The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  ‘Where are you going, yaar? Kya jaay che? Where are you going?’ he asks in English then Gujarati then English, just to confuse me. ‘Bhaiya, stay.’

  We are standing by the only exit. Prash places himself between it and me.

  ‘Home,’ I stammer. I’ve lost all my English, all my Gujarati.

  ‘Nitaka nirudi nyumbani sasa hivi,’ I say fluidly. In Swahili. I want to go home now.

  He looks at me, confused.

  ‘Home,’ I say again.

  It feels like an English word: it is plain, single-syllabled and with a long vowel sound in the middle. There is no letter to place stress on. It exists only as itself, not as a word you can mould and meld to make it your own.

  Someone once told me that in Zimbabwe, children are often given names to annoy neighbours. So someone will be called Patience if the neighbour has a short fuse; that way, when the word Patience is bellowed, it means more than one thing to more than one person. In my family, we used to name our children according to the astrological signs. In England, they are named after their ancestors; memories are kept through the recycling of names. The man I lodge with told me to call him Harry even though his name is David. Harry was his father’s name, is how he explained it to me, as if I would know what that entailed. But I loved the sentiment, of preserving memories through this recycling. Which is why your brother is named after my father.

  Prash, short for Prashant, I think, means patient or tranquil. He was perhaps a quiet boy, born under a certain sign. His entire body language is the opposite of his name. He oozes aggression. He places his hands on the wall so that I am pinned between them. He bows his head closer to mine. I do not know where to look so I search for Chumchee, past his body. I can see the moist ripple of sweat on his perfect pectoral muscles. He must shave, because the closer I look, the more I can see red bumps where the follicles are rebelling, growing back, searching for freedom.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he hisses, trying not to be heard, forgetting that this hall is an echo chamber. The best way not to be heard is to talk in your normal voice.

  ‘Home,’ I repeat.

  ‘Where. Are. You. Going?’ he repeats again, this time making each word its own sentence.

  ‘Nowhere,’ I say.

  ‘Shabaash. Sit down. I cannot have you walking around the set while I am rehearsing. I am concentrating hard. I am trying to be Rama. You are distracting me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’

  He slaps the wall to my left. I look at it. He slaps the wall to my right. I turn to that.

  ‘You, bevakoof, are not the star. I am. You do not distract the star. It is opening night. We have one performance. I have been practising for ten minutes. Maroo mathoo nahi ka. Okay? Bessi-ja. Choop-chaap. Okay?’

  I nod.

  ‘Okay?’

  I try to wriggle out of his prison. I think about biting his perfectly toned arm.

  ‘Hey,’ calls Nisha from the other side of the room. ‘Prash, challo.’

  ‘You sit, you stay quiet, you watch, you smile, you clap, you love me. Okay? You are not Rama. I am Rama. You are not Laxman. Chumchee is Laxman. You are the audience.’

  He finally pushes himself away from the wall and walks backwards, keeping his eyes in contact with mine so I know he is serious, that he is not to be trifled with or disturbed. He is amazing. He avoids tripping, walking into chairs, into people, into himself.

  I want to drop to my knees, wring my hands to the sky and ask Sailesh why he has forsaken me here, of all places, 213 miles from where I need to be, 11,500 miles from home.

  What I learned about performance, from Sailesh, is that it is a ridiculous thing, to stand up in front of people and try to entertain them. Storytellers, at least, I can understand. A story can instruct, can impart knowledge, news, history. A story can teach you about destiny, about family. Can dancing and juggling do the same? Or are they distractions?

  When Prash dances, he does it so everybody in the room notices. He is not performing to entertain. He is performing like a peacock, attracting mates. Which makes me uncomfortable because Nisha is his mate.

  I will break him, I think. I will use my mother’s powers of tiny undercutting comments to make him feel bad about himself, and I will get him away from Nisha, the love of my life.

  They stop dancing.

  Prash strides over to me. I have not moved. I have been thinking about juggling. He pulls at my shirt and I feel the buttons strain. He drags me to where Chumchee sits, over to my vacated chair, and pushes me down into it.

  ‘I told you to sit,’ he barks. ‘I cannot have you in my eyeline. You are disrupting this sacred dance. Sit down, bevakoof, or I will beat you.’

  Staring at Nisha as I watch them rehearse, I remember falling in love with a classmate. It was some time after my one-sided romance with the maths teacher ended. There was one girl who always caught my eye, mostly because she was so small – miles shorter than her swan-necked gaggle of friends. She was skirting five foot tall, with a round face, thick severe eyebrows and toffee-coloured brown eyes. Her name was Sri. She smiled a lot which showed the slightest gap between her front teeth. Her lustrous black hair was always pulled into a messy ponytail or tight pigtails. She wasn’t graceful and she wasn’t clumsy. She wasn’t naughty and she wasn’t a swot. She just got on with things, had in-jokes with her friends and went through the routines of life demanded of her with a mixture of mediocrity and indifference.

  I used to watch her kathak dancing classes because they took part during my free periods.

  I was there when the small girl with the toffee-coloured eyes fell over a nearby dancer’s outstretched foot and flopped to the floor in a tiny bundle, like a crumpled teabag.

  ‘SRI . . . SRI CHAUHAN . . . GET UP NOW,’ screeched the instructor. My lucky stars – spying was easy when teachers used the full names of your targets to berate them.

  I saw Sri Chauhan leave school, walk out of the gate, punch Amitesh, the podgy quiet boy in the front corner of our classroom and sashay off towards the bus stop. Amitesh Chauhan . . . Of course! She was his sister! The stupid podgy quiet boy who bested me the whole time with grades and the favour of teachers. I had no choice. My route to Sri was through him. I had to make him my best friend in the entire world.

  I assessed my hobbies, potentially transferable areas of interest I could use to barter companionship with Amitesh. He was definitely a fringe class member, more of a loner than me, more concerned with eating than bantering, more likely to whisper than to murmur, more familiar with retreating from social interaction than initiating it.

  I could pretend I needed help with maths, one of his stronger subjects. Except I was better than him at maths and he knew it. We were classroom rivals, constantly aware of each other’s scores and how they compared against our own.

  The other option was just to make my intentions of being his friend clear. I walked home debating the best course of action. Coincidence, my old friend, winked at me once more because I saw Amitesh waiting, lost in thought, at the bus stop.

  Approaching him was someone else, a face I can no longer remember except for glazed eyes and a teenager’s wispy moustache; he made a grab for Amitesh’s satchel, known to be stocked at all times with snacks. The mugger hadn’t accounted for his victim’s watchfulness, however, keeping the strap of the satchel across his shoulders so that, when it was grabbed, he was propelled violently forward, his round head crunching into the thief’s nose.

  This was my perfect moment. If I stepped in just as the thief got away with or without the bag, I would get points just for trying. I mistimed it, though. The mugger, blood flowing from his nose, wasn’t leaving. Instead, he was still gamely trying to wrench the satchel from Amitesh. I squared up to him, defiant, despite inwardly cursing my premature entrance. I faced his glazed eyes and feeble moustache when – BOP – he punched me, hard enough to shake but not with any real conviction; he must have known that the battle was lost, because he then immediately re
treated. I felt a trickle of blood ooze from my left nostril, as I watched some older kids decide now was the time to intervene and give chase, screaming at the fast-disappearing thief. My eyes brimmed with water, and my heart sank when Amitesh smiled thinly at me before boarding his waiting bus home as though nothing had even happened.

  As he smiled, though, so did Sri – she was so small that I hadn’t even seen her in the confusion. Her pigtails were tied with orange ribbons and she clutched some textbooks. She beamed at me, said ‘thank you’ loudly in English and got on the bus. She’d seen me take a punch. A punch that looked more severe than it felt, but my nose still stung when I tried to blow it.

  I went home with a swollen face and a successful first impression.

  Befriend the brother – it all makes sense.

  I turn to Chumchee.

  ‘Prash is very mean,’ I whisper.

  ‘But he is beautiful,’ Chumchee says with a smile.

  ‘Hahn-ji,’ I reply. I look at Chumchee.

  He is smiling vacantly in the direction of his sister and Prash. He sits with his back straight, his hands on his knees, his fingers gripping and rubbing them.

  ‘He looks like an angry man,’ I say.

  ‘I have heard him shouting,’ Chumchee replies. ‘His cheeks go very red. He is lucky to be so fair-skinned.’

  ‘How long has he been Nisha’s boyfriend?’ I ask.

  ‘He is not her boyfriend,’ he says in English. ‘He is her naseeb. She said that to me. Naseeb. You know it? Destiny.’

  I nod my head.

  ‘He is that to her. What is your naseeb?’

  I shrug. ‘How do I know? You can’t be sure until after the event. Anything could happen in our lives, and then we say it is destiny. I could fall over and say, I was destined to fall over.’

  Chumchee laughs. ‘Know what you want and go for it. That is destiny. Because then, everything you get, you had coming.’

  ‘Why should we do anything in that case? I do not believe in destiny. It is a nonsense.’

  ‘Look at him,’ Chumchee says, turning back towards Prash, who is laughing at something Nisha is telling him. She is gesturing wildly with her hands, but the harmonium is still going. They get back into position, and begin the dance routine again. ‘He does not need to try. His destiny is to get exactly what he wants. The universe has decided this for him.’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘And they call me the bevakoof,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘They call you Chumchee. A spoon.’

  He looks stunned, as if I have slapped him. Then he stands up and wails like a child who has dropped their ice cream on the pavement. The girls stop dancing to see what the matter is. Nisha throws her arms up to the sky in frustration. The harmonium player, eyes closed, lost in a trance, continues playing.

  Prash shouts at the old man, ‘Arre, bhaiya, ek minute.’

  The harmonium player stops, takes off his glasses, cleans them and rolls his eyes at Chumchee.

  ‘I want him to leave,’ Chumchee whines to his sister, pointing at me. ‘I need him to leave.’

  ‘What is wrong?’ she asks, looking at me suspiciously. ‘What did you say to my brother?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say innocently. ‘Nothing, I swear. We were talking.’

  Prash takes a step towards me.

  ‘You were talking?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Did I tell you to talk?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Did I tell you to be quiet?’

  I nod my head.

  ‘Did you defy me?’

  I nod my head again, then bow.

  My mother once said, ‘Namaste translates into English as “I bow to you”. No wonder we were so ready to be colonized,’ she told me and my brother, ‘if, instead of saying hello, we show how subservient we are to other people. It is a Hindu custom, to serve. At the same time, it shows weakness. No wonder these mzungu mahdechods found it so easy to rule over us. We were too busy bowing.’

  It is not difficult for her to say this as part of the diaspora, I realize now.

  Language is important. We forget this because most of us don’t understand its power. But language kills people. It hurts people. It colonizes people. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen on menus in those artisanal coffee shops your brother asks me to meet him in, ‘chai tea’. It angers me, but, after a while, I just decided to order it, because it is delicious, and it is exactly what I want. I bowed to them. I let them corrupt our language with ignorance. They were my masters. What can you do?

  Years later, your mother and I went to Indian restaurants, tandoori restaurants, balti restaurants with the fascination of tourists. This was food we had never experienced before, food that we had certainly never cooked or eaten at home. Yet it was being culturally packaged as our own. Our country had existed for only about thirty years at that point and already its cuisine was world-famous, despite it being unrecognizable to most Indians. So we went, like all the Angrezis, and we ate, ordering everything off the menu, asking for spicy hot, Indian hot, and the waiter sighed and told us the food wasn’t invented for us, so it would be English hot. And we laughed incessantly about naan bread.

  ‘Bread bread,’ your mother teased. ‘Bread bread, sir? Would you like some bread bread?’

  That’s why ‘chai tea’ used to upset me so much. Chai means tea. Tea is the English word for chai. The English call it their national brew. They had no idea of its existence before they took it from their colonies. You cannot go around the world taking everything and not only calling it your own, but also claiming it as a part of your national identity in the process.

  When I bow to Prash, I know I am being weak in front of him. I can almost hear my amee tut at me.

  I glance up, and he is already walking towards me. I almost know what is coming but I cannot move myself an inch.

  I hear Chumchee breathing deeply, excitedly.

  I keep my head bowed.

  Prash pulls at my white shirt with one hand, wrenching me off the chair towards him, while with the other he slaps me three times across my cheek. One, two, three – firm, openhanded slaps, his aum ring turned inwards, its gold, coarse surface scratching my face. I bite my lip to keep quiet. I will not show weakness. I will not show subservience. He lets go with a shove and I fall over backwards, catching my kidneys on the lip of the chair and hitting my head hard on the floor. For the second time that day, it is as if a black saree billows over my eyes until I can’t see anything.

  ‘Wake up, bevakoof.’

  I feel a tap-tap-tap on my cheek. I open my eyes.

  Prash squats over me, gently slapping the side of my face with the offending palm.

  ‘I . . .’ I stammer, before realizing I don’t know what else to say. ‘My head hurts,’ I tell him.

  ‘Hahn-ji, get up, yaar,’ he says, offering me a hand.

  I maintain my dignity by refusing to take it.

  ‘Mukesh? Are you okay?’ Nisha asks me.

  Her face is upside down, standing over me, her hair over her eyes like the dangle of a beaver’s tail. My brain is spinning too much for anything more poetical.

  Oh, Nisha, Nisha, my head.

  I touch my hand to my cheek. I can feel the welt, the spectre of a larger, firmer palm. When I take away my smaller, bonier, shakier hand, I notice a smear of blood across it. From his ring. Aum. A sound so short and sharp that it drew blood.

  ‘No, I’m not okay,’ I say to Nisha. ‘Your boyfriend slapped me to the ground.’

  Prash grins.

  Nisha blushes. Her mood turns defensive.

  ‘He is not my boyfriend – why do you think that?’

  From the way he kissed you, I want to say, but before I do, Prash glances at Nisha. ‘Am I not?’ he asks, hurt. ‘Am I not?’

  He is still squatting over me.

  ‘I do not understand, Prash. What? No. I cannot have a boyfriend. We are not in London. I am not the lady on your arm. What do you
mean?’

  ‘Nisha,’ he says. ‘But Nisha.’

  My spirits lift a little. With a few well-chosen words, I have caused a rift. Boyfriend. Definitions are important. Language is important. Not destiny. My path is dictated by the careless language of others.

  He lifts his hands to her.

  ‘Prashant, I have told you. My parents. Your parents. They have to meet. My mummy and daddy and your mummy and daddy. I know we like each other. But why are we talking about this? We have to do a performance. The show must go on.’ She looks down at me. ‘Are you okay, Mukesh?’

  I shake my head.

  Prash holds up both his hands and laughs angrily.

  ‘You are making me look stupid,’ he says to Nisha. ‘You’re making me look like Chumchee. Kuti. Why are you never happy?’

  He pushes her.

  Even though I am prone on the floor, even though I am terrified of him, I decide to get up and punch him.

  I do not need to.

  Your mother, Nisha, she stumbles, steadies herself and then leaps at Prash with clenched fists. She is fearless. She is the bravest person I have ever seen in my life. She springs at him and punches him in the chest. It is surprising and symbolic enough that Prash doesn’t fight back.

  He looks at me. Then at Nisha. She has both of her fists clenched.

  I stand up slowly. Dizzy. Uneven on my feet.

  ‘Nisha, you have a lot of energy for a person who is dying,’ he says.

  His tone is flat, the line delivered as though he is an assassin.

  Nisha’s face is emotionless for the second it takes me to realize that his words have destroyed her. She dashes towards the back of the hall, her bare feet pat-patting on the parquet floor like pigeons on tin roofs, and disappears through a door I hadn’t noticed before. Another room? Where I could have changed? My skin flushes hot with my earlier embarrassment. Then I remember where I am.

  Prash smiles.

  ‘You are duttee, man,’ Anjali says.