Hanif Kureishi
@Hanifkureishi
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Writer. My Beautiful Laundrette. Buddha of Suburbia. Winner of a Whitbread and a PEN/Pinter. Fellow of King's College London. Dispatches from my hospital bed.
London
Joined December 2009
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Dear Readers,
Since my fall in Rome, where I was left without the use of my arms or legs, I have enjoyed our can read all of my dispatches and additional writing on my Substack.
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I will be returning to London after six months of hospitalization in Rome at the
@SantaLuciaIRCCS
. I have been treated with professionalism and kindness by all the personnel of the Neurorehabilitation Unit 1. I am grateful to Italy’s national healthcare system for providing free
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THE PHOTOGRAPH
An old friend of mine came in to my hospital room with an envelope of photographs. He pulled one out, it was of me, taken in Cork in or around 1993. I am at a book signing, handing a paperback copy of my first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, to someone. I am
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RUDE
I had the good fortune earlier this week to be visited here in Rome by an ex-student who was brought up in Nigeria and has been working on a novel set there. I’ve only read the beginning of the book and have been unable to read more. (At the moment I can’t read much because
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Dear followers,
I should like you to know that 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.
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MY BODY
“Let’s have a look at his penis,” said one of the doctors to the other. Both were young and elegant, and obviously clever. “Is that okay?” she said to me.
“Sure, go ahead, feel free,” I said. I almost added, “This is something I’ve waited a long time to hear.”
The
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How Easy it is to Nearly Die.
I wake at four in the morning knowing I will be moving today. I wonder what the place will be like.
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DESOLATION ROW
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you. But it has certainly happened to me. I have entirely lost my appetite. I cannot eat more than two or three mouthfuls of melon, or of pain aux raisins. Sometimes I have some chocolate or a protein drink and all day a
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A VISIT HOME
A right-wing acquaintance - a man I have met just once before, during lockdown - comes to visit me. He says that the problem with Rishi Sunak is that his voice is too high. He’s not convincing as a leader. I say I can imagine him in a white coat, behind the counter
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A message from Carlo,
Dad is well and resting today, enjoying Spurs vs Arsenal.
Back tomorrow. Big drink on him.
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Later on, a man comes into the room with a measuring tape. He says he’s checking my size for the wheelchair.
Until tomorrow, dear friends, in these shitty times, your writer Hanif, and a kiss.
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This Morning I Looked Out the Window.
Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy. Last night at around nine I watched a few minutes of Glass Onion, which I enjoyed. Then I lost connection and everything went dark.
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and begin work again, and continue some kind of half life.
If you have any ideas about how you might help, please comment below and my son will be in touch.
I want to thank all my readers for their love and support over the years.
Love Hanif
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Having always wanted to be a subject in a medical experiment, I am very enthusiastic.
In these shitty but sometimes heartening times,
Your loving writer pal,
Hanif x
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The Door Opens
Another shitty night. One of the worst. I went to sleep at eight o’clock after taking my medication and by one o’clock I was wide awake. Not only that, my head had become jammed down the side of the bed.
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A HAIRCUT AND A SHAVE
Sachin takes me out of the hospital and into the filthy street, clogged with traffic. Outside, in my wheelchair, I feel frail and vulnerable. People are literally looking down on me. I cannot believe that they don’t know what is it like to wake up and find
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LIFE IS NOT BEAUTIFUL
Yesterday, as you might have heard from my son Carlo, was a bit of a catastrophe because we wrote the blog and then we lost the blog. I am sure all of you have had this experience.
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In late middle age, lost in a dark forest, no direction home…
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A message from Carlo,
Dad’s blog today was written and ready to go out but for reasons unknown to us, it was deleted and is now unrecoverable. I’m sure you will hear about the tragedy tomorrow. In these shitty times. C
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YOU CAN’T GO HOME
It’s not unpleasant here. The doctors, nurses and all the workers are kind. Almost all of them look you in the eye and at least smile. They know that they have to relate to each patient. They aren’t afraid of touching the most abhorrent, aged or broken body.
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A SMALL UPDATE
Numerous petty disputes with one of the head nurses about whether I can or cannot have the door to my room left open. I have claustrophobia and hate to feel trapped. She claims that I must keep it closed. It’s difficult for me to argue with her since I feel
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Isabella and I are working on a longer blog, partly about writing, which we are enjoying. This is taking some time. But at least it is moving forward. You will receive it in due course. Thanks for sticking with me.
Your loving writing,
Hanif xx
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The day after that, if there is another day, I will try and say something about drugs. Who could resist?
Stay with me friends, don’t let me go.
In these shitty times, your loving cripple, Hanif.
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But writing this blog, which has connected with so many thousands of people, is a good reason for living.
So: two victory fingers to my pals and readers. And a finger to the future,
Your loving No-hands man,
Hanif x
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Sleepless night. Not a moment’s rest. Racing mind. I wake up with an elevated temperature and fear of an infection. Blood in the urine.
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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.
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A PAIN IN THE ARSE
Isabella suggested that I shouldn’t write a blog if it was going be too miserable and morbid. But this is how it is.
I left the previous hospital a few days ago. It was such a relief. It was a general hospital and a mad house. I might have said already that I
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BACK
It was my first time travelling as a disabled person and I was keen to see what the experience would be like. The day had come; after six months, I was making progress, leaving at last, going back to London, my home city, for more treatment.
My heart sank. Outside the
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That’s entertainment folks. In these shitty times, your loving writer, Hanif.
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That’s all folks for today. The only good thing to be said for paralysis is that you don’t have to move to shit and piss.
Have a big drink on me. Until tomorrow dear friends, in this shitty world, all my love.
Hanif.
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Apologies.
Apologies for hold up on the latest blog. I have been feeling harassed and unwell. My hands and feet are swollen, and I have been spending too long in bed doing nothing because of my inability to use the tech. I have also been having a series of tests.
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A message from Hanif: I want to thank everyone for their outpouring of support and I will keep you updated on my progress. My son Carlo will be in touch shortly concerning your offers of support. Love H
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My son Sachin comes in and I reproach him for being late. My family and close friends are on a relay system so that I am never alone during the day. But sometimes there are gaps, which I do not enjoy, since I have dreadful thoughts when I’m alone. While my son Sachin feeds me,
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LA DOLCE BOREDOM
Yesterday, before lunch, I was elevated from my bed and slid into my wheelchair.
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Super-Painted Toenails
Being a tetraplegic isn’t all bad. As I write this, I am having a pedicure while eating caviar with a plastic spoon. My girlfriend is tickling me under the chin. I have just proposed to her. ‘Barkis is willin’’.
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Thank you so much.
Your loving and devoted scrittore.
No hands Hanif.
xx
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The Human Flies
Someone must have listened to my complaints because the doctors upped my sleeping dosage.
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That’s all for tonight folks.
In this shitty world, your loving writer, Hanif x
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Writing tip: write a character, give them a problem, have them devise an unusual solution.
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Now I want nothing but surprises.
Tomorrow: more Amsterdam, more Freud, less boredom.
Your loving Hanif
x
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A Writer Collapses. As He Recovers, His Dispatches Captivate Readers
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ON CUNNILINGUS, ENVY, AND OTHER MATTERS
As my more discerning readers will already have noticed, I am - after the incident involving the fish - now more intimate with the Heimlich manoeuvre than I am with cunnilingus.
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STARMAN JONES
One of the first, and most important pieces of advice David Bowie ever gave me - and this was in the early 1990s - was to make sure I noted down the names of secretaries and assistants I came into contact with. This would help me later, he explained, when I needed
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Day 2 report
7 January 2023
I wasn’t a happy child but I wasn’t an unhappy child either. 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.
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I work in the gym with the physio for an hour or so and I feel different parts of my body starting to respond. This has been the best day so far.
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A CRICKET BALL
Last night was a bad one. A bit of a standoff at one-thirty in the morning with a nurse. I wanted more sleeping pills and he insisted I had had enough already.
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Excuse me for a minute now, it is time for my second enema. I am looking forward to it. More news to follow.
Big drink on me tonight, your loving writer, Hanif x
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I can tell you, I had to think.
My analyst will be pleased with the dreaming, but not with antidepressants, which he is against. A psychiatrist who visited me here said rather sarcastically, “psychoanalysts understand nothing about drugs”.
I’m sure there are many
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After breakfast, I will be hoisted into this chair and will leave the ward, getting a taxi and heading home, back to the place I left six months ago for the Christmas holidays. Isabella looks justifiably nervous at this mad scheme, but I have got it in my head and will not let it
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HOSPITAL UPDATE
I’ve been here too long, since January 10th(my accident was on Boxing Day last year). My sanity, such as it is, has been severely tested. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to go mad. More than anything I’m desperate.
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I’d like to add that I really enjoy writing this diary. At least I haven’t lost the one thing that was most valuable to me, that is my ability to express myself. I hope soon to be writing some stories and little essays on other topics which I hope might interest you.
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Day 3 report
8 January 2023
Dead Fingers Talking, Talking
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is make my coffee and go upstairs to my desk which overlooks the street.
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Writing tip, dialogue:
In natural conversation, people speak at cross purposes, often asking the same question repeatedly. They might be repressed, saying one thing but meaning another.
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If you were with me tonight, we would each pour a large vodka with a juicy mixer and drink and embrace each other with a little hope.
That’s all for tonight folks. More tomorrow, more optimism, more jokes.
Love Hanif.
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AN ORGY IN AMSTERDAM
I was happily watching Better Call Saul when the iPad stopped working.
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The last time a medical digit entered my back side was a few years ago and as the nurse flipped me over she asked me; “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?” I replied, “If I had indeed written Midnight’s Children, don’t you think I would have gone private?”
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For the first time I believed that things might begin to improve.
My heart is like a singing bird.
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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 -
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MONEY AND HOW IT GETS THAT WAY
A few months ago, during my hospital stay, a new friend gifted me two bottles of wine. I had known this friend was rich, and so when he left, Isabella and I looked up at value of the wine. Each bottle, it turned out, was worth almost a thousand
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was chatting to a research doctor the other day about vocations and she told me once she was teaching a clever student and made the mistake of asking him why he wanted to be a nurse rather than a doctor. He was offended by the question; it never occurred to him to be a doctor.
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Late at night, around ten thirty, the nurses come in, turn the big lights on and give me my medication. They usually check to see if I’ve had a shit, and if I have, they clean me up and change me. Unlike you, I’m handled and turned and washed by complete strangers every night. It
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DOWN
I am waiting for my hypnotist to call. He’s been recommended by a friend; I have worked with him before, years ago when I had a writers’ block. It did actually work insofar as I was able to continue as a writer, fortunately or unfortunately for the public.
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Most of us at some time in our lives will suffer from a catastrophic health crisis which will make us feel isolated and afraid. But it is as if we want to believe that we live in a world of many healthy and well-functioning people. We do not.
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Tomorrow: less Proust, more Freud, more Iris and…
Your loving Scheherazade,
Hanif the scrittore
xx
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My devoted son
@carlokureishi
has been posting these notes on the internet every day, and this is the one thing, apart from the love of the wife, that keeps me alive and gives me meaning, because so many people read these rather sad if not rambling pieces, and they respond to me.
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It is wonderful to have found such a companion. I ask him what worries him most. He says the future of Italy. I have to say that becoming paralysed is a great way to meet new people.
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I have sensation and some movement in all my limbs, and I will begin physio and rehabilitation and soon as possible. I want to thank the doctors and nurses at the Gemelli hospital, Rome, for all their extraordinary kindness, competence and care.
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When you see the mutual work done in the gym, it is a place of beauty, collaboration and respect.
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CIRCUS CHAIR PARTS
We try to keep a rotation of visitors coming, from ten in the morning to nine at night, so that there is always somebody here with me. Isabella is here all day, but any visitor is welcome, since they provide distraction from my feeling of being trapped in
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What a quality of innocence people have when they don’t expect to be harmed.
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NIGHTMARES AND KISSES
He is still asleep when she gets up to have her yogurt and honey. She likes to eat privately in her narrow kitchen without being observed. Then she returns to bed, to read the Italian newspapers on her iPad.
They are in Rome, in her apartment across the
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The doctor tells me I could have died at any moment. I’ll take it easy with the fish in the future.
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Many of us live as if we expect one day to be acknowledged for our exceptional qualities, but Kafka points out that we may be noticed only for our ordinariness -
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It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body. I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left.
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It means that we cannot always see the disabled, just as in other circumstances we fail to see others of colour, or queers.
We should give up the standardised view of the world for a more complex view, which will include more people.
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Writing tip: your characters should have fascinations and idiosyncrasies.
But they are defined and changed by the events you put them through. These events should pronounce their traits. Story and character are one.
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Immediately I feel depressed. I am in despair, I don’t want to be here, I want to go home, I’d rather die now. I’ve had enough of this shit. I feel I lack the strength to take this on.
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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.
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Four physiotherapists came to my room. They started to move me with the determination of putting my feet flat on the floor. They turned me, and for a moment I sat on the bed staring ahead of me. I have to say, I felt proud and amazed and incredibly dizzy.
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Perhaps at last I can afford a little optimism, and even praise.
Onwards!
Your loving writer,
Hanif
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We have convinced ourselves that there is a standard of the well and effective human being. This is deception, an ideology, which is deliberately misleading.
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ADVENTURES IN FATHERLAND
There has barely been a minute of the last ten years that I haven’t enjoyed being with my three sons, Sachin, Carlo and Kier. But I have to admit that the early days were difficult, if not nasty and even hair-raising at times.
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I’M COMING HOME!
Dear readers,
A small note before we begin. Since my accident in December which left me without the use of my hands or legs - a considerable inconvenience - I have been writing, via dictation, a weekly dispatch, which you all read and respond to with such
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So I said to him, every morning if he has time, when he is practising, if he could make a sound that came from himself that was new, he might begin to find a new self. This sounded frightening to him. I said fear is the engine of art, the engine of conversation and love.
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This afternoon I stood up for the first time since my accident. I was strapped to a gurney and raised up above my natural height, but in a standing position. I felt such a sense of exhilaration and pride I almost cheered myself.
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She said I behaved as if I, Marcel Proust, had written the whole of the Remembrance of Things Past on a toilet roll on which a passing rent boy had just wiped his arse.
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My dad used to say if you wanted to write an article for a newspaper you had to use the who what when where why principle. These fundamental questions are also the basis of fiction. You must interrogate your characters – they must live in a recognisable world.
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I was far more developed than my peers. Trauma saved me and made me into a writer. Something similar is happening here, I am finding a way to cope with the horror of my recent accident.
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Having promised myself as a young man never to drink anything orange, I did in fact enjoy the Crodino, and as you can see I have become a man of flexible principles.
The good news is I have a new mattress.
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What does and does not make a piece of writing work? I’m watching a lot of television now and I find most of it unoriginal and unadventurous. The era of neoliberalism in creative writing has somehow convinced people that you can purchase the ability to write.
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SMALL TALK / BIG TALK
Miss S suddenly swung back into my room a couple of days ago. As I might have told you, she left this hospital after five months and moved back into her apartment in Rome, which had been adjusted for her to live in. She returned to use the pool here, and
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Bring in love means being at the mercy of someone’s childhood.
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