by Vivek Shraya
When the city’s famous curvy twin towers, nicknamed after Marilyn Monroe, began to loom in the distance, cutting through the fog, she unexpectedly thought of Kasi and parked the car on a side street. Onstage next to Kasi, she had always felt wonderous and indestructible. Would the buildings be as arresting if they weren’t a duo? What would become of the buildings if they were split apart?
Neela reached into the backseat for the hoodie Kasi had loaned her on one of their tours a few years back. She had brought it in the hopes that dressing like someone whose musicality she admired would enable her to borrow their ears and hear what they heard. After she shimmied out of her wool coat, she pulled the royal blue sweater over her head and pictured Kasi listening to the album. How would they perform these songs live? Would Kasi even be available, or interested, amidst her hectic new schedule? She had considered sending Kasi the album, but their communication had broken when she had joined Rukmini on tour. Was it because Kasi felt guilty? If so, it was up to Kasi to take the initiative and make contact. And if she didn’t reach out while she was on the road, Neela was sure they would sort it out once Kasi was home and they met face to face, like two professionals.
A few weeks after their phone call, Rukmini subtweeted,
TFW your bestie records a new album and won’t let you listen #LOL
Neela sent her the album as soon as she saw the tweet. Rukmini didn’t respond.
* * *
Rukmini couldn’t stop listening to Neela’s album.
Neela had sent her the unmastered files right before the tour headed back to the U.S. from Europe. Rukmini downloaded the files onto her phone as she boarded, grateful she had a long uninterrupted flight to give her friend’s work the attention it deserved. She almost pulled out her journal on the plane to make notes, a holdover from her student days.
“What are you listening to?” Kasi had asked while she adjusted her eye mask.
“Oh, just a playlist,” she lied, suspecting Neela hadn’t sent Kasi the album yet.
She waited for the plane to lift off before hitting Play and then let Neela’s voice carry her to the skies, unaware of her hands clawing her knees.
After she had listened to the first ten minutes, Rukmini’s fingers relaxed. She’d worried that Neela, wanting to challenge herself, would explore the genre she loathed — electronic music. Before she had received the album, every time she sang over Malika’s now-dated production at her shows, she had worried that Neela was simultaneously in her studio reinventing these very sounds, creating drums and synths of the future. Thankfully, Neela had continued to avoid the genre altogether.
She reclined her seat alongside Kasi, who had already dozed off, but with Neela’s voice still in Rukmini’s ears, she remained alert, staring out her window. How fitting to experience this music in proximity to masses of water and crystal. Unlike any of Neela’s previous work, these songs were almost ambient, seamlessly mixed from one to the next. The tracks were named after vowels and had very few words. Ironically, these distinctive qualities also made Selfhood a quintessential Neela Devaki album.
The third or fourth time she listened to the album, Rukmini started to feel queasy. She poked at the compartmentalized chicken spinach pasta with her plastic fork but knew the food wasn’t at fault. Suddenly, Neela reminded her of Malika — not her voice, but the way she channelled a talent so radiant that it illuminated Rukmini’s shortcomings. She mentally replayed her fight with Malika after graduation, as she had over the years and more frequently since the resurfacing of Hegemony, trying to rewrite the past.
She wished she had said, “Fine. You want the truth? I’m definitely worried about getting a job with a useless arts degree. But what I’m more worried about is that the more we do this, the more you are going to see that you don’t need me. You’re the talent, the vision, the drive. You even made a singer out of me. You deserve a bandmate at your level. And we both know that isn’t me.”
She knew Malika would have retorted with “That’s a fucking cop-out,” but Rukmini would have been ready with her response. “It’s not a cop-out. This isn’t a hobby to me either, okay? But I’m afraid to invest more because I don’t want to lose what we have right now.”
Rukmini’s re-creation always ended with Malika saying either “That makes no fucking sense” or with the ending Rukmini wished they could have had, the ending that would not have been an ending, where Malika said, “You can’t lose what we have. And you can’t lose me. You’re stuck with me.”
Then they would hug on the street and saunter to Malika’s place, where they would write another song and another and another until their music blasted through this blip and trumpeted a future where they were still intact.
Except as she listened to Neela’s album yet again, she felt as though Malika had never fully left. Instead her ghost had joined forces with Neela to remind Rukmini of her inferiority as a generic cover singer.
“So, what do you think of Selfhood?” she blurted to Kasi after they landed, hoping that maybe Kasi had heard the album and didn’t share Rukmini’s reverence. Maybe Kasi’s opinion would console her.
“What do I think of what?” Kasi asked, stuffing her copy of MOJO in the side pocket of her duffel bag.
“Neela’s new album?” Rukmini’s stomach gurgled a cloud of garlic up her throat.
Kasi unbuckled her seat belt so she could face Rukmini directly. “Neela has a new album? Is that what you were listening to?”
Rukmini responded through her fingers. “Yeah. I’m sure she is going to send it to you soon.”
“How is it?” Kasi asked quietly. Rukmini thought about lying. Not just to comfort Kasi, but both of them.
“It’s very good.” Rukmini’s hand dropped from her mouth.
“Stupid question. Of course, it is.” Kasi turned to face the aisle, hiding her expression from Rukmini.
After they disembarked in Atlanta, Kasi headed for the Oversize and Fragile carousel to collect her keyboard, while Rukmini waited for their bags. She turned her phone off airplane mode and was about to swipe past all the new notifications that popcorned onto her home screen when she noticed:
@SumiMalhotra started following you
She and Sumi had started following each other on Instagram a week after meeting at Toronto Tops. When and why had Sumi unfollowed her? Was it after Rukmini hadn’t texted her back about the Detroit show tickets? And why refollow her now? Irritated, she was tempted to subtweet,
can’t get enough? eye roll emoji #follow #unfollow #follow
Instead, Neela’s Selfhood melodies, which continued to waft through her mind, calmed her momentarily and then revived her agitation. She swiped away the Instagram notification and texted Neela.
Hey just landed in Atlanta. Things a bit hectic. Can’t talk on Sunday but will text about a makeup call soon! Miss you xo
By the time Kasi and Rukmini jumped into a cab to head to the venue, Neela still hadn’t texted back even though they were now in the same time zone. Rukmini sucked in her breath and checked her Instagram account to see if Neela, perhaps now upset with her too because of how sporadically Rukmini was able to reach out, had also unfollowed her. She hadn’t. Rukmini exhaled but she still didn’t want to talk to Neela any time soon. Neela would first want to know what she thought of the album, and she would have to tell the truth, to offer her the word “masterpiece.” And this would finally reveal to Neela the disparity in their skills, and ultimately in their relationship.
Rukmini was convinced that beneath the bed tracks of Neela’s grand gesture to herself, Selfhood was a fuck you to friendship, and she wasn’t ready to let Neela go.
* * *
On the morning of Selfhood ’s release, Neela posted the album artwork — the album title and her initials in her fine handwriting on a white background — with links to the various music retail outlets on all her social media platforms. Then she logged out of each one
. It seemed antithetical to the message of the album to pay attention to how others reacted to it. Instead, she strolled to the neighbourhood bakery, picked up a loaf of butter challah and whipped up French toast and a celebratory grapefruit and rosemary mimosa. “Cheers, Neela,” she said, as she tipped the champagne flute against the air before taking a sip.
It was finally warm enough to keep her window open at night, and the smell of imminent green was intoxicating. Beguiled by the promise of fresh starts, Neela logged into Twitter as soon as she woke up the next morning. “Only four?” she blurted, when she saw the number of notifications. She clicked on her drafts folder to see if she had accidentally not posted her album announcement, but it was empty. And there on her profile, at the top of her tweets, was the post about Selfhood, retweeted four times. None of the retweets were from Rukmini. She told herself that it had only been twenty-four hours, that the response would grow, that not everyone lived on the internet. She also reminded herself that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. She knew she had made the best album of her career so far.
But the response didn’t exactly grow — it fumbled. Every other week, someone would retweet her initial post or write an enthusiastic tweet but nothing like the response to Rukmini’s cover of “Every Song.” What made Rukmini’s music more exceptional than Neela’s? Given how close Neela’s name was often positioned next to a number on Twitter, it was difficult not to seek answers from a number and not to equate her worth as a musician, as a woman, as a human, with a number. Thirteen retweets meant that thirteen people valued her work — and her. Being appreciated by thirteen people seemed like plenty, if not excessive when she pictured them as friends. But the number destablilized in relation to someone else’s number. Thirteen was unequivocally less than the four million listeners who had streamed Hegemony. She imagined Rukmini crowd-surfing over four million people with heart eye emoji faces. Beloved. Quantifiably more than Neela. Neela = 13 and Rukmini = 4,000,000.
Two indie blogs had written complimentary posts but both focused on Rukmini. “So, has Rukmini heard the album?” the journalist from Sheep & Goat had asked over for the phone.
“I sent it to her, but she is on tour right now, so she’s pretty busy.”
“Do you think she’ll like it?”
“I hope so. Some of my approach to this project was inspired by her,” Neela offered, trying to sound generous to take her mind off the fact that she hadn’t heard from Rukmini since she landed in the U.S. She had been concerned about Rukmini’s state of mind, but her social media life continued to thrive. And unlike the past, Neela had been trying to trust that Rukmini would reach out when she had time for a prolonged conversation instead of a rushed catch up.
“Can you say more about how Rukmini inspires you?”
Even when she was promoting an album called Selfhood, she and Rukmini, or at least their careers, were seemingly inseparable. Or, rather, her career was now officially bound to Rukmini’s. Maybe that was why Rukmini hadn’t shared the album post or any of the related articles. Maybe Rukmini was tired of generating press for her.
She had planned to have an album release party, but given the response and Rukmini’s and Kasi’s absence, it seemed pointless. Was Selfhood a fraud at its core because of her desire to share it? Neela began to plunge into the wormhole that this question exposed, and she poured the extra bottle of champagne that she had bought for the party down the kitchen sink. If a self drops an album and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
Neela’s salvation from this spiral arrived in an email.
Dear Ms. Neela Devaki,
We are inviting you to attend the upcoming Orion Prize ceremony.
The Orion Prize is an annual award that honours artists who produce music albums of excellence.
Her head tilted back and laughter burst from her lungs like a firecracker blazing through the fog of disappointment in her living room. Her star was being seen, at last. She opened iTunes and blasted Selfhood, listening and then crying with her eyes closed.
After a few minutes, she went to the Orion Prize homepage to find out when the shortlist and the longlist were being announced — the longlist not for another week, the shortlist a month later. This invitation had to mean that she had made it onto the shortlist. She returned to the message to digest the moment, to read and savour every line before she clicked Reply.
We are inviting you to introduce the performance of 2018 Orion nominee Subaltern Speaks.
Please keep this invitation and its contents confidential and RSVP by June 10, 2018. We sincerely hope you can make it.
Best regards,
The Orion Prize Jury
“Fuck.” She slammed the computer shut and shot up.
Was this a joke? Wasn’t it enough that Rukmini had stolen her song? Now the industry was finally acknowledging her existence by asking her to introduce Rukmini? Was she nothing more than a prologue to Rukmini’s story? What about her story? Her years of hard work?
Then she thought about Rukmini and stopped pacing. Did Rukmini know about the nomination? She must have been contacted as well. She reopened her computer and went to Rukmini’s Twitter page. She scrolled through Rukmini’s tweets, looking for clues that she was aware of the news.
Why hadn’t Rukmini told her? Or was this why she hadn’t heard from her? Was Rukmini afraid that if they spoke she would break the confidentiality request? But she must have told Kasi. Who else had she told?
Guess what? Rukmini would have texted Puna.
OMG what now? Puna would have texted back.
I’m longlisted for the Orion Prize!
HOLY SHIT!!!
I know shocked face emoji
I think I’m going to come out to your next show airplane emoji
Really?
Absolutely! We have to celebrate this in person!
Kasi will be so excited to see you.
Should I invite Neela too?
Bad idea zipped mouth emoji
When Neela abandoned her inspection of Rukmini’s tweets, she returned to the top of the page and looked into Rukmini’s kohl-lined eyes in her profile photo. She hadn’t changed the photo since the first time Neela had visited her page, almost a year ago. Neela’s heartbeat slowed down and the thought of the fictional text exchange faded.
She picked up her phone off her desk and texted Rukmini.
Orion. I am so happy for you. This is a big achievement.
She meant these words. Or wanted to mean them. The intention had to be what counted.
A week later, the longlist was announced, and her Twitter feed overflowed with congratulatory tweets for Rukmini from other Canadian musicians, including artists Neela admired.
@JannArden: Hurrah for #Hegemony! So well deserved.
@FeistMusic: Big congratulations to @RUKMINI. Hegemony is a special album.
@anjulie: Screaming! Subaltern Speaks on @OrionPrize longlist! You earned this girl.
Every earn and deserve stung, and Neela was surprised by how frequently and confidently these words were bestowed. How could all of these strangers measure the efforts of a nominee — and all of those who were not nominated? Did Neela not deserve? Had she not earned? She retweeted many of these messages to compensate for feeling sorry for herself, even though each share felt like an extraction, like something was being torn from her, hoping that this online support would inspire Rukmini to text her back. Rukmini remained silent.
Over the next few weeks, Rukmini continued to tweet about the Orion and to post tour photos. Neela began to analyze these photos more closely, trying to gain a better understanding of who was occupying Rukmini’s time, who was more important to her than Neela. But aside from the selfies with Kasi, the photos were often a blur of smiling and screaming white faces behind Rukmini’s own beaming face. Because of the flash, in many of the photos Rukmini’s face didn’t even look brown a
nymore.
It was the flash that finally gave Neela clarity, that illuminated the reason for Rukmini’s silence. Immersed in so much white love from her fans, peers and the industry, Rukmini must have decided she no longer needed Neela. If anything, Neela was a hindrance, an anchor to Rukmini’s origins. Letting Neela go was Rukmini’s way of setting herself free.
Neela needed to be free too.
She rolled her neck from side to side. Then she went to her own Twitter page, clicked in the dialog box and began to type.
Pandering to white people will get you everything #hegemony
Rukmini
The moment Rukmini disappeared, I became more visible.
After my first experiment with subtweeting, I went to bed — stupidly. Rukmini had been right: subtweeting was unburdening. I had said what I wanted to say without directing my words at anyone in particular. I didn’t have to say them to Rukmini, have to witness the wilting of her expression, the floundering of her words. And for the first time in months, I slept soundly past sunrise and late into the afternoon.
In my dreams, Rukmini responded to my original congratulatory texts about the award nomination via email instead of text, and her message was hidden in my spam folder. Certain that this dream was reality, that of course Rukmini had responded to me, I opened my inbox to search for it as soon as I woke up. I never got the chance.
