Hanif Kureishi: Writing the self: A biography

By Ruvani Ranasinha

Original, bold and always funny, Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain’s most popular, provocative and versatile writers.

Born in Bromley in 1954 to an Indian father and white British mother, Kureishi’s life is intimately bound up with the history of immigration and social change in Britain. This is the story of how a mixed-raced child of empire who attended the local comprehensive school found success with a remarkable series of novels and screenplays, including My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, Intimacy, Venus and Le Week-End. The book also illuminates a larger story, not only of the artist as a young man, but of the recasting of Britain in the aftermath of decolonisation.

Drawing on journals, letters and manuscripts from Kureishi’s unexplored archive, recently acquired by the British Library, and informed by interviews with his family, friends and collaborators, as well with the writer himself, Ruvani Ranasinha sheds new light on how his life animates his work. This first biography offers a vivid portrait of a major talent who has inspired a new generation of writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526147387

Ruvani Ranasinha

Ruvani Ranasinha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, King’s College London

Book preview

Part I

Origins

We had been … devastated in ways we didn't understand by racism.

Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart, 85

1

Audrey

Behind Hanif Kureishi's coming of age in Bromley stands the intertwined history of India and Britain. Ideological forces of empire, colonialism and Partition, with its traumatic legacy and shifting borders, shaped the paternal side of his family. The ‘pigeon-keeping, greyhound racing, roast beef-eating and piano in pubs’ strand of British culture of his English grandfather composed the other half of his origins (B 126). If this mixture has given him a particular appreciation of the complexity of modern British identity, in his writing he delights in combining bold oppositions. His breakthrough screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) brought together two characters – a gay British Asian and white former National Front supporter – you never imagined could be together in a kiss. His creative approach continues to couple fact and fiction, honesty and invention, and comedy and sadness.

Racism distorted the lives of the first generation of Kureishi children born in Britain; but class appears almost as large as race in the story of this family, with its mix of upper-middle and lower. Ahead of his time in confronting racism and especially articulate on its violation of self, Kureishi came to the fore as an outspoken outsider with a background quite different from the circle of white, privately schooled, Oxbridge-educated men who still tended to dominate British culture. And Kureishi's veneration of the Swinging Sixties stems in part from the era's fresh, non-metropolitan talent; a time when working-class novelists stormed the citadel of literary London.

Yet what looms large in his mind is a depressed, emotionally distant mother who shadowed and fractured his and his younger sister Yasmin's childhood. In his writing so far, the portrait he paints of his withdrawn mother is mostly confined to the edges of stories. He hints at the muted traumas and perceived maternal inattention of his childhood. One could say that he has yet to explicitly explore his feelings about his maternal neglect creatively. So far, he has approached the subject insistently, yet obliquely. In his novel Intimacy (1998) the protagonist's mother is likened to ‘a lump of living death’. In his short story ‘Goodbye Mother’ (2000) the son visits the mother he hates and relishes turning off her TV. This recurring figure of a mother more absorbed in the flickering figures on the screen than in her children recalls the more caricatured figure of Janice Armstrong, ‘highball in hand, glued to the television set’, who drunkenly allows her baby daughter to drown in the bath in John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960). Yet Kureishi's own feelings are more complex and far from a blanket hatred. His first sustained creative and empathetic engagement with the subject in his screenplay The Mother (2003) features a mother and a daughter who disagree about their shared past: ‘The daughter has been in therapy and has come to resent the mother for neglecting her as a child. What interested me is the wild divergence of people's accounts of the past, so much so that these seem like quite different stories’ (MEAHH 29). A more generous, softer characterisation of a peripheral mother-figure emerges in his later novel Something to Tell You (2008).

Remote and depressive, Audrey appears to have been ill-equipped for motherhood and domesticity. It is not clear what triggered her spiralling despair, likely exacerbated by postpartum depression, but her children remember her as mostly brittle, morose and unresponsive, slumped in front of the TV in a royal blue dressing gown. In his memoir of his father Kureishi observes that his mother ‘had been to art school, and had studied art in Paris. But then she lost hope; she wouldn't draw, or engage with others’ (MEAHH 48). Audrey had been a nanny in France, not an art student. Yet this story recurs and becomes part of the family mythology. Both Hanif and Yasmin believe their mother had always been depressed: being with their father cheered her up a bit but she still moaned a lot.

On 12 December 1926 Audrey Buss was born in Bromley, then a small town situated on the river Ravensbourne in Kent on the outskirts of south-east London, and where she would spend almost the entirety of her life. Audrey was the only child of late Victorian parents Hilda Beatrice (née Ruffles) and Edward Walter Buss. Hilda was born in 1900 in Gillingham to a railway guard James John Ruffles and his wife Rosina. Audrey's father Edward was born in Bromley in 1897, where he remained until his death in 1977. Edward even went to the same Raglan Road primary school that his grandchildren Hanif and Yasmin would attend. The school opened its doors in 1889, almost a decade after the 1880 Elementary Education Act came in, which made education compulsory for all children up to the age of ten in England and Wales. In 1891 elementary schooling became free in both board and voluntary (Church) schools. Raglan was one of the two new schools built because of a population boom in Bromley due to the expansion of the railway lines (opened in 1858) into London and lots of newly settled families. Part of the suburban growth of London in the twentieth century, Bromley significantly increased in population.

Edward was the son of a painter, Henry George Buss, born in 1860, and Alice Parker, born in 1858. Alice became the head of the family on her husband's premature death in his forties. Edward was one of seven. He had an older sister Alice, a laundry washer, and four older brothers: George, a rustic woodworker and house painter; Benjamin, a golf caddie (later a professional golfer); Robert, a house painter; and William, who started as a groom but later ran a pub. He also had a younger brother Harry, also subsequently employed as a golf professional, following his older brother. They all lived at 20 Pope Road, a terraced house with five rooms. Almost a century later in 1998, Kureishi's mother and sister would accuse him of misrepresenting his maternal family's class background in a self-serving bid to accrue ‘trendy’ working-class credentials.¹ They especially contested the impression that Edward was ‘cloth cap working class’.² Kureishi may have downplayed his own suburban bourgeois beginnings to accentuate how far he had come: he was not himself aware of the precise details of his maternal family history. Nevertheless, although they went on to own a few shops, Edward and Hilda's beginnings were indeed humble. During the First World War, now an imperturbable, well-built young man, Edward served with the Lancaster Cyclist Battalion, mostly deployed in Britain for communications and intelligence work. He registered at Maidstone in 1916 at the age of 18. In the census his trade is given as a car man. In December 1918 Edward returned, ridden with lice, to find a slender young woman occupying his bedroom. Hilda had been taken in by Edward's mother after her own mother had died aged 45, when she was only 14, even though her widower father was still alive. Two of Hilda's three siblings, including her twin, had died in childhood and her grandmother had been in the Workhouse after the death of her husband during this time of harsh social conditions, extreme poverty and ill-health. Edward's family's kindness offered Hilda an escape. Edward was drawn to her competence and dexterity. Skilful with her hands, Hilda enjoyed sewing, knitting and dressmaking. They fell in love and embarked on a long engagement: their marriage was registered in July 1924. Two years later Hilda gave birth to Audrey Alice (named after Edward's mother) Buss, when she was 26.

For much of Audrey's childhood they lived above Edward's grocery shop: 22 Coopers Farm (Dairy) on Chatterton Road in Bromley. The 1939 census records Edward as Dairyman and General Dealer and Hilda as Post-Office Clerk. Hilda's father James, a widower who was now sixty seven, was living with them. A photograph shows Edward as a dapper, suited man in front of his shop. The area was a hive of activity, with local shops and homes all within easy walking distance of the railway station. ‘Our house had plenty of rooms and three flights of stairs’, Audrey recalls. The family later moved to the flat above their corner shop on Pope Road. Their lives were relatively prosperous, especially after Edward acquired a couple of antique and junk shops. Still Audrey remembers moments of financial instability, not unusual in the lives of the lower-middle class at that time but heightened by Edward's financial recklessness. On one occasion Hilda had to sell her engagement ring to buy her daughter a warm coat. Edward's own childhood had been marked by penury, especially after his father's death. Never having had much money, Audrey remembers ‘he didn't know what to do with it when he did’.

Audrey attended the Princess Plane primary school in Bromley. She was 12 years old at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Entranced by the wave of Spitfire planes taking off from the Biggin Hill RAF base close by, she would step outside to watch the battle in the skies: the British planes flying alongside the German ‘doodle-bugs’ to tilt their wings to turn them away from London and back towards occupied France. She recalls the German flying bombs with flames coming out of their tails crossing the sky. ‘So many never made it’, she comments, referring to the five in six British planes shot down. Several crashed into the fields in Kent that her son would later roam as a child.

With the characteristic patient stoicism of her generation Audrey reflects on how the war ‘seemed normal’: they all ‘took it in their stride’. Owning the grocery shop shielded the Buss family from some of the indignities and deprivations of wartime rationing. Edward was responsible for portioning the meat and fat into the requisite amounts per family. Audrey remembers her father cutting the huge slabs of bacon and lumps of butter, lard and margarine on their kitchen table with only a kitchen knife. During the summers, with no refrigeration, he had to keep the meat and fat in large tubs of water. They faced the Blitz on London and major industrial areas in 1940: 127 bombs were dropped on Bromley between 7 October 1940 and 6 June 1941. The parish church of St Peter and St Paul had to be rebuilt in the 1950s following wartime devastation. As an Air Raid Precaution warden, Hilda patrolled the streets during blackouts in a dark blue suit and tin hat to ensure that no light was visible. The injunction ‘Turn the light off Mr Malory’ was often repeated at home. Much time was spent counting people in and out of the crush of the air-raid shelters. After a bomb exploded on the laundrette directly opposite their shop, their windows had to be boarded up. Another bomb killed Edward's youngest brother Harry and his 11-year-old nephew. Edward's sister-in-law and their daughter and son survived. Audrey remembers going to see her cousins in hospital, but there was no discussion of the tragedy, in keeping perhaps with the prevailing attitude of ‘least said, soonest mended’. There also appears to have been a rift among the Buss siblings who were not close to Harry's family.

With the air raids persisting, Audrey's parents reluctantly made plans for their cherished 15-year-old daughter to be evacuated to North America, as part of the transatlantic evacuation scheme Churchill's government had eventually agreed to in June 1940. Audrey's best friend since the age of eight, Yvonne, had an American father who arranged for Audrey to stay with their relatives. She had packed her suitcase in readiness to leave when on 12 September 1940, the SS City of Benares carrying ninety passengers, including many children, was sunk by a German U-boat. Only thirteen passengers survived. Hilda and Edward decided not to send Audrey and soon after the scheme was stopped. The Blitz was suspended in May 1941, but in June 1944 the conflagration reignited, with sixty raids between June and August: as many as five a day. The last air raid was in March 1945. Ultimately Audrey's family escaped some of the wartime dislocation and separation suffered by others in their area: many Bromley youngsters were evacuated to North Wales, but Audrey's parents could not bear to part with her.

The most severe disruption Audrey experienced was in her education at the Bromley School of Art on Tweedy Road. The myriad wartime upheavals meant that Audrey was 21 by the time she completed the education she began at 16. From an early age, art provided an inspiration and perhaps an escape: ‘I've always liked art: I became a Friend of the Royal Academy where I used to love to go on the weekends. And I would love to visit now.’ Hilda, a keen and talented seamstress, was proud of Audrey's considerable artistic talent. After leaving college and while still living with her parents, Audrey worked as a painter: ‘I went to work in a small factory where I painted flowers on pots made from pottery. Later I used to paint eyes on rabbits and toy soldiers for a local potter Mrs Jenkins up in Bickley: she brought them to me to paint at home.’ In her free time her creativity found expression in still-life portraits. Yvonne, who became an art teacher and made a career of her art, nurtured Audrey's talent and encouraged her. Yvonne was also to change Audrey's life in another, more decisive way.

After a brief, unhappy stint working in Paris, Audrey returned home in November 1952. Shortly afterwards Yvonne, then engaged to a Pakistani naval officer, telephoned to invite Audrey to join them on an evening out. Yvonne's fiancé would bring along a friend. They would go to Maxim's, a bar near Victoria Station with a small dance floor in the centre, a favoured spot among courting couples. The area was a popular space for new arrivals from the Commonwealth to congregate. It was a stone's throw from the Catholic Overseas Club where the white mother of Kureishi's contemporary, author Bernadine Evaristo, met her Nigerian father. These were alternative spaces that allowed interracial relationships to thrive and that transformed London. The pretty young women took the train across the river together. It was on this blind date that Audrey met her future husband Rafiushan, known as Shanoo: the seventh of Lieutenant-Colonel Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed and Zainab Kureishi's nine sons and eleven children.

2

Shanoo

The easiest way to understand Kureishi's paternal ancestry is to begin with his grandfather. An imposing figure, Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed Kureishi was born in 1884 in Sirhind in the Indian state of Punjab. After completing a preliminary degree at the University of the Punjab, he came to England in 1905 at the age of 21 to complete his medical studies at King's College Hospital in London. Between 1905 and 1909 he attended lectures in zoology and anatomy, and won prizes in clinical surgery and pathology. He moved between digs in South Kensington and Clapham Junction. After he qualified as a doctor in 1909, he was one of the first Muslims in the Indian subcontinent to be selected for the elite military Indian Medical Service of British India. He joined as a lieutenant in 1909 and received a medal at the last Delhi Durbar in 1911, the only one attended by the then sovereign, King George V. As his son Omar Kureishi writes, ‘This background made him something of a Sahib, though more properly he was a member of an emerging middle class of professionals as opposed to the comic aristocracy of the ruling princes and landed gentry.’

³

Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed married his petite Kashmiri wife Zainab Naik on his return to India in 1909. He was 25, she was 24. Born in Jammu in Kashmir in 1885, at four years old Zainab, her mother and brother fled a plague in Kashmir which killed her father. They moved to Moochi Gate in the affluent old city of Lahore, where Kashmiri families settled. In a union based on class and kinship ties, the couple lived initially in Lahore. Their first child Nasir was born in 1910. As a young man who had travelled and wanted to get ahead, it's not entirely surprising that Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed was initiated into the United Grand Lodge of England Freemasons in 1913 at the age of 29. He is listed on the membership register of the Derajat Lodge in the Punjab. In The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World, John Dickie argues that freemasonry, one of Britain's most successful cultural exports, appealed to ambitious men the world over who sought influence through its effective system of networking.⁴ Perhaps its supposedly non-sectarian and egalitarian ethos appeared invitingly inclusive amid the bigotries of empire. Promoted to captain in 1915, Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed was awarded a further British war medal in 1922. He would become a lieutenant-colonel in 1930 at the age of 46.

They were a peripatetic family. Muzaffer ud Din Ahmed's early posting to Tientsin in northern China during the First World War saw the birth of the next batch of sons – Shanoo's older brothers – Zahir (known as Zabak), Enver (known as Abo, born in 1914), Safdar (known as Sattoo, born in 1917) and Asif (known as Achoo, born in 1919).⁵ After the war ended, the Kureishi family were posted back to Madras where Humayun (known as Toto) arrived in 1922, followed by Shanoo on 4 May 1924, sisters Bilquis (born in 1927), Kudsia (born in 1929, known as Rani), Omar in 1928 and the youngest son, Muhtasim known as Gulloo, in 1932.

For the first decade of his life (1927–35) Shanoo lived with his family in Delhi. Inaugurated as the new colonial capital in 1931, the city of New Delhi was designed to showcase British imperial authority. Lutyens’ monumental rose-coloured places of colonial government represented the racial and social hierarchy of Raj society in their layout. New Delhi displaced the ‘old’ Mughal city of Shahjahanabad. The colonel bought a palatial, whitewashed home typical of the grandeur of the imperial city and Lutyens’ model garden suburb on a road named Harding Avenue under the British, in prestigious surroundings near India Gate. He called it Al-Kuresh.

A domineering yet remote father-figure, the colonel – or Papa as the children called him – was a strict disciplinarian. His last surviving child Toto remembers him as ‘terrifying’.⁶ As a military man, immaculately turned out himself – in boots polished ‘till you could see your face shine in them’ and a brown trench coat with two stars on his shoulder pads and dark glasses – the colonel remained obsessed with appearances and propriety. Papa roundly slapped infant Toto when he escaped his bath naked. He routinely shouted at dishevelled servants. Omar Kureishi's son Javed interprets his grandfather's neurotic demand for perfection as the result of ‘having to be twice as good as his white peers to succeed in the British colonial army’. The colonel could, however, also be kind. His grand daughter Maheen says, ‘From what I gathered from my parents, my uncles and aunts, and siblings who lived with him, Papa was extremely strict but at the same time caring and loving to the extreme. He was very wise as well.’ In his obituary, his English son-in-law remembers his ‘lively mind and a warm, kindly personality’.⁷ And he was extremely ambitious for his children, especially his sons.

Papa mortgaged (and eventually sold) the house in Delhi to educate his oldest sons abroad. Shanoo's younger brother Omar suggests that their father saw educating his children ‘as his foremost duty’.⁸ Encouraged by Papa, all his children acquired a view of a wider world by avid reading. Omar recalls moving through Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond and The Saint before immersing himself in Shakespeare and Somerset Maugham. No one dared read the colonel's copy of Punch magazine before him. And like Kureishi, his grandfather's favourite comic author was P.G. Wodehouse.⁹ This upbringing and colonial education primed the children for a life outside India. Nasir studied engineering at London University. During the 1930s Enver (Abo) studied at Exeter University. Safdar (Sattoo) attended the College of Aeronautical Engineering in Chelsea, while Asif (Achoo) graduated from LSE. Lacking inherited wealth, the colonel worked hard to provide his sons with a prohibitively expensive foreign education. Transport costs were high. Few from the non-white colonies could afford the trip to the ‘mother country’, let alone expenses such as university fees. In the 1930s this education gave his sons an exceptional, formidable head-start in comparison to the rest of the population. It also left the colonel considerably less well-off than he might have been in old age.

For a few years (1935–39) the family lived in Poona (present-day Pune). Papa commanded the Indian Military Hospital at Ghorpuri, a military suburb of Poona. The family occupied a fully furnished, two-storey army house in a leafy housing estate in Koregaon Park, surrounded by mango, guava, custard apple and tamarind trees, and equipped with a tennis court and billiard room. These idyllic years are lovingly described in Omar Kureishi's memoir Once Upon a Time (2000), and Shanoo too would conjure them memorably in his unpublished writings.¹⁰ Toto recalls a river running through the back garden. In the neighbouring house lived a young Nargis Dutt, who would become the acclaimed actress Nargis. The younger Kureishi boys buzzed around Nargis whenever she visited and played cricket with her brothers.

Excelling at the game, this was Shanoo's chance to outshine his less sporty but more academic brothers. Shanoo captained Colonel Kureishi's Second XI. According to Omar, Papa demanded of all those who played for the team that bore his name ‘a modicum of talent’. This almost ruled out Omar until their mother intervened. Omar wryly evokes the passionate fervour of the Kureishi Second XI's ‘great anti-imperialist battles’ against the Somerset Light Infantry. Equipped ‘with only cast-off cricket gear, deformed cricket balls’ and ‘an odiferous box … we were convinced that through our ineptitude and dropped catches we had put back India's independence’.¹¹ The task of running the household with military precision at the colonel's insistence preoccupied Zainab, who also enjoyed her own busy social life. She had a ‘strident’ personality and disapproved of her husband's ‘blimpish authoritarianism’.¹² Husband and wife remained at a distance. It fell to Zainab's widowed mother Nani to adore and indulge the children. Omar recalls their grandmother rather than their mother as ‘the dominant influence on our lives: a figure of vitality and a fund of stories’.

¹³

Shanoo and his siblings travelled in a gora gari – ‘carriage of the whites’ – a further class marker of this Anglophile, anglicised family. Papa spoke to his children only in English and brought them up to share a deep respect for British literature and culture. Their mother, known as Bibi, spoke to them in Urdu, which Shanoo and his siblings could speak, but not read or write. Although they were a Sunni Muslim family, this was a secular Muslim household. The children had never been brought up to think on religious or ‘communal’ lines. As Omar explains, in Delhi and Bombay (present-day Mumbai) religious antagonism was minimal given the cosmopolitan nature of those cities. However, once the family moved to the more ‘insular … Poona, one became conscious of the militant Hindu mind-set. Among the prominent Hindu families in Poona, we were identified as a Mussalman household. This did not breed hostility on its own. But it underlined a crucial state of mind.’ ¹⁴ Omar lightly positions the seriousness of the Kureishi Second XI's fixture against the P.Y. Hindu Gymkhana ‘as a forerunner of the communal frenzy that was to batter the subcontinent’.¹⁵ The only member of the family who consistently followed Islamic rituals was their mother.¹⁶ Toto, Shanoo and Omar attended the English-language St Vincent's High School, a Roman Catholic missionary school in Poona.

In 1939, when Shanoo was around 16, the family settled in Bombay. Once the war hostilities ended, the colonel joined them. (In 1939, nearing the retirement age of 55, the colonel retired from the Indian Medical Service to take up private practice. During the Second World War he returned to service as the commanding office of an internment camp at Satara, near Poona.) He continued practising medicine in Bombay until the time of Partition. Prioritising the education of his sons, Shanoo, Omar and ‘even’, in Toto's words, ‘the unfortunate, unbalanced Gulloo’ attended the elite, private Cathedral High School in Bombay. Here Omar befriended the future prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, known to the family as Zulfie. At this English mission school modelled on British public schools, replete with hymns, blazers, ties, lawns, tuck shops and playing fields, the anglicisation continued. In later years, fallen on hard times in Britain, Shanoo would insistently recall and remind others of his privileged education.

Largely absent and aloof – ‘Papa would come home for lunch, nap, play cards on a green baize table before getting ready go to the club. He was a member of them all’ – the colonel nevertheless remained a figure of authority according to his son Toto. Although now retired, he inspected their rooms as though he was still in the army barracks. Moreover, ‘Papa knew every child. All school reports came to the colonel and woe betide you brought home a bad one.’ He was adamant about falsehoods: ‘You could not tell a lie he would kill you. It was best to confess’, Toto recalls. This zeal was extended to the children's friends: ‘When Papa found out Zulfie had lied he gave him one slap asking, Who taught you to tell lies?’ In retrospect, Toto, an old-world character of deep integrity, takes pride in their strict upbringing. ‘It instilled virtue in all of us. You dare not steal even a pencil from school. He would murder you. A model of rectitude, Papa set high standards for all his children who never cheated or succumbed to corruption.’

In his memoir decades later, Omar recalls, ‘we saw the British as the villains’.¹⁷ He claims his father ‘loved England but was a bitter foe of the Raj’.¹⁸ As a member of the military medical service in British India, however, the colonel accepted British rule and had faith in the Raj. Toto confirms, ‘Papa believed in the British. He was not anti-colonial like his eldest sons.’ India's burgeoning independence movement, as demands to ‘Quit India’ grew more vociferous, especially stirred Papa's older sons Zabak and Abo. ‘Us younger children Shanoo, Omar and myself couldn't care less. The politics didn't affect us then. We were too young’, Toto comments. The colonel participated in certain rituals of the Raj that established a mini-Britain in the tropics, revolving around tea parties and dances, golf clubs and polo. In turn, Toto recalls, ‘Papa was welcomed by the British. He had very good friends in the army. They would come to the house for wine and whisky.’ Cool, alert and sharp, Papa ‘excelled at bridge’. The colonel's interracial friendships, forged over cards, conversation and drink, need to be seen in the context of the growing social relaxation between the British and Western-educated Indians. As he grew older, Shanoo would become increasingly politicised and critical of colonialism. Yet he would retain his father's firm belief in law-governed British institutions, with an abiding respect for British freedoms and fairness to which his own son would hold the country to account.

The Kureishi family remained in Bombay until independence in 1947. Unconvinced by the two-nation theory that Muslims and Hindus were politically irreconcilable, the colonel opposed Partition: ‘Papa had more Hindu than Muslim friends’, says Toto. These harmonious ties and easy familiarity – memorably evoked in Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy – offer a repudiation of the ancient hatreds thesis. The colonial power's divide-and-rule policy culminated in a calamitous partition, with the new national borders of India and Pakistan (extending over 7,500 km) drawn up in indecent haste. The fratricidal horror of Partition violence that accompanied the largest internal migration saw one million killed, 10 million displaced and an estimated 75,0000 women raped. The Pakistani Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's famous poem ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (‘Freedom's Morning’) captures the desolation of a blood-soaked Partition and ‘mottled’ dawn of freedom: ‘This is not the dawn we were waiting for.’

Unlike many families, the Kureishis emerged relatively unscathed from Partition. Yet one story haunts the family. Rushing to leave, among the crush of bodies at the train station Papa's cousin momentarily let go of her five-year-old daughter's hand. The child disappeared into the crowds and was never seen again. ‘One of the Sikh people carried her off and we never got her back’, Toto says. At the same time, he insists that in Bombay, ‘the Hindus were very good to the Kureishi family. No one threw a stone at us. Papa didn't want to move from Bombay. But he accepted that even though the family were doing very well in India, the future for his children lay in Pakistan.’

After Partition the family scattered. The eldest son Nasir remained in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata). Sattoo migrated to the newly created Pakistan. By 1944 the forward-looking colonel was convinced that ‘the future was America’ rather than England.¹⁹ Toto won a scholarship to study chemical engineering at Caltech. Omar travelled to study International Relations at the University of Southern California, where he would share a room with his school mate Zulfikar Bhutto. Shanoo left for Britain in 1947, shortly followed by Rani who would study nursing at King's College London. Long estranged, their marriage over, the colonel and his wife went separate ways. Bibi joined her son Sattoo and his family in Karachi. Reluctant to start afresh in the new country of Pakistan, the colonel eventually decided to join his children in Britain in 1950.

Ferried from Bombay to Tilbury on the ship Startheden to study law at London University, Shanoo disembarked in a thin suit amid the drizzle to begin the adventure of his life on 20 December 1947. He was 23. Shanoo arrived a few months after the Partition of India and just before the British Nationality Act confirmed unrestricted entry for Commonwealth citizens, following which the first wave of immigrants from the West Indies arrived in Britain on board the Empire Windrush in 1948. Although India, Pakistan, Burma (present-day Myanmar) and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) had recently been granted independence, in Africa, South-East Asia and the West Indies the empire was still intact. And Britain had a notion of itself at its centre. The British population of about 50 million in 1950 was overwhelmingly indigenous. The 1951 census showed that only 4.2 per cent of the population had been born overseas and the great majority of immigrants were white and European: mainly Irish but also European refugees from the Nazis and the Second World War. The census also showed there were fewer than 140,000 black and Asian people in Britain in 1951 when a Tory administration replaced Labour. A few years later Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden would try to hold on to Britain's gateway to a disappearing empire in the Suez debacle of 1956; this failure and historic setback signalled the end of British predominance in the Middle East.

On arrival, Shanoo lived rent-free in the dilapidated London premises of his father's Hindu Marathi colleague Captain Lal at 652 Old Kent Road, just as his older brothers had done when they came to Britain to study in the previous decade. Shanoo disliked his lodgings. He had to sleep on the floor and would wake up in the middle of the night when mice ran over his body to plug the mouseholes in the room with the itchy woollen vests packed by his mother. A key trope of Kureishi's first novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is how London was transformed both demographically and imaginatively because of Britain's imperial legacy. His literary forerunners, notably the ‘Windrush generation’, Sam Selvon and George Lamming, among others, had explored ‘the voyage in’ and the establishing of minority communities in the old imperial centre. As a British-born writer, the story of arrival is not Kureishi's, but is instead traced in the novel through the perspective of the father-figure. Haroon arrives in Britain from India, much like Shanoo, having left a more comfortable, privileged life back home that he was expected to return to. Through the eyes of its first-generation migrant protagonist, the novel demythologises the colonial metropolis in a deft reversal of the colonial gaze. On arrival to the freezing shock of the Old Kent Road, Haroon is

amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England… He'd never seen the English in poverty, as roadsweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He'd never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him that the English didn't wash regularly because the water was so cold… And when Dad tried to discuss Byron in local pubs no one warned him that not every Englishman could read or that they didn't necessarily want tutoring by an Indian on the poetry of a pervert and a madman. (BS 24–5)

Kureishi's journals clarify his portrayal of Haroon's experiences as emblematic of those of his own father and his anglophone, Anglophile generation. ‘Indians looked down on although they speak better English. I think of my father reading Pope, Chaucer, Milton and Orwell because he wanted to be a well-educated Englishman, the equal of any Englishman! And they looked on him with even more loathing because he was cleverer than them and better educated’ (Diary undated).

While Papa had paid for the education of Shanoo's older brothers, the retired colonel had no money left to educate his second ‘batch’ of younger sons, Toto, Omar and Shanoo. Toto's fees were covered by his Indian scholarship. Sattoo and Rani paid for some of their brother Omar's fees, but there was nothing for Shanoo. He soon ran out of money and had to abandon his studies, shoring up resentments that would surface later. ‘Less able, Shanoo felt inferior, conscious he had underperformed, but also patronised and resentful of his brothers’, according to his nephew, Omar's son Javed Kureishi. Shanoo began to work as a clerk in the Finance and Economic Division of the High Commission for Pakistan in 1951. This would be a temporary post, he told himself, while he prepared for a career as a journalist and writer in Britain. (In India he had worked with his brother Omar on a magazine.) In his spare time, he wrote letters to the British press on the evolving disputes between India and Pakistan. In a letter dated 27 September 1951, he upbraided the New Statesman & Nation's bias towards Nehru and his ‘sentimental claim’ to Kashmir that overlooked Pakistan's agricultural dependence on the region. His letters were not published, but in writing them Shanoo identified the political rationale for his later non-fiction books: he would counter British ‘blindness to Pakistan's point of view’.

On the blind date at Maxim's the physical attraction between Shanoo and Audrey was instantaneous: ‘Shanoo liked buxom blondes’, Audrey suggests with a laugh.²⁰ Audrey's hesitant demeanour in the shadow of her more confident friend Yvonne invited Shanoo's protection; her attention erased his loneliness. Photographs taken during their courtship show a stylish, handsome, relaxed couple meeting the camera's gaze with confidence. Audrey's milky-white skin and wavy, shoulder-length, ash-blonde hair and pale blue eyes contrast with Shanoo's dark expressive eyes, bulbous nose, olive skin and thatch of jet-black hair: short, back and sides with a shiny touch of Brylcreem.²¹ Smartly dressed and well spoken, he took a keen interest in his appearance, as would his son. At five feet one inch tall, Shanoo was slightly shorter than Audrey; diminutive but a powerful presence. Expansive, especially in the presence of an attractive woman like Audrey, he was much more attentive than the English men she had previously dated, including most recently Alex, who had dumped her for an Italian girl. Charismatic, curious and irrepressible, with a bold, throaty laugh, this pioneering émigré brought vitality to the grey monotony of her starched life. He made her happier than she ever expected to be. The couple began to go out regularly. They shared a passion for dancing at the Commonwealth dance halls. Audrey used to visit Shanoo at his bedsit some twelve miles away in Wood Green, North London. He shared the flat on Mayes Road with other Asian students who she recalls were very ‘well-disposed’ towards her.

Despite the forbidding landscape of racial antipathy towards newcomers, who suffered discrimination in employment and housing, with ‘European only’ and ‘no Coloureds’ advertisements displayed in the windows of inner-city boarding houses and in ‘To Let’ columns of suburban newspapers, 90-year-old Audrey insists she did not see her relationship with Shanoo as either ‘brave’ or ‘unconventional’. This is partly because she first met Shanoo in the early 1950s before mass immigration in the 1960s and 1970s triggered waves of racism and racist violence. Coming from an affluent and educated Indian family, studying for the bar, Shanoo represented an exotic ‘catch’. One of a small presence of mostly students and doctors, at this juncture he elicited curiosity rather than resentment. Of 140,000 ‘coloured’ people settled in Britain in 1951, the India Office estimated that only 43,000 were South Asian. But by the end of the decade, the atmosphere had changed. By the early 1960s 122,000 Asians no longer constituted a novelty; the decade saw a fivefold increase, largely fuelled by South Asians expelled from newly independent East Africa (though still an incremental increase rather than a significant Windrush moment). Immigration figures from South Asia began to rise exponentially, making the ‘Paki’ a target of racial abuse and prejudice.²² Audrey married into something she had not anticipated. By 1958, with the ‘coloured’ (black and Asian) population estimated at 180,000, interracial marriages faced extreme prejudice. That year in a survey of British attitudes, 71 per cent disapproved of marriages between ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ people. Black and white intermarriage faced even more virulent racism than marriages between Asian and white people.

In any event, Audrey's kind and open-minded parents Hilda and Edward were ‘very happy with Shanoo: they liked him very much’. His gentle intelligence, spontaneous warmth and jollity beguiled everyone, while his habitual courtesy would instil good manners in both his children; they also share his curiosity about people and interest in human transformation.²³ Audrey could not recall any nervousness about telling her parents about the relationship or introducing them. Audrey adored the way Shanoo could talk to anyone about any topic, even horse-racing with her father, something Shanoo knew little about. Even though she and Yvonne were the only women in their circle to date Asian men, no one ever tried to dissuade her. Yvonne subsequently broke off her engagement to the Pakistani officer, but not because of any external pressure. She didn't want to leave her siblings and could not contemplate moving to Pakistan. Instead, she went to Paris to pursue her art.

However, the courtship was not all smooth sailing. Audrey maintained that ‘it was the other side that didn't like it’, Shanoo's father especially. As a military man and unyielding patriarch, the colonel had expected to choose all his children's partners. In his memoir Omar describes his father as a man who ‘believed in family as a unit and whose writ was non-negotiable’.²⁴ Papa had already arranged the marriages of his older son Sattoo and daughter Bilquis.²⁵ Toto, however, recalls that ‘when both those marriages flopped my father vowed not to interfere in his children's marriages any more’. The younger son Omar had English girlfriends, but left them broken-hearted when he chose to return to Pakistan and marry Zohra.²⁶ Yasmin describes her father as a rebel compared to his brothers.

Certainly, Papa did not object to his children marrying into other cultures. He had moved closely with British Army officers. Nor was Audrey the only white person to have married into the Kureishi clan. To Audrey it seemed that the colonel enjoyed far more cordial relationships with his other white in-laws than with her. He bonded with his daughter Rani's fiancé, an English doctor Norman Williamson, and especially with his son Achoo's Jewish girlfriend Anna Soloman, who was a nurse. From a wealthy, distinguished, educated, upper-middle-class background, Colonel Kureishi's disapproval may have been more classed than raced. He shared professional ties with Anna and Norman. Shanoo's brother Toto remembers that their father ‘didn't have much time for Audrey: they had little in common’. Audrey muses that as a socialist Shanoo did not share his father's class affiliations. Yet Shanoo remained sharply conscious of the downward social trajectory his move to Britain and marriage entailed. Patrician in some ways, as a skilled player, Shanoo prized cricket above what he termed ‘lower class’ football. Although the game invented by the English has been passionately adopted throughout the Indian subcontinent, when Shanoo was growing up in India cricket did not have the mass appeal it has now. As his brother Omar puts it, at that time cricket was ‘not played by riff-raff’.²⁷ More sedentary than the sporty Kureishis, the Buss family did not share Shanoo's interest in cricket, but indulged the enthusiasm that he retained after moving to Britain.

In his memoir, Kureishi observes, ‘Mother didn't like Colonel Kureishi who tried to force her into the kitchen to cook for him… She wasn't keen on any of the Kureishi brothers’ (MEAHH 128). Audrey concurs but insists on a mutual disaffection: ‘They didn't like me at all.’ While Audrey admits that ‘the Colonel’ used to ‘annoy’ her with his overbearing manner, she insists that he and Shanoo's siblings never welcomed her into the family. After Shanoo died in 1991 ‘they stopped contacting me’. Audrey appeared disinclined to accept Yasmin's gentle but frank interjection that her mother's manner did not invite friendship. Nevertheless, Colonel Kureishi's far more convivial relationship with the vivacious, smiling and talkative Anna suggests that Audrey's introverted nature contributed to the froideur between them. With her blue eyes and bright ginger hair, Anna, a bohemian ‘blousy northerner’ who liked going to pubs and was always loving and laughing, would become an alternative mother figure to young Hanif, and ‘his favourite aunt’. At the same time, Omar's observation that ‘Anna was one of those one in a million girls, good looking in a quiet sort of way, obviously with immense reserves of patience to put up with Achoo's thoroughly disorganised life’ clarifies the kind of tolerant, self-sacrificing woman the Kureishi men approved of.²⁸ Strong-willed and forceful in her own way, Audrey refused to fit this mould. Achoo's daughter Deedee recalls that Kureishi family gatherings at their home in Somerset entailed her mother Anna slaving away for hours in the kitchen to produce endless meals for the colonel, Shanoo and any visiting brothers. Audrey's rebuttal of the expected role of hostess discomforted the Kureishis. The colonel settled in Hastings. He spent time in Achoo and Anna's home in Somerset and later with Rani and Norman in Birmingham: he never stayed overnight in Bromley. Towards the end of his life Anna nursed and bathed her elderly father-in-law.

As an alternative, Colonel Kureishi and the obliging Hilda formed an amicable bond. Audrey acknowledged that ‘he was very interested in my mother’. In contrast to Audrey's strained relationship with her father-in-law, the colonel and Hilda would engage in deep conversations on their long walks together. Audrey recalled the colonel visiting them in Bromley one weekend when cricket enthusiast Shanoo was playing with his local team at an away match. Shanoo, out of residual adherence to his culturally Muslim upbringing, never ate pork. So Hilda had decided to take advantage of his absence and cook roast pork, which the rest of the family enjoyed. These customary arrangements underscore the extent to which his mother-in-law respected Shanoo's wishes. When the colonel turned up unannounced, Hilda was mortified that he would be offended by the menu. Instead, he expressed his delight that he could enjoy the forbidden treat, insisting ‘it is my favourite meat’. The meal cemented Hilda and the colonel's friendship.

Nevertheless, when Audrey and Shanoo married at a simple ceremony at Bromley Registry Office on 6 March 1954, neither the colonel nor Shanoo's sister Rani attended. ‘They disapproved’, according to Audrey. Her parents, cousin May and her husband Fred, friends Yvonne and Irene and Shanoo's brother Achoo and Anna celebrated the nuptials.²⁹ The party with beer and cucumber sandwiches continued at Edward and Hilda's home in Bromley afterwards. Shanoo was 29, Audrey 27.

Like many lower-middle-class couples, the newly married Kureishis lived with Audrey's parents in their flat above the corner shop on Pope Road. Every morning Shanoo took the train from Bromley South station to Victoria and then a bus to the Pakistan High Commission overlooking Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge. Omar, now a columnist and writer visiting from Pakistan, recalls: ‘For a young country, the Pakistan High Commission looked tired and mouldy and had a tiny lift and it groaned on its way up.’ The internal politics were toxic: ‘everyone seemed to be gunning for everybody’.³⁰ Appalled by a series of arbitrary dismissals in the embassy, Shanoo abhorred the Pakistani government's treatment of its own nationals. He fearfully sympathised with ‘the plight of sacked office workers stranded with families in a foreign country where they will find it very difficult to find work’ in his diary entry dated 1 July 1959. This became the impetus of Shanoo's unpublished novel ‘The Redundant Man’, which evokes the depressing, insecure atmosphere in his office.

The couple didn't waste any time. Audrey became pregnant with Hanif possibly on her wedding night. She endured extreme anxiety and physical discomfort throughout her pregnancy. During her confinement her depression exacerbated. Hinting at the conflictual nature of their subsequent relationship, she joked slyly: ‘I'm not surprised that I was sick with Hanif.’ The smell of paint now triggered extreme nausea, stalled her art and stifled her creativity, just as the early years of motherhood would leave her no time to draw. Coming from a family with a predisposition to produce twins (Hilda was a twin; Hanif and Yasmin would go on to have identical twins), Audrey was convinced she had conceived twins. Throughout the pregnancy, she lost so much blood and tissue that she felt traumatised that ‘the other twin was coming away’. She worried – understandably in those days before ultrasound scans – that ‘there would be no baby left’.

Ultimately only Hanif was born on Sunday 5 December 1954, a little prematurely, weighing only five pounds, at the Bromley Nursing Home on Masons Hill.³¹ Bawling and lusty, with a mop of dark hair, he was a butterscotch hue, unlike the bald, fat, coral pink babies in the neighbouring cots. He soon filled out into a rosy-cheeked toddler. Poignantly, Audrey had intended to call the other twin Karim, the name Kureishi gave his alter ego in The Buddha of Suburbia. Delighted that his first-born had secured the male line, Shanoo warmly welcomed his serene and chubby baby daughter four years later. He photographed her enthusiastically. In his diary he likened one-year-old Yasmin ‘to a little doll in her new bonnet so cuddly & sweet’ (Diary 11 May 1959). By this time Hanif had grown into a skinny, light-brown, watchful young child with a precociously precise turn of phrase.

Both children were born into a Britain on the cusp of change. Surprisingly Audrey, rather than Shanoo, chose their children's Asian names: ‘Shanoo didn't get a look in’, she told me. Audrey had always liked the name of the eminent Pakistani cricketer Hanif Mohammed, whom Shanoo and Omar often talked about. She named Yasmin after the American movie star Rita Hayworth's daughter with Prince Aly Khan. Shanoo was only permitted to select his daughter's middle name, after film star Belinda Lee, another heavy-bosomed blonde. Even today the naming of children from minority backgrounds reveals their parents’ attitudes towards the culture of origin and the dominant ‘host’ society. Not wanting to ‘burden’ a child with a supposedly difficult to pronounce ‘foreign’ name, some choose ‘Western’ names to ease their child's path to assimilation. With the overarching emphasis on ‘passing’ as white in 1950s Britain and the prejudice directed towards mixed marriages, with their offspring viewed as tragic social outcasts – part of what even liberal newspapers referred to as ‘the colour problem’ – Audrey's bold choices for her biracial children (‘half-castes’ in the terminology of the time) are significant. Growing up two decades later in the 1970s, the BBC's economics editor Kamal Ahmed admits he felt the need to pretend that his name was Neil: ‘lots of us did it – children with funny, foreign names used short English names in our effort to fit in, particularly with people we didn't know well. We were the generation of black and Asian people who fought for similarity, it was a confidence thing. A lack of confidence thing.’ ³² Young Hanif would call himself Paul for a while, but this grew out of his worship of Beatle Paul McCartney. He sometimes wonders how differently his career might have turned out if he had been given an English name instead.

³³

Having just before we met watched Channel 4's fly-on-the-wall documentary cum reality show from maternity units, One Born Every Minute, featuring contemporary fathers comforting their partners during labour, Audrey laughed at the very idea of Shanoo's attendance at the birth: ‘He would have passed out!’ Not unusually for his generation of fathers, Shanoo slept through the labour and the subsequent nights of broken sleep. Although enchanted with his first-born, ‘he never changed a nappy or pushed the pram’. Prioritising regular feeding and sleeping routines rather than bonding, Audrey was able to survive the early physical demands of motherhood and all the washing by hand with her mother Hilda's help. The problems emerged later.

Yasmin was born on 18 September 1958, just a few weeks after the outbreak of racist violence in the streets of Notting Hill, which was mirrored in Nottingham. About 350 white youths went on the rampage, hurling bricks and beating up black residents for six nights in a row. Growing up Muslim in a majority Hindu nation, Shanoo knew of the tensions bubbling between Hindus and Muslims. He confided in his diary that the racial violence in Notting Hill prompted memories of ‘living in the riot era of the pre-Partition period’. The racist attacks bred ‘insecurity and fear in the minds of all coloured people’. Shanoo's memories of the summer riots of 1958 were triggered a year later by the ‘distressing news of the murder of a coloured man’ in the same district of Notting Hill, as it became a stronghold for Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and Colin Jordan's White Defence League. (After the war, Mosley had attempted to revive his virulently antisemitic British Union of Fascists (est. 1932), renamed the Union Movement, with little success. He left the country in 1951. Eight years later, in the wake of the race riots in Notting Hill, he stood for election in Kensington North on an anti-immigration platform: forced repatriation for black people and a ban on mixed marriages.) On 17 May 1959 six white youths set upon a 32-year-old black carpenter Kelso Cochrane as he walked home after midnight from hospital following treatment for a minor work-related injury. They stabbed him to death with a stiletto knife. And yet Shanoo predicted hopefully that ‘matters here would not reach the pitch’ of Partition violence: ‘The English seem civilised and might contain it before it spreads. There are a lot of people who think and abhor racial animosity over here. And I think they will come forward when the need arises’ (Diary 18 May 1959).

This vision of Britain as intrinsically humane but for a few rotten apples is one the first-generation migrant father Amjad clings to in Kureishi's early play Borderline. Shanoo's steadfast faith in British society stemmed in part from nostalgic notions of British fair play and the ‘gentleness of English civilisation’, as espoused by George Orwell in The Lion and The Unicorn; but also from his keen awareness of the racism that existed in other nations. Conscious of the sectarianism he had witnessed growing up in India, Shanoo kept a sharply critical eye on global political issues, namely the ‘barbaric policy of white supremacy’ in South Africa. (Although he is here silent on British support for the South African regime.)³⁴ He eloquently called out America's self-representation as a custodian of liberty in the face of lynchings in the Southern states: ‘how can we have faith in a nation that in its own backyard commits acts of inconceivable brutality in the middle of the twentieth-century … whose justice breaks down every time a coloured man is involved’ (Diary 28 April 1959).

For Shanoo, Britain was less sectarian and more meritocratic than any other country. In his experience kindness matched unkindness. Warmly embraced by his English in-laws, he and his younger brothers enjoyed many positive interracial encounters. When visiting Papa in Hastings Omar played club cricket for the local team. Towards the end of the season, an unknown elderly white lady presented Omar with a cricket jumper she had knitted especially for him. As for the impact of Cochrane's killing, Shanoo was partly right. While no one was ever convicted for Cochrane's murder and the police swiftly tried to dismiss racism as a motive, his racist killing provoked an outcry. More than 1,200 people, black and white, joined his funeral procession. It may have led to a decline in support for Oswald Mosley: he polled under 3,000 votes in Kensington North in that year's general election. Still, of course, the worst had ‘not passed’ as Shanoo had hoped: this was only the first racist murder in modern Britain. In 1960 the National Labour Party joined the White Defence League and formed the British National Party. The anger of the white mobs in 1958 alarmed the authorities. The Economist warned that ‘the liberal line – uncontrolled immigration – can be held for a few more years, but not indefinitely’.

Financial woes rather than racial tensions dogged Audrey and Shanoo's early married life. Shanoo's journal reveals how perilously close they were to being ‘dead broke’. In September 1959 he decided to enrol for an evening class in journalism. He wanted ‘to save face from the scathing and biting criticism of both friends & foes: the embarrassing question of what I was doing and what I had to show for all these years’. After queueing for hours to register, when his turn came he suddenly realised that the course fees were £3 10s., one shilling more than he had anticipated. With only just enough money to pay the fees, he was now stranded with no money for his fare home. Mortified, he approached two Pakistani students, who ‘kindly and quickly’ produced the shilling: ‘I have never felt so terribly embarrassed and small’ he recorded in his diary (Diary 22 September 1959). Not only did they struggle on Shanoo's modest salary, but they also absorbed Audrey's father's debts arising from his ill-judged business ventures, love of betting and drink: ‘Edward's unpredictability and foolish adventures in the field of business have added unfair responsibility to our lives. We cannot move forward without encountering obstacles which do not belong to us but placed by our relations’ (Diary 6 March 1959). A lesser man might have resented his in-laws, or even blamed his wife. Instead, musing on the impact of these life-sapping burdens on their marriage on their fifth wedding anniversary, Shanoo showed not only his deep attachment to Audrey, but his determination to find a silver lining: ‘In the face of these worries and problems we have not wavered in our devotion to each other. In fact, we have closed our ranks more solidly than ever before. I am still in love with Poofie [Audrey's nickname] & I think she is with me.’ His last line hints at her unknowability. With irrepressible optimism, the avid cricketer concluded: ‘There will be a time when we will hit sixes’ (Diary 6 March 1959).

Facing financial ruin, selling the corner shop on Pope Road offered the only escape. On 21 May 1959, Shanoo recorded intense relief and pride that he had ‘admirably’ secured the sale of ‘our shop’. ‘Before Mr. W could knock further off the price,’ he added, ‘I gave him my side of the story. If he had any tears to spare. I am sure he will shed it at my plight.’ Rather than dwell in self-pity at their straitened circumstances, Shanoo wrested comfort from having averted financial collapse: ‘I sometimes feel that there is some divine power looking after my interests for I have escaped many a disaster’ (Diary 21 May 1959). The proceeds from the sale enabled Shanoo and Audrey to buy a Victorian house, presumably in exchange for rescuing Audrey's parents from Edward's ill-judged decisions. Shortly afterwards, almost a year following Yasmin's birth, the entire family, including Edward and Hilda, moved to 14 Whitehall Road, still within the suburb of Bromley.

This was a place that was to profoundly shape Kureishi and play a vital role in his development as a writer. Bromley was monocultural, unlike nearby areas in South London: Croydon, Clapham, Stockwell and Brixton. The latter was known as ‘little Harlem’ as early as 1952, in the context of large-scale, post-war immigration. Xenophobia thrived in Bromley. Devastated by the war, with its featureless, mostly uniform mock Tudor homes, the birthplace of H.G. Wells evoked lastingly in Kureishi's mind nondescript, yet exclusionary strands of Englishness, not always concealed behind its closed net-curtains. Roaming bomb-scarred sites and air-raid shelters and hearing his grandmother's hair-raising stories about the nightly Luftwaffe raids from her time as a firewatcher and air-raid warden, he grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and the cultural emptiness of the end of empire. Born in the year wartime rationing ended, as Britain began to shake off the memory of drab austerity and embrace a feverish new consumerism, this world would find a perfect chronicler in Kureishi.

3

Boyhood

Set in a quiet cul-de-sac, this white and russet-brick semi-detached house only a few minutes’ walk from Pope Road would be the children's sole family home. For several years the siblings shared the back bedroom overlooking the large, secluded garden, with a purple-brown copper beech, lilac trees and yellow summer roses. Kureishi’s parents occupied the front bedroom. Downstairs, there was a small living room where Audrey's artworks were on display and a second room, piled high with surplus junk from Edward's shop including TV sets that smelled of fish and chips when switched on – a detail that crept into The Buddha of Suburbia – which he occupied. The tiny box-room at the side was where Hilda slept at night. They all shared one bathroom. The cramped rooms had paper-thin walls and no central heating until the mid-1960s, with only the downstairs rooms heated by coal fires. During the winter it was common for ice to form on the inside of the windows. There were night-time routines of hot water bottles in the beds and undressing downstairs in the warmth.

Mirroring Shanoo's closer relationship with his handsome Kashmiri grandmother ‘Nani’ than with his own mother, for Hanif, Hilda, with her warm, hesitant smile, replaced Audrey as a maternal figure. (Seeing her own parents daily throughout their lifetime, Audrey found it strange that Shanoo not only never wished to see his mother again after he moved to England, but that he barely wrote to her before her death in Karachi in 1969.) Audrey recollects that ‘Shanoo wasn't close to his mother: she was very religious. Shanoo's grandmother brought him