Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Read Free Book Online Page A

hearing in my head: “She was my first love, but I was not hers.”
    Oh, Ajita, if you are still alive, where are you now? Do you ever think of me?

CHAPTER THREE

    So, I must begin this story-within-a-story.
    One day a door opened and a girl walked into the room.
    It was the mid-1970s.
    The first time I saw Ajita was in our college classroom, an airless, dry box in the depths of a new building on the Strand, down the street from Trafalgar Square. I was at university in London, reading philosophy and psychology. Ajita was pretty late for the discussion on St. Anselm’s arrow; the class that day was nearly over; anyhow, it had been going for two months. She must have had good reason for them to let her join the course at such a late stage.
    It was as hot in those college classrooms as it was in any hospital, and Ajita’s face was flushed and uneasy as she came in half an hour after the class had started and put down her car keys, cigarettes, lighter and several glossy magazines, none of which had the word philosophy in the title.
    There were about twelve students in the class, mostly hippies, down-at-heel, hardworking academic types—the sort my son would refer to as “geeks”—a Goth, and a couple of punks wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. The hip kids were turning punk; I’d been to school with some of them, and I’d still see them when I was out with my friend Valentin in the Water Rat or the Roebuck, and sometimes the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road. But I found them dirty and dispirited, thuggish and always spitting. The music was important, but no one would want to listen to it.
    I’d always been a neat kid; talentlessness, to which the punks subscribed as a principle, didn’t inspire me. I knew I was talented—at something or other—and my own look had become black suits and white shirts, which was both counter-hippy and too smooth to be punk, though it might have passed as New Wave. You wouldn’t catch William Burroughs in beads or safety pins.
    Now the Indian girl was at one of those chairs with a swivelling flat piece of wood attached, for writing on. She was pulling off her hat, removing her scarf and trying to lay them on the flat surface. They slid off. I picked them up and put them back; they fell off again. Soon we were smiling at all this. Her coat came off next, followed by her jumper. But where would she put them, and what would be next?
    This performance, which was embarrassing her, seemed to go on for a long time, with everyone watching. How much clothing, perfume, hair, jewellery and other frills could there be on the relatively small surface of a girl? A lot.
    Suddenly philosophy and the search for “truth,” which until that moment I had adored, seemed a dingy thing. The grimacing professor in a wrecked pullover and corduroy trousers, old to us (my age now, or perhaps younger) and in a Valium stupor, as he insisted on informing us, seemed like a clown. We smirked at one another whenever he said, with emphasis, “Cunt!”, which he assured us was the correct pronunciation for Immanuel Kant. And to think, only the other day the university was at the centre of intellectual ferment, dissent and even revolution!
    Truth was one thing, but beauty, beside me now, was clearly another. Though this girl’s arms were full, she wasn’t carrying any accessory as routine as a notebook or a pencil. I had to lend her some writing paper and my pen. It was the only pen I had on me. I pretended I had more in my bag. I’d have given her all the pens and pencils I had or, indeed, anything she asked for, including my body and soul, but that was to come later.
    After the seminar, she was sitting alone in the refectory. I needed to retrieve that pen, but did I dare speak to her? I’ve always preferred listening. Tahir, my first analyst, would say: people speak because there are things they don’t want to hear; they listen because there are things they don’t want to say. Not that I thought I had