When Hanif Kureishi, who may not hold a pen again, held court in Jaipur

“On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall. I had just seen Mo Salah score against Aston Villa, sipped half a beer, when I began to feel dizzy. I lent forward and put my head between my legs; I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood, my neck in a grotesquely twisted position, my wife on her knees beside me,” Kureishi wrote on his Substack page, shared on Twitter, on Saturday (January 7).

“At the moment, it is unclear whether I will ever be able to walk again, or whether I’ll ever be able to hold a pen, if there is any assistance that I would be grateful for, it would be with regard to voice assisted hardware and software, which will allow me to watch, write and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life,” the writer who shot to fame with the screenplay for the My Beautiful Launderette (1985), a social comedy set in the 1980s, featuring a gay British Pakistani man, and an indictment of former British PM Margaret Thatcher’s policies. The film, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award.

Past forward: An encounter with Kureishi

I had had the privilege of listening to Rushdie live at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in 2007, when the author of The Satanic Verses waxed eloquent, among other things, on Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, the two writers whose first names he used for his 2013 memoir. Three years later, in 2010, it was Kureishi regaling the literati at the festival with his quips, wisecracks and deadpan humour.

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The vocation of each writer, according to Kureishi, is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising. While Kureishi describes the world (tales of growing-up in London, racism and the immigrant experience) as he sees it, there is too much of his world — his father, his family, his ex-wife, his children — that gets in his way.

His stories and novels have striking parallels with his own life and his family members, including his father who died in 1991, have often expressed their displeasure over family secrets (“Fabricated for the entertainment of the public for profit”, his sister, Yasmin, wrote in a letter to The Guardian), being “sold”. But Kureishi couldn’t care less. “The sort of writing you do comes out of your character and nature. You write from who you are and where you are. Writing comes from the wordspace in your head that is called subconscious,” said Kureishi, who was in conversation with Amitava Kumar.

Then 55, the brooding author walked around the venue, fending off people — fans, readers, journalists — I noticed his expressionless stare greet everyone, everything. “Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored,” the line from The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), his debut novel, came back to me.

Cold and detached, Kureishi made no effort to hide his conceit. A lady, who approached him after his session, was asked to “read my books” before she could get around to speaking with him. Kureishi carried with him the irreverence and insouciance of Karim Amir, the funny, mixed-race boy from The Buddha of Suburbia. In the sessions at the fest, the author, who explores sex, families and middle age in his 2008 novel, Something To Tell You, talked about how he started as a pornography writer, using Antonio French as his pseudonym. “If you are writing pornography, it is good to have French in your name,” he quipped.

Kureishi, who had the opportunity to see Samuel Beckett during the rehearsals of his plays and called him a “sound conductor”, also talked about theatre, “the most exciting thing to have happened to me”. Kureishi said he took his role of a playwright as seriously as that of a novelist, a short story writer or a screenplay-writer. His “version” of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. His plays, Sleep With Me and When The Night Begins, have been the toast of the theatre circuit in London.

In 2004, Kureishi’s play When the Night Begins was produced by the Hampstead Theatre. Asked about race in his writing, he said: “I’m no longer interested in race. What I’m interested in is telling a story. What I want to learn is how to tell a story. If you tell it right, there is something about it that always works. I’m interested in economy, saying things in less space.” The world, Kureishi said, seemed to be very funny and tragic at the same time. “I just try to combine the two in my writing,” said Kureishi, adding that he doesn’t give a “f*** to reviews”. “All I care about is money,” he said, nonchalantly.

A tragedy in 2013

When the news of Kureshi’s fall reached me, my mind raced back to 2013, when the writer had had another major tragedy: he had lost his life savings (£120,000) after he became the victim of a fraud. Nearing 60, he was looking to  plan for his and his children’s future. Knowing little about complex financial affairs, he had turned to his agent to recommend someone. Subsequently, he hired Adam Woricker, who claimed that he worked with the reputable firm, Fisher Phillips. Woricker recommended that the writer should invest in a property scheme. Kureishi followed his advice, but found out soon that the former had swindled all his savings. Kureishi recounts the story in his book of personal reportage, A Theft: My Con Man (2014).

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2014 also saw the publication of another of his screenplays, Mother, the story of 65-year-old May, who fears that life has passed her by  and she has become “just another invisible old lady whose days are more or less numbered.” When her husband dies after they travel down from the north to visit their grown-up children in west London, she begins a passionate affair with a man half her age. A meditation on the quest for love and the passage of time, Mother showcases how sometimes it takes “a lifetime to feel truly alive.”

Before the pandemic raged across the world, Kureishi came out with a new collection of essays and fiction. Essays and fiction as part of  one book? You might ask. To Kureishi, they can coexist; fact and fiction. For both have sprung from the life he has lived. What Happened? (2019) is Kureishi’s ‘literary event’ that is replete with his characteristic curiosity and wit, both boundless. It’s a wide-ranging book of Kureishi’s “catholic appetite for culture” in which he casts his gaze, among other things, on David Bowie, Georges Simenon and Keith Jarrett.

A writer’s journey

Kureishi wasn’t a happy child, but he wasn’t an unhappy child either, he wrote on his Substack page on January 7. “Once I could read, I was free. I could go to libraries every day, often accompanied by my mother, and I saw reading as a way out from my immediate surroundings. Soon, I learned to cycle. Alone, I could explore the streets and fields of the countrified semi suburbs in which I grew up. It was a county called Kent which had been bombed to hell not long before I was born.”

Another element in his liberation, he writes, was his discovery of his father’s book on how to type. “My father himself had been a journalist and was writing fiction. His vigorous typing in his sexy shirt sleeves seemed very impressive. One day he bought a little portable typewriter in a blue case of which he was incredibly proud. He swung it round and round, because it was light, and suddenly announced he was going to Vietnam to be a war correspondent like Hemingway or Norman Mailer,” he writes.

As an adolescent, Kureishi would blindfold himself with his school tie and try to write. “Soon I found I could write the right words in the right order without even looking.” The realisation was exhilarating: “I had been reading Crime and Punishment at the time, always a cheery go-to book for a young man, and I began to copy out pages from this great novel.”

At school, Kureishi writes, he had been a disaster, but after he discovered writing, he at last found something that he could do alone: “I never had the desire to write underwater stories, adventure stories or amazing stories involving giants, dwarfs, elves or mermaids. I didn’t know much about those things, but I did know the people around me. And I guess that made me into something of a realist. One day, I called myself a writer.”

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Being a writer has suited him “like a good shirt, haircut or well cut trousers.” What’s more, it has “covered me like a cloak and I was keen for others to apply the word to me even though I hadn’t yet written anything.”

When he was in school, he was a victim of racism, like most Browns in England. Words like “brownie, or Paki, or shit-face” were hurled at him indiscriminately. “So,I found my own word, I stuck to it, and never let it go. It is still my word.”

A few years ago, while flipping him over for a dose of enema, a nurse, who mistook him for Rushdie (to the whites, all Browns must look the same?) asked him:  “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?” Kureishi coolly replied: “If I had indeed written Midnight’s Children, don’t you think I would have gone private?” On Monday (January 9), one of his posts on Twitter read: “My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has stood up to the most evil form of Islamofascism, writes to me every single day, encouraging patience. He should know. He gives me courage.”

From a ‘desolate’ hospital in a suburb of Rome, Kureishi has been sending out despatches on his condition to the wider world, dictating his blog entries to his wife, Isabella d’Amico. His notes are diligently posted on Twitter every day by his son, Carlo. Kureishi’s little notes to the world are laced with bon mots that underline the art of laughter in the dark:  “My hands feel like alien objects. They’re swollen, I cannot move them, and I could not tell you where they are. They may in fact be in another building altogether, having a drink with friends.”