The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  I hate being barefoot. Especially in places my toes are unfamiliar with. The ground feels crusty and unknown. My foot feels untrusting. I rock back on my heels, lifting my toes, keeping the surface area of foot-to-ground to a minimum.

  I unbuckle my belt, watching Nisha instruct the girls, who peep at the wispy upside-down triangle of hair on my chest instead of following the choreographed steps. The harmonium player oozes out a melody, a slow droning piece, centred around three notes.

  I start to pull my trousers down before I stop and realize.

  I am not wearing underpants.

  They are, the three pairs of them that I own, bathing in the basin in my room, waiting for me to beat the water out of them until they are dry.

  I stop undressing and begin to edge into the corner.

  One of the girls, seeing the bare curve of my bottom as I pull the trousers back up, sniggers. Nisha calls a halt to their rehearsal.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  Anjali points. She turns around.

  I shuffle backwards in a panic but manage to stand on the hem of my trousers, tripping myself up and falling to the floor, bare bottom first.

  ‘No, no!’ I cry, protecting my modesty with my hands.

  The girls burst out laughing. Nisha buries her eyes in a hand, her entire body shuddering with silent laughter.

  Chumchee leaps to my defence, waddling over and attempting to help me shield my crotch. I try to bat his hands away but he is firm in his efforts and surprisingly strong.

  I look at Nisha, openly laughing now, as if this is not the first time someone has exposed themselves to her.

  I rue the day I decided to say yes to everything.

  When the girls return, ten minutes later, smelling of tobacco and factory smoke, I have composed myself and changed into my outfit.

  I wear the green sequin-and-paisley dhoti.

  Again, I stand with my hands on my hips, my back ramrod straight, because if I move my head the crown will slip off.

  I am formally introduced to the dancers – Anjali, Shilpa and Mala. I shake their hands and none of us makes any reference to what happened ten minutes ago.

  I never remember the okay things. Only the good things and the bad things. They are what form me, what propel me through life. Surely, it is the okay, the mundane, the everyday that makes me more than the good and the bad times. When I first arrived in England, I was nervous, anxious all the time, panicking, because Sailesh was not here. He chose my path for me at all times. He knew our best move as a team. This was our dynamic. He would decide what was next for us and I would emphatically agree.

  I haven’t seen him for two weeks. I miss him. I have only my memories of our happiest times. I think about this a lot. Those happy times made me who I am. And yes, Neha, you will never know Sailesh. He made me into the person I was.

  Without him, I would not have met your mother.

  When he started becoming famous at the hotels, it didn’t change him. I was worried he would leave me behind for a more exciting life but he remained my best friend. His dad was disappointed that he was straying from the family business. But, see? We had an end-game. Our ultimate goal was to head to Nairobi.

  In the big city, we could be who we wanted to be. I had a cousin – Manish – who lived there, working in the family’s maize business. He used to write me letters about what Nairobi was like. He told me about the girls, the music, the clothes and the freedom in general. Despite living in our family’s compound, he said, there was a freedom in having access to the city. We were seduced. We wanted what he had.

  Sailesh’s career at the Casablanca hotel was entirely ruled by the assumption that one day we would move on to a bigger city. Nairobi. London. Certainly not Keighley, 213 miles north of London, the nearest place that advertised friendly lodgings for coloured workers.

  I went a couple of times to watch Sailesh juggle. He would sneak me in through the kitchens and I would watch him stand in the centre of the room, an Indian, surrounded by the British Empire. This is something you cannot appreciate – I grew up while history was being made, during an occupation. I watched Independence unfurl before my eyes. I witnessed the last days of the British Empire. All these white men, eating and drinking as though they were destined to own us for ever. All those men, with their furry white chests and moustaches, their hats and their beige clothes, their young girlfriends and their strait-laced wives, all of it coming to an end. Man, it was a scene.

  Anyway, I would stand in the door of the kitchen and watch the routines. Sailesh’s look of concentration was a smile with a tongue in the left cheek. He wore one of Papa’s old suits which had been discarded because of a tear in the left shoulder and wear in the crotch from overuse. Papa cast off the suit but Amee was resourceful and knew how to tailor it into something wearable. She re-sewed the crotch and worked the sleeves into something deliberately torn, to make Sailesh look like a dishevelled juggler. It was part of the act. He walked on stage – well, the centre of the room – playing a drunk hobo, with an empty bottle of beer. He pretended to trip, threw the bottle of beer into the air and as it reached the peak of its arc, he would remove another from his pocket, try to sip it, realize it was empty and then throw that into the air as well. He would juggle the two. Then a nearby waiter would walk past him with a tray carrying two bottles of beer; he would grab one, down the contents and fling it up to give him three bottles in the air. The third was a plant. It was half-filled with water. He juggled the three bottles, stumbling about like a drunk. People applauded. This was just his first routine, one that he savoured because it offered the maximum showmanship for minimum skill. It required no concentration – even though each bottle was weighted ever so slightly differently, muscle memory allowed him to throw them up with the precision of a master.

  Things happened quickly after those first few performances. He was given a regular job at the hotel and left school to pursue the juggling. His father was terrified that Sailesh would never amount to anything. There was a quiet rule in his family: a chance is only a piece of chance; hard work is worth more than chances. It doesn’t make sense but his father liked to think of himself as a philosopher. He wrote these motivational messages on the board outside Cheap Ration Store. Many times people would mistake his shop for a church.

  Sailesh was granted an opportunity to come to London and work. He was contracted by the owners of the Casablanca hotel, who had interests in London, to play cabarets in Soho for a trial of one month, if successful extended to six months and then potentially permanently.

  We had had dreams of Nairobi for so long that London seemed like a walrus; we knew what it looked like in books but assumed we would never see one in our lifetimes. Nairobi for us was a lion, a once-in-a-blue-moon sighting from the window of a car.

  Sailesh was excited. This surpassed any expectation he had for his life, which had already been overtaken by his small success at juggling. We were expected to walk in our fathers’ footsteps, to go and work in their businesses, continue their success, and survive to pass on even more to a future generation. We were not meant to live our own lives. Our desire to escape was real.

  We wanted something more than what was on offer. Mainly because our letters from Manish showed what else was out there in the world, what life there was to be lived. It wasn’t just the thought of girls, or the thought of drinking or anything like that. There was just this feeling that in Nairobi we would be free to explore our options. Maybe through the arts or through other people’s businesses. It felt freer than where we were.

  Nairobi, that’s where I always thought we would end up. But with no tangible plans to go, other than the general desire to escape, I started to feel as though I would live out my days running my father’s kiosk and fighting with Naman over parathas. So when Sailesh told me about the London contract, he asked if I would come.

  I said, of course, bevakoof.

  When he broached the subject with his amee and I with mine, I had more success.
This was because I presented it as a chance for further education. When I told my amee that Sailesh was heading to the UK to work and that I could go with him, maybe to study, maybe at a university, she practically exploded with happiness. She told me that before he died Papa had saved a special fund of money to give to either Naman or me should we want to continue our education. I would need to work to pay my rent, the caveat was, according to Amee, but I would be the first Jani boy to go to a university. A real university with professors and lectures and learning to better one’s self. My father had wanted to get a degree in accountancy but instead had had to work for the family business. And that job, the stress of working with his brothers, nearly killed him. So he moved to Mombasa. Which did kill him. Because who lives by the coast but cannot swim properly?

  Sailesh, on the other hand, broke his father’s heart. We were two months away from finishing school and Sailesh’s papa wanted to start taking it easy, while his son assumed more responsibility at the shop. Sailesh was unsure whether his father would let him go. But then the tide intervened and took our fathers from us.

  This is why I do not believe in destiny, my child. Destiny has one single agenda: to force you to make decisions. Had Papa lived, Neha, you and I would be speaking in Swahili right now. Not this terrible English. Papa made a choice to run into the sea to rescue Naman. I made a choice to leave Kenya. I am not trapped by destiny. I command my choices.

  I had to find something to study and I wanted it to be poetry. I liked poems. I liked reading them and the idea of writing them. Especially the rhyming ones. But I didn’t think my father’s money would be paid out for me to learn to write poetry. Naman was also encouraging me to go, saying, brother, you have to go and you have to get set up so you can bring me over. I want to walk through Leicester Square.

  So I told Amee I would go to London to do my A levels and then I could pursue an accountancy degree. This made her so happy. She paid the money for my ticket – one way because, she said, when I was done I would be able to pay my own way to come back and visit.

  Nisha leads me into the centre of the stage.

  ‘Stand still,’ she says. ‘With your hands on your hips. Look like a hero.’

  She counts in – ek, bey, thrun, char – and the harmonium blasts out a slow trance-like melody. The girls dance behind me. I can feel their shuffling steps, hear the jangle of the bells around their ankles.

  I am bewitched by Nisha, playing Sita, my wife.

  She bows her head slightly, looking up at me all innocent and doe-eyed. She smirks and then starts to dance.

  ‘She is so submissive,’ Nisha sneers, as she dips and whirls. ‘Everything is about her husband.’

  The girls behind me stop dancing.

  Anjali shouts, ‘She is the partner of our god Vishnu. How dare you.’

  Nisha, without losing her step, keeps dancing. I can see the gyrations of her belly.

  ‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘She is defined by who she is married to. I will never be identified by my husband.’ She pauses. ‘If I get married.’

  Anjali rolls her eyes, and then chivvies the girls to continue dancing. She feels heavy behind me. I can hear her panting, trying to slow it down to disguise it as normal breath.

  Sita, Nisha-Sita, steps towards me and twirls her hands up and down in front of my face and chest, never touching me, except for the wild fling of the odd bangle. I keep my posture as still as possible and I try not to move, I try not to breathe, I try not to be anything other than her stoic husband, returned from the jungle after an exile of fourteen years, ready to take his kingdom as promised.

  I am Lord Rama.

  Sita, Nisha-Sita, places her hands on my chest and rests her cheek on them. I can feel her light breath on my nipple.

  I close my eyes, wanting to cry because this is the moment I have been longing for. Sailesh can wait for his visa for the rest of his life as far as I am concerned.

  I hear the door crash open.

  Something bounds into the room and announces itself with a booming voice.

  ‘Nisha, I am here now. I will be your Rama.’

  I open my eyes, startled. A muscular man, taller than me, fair skin with a thick moustache, stands with his hands on his hips, in challenging hero pose.

  Nisha lets go of me.

  ‘Prash?’ She says. ‘You came? I knew you would.’

  He strides towards her. The air bubble of force around him pushes me backwards. I step on Anjali’s foot.

  He walks over to Nisha, loops one arm around her waist, leans her backwards and tries to kiss her but she recoils.

  He stops and turns to me. ‘You’re wearing Rama’s dhoti.’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m Rama.’

  I gulp.

  Quest. Surprise

  I take my dhoti – Prash’s dhoti – off, and hand it to him. He stands as close to me as he can, blocking Nisha and the girls behind him, almost as if to protect my modesty. He smirks and looks down at me intently. His eyes are brown going on green. I could fall in love with those eyes, collapse and cut myself on those cheekbones. Luckily, my fall would be broken by the comforting cushion of those lips.

  Prash, my love rival, I am inferior to you.

  I realize my trousers are three or four embarrassing strides away. Chumchee is sitting on the seat that I’ve hung them over.

  I don’t want to move. Partly I’m hypnotized by this Adonis. Partly I’m paralysed by embarrassment for my nakedness.

  I shuffle backwards, cupping my lakri, and wrestle my trousers from the back of the chair. Chumchee, either revelling in my discomfort, or because he is a pendoo, doesn’t move. He watches me struggle instead, absent-mindedly drawing circles on his thighs with his index fingers.

  I wrench the trousers free, creased from being wedged between the plastic seat and his flabby back. I notice Nisha touching Prash’s sculpted arm as he takes his top off. Anjali is staring at me, laughing, holding her sides to stop the shake of her jiggling belly. I keep looking at Prash and Nisha. He whispers something to her. I see her face crumple for a second, almost as if she is upset, before it returns to a smile.

  Her resting face is a deep smile. It was the first thing I noticed about her.

  That is a lie.

  The first thing I noticed about her was that she was another desi and it was a comfort to know there was one so close. This is another reason why I do not believe in destiny, only in coincidence. It does not negate the fact that she was the love of my life. Had coincidence not led me to Keighley, had she not been the only desi I saw, had I not felt so isolated surrounded by so many goras, would we have fallen in love?

  It’s a strange thing. To be the only desi in a room. And yet, coming here, it has happened a lot. It is scary, looking out on to a sea of white faces, skin like plucked chickens, skin like alabaster walls. People look at you differently.

  Mrs Simpson asked me on that first day, where are you from? I told her, Kenya. And she said, no, but where are your parents from? I told her, Kenya. No, but where are you from originally? Kenya, I told her again. I think she did not understand me because I was not saying India, the land of my forefathers; I am in an in-between world. It seems such an innocent question. Where are you from?

  I don’t know. Why does it matter so much?

  I cannot talk to goras. I watch the way their heads tilt when they’re trying to communicate with me, as though a sideways glance will make me seem more sympathetic. I will be more understandable askew.

  I think about all of these things as I try to place one foot through the leg-hole of my trousers, and I topple over. I windmill my arms to try and keep my balance, but gravity takes hold and pulls me to the floor.

  Chumchee jumps up and points at me, laughing. It doesn’t matter – everyone else has already lost interest. The muscular Prash is in place, the music is playing and the girls are sashaying around him. He is a better Lord Rama than me. He oozes regality.

  I look at Chumchee, pointing at my body, and
he smiles at me. He bows his head, moves closer and nestles his forehead into my neck. I close my eyes and will myself to be back in my room, alone, practising faces in my mirror.

  The show goes on.

  Prash quickly picks up the steps. Ten minutes after my fall, I am reduced to a spectator. I pull up a chair next to Chumchee and sit with him as we watch the girls dance for their Lord.

  I shift in my seat and think about leaving, but Chumchee puts his hand on my knee.

  ‘I know you want to go,’ he says quietly. ‘Please don’t. Please stay.’

  ‘Why? There is no reason for me to stay. I am not in the show.’

  ‘Do you like my sister?’ he asks.

  I don’t answer him.

  ‘Prash is a bevakoof,’ he says. ‘He will soon get bored and leave. Then you will be needed. You will save the show. Our hero.’

  As Chumchee says these words, I watch Prash, as Lord Rama, sweep Nisha up into his arms. He spins her around and kisses her on the lips.

  It must be unscripted because Nisha struggles out from under his mouth and the crush of his arms, and pushes him away.

  She looks around the room, embarrassed. Then she touches her little finger to her bottom lip and rubs at it.

  She glances at Chumchee and me.

  ‘Again,’ she calls out.

  And the harmonium player considers his instrument for a moment before playing a sad, low note while the dancers readjust their positions.

  Prash peacocks this time. His moves are more animated. He introduces hip thrusts and winks and clicks of his tongue, like someone calming a horse.

  Nisha dances coyly. She flicks looks around the room, to gauge what people might be thinking.

  When she meets my eye, she turns away.

  ‘Please stay,’ Chumchee repeats. ‘It is boring sitting here by myself.’

  I ignore him and stand up, picking up my blazer. Prash notices me and raises his hand to the harmonium player to tell him to stop. He walks towards me. Nisha asks him what’s wrong. He holds his hand up again to shush her. It is not the time for questions. Smiling, he approaches me. He throws his arm around my shoulders, the weight of it like a python, squeezing me tight as he leads me towards the door.