Brown Baby Read online

  It’s easy to blame the both of you and the stress impact of you on my day-to-day life, but it wasn’t perfect before you. It won’t ever be perfect. I’ve replaced bad habits – smoking, going to the pub three nights a week to binge-drink, going to work hungover, self-medicating with McDonald’s – with new ones: I stay up late, dividing my attention between Netflix and Twitter, scrolling mindlessly through social media with one eye on whatever Jason Statham film I’ve managed to discover. When I feel like I should be doing something, I dive into the admin of being a writer. If I haven’t hit my word count, I do my words, I go to bed late, knowing that you will stir any time between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., and my internal body clock has started to begin the slow process of waking up at 4.30 a.m. in preparation.

  If I’m to fit everything in, I need fuel.

  So I eat constantly.

  Not because I’m hungry. I eat far too much every day to ever feel hungry. At some point though, a subconscious part of my brain will switch on and tell me I’m bored and I need food, or I need to concentrate so I need food, or I’m tired so I need food, or I had a bit too much to drink with dinner and Netflix and I need food, or it’s Tuesday night and I need food, or I need to buy milk and I need food, or I’m on a train and I need food. It won’t go away. If I ignore it, or if I drink some water, or if I go to bed, my stomach is spun a yarn by my brain, growling, telling me, feed me, Seymour. Once my stomach is repeating my brain’s messaging back to me, it’s too late. All I can think about is food. I have fallen for my own internal Pavlovian response. So I get up at 3 a.m. and watch Netflix and eat whatever I can find in the drawers and cabinets.

  When I can’t sleep, I watch food programmes. I tell myself it’s because of Anthony Bourdain’s ability to understand the human condition as he sits with people and eats food they make for him, and in these uncertain times, it’s a comfort. Actually, it’s because food is all I can think about at that time in the morning.

  Outside of mealtimes, I never make good choices.

  There are crisps and chocolate bars and a little can of something fizzy and sugary and more crisps and more chocolates and maybe I’ll get some sweets because I want something sweet and I can just chew them over until they dissolve in my mouth and I don’t need to shovel crisps into my face as quickly as possible, but I also buy crisps and chocolate to eat first. There are proper balanced meals and delicious stall food and truck food and street food and ordered food and containers of summer rolls and flattened rice mixed with chicken and prawns, and homemade parathas and crispy soy sauce-infused paneer folded into the middle like a makeshift kathi roll. And recipe books are always open, somewhere in the kitchen area, or dining table, on a page of food I want to eat, or will one day attempt to recreate, or dream of seeing. Currently I’m thinking about one day making Meera Sodha’s beetroot and paneer kebabs, and a proper bulgogi sauce.

  I watch food shows and imagine a version of myself that is a cool food eater, wearing a black T-shirt to hide the rolls of shame from eating bread and meat and cheese and dumplings and pasta and pastries and guzzling down wine and beer and those sweet Mexican sodas you can get from hipster taco trucks (and Mexico, where they just call them the Spanish word for soda). I love food. Food is important. Not because I think I’m one of those exhausting foodies who carries a tiffin around and chooses the tasting menu and reads blogs and restaurant reviews. But because food is home and home is what I yearn for.

  And I ruin it all, every single day, by punishing my appetite with a packet of crisps, a chocolate bar, cashew nuts because they’re healthy and energy-giving (so why not have two handfuls instead of one?) and then a slice of bread with chocolate spread or peanut butter, or whatever I can mine out of the snack drawer. Maybe there are snacks left over from a party you went to. I check. When was the party? Have you forgotten about them yet? Maybe I can go to the shops and buy a big packet of chevdo and put it in the drawer so it seems communal, but it’ll be gone after two days so get in there quickly, and maybe your mum won’t even see the packet in the snack drawer. I hide empty crisp packets in my backpack and the bin in the spare room so I can dispose of them at work, having eaten them at home, late at night.

  I watch Netflix with subtitles on, so I can crunch through my food and not miss anything, in the quiet of the night where the explosions and witty back and forth might seep through the floorboards and so can’t be too loud, but loud enough to mask the crinkle of packets and the crunch-crunch of food in my mouth.

  The stairs down to the kitchen creak every time. In the middle of the night it sounds like a haunted house.

  And every single time, I feel shame, shame, shame, so much shame I know its name. Because all of this is in secret. All of this is the explanation for why I have gained so much weight since you came into my life. It’s not you, as the old cliché goes. It’s me.

  I think about this hunger, this yearning for home. The time I felt most at home, growing up, was lounging about with Mum and your fai, watching American sitcom after American sitcom, and eating snacks together, sharing gathia or crisps or chocolates or ice cream, washing them down with cans of diet Coke. It was a carousel of salt and sugar and fizz and crunch. All on a full stomach post dinner. My mum loved to snack and was happy to co-opt us into her habits so she felt less guilty. The snack cupboard grew from half a shelf under the sink, to the whole of the cupboard under the stairs. Multipacks, multibags, multiple boxes, stuffed with salt and sugar.

  We ate well, four rotlis, sometimes five, finishing everything on our plates because it was disgusting, my mum told us, to waste food when so many in the world did not have anything. Snacking was never about hunger. Every night, most nights, dhal bhatt shaak rotli. Stomach full. Every night, wash it down with snacks.

  Snacks were a new thing to Mum. She never had snacks growing up. She had mealtimes and that was it. She told me about the first time she had chocolate, as a teenager, with her friend Lesley, and how it gave her the drive to go to work as soon as she could, because then she was more in control of what she could and could not eat, and sure, ba’s dhal bhatt shaak rotli would line her stomach but now she had disposable income to eat crisps, chocolates, cake, fizzy drinks. This lightness that the sugar and salt gave, this feeling of Britishness that she yearned for so much.

  There were always biscuits in the house. There were always crisps in the house. There were always cans of fizzy drinks in the house. And so long as we ate properly at mealtimes, there was never any differentiation for official snack time. It was available to us whenever we wanted.

  And with Mum and your dada gone for large parts of the weeks and weekends, the snack cupboards were constantly raided and constantly restocked with no arguments.

  And then an Indian snack store opened down the road and that became our Sunday mornings. Before Mum and Dad disappeared to the warehouse to drink lager, listen to cricket and pack orders, Dad drove to the Indian snack shop and came home with boxes of chevdo and crisps, and fresh gathia and jellabi. And we’d eat as a family, watching the highlights of yesterday’s Test match, or the news, or if we were lucky a repeat of whatever sitcom we’d watched on Friday night.

  That was home.

  My deep hunger is a yearning for that home.

  The kitchen was the central hub of our home, the main family thoroughfare. Your fai and I ate in silence, listened to Mum sing along to Sunrise Radio and kept our eyes down. Every now and then my mum would stop singing so she could ask us about school work, each question a pre-prepared torpedo, aimed at the faultlines in our weaker subjects. We studied in there, shared snacks, prayed, laughed, cried, got told off, were praised – everything happened in that kitchen. We’d reply in grunts and one-word answers, hoping it was the other’s turn for the firing line. My mum kept the rotlis coming and we ate and we ate till we were full and when we were full we washed it all down with water before contemplating dessert.

  I remember going home in those two weeks Mum was brought home from hospital, living on a ventila
tor, sagging in an armchair, unable to go into a deep sleep. The first thing I noticed was how the house didn’t smell like the home I grew up in. The kitchen had become a shrine to takeaways and the Tupperware dishes of well-wishing relatives. The fridge was empty, save for milk and bread. No one was hungry – not even me, and I had a Pavlovian reaction to that kitchen. As soon as I saw it, I felt hungry. I spent years growing up in a bedroom above it, my rap music punctuated by bursts of pressure cooker and sizzling onions, the dull thud of Mum frying, boiling, baking, chopping, occasionally banging on the table with a rolling pin to alert us to dinner. Now that kitchen was like a perfect showroom for a family-sized kitchen, imbued with flashes of memory on how things were and what they used to be, each surface gleaming with bleach and polish (my sister’s touch, an urge to purge the house of all bugs).

  With her gone, we were lost. I do not say that lightly. She was the linchpin of my family. Its heartbeat, its core. I was thirty. And I was most definitely lost: my first book had come out the week before, and the only person I needed to be proud of me was gone. So, yes. We were completely lost.

  I have this specific memory, my Ganga – Mum stood at the kitchen table, one foot up on a stool, clutching her small black serrated knife cutting potatoes in the palm of her hand, singing along – out of tune – with whatever was on the radio. That feels most like home.

  I’m sitting at the table watching her in my memory. But that’s not the truth. I’m usually eating, usually fielding questions about my school in as monosyllabic a way as possible. I’m usually counting the seconds till I can run upstairs and get out my stash of comics and reread them. I’m not watching her. I’m not living in the moment of her cutting potatoes.

  The memory is a lie, Ganga. Why are we all so symbolic and perfect in our memories? This happened every single day and I never thought to memorialize it at the time. Now, the repetition of the sight is probably why it’s etched into my memory. Carbon copies of my mum, doing the same action, again and again, laid on top of each other like tracing paper. That’s how she becomes perfect and immortal.

  The kitchen at home took on a sterile unused sheen when she died. It was clean and empty, surfaces unused, and it stopped smelling like garlic and ginger and popping mustard seeds and cumin sizzling in half an inch of vegetable oil. It smelled unused and unloved. It looked like a museum of how things were, how things used to be, how I used to be.

  In this exhibit you’ll find a traditional Gujarati family kitchen. Over there in the corner, you’ll find the pint tankards for water, the frilly mats and the steel dubba with ghee in it. And the tawa has never been cleaned, you are correct. And those yoghurt tubs in the fridge, we don’t eat that much yoghurt, no, they’re filled with leftovers and cut-up fresh coriander and half an onion and the unused remnants of a tin of chopped tomatoes. And those plates with a ring of small green flowers around the perimeter, well that’s just Gujarati as fuck, mate.

  This is how things were, how they used to be, how I used to be, Ganga.

  And now the kitchen is frozen, prepped and ready for my mum to get dinner ready. Clean and awaiting her arrival. As the dust settles on every surface, as the utensils go unused, it starts to look like a formerly glorious seaside ballroom. A time capsule of a memory that is distant and fresh all at once.

  It was sad, in the months after my mum died, to be faced with her legacy enshrined forever. Instead of changing the space or disrupting it, we just left it to gather dust and for that dust to be wiped away once a week by the cleaner Dad employed because he wasn’t able to manage housework himself. A mixture of laziness and not feeling like it was his responsibility, masked by the complaint that he was old now.

  I thought about her handbag, still at the bottom of the stairs. For months and months. Like she was home. It was where she left it, on the bottom step. The last time she had come home. What we didn’t know at the time was that the doctors were sending her home to die. It had been untouched since my aborted attempt to contact Auntie Lesley a few days after the funeral service.

  Lying on the spare bed in your fai’s old room one night (because my room, the bigger room, was now her room), thinking about Mum and who she was when she was a teenager and when she was your age, and filling in all the gaps of who she was before she became my mother, I realized I didn’t know enough. And increasingly, there were fewer and fewer people who could tell me what I needed to know. I wanted to know more than what I already knew about her or what people always missed about her, what they missed out when they talked about her.

  Grief plays romantic games with you.

  You remember only the good times and you roll your eyes at the bad times. You perfect that person in their absence. They become the sum of the golden moments. When I think about my mum, I think about her laugh, and those happy moments watching endless television and shoving food in our faces and being together in our laughter. And I think about how much she wanted me to succeed but wanted it to be on my own terms. And I think about how much she wanted grandchildren. And I think about her food. And how vicious and sarcastic she was. And how no one was safe from her tongue. And what a terrible driver she was. And how principled. And her charity work. And her speaking truths to my dad and uncles whenever they said something homophobic or anti-Muslim. And her dancing. She loved dancing.

  I try to not remember that her tongue was at its most vicious when it was aimed at me. And there was no sarcasm. Only despair and what she thought of as pragmatism. Why did I want to dedicate my life to writing? Why did I think I deserved success?

  She once said, ‘Tell me ten writers who look like you who make enough money to do this for a job.’

  I named Hanif Kureishi. I stuttered.

  She said, ‘Look at all the lawyers who look like us. We can be respected there.’

  ‘Name ten brown lawyers, Mum,’ I said, thinking I had her.

  She asked me to get her the phone book. She turned to the section for solicitors and pointed to twelve different lawyers with brown names. She smiled.

  ‘No one’s ever heard of them,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t name them.’

  ‘So? So you want to be famous? Oh. Oh, I see. My son wants to be famous.’ She said famous like she might say la-di-fucking-da-mate-la-di-fucking-daaaa.

  She laughed into the dough she was kneading. I backtracked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t, no.’

  ‘Imagine,’ she told me. ‘My famous son.’

  She laughed again and slapped my arm.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, feeling the teenage whine in my voice twisting through the octaves of high-pitched annoyance as I made a three-letter word last the length of my breath.

  She stopped laughing and gestured for me to sit down. I did and she put her foot up on the bench, her toes pointing at me.

  ‘Beta,’ she said. ‘Look at this country. Where do you see yourself? You have to be where you can see yourself. Otherwise you cannot earn money, buy a house, have children, raise them comfortably. We all make sacrifices for our children. Do you think I wanted to work for my husband on weekends?’ She shook her head. ‘Lawyers earn money. People accept us as lawyers. Pharmacists. Doctors. These are careers where we are here already. They don’t accept us as writers.’

  ‘I can change the—’

  She stopped me. ‘Do it as a hobby then. But be comfortable first. Don’t struggle like we do. I had dreams when I was your age too.’

  Months ago, I had tried to call Auntie Lesley and I had failed. I felt closer to ready now, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, Mum’s handbag in my lap, I could find out what those dreams were. I didn’t want to consider that Mum may have been disappointed in how her life turned out. But knowing what her hopes and dreams were, that would tell me exactly who she was.

  I knew if I could contact Lesley, her best friend from when she lived in Keighley, she could tell me things I’d never known.

  I rifled through the handbag again for her address book. I found her purse. Out
of interest, I wondered if there were pictures in there.

  Passport photo of Dad. One of your fai. None of me. I feel left out. Until I saw, stuck with heat to the inside of one of the purse sleeves, a photo of me when I was thirteen, for my first passport. I needed it to go to France to visit your uncle Nishant and his family. I had the bum fluff moustache that caused young Asian teenagers so much consternation and shame through the years. Not quite thick enough to be considered manly. Not quite wispy enough to not be seen other than up close.

  There was a mound of dirty tissues too. Fossils of snot and DNA encased in their folds and creases. My mum. Could we clone her, I wondered? Was this the start of a Jurassic Park spin off? Could I clone her from her snot? Would she have all her memories? Would she know me? Would she be my mother still? Or an empty shell that looked like her?

  I longed to see her again. Everything in my body was weighed down by her not being around.

  Remember that stack of note papers, Ganga? I flicked through them again. And her handwriting was like the magic spell from a book lifting each word off the page till it swirled around me, dizzying me. Shopping lists. A stack of about twenty lists of items required during the big shop.

  Mundane lists, like pasta, milk, yoghurt, cheese. They listed all the essentials. A few embellishments. No evidence of snacks. No, those were instinctive purchases and our secret collective shame as a family.

  What was it about her handwriting that did this to me? Before I had thought of it as proof that she had lived beyond the fragmentary memories I still have of her. Every single day, I forget another moment with her. But now these shopping lists acted like a record of our family. Everyday memories I should not forget. And yet, she wrote things down. She kept lists. A connection of brain to hand to fingertip to pen to ink to paper. It was evidence that she had lived, Ganga. Beyond what I knew of her. She had capacity for mundane thought. It was enough to remind me that she had been alive and been normal and ordinary enough to buy pasta when the cupboards were pasta-less. It signalled a shift for me. An understanding of what loss entails.