It’s not unpleasant here. The doctors, nurses and all the workers are kind. Almost all of them look you in the eye and at least smile. They know that they have to relate to each patient. They aren’t afraid of touching the most abhorrent, aged or broken body. But what still makes me despair is the idea that I can’t walk up the front path of my house, open the door, and step back into my old life – lie down on my sofa, with a glass of wine and the Premier League. It seems unbelievably cruel that I cannot do such a simple thing.
I had my accident on Boxing Day. What’s that - about a month and a half ago? This is a fact that is unbearable, a stone so hard and round, I can’t swallow it or spit it out. It’s as if I have been plucked off the street by four anonymous policemen and been taken to a strange school, an irrational persecutory alternate universe. I have to find a way to survive, like we all did when we were children. I need to make friends, I’ve got to find out how the system functions.
I want to be a good patient and to be recognised as a polite and decent man. I want to ask everyone their name, their story and why they chose this job. At other times, I’m too tired for this rigmarole.
I recently had a discussion with my old school friend David Goatley. I put to him that old cliché ,‘why me?’ he replied ‘Why not you? Whyever would you think it would not be you?”
His brother was killed in a motorcycle accident; David himself was almost killed in a motorcycle crash, he was eighteen inches from death.
Many of us live as if we expect one day to be acknowledged for our exceptional qualities, but Kafka points out that we may be noticed only for our ordinariness, for the fact that we are not much more than nothing in the universe, though we may be important to one another, if we are lucky.
Death staring at you in the face renders you less inhibited than you might have been before.
It is not so difficult to become intimate with strangers. I knew Neil Kinnock, former leader of the Labour Party, in the late eighties. He was a charming and intelligent man. He taught me how to ask anyone where they came from, where they live and who their parents were -how to get a measure of anyone in ten minutes. Several direct questions can create a bridge between people, the illusion of knowing. It is easy to do. Sometimes too easy, if you think of it as a form of seduction. People are keener than you might think to tell you about themselves. They want to be known and recognised. This is the basis of psychoanalysis: questions provoking free associations.
My dad used to say if you wanted to write an article for a newspaper you had to use the who what when where why principle. These fundamental questions are also the basis of fiction. You must interrogate your characters – they must live in a recognisable world.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
Mr Kureishi, if you were an invented character, you would be a very lovable one. Reading the stories that we have sent in with your kind prompt, I more or less came to the same conclusion: we are all the same. We are not alike in all our details, of course, but in our essential qualities and needs we are. The fact that you have given us your story has made your story part of our experience. And just as we can identify with a dear fictional character and never want to let go of them, not want the book to end, we identify with you. Now I should go back and change all the "we's" to "I's." This is my experience. So, not knowing you personally, I have come to know you.
Many years ago now, I was at a meditation retreat. Someone was making a documentary about the teacher, and unbeknownst to the participants, had a microphone near the teacher's seat. And when people came up to talk to him, sharing their deepest concerns, they were being recorded. This is obviously not a good thing. Nevertheless when the teacher was told about it, he said, "Why does it matter? Everyone says the same thing." Obviously, as a writer always writing about semi-fictional characters- semi, in that they are always partly me or someone I think I have seen outside of me- I don't really want to think we are all the same. The variety is what is intriguing. The variety is what brings us together. Can I say that we love you? We do. We have come to love you and share your dilemma, your predicament, and to wish so fervently that you manage to overcome all difficulties.
Thank you so much for your latest post. It’s a melancholy one embedded with hope, because no matter our circumstances, we can still often connect with another with concern, curiosity, and good intent. Even a superficial connection places us on the same universal plane, temporarily of course, but,still, we’re glad to be alive in that moment, talking to this stranger.