The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  ‘Whoa, Bernard Manning, okay. Why?’

  ‘Raks,’ I say, coming out from behind the bar. ‘What’s ten foot long and wrapped round a cunt? A turban. What do you call a good-looking Asian? Asif.’

  ‘What do you call an Englishman farting? British Gas.’

  ‘Go deeper. Go more racist.’

  ‘I feel like I’m on a hidden camera show, man. I mean, Uncle Dave. What is this?’

  ‘No one has called you a paki while you’ve been here, have they?’

  Raks looks at me weirdly, as though I’m talking in code.

  ‘No,’ he says. He shakes his head again, just to emphasize it. ‘No. Definitely not. What?’

  ‘Have they or haven’t they?’ I stand in front of Raks and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You can be honest with your Uncle Dave, my friend. You can always be honest with me.’

  ‘No,’ Raks says. ‘They haven’t. Everyone has been lovely. Everyone has been super nice. This is a dream come true. Thank you for the opportunity. It means so much to be here.’

  ‘You’re welcome, you know. Not enough young comedians show us the proper respect we deserve when they come through here. Instead it’s all, what does this mean for my career? Where am I going to go to next? How do I get to be a regular on a show like this? No one actually thinks to say thanks. A thank-you goes a long way. You see? Indians are very polite. I’ve always thought that. Polite. Very polite. Namaste – it means, I bow to you, right? It’s nice that when you greet someone, you show your subservience to them, your politeness by bowing.’

  ‘No wonder we got invaded,’ Raks says. ‘We’re always bowing to people, showing how weak we are. Something my dad once said.’

  I laugh. It throws me off the speech.

  ‘What I’m trying to show you, Raks, is what racism actually looks like. So that you might stop being a massive fucking paki and just say the bloody fucking joke that we have written for you.’

  Raks looks up. I have his attention now.

  ‘Say the fucking joke,’ I tell him. ‘It’s funny. It’ll get a laugh. People will think you’re a nice self-effacing Indian. Okay? You will say the joke.’

  Raks looks at the door. Yup, you’re right, mate. There is no one here.

  He says nothing.

  ‘Look at me,’ I say. I stand close to him. I finish my whisky. ‘Repeat after me. Uncle Dave . . .’

  ‘Uncle Dave . . .’

  ‘I will read the script . . .’

  ‘I will read the script . . .’

  ‘That you graciously wrote for me . . .’

  ‘That . . . you . . . graciously . . . wrote for me . . .’

  ‘Because . . .’

  ‘Because . . .’

  ‘I want to work in television again after today . . .’

  ‘I want to work in television again after today . . .’

  He is meek in his repeating. It makes me want to laugh in his stupid fucking face. I hope he realizes he will never be on any of my shows again.

  ‘Do you understand now?’ I say. ‘Do you understand now what a racist joke is?’

  He nods. ‘I didn’t say . . .’

  ‘Pardon?’ I say, poking at him. ‘What did you say?’

  I poke again.

  He looks up at me. ‘Do I need to do the accent?’

  I shrug. ‘Well, that’s up to you. Depends if you want that racist joke to get a laugh or not.’

  I leave him in the room. I consider locking it until after we’ve filmed the show.

  He is silent as I walk away from him.

  My favourite part of the recording day is the rehearsals. It’s a chance to see the comics’ natural reactions to our scripts before they get anaesthetized to them. To see the guest presenter giggle his way through the first run-through of his opening monologue and the put-downs he has for each member of the teams as he introduces them. To see the non-comedian, in this case the Daily Mail columnist, get his comeuppance time and again, until the point where he is immune to all the insults hurtling towards him, so that he’ll forget what a figure of hate he is for the duration of the recording. He’ll think they’re all together, the last gang in town. And then he’ll check his social media on the way home, and see what we all think of him, as the public have their say. I get to watch the improvisational genius of the long-standing team captains, their ability to segue seamlessly between politics and pop culture, their back and forth, the will-they-will-they of their on-screen relationship, the do-they-really-like-each-other-or-hate-each-other of their off-screen relationship.

  I’m glad there are no girls this week. They try to bring gravitas to the show. And how fucking unfunny is that.

  I return to my office and nod at Sri. To say, he’s doing the fucking joke.

  I switch my monitor on to the CCTV cameras and watch the green room, waiting for Raks to come back, see what he’s like. What is his body language saying?

  I worked on this sitcom in which we got a guy called Michael Jenkins to brown up to play a Muslim neighbour. He had one line per episode. Usually, towards the beginning, he would come into the shop and make an increasingly bizarre request. It was funny. But what really sold the joke was getting Michael to play him. I don’t even think we gave him a name. He was just the Mossie in scripts. We tried it with an early Prash Shah role but he didn’t test too well, and though he did okay it never got the laugh we needed. It had to be one of the signature guffaws at the start.

  Michael, browned up, sold it every time.

  Don’t tell me funny’s not funny.

  Raks enters the green room and sits down. He reaches for a towel, opens it up and buries his face in it.

  I eat an apple and ring Sri on the intercom.

  ‘Sri,’ I bellow, wanting to laugh. ‘Get some poppadoms for the green room, and a massive bowl of mango chutney. Sharwood’s. Not Patak’s. It has to be Sharwood’s.’

  The second run-through stalls because the Daily Mail columnist doesn’t like the constant references to his newly-dyed hair. I bet he’s done it because he’s about to run for office or use this to do more telly work. It’s very arresting. It would have taken about ten years off him if his actual face didn’t look ridden by gout. He keeps his right hand under the desk at all times.

  When we met I went to shake his hand; I led with my right hand, as you do. He kept his in his pocket and then lifted the disgusting ham fist to me – scaly, bloated and so red, like a dry serrano ham.

  ‘Gout,’ he said, before shaking my left hand.

  Dyeing your hair is the least of your problems, brother. You need to think about your health. Maybe eat less cheese, dine out on the blood of Syrian refugees only two days a week, eat a salad. Bloody hell.

  Anyway, the guest presenter keeps referencing it, and I might have to tell him to stop. Because there is a massive difference between a repetitive joke and a call-back reference. This isn’t Stewart Lee. He built his whole annoying shtick on one funny joke, overtold till it’s not funny and then retold till it’s funny again and then thrown away to be brought back at the end. That’s fine, Stewart, you talk to students for three hours for £50 a night. I’m in the comedy fucking business, mate.

  Repetitive does not work.

  And a call-back. On a television show with a tight editing process that cuts to script – it’d better be the best fucking call-back in the world.

  They take a rehearsal break – five minutes, for comfort. The euphemism for pissing is now comfort. Jesus fucking Christ.

  I head down to the studio to watch.

  Raks is still in his seat when I arrive on set. He’s looking at his phone. When I walk over he glances up at me.

  ‘All okay?’ I say. I look around. People are in earshot. I smile at everyone who walks past.

  ‘My twin sister told me, just before she passed away, that it was written in the stars or whatever that I would die at work. That was my destiny.’ He looks at his fingers. At the phone. ‘I didn’t get to tell her. Comedians die on their arse all the
time. And if you don’t die on your arse, well, you won’t get better. She said it, as we watched films together. She had worked on a thing that she reckoned would predict the future. She wanted me to get better. And in order to get better, she told me, I had to die. On my arse. It’s the gigs that suck, the jobs that sap your strength, the times you aren’t the funniest sad clown in the room that make you better. If I’m not driven by my failure, if I’m driven by success and ambition, why the fuck am I not a management consultant?’

  He looks up at me.

  I go to put a hand on his back. I don’t.

  ‘Raks, you need a few minutes to compose yourself?’

  ‘I am going to die,’ he says. ‘Every night.’

  ‘Dying is easy,’ I say, quoting the old adage. ‘Comedy is harder.’

  ‘Real comedy doesn’t make people laugh and think. It makes them laugh and change,’ he quotes back at me. We’re in a strange quote-off.

  I go for the big guns. ‘Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon – laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution – these can lift at a colossal humbug – push it a little – weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,’ I say. I have the quote on my wall and stare at it most days. It was a present from my mother-in-law, and bloody hell, she’d give me shit if she knew I thought about chucking it in the bin every single day. ‘Mark Twain said that.’

  ‘Is the joke funny?’ Raks asks. ‘I don’t even know any more.’

  Me neither, I want to say. Me fucking neither.

  The run-throughs are a strange environment. The crew is instructed to laugh as loudly and as emphatically as they can, to create the illusion that the jokes will have the ha-has, but also to help with pacing and timing, to ensure that we don’t tear through a script without leaving space for chuckles. Who knows what gets applause these days too?

  When it’s time for Raks to say the line, to do the impression, I watch his eyes. He knows it’s coming and there is a terror about him.

  He looks off camera. There is silence.

  When the set is cleared, I sit in the presenter’s chair and look out into the camera.

  ‘You could just not be on the show,’ I tell him.

  ‘It feels like a betrayal. I’ve never done an accent. For anything. Well, I used to, but that’s how you get by when you’re an immigrant kid. You do the voice, in your most 1980s sitcom way. You go full Short Circuit. You try to fit in and make yourself more palatable, more open to integration or assimilation by thinking your parents talk funny in the same way your so-called friends do. Do you know what code-switching is? It’s like a speaker alternating between two or more languages or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilingual speakers of more than one language sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Like when you have an Anglo-Indian, such as myself, in the room. I have three voices. I talk in Guj-lish, my normal voice and white comedy party. I don’t know whether my normal voice, in which I feel most comfortable, most safe, even feels like me any more. I’ve splintered into different personas. This is the trick of living publicly online with increasing watch and scrutiny by others. When I first started out on Twitter, I had ten-odd followers, all people I knew in the real world, people I could be myself with. As my following increased, I had to become less of myself and more of the public perception of me as the writer. And it made me lose track of who I was and what voice I spoke in. Nowadays, I ensure that when-ever I tweet about comedy things, I add the odd “fam”, “bruv”, “cuz” or “innit”, just to ensure the execution of my thought comes with the necessary rooting in my background. Do you get me? Uncle Dave, I am not that guy. This is not my fight. You need a Citizen Khan or a Goodness Gracious Me up in here. You have brown Stewart Lee. At least, that’s what I hope. So, in good conscience, I’m not telling that joke. I’ve written three alternatives. None of them show any political bias. They’re all dope, cuz. Get me?’

  I get up and I walk out of the studio.

  I stand in the disabled toilet for five minutes, timing it on my watch. I am so very fucking tired. I’ve had a Kirin cooling in my fridge since Tuesday. It will be at the optimum temperature to watch the show with. Simon’s out tonight anyway.

  I come back in.

  ‘Raks, we’re done,’ I say. ‘Get up, we’ll find a replacement.’

  We’ve interrupted the start of the rehearsal and I can hear one of the team captains say for fuck’s sake. I shoot him a look to remind him that my name’s the last one in the credits, and the one we linger on, so he can fuck the fuck off.

  Raks stands up like a naughty schoolboy. He pauses. I think he realizes everyone is looking at him. Not at me. At him.

  He holds up his hands and looks at me.

  ‘We’re fine, Uncle Dave,’ he says. ‘We’re fine.’

  If it wasn’t the time it was, I would have pulled him out anyway, to sweat him. But this is enough.

  ‘We’re running late. Set needs to be cleared in forty-five minutes for tech run-through.’

  Raks sits down.

  *

  When the joke comes, he gives it a self-conscious shot, and the loud laughter from the crew is enough to send me back to the screening room for another dram of the Talisker.

  I watch promos for our new season of comedy with the door locked.

  I walk past Raks in the corridor. He takes his phone out and pretends to be talking.

  I watch from my office. I like to gauge how the laughs fall through the speakers – it helps to hear the jokes that land. Because in the room, everything sounds funny. No one will be watching in the room when it’s broadcast on television, though.

  I get a text from Simon. It says U R MY SPACEMAN. I don’t answer. I don’t know what he’s referring to. He’s probably fucked already. I promise myself I won’t wait up for him. It’s like you’re priming yourself for an argument for hours so that when it lands, you either go aggressively or so limply there was no point bringing it up at all. It feels like it’s nearing its inevitable end.

  There’s an email from Raks’s agent thanking me for the opportunity. I delete it without replying.

  There are three more emails – one is a press release for a memoir, another has some suggestions for next week’s guest presenter, as though we don’t book this up months in advance, and the third is from one of the writers with some last-minute joke punch-ups. Too late, dickhead.

  I watch the feed of the live recording. It’s warm, and the guests are so-so. We are lucky to have such practised team captains, who are able to steer and punch and subvert and comment and lead, allowing our guests the space to give facts to answer the question.

  The jokes about the Daily Mail editor’s hair dye make it in. People laugh, then sigh-laugh, then laugh again as the references come thick and fast. Raks improvs a bit about junior doctors at a rave that has the whole crowd applauding. The guest presenter leads from the front, utilizing the script for every laugh, every single joke, every pause, every giggle, titter, groan. Thank you, me, I think.

  Thank you, me.

  I’m flicking through Broadcast when I hear Raks do an Indian accent that’s so perplexing, it sounds like a Welsh crow. My feet fall off the table and I lean forward. He is going for it. He is utterly going full throttle at the accent and the joke.

  It’s glorious.

  Well done, mate. I think. You heeded the warning.

  What follows is silence. Only silence. A single guffaw.

  I make a note to fix this in the edit.

  A Man Without a Donkey Is a Donkey

  Ingrid. Lamu

  La-la salama, Raks sings to himself as he tips his sister’s ashes into the Indian Ocean. He’s parroting the boy steering the dhow who started singing it. I ask what it means.

  ‘Sleep well, now,’ the boy says.

  I rub Raks’s back as he cries. He g
rabs my hand and pulls it to his face and my fingers are wet with his tears.

  He puts the urn on the floor of the dhow. The boy asks if he can have it. I nod.

  The song rattles around my brain. As the dhow cuts through the water, the sun glinting off the waves like television static, giving it the shimmer of bad reception, John plunges the urn into the ocean and swills out the last particles of Raks’s twin sister. Once he is satisfied, he places the urn under the bench.

  ‘Everything in Kenya is recycled,’ John says to me. ‘It is good for carrying water. Pole-pole. Slowly-slowly.’

  I smile at John and look out at the horizon. Everything is blue. It is a bright, sunshine-filled day, and despite this act that I have borne witness to, I am feeling at peace.

  Raks takes some deep breaths and looks at me.

  ‘Thank you for coming with me. I don’t think I could have done this alone.’

  ‘You aren’t alone.’

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to come here,’ he says. ‘I was meant to wait for my dad in Mombasa. He wanted to be there when I said goodbye to Neha. But I felt she would have liked to come here. She loved it that time we came as children. It felt like the right thing to do. Plus, I had to deliver that cheque for the will.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me things,’ I say. I know I have a face that looks as though it can be trusted with secrets.

  ‘She has fond memories of this place,’ he says.

  The boy steers us back towards the shore, our job done.

  ‘She once sent me a message, just before she died. It said, Find Ba. She is the key to everything. Sorry, I’m babbling. I haven’t spoken to anyone, really, since I left the UK. And my job involves talking for a living, so it . . . I’ll shut up.’

  He doesn’t, though. Raks goes on to tell me that until he received that message from his sister, he had barely thought about his mum’s mum for the last few decades, that visit of theirs a distant glimmer. And she repeated this on her deathbed, saying, ‘Our destiny is linked to hers. If you want to understand how we came to be as a family, you need to find out about her. What happened to her. She loved us both so much, and she didn’t need to.’