I’ve always wondered what it takes to get a barber to talk to me. There’s something about me that clams a barber up. I sit there in the plastic waiting throne and watch the barbers all talk to their customers, chatting about weekends and about hairstyles and about their lives. It feels intimate and fun at the same time. Both pass the awkward time and leave the premises with enriched lives. I sit down on the cutting throne and the barber asks what I want. I tell them and away they go. In silence.
Why won’t they talk to me?
I wondered if I was the one meant to initiate the conversation. I’ve been to a lot of barbers in my time and felt the same thing happen. Recently, I’ve moved to a place which has a barber’s on the corner. They wave at me every time I walk past now. This means I can change the pattern.
Except, today, I went into the barber’s, thinking, I am Mr Banter – I am the guy. I am going to make this happen. The barber pointed at the chair and I went to sit down. He said he was going to the toilet. Thinking I could lead with something funny to show what a guy I am, I said, ‘Remember to wash your hands,’ and smiled. He looked at me like I was an idiot, a disgusting idiothole for even pretending to suggest he was anything other than hygienic in work-based toilet situations. I smiled and when he returned from the toilet, he washed his hands in front of me a bit vigorously, as if to say, LOOK, I AM WASHING MY HANDS. OK DICKHEAD?
I let him drape me in the cutting cloth and rubber cutting weight, informed him of my style of choice, watched his face in the mirror to see if he thought I could pull it off or not and let him get on with it. I then asked, ‘So… good weekend?’
He stopped and looked at me, sizing up the banter cloud that was before him – could I deliver? would I be funny? Do I know anything about football? He said, ‘Yeah it was great, except Sunday when we scattered my girlfriend’s dad’s ashes.’ Oh, I thought, that’s a downer. How do I lead on from that? He’s presented me with a quandary? Do I rise to the challenge? Do I say, hey man, I’m so sorry – or something like way-hey, shoulda snorted the guy or something like that. No, you’re sensitive in those situations. Even if all these years you’ve been trying to break the glass ceiling of barber silence by initiating conversation and that’s what you’re given, so I replied with… ‘Well, we scattered my mum’s ashes in India last year. Bet it was a bit warmer…’
The rest of my haircut was in silence.
I bought some clippers on the way home. Maybe I’ll do my own hair from now on.
I used to think I looked like Maseo from De La Soul (top, left, upside down). This meant I had underground credibility. I used to purposefully tell people I looked like Maseo from De La Soul. Because I had underground credibility. Because it was preferable to saying a Bollywood star that no one knew, or a Lidl Peter Andre. People didn’t appreciate that as a brown boy with lightskin, chances are, my lookalikes weren’t too well-known. If they existed at all. We lived in this enclave of suburbia where you had to look like someone else and sound like someone else and be the potential to be someone else. So I went for the wilfully obscure, the wilfully cool and the wilfully nothing like my school friends. I remember one of my colleagues aligning himself with a likeness of Robbie Williams, another saying he was like Ralph Macchio. I said I looked like Maseo. This was 1990, after all. They would say, ‘Who?’ and I would go ‘Three, that’s the magic number,’ and they would nod, not really sure who I meant, but nodding at the recognition of the song.
Zone One by Colson Whitehead (Harvill Secker) is my favourite book of the year. Mostly because the more I read of his work, I have to just throw my hands up and say it and own it – he’s my favourite author at the moment. Living, at least, and still writing. Every single one of his books has affected me in some way. Usually, it makes me think about writing and how I write. I’ve said this openly in the past A LOT, but Sag Harbor was the catalyst for Coconut Unlimited, my novel. But this is about Zone One. I love books that give you a different read depending on what you’re projecting on to it. Zone One could be a ‘literary’ (and yet, readable… OH MY THEY CAN COEXIST) thriller about the days and weeks following a zombie attack. It could be an allegory for the effects of urban gentrification, of the rich moving into poor areas and changing them for the worse. It could be a love letter to a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. It could be a book about memory and desperation enducing moments of quiet reflections on its victims. Whatever read you give it, it’s all of these things. It is subtly political, it is overtly honest about humanity, it is textured and still and tense and all the parameters you want to give it. But it is also funny. Not funny in a *KLAXON* JOKE APPROACHING way, just wry and witty with language, and genuinely affectingly funny with dialogue. That’s why it’s my book of the year.
Home Boy by H M Nacqvi (Penguin) blew me away. I read it in two sittings on long coach journeys in India in January, having picked it up at Mumbai airport on a prize-winning whim. It finally got a UK release date in August. Finally. Listen. This book is hot. H-A-W-T HOT. Written in that grand tradition of bottle of whisky, burning cigarette dangling dangerously from the lips, the whoosh of an arrhythmical ceiling fan and the pounding of angry possessed fists on to a typewriter. It reads like poetry. It reads like a political manifesto. It reads like a libertine’s diary. It’s the first book to really properly capture the post-9/11 experience for Muslim Americans in a human way, rather than an issue-based way. It’s wild and funny and well-drawn. And it’s simple. Really simple. Four Muslim American metrostani hipsters load a car full of booze and drugs and go on a roadtrip looking for a friend. It ends badly. It goes wrong for them. America cannot process who these boys are and separate their faces from the faith of their fathers. It’s an arresting book. Full. Of. Life.
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton) was Hari Kunzru getting better and better. I’ve always been a fan. I was worried when I read the press release for the book, thinking, ‘it doesn’t sound like it knows what it’s about. The desert. People looking for something. What’s it about?’ But it instantly hooked me. I love the fragmented narrative, the call and response nature of a series of interconnecting stories that weave in and out of empty spaces in the Mojave desert, bringing together an autistic boy, an Iraqi refugee who works on a US military base and a religious wingnut cult. There’s a lot of empty space in the book and it’s about conflicting systems looking for patterns to converge. It’s well drawn, ambitiously written and builds and builds in a satisfying way. Hari Kunzru really knocks this one out of the park.
Open City by Teju Cole (Faber) is almost like psycho-geography. First of all, reading it in situ in New York over the summer really brought it home for me. Secondly, as Julius traverses physical and social boundaries battling solitude, the conflicts his past and future inflict on where he is now, he is able to escape into the edges of the city’s grid. The book was a punch in the chest, delivering a sermon about national identity, about race, about immigration, about self, about grief, loss – all the big guns in the ol’ thematic department. The book is also so well drawn, the language melts and ebbs and flows with a controlled brilliance. I found this book so moving, I’ll hold my hands up and admit a few tears were shed on Julius’ behalf, and as I wandered around New York (and subsequently London), I wondered about the anonymity a city affords an individual and how that allows them to escape everything they were but the loneliness only builds. What. A. Profound. Work.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) seemed to divide people, Marmite style. They either really thought it was something truly special or really hated it. Can you guess which one I was? I’ll give you a clue… look at the title of this blog. It’s brilliant. When I interviewed Dinaw Mengestu at the beginning of the year, he recommended it and it was brilliant. Apparently, everyone already knew Jennifer Egan was brilliant but it was the first time I’d heard of her. And Mengestu’s great. Although when it was doing the rounds, people cleverer than me hated it. I gave myself to it completely, I love the loose structure of intersecting stories, how it deals with big themes and questions, about getting old and never truly knowing yourself an admirable warmth and lightness of touch. It’s funny and engaging and hey, kooky maybe, but delivering its final chapter as a powerpoint presentation is genius. It’s a great book. There. That’s all you need to know. Fun fact: Booktrust won an award for best pub quiz team name this year for ‘A Quizit from the Goon Squad.’
a sitcom. It’s called Kabadasses. It’s about Kabaddi. It was directed by Anil Gupta. It stars Jack Doolan, Shazad Latif, Tony Jayawardena, Kulvinder Ghir, Ian Bonar and Josie Long. It’s on E4 on 13 November 2011 at 11pm, after MisFits.
