A HEARTTHROB AND COOL KID

Earlier this week, my school friend David flew from Canada to visit me in hospital for four days. Staying in central Rome, he took the bus out to the hospital, and sat with me through the lunch that Isabella brings me every day. David pushed me around the small garden while we discussed anything that came into our minds, from our childhood, to our parents, to our children, and to ageing and my situation here in the hospital.

 As I said in my last blog, despite the constant and devoted companionship of Isabella, I need plenty of company at the present time. Being here has become more difficult as I feel more isolated from the general world, and more desperate to escape.

Although David is the same age as me, he was a year above me at school. And he was the classic school heartthrob and cool kid. He had hair down to his shoulders, wore bellbottoms, which the headmaster called ‘sailor’s trousers’, and was also referred to as ‘girlie’ by the headmaster.

David arrived on a motorcycle, was known to listen to the coolest music, knew the young David Bowie from the Three Tuns pub, and brought early Pink Floyd and King Crimson albums to my house in the evenings. He would sit downstairs in our tiny living room with my father, delighting him with his attention, giving Dad the opportunity to discuss his favourite subject, Eastern religion, and what Zen could teach the West about what Dad called ‘spiritual values’. Dad thought the West was becoming too materialistic and was forgetting more important values of meaning and the significance of living. David would listen to this like an enthralled disciple.

David’s mother was a friend of my father’s and she was considered by me and his friends to be very sexy and cool. It was said in school that when David was in bed with his girlfriend she would bring them breakfast.

The opening chapter of my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, concerns the naïve 17-year-old hero, Karim Amir, along with his father, an Indian immigrant from Bombay, now working as a civil servant. One evening they go Beckenham – a posher suburb to the one the Amir’S family lives in – to visit Charlie, Karim’s school hero. The father has been invited by Eva Kay, Charlie’s mother, to present a yoga class and talk to the assembled white suburbanites about Zen Buddhism. During the course of the eventful evening, Karim finds his father and Eva having sex on a bench in the garden. Shocked, he flees upstairs to Charlie’s bedroom – a cool cave in the attic, adorned with pictures of The Beatles, during their Sergeant Pepper period - where he masturbates a stoned Charlie to orgasm. It is Karim’s first homosexual experience.

This first chapter was originally a short story. I remember being on a flight to Canada and for some reason I had nothing to read but at least I had my ever-present pen and a notebook. I wrote the entire story on this nine-hour flight. It was published in the London Review of Books and later, having always wanted to write a novel, I went back to it and built the entire story around this opening.

Very little of this audacious scenario actually took place. I remember going excitedly to David’s house one evening with my father, his mother listening to Bach. But now, this chapter of the book, and my reimagining of the scene, has replaced any real memory of what might have taken place. I guess this is how memory and fiction work together: there was an initial scene, which is copied, repeated and elaborated, inflected with fantasy and desire, until it becomes something else entirely.

Charlie, or Charlie Hero as he becomes, is nothing like the real David, with whom I lost contact after I left school, but met up with later. Charlie Hero was then based on other boys I knew in the punk scene. But he really became himself because of the demands of the novel. Karim remains in love with him, and continues to idolise him, even as Charlie becomes wilder and crueller. David himself, though once a wild person, was never unkind, and was always vulnerable, interesting and sweet.

My son Sachin, typing this out for me - when we stopped for a break - told me about a fifteen-year-old kid he idolised at school, who scrawled tattoos on his arms in pen, carried a guitar around on his back, and had the coolest hair in the playground.

Girls and boys alike do this idolising and identification. It is an important stage of childhood, when who we want to be is embodied in another person, an ideal self and paragon, who we are narcissistically in love with.

We make ourselves out of others, particularly at this age. They are our social and sexual templates. Our idols are apparently immune from pubertal terrors, fears and social awkwardness, as well as the physical disfigurement of that period between childhood and adulthood, which we all have to endure. Do we ever idealise others like we did when we were at school?

Your loving writer Hanif x

Who did you admire and idolise as a teenager?