I hear gasps from behind me. The firework shoots off like a snake on heat, zinging around the garden, ricocheting off the fence, spraying Nisha and her family with hot yellow sparks, careening into the toilet door. I duck for cover just before there is a deafening boom and a shower of red, white and blue fills the garden, twinkling like the American flag.
‘My toilet’s on fire!’ cries Nisha’s father. ‘My feet are on fire!’ he then screams. His socks are smouldering, and the outhouse is indeed flickering with yellow and orange flames.
I kick the door off its hinges as I try to put out the fire. Nisha appears beside me carrying a bowl of water and douses the flames with a hiss. The garden is quiet. Curtains twitch. Several neighbours peer out of their windows.
‘Come inside,’ Ba says wearily. ‘I suppose we’d better all have a drink. I’ll need one if I must now do piss in front of everyone.’
She laughs to herself and walks back into the house.
Nisha looks at me.
‘Disaster follows you, doesn’t it?’ she whispers. I nod. ‘Are you just unlucky or are you a causer of chaos?’
‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘I love you,’ I whisper a second later.
She laughs at me and puts a finger up to her lips. ‘Pagal ho-gaya? What?’
‘I love you,’ I say, a bit louder, turning around and seeing her father, sockless now, standing in the doorway, watching me like a man with a loaded gun.
She sighs. It’s a deep sigh, a frustrated one. She waits for a second. We watch the smoke curl from the burnt door. I hear her father shuffle away behind us. She is close enough that I can feel her skin causing the hairs on my forearm to prickle.
Suddenly, she puts her hand to the back of my neck, and quickly pulls me towards her. She kisses me on the cheek. Her lips are cracked, full, thorough, as they press against my stubble.
‘You don’t love me,’ she says, quietly. ‘Not yet you don’t.’
NEHA
London, 2017
Maybe this is my manifest destiny.
Maybe this is my purpose.
Neha Jani
Denial
TUESDAY MORNING
GoTo: Bubblegum-Lung
It must be difficult for doctors to tell you that you have cancer.
They have to do it in the flattest way possible. They can’t sound happy or sad. They have to sound realistic, bland, confident. You have to walk away from the encounter knowing that you have cancer and that it’s not something to be sad about, because in your case there are no treatments available.
Also, there is nothing to be happy about.
Cancer is not a walk in the park. Which is not a great metaphor.
I don’t walk other than for practicality. Walking gets me from A to B. Parks are cut-throughs. I have no use for this metaphor.
I have terminal cancer.
I keep expecting Dr Hamid to break into a grin in the meaningful silence that follows the delivery of the diagnosis. I want him to laugh. I laughed when Shilpa fai was cremated. Mostly because the singing at the service was woefully out of tune, simultaneously spanning every octave, major and minor key and note known to modern music. The smile crept on to my face, forcing my lips into a convulsion, revealing the grin’s true intentions – a guffaw.
I don’t find much funny.
Dr Hamid looks at me with all the goodwill in the world and there’s something in his face, an earnestness that makes me want to strangle him with his stethoscope.
I cough instead.
Which appears to be my life now. The cough is empty – as though I’m trying to shift an immovable piece of bubblegum that’s stuck down on the inside of my lungs. I can feel my diaphragm shudder, but it just won’t shift.
I look at him through my watering eyes and he is poised with a tissue to hand to me, as though it’s the simplest, kindest act in the world. I reach into my pocket and pull out some toilet paper that I’d grabbed earlier. I hack violently, hoping that something will shift whatever it is – the cancerous lump, the bubblegum of deterioration, the architect of my destruction – and I try to spit into the toilet paper, but only drool comes out.
I look up at Dr Hamid and smile.
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ I say.
I ball up the toilet paper and put it back in my pocket.
‘My mother did say there would be days like this,’ I murmur.
I’m paraphrasing a song I hate, but in the moment it feels meaningful. As though I’m supposed to have some sort of golden moment of clarity that was passed down to me from someone I never met. I’m dying. Death is only a short time away. What song would I need to narrate it in the film of my life?
I thank Dr Hamid.
He mutters about some leaflets and referring me to the oncologist, the specialist of all things bubblegum-lung.
‘Will it make any difference?’ I ask him point-blank.
He looks down at his notes; the little pince-nez glasses he has on a shoelace around his neck fall off the bulb of his nose and he looks at me plainly. I know that he has delivered his death sentence effectively. I am neither comforted nor elated nor worried by his diagnosis.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, closing my folder, placing it on an outtray, picking up a glass of water and slurping it with satisfied wet lips.
I want to tell him I hate him. That he has ruined my life. I imagine mine is not the first.
I stand up and shake his hand, ensuring that I offer the hand still drenched in the evacuees from my bubblegum-lungs. I cough again, but I’m too busy shaking his hand to be decent about it and cover my mouth. I let pearls of my spittle settle on his sleeveless cardigan.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asks.
I shrug.
‘No, Doctor. You’ve given me a death sentence. I have the rest of my life to live with that. You have the rest of this appointment to deal with it.’
I leave, knowing that this is a killer exit line. A movie gold moment. I wish my mama had told me there’d be days like these.
TUESDAY EVENING
GoTo: Messages from Beyond
Neha: egotist, hard-working, stubborn. Avoid these numbers: 16, 12, 9, 22.
I trace my mother’s handwriting on the slip of paper. I try to picture the fortune teller who told her this. I try to picture my mother. I’ve only seen her in photographs, so giving her three dimensions is difficult. I don’t know how her body moved. She was short, like me, just shy of five foot. Did she waddle or did she stride with purpose? Did she talk with her hands or with her mouth? Did she have the sort of nose that bounces with each word?
Maybe the fortune teller should have concentrated on the cancer in her lungs rather than the two foetuses in her womb. Maybe then I could understand the fingers behind the handwriting, the hand behind the fingers, the brain behind the hand. The waddle behind the short legs that went to the fortune teller in the first place.
Fortune telling: a bigger con than echinacea. A worse comfort blanket than yoga.
I don’t know if I could have respected her if I’d known she dabbled in the dark arts of the stupid, thumbing her nose at science. But I might not have turned to science, had she been around.
There is no way of knowing. Ba told us that this was all written, all predetermined. She told us of destiny.
She is not here any more. She is a distant memory I barely feel is real. My mother is four photographs, each one of her smiling.
I don’t feel bereft.
Why feel bereft for something you’ve never had?
It boggles my mind that part of me does look for these numbers: 16, 12, 9, 22. 16.22 in the afternoon. 22nd September. Lottery numbers. Phone number for the love of my life. Odds on horses. I notice them when they crop up. Because I’m aware of them. I know their significance. Their significance is through my powers of recollection. Not because 9.22 a.m. or p.m. on 16th December is going to result in a life-changing event.
Egotist. Hard-working. Who among us doesn’t display these
characteristics some, if not all, of the time? I’d have been more impressed if the fortune teller had nailed some of my deeper psychological defects – growing up without a mother, sharing a womb with a clown, being able to recite pi to seventeen decimal places by the time I was ten. Not caring in the slightest about any aspect of any sport, professional or recreational. Not being into music. Being a-racial, a-political, a-theological – these are the things the fortune teller should have gone for to really get my attention.
It’s easy to apply a fortune teller’s prediction, or a notion of destiny, retroactively, when you spot the pattern. That does not mean it was predetermined. Least of all, a second-hand prediction given by a fortune teller to a woman I’ve never met.
The fortune teller would have done better telling my mother that she and her daughter would die of the same thing before their thirty-fifth birthdays.
That would really impress me.
WEDNESDAY EVENING
GoTo: Tech the Tech
The other night, my brother told me he didn’t understand what I did for a living. Could I explain it to him? I think he was fishing for material. One of the stand-up comedian’s commonest tricks is to have pre-prepared jokes about people’s jobs for when things are going badly, or for when they want a cheap laugh.
Who are you and what do you do? I’ve seen him go through this routine hundreds of times.
Good question.
I answered him honestly. I didn’t try and put anything into layperson’s terms. I laid out my life for him. What I do is:
1) analyse information to determine, recommend and plan layout, including type of computers and peripheral equipment modifications.
2) analyse user needs and recommend appropriate hardware.
3) build, test and modify product prototypes, using working models or theoretical models constructed using computer simulation.
4) confer with engineering staff and consult specifications to evaluate interface between hardware and software and operational and performance requirements of overall system.
5) design and develop computer hardware and support peripherals, including central processing units (CPUs), support logic, microprocessors, custom-integrated circuits and printers and disk drives.
6) evaluate factors such as reporting formats required, cost constraints and need for security restrictions to determine hardware configuration.
I’ve been in the same job for fourteen years. I use three screens, an ergonomic backless chair and four external hard drives. I’m the only one in my company who can do what I do.
There’s a reason I’ve worked at the same place for fourteen years and have retained the same position I entered at. Raks laughed when I told him this but I gave him the truth.
‘I’m not in this for glory,’ I told him. ‘Why get promoted? It takes me away from what I do best. Making things. People don’t make physical things any more. They make things that exist inside boxes. I design the boxes that make what they do possible. Why do I want to manage other people doing that? You’re just in it for the money, aren’t you? I’m going to go down in history. And it will be for something I made. Not for something I was paid to make by someone else. This job gets 40 per cent of me. But that 40 per cent is better than 100 per cent of 90 per cent of other people.’
‘I try and make drunk strangers laugh in the dark,’ he replied.
‘You’re a national treasure,’ I told him.
‘I’m a national laughing stock.’
‘Isn’t that the point?’ I rebutted.
‘So what do you do exactly?’ he asked, after a beat. ‘Because your job description is nonsense.’
‘I design computer hardware,’ I sighed.
In the scripts of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’ve downloaded, in instances where there is a computer malfunction or the warp drive needs fixing or the dilithium crystals are failing, the screenwriter has written, ‘The tech is going badly’, to which the engineer Geordi La Forge will shout out some technobabble. The script instructs him to ‘tech the tech’. This is how my job description must appear to some people.
Star Trek hired technicians to tech the tech in the scripts to make them sound presentable. Often, when someone uses techno-bullshit in films or books, you read the words and nod, because nonsense or not, it probably sounds about right. So, to Raks, I tech the tech.
I head home from work, trying to think of an eloquent way to describe my condition. How would the greats describe it? How would the Bukowskis describe it? How would the Virginia Woolfs describe it?
I listen to a pink-noise app on the bus. It drowns out all unnecessary breaches into my brain. Drunk people’s conversations, mostly. I’ve stayed late to finish things. Now that I’m dying, my biggest fear appears to be the legacy of unfinished projects. I’m struggling to concentrate. I look at the intoxicated commuters around me.
A middle-aged woman sits next to me. She’s dressed in the drab grey suit of a powerful position at a big-but-dull company. She probably works in a bank or heads up a recruitment firm or something more mundane. She’s swaying, clutching her bag and resting her feet on her shoes, where she pinches her toes. She smells delicious – the mix of old perfume, stale tobacco and sweet Chardonnay sweat from her pores. She has a pink cheek.
She’s looking at a girl dressed for summer, short skirt, opentoed footwear, a white T-shirt, sheer over a polka-dot bra, her hair in a big twist out. She doesn’t look that old. She looks as though she might be on her way to a gig by some young hip gunslingers in some young hip pub. Do people still say gig? Have they ever said young hip gunslinger? She looks like someone with not many responsibilities. The grey person is holding this against her. She looks at me every now and then and flicks her eyes back to the girl, to show me that she is disgusted with how she is dressed. And she wants me to be complicit in her disgust. Because I am dressed in black and I wear glasses and I’m much more interested in the screen of my phone, scrolling through lines of code that I need to troubleshoot when I arrive home from work, ready to work.
The stares build in tension until I feel her lean forward. She’s going to say something. Why must people always say something? I switch off my pink-noise app, because she looks back at me to indicate that she requires an audience for what’s going to happen next.
‘Have some self-respect, love,’ she says to the girl.
The girl looks at her and rolls her eyes. What? they say. She doesn’t otherwise reply.
‘No one needs to see everything,’ the woman says, nudging me.
Then she stops nudging and looks at me.
‘Eh?’ she repeats.
She wants me to engage. She is desperate for me to validate her opinion. We are no longer spectators. We are either co-conspirators or antagonists.
I turn to her and take off my glasses and pinch the bridge of my nose for emphasis. ‘She could be naked,’ I say slowly. ‘With the words “fuck me” written on her tits in lipstick, and it would still be neither of our businesses.’
I can feel my bubblegum-lung rattling as I speak. The grey woman with the grey life tuts at me and crosses her arms, leaning back into the seat with a thud. She begins to retort, but I talk louder, over her – it’s the only weapon we have against white people. They fear a loud immigrant. It’s easier to dismiss me later as an angry brown woman than deal with me in the present.
‘I hope one of your stilettos gets trapped in a tramline and you get run over slowly,’ I tell her through the coughs.
‘She’s the one dressed like a hussy,’ she splutters.
I cough violently, my hands on my knees, leaning towards her.
I can feel the bus braking.
‘Get off the bus,’ I say. ‘Now. No arguments. Get off.’
She grabs her bag and a supermarket plastic carrier with a Telegraph peeping out of it and stands up, pushing past the girl as she gets off the bus.
People look at me with admiration but I can feel the rattle of the cough. I spit into my hand an
d wipe the drool into her newly vacated seat.
The girl sits next to me, on top of my drool, seemingly unbothered. I can feel her naked knee touch my jean-clad one.
I cough repeatedly.
I cannot live like this.
‘Thank you,’ she says quietly. People around us nod as though I’ve been a hero. I smile vacantly, like I’m just doing my job.
WEDNESDAY EVENING
GoTo: Twice as Good
I sit on the bench of the bus stop near my flat.
The girl gets off the bus as well and looks at me strangely, as though she needs an excuse to engage. I’m coughing into my toilet-paper wad. My free hand is clenched white. When we were younger, my brother and I used to high-five using the backs of our hands instead of the palms. We called this ‘brown five’. When Dad wanted us to choose a movie to watch, we’d reply with one of us holding out their white palm to represent the West and the other holding out the back of their hand to represent the East – because brown didn’t just mean Bollywood. It meant martial-arts films and films from Kenya if the guy who drove an old mango box filled with VHS tapes around the houses of suburban immigrants had any that week. I look at my knuckles as I cough. I’m white underneath.
She sits next to me and her hand hovers somewhere behind me. She hesitates, caught between a comforting rub and a hard thorough smack, to help me through my convulsions. I unclench my fist and hold it up as if to say, stop. I’m fine.
I hack with all my might to shift the rattle. I manage a trail of drool and bloody mucus into my hands, the toilet paper disintegrated and fallen to the floor as my body shakes.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks, rubbing my back with what she thinks is comfort. I flinch and arch until she stops. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks again.
I’m regulating my breathing, slowing it down to a steady controlled crawl. I look at her.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, in a closed way, to break off the conversation. ‘I may not seem it but I am.’
‘Why did you speak up for me?’
I look at her and shrug.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
The One Who Wrote Destiny Page 7
