Robert McCrum in The Independent:
Dear Hanif,
You and I have been friends and sparring partners in the beaten way of the London book, theatre and media world for about half a lifetime – more than 40 years. At Faber’s in the 1980s, I published quite a bit of your early work (notably The Rainbow Sign, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album).
So when I heard, just after Christmas two years ago, that you’d fallen badly in Rome and been taken into intensive care with a broken neck, severe paralysis, and had almost died (there were many rumours: none of the stories about you were exactly the same), I was stunned and distressed.
When, finally, I was able to visit you in the Stanmore rehab centre on your return to the UK, you were already a veteran of many months of neuro-physiotherapy, acclimatising to a weird new world of disability. Possibly, I was more concerned on your behalf than some of your circle. As someone who is a long-term survivor of a stroke (in 1995), I know all about the brain injuries that induce paralysis, and the struggles, inner and outer, involved in getting back to health. I also understood, in my own way, the dreadful severity of your plight as a tetraplegic – in your words, “like a Beckett character”. At any age, the reminder that we live in our bodies can be a personal apocalypse, and a shock that many don’t get over.
More here.
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