The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  These types of wake I remember well. They’re often an opportunity for family to catch up, so relations descend on the house to show their faces and offer condolences, eat the lukewarm khichdi and leave. You either sit reverentially in the room where the prayers are happening or natter in the kitchen with the aunties.

  This is the first time I’ve been to a Gujarati wake in a cramped flat above a photocopier shop, though.

  People will look at me and assume I’m a cousin, probably Prabhula masi’s daughter. Every Gujarati family has a Prabhula masi.

  You imagine these occasions to be sombre. People sit in front of the mandhir and sing tunelessly, for thirteen nights, going from sad to more sad to depressed to bored to numb to sad again.

  This wake is much more alive.

  The hallway is the battleground for a four-way Nerf-gun fight, girls versus boys; the girls, at the top of the stairs, are obliterating the boys who fight relentlessly, too stupid to realize that if you have the high ground, moral or physical, you win the war. The kitchen is brimming with aunties, kakis, masis, mamis, fais and granny bas, all shrieking in Gujarati and cackling through the sides of their teeth. The men sit in a circle in silence. B4U is on. Shah Rukh plays coy with Kajol. I remember the song well, though the television is on mute.

  I feel at home. With the men in the front room and the women in the kitchen, I try to find somewhere to compose myself.

  I move into the dining room, which appears empty, where snacks are laid out in steel bowls. I take a samosa and let it crunch into my mouth. There’s too much garam masala on the potatoes but it is warm and tastes exactly like the pre-made samosas my mum buys and deep-fries. I haven’t been home for months. The train to Leicester costs the same as twenty-two bottles of cheap wine and I enjoy getting drunk more than seeing my parents.

  It’s hard to feel like an intruder when the house seems familiar. The clear plastic table cover, the huge Hanuman painting on the wall, the statue of Kali stamping fools’ heads off, the steel bowls of samosas, bhajias and chutney, the music.

  It takes me a second to realize. It’s a song from the film Naseeb. Hema Malini, in a shimmering black sequinned dress and ridiculous fringe that’s also a quiff, sings with the microphone at arm’s length, while Amitabh Bachchan plays the happy-go-lucky waiter in a red suit, John Jani Janardhan, falling in love with her from across the room.

  ‘Naseeb?’ I say, to an empty room, hearing the Nerf-gun fight descend into boy tears.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I hear from a small voice to my right.

  I jump in shock and turn to face the chair.

  It’s him – Raks Jani. Sitting in an ill-fitting black suit with a black tie that’s too thin, wiping clean his glasses as he squints at me.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ I tell him.

  He stands up, putting his glasses back on. I steel myself to do the thing I’ve been paid to do. Here he is. I can do this job within five minutes of arrival, with a bonus samosa in my belly, and go straight home to invoice for the £750 fee.

  It’s ridiculous. I don’t understand it.

  He tries to smile.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I mean, it’s not. I just mean, thank you. Thanks for coming, right? You’re, errrr . . .’ He hesitates, trying to pluck my name out of the same roster of Gujarati cousin names that we all live through, hoping to land on a girl’s name.

  Manish, Dipesh, Sailesh, Rajesh, Sita, Rita, Manita, Kajal, Radha, Dipti, Vimal, Vipal, Bipal, Minul, Minal, Rinum, Manan, Minan, Minay and Karthik. Maybe Manita, Tina, Naina, Bhawna, Amee, Mira, Mina, Bina. It’s in there somewhere.

  My nerve breaks.

  I do what I’m paid to do.

  I reach out my hand to his.

  Instinctively, he reaches his out to mine too. I keep my face frowning and serious, as instructed. One foot back. One foot forward.

  I thrust my hand into his and shake three times, firmly, up and down definitively. I look him in the eye and his sightline darts between our hands and my face. When the hands have shaken three times, I draw mine back in a wiggling-fingered explosion.

  ‘Good. Bye,’ I say firmly. ‘Good. Bye. One day you will die. Until then, good. Bye.’

  Raks hesitates, then he looks at my hands again, surprised. Almost robotically, he replies.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he murmurs. ‘When I die, I’m bringing you down with me. Goodbye.’

  I can see his face tense up, as though he’s holding back a well of tears. I can feel his body trembling. He snorts as a tear falls down his cheek. He hunches and puts his hands in his pocket, frozen.

  I let go, grab another samosa, turn quickly and walk out of the room. My cheeks sting. My head is bowed.

  I do not look back at him.

  A passing masi offers me a, ‘Hello, beti, how’s your mum?’

  ‘Fine,’ I stammer, high-pitched, desperately searching amongst the rubble of open-toed sandals and black Clarks shoes for my Converse, wishing I’d chosen shoes that you could slip in and out of, instead of having to stop somewhere, put the things on and tie up the exceedingly long laces.

  I see my beaten formerly-white Converse with the biro marks on the left shell toe from a long boring train journey, and I pick them up, rushing out of the door towards the front garden. I can sit on a wall and put them on.

  I feel like crying. What was I doing in there?

  I still don’t understand the job.

  £750’s a lot of cashola when you’re a jobbing actor, especially a woman who has to deal with castings involving your body, nudity, humiliation and dressing like you’re well up for it.

  Busty female. We require a scene where we spray fluid on you and you make out with a small old man.

  Thugs will try to grab your butt so I need you to wear something enticing but conservative-ish.

  You will be caressed in a subtly erotic way by a deformed pig-man.

  Needs to be okay that we glimpse her butt in the shower and comfortable with the ‘rape’ scene.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I hear, a few houses down as I lean against the brick side wall of a garage and try to wrench my sweaty half-a-size-too-small Converse on to my flat feet.

  The film contains some tasteful allusions to sexual assault.

  That last one, that one nearly lost me my agent – sick of me saying no to parts with mostly one line, one nipple, one butt cheek, my agent took umbrage with this one – it was a feature, with a semi-famous director, if your Mastermind specialist subject was British directors with derivative gangster film knock-offs to his name.

  I told him I was holding out for the main part in the Mae West biopic. The timing was canny. The next day a Mae West biopic was announced in the trade papers. I sent my agent a picture of myself in a blonde wig, with the caption, ‘What time’s the audition?’ and it must have charmed him enough not to dump me. I mean, he’s a shit, the industry’s a shit but having an agent is better than years without one, like I had. At least I can say I’m represented.

  I turn to see Raks, running down the road.

  He stops, panting, in front of me as I do the standing-up lacing of my trainer. He is sweating. He takes off his glasses to clean them again. His right eye is slightly off-centre; his pupils beady, intense, as though they’re searching for something and if he can’t find it, he’ll cry. I know nothing about this person but I feel sorry for him.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ he asks, putting his glasses back on. ‘What you just did. What the fuck was that?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I’m not sure I’m supposed to say what I was doing or why I did it. My agent didn’t specify the way to behave if confronted, or how much I could share about why I was there.

  ‘What you did. Wait,’ Raks says, stopping. ‘You’re ummm . . . you know . . . The . . .’

  He mimes the handshake, pulling a face as though he has smelled something rotten.

  ‘What?’ I ask, my shoes on now, ready
to flee.

  ‘You’re not related to me, are you? I know you, though. Who are you?’

  I smile. I can’t believe he doesn’t remember, though I’m sure he’s done the joke time and time again – and I bet he cringes every time.

  When I asked my friend Mike – who had been up that night too, trying out a five-minute set, his third attempt at stand-up, blagging his way on to a bill with more established up-and-coming people like Raks – to explain what had happened, he said crowd work was essential for when your jokes weren’t landing. In the case of people not finding your preprepared stuff funny, you could rely on taking the audience on and making fun of their hair, jobs, general appearance, choice of companion or place of birth.

  ‘Haven’t I seen you on Shaadi dot com?’ I say.

  When he said the same words to me, it was a cheap shot. Like I was the only Asian in the room apart from him, so hearing a culture-specific reference to a crappy marriage site was weird. He was doing badly that night, sweating his way through the set, begging the audience with his beady eyes to love him, and they just weren’t responding.

  I was his first crowd work of the evening – I was three rows back, and, to all intents and purposes in the dark, but he pointed at me, and made me feel exactly what I was – the only brown person in the room. He didn’t count. He had a platform. I sat amongst the white people of the Amersham Arms and let him reduce me to every conceivable stereotype, jolting him from laugh to laugh. ‘Maybe our mothers should meet. Wait – what caste are you? I’m Shaggy caste. They call me Mr Lover-Lover.’ It wasn’t even funny – people were creasing, though, because he was confirming all their expectations of our culture. Because if you acknowledge that the stereotype might be based in reality, boy, does it make white people more emboldened to laugh. Not like they find it funny. But that they are revelling in how superior they are.

  ‘Oh,’ he says.

  He remembers. I smile at him. The impact of what I’ve done to him, for him, has gone and I’m angry again. Just as I was when I blogged about it the next day on my ‘Chai Tea is Tautology’ blog.

  ‘It’s cool, man. Laters, yeah,’ I say, walking away and cringing into my coat collar.

  He runs after me.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he asks.

  He talks softly when he’s not on stage. Like a librarian worried about the noise levels.

  ‘Do what?’ I ask, not stopping.

  ‘Why did you do that handshake, say those words? How do you know about that? Who are you?’

  I want to tell him that following me down the street is no way to get a woman to answer him. I don’t owe him anything while he has a threatening attitude.

  ‘Laters, man,’ I whisper.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, more urgently, loud, pathetic. ‘Please. Why did you do that? I need to know.’

  This is the park where my friends and I used to come and watch people play basketball. Someone would have a Walkman connected up to some battery-powered speakers playing tinny RnB and gangsta rap. We’d sit on the grass next to the nets and watch the game. No one really knew the rules, and those around what constituted travelling were enforced arbitrarily. I’d bring theplas and bhajias made by my mum so that I didn’t have to spend money on snacks. My friends brought cans of Coke and cigarettes stolen or cadged from elder brothers and we watched basketball. As though it was our nation’s pastime. The park was thriving then.

  Even though the swings look brand new, the park is empty. The netting around the basketball courts has been torn down and the grass tennis courts are now a meadow. The public toilets are boarded up.

  We sit on the swings.

  I’m swinging freely while Raks remains rooted to the spot, his arms slumped around the chain to keep him from falling face first on the ground.

  ‘I was paid, through my agent, to go to a funeral and do that handshake and say those words to the brother of the deceased. You. I don’t get many offers of work at the moment that aren’t playing the wife of a terrorist or a girl with her tits out, and seven hundred and fifty notes is seven hundred and fifty notes. So I did it. Sorry if it upset you.’

  ‘It did,’ Raks is looking at the ground again. ‘You know, my sister and I used to come here and play tennis for hours. Back when she did exercise. Look at the courts now. It’s like a rainforest. Almost extinct. Verdant but nearly extinct.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  ‘My sister, my twin sister, that was our handshake. We’ve been doing it for years, decades now, since a trip to Kenya when we were kids. It was our thing. Good. Bye. One day you will die. Until then, good. Bye.’

  His voice cracks. He presses his lips together tightly, hoping that if he doesn’t open his mouth he won’t cry.

  I look at him sympathetically and slow my swinging.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘We never told anyone,’ he says, before he lets out a sigh, low and rumbling, like a Tube train beneath my feet.

  His shoulders shake and he twists his heels inwards and out, into the wood chippings. I notice he’s wearing flip-flops with black socks.

  ‘Only my ba saw it,’ he says. ‘We invented it when we went to visit her. It was our thing. Her and me. Only us. Not even my dad knew about it. How did you?’

  ‘I’m just a jobbing actor, dude,’ I tell him. ‘I read the script, I say the lines, I get paid. Maybe it’s like a message, beyond the grave, from your sister.’

  He looks at me and takes his glasses off.

  ‘But why?’ he asks. ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘So she has a chance to say goodbye, I guess. It’s quite beautiful.’

  Raks turns to me and slips off the swing, falling on to the chippings below. I laugh, without meaning to. He stands up and pretends to slip on a banana peel, falling down again.

  When he stands again, it is directly in front of me. He smiles. There are dark circles under his eyes and a tear hanging from a beard hair.

  ‘Can I see you again?’ he asks.

  I meet him outside the off-licence. He is holding up a blue bag of Red Stripe tins. I open my handbag and show him the nice-but-cheap Tesco wine I read about in the Guardian Weekend magazine.

  He wants to kiss me on a cheek because he bends slightly when I offer a hand, which he takes, before the bow. I offer the whole of my cheek, to avoid a straying on to my lips (it’s happened before) and when we release, he goes in for a second one. My face is so far over, that as I relent and switch cheeks, our lips graze.

  I can’t help it.

  I laugh.

  He kisses my other cheek.

  ‘That’s very continental of you,’ I say.

  ‘It feels like how they do things in the movies. Believe it or not, this is my first ever date.’

  ‘Do you usually just get drunk in groups of people and snog whoever you’re closest to who’s single? Then you end up dating them for six to eighteen months?’

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘No. I don’t know that many people. Actors are always fucking, though. The work is so antisocial, the only thing to do is just get drunk and shag people after filming or whatever.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stand-up’s the worst for a social life. You spend your entire career being as social as humanely possible. Chatting to people, making them laugh, drinking with them. And then you competitively socialize with comedians afterwards, getting pissed and trying to be the funniest person in the room. It’s exhausting. You realize how much of your life you spend viewing yourself through the lens of other people. You realize you care less about how you think of yourself and more about what others think of you. And that professional life, it becomes your sense of worth. I don’t want to socialize in my free time. I want to eat pizza in dark rooms and watch films. And sleep off my daily hangover.’

  We fall into a weird silence as we walk to the restaurant. There’s a pressure to keep talking on dates, as a silence will assume you’re boring each other. I t
hink of something to say. We arrive at the restaurant – a scuzzy-looking kebab shop that from the outside looks untasty, unhealthy. But if you’re brown, you know it has the best £2 kebab rolls, and you always get the dhal too. I can see Raks’s smirk when we enter. The place is my choice and I haven’t warned him. On the wall there are posters of pehliwan strongmen in their leopard-print pants, standing next to gadas to show how strong they are.

  ‘What’s good here?’ he asks.

  ‘Avoid the curries. Kebab rolls, kathi rolls, dhal. Only.’

  ‘Sign me up,’ he says. ‘What’s a kathi roll?’

  I look at him incredulously, one eyebrow arched, the diagonal opposite corner of my mouth upturned in a Bruce Willis quizzical smirk.

  ‘I don’t eat Indian food much,’ he says.

  ‘This is Calcutta food.’ I point to the sign: Sweet’n’Spicy – Kolkata cuisine. ‘Don’t be that guy. The one who conflates all of South Asia into generic Indian.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Raks says, almost embarrassed. ‘I just find the food too heavy, you know? It smells amazing, though.’

  We sit. I thump down on to my plastic seat, deflated with the thought that I’ve chosen poorly with this restaurant.

  Raks takes his glasses off and cleans them. It’s a particularly annoying nervous tic. He looks distracted.

  ‘What you been up to today?’ he asks. ‘Any more ridiculous castings?’

  ‘I’ve been rehearsing for a play.’

  I explain its premise. I’m playing an ayah to the daughter of a British soldier and he becomes obsessed with me. I use his obsession to bring home some truths about the occupation of India. Neither of us wins and in the end I die by letting him stab me because I won’t sleep with him and because my brother has joined the resistance. The stabbing is a dream-scape metaphor for sex, dealing with themes of otherness, about bodies and the violence inflicted on them and being a woman of colour. Or at least that’s what the playwright told us. We’re still trying to work the themes into the script. It’s going to Edinburgh. I ask if he’s going.

  ‘Yeah,’ he nods. ‘My show is just – well – it’s okay. I’m struggling with it. I don’t really know if I can do it now.’