Daily Mirror, that was all. Eva liked to sprinkle the house with about five papers and three magazines a day, skimming over Vogue and the New Statesman and the

basket beside the bed. Perhaps Ted told Jean of the walks the four of us took when Eva got tired of working; and the time Eva’s feet hurt and she hailed a cab – absolute Roman decadence for Dad, Ted and me. We took a two- hour tour of South London with Eva drinking Guinness and hanging out the window cheering as we passed down the Old Kent Road, stopping beside the famous site of Dr Lal’s surgery and the dance hall of love, where Mum met Dad and fell. But I doubted if Ted could say anything about all this joy and good times. It wouldn’t be what Jean would want to hear. It wouldn’t be of any use to her.

Obviously Ted and I weren’t always around to scrutinize the intricate excitements of this new love, especially as Dad and Eva spent many evenings over the river in London proper, going to the theatre to see controversial plays, to German films or to lectures by Marxists, and to high-class parties. Eva’s old friend Shadwell was starting to make his way as a theatre director, working as an assistant at the Royal Shakespeare Company, running workshops on Beckett and putting on plays by Artaud and new writers at fringe venues. Eva helped Shadwell out by designing one of these productions and making the costumes. This she loved, and it led to her, Dad and Shadwell going to dinners and parties with all kinds of (fairly) important people – not the sort we knew in the suburbs, but the real thing: people who really did write and direct plays and not just talk about it. Eva wanted to do more of this; she discussed furnishings and house decoration with the better-off ones – they were always buying new places in the country, these people, and

she knew how to make herself useful.

How smart and glamorous they looked when they went off to London in the evenings, Dad in his suits and Eva with shawls and hats and expensive shoes and handbags. They glowed with happiness. And I’d walk around the empty house, or ring Mum for a chat; sometimes I’d lie on the floor in Charlie’s attic and wonder what he was doing and what kind of good time he was having. Dad and Eva would come back late, and I’d get up to see them and hear, as they undressed, who’d said what to whom about the latest play, or novel, or sex-scandal. Eva would drink champagne and watch television in bed, which shocked me, and at least once a week she said she was determined to take us all to London for good. And Dad would talk about the play and say how the writer wasn’t a patch on Chekhov. Chekhov was Dad’s favourite all-time writer, and he always said Chekhov’s plays and stories reminded him of India. I never understood this until I realized he meant that his characters’ uselessness, indolence and longing were typical of the adults he knew when he was a child.

But one subject Jean and Ted must have discussed was money. It was even bothering me. We were haemorrhaging money on the house. Unlike Mum, who took scarcity for granted, Eva bought whatever she wanted. If she went into a shop and something caught her eye – a book of Matisse drawings, a record, Yin and Yang earrings, a Chinese hat – she bought it immediately. There was none of the agonizing and guilt over money we all went through. ‘I deserve it,’ she always said. ‘I was unhappy before with my husband, and I

won’t be unhappy again.’ Nothing would stop her. When I mentioned this profligacy to her one day as we were painting side by side, she dismissed me, saying, ‘When we run out of money I’ll get us some more.’

‘Where from, Eva?’

‘Haven’t you noticed, Karim, the world’s full of money! Haven’t you noticed it sloshing around the country?’

‘Yeah, I noticed it, Eva, but none of it’s sloshing against our house.’

‘When we need it I’ll draw some of it over here.’

‘She’s right,’ said Dad, somewhat magisterially, when I went to him later and told him what she’d said, trying to make him see how demented it was. ‘You have to be in the correct frame of mind to draw masses of money to you.’

Coming from someone who’d obviously never been in the right frame of mind magnetically to attach anything but his salary to himself – money Anwar always referred to as ‘unearned income’ – this seemed a bit rich. But love and Eva had unrolled the carpet of Dad’s confidence, along which he now ebulliently danced. They made me feel conservative.

Dad started doing guru gigs again, once a week in the house, on Taoism and meditation, like before except that this time Eva insisted people paid to attend. Dad had a regular and earnest young crowd of head-bowers – students, psychologists, nurses, musicians – who adored him, some of whom rang and visited late at night in panic and fear, so dependent were they on his listening kindness. There was a waiting list to join his group. For these

meetings I had to hoover the room, light the incense, greet the guests like a head waiter and serve them Indian sweets. Eva also insisted on Dad improving the service: she got him to consult esoteric library books early in the morning before work and asked him at breakfast, in a voice which must once have enquired of Charlie if he’d done his technical-drawing homework, ‘And what did you learn this morning?’

Eva knew a man on the local paper, the same co- operative journalist who got Charlie on the front page of the

Bromley and Kentish Times, and he interviewed Dad. Dad was photographed in his red waistcoat and Indian pyjamas sitting on a gold cushion. His commuter companions were impressed by this sudden fame, and Dad told me delightedly how they pointed him out to each other on Platform Two. To be recognized for some achievement in life lifted Dad immensely; before Eva he had begun to see himself as a failure and his life as a dismal thing. But the office, where he was an unelevated lazy Indian who had run away from his wife and children, there was disapproval from the clerks he worked with: there was mockery behind his back and in front of his face. On the picture in the newspaper a bubble was drawn protruding from his mouth saying, ‘Dark mystery of life solved by dark charlatan – at taxpayers’ expense.’ Dad talked about leaving his job. Eva said he could do what he liked; she would support them both – on love, presumably.

I doubted whether Ted spoke to Auntie Jean of this, or of the other manifestations of love that filled our hours – of

Eva, for example, imitating the numerous grunts, sighs, snorts and moans which punctuated Dad’s conversation. Ted and I discovered her once in the ripped-out kitchen running through a symphony of his noises like a proud mother reproducing the first words of a child. Dad and Eva could discuss the most trivial things, like the nature of the people Dad met on the train, for hours, until I had to shout at them, ‘What the fuck are you talking about!’ They’d look at me in surprise, so enthralled had they been. I suppose it didn’t matter what they said; the words themselves were a caress, an exchange of flowers and kisses. And Eva couldn’t leave the house without returning and saying, ‘Hey, Haroon, I found something you might like’ – a book on Japanese gardens, a silk scarf, a Waterman’s pen, an Ella Fitzgerald record and, once, a kite.

Watching this, I was developing my own angry theories of love. Surely love had to be something more generous than this high-spirited egotism-à-deux? In their hands love seemed a narrow-eyed, exclusive, selfish bastard, to enjoy itself at the expense of a woman who now lay in bed in Auntie Jean’s house, her life unconsidered. Mum’s wretchedness was the price Dad had chosen to pay for his happiness. How could he have done it?

To be fair to him, it was a wretchedness that haunted him. He and Eva argued about this: she thought him indulgent. But how could it honestly be otherwise? There were occasions when we were watching TV or just eating when waves of regret rippled across his face. Regret and guilt and pain just overwhelmed him. How badly he’d

treated Mum, he told us. How much she’d given him, cared for him, loved him, and now he was sitting in Eva’s house all cosy and radiant and looking forward to bed.

‘I feel like a criminal,’ he confessed innocently to Eva once, in a moment of forgetfulness, truth unfortunately sneaking through. ‘You know, someone living happily on money he’s committed grievous bodily harm to obtain.’ Eva couldn’t help herself crying out at him, and he couldn’t see how suddenly and cruelly he’d wounded her. She was being unreasonable.

‘But you don’t want her! You weren’t right for each other! You stultified each other. Weren’t you together long enough to know that?’

‘I could have done more,’ he said. ‘Made more effort to care. She didn’t deserve to be hurt so. I don’t believe in people leaving people.’

‘This guilt and regret will ruin us!’ ‘It is part of me –’

‘Please, please, clear it out of your mind.’

But how could he clear it out? It lay on him like water on a tin roof, rusting and rotting and corroding day after day. And though he was never to make such almost innocent remarks again, and though Eva and Dad continued to want to make love all the time, and I caught her giggling while she did idiotic things with him, like snipping the hair in his ears and nostrils with a huge pair of scissors, there were looks that escaped all possible policing, looks that made me think he was capable only of a corrupted happiness.

she put the beautiful white Ted-decorated house on the market as soon as it was finished. She’d decided to take Dad away. She would look for a flat in London. The suburbs were over: they were a leaving place. Perhaps Eva thought a change of location would stop him thinking about Mum. Once the three of us were in Eva’s car in the High Street