The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  ‘I’m not a racist,’ the waiter begs.

  ‘I didn’t say you were,’ I tell him. ‘I did not tell you that you were a racist. I said you wrote a racist thing. Do you even know the difference between the two?’

  Raks starts to stand up, to leave. I look at him until he sits back down.

  ‘Can you call the manager, please?’ I ask.

  ‘I am the manager,’ the guy says, looking around at the two or three other customers, hoping for allies, instead getting back a whole lot of stink-eye.

  ‘Well, you should be ashamed of yourself, then,’ I tell him. ‘I will be making a formal complaint, buddy.’

  I don’t know where this is coming from. My cousin told me I had become increasingly confrontational since working in the coffee shop. Like I had all this pent-up rage from smiling at people all day and treating them like they are always right. And this was making me project all my frustrations on to things I could control. I told him it was the worst thing he could do, to tell a woman of colour she’s being irrationally angry, like not only does she come from a subservient culture, but her womb is stopping her from acting in an appropriate fashion.

  We walk out of the bar.

  I keep the receipt.

  We’re walking towards the end of the block.

  ‘Can I take a photo of the receipt?’ Raks asks. ‘I want to put it on my Facebook. I reckon there’s something funny I can do with this.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ I ask him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he says, confused.

  ‘I argued for our people. And you sat there.’

  ‘I didn’t want to talk over you. Everything you said was perfect, actually,’ he offers limply.

  ‘You could have agreed more forcefully.’

  ‘Yes, I could have. I’m basically a coward.’

  ‘You’re a comedian. You’re supposed to be the bravest of the lot.’

  ‘Comedians have a thick skin. And a thin skin. On stage, when we’re in control, it’s perfect, and when we’re not, we’re getting better, stronger, harder, faster.’

  ‘You’re not turning this into material,’ I tell him. ‘This is life. Promise me.’

  He nods.

  I look at my phone, wondering if I can find myself an excuse to leave.

  I go to see his stand-up show.

  He opens with a bit about American sitcoms and the omnipresence of what he called ‘the wanking foreigner’. How everyone who is not American, from somewhere foreign, another culture, will be caught jerking off somehow by a beautiful Westerner.

  The frustration at not being able to get it on with the beautiful Westerner, the complications arising from adjusting to city life in Western society, the omnipresence of cleavage — it proves too much for ‘the wanking foreigner’. ‘The wanking foreigner’ will be impotent in front of women; these white girls will be the subject of their wanking fantasies. He says the word ‘wank’ so many times that it’s really funny, then funny, then really funny, then unfunny, then tedious, then more tedious, then the funniest thing in the world.

  Even though I’ve lost respect for him, I can’t help laughing.

  ‘The wanking foreigner,’ he says. ‘This is what America wants to tell itself – that its girls are “for internal use only”, that they don’t want to leave or to marry or fuck people from other places, that they exist purely for American dicks, and the only way to disempower the allure of the dusky foreigner is to turn him into the wanking foreigner, pathetic, and privately living out a perverse fantasy of unattainment.’

  The audience is with him, waiting for the punchline.

  ‘We are impotent, and hard,’ Raks says. ‘It’s confusing.’

  I laugh. The audience erupts, whoops and claps and belly-laughs.

  He’s good.

  He asked me to stay and wait for him after the show but I leave as he says goodnight.

  The audience applauds enthusiastically.

  He bows.

  I sit up off my seat and stand. I wait until he’s not looking and then I walk towards the door.

  Outside, men thrash away at plastic containers with drumsticks. The city is a cacophony. Even on its quiet streets, you can always hear cars and the squelch of sneaker on concrete. You can feel the buzz of electricity and wi-fi in the air. You’re breathing in the cloud. I stand outside and look around the intersection, either for a dive bar I can decompress in for an hour while I read my book, or a subway stop.

  I don’t know Crown Heights too well.

  The people walking past all look as though they work in publishing. Between the bookish totebags and Warby Parker glasses, the brogues and pressed chambray shirts, I might as well be suffering at a Jonathan Franzen reading with all the white people in the city.

  ‘Hey,’ I hear. ‘Rakhee.’

  I turn around. It’s Raks. He’s smiling apologetically. I smile back at him. I’m tired. I don’t want to stand here.

  ‘It was so hot in there,’ I say.

  He nods his agreement.

  ‘You were great,’ I assure him.

  He smiles. Like a baby, a baby dog.

  ‘I’m going to go home now,’ I offer by way of peace.

  He cocks his head to one side.

  ‘I’ll see ya,’ I say.

  ‘Wait, Rakhee,’ he says. ‘We didn’t get our baos.’

  He points across the road to a bao joint that has a service window.

  Three guys in vests and baseball caps lounge outside, smoking. One of them has a shirt draped over his shoulder that’s the same colour as the signage. Slow night.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ I say.

  ‘Is this because of that bar manager? That dickhead?’ he says.

  I want to tell him yes, that it is everything.

  That not saying anything, that smiling and either accepting the systems that oppress us or using them to tell a story to a bunch of strangers, where you get to control the narrative for maximum impact, it’s disingenuous and weak. We are gods. And we are treated like animals. For years we thought we were the problem. For years we were made to feel like we were being too confrontational, too sensitive, too unassimilated, making us feel guilty when we weren’t the problem, lying to ourselves that these things were in our heads, that no one else could see them.

  And then you’re handed a receipt that calls you Apu, and you find yourself explaining why the word is toxic, and you’re back where you started again. Alone, because it’s only ever you who calls it out. Everyone else counts on your bravery.

  ‘No, Raks,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to be at work tomorrow. And you have an adoring audience to charm again in an hour. Have a great rest of your trip.’

  He grimaces. ‘I fucked this up, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ I tell him. ‘It’s okay. You can turn it into material when you realize your destiny of greatness.’

  ‘A Donkey Will Always Say Thank You with a Kick’

  Uncle Dave. London

  The number of times I have to write ‘It’s just a joke’ in an email, I should have it as a template. These bloody over-sensitive left-wing comedians never get it. Your job is to be funny first.

  Funny first.

  No one is watching my show for my politics. They’re watching it for the jokes.

  I look at the bio of this guy and try to remember why we decided to put him in the show.

  Box-ticking exercise from upstairs, probably. More women, more coloured people, more disabled people. Do you fucking know how hard it is to find a Bengali paraplegic lass? I mean, don’t even try and ask for her to be gay as well.

  It’s exhausting.

  I’m trying to put on a weekly topical news show. Box-ticking should be for council meetings. It has no place in comedy. Funny. Is. Funny. How many times do I have to fucking say it?

  Raks Jani – not even nominated for a Perrier. Not even. And still here he is, refusing to say one of the many jokes we’ve given him.

  Racist, apparently.

&n
bsp; He should think himself lucky. He is killing comedy. He may not realize it but he is destroying the fabric of the funnyman industry. First, he thinks he’s owed a place in my show because he’s a minority. Secondly, think about the word, minority. Who does he think the majority of our audience is? Fucking Mr Patels up and down the country.

  Sometimes this shit forces the racist out of me. Just because I’m so fucking furious at having my fucking show meddled with. It’s a comedy show. It’s not supposed to put representation above funny. Funny is funny.

  He’s not even done a major tour yet.

  I’m so angry, I don’t even reply to Simon with something bland like, he’s free to suggest alternative jokes, as long as we get takes of both. Both Simon and I know what’ll end up in the edit. I don’t email that back.

  Instead, I’m pacing my office, looking out through the glass at my production worker bees. A quick headcount – Sri, Ming, Ore, Paul, Mo – yeah, we’re fucking representative here. Those guys, fucking hard workers, that’s why they’re here.

  Box-tickers like Raks make things twice as hard for those here on merit.

  I storm out of my cubicle and stand in the main office. People look up at me. They feel my presence when I enter a room.

  ‘Are they still in rehearsals?’ I ask Sri, who has a live camera feed straight to the studio. She looks up from one screen to another, then shakes her head without looking at me.

  I walk towards the stairs, trying to see, in the reflection of the glass door, if people are looking at me, knowing that someone is about to get bollocked.

  *

  I met Raks on Monday. He was booked already but came in with his agent, darling Dotty, to come and meet me. She probably told him I’m a kingmaker and he needs to pay his tribute to me. Eat the man’s shit, she said to him, and you’ll be rivalling Jack Whitehall for saturation point.

  I’m not going to argue. It’s a fair assessment.

  I’ve eaten enough shit to know that shitting it back out the other side and feeding it to someone else – well, that’s where the power lies. If there’s no one lower than you to eat your shit, you’re literally the bottom of the shitheap.

  He made me laugh. He said, due to the traditions of his culture, he now has to call me Uncle. Uncle Dave, he called me. Thank you for the opportunity, Uncle Dave. I laughed.

  He talked a bit about his Edinburgh show, how he found it, his second full hour, a personal show about the death of his twin sister. Barrel of laughs. Grief is only funny years later. He talked about the show like I had seen it. He talked about the show like I knew everything about him and his comedy. I stopped him.

  ‘Raks, I know a lot of your sort.’ I paused, to let him think I meant Asians. ‘Up-and-coming comedian is the break-out star of Edinburgh. You’re heading for big things fast. And you want it all now. You want Live at the Apollo, you want panel shows, you want meetings about the sitcom loosely based on your life. But being the break-out star is only the first due you have to pay.’

  Raks nodded like I was giving him the keys to the car that’ll drive him to the kingdom.

  ‘That’s true, Uncle Dave.’

  ‘This isn’t advice, Raks. This is a warning. I’ve seen too many of you lot crash and burn and die on your fuckin’ arse too many times. Don’t die on your arse, my friend.’

  ‘Good advice, Uncle Dave,’ Raks said, like he was patronizing me. Like he knew.

  ‘What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever been given?’ I asked, throwing him a curveball.

  ‘To be honest, Uncle Dave,’ he said, ‘my dad’s advice was always, stay away from white people, they want to murder you. So at this point, what you told me, even if you meant it as a warning, it’s now single-handedly the most important piece of advice I’ve ever been given.’

  ‘Your dad sounds like an interesting man.’

  ‘I mean, most white people do want to murder him. He’s a dickhead.’

  I laughed.

  I have to walk through the studio to get to the green room and the dressing rooms. It’s just the guest presenter and the two regular hosts who get dressing rooms. The other two on the panel, we shove ’em next to the bowls of dry-roasted peanuts, sweets and ply them with coffee and alcohol and hope for some sort of jittery high-octane performance. Also, if they’re politically opposed – like Raks and this Daily Mail columnist – then hopefully they’ll either want to fight or fuck by the time the cameras roll.

  Television, you do make my dick hard.

  Today’s guest presenter makes my dick hard too. Maybe because the way he travelled round India on those railways and managed to remain posh and British was so utterly charming. Who am I kidding? I love a posh knowledgeable bloke with a strong chin.

  Charlie told me that my dad has a strong chin. Maybe there’s something in that.

  Raks is on his phone when I storm into the green room. He looks up and smiles, nervous. He knows why I’m here.

  The Daily Mail columnist looks up from his paper – the fucker is reading his own fucking paper – and nods at me.

  I beckon Raks with my finger. My index finger. I will not give him the benefit of words. The stupid curly-topped arsehole. Just one look at his tired, bearded face encased in a cauliflower of hair and I want to break him down into tiny little pieces.

  He gestures to himself. Who, me? he asks.

  ‘Of course you, who the fuck else am I pointing at?’

  The Daily Mail columnist lowers his paper on hearing the word ‘fuck’. I see a smirk. Raks stands up and follows me as I leave the room.

  I don’t tell him where we’re going. We’re silent as we walk the corridors. When we reach the stairs I head down to the basement.

  I can hear him behind me. Almost skipping.

  In the basement, there’s a screening room, empty and soundproofed.

  It hums with the dampness of foam walls and heavily cushioned chairs.

  ‘Whisky?’

  He hesitates.

  He’s working out whether this is something he wants to do. His big telly break. Circumventing the usual route of smaller appearances and going on one of the big guns. And I’m offering him alcohol when he needs his brain the most.

  I’m not stupid, son.

  ‘Join me,’ I say.

  I turn to him. He nods. His entire head of hair shakes when he does. I walk behind the bar and fiddle about in the cupboard till I feel the neck of a bottle at the back. I pull it out.

  Secret supply. Everyone else gets bottled lager and boxed wine. This is for me. For emergencies.

  Noting that it needs to be replenished, I pour two fingers each of the Talisker in plastic cups and put the bottle down. I hand one to Raks.

  I like to wait, to see where they sit, what they do, how they react. I hover behind the bar.

  Raks stands and waits for my lead. He is scared.

  ‘Take a seat,’ I tell him.

  Raks leans back on to the arm of one of the folded chairs. He looks at me and waits. He shifts till he is straddling the armrest like a bike saddle. He puts one foot up on the folded chair it’s attached to.

  ‘Indian-style, eh?’ I tell him.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s how Indian uncles sit, right? I had this guy tell me that he had to ban his kids from sitting Indian-style at the dinner table. He’s Indian too. Said it was rude.’

  ‘Dunno. It’s just comfortable, sorry.’

  He puts his foot back on the floor.

  ‘Apparently all Indians, even you, have elongated tendons in your heels, helps you with that squat that you all do, while you’re talking, or cleaning, or shitting or whatever.’

  ‘Wow, I never knew that.’

  I wait for the interaction to sink in.

  ‘Tell me a racist joke,’ I say.

  Raks stands up.

  ‘Sorry?’ he says, confused.

  ‘Remember when you came in for a meeting with your agent? And I gave you that warning.’ I nod to prompt. He looks confused. ‘A
nd you said you’d only ever received good advice from me.’ He nods. ‘Trust me. Tell me a racist joke.’

  Raks looks at his shoes, then brings the cup of whisky up to his mouth. He sniffs it, touches the rim to his nostril, then places it on his bottom lip before tipping it.

  ‘What was that?’ I ask, as he baulks at the taste.

  He doesn’t answer me. Instead he murmurs, ‘I lost.’

  ‘Raks, mate, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Sorry – pardon?’ he says. He looks confused for a second. As though he’s just woken up in a strange market in another country.

  ‘The thing with your nose?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘That. My twin sister taught me that. I always spill drinks down myself. There’s a blob of wet on most of my T-shirts that looks like Boris Johnson’s head. And she said it’s because I pour the drink before it’s arrived at my mouth. I need to ensure the glass is at my mouth before I pour. That’s my problem. So she said, touch it to your nostril, then to your bottom lip, then you can tip it. Now it’s like a nervous tic.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Okay. I’m sorry about your loss, by the way. I heard she . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ Raks says, nodding. ‘Thanks. Thank you.’

  I pause. Enough for it to not seem like a heartless segue.

  ‘So, now tell me a racist joke.’

  ‘Why?’ Raks asks. ‘I don’t know why. I don’t even know if I know any. Like, are they racist? To who? To me? To you? Am I trying to find an aren’t-white-people-the-stupidest joke? Am I supposed to kick another race? I don’t get the brief.’

  ‘Tell me a racist joke,’ I say. I’m starting to lose my patience with this guy.

  ‘The British Empire, am I right? What’s the deal with the British Empire? Am I right? Am I right, ladies and gentlemen? Remember to tip your waiter.’

  Raks shakes his drink at me and smiles.

  I say, ‘My regular Indian taxi driver picked me up whilst singing along to his crappy Punjabi music at the top of his voice. He smiled when I pulled out my set of new earplugs. “Looks like you’ve come prepared this time,” he said, laughing. I smiled back at him and replied, “Yes,” as I put them up my nostrils.’