The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  Before they fall asleep, I ask Rakesh and Neha what they want for breakfast.

  Sugar rotli, Rakesh says.

  Neha looks through me, uninterested.

  Tomorrow, I think, I will find something to connect me to her. Rakesh’s stomach has been reached.

  I make us go for a walk.

  My darling, I want to show them where you taught our daughter to swim. She was so young when we took her to England, that she quickly forgot where she came from. I did not. I remember everything. I see the ghosts of our every footstep on these streets.

  They should see these shrines to her, proof that she existed, examples of who she was, beyond the confines of photographs.

  Jonathan makes a sudden gurgling sound as we pass him. He is sitting against the wall as he always does, where the green of the bush masks the green of his clothes, the green in his matted hair, the green around his face. The sudden noise frightens Neha – she leaps into Rakesh, who stumbles and yelps in pain. Jonathan leaps towards Rakesh and catches him before he falls. He moves oddly, wildly, splaying his arms and legs as he gathers Rakesh in to his chest.

  Rakesh barks in fear. Jonathan looks at his leg, grunts fiercely into Rakesh’s eye and he touches down the leg till he reaches the ankle. He clutches it tight. I’m frozen too. I do not intervene. I trust Jonathan’s instincts, so still and primal now. I know him, you see. When I first saw him there, against the wall, I asked him what he was doing. He sits and he waits for death, he told me. Why? I asked. Because death is the only destiny, he replied. The next day, when I walked past him again, I saw that what he was doing was strangely beautiful. He was trying to disappear in plain sight. He didn’t want anything from anyone and the easiest way to do that was to cease to exist. I watched as he ground leaves and soil together, kneading them in a well in his long tunic, till they became muddy and off-green, finding spilt atoms of moisture to help make the mixture wet enough to apply. He daubed himself over the course of three days, becoming greener and greener. The rest of the month was about the art of keeping still.

  He massages Rakesh’s leg, looking at me through his hair. Rakesh squeezes his eyes closed and waits for it to be over. Jonathan smells like duttee and dirt. Neha places a hand on his shoulder as he continues to grip Rakesh’s ankle. He does this for a minute and then lifts Rakesh to standing.

  Rakesh twirls his foot around. He nods and looks at me. It doesn’t hurt? my eyes ask. He shakes his head. Then he looks at Jonathan. It’s as though he hasn’t moved – he sits, legs akimbo, arms folded, staring into the distance, as still as he can manage. You cannot even trace an outline of shifted dirt.

  I stare at him for a while, trying to understand why he broke his cover for my grandson. Neha walks towards him. Jonathan continues to look at me. For a second, he breaks his stare to look at Neha, then back to me. Neha shows no fear now but stands in front of Jonathan and takes the Star Trek comic out of her back pocket. I asked her to leave it at home but she tucked it into the waistband of her jeans and pulled her T-shirt down over it. She unrolls the comic and holds it up to Jonathan’s face. Not so close that it’s intrusive but close enough not to be ignored.

  She holds it there for him to read the cover.

  I watch them both. He neither moves nor takes his eyes off me. Frustrated, she lifts up and down on her heels.

  She gets bored and drops the comic into his lap.

  Thank you, she says quietly. Thank you for not hurting my brother.

  Jonathan picks up the comic book and surveys the front page.

  He tears at it and shoves the cover into his mouth.

  Neha cries. She turns to me. I try to usher her away but she stands there for a few more seconds before following me. I pause to let her catch up, and cast an eye back to Jonathan. The comic has been flung away from him and he is back in position. Disappeared against the wall.

  I tell them a story of their mummy while we walk to a bookshop that sells comic books. In Gujarati. I have a plan.

  The shop is always open.

  I stand in the doorway and let the children walk in.

  It is a chaotic mess. This shop has no structure to it. Books find their way on to shelves without categories – there is no reason for school books to be next to romance, no reason for me to find Lady Chatterley’s Lover next to a cookery book.

  I watch as these two walk to the back of the shop. It is small enough for me not to lose sight of them.

  Neither Neha nor Rakesh know what to do. It is funny watching them react to freedom. Mr Shukla, the owner of the shop, does not even look up from a ledger he is annotating. I run my fingers along a shelf near the door, gathering a thick skin of dust. I lick at it and it tastes fermented on my tongue.

  Neha picks up a stack of what looks to her like comics and flicks through them. They are Amar Chitra Katha books, comic strips about Hindu deities, Jātaka folk tales, Buddhist parables. I want to buy a stack for her, replace Spock with Hanuman.

  Rakesh disappears from view but I do not worry. I am standing by the only way in and out of this dim dusty box of a room.

  Mr Shukla continues to ignore us.

  I cannot see myself in these grandchildren of mine.

  Neither of them knows what they want. They cannot do. Not at this age. It will take years of them chasing what they don’t want before they get tired and acquiesce to their destinies. I have no interest in their future, no investment in their destiny. And yet, here they are, against my wishes.

  I tried to have sex with Jonathan.

  One night, it was hot, sticky, I could not sleep. He was on my mind. It was a Sunday. I knew there was nothing outside – no Kenyans, no Indians, no British, no market, no drunks. Nothing.

  I had not felt this way since I left London. I remember fragments of the end of my time there: your cremation, my darling. Scattering your ashes in the Thames, so you could be an Englishman for ever. I sat with Nisha towards the end, while Mukesh looked after the babies. We watched Bollywood films, with her head in my lap. I massaged coconut oil in her hair. Mukesh, beleaguered with the twins in a pram, pushing them around the park until they slept. I remember the day Nisha died. We were watching a film, and a mummy yelled naheeeeee because her child had died. I laughed and did the same. Naheeeeeee, I called out, clutching at your daughter’s head. But she had passed. I left soon after this because I could not be there any longer. I remember that first year back here. People were so desperate for me to remarry, they kept introducing me to men. I was mourning you and Nisha, and missing my Chumchee, and instead of giving myself to this, I was meeting people, not as a mother or a masi, but as an eligible widow looking for companionship. I felt this stirring again that night. Not for any specific reason. There was no catalyst for the chemistry in my body other than the fact that I had not been touched in years. Decades. I wanted to feel something.

  I went for a walk. To walk off these tingles. Push them into the mud of the streets.

  Sea breeze. It blows things out of your brain.

  I saw Jonathan because the light bleeding from the moon highlighted the hulk of his body against the wall. In the dark, he didn’t look green any more. The orb of moon glinted off his eyeball. I stopped, then moved towards him. He didn’t move. Everything was static around us. Frozen. I moved closer. He neither flinched nor moved to accommodate me. He just sat there, staring . . .

  I sat next to him.

  I shuffled back, uncomfortably sticky in my saree, till my back was against the wall.

  I could not even hear him breathing.

  For a second I thought he was dead though I knew he wasn’t.

  I could feel the warmth inside him throbbing on his skin.

  He was still. He did not move.

  I felt the throb beat harder.

  I put my hand in the air in front of me, feeling the cool sea against my fingertips.

  Then I put my hand on his thigh.

  I wanted.

  I could feel his bones. There was no fat left on him. He h
ad wasted away.

  I didn’t dare move my hand until he showed a response. I didn’t know what to do. I expected him to stink of rotting and wasting and disintegration and street dirt. Instead he smelled of musty fungal growth, almost earthy. Like the dust in Mr Shukla’s bookshop. I started inching my little finger towards his penis, hoping for it to stir something in him.

  My finger curved and extended, millimetres closer and closer to his lap, where who knew what lay underneath his tattered clothing.

  He shifted.

  He placed his hand on mine, forcing it down on to his thigh so I couldn’t move it. Then he turned to me.

  No, he whispered, without looking at me. No.

  He released my hand and I removed it, brushing it off as though he had covered it in sand.

  Why do you do this? I asked. Why do you sit here?

  He turned and looked at me through the matt of coarse unkempt hair falling on to his face.

  You have a weakness in you. The women in your family will be cursed by it, the men by their own weakness. Who has cursed you? he said. He repeated the question, looking ahead once more. Who has cursed you?

  Then he went still again, as though he had never moved.

  How did he know about Nisha’s disease? My bad genes, the ones I gave her.

  Why did it take my daughter? I asked him, crying, thinking about the reality of her for the first time in a year. Why not me? Why am I stuck here?

  I am not God, he whispered. I can only see in front of me. I can only see what is going to happen, not why it will happen. I cannot see the patterns that thread everything together.

  I walked home and slumped on to my doorstep. I watched the sun rise, hoping for an epiphany. I felt tired the rest of the week.

  Rakesh walks towards me with a book thrust out in front of him. 101 Jokes, it says on the cover. I smile and hold it for him.

  May I have it? he asks.

  I nod. I’m starting to forget that I told Mukesh I would pretend to be unable to speak English.

  Neha comes back towards me. She has found a Batman book which she holds out. I smile and put it on the shelf, then pick up three or four Amar Chitra Katha books to show her, but she shakes her head and points at the Batman comic.

  I pick it up and place it in a pile with the joke book and the Amar Chitra Katha comics. It occurs to me that our stories, your story and mine, will die with me, because who will tell our histories? Mukesh? It must be me. I must tell them about their mother, their bapuji, their family.

  If they must be here, to pass the time, I will tell them your history and mine. Our history.

  Over dinner, I watch Rakesh and Neha sit in silence. I fear they are communicating with each other in their minds. They eat nothing. They are not difficult about it and do not cry, but they both look around the room, waiting for dinner time to be filed as defeat. I persist, eating slowly, tearing off shards of rotli and scooping up delicious oily bateta shaak into my mouth. I chew slowly, and wait till they are looking at me before swallowing.

  The radio is on. Playing Mohd. Rafi. Always Rafi.

  It is a song about how young people wander about, hopeless. I look at my grandchildren, who are still.

  I sing along.

  Neha stands up.

  Sit down, I say, motioning for her to remain where she is. We are eating.

  I’m not hungry, she whispers, then looks at Rakesh.

  I am eating, I say in English. It is rude to leave the table when someone else is eating. You have to ask to be excused.

  It’s strange talking in English. I never do it any longer and have forgotten more than I remember. I had to relearn Swahili. Being here, it’s essential to preserve things. Everyone wants to learn English and letting them know you speak it means you lose part of yourself. You will always converse in English. They may have given us our country back but they have left us their ways. We want that British passport and to be able to move around, be free. The world has been given to us. I am here now. English is a functional language with no poetry. When I hear a good Rafi line on the radio and translate it into English, it sounds flat. My world – it is not flat. The globe is not flat. We exist in tiny clusters. Now we have been given a burden. We were enslaved, then freed but still with shackles. Like the English language – and bone-china teacups, and politeness, and gratefulness. The English want us to be grateful. The English for please and thank you comes much easier to the tongue than abhara and shukriya, tafadali and asante.

  I came home because I could not pretend to like people any more.

  I am comfortable here.

  I am not required to speak in English.

  Why do you not speak in English? she asks.

  I nod.

  I do, I reply.

  No, she says. You speak in Gujarati, which we do not know. Sometimes you speak in English.

  Gujarati is our family language, I tell her.

  It is not my language, she shouts.

  It is the language your mummy and I spoke, I say, smiling and lifting my arms out to cuddle her.

  She is dead, Neha shouts.

  She thinks about it, then turns and bolts for the door. I continue sitting.

  Rakesh turns to her. Neha, man, come back, he says limply.

  She cannot open the door because I have locked it.

  Neha tugs at the door, kicks it, rattles it as aggressively as she can, shouting in frustration. Rakesh sits, looking at me, daring me to intervene. She drowns out Rafi. I finish everything on my plate as slowly as I can. I take two rotlis from the dubba and put them on to my plate. I pinch sugar from the pot on the table in my dhal-smeared fingers and sprinkle down the spine of one. I roll the rotli into a cylinder and offer it to Rakesh.

  Neha stops rattling the door and looks at her brother.

  Don’t, she says. Don’t eat it.

  I hold it aloft. His eyes are drawn to it.

  Don’t you see what she’s doing? She’s buying you. We can escape. Go and find Dad, go home, like we talked about. Don’t eat it.

  Rakesh tells me he is hungry. Neha is fuelled by the need to be right, by anger. Rakesh has baser needs. Food and, in the future, girls, money, compliments – these are the things that will make him do anything for ever more.

  When I was clearing away Nisha’s things, I found her handbag. Darling, I did not tell you. Going through it, throwing away all the dirty tissues and shopping lists and hairpins, I found the notes she had written when she went to see the fortune teller. That was when these children were still very young, only days before her death.

  Neha: egotist, hard-working, stubborn, avoid these numbers: 16, 12, 9, 22.

  Rakesh: clown, needs validation, lazy, avoid these numbers: 3, 13, 14, 22.

  I took them because I didn’t want Mukesh to throw them away, thinking things like this didn’t matter.

  I took them so that the children had a record of their destiny. And it comforted me to have these bits of paper with me here. It kept these children at a distance.

  Mukesh should want to hold on to these things.

  Rakesh can’t decide whether he wants my approval or Neha’s. Neha is still angry with me for saying that chips were for goras when she asked me to cook them for her on the first day.

  I look at the time. It’s 9.21 p.m.

  Rakesh takes the sugar rotli from my hands. Neha tuts and goes back to rattling the door as loudly as she can, begging for escape. The neighbours will not care. Be quiet, child, they’ll think, if they understand the cries in English for escape.

  Rakesh stands up and walks towards Neha, who is getting into a frenzy. He puts a hand on her shoulder without saying anything. He talks to her in their minds and it makes her stop.

  Rakesh tears the sugar rotli in two and hands half to his sister.

  The moment is so still and beautiful that I realize what’s been missing in this room the entire time. I thought it was Nisha. I realize now, it was me.

  I have been missing.

  I smile at my
two grandchildren, eating their halves of the sugar rotli, Neha with her back turned to me so I won’t be able to see what she deems a defeat.

  In that brief minute, my grandchildren and I no longer feel like strangers.

  The Bed Will Form the Heart of the Garden

  Watching Neha hold Rakesh’s hand as we amble around the museum, I think about our daughter and how she used to do the same for Chumchee.

  Do you remember, darling? How Chumchee did not have the confidence to go to places he had never been before. How he had so many anxieties that taught him to be cautious. We thought he would die from stress or from a heart attack, the way he seemed to panic and then eat and then panic and then eat. He was picking up a hot dog he’d dropped to the ground when the bus hit him. I cannot lay any of the blame on you. But you, specifically – I keep wondering how much of what happened was because you wanted it to happen. Maybe it was your fault. Maybe it was how you died, the way you weren’t around any more. Maybe it was that Indian restaurant. Everything started with that Indian restaurant. When you lost your job.

  Remember that man who would come in, wearing a pinstriped suit. The man with a red face who had no interest in those beneath him. You didn’t know what he did. Instead, you just knew him as Mr Landry. Mr Landry would call you Smiley.

  Whenever you saw him, he’d say, hey, Smiley, what’s happening tonight? What’s making you smile?

  It was benign – he probably meant nothing behind it. But you hated it, being called Smiley. Mr Landry came in often enough that we didn’t ever think he was a racist. He loved Indian food and tipped generously in a culture that doesn’t generally give tips for good service, unlike America. Still, the Smiley nickname would stick in your stomach like an ulcer. You told me you did not understand it.

  I have to repeat these stories to you so neither of us forgets our histories when we are together again.

  Hey, Smiley, what are the specials?

  Hey, Smiley, more poppadoms.

  Hey, Smiley, what’s the score? Have you got the radio on?