HOW MANY PEOPLE AM I?

I am another person, a third person. A subject to be studied and thought about. My life a story now, preserved in print. Do I recognise myself in this mirror? Is it a mirror?

Thank you for continuing to read The Kureishi Chronicles. This week, on a rare expedition outside, we ran into several keen readers, and are moved by your enthusiasm for our work. We are pleased to be reaching so many people.

Carlo and I work on this page everyday. This is our living. So, we would be grateful if you could continue to support us in anyway you can, either by subscribing or becoming a paid subscriber.

All our love, Hanif and Carlo

My mother liked to say that things would have been even worse had there been two of me. My twin brother, who apparently died at birth, would have been called Karim, so she said. Mum preferred not to talk about it – she found most forms of conversation a nuisance - but on occasion she did say there was another child in her womb who would have added to her burden.

We will never know the truth because in those days there were no neonatal screenings. But since then I have wondered what it would have been like for a woman to give birth to one son, while at the same time losing another. A loss and a gain, a mourning and a mercy. So I grew up with a shadow, with a hypothetical brother beside me, always absent, somehow there.

Being a bereaved twin is an odd thing, you wonder what your other half would be like, and how his existence would have changed yours. It might have been nice to have more company, an ever-present best friend. But he might have kept me at home, with less reason to go out into the world and find others to play with.

In 1993, I called my mum to inform her that Tracey and I were having twins. Mum became hysterical and started to cry. She had to sit down for fear of fainting. There are twins in the family; my grandmother was a twin, I have identical twin boys, as does my sister. Carlo is dating an identical twin.

Twins: where there should be one of something, there are two. They may be identical, but of course, they are different people, while sharing the same parents, history and genetic makeup. On holiday in Italy as babies, while in their pushchair, my twin boys were applauded; women cried out as the gemelli passed by. Twins are arresting and uncanny, they make you ask; what if I met myself?

My study overlooks the road where Sachin and Carlo would walk home from primary school. Training my binoculars on the street, as I liked to several times a day, I would watch them shambling up the road, accompanied by their au pair, talking all the way. I’d think: they’ve spent their entire lives together, day and night, what the fuck do they have to talk about?’ Even now, they still talk constantly, listening to one another, rarely fighting.

On my sofa across the room, there is an eight-hundred page biography of me, the cover a 1990 photograph taken in the basement of my apartment in Comeragh Road, Baron’s Court. I am leaning back in a chair, in a leather jacket, with hair down to my shoulders.

Five years ago, Ruvani Ranasinha, an intelligent and thorough academic at Kings College, London, approached me saying she wanted to write my biography. When I asked the kids’ advice, Sachin said, “What’s the big deal? Every idiot these days - hairdressers, comedians, minor sports people, politicians – all have books written about them. You should be flattered”.

So I told Ruvani I would help, but she shouldn’t be offended that wouldn’t read it. She agreed and got down to it. Occasionally she came to the house to ask me questions, and I would talk with her about my family, friends, lovers and work. I enjoyed it, thinking through my life, the people I’d known and worked with, what they meant now, and what they might say about our shared past.

She had access to my diaries and journals, which are in the British Library. Other diaries, the juicy ones from the eighties, I had kept by mistake. I didn’t envy her, having to plough through accounts of parties, dinners, sexual scenes, notes on books and movies, the kids growing up, and remarks I’d overheard on buses, spanning forty-five years. But she told me she was a meticulous researcher, and would interview everyone I knew, including my boys, who I feared would struggle to remain loyal and hold the line about my essential decency. But they did, surprisingly.

The book was published last year, when I was in hospital, and there were some reviews, but I didn’t pay much attention. I wanted to carry on living and writing, the biography seemed like a long obituary.

A few weeks ago, a dozen monolithic copies of my biography showed up at the house and sat there unopened. I would glide past the box in my wheelchair from time to time, glancing at them suspiciously. What was going on here? The size of them was startling, clearly this wasn’t a sprint through the major ups and downs of a minor writer’s life, but a heavily detailed, academic investigation. I have many biographies on my shelves, particularly of modern American writers like Cheever, Bellow, Roth and Capote, and my book is even fatter than those. I had no idea I was so interesting.

I tried to hand out copies to family members. No one wanted one. They weren’t enthused by the idea of reading an eight-hundred-page tome, much of which would be set in Bromley. They’d had more than enough Hanif Kureishi for one lifetime. 

I was torn, wondering whether reading it would be like overhearing a conversation about you from another room. You would hear things not meant for you, which might be cruel or offensive, or even worse, true. Years of bad behaviour exposed, and whether you’d been more of an arse than you might have thought. 

Now, Carlo and I are in my kitchen, batting around ideas for this week’s blog.

“I’m worried we’re running out of material.”

“You always say this, dad.”

“I want to write about twins.”

“Okay. But don’t mention me.”

“They seem to like hearing about you.”

“What do you want to say?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“We could talk about twins in literature, in film?”

“We’ve got to keep it personal.”

This is how it works: I make a suggestion and he tears it down or occasionally builds on it.

“I know. Look in my biography. See if mum mentions anything about my twin.”

“Really?”

It is the first time I have had any contact with the book. Carlo flips through it and reads to me from the index.

“Beckenham… Homosexuality… Multiculturism... Nietzsche… Peter O’Toole…”

As he goes, I recognise the names, people I knew and know, those I have studied and admired; significant places, from Bromley to Karachi and Rome, everything painstakingly arranged and ordered, as if it were all inevitable.

“There it is, pieces of my world, pages and pages of it.”

“… Threesomes… Trump… Turgenev… Twain…Twitter…”. 

My initial fear about the book - of how Ruvani would interpret events that I remember only in my own way – begins to shift. Seeing the incidents of your life, from the seismic to the banal, seriously interpreted is an eerie experience. Dozens of friends and family members drawn on to cast their opinions. For them, I am another person, a third person. A subject to be studied and thought about. My life a story now, preserved in print. Do I recognise myself in this mirror? Is it a mirror?

A couple of weeks ago, Ruvani came round to see me and said, rather disconcertingly, “You are my life’s work”. I was moved, but at the same time, it felt like an intellectual stalking, an intrusion. Who, other than a narcissistic authoritarian leader, would want to be someone’s life work? What am I doing for her?

What worried Freud when he condemned the idea of biography was that the account would be about events rather than internal states. A biography can say where you were or what you were doing on a particular day, but only a novel can capture how scared or excited, how lonely and bereft you felt at the time.

You don’t live your life as a story, the future is open. The biography, on the other hand, is omniscient; everything is connected and has narrative meaning. But mine didn’t know about my accident.

I never had any intention of writing a memoir or autobiography, though I did write a book, My Ear At His Heart, about the writings of my father and his brother Omar and their family as they moved from India to Pakistan, and then to the U.K. But as I continued to write about my condition – in my dispatches from my hospital bed - I found I started writing about my childhood, parents, schooling and my early life in the theatre for the first time. I was compelled to consider how I’d lived and write about it through the prism of the accident. There was now a before and after.

Yesterday, we invited the actor who plays Karim in my play, The Buddha of Suburbia, over to my house for a drink. With his long hair and brown skin, and sweet, innocent demeanour, he looks startingly like a young version of me. He quoted long passages from the book that I had entirely forgotten.

How many of you are there? And where are they now? There is a version of me in Ruvani’s biography; there is another on stage in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and there is this version I am writing, through Carlo, to you now. I am all over the place, being twinned, tripled and multiplied. Mother would be horrified.

Carlo opens the book and begins reading to me from an early chapter, a particularly embarrassing diary entry I wrote when I was fifteen in the style of a Muhammad Ali boast, addressing my future biographer,

“Dear biographer, note this, because I want it to be seen how much potential I had -”

“Stop! Stop! I can’t bear to hear it.”

“- Even at the age of fifteen.”

“Stop!”

“I knew I was going to be great and therefore I made all the correct arrangements -”

I cry and scream, but I can’t even cover my ears. I shout out for Isabella to help as he tortures me with my own words. Enough already.