The One Who Wrote Destiny Page 2

  I smile with her, not sure where the hilarity lies, waiting for her to fill me in on the joke.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I ask about twenty steps later, stopping in front of a house and folding my arms.

  She looks at me.

  ‘Have you gone mad? Keighley is two hundred miles from London. What are you doing here? You can’t get from here to college and back in a day.’

  ‘I know,’ I tell her.

  I don’t know how it happened other than that I got sucked in by Sailesh’s enthusiasm.

  Go to Keighley, he said. They take coloureds there. You will only be there a few weeks, a month, three maximum and then I will come and get you. And we will tear London apart looking for Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Keighley is not that far. Your school does not start for three weeks after you arrive. You can wait for me. You have money, yes?

  I said yes. It was the easiest thing to do. Arguing with this man is impossible. He talks like a machine gun. He will unleash a hail of words at you until you end up with your hands over your head, begging for mercy. Machine guns, they are bad for your health, bad for friendships.

  I wish I had listened to my instincts and trusted my map-reading skills. England may fit inside Kenya four or five times, but even with that proportionally restricted map in mind, Keighley and London are far apart when you are in a strange country, on a limited budget, with no friends, family, job or idea of what to do by yourself.

  This is the longest time I have been on my own.

  I thought I would find myself in this month. Discover a love of novels or learn to play an instrument or write letters to my loved ones. And Sailesh. And Naman. Amee, I could have written to Amee.

  Instead, I got distracted when I saw Nisha for the very first time. She was walking down my street, laughing with a friend, her hair shaking like palm trees from side to side, while I stood at my bedroom window, airing out my armpits after a hot night, tossing and turning and cursing the English for having central heating turned on all year round.

  Nisha is the third person I have developed feelings for.

  The first was my maths teacher. He seemed so cool, yaar. He was always singing the best songs, wearing the shiniest shoes and wore sunglasses at all times except when he was in class. I used to linger after every lesson, or turn up early hoping to spend extra time with him, hoping to get some bon mots, advice or recommendations on how to be so unbelievably cool in life.

  The second was a girl called Sri, who I went to school with.

  And now Nisha. Who I have been wanting to notice me for two weeks. And all I had to do was throw myself in front of a bicycle, trying to rescue her when she didn’t need rescuing.

  ‘So that’s why I’m here,’ I finish. ‘Because my friend told me to come here. Because the British would welcome me until he arrived.’

  ‘You know what else is funny?’ she asks. ‘I know Sailesh. Shah, na? Sailesh Shah?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, rubbing at my chin and scratching my ear. ‘How did you know his name?‘

  Nisha laughs. ‘He is my cousin. No wonder he sent you here. It’s probably the only place in the UK he knows. I didn’t know he was moving here.’

  I nod.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He’s quite talented. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I have never met him,’ she says. ‘He’s just a cousin I write to and send a rakhri once a year.’

  I nod again. My responses are slow. I can’t think of a thing to say to her. I feel as though every English word I’ve ever learned is useless because I cannot connect them together into a sentence. I’ve never spoken to a girl before. Even at school, I kept myself to myself. I let Sailesh have the relationships. I had the headspace. Sailesh could talk to anyone in any capacity. I was his mute sidekick.

  I realize we are in a part of town I don’t recognize. We have left Nisha’s street and are approaching the church that dings a bell on the hour every hour, without fail. It wakes me up most nights. I’m constantly aware of the time, how slowly it is moving, how much I feel as if I’m in suspended animation.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she replies. ‘Good question, yaar. I don’t know.’

  ‘I think I’m following you to where you’re heading. I don’t know where that is. I’m sorry. I will go home.’

  She exaggeratedly rolls her eyes, but then smiles at me.

  ‘Will you come to our Diwali show tonight?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s Diwali?’ I ask, playing the innocent.

  ‘Yes, bhai. It’s November. We are putting on a show in the community hall. You were going to come to this, yes?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was happening,’ I tell her, my body tense with an excitement I’ve not felt since leaving Kenya.

  ‘Yes, bhai. Tonight. Seven p.m. People are coming from Bradford, from Huddersfield, to see our show. Did you not know about it?’

  ‘You are the first person I have spoken to in two weeks,’ I tell Nisha.

  She laughs.

  ‘I do not believe you, Mukesh. You know what I think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you want to be in the show. That’s why you’ve been waiting outside my house for a week. You know I am organizing it.’

  I stammer a protest. She has seen me. I thought I was invisible. I thought I faded into the white wall I’ve spent the week leaning against.

  ‘It’s fine, Mukesh. We can find a job for you. Maybe you can be the deer that Laxman kills? Or Hanuman’s gada. We could wrap you in gold fabric and you could make a clank-clank-clank noise when Hanuman wields you. Yes, the way you defeated that bicycle, you can be the gada.’

  Somewhere in me a ticking starts, a countdown timer to panic.

  Nisha looks at me and laughs again, this time bending over, her hands on her knees.

  ‘I’m joking, yaar. We can’t make you be a gada,’ she says. She pauses for dramatic effect. ‘You don’t have the body type.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I say, a little disappointed.

  ‘Do you want to be involved?’ she asks me. ‘We need to finish sewing the backdrop together, someone to do all the make-up, someone to play tabla. All by tonight. It’s a disaster this show, I tell you. A disaster. Anyway. What are your skills?’

  ‘I am a poet and an actor,’ I lie.

  Trigger

  Somewhere, somewhere, Nisha, my heart is in a box

  A box locked with your hair locks

  I listen to the roll and I listen to the rock

  You are the hole in my sock.

  My brain clouds.

  ‘What do you know about the Ramayana?’ Nisha asks me as she opens the gate leading to the back door of the hall behind the Catholic church.

  I can hear the drone of a harmonium making its long elephant trumpet of desperation. The person playing it is clearly not an expert. A beginner at best.

  ‘I read the comics of it back in Kenya,’ I say.

  ‘We are doing a performance where Sita dances for Rama, just before they return to Ayodhya. To show him everything she has gone through. Everything she has learned. Do you know it?’

  ‘No,’ I reply, then immediately regret it. I must say yes to everything. Ignorance does not make you needed. Knowledge does.

  ‘I made it up,’ Nisha says, smiling. She closes the gate behind me. I can hear the thump and pat of bare feet on parquet flooring. ‘It is not actually in the Ramayana. But we only have girls in our community. And my brother. And Prash, but he’s a bevakoof. So we had to come up with something. Have you met my brother? Chumchee? His name is really Chetan, but we call him Chumchee as he is always hanging around.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, you have? Perfect, yaar. I am so glad I spoke to you. He will be less nervous having another boy dancing next to him. Are you happy to be Rama? He refuses to be him, yaar. We promised him he can be Laxman. Not Rama. You have to be Rama. If you do not do it, we will have to ask Suresh uncle. No one wants to ask Suresh uncle
anything. You know about Suresh uncle?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  This is proving an effective strategy.

  ‘Oh God, has he ever told you any of his stories?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Which one?’

  I shrug my shoulders and smile awkwardly as if to say, yep, that one. Nisha frowns as she opens the door.

  We walk into the school hall.

  I expect to be transported to Dandaka Forest. Instead I am taken back to my childhood days. Benches that you had to sit on for assemblies if you were in the top year. Everyone else sat on the floor. Getting to the age where you were on a bench was an honour to look forward to, till you realized it gave you splinters on the backs of your bare legs. Bench privileges did not mean trouser privileges as well.

  The walls are bare and once were white, but now they’re scarred by decades of bored children picking off the paint, using it as target practice for flicked goongas, spraying it with shaken cans of soft drinks.

  There are six people in the room. There is Chumchee. He is short and waddles like a penguin. He is pale and vacant, the type who would smile at clouds and old ladies. He looks like someone who cannot stop sweating. He smiles at the floor when we walk in.

  There are three girls, dancing in a line, all dressed in sarees and wearing cat-like eyeliner, because each one wants to look like Mumtaz. They look like children playing dress-up with their mummy’s saree box.

  There is an old balding man in an off-white shirt and black trousers. He sports a sequinned waistcoat from a jubo lengha suit. He sits in the lotus position, murdering the air with a single-note drone from his harmonium.

  There is also a white man armed with a butter knife, scraping off chewing gum from the bottoms of chairs. He looks harassed, as though he should be somewhere else. And he should. What a job.

  ‘We have found our Rama,’ Nisha announces.

  Suddenly, I realize the enormity of the situation. Especially when Chumchee stands up to clap at me.

  The girls stop dancing, put their hands on their hips in synchronized aggression and look at me, expressionless. As if they are waiting for me to say something impressive.

  I wave.

  ‘I am playing Rama,’ I say.

  This is an important role, playing one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and I feel like a trespasser in someone else’s community. I am to stand up, in front of other people’s families, and parade myself for their judgement. Mothers and fathers will be assessing me as a potential son-in-law. They will want to know what I am studying, who my grandparents are and what side of the heart disease/diabetes spectrum I fall into.

  Both, as it happens. My family likes to have all angles covered.

  ‘Him? He is playing Rama?’ one of the girls asks suspiciously.

  Nisha turns questioningly to me. She smiles. It is a smile that could launch a thousand ships. Which is a strange comparison to make. I know about Paris and the Greeks, but I still do not know why anyone would launch a thousand ships after a girl. We now have commercial aeroplanes.

  She is beautiful. My hips ache. My toes burn. My mind turns from cloudy to fizzy.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, looking at her.

  Chumchee appears by my side.

  ‘Brother,’ he says, smiling. ‘My brother.’

  I offer my hand for him to shake but he looks at it as though he would rather not be touched. Reluctantly he offers me fingers, which I pull on once. In the years I knew him after, I learned that it wasn’t just me. Year after year, I saw him shrink when people approached, and stand two feet away from conversations, always listening, never part of the action.

  He smiles, stepping back from me as quickly as possible, stumbling into some chairs.

  Nisha, oh, Nisha, I would follow you anywhere.

  She tosses something to me. It is a dhoti, green with pink sequins sewn into a makeshift paisley. It looks . . . big.

  Chumchee hands me a domed crown, like the mound of a temple. It’s gold foil over a safari hat.

  I hold both the dhoti and the crown and I look around the hall. The harmonium player has stopped playing his long endless note and everyone in the room is looking at me, smiling expectantly. The man removing chewing gum has disappeared. All eyes, however, are on me. I am here to save them all. I have to be their Rama.

  ‘Get changed then,’ Nisha says.

  ‘Yes, bhai,’ one of the younger girls says. ‘We have to teach you your moves. We open the doors in four hours.’

  I drop the crown.

  ‘Four hours?’ I gulp.

  What do you mean four hours? I have just arrived. I have never been in a theatre production. I cannot dance. I don’t know what anyone is doing. I don’t know what I am doing.

  ‘Mukesh bhai, are you sure you want to participate in this?’ Nisha asks quietly, walking towards me, her hand outstretched to put reassuringly on my arm.

  I wait for her touch. I will melt into it.

  I edge forward, so that my sleeve reaches her fingertips that much sooner.

  ‘Bhai saab,’ she says. ‘We need you to get changed. So we can teach you the dance moves and show you what you need to do. Where to stand. How to act. Who to look at. Yes? Is this okay? Can you do this?’

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  This is not going well.

  I was a quiet kid. I did not like anybody looking at me and sat in the classroom in the middle. Away from the clever boys at the front, away from the naughty boys at the back, away from the boys on the sides making hungama. The teacher never picked on anyone lost in the middle to answer a question. I would know the answers sometimes, but saying it out loud filled my heart with terror.

  Talking in public was my greatest fear.

  I grew up between a dust bowl and a blue sea. Where they met was an island, a booming port town called Mombasa. We lived there at an unremarkable time.

  I do not believe in destiny. Not for our family. I do not believe in learning from the past. We live a life and then we die. I do not think there is anything remarkable about history. You know that, don’t you, Neha? You are aware that whatever we learn about the past doesn’t shape the future. We don’t exist in loops of time. Nothing repeats, except human nature. Not events. Not mistakes. We’re not pre-programmed to be dictated to by our past. All we can glean from it is that at some time at some point in some distant bygone era, someone will have done something to surprise you now.

  None of this is by design. It is by circumstance.

  My papa had the same routine every day. He and Amee rose at 5 a.m. for their yoga routine. This woke the rest of the house because they did sun salutations before clearing their nasal passages, one nostril at a time. This ak-ak-ak-akkkk noise signalled to the children that it was time to get up. Once yoga was over with and while breakfast was being prepared for my father, he did his calisthenics. He took a steel tray and balanced it on his head whilst doing hip rolls and knee bends. He stood on his head for a full minute and only then would he come to the kitchen for his garam chai and two sugar rotlis. Then, it was work – and work, for him, had to be hassle-free. He had spent most of his life in the family haulage business in Nairobi, staring at ledgers and signing cheques and having lunch with the bank manager every week. It was a clockwork existence, and he wanted to be free from such regularity. So he left the trucks to his brothers and moved to the coast to have me and Naman. And a hassle-free job. He opened a kiosk. He sold cigarettes to white men and newspapers to everyone else.

  But he still had an accountant’s respect for numbers. He told me how his father had told him why it was important he understood them.

  ‘I want you to understand every process, every minor detail of every number, son,’ my grandfather had said to Papa. ‘Then nobody can take you for a ride.’

  ‘I understand, Papa.’

  ‘Numbers are life,’ my grandfather had continued. ‘You understand that. Without them, we cannot survive. They create patterns in
life. We exist in patterns. Without them, life is chaos.’

  ‘I understand, Papa.’

  As for me, the teachers told Amee and Papa, every time we had our school reports, He has not made an impression in class. His written work is good. But he does not speak. And his maths is terrible.

  ‘Why do you refuse to speak in class?’ Papa asked me.

  ‘I do not need to prove to the class that I know the answers. I prove it to the teacher.’

  He seemed unconvinced.

  My father told me, ‘You must never assume people know what you are talking about. You must never assume they even know you are alive.’

  *

  I ask where the changing rooms are.

  Nisha smiles sheepishly.

  ‘This is the whole room. Here. You can change on the stage and we can all turn away. Yaar, the thing is, we are going to see it all anyway, bhaiya.’

  Chumchee laughs.

  ‘I might look,’ he says. ‘We are brothers, after all.’

  I don’t want Nisha to see my frustration with the situation I have agreed to. I want her to think I am cool and breezy. Like Jimi Hendrix, man. That kind of thing. I want her to think, look at this guy. He strides into my life, hurling himself in front of a bicycle to protect me, and now he is saving my play at the last minute by playing the hero, because my bevakoof brother is being difficult – so I should definitely kiss him and cuddle him and promise him that, for ever and ever more, I will be his, whatever he wants me to be.

  My girlfriend, I think. I want you as my girlfriend.

  Oh, Nisha, Nisha, I unbutton my shirt.

  Nisha, seeing I am doing her bidding, turns back to her dancers.

  ‘Anjali,’ she says wearily. ‘You are not in time.’

  ‘Come on, Nisha. It’s a lot to learn. We only started this morning.’

  I pause. This morning? Nisha, baby, darling, your organizational skills leave a little to be desired. I take off my shirt.

  I stand topless, my hands planted on my hips, my shirt bunched in my fist. I am in hero stance.

  No one pays any attention. Except Chumchee. He hovers in front of me, mirroring my pose. The little suction cups of my breasts tingle in the cool air. My nipples harden. I wish I had started from the shoes and socks and worked upwards. Disappointed in the lack of response, I start unlacing my shoes.