His Big Typewriter

Eleanor Birne

• My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father by Hanif Kureishi
  Faber, 198 pp, £12.99, September 2004, ISBN 0 571 22403 2

Hanif Kureishi’s father, like many fathers, hated his job (he was a clerk at the Pakistani Embassy in London). But unlike many fathers, he tried in his spare time to forge for himself an alternative, fulfilling career as a writer. He was proud, humiliated, persistent. He wrote at least four novels, all of which were turned down by publishers and agents. Kureishi recalls mornings in the family terraced home in Bromley: ‘I’d always had a paper round; I liked getting up early, when you could feel the quality of the air. Dad would be up and dressed already, writing at his desk in his suit before he left for work.’ The occasion that gives rise to My Ear at His Heart is the discovery of a manuscript written by his father in one of his agent’s filing cabinets. Entitled ‘An Indian Adolescence’, it is, Kureishi believes, the last novel his father wrote. Having been unearthed, the manuscript sits in the corner of Kureishi’s study for a while; he spends time ‘glancing at it, looking away, getting on with something else, thinking about it, doing nothing’ before finally settling down, with a cup of tea, to read it.