The Subtweet

by Vivek Shraya

  That was also the night we had first talked about subtweeting.

  Sometimes I think brown girl subtweets are part of this secret language we have with each other.

  Rukmini’s words haunted me as I flipped through the rest of our photos, landing on the selfie we had taken at the end of our first coffee date. After mentally weighing the pros and cons, I opened my Twitter app and tweeted,

  No matter what anyone says, the real tea is served on Saturday afternoons.

  That Saturday, I arrived at Grapefruit Moon at 11:30 a.m., wishing I had mentioned a specific time in my new subtweet. As I feared, the tweet attracted attention and was retweeted 214 times. My followers — who had quadrupled in number since I first met Rukmini — speculated that I was finally going to make some kind of public statement on Saturday. I hoped that every retweet increased the chance that Rukmini would see it and decrypt my code. Sitting in the café, I suddenly felt confident that Rukmini would show up. I had no idea if she was even in town, let alone ready to meet with me, but being back at our old spot felt right. If this were a movie, if there was to be a reunion, if we were to repair our friendship, this was where it would happen.

  That was likely why I had spent over an hour trying to decide what to wear. Combing through my closet, I had agonized over what clothing (and then what makeup) would help me appear both friendly and remorseful without seeming overly staged. In the end, I had decided to tie my hair up and wear jeans and a T-shirt — echoing Rukmini’s look from the first time we met — assuming that she might feel most comfortable in the company of a version of herself.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. We are a bit understaffed at the moment. What can I get for you?” the server asked.

  “Two peppermint teas with agave.”

  After forty minutes passed and the teas had gotten cold, the server returned. “Is your friend coming?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you mind if we move you to the bar for now? Saturday brunch is a pretty busy time for us and we can’t afford to lose a whole table.”

  I ordered an omelette from the chef flipping and grilling on the other side of the bar to fill the time. I ate every bite slowly, chewing the prescribed ten times before swallowing, distracting myself from staring at the door. I remembered the first time we were supposed to meet, how I had almost stood her up. Maybe it would be fitting if Rukmini didn’t show up.

  After I had eaten everything on my plate including the parsley garnish, I reached for my phone, bouncing between my inbox, my texts and Twitter, in case Rukmini had sent me a message. At around 2 p.m. some of my followers began to lose their patience:

  When exactly is “afternoon” @NeelaDevaki?

  @NeelaDevaki When are you going to spill the tea?

  At 3 p.m., the server took pity on me and moved me back to a table. Feeling equally embarrassed, I ordered the squash soup. At around 6 p.m., I paid the bill, left a large tip and trudged out of the café alone, half-expecting to look up and see the rain clouds that this sad scene called for.

  Maybe Rukmini hadn’t seen my tweet. Maybe she wasn’t even in the city. Or maybe she was holed up in her basement, channelling her feelings into new music while Puna doted on her. The image of her studio unconsciously steered me from the café south to Rukmini’s house on Palmerston and compelled my finger to press the doorbell.

  “She’s not here,” Puna said, barely opening the door.

  “Can you tell her I stopped by? And can you give her this?” I pulled out the folded envelope I had tucked into my inside jacket pocket that morning. I had brought it with me to the café in case my spoken words didn’t convey everything I wanted to say.

  Puna reluctantly opened the door and took the letter. I tried to glance behind her to see if Rukmini was there, but Puna deliberately moved her head directly into my sight line.

  “You know, all she wanted was for you to like her.”

  “But of course, I like her. I lov—”

  “No, as her peer. To actually respect her.”

  On the streetcar back to my place, gripping the metal bar overhead, I couldn’t stop thinking about Puna’s words. Had I never shown Rukmini that I respected her?

  Dear Rukmini,

  I’m writing this letter because I owe you more than an apology. I owe you an admission:

  I was jealous.

  Maybe if I had admitted this to myself sooner, I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did. But contrary to what has been suggested, it wasn’t the award nomination, the tour, the press or the praise that made me jealous. I was jealous of your effortlessness (or rather, of how easy you made it all look, at least to me).

  Like thousands of other artists, I believed if I didn’t bleed in the creation process, I wasn’t making art. It was easy for me to devalue or ignore commercial art, however successful it was, because commercial art was easy, bloodless. It was meant for a lazy audience uninterested in blood. They wanted watered-down fountain pop.

  But then you showed up. You took something of mine, something I built from scratch, and remodelled it. You refined it, while preserving my bloodstains. You enhanced the song’s emotionality while making it danceable.

  Watching your cover achieve both fringe and mainstream success, I wasn’t able to easily dismiss the art — because it was partially mine. I wasn’t able to discredit you either. To my surprise, I loved it.

  This realization forced me to reexamine (and eventually ravage) my entire artistic framework. Had I been wrong in my extremism this whole time? You never seemed consumed by the weight of discipline or precision. Instead you created from a place of curiosity. For you, art was exploration, not excavation. And this was what made me most jealous.

  Do you remember that afternoon when you opened up Ableton to show me how you had built “Every Song”? I was so unsettled by how disorganized the project looked. None of the tracks had been labelled or colour-coded, and some of the drum tracks were placed in between the vocal tracks. But I was more unsettled by how little this mattered to the final result. How could such beauty be born from such disarray? Or was this precisely the magic behind your work?

  You approached our friendship with the same sort of haphazard enthusiasm and wonder. You had questions and ideas and opinions. All I had were my regulations and reservations. But unlike most, you didn’t see these qualities as stuffiness or me as standoffish. You understood that, for brown women in a white world, self-preservation takes many forms. And similarly, I began to see your qualities not as immaturity or flippancy, but as a different form of self-preservation. You thrived on building connections with other brown women. And yet, when you and Kasi became friends, again I was jealous of your ability to open up so freely to someone new, when it had taken me so long to open up to you.

  During these past few months, I have often looked for a green-eyed monster in the mirror and have been disappointed to see my own face. Seeing (and then hating) myself as a monster would be relatively easy. Instead, I am recognizing that the real monstrosity is not in wanting — even if it’s wanting what someone you love possesses — but in harbouring jealousy without naming it.

  So I am writing it down here in hopes that I never make this mistake again, and that it’s not too late.

  I miss you.

  Neela

  Once I reached my apartment, I planned on adding a few more sentences to address what Puna had shared. I would then try to find Puna’s email address online, send her the revised version and ask her to swap the revised letter. Maybe that was asking too much from Puna. Maybe I would just go back to Rukmini’s house and hand-deliver the replacement.

  My planning was interrupted by an unexpected visitor sitting on the steps outside my house.

  * * *

  “Oh I’m so happy to see you, Neels,” she said, throwing her arms around me.

  “You are?”

  “Of course, I am.”


  “Even after what I did?”

  “What you did . . .”

  “I know. It was vile,” I admitted, waiting to be berated, at last.

  “No, it was necessary.”

  “Oh, Kasi. Not you too?”

  “We’ve so much to talk about. Can I come in?”

  Seeing Kasi in my apartment, watching her fingers lightly trail along my piano, brought back memories of rehearsing for shows, rearranging album songs so they would soar in a live performance and going over set lists. I’d forgotten how short she was, how my leather couch cocooned her. She looked as though she was going to fall asleep right there, but instead she picked up what she had started outside.

  “Those shows. That tour. It was so hard. On both of us.”

  “It looked like you were both having the time of your lives,” I interjected, pulling the bench from under the piano, Kasi’s usual spot in my house, and sitting on it across from her. I needed to be able to see her expressions to get full clarity after all the months we hadn’t spoken. I was done with internet ambiguities.

  “That’s the point of social media, isn’t it?” Kasi stretched her eyes and mouth in an exaggerated smile, looking like a vacant clown.

  “I suppose?”

  Kasi reached for my hand and once I gave it to her, she tugged on it to help her sit upright. “Remember the stories I told you about touring with The Turn Arounds?”

  “I always forget that you did that.”

  “Trust me, I try to forget. But on that tour, I knew what to expect. The cheesy audiences reflected the cheesy music. But on this tour, it felt weird to play those songs to that crowd. We talked about it a lot. Especially midway through the tour, when our gratitude was starting to wear off.”

  “What do you mean?” I pinched my lower lip together with my fingers, trying to focus while also picturing Rukmini and Kasi having long conversations. I wish I could have been there, that I had taken Rukmini up on her invitations to fly out for some of the shows.

  “Rukmini felt like we were nobodies opening for this giant pop star.”

  “Even with all the attention around the cover?”

  “Honestly, there were a lot of cities in Europe where no one had even heard of Rukmini. I don’t think she felt she could be particularly critical of the situation though. And she didn’t want to go back to being a freelance writer. But your tweet . . .”

  “I should never have done that.” I leaned forward to stand up but Kasi put her hand on my knee.

  “No. You crystallized the problem. You set us free. I honestly feel relieved that it’s all over.”

  “But it’s not really over. Not for Rukmini,” I said, pressing one of my bare feet over the other.

  “You’re right. It’s not. And I don’t know that she feels the same way I do.”

  “So, she’s mad at me? Of course, she’s mad at me.”

  “I don’t know if mad is the right word.” Now Kasi squirmed and glanced towards the door.

  “Just say it,” I pleaded.

  “Well, I defended you. And that didn’t go very well.”

  I pulled my head back. A part of me should have relished that I had been a cause for conflict but instead my guilt swelled up. “You did? Why did you do that?”

  “I probably wouldn’t have said what you said the way you said it. But you and I have history. And I also know how much Rukmini means to you. It’s not like you would intentionally hurt her.”

  “So much history that you didn’t think to tell me you were going on tour with her?” I would have been embarrassed to ask this question before, especially passive-aggressively, but my embarrassment bar had drastically lowered in the past months.

  “It was meant to be a surprise!” Kasi smacked my knee excitedly.

  “A surprise? Why?”

  “Rukmini said that you were always talking about how you wanted to introduce us and that nothing would please you more than seeing your two close friends collaborating.”

  How had I managed to turn a surprise from a friend into a way to feel sorry for myself? Before I could figure out how to respond, Kasi continued, “Plus, you’re the one who stopped responding to my texts.”

  “What are you talking about? The last text I got from you was a month before the tour.” I plied out my phone from my jeans pocket and showed her the screen of her last text to me and mine to her, two unrelated questions, from two different years, locked in an incoherent conversation with each other. There was nothing more satisfying in a disagreement than proof.

  Hey! I am just doing my taxes did Marcus ever pay us for that Turn Arounds gig from ages ago?

  I will follow up. Thanks for the reminder.

  How is Rukmini holding up?

  “Wait, I never got that text from you! I haven’t gotten any texts from you. That’s why I finally decided to wait outside your house and stalk you,” she said, holding up her phone to me and scrolling through a dozen texts that I never received.

  “What the fuck?” we both said in unison.

  “How is this possible?” I asked.

  “I got a new phone right before the tour, but this is your number, right?” She showed my contact information to me.

  “That’s my number. Maybe you blocked me?” I said, half-kidding.

  “No way! Why would I do that? This is some Mercury retrograde shit.” She checked her settings. Had Rukmini gotten a new phone too somewhere on tour, or was there some other technical difficulty that would explain why I hadn’t heard from her after she landed in Atlanta? As if she heard my thoughts, Kasi said, “Actually, I wonder if it has to do with all the international roaming?”

  “Okay, Miss International.”

  “Neela!” She giggled. And then I did too. I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed in the company of a friend. The last time was probably with Rukmini. This thought made me cry while we continued laughing. Kasi was crying and laughing too. She probably hadn’t laughed in a while either. Her last laughs had likely been shared with Rukmini too.

  After our laughter subsided, I crossed over and sat beside her on the couch. I wanted to ask her more about Rukmini — Where is she? Will she ever forgive me? Instead I listened to her stories about the tour, riveted, sometimes even clapping. About how Hayley had asked for Kasi’s permission to sample Indian music in her new songs. About how Rukmini had entertained her in their hotel rooms with impressions of Hayley’s theatrical dancing. About the brown kids in the Houston audience who wore self-made T-shirts based on the 2001 Experimental Jetset merch, that read,

  Rukmini&

  Kasi&

  Neela&

  Malika

  Hearing the last story, I placed my hand over my chest. Maybe Rukmini had been on to something when she had proposed we form a band, except maybe, in some alternate reality, the band was all four of us — as friends, as sisters. And in this perfect, musical haven, Malika was still alive.

  Hearing Kasi’s stories, her candidness, also made me think that maybe we were more than colleagues. Maybe my limited categorization had prevented us from growing closer all along.

  “Let’s do this again later this week?” I offered as she unlocked the front door.

  “I would love that. Maybe call me to confirm instead of texting?” Kasi teased.

  Before heading to bed, I turned on my computer to compose the new lines about respecting her that I had decided to add to my letter to Rukmini. My Twitter page was still open, and I had 89 notifications.

  “Now what?” I sighed.

  @NeelaDevaki pls sign this petition! @OrionPrize

  Was this petition @NeelaDevaki’s big announcement?

  I just signed @NeelaDevaki’s petition. If you care about fixing Canadian music you should too.

  I pinched my eyelids together and then clicked the petition link included in these tweets.

  We,
the undersigned, are troubled by the recent inclusion of the ten-year-old album Hegemony by Subaltern Speaks on the Orion Prize shortlist.

  According to the Orion Prize mandate, “eligible albums must be released in the previous year.” Given the scarcity of cash music prizes in Canada, recognizing a ten-year-old album sets a dangerous precedent while also denying a spot on the list (and therefore potential prize money) to an artist who has produced an album within the stated timeline.

  Beyond this, there have been questions raised about whether or not prize money should be potentially awarded to a band if one half — Malika Imani — is deceased, especially in light of complaints about misdirected profits that have been made by Imani’s relatives.

  There have also been looming concerns about the potentially racist promotion of this album, which is in direct opposition with the Canadian value of honouring diversity. This critique is especially significant given the recent conversations about racism in the music industry.

  We hereby petition to have the nomination for Subaltern Speaks’ Hegemony rescinded.

  The petition had been signed 1,567 times in the last three hours. The signatories included Sumi and many of the famous musicians who had publicly congratulated Rukmini on her nomination.

  I frantically typed @RUKMINI in the search field to see how she had responded.

  Sorry, that page doesn’t exist.

  TOPS’ EIGHT WITH RECLUSIVE MARCUS YOUNG

  Lead singer of 2018 Orion Prize–winning band The Turn Arounds

  By Sumi Malhotra

  1. Did you write a speech?