Raks fell over trying to tickle my father.
My father fell off the toilet reaching for another toilet roll.
Raks prank-called my father and pretended to be the bank foreclosing on Dad’s photocopying shop.
I sip from my drink and look around the room. Mika is leaning on the bar, head resting on hands, eyes closed. There is no one else here. Dad stops laughing and I turn back to him.
‘So?’ I say.
He shrugs. ‘Sure. I can do this for you in a few weeks. I’m really concentrating on booking a holiday at the moment. Lots of research. What do you think? St Lucia or Dubrovnik?’
‘That’s your either/or?’
‘For the prices I’ve been quoted, yes. It has to be all-inclusive. You think I will stay at a self-catering apartment? I would forget to buy milk for my tea all the time. Supply my own toilet rolls. There would be no one to talk to except for foreign television channels.’
I pull out a tablet from my bag and place it on the table.
‘What’s wrong with right now?’
‘You want me to show you the places I’m thinking of?’
I pause. I nearly laugh in his face. This man is so ridiculous. This is why we don’t talk. One of many reasons. The great storyteller, in love with his own place in a story.
‘Let’s start with Raks and me, and our cousins, and work backwards from that.’
Dad gets up and stands, hovering by the table for ten seconds or so. He looks around Pivo, for some reason fixating on the lighting.
‘I’d better go and relieve myself. This is not a quick-pint conversation.’
‘I just need a list. Not their life stories,’ I say, looking at the time.
‘Never stay the full whack, do you?’
The phrase ‘the full whack’ stings. I think about my cousin Bhima. One of the smokers in my family, my first enabler because I used to steal cigarettes from his room when he was at work. Raks and I would pay his mum a surprise visit. She lived down the street from Dad. One of us, in rotation, would talk to Auntie about schoolwork, about Bollywood films, and the other would sneak upstairs, into Bhima’s room, and steal his fags. He probably knew. He probably didn’t care. He had made the long hard journey in our family from secret-shame smoker to open smoker, so didn’t need to count, ration or be careful about concealment. Growing up, we had an abundance of family functions. Every Sunday, for they were always Sundays, to accommodate the ones with shops, there was a function, in someone’s house, a community hall, a school hall, a park. Raks and I would rather be anywhere else. We thought ourselves independent sorts who wanted to smoke cigarettes and repeatedly browse the aisles of video shops and record shops just in case that week was the week Portishead or Radiohead released an album we hadn’t heard about. We put in the time with those functions; just not much of it. We’d show up late, in time to have twenty minutes to say hello to family members (a hello in a problematic accent or a Hari Aum, sometimes a Jay Shree Krishna if we were feeling fancy) before food was served. Raks would load up a plate. I grabbed a samosa and a kachori. We ate and ran.
One day, Bhima, smoking outside, saw us as we left. We were good at not saying goodbye, only hello. That way, we didn’t have an extra twenty minutes of ‘Why you leaving, you just got here, have you eaten?’
With a cigarette in his mouth, which was at the time the coolest thing in the world to me, he said, ‘Why are you going?’
Raks stared at the ground. I smiled.
‘Homework,’ I said blandly.
‘You know, sometimes you have to stay the full whack,’ he said, before turning back to the conversation he was having with another of our cousins whose name neither of us knew.
There was disappointment in how he turned away. He knew we were phoning in our appearances, not interested in spending time with our cousins.
We were found out.
We thought we were so slick but he knew. He knew everything the entire time.
Being seen, it was so mortifying to me as a teenager.
The full whack.
*
‘Why do you want to know all these things?’ Dad asks, returning from the toilet. I cough, trying to keep it sounding as calm as possible.
I shrug. ‘For work,’ I say again. ‘And Ba, tell me about Ba. What happened to her?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Dad says. He takes a long slow sip of his lager. ‘You want me to tell you the story of how your mother and I fell in love, do you not?’
‘Not again, Dad,’ I say, pleading.
‘Not a problem,’ he tells me. And he begins. Starting as he always does, with the leaning against the wall.
‘I have no reason to be anywhere,’ he says. ‘I find myself in an in-between world, with no purpose, except to lean with my back against the wall, across the road from Nisha’s amee and papa’s house. . .’
And like always, I listen, hoping for a clue to how I got here.
Bargaining
TUESDAY EVENING
GoTo: Research. Development
I stare at the records for these seventeen family members and their bios. I scan over the A3 sheet of paper with the family tree I sketched out when I got home from Dad talking at me. There’s a daunting number of names of people I don’t know, mostly male; the women all seem to have the same name but the salutation after it, faiba, masi, mami, etc., makes them crystal clear in my brain. I realize how many men in our family I call uncle rather than kaka, mama, fuva, masa, because I don’t know their actual names.
They never want to talk to you if you’re female. At functions, you’re expected to serve them while they sit in silence, occasionally relaying the contents of a letter from ‘India’ to each other. It’s as nebulous as that. The letter is from India. Not from a named person. Sometimes, there will be cricket chat. Other times, they will discuss problems they are having with builders or workmen.
The hardware I build, the systems I facilitate through the boxes I make, they make all of their lives easier. I am of equal status to them and thus sit with them. I have no interest in cackling and gathering in the kitchen with the women, to perform the servile tasks expected of me. And yet their names are the ones I retain. Not the sea of miscellaneous uncles, wearing thin white polyester shirts and navy blue trousers, chewing tobacco and arguing about who hates Muslims more.
I stare at these names.
I like to be process-orientated, even when building a project from a small scale up to its full potential. I love every part of the process, from the innocuous beginnings of data collection and building subsets, through to pushing the information to reveal new and interesting things.
These names correspond to a folder on my desktop called ‘Photos of the Janis’. The file name for each picture is clearly labelled with the names of its subjects. I’m trying to build a piece of functionality that can marry a visual representation of the family tree with corresponding head shots of my family members: the cousins, the second cousins, the uncles, the uncles of uncles, the first wife, the second wife, the grandparents, their servants, the nieces, nephews, the alive, the dead, the forgotten about and the ostracized, everyone, no exclusions.
Any photograph that isn’t a portrait will correspond to a date and event in the timeline. Every photograph will correspond to a location in the world, because the family spans India, Kenya, Aden, London, Leicester, Canada and Wales. Every photograph will correspond to an approximation of the date it was taken in the timeline. Once I have those parameters, I can start to measure what role cause of death plays in our lives and vice versa. Once I establish the landscape, I can spot the patterns within it. I can already see, though, that this is just not enough. I know it’s not sufficient simply to upload these photos with no context into some functionality with no function. That would just be Facebook.
What happened to Ba? The stray thought itches my skull.
It’s an easy enough task but what does it do? What sense of my family does it give? Who does it celebrate as its characters, who li
ved, loved, fucked, argued, made up, poked fun at each other, poked fun at themselves? This is the problem with history. There is no way you can contextualize anything with a series of photographs. Everyone is frozen in time as a statistic, not as a person.
I file through the seventeen records I’ve already created.
I know nothing about these people except when they were born, when they died (if they’re dead), how they died, thanks to Dad, and how they’re related to him, and thus to the grander structure of the entire family.
It’s a small set of data but it’s a start.
What did they like? What did they dislike? How did they really view their fellow family members? They can’t all have got on. I remember arguing with Raks about him being sick on my sofa and not cleaning it up, just going home and leaving me to deal with it. He didn’t feel guilty. He thought it was funny and it ended up in his stand-up. I am material for him. My need to show him how to behave like a functioning human.
So we can learn. We don’t know anything about the past, we don’t care, we look back only to romanticize. We never learn anything. We only reminisce.
I tell Raks his stand-up is about nostalgia. About looking back on the past with no real analysis. No need to try and understand it and what impact that has on futures. If I can prevent the next generation of Janis from getting these genes, these disgusting ailments, the diabetes, the heart disease, the angina, the high blood pressure, the cancer, the fibrosis, then maybe they can stop making our mistakes. How much of that is about the secret lives of immigrants, what we did when no one was looking, as well as when they were?
Accessing some dark websites, I try to flesh out these records, see if I can find news stories about these family members, like local news documents of when he won this spelling contest and when she won that football tournament, these will help.
I hack the records office’s Mobile Gateway. It isn’t even a cloud network like I initially assumed. It works on an outdated system that’s pre-Cloud, meaning that all the computers in the local area are hooked up to the local authority’s network and you effectively have two desktops. You have your normal one, which works as fast as your machine works, and your Mobile Gateway desktop, which you, as a local authority employee, are expected to use; it’s exceptionally slow. You share the bandwidth with everyone else using the remote desktop and the further you are away from the server, the slower the thing works. I mirror an email address and request a replacement password.
Every record, every scan, every microfiche is logged in this system. I can find anything I need. I don’t need newspaper reports or anything like that, yet. I’m after facts to begin with, so I can build a framework. Once I have facts, I can move on to profile-building with education results, health records, criminal and civil disputes, logged complaints. Some of these would involve a deeper hack into the local authority’s system.
I look for news reports on the aftermath of the Diwali show. I find a couple of stray references that I download to review later.
I create search terms around the family tree. I check through names on the list then delete the file paths, realizing that because my family is largely unimaginative and thus repeated a lot of the names for their children and grandchildren, I can’t just port over records and expect them to match up to the right people. I have to do this manually for each branch of family at a time. It’s annoying to see that two Manishs attended the same university and did the same course, getting the same degree. It may have been decades apart but still it makes it difficult for me to allocate these records to a home within my framework.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
GoTo: Rest. Relaxation
My energy wanes and each evening, I find myself in a new pattern. I watch episodes of The Next Generation and think about death.
I drink wine by myself.
I make my famous egg-fried rice. Special ingredient: sugar.
I take the bins out.
I read. I stare at words until they blur. I Google Image search photos of cancerous lungs, print them off and leave them around my flat. I think about smoking. I visualize myself smoking. I mime smoking. I drink coffee and my hands do the air cigarette. I get into deep searches looking for information about whether e-cigarettes work with the ol’ cancer.
I start referring to my ailments as the ol’ cancer.
Out of breath? The ol’ cancer.
Council tax late? The ol’ cancer.
No milk? The ol’ cancer.
I develop a character for it. It’s a smoker, with a raspy, fast-talking 1920s New York reporter/gangster voice.
Now listen here see whats the big idea I got a scoop for you you got cancer cancer Itellsya.
I feel lost. I sleep a lot. I don’t reply to emails as much. No one emails me now I don’t have a job.
I long for sleep but it eludes me. Frustrated, night after night, I wish for death.
I look up ways to relax online. I trawl through lists of local spas, potential hobbies, social groups and cinema times. Nothing is working.
I watch episodes of The Next Generation. I watch as Worf and Troi go from colleagues to lovers with almost no signposting. I marvel at how much taller than her he is, at how, for all its utopian diversity, Star Trek’s creative decision to make her wear such a degrading skin-tight outfit is both genius and appalling.
I don’t feel relaxed.
I track down the song that’s been haunting me. It’s from a Hindi film called Naseeb. It’s the title song, about destiny. The plot of the film sounds flimsy. In it, four friends win the lottery and two of them get together to murder a third member of the syndicate, and frame the fourth for it. Years later, his three estranged sons come together to exact revenge. Naseeb means destiny. The title song, pretty repetitive, pretty disco, presupposes that all of this has been written by someone else, probably God. Destiny, it suggests, is being written by others, not us.
Are you written to be with me or not?
Am I written to be with you or not?
Are you written to be with me or not?
Am I written to be with you or not?
This isn’t something we can know, only that person knows
Who has written everyone’s destiny.
I can hear this song, playing on a transistor radio, as a sea breeze blows past palm trees and through the open door of a one-room house.
I am six years old, maybe eight. I can’t quite remember. I am with my twin brother. We are staying with her, with Ba. The song is playing on the radio.
Now it shows up everywhere – on YouTube autoplay, on the radio, from passing cars, looping endlessly, as though it is sending me a message, from Ba, that all of this was pre-written. I hear it in its original form, remixed, sampled into bhangra and hip-hop, whimsical slow white-girl acoustic cover version, chopped and screwed, with an obnoxious big-beat backing.
Each morning, I return to writing this algorithm. Initially, before my energy surge comes, I feel slow to start.
No, a voice in my head says. You’re about to cop it, cark it, die. Cos of the ol’ cancer. Make the most out of life.
I hate walking. I hate socialized institutional eating. I hate dinner-party conversations, team-building games, ice-breakers, presentations, speeches, discussing art, making art, talking in any language other than C++ or Dothraki – what is there to do with life?
Spend time with loved ones.
I look at my brother’s tour schedule. I smile. He’s in Bracknell tonight. The big time, I mouth to myself. I have no interest in seeing my father.
I stand up and walk to the window that looks out on to the high street. I peep behind the curtain and the net curtain. Pivo is open. I long for it.
My tongue feels dry.
Every online source tells me I need to drink more fluids.
I think about water.
It offers no comfort. I grab a hat, slip my feet into my shoes and pick up my house keys, jingling them. I head out for a drink.
SUNDAY NIGHT
/> GoTo: Patterns
I return home from Pivo, drunk, my eyes half open as I stumble around the flat. It took a pint I couldn’t finish and two shots of rum but I am blotto. I return to find the door open and my keys in the lock. I thought I locked up. I’m too pissed to dwell on it and I enter my flat, calling out for Ba, in case she has come to see me.
Silence.
I sit down at my desk. Relying on my overfamiliarity with my keyboard, I perform a manual export of information about all of my family members. For each one I pull out date of birth, location of birth, date of death, cause of death as these have the parameters I can base all my pattern-mapping algorithms on later.
I port over eighteen of my family members, with thirty-six to go. I learn nothing new about any of these people. They remain names and basic details on a screen. The only thing that sticks out to me is how many of the females have the same genetic condition.
I am suddenly not as individual as I thought.
I pour myself a whisky, from a bottle I was given as a Christmas present from work. It’s cheap and largely goes untouched, except for when I’m this drunk and need to sip something that slowly brings me back to consciousness. Each sip is like a jolt of electricity to my cerebral cortex. I’m weak in this moment. I know where I’ve stashed a pouch of tobacco. I see a stray rolling paper on my desk, poking out from under my keyboard. I pull at it, as carefully as I can in this state of inebriation, so as not to rip it. I tear some card from the top of the box the whisky bottle came in, and I roll it into a cylinder. It is my glossy roach. The fumes from the embossed foil will probably do my lungs more damage than inhaling the smoke filter-less. With an expertise and practised steadiness from two decades of drunkenly rolling cigarettes, the only level of Zen or calm I have ever attained in this state, I make myself a fag. I light it and listen to the paper crinkle as the tip glows amber for ‘get ready’. I inhale, exhale and think about the ol’ cancer. The tobacco forms a protective fuzzy shell around my entire body. I feel blessed to be alive.
The numbers don’t lie. It seems as though it was always inevitable I was going to die of cancer. The numbers speak for themselves. The probability is too much to ignore. I know it’s a small data set but the repetition of DNA patterns in a bloodline is inescapable. I’m bewildered, I don’t understand why I’m discovering this now. If the small data set of my family is anything to go by, this should have been obvious to me. A thought pops into my head – if the numbers don’t lie, I can map the cancer correctly. I can find it in genetic code. I can predict the occurrence of cancerous cells. I’m God. I’m a cartographer, building a map of the future. You can’t beat the numbers, there is no way. Good data does not lie. And good data can tell stories, lead us through difficult times, map out our lives, give us life itself. And take it away.
The One Who Wrote Destiny Page 10
