It's all about loving one's parents

Reading can be a secondhand pleasure, a fact which this memoir sifts through with some delicacy. British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi's family has its claims to fame���his uncle Omar (who died in March this year aged 77 ) was the legendary Pakistani cricket commentator and columnist, who led a glamorously Boy's Own life spangled with wine, women and rakishly drooping cigarettes; Kureishi's father Shannoo and Omar were schoolmates (at Cathedral) and friends of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Bombay.
But the charms of this book lie in more ordinary discoveries, as the fifty-something Kureishi reads and reflects on a manuscript written by his father, a failed novelist.
An Indian Adolescence, Shannoo's manuscript, which Hanif comes across after his father's death, turns out to be something of an attempt to come to grips with the past: Shannoo's family life, his glamorous brother, his unhappily married parents and what it was like to grow up in a Bombay grappling with the independence movement.
Hanif's book starts out cautiously, almost tediously, as he speculates on the meaning of his father's words and how far they explain the parent Hanif knew.
Reading it, much like the young Hanif, you feel something of a pang of longing for the far more charismatic Omar, who spends often less time mooning around and much more going out and getting the girl.
And the occasional self-importance that seems to go along with the retelling of Omar and Shannoo's boyhood can be irritating.
"They never quite know what they should be doing, these over-educated and somewhat Chekhovian Kureishi boys," the second-generation Kureishi remarks.
But by the time we get around to young Hanif's own boyhood and the side of his father he knew first-hand���the cranky, driven, cricket-obsessed, anal man who'd grown up in metropolitan Bombay but loved living in the suburban outskirts of London and who got up early every day to work on novels no-one would publish before going to his day job at the Pakistan Embassy���the story picks up.
The way Hanif's English adolescence fits in with his father's angsty novel is finely judged comedy, as young Hanif negotiates the 'multicultural' world of 1970s Britain and tries to get what he can out of it and out of writing, the profession his father has trained him for.
The book charms not because of anything special about the facts of the story told. In some ways, Shannoo is less interesting than characters in Hanif's fiction (the endearing Changez in The Buddha of Suburbia, for example).
But the particular sadness and longing of the child's relationship with his parent���love at a necessary remove of incomprehension���remains, and that is why this book makes enriching reading.