Dear Loyal Reader,
You are keeping me alive. Your interest in my weekly ramblings have given me a reason to go on. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I want to continue sharing my progress with you. You are on this journey as well. I kindly ask that if you have the means, it would mean a great deal if could support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber, and keep this show on the road.
Your loving writer, Hanif
Things are looking up. We are definitely leaving here on Tuesday and returning to London at last. Strangely you get attached to places even when you have spent a lot of time lying on your back watching a fly making its way around the ceiling. Each time I went back to bed I looked out for that fly, wondering where it was and how it was doing. Had I become that fly, making my way around and around the same space, looking for a way out? But I knew there was no way out for the fly. One day it was gone. I looked for it everywhere but it was no use.
Isabella has been interred here with me, scratching the back of my neck, shaving me, filing my toenails, reading to me, feeding me – she says it’s okay if I don’t mention everything – as well as listening to me complain about my situation. This situation is coming to an end and another situation – perhaps an even more uncomfortable one; we just don’t know, we will find out - will be replacing it. I will be going in a taxi, then in an airplane, then in another taxi. I’m going to a hospital in West London, followed by another hospital in West London, followed by another facility just outside London. Nothing happens for months, then everything happens at once and you seem to have little idea of what’s going on. You, dear reader, will be kept informed. There will be many adventures ahead.
This movement has been made possible by Tracey and Charlotte in London, and by Isabella and Giovanna in Italy, as well as by the doctors here, who have been very helpful. Bureaucratically it has been complicated and frustrating. I’m looking forward to seeing my city again; in fact I am looking forward to seeing anything at all again. For six months I have looked at nothing but this room and the terrace outside the bar area here, which is a very pleasant place to sit and talk with whoever has popped by on that day. Time has slowed down almost to a standstill, as it does when you are a child. Not that I led an interesting life before my accident, it’s just that I was free. Now I cannot do what I want to do; I am entirely dependent on others and it’s an interesting and painful experiment.
On another note, years ago I read half a book by Cormac McCarthy but had to put it down. I don’t read a lot of fiction. I watch movies, but I don’t much like reading or writing made up stories now. I don’t know why. I read a lot of newspapers, including the shitty ones, and I admire and respect journalists, particularly sports writers, whom I read avidly. It must be difficult for journalists, all that sticking to the truth and trying to make it interesting; all that chasing after facts, looking things up. As for the Cormac McCarthy, the title of which I forget, it was so good I could hardly bear it. I wanted so much to write as well as that. I couldn’t read any more of it. I knew I could never be as good and when I went back to writing my own stuff it started to come out like him so I had to put the book down and never went back to it. It knocked me sideways. Some books are just too good to read. I wonder whether this is the same for other writers.
Lady G has obtained a special permission and tomorrow she is taking us out for lunch in Rome as a rehearsal for our trip back to London. I can’t wait to eat spaghetti alle vongole again and have a glass of wine. My first in six months.
So that is all for now, folks, as we are busy preparing for our exit.
Your loving writer,
Hanif
Carlo and I doing the blog. As you can see, the process is collaborative.
Speaking about my accident on BBC Radio Four.
Dear Hanif.
You were ‘that’ writer - the one who helped the teenage me realise that a repressed Indian teen from Birmingham could actually live a life of (mis)adventure and some fulfilment, and for that I owe you a debt. You might imagine, then, that I was shocked when my friend first alerted me to what happened to you months ago. Hearing about what you experienced felt like the latest, most pronounced jab from mortality, reminding me of what must befall us all. Last year there was Salman’s brush with death, then what happened to you and then more recently, Martin Amis passed away. Three fearless and formidable writers for whom I have deep-rooted respect and admiration all, to varying degrees, tussling with the reaper. Sorry - this doesn’t seem to be heading in a particularly cheerful direction!
I have no reason to assume you’d remember but I met you a couple of times in the late 1990s when I introduced you at a couple of book readings for Waterstone’s in Manchester. You and your publisher were gracious enough to take this impoverished bookseller out for dinner, and to sit through what was probably a gruelling evening of inane fan-chat. But I won’t forget how interested you seemed to be - listening to me talk about my dad, India, the dissertation I’d written about your work. I remember telling you of the slightly uncanny sensation of reading ‘Intimacy’, whose two main characters were but one letter apart in name from me and my future wife. I can report - it didn’t end well!
In another case of happenstance, I now sit reading your chronicles, in which you often talk fondly about your absent canine friend, Cairo, in his namesake city, one in which I’ve lived and taught English literature for the past six years.
I want to say that I’m glad you found your voice so soon after it was almost snatched from your mouth along with your breath - it feels like it could be so easy, when confronted with something as terrifying as your ordeal must initially have been, to simply retreat, to curl up and shrivel because the vessel in which the writer, Hanif Kureishi, has resided for so long has changed beyond recognition. To speak - to write, of sorts - so soon after your fall is, I think, a defiant act, and one which embodies the very fearlessness you wrote about recently in your ‘Rude’ post. It’s as though somehow, whatever happened to your body, there was some force which understood the importance of preserving your ability to speak; to write. With that intact, I share people’s optimism - including your physiotherapist’s - that your physical body will also again begin to assert itself in some fashion.
I’m glad you’re still with us, glad you’re heading back to your beloved London and glad you’re still demanding to be heard.
The radical honesty of your writing in these posts has been balm to my soul, yes, I can say that. I feel so much for Isabella, your rock, a guardian of your dignity. Her devotion moves me because my beloved mother was paralyzed due to a spinal cord tumor, and my father was unable to lovingly rise to the situation’s detailed hells. I send you sincere sisterly love from a minor writer (Harbor, Knopf; The Room and the Chair, Knopf) in New York City, who has come to idolize your inner demons, angels and life force.