Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  And then, at the pre-agreed nap-time in our dream routine, you slept. Crashing hard, in your basket. Which, by day, you slept in no problem. I woke you after an hour as promised and handed you to your mum, who took you downstairs to play.

  I cannot tell you anymore how I felt that day, such is the nauseating cruelness of parenting: in the moment, it feels like it’ll never end. When you recollect it later, it’s a wistful memory. Your body forces your mind to wipe itself clean of the drudgery.

  A few months ago, a friend handed me her newborn so she could go to the toilet. As soon as I grabbed her and felt her lolloping loose head wobble, I supported her neck and cuddled her into me, I started jigging about on one foot and then the other, and it was there, like a shot of PTSD to the system, the flashback to those crueller more confusing times.

  That night, night three, you slept almost all through the night. You were broken and tired and you fell asleep, on your own, your eyes heavy with fatigue. I aided your sleep with a white noise app on my phone, and fell asleep in our bed, while your mum took refuge downstairs.

  As it turns out, the night after the night I thought was going to be the first night of the rest of our lives was actually the first night of the rest of our lives because after that, your mum and I started to claw back our evenings, get more of a sense of ourselves, have conversations that weren’t panicked ones about what needed to be done with you.

  Everything did change.

  By this point, it was Tuesday morning. I emailed my friends and said: It was good to see you Saturday. I don’t think I’m ready yet to start going out again. There’s stuff we need to sort at home. But it’s nice to know you’re there.

  I got an emoji thumbs up in return. From one of them.

  It’s years later, and you still struggle to sleep. This time, it’s worrying about bad dreams about wolves that stops you from shutting your eyes.

  ‘I don’t want to have bad dreams. I always have bad dreams,’ you tell me night after night. We take you to see wolves. You’re told they’re harmless and shy, a far cry away from the stereotype of the big bad wolf of fairy tales. Your wolf is my Rumpelstiltskin, stealing my baby sister away.

  I struggle to tell you that they’re just dreams. That they’re not real. It doesn’t comfort you. You lie there, night after night, whimpering, getting louder if I express annoyance.

  One night, I whisper in your ear. I tell you to visualize the place you’re happiest.

  ‘You’re on a beach. The sky is blue, the water is clear, it’s sandy and warm and you’re sitting next to your sister, as she shovels sand into a bucket. And your mum is on the other side of her and she tells you to shush, to listen to the waves crash gently before they reach your toes. And then I appear with four ice creams. There’s chocolate for everyone and strawberry for you. And as you lick your ice cream, and look out to sea, you know there is nowhere else you would rather be. Because this is your happy place.’

  And every night, you sleep hard, with the ebb and flow of the water in your ears.

  ‘Come here,’ your dada says to you.

  ‘Dada, will you play with me?’ you ask again.

  ‘Dada can’t hear you,’ he says to you. ‘Dada is deaf. Come here!’ he demands again.

  You stop playing with the big Lego bricks and approach him. He lifts you up and hugs you. You sit on his knee and wait patiently for whatever he has called you over for.

  ‘Will you read a book with me?’ you ask.

  ‘Dada hasn’t got his glasses on,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll read to you,’ I say, putting the Lego away. ‘Once we put the Lego away.’

  ‘But I’m still playing,’ you say, kicking your legs out in frustration.

  You get off your dada’s knees and come over to me, carrying on building the tower you’ve been concentrating on. The book is left in your dada’s lap.

  ‘Why don’t you play Lego with her?’ I suggest to your dada.

  ‘My back, beta,’ he says, rubbing at his lower back. ‘I’m in pain, bwana.’

  Because you don’t see him often, your dada just wants to cuddle. He doesn’t know what you’re into and doesn’t like to ask questions.

  It’s like when we were growing up. Our interests were our own to curate and indulge just as long as they didn’t cost money. We didn’t sit down at the dinner table together as a family and talk through the day, debate the news or rhapsodize about what we were currently obsessed with. It was in our bedrooms your fai and I developed our personalities.

  One hot summer’s day a few years ago, I made myself a gin and tonic at dada’s house. A cool summery refreshing one with cucumber to trick me into edging towards my five a day. It looked so delicious I made another, for me, for your fais, for your mum.

  ‘Oh,’ your dada said. ‘I didn’t realize you liked gin now. I thought you were a red wine drinker.’

  He opened the cabinet to show me four bottles of the same red wine your mother and I liked from our local supermarket. The same bull insignia peeking out from the back of the shelf. Drink me, it seemed to be saying. Drink me to get through this family occasion. He had drunk that same wine when he visited, taken a photo of the label and then assumed that was what we liked. So he’d bought multiple bottles. Sweet, in a way. Now, he was discovering, I liked gin.

  The next time we visit, he tells me, ‘There is gin in the cabinet.’

  Confusingly for him, I want a red wine. I open the cabinet to find three different new bottles of gin, and no red wine.

  This is entirely my relationship with my dad. It is born out of him making grand gestures to wallpaper over his lack of participation in the day-to-day of my life. In my teenage years, I resented how much he worked. I didn’t appreciate that he chose offering me security and opportunity rather than time. He was desperate for someone in his family to go to university. I was the first one. His sacrifice allowed that.

  But then I look at the patterns that shape us both, the intersection of how we think and act, and I see his work obsession in me. I see his work ethic. I see patterns of distraction, being lost in thought, thinking about work, unable to socialize unless drinking. Sober thoughts stray towards work. Both of us stare into space, thinking about work. If you ask a simple question, it takes us a good five seconds to concentrate. It’s almost like you’re being ignored.

  He wasn’t absent. He was present. He came home every night. He showed love in ways other than interaction. It took me years to understand that.

  When we look to our parents for modes of how to step into those spaces ourselves, we tend to establish what worked and what didn’t. Were our parents good ones or bad ones?

  We rarely allow them the right to be complicated and sometimes have their own shit going on, meaning they act differently towards us. Our opinion of our parents is often unnuanced, and insensitive about their own lives, problems, issues. I knew every time your dada’s business was doing badly because that was the constant topic of conversation. I knew about the daily problems of late invoicing, losing big accounts, customs charges on importing, late deliveries. Heck, most Sundays, I even participated in many an order preparation, be it on weekends or in front of the television, folding sheets of glittery tissue paper into branded bags headed for specific high street shops.

  But I never knew of the interior toll this all took on my mother and father. Whether they felt like life should be easier. Whether there was more to this than working seven days a week just so one of their kids (the eldest, the boy: me) could go to private school for a few years. Whether they argued. Whether they made up. Whether they had issues working with the family.

  All I knew was that Dad wasn’t there, and when he was there, he was thinking about something else.

  Children of immigrant backgrounds in the United Kingdom get the same speech from our parents: you have to work twice as hard to have half the opportunities. I know women of colour who received a private addendum from their mothers: you’ll have to work twice as hard as the men of co
lour because what few opportunities there are will be handed to them first.

  I felt this so much, growing up. I knew that whatever I did, I’d have to work damn hard. Even with the opportunities my father fast-tracked me for by sending me to private school for a short while and then ensuring I got into university. They accelerated the possibilities I was presented with but I always had my mother whispering in my ears saying, an opportunity for you is an opportunity for all of us.

  To me, that meant, don’t pay us back, pay it forward, make space for your cousins, for other people who look like you. She never overtly spoke to me about race or how immigrants were always on the back foot, but occasionally these asides would come to me and give me the course of direction.

  When we look at our parents, and establish what worked and what didn’t, we make choices. Who will we be? Who will we be inspired by? You tend to operate exactly as your parents did, because theirs was good parenting, or you tend to go the opposite way. In which case, you do the exact opposite of how you were raised. With the inevitable realization a few years down the line, you’re just like your dad.

  Neither of these approaches really take the child, and their individualism, into account. Neither thinks about place, time, setting, lifestyle. Of course my parents raised me differently than they would now: mangos were much less readily available; you couldn’t even buy hummus in the shops. The only Indians you saw on the road were actually in the corner shop. Or your family.

  Society feels different now white people all know the secret about mangos. You and I have a duty to protect the rest of the secrets, like how to eat a mango properly.

  Things are different now. The time is different. Society is different. There are fewer conventions on what it means to be a dad.

  Of course my parents raised me differently than they might now: they came here for specific reasons. To give their children opportunity. To earn money themselves.

  In season 2 of Channel 4’s seminal sitcom Desmond’s, set in a Black-run barber shop in Peckham, episode 1, ‘The Treatment’, depicts the perfect representation of my mum’s version of the immigrant experience.

  In the episode, Desmond, the linchpin of the community, his barber shop a social hub, is taken to hospital with a life-threatening illness. It causes the largely immigrant community around him to think about death and the end.

  Shirley, his rock of a wife, is asking herself the big questions she has been avoiding for so long. In a conversation with Desmond’s best friend, Porkpie, she says, ‘None of us, when we came to England, wanted to die here. Least of all Desmond. I know he’s not going to die but now he’ll want to go home so that he can. I can’t, Porkpie. There’s nothing back there for me anymore. My life, my family, my whole existence is here. Thirty-two years is a long time. The majority of my life. I know it’ll hurt him. I know he’s got his heart set on me going with him. But I can’t.’

  In her play, Salt, Selina Thompson projected this clip on to a wall of salt bricks. I sat there crying, remembering how mum felt about where she wanted to die, not in a London suburb, on a pleather armchair. But at home. As the clip played, I thought about my mum, about her smile, about how an ex-girlfriend once said she had pain in her smile, like salt in the sugar jar.

  It’s a spine-tingling moment. And it gives us the utter predicament of the immigrant. Of my mother. She never wanted to die in England. She wanted to die in India. She felt she was an Indian. The irony of this is that she never actually lived there, bar a few years at boarding school. She viewed it as home. And she did not want to die in England. She told me that.

  Your dada on the other hand, when he left Kenya, he never looked back. He was ready for the land of opportunity and riches. For England and everything it could offer to change the course of his life.

  An immigrant’s life is precarious at best. You have to make choices about what sort of immigrant you are. Do you wish to integrate? Do you wish to be neither seen nor heard while you get on with whatever drew you to this place? Do you wish to lay down roots on your own, very human terms? Do you wish to disrupt the status quo for everyone to make it easier for everyone else? Do you want to make money? What are you willing to do in order to get it? Who will you trample over? There are other reasons. But these questions all flowed through your dada’s mind at various points.

  Who do you want to be?

  I think about this a lot. In the chicanes of my mind, where bad things dwell – bad thoughts, bad actions, bad choices – I think about who I want to be. Who to look up to? Who to draw from?

  I took my work ethic from your dada. I applied my mum’s motto to it, about having to work twice as hard, and I did what I needed to do to get to a point where I’m given permission to write this book for you and have other people poke their noses in. I want you to not have to work as hard as I have. I want you to enjoy life.

  I want you to only work as hard as a straight middle-class white guy works and have exactly the same opportunities, access and encouragement.

  This morning, I left you to get dressed while I went in the shower. It wasn’t a short shower. I got lost in thought and took my time. Drying myself, twenty minutes later, still singing whatever song sounded better in the echo chamber of a shower cubicle, I was startled by you walking into my room, topless.

  ‘Daddy,’ you said, ‘I’m struggling to find a T-shirt that makes me look nice.’

  ‘Just take the first one off the pile,’ I said. ‘They all look nice.’

  I was perplexed by this complicated emotion you were having. It was about appearance and self-image. It was about clothes as confidence and it was about thinking things through rather than just throwing yourself at anything impulsively. I joined you in your room and went through some options with you. We went with the first one.

  Reflecting on the conversation, I realized it was exactly the type of thing I would never have brought to my dad. He was not the person for everyday things. Even to this day, when he’s reminded of upcoming birthdays, he will bemoan the fact that my mum’s dead because she would have sorted out the cards and presents. She was the organizational one. He uses grief to dodge basic admin like an elite-level boss. Because why change? Why now? Why change from the person my mother loved?

  As a kid I knew that when I needed to sit down for a chat with my father it was because I was in trouble. Either behavioural problems had caught up with me or bad marks at school had been exposed. The first two or three times, my mum would deal with it. When there was danger of a pattern forming, she sat me down with your dada. Who ran through the same hour-long talk about working out what your goals are and then developing a strategy to achieve it. He told the same three stories about coming to England and the things he had to go through in order to find a job to get him through college, getting his college to recognize his degree even though he was six months too young to qualify as an accountant, and a mentor of his at his first big job. I knew all of them off by heart, and insisted on note paper each time I had the chat. Pretending I was taking notes, I doodled and wrote rap lyrics while he talked at me.

  My father had no time to know the day-to-day of things. He had his job to worry about. I resented him for not engaging with me, not showing any interest in what I was into. I pretended, for years, to be into cricket, just to have something to talk to him about. When I think about your mum and your granddad, they will talk about everything from the weather to each little thing they did the day before to their interests to politics, and never tire of each other’s company. Me and dad, our phone calls last less than five minutes each time. We still have nothing to say to each other. I fear I’m boring him if I tell him anecdotes, either professional or personal, he doesn’t really do much other than drink and watch television, and we don’t have much of a shared history other than the torment and grief of losing my mum to deal with. It’s painful. I feel defeated by our silences. Almost like I want to shout, ‘I’m not telling you anything unless you ask me. You have to ask me.’

  I shoul
d volunteer information.

  That lifetime of baggage. As I slowly understand the reality of my dad as an actual person with a life that didn’t revolve around me, I have to let go of my anger about him. So he didn’t put me at the centre of his universe every day growing up? That’s fine. His sacrifices were to make my and your fai’s lives easier. So he left the pastoral stuff to my mum? That’s fine. She was empathetic and scathing all at once. It’s the building blocks of me.

  When we look to our parents, we only see where they failed us and came through for us. We rarely look to them as people who, like us, have stresses at work, idiots in their social circle, mental health problems, an addiction to television, the need for solitude, regrets for all the things they wished they had done, issues with their own parents or siblings or cousins or aunties. Our poor parents, destined to be seen as our parents forever.

  Do I define myself as a father? Or am I simply your father?

  In Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco writes, ‘I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.’

  What I learned from my father, I learned in his warehouse on Sundays. To understand our family, to understand the power of your dada and how he taught me about his work ethic, is to know about the warehouse. Magic things happened there. Our fortunes fluctuated. We were able to run a small international company by each one of us occupying every single role, from managing director to warehouse staff to janitor. We gave it everything we had. Each of us. And so our family survived.

  On Sundays, we were a gang. Your dada, my mother, both your bapujis and your nani, and a stack of theplas wrapped in tin foil. The radio was tuned to Sunrise. My friend’s dad voiced the occasional advert. We did impressions of his Rothmans-rich voice. In summer, we listened to Test cricket, loudly if India was playing. Dad and your bapuji drank lukewarm tins of Foster’s and occasionally bellowed ‘ahl-roight bra-thaaaa’ to each other as a motivational battle cry each time they flicked back the can top and let the air fizz out, and kaki and my mum took over the office at the back, licking their glitter-peppered fingertips and counting reams and reams of tissue paper out before folding them into individual packs of three sheets.