by Vivek Shraya
“‘Wanting’ is your closer. Just like on the album. Trust me.”
“Good call. What else?”
“Swap one of the Subaltern songs for ‘Sadness Is a Blessing.’”
“Really?” Rukmini took the Sharpie from Neela and wrote down “Lykke Li???”
“This is a pop crowd. They want to hear pop music,” Neela said.
“Gotcha,” she said, crossing out the question marks she had just written.
“Are you sure you don’t want to use my rehearsal space some time? No one is using it right now,” Neela offered. “I can come and watch. Give you constructive feedback?”
Rukmini squirmed and folded up her revised set list. “You’re sweet but I’ve been using my basement. And I’d be way too nervous performing in front of you!”
“Why? It’s just me. Plus, we just mi-mi-mi-ed together for twenty minutes.” Neela gently nudged Rukmini’s rib with her elbow. “We have nothing left to hide now.”
* * *
“I’m going to miss you!” Rukmini cried. She let go of her blush-pink suitcase and hugged Neela.
Instead of closing her eyes, Neela stared ahead at the flight information on the digital departures sign, checking that Rukmini wasn’t going to be late for boarding. “I’m going to miss you too. I can’t wait for the Toronto show.”
Easing out of their embrace, Rukmini floated her hand down to hold Neela’s. “Think about what I said about coming to one of the other East Coast shows? Or all of them?” Rukmini winked.
“You’re going to be super busy.” Neela glanced at the sign again.
“Sure, but I’ll want to see you. And we’ll talk every Sunday?”
“Every Sunday,” Neela repeated and then let go of Rukmini’s hand. Rukmini joined the security line of hoodies and jogging pants, already standing out like someone famous in her Hatecopy dress. “Go get ’em, Rukmini,” Neela said to herself.
When Neela returned home, she sat across from Rukmini’s chair and searched on her phone for the tour dates on Rukmini’s website. She looked up again at the empty chair and sighed. Rukmini wouldn’t sit there again for a long time. After she bookmarked the page, she noticed the start date for the tour and texted Rukmini.
Safe travels. PS I just saw that your first show is on Sunday. Don’t worry about calling. We can talk on Monday?
Ok Neel! Can’t wait to debrief! eee!
That Sunday, Neela woke up feeling bloated, nervous for Rukmini. She herself had toured many times but never on this scale — to that many cities and to that wide an audience. She patted her bedside table for her phone to send Rukmini a good luck text. She made the mistake of opening Instagram first.
Rukmini had posted a selfie with Kasi. With their hair braided, their heads were glued together with their tongues sticking out. Her caption said, If you don’t know @KasiOnKeys, you will! She’s joining me on the #HeyHeyHayleyTour
Kasi had posted the same selfie. Her caption said, So lucky to tour with this star. Come see us on #HeyHeyHayleyTour
Neela set down her phone as her pulse sped up. When had this happened?
Though the right time to introduce Kasi and Rukmini had never materialized, if Rukmini had talked to Neela about the possibility of having Kasi join her on tour, Neela would have encouraged the idea and arranged a meeting. Kasi wasn’t just a skilled keyboardist, she was the woman you wanted on your team: she was reliable, punctual and had an instinctive understanding of when to offer ideas for collaboration and when to take direction.
Of course, she didn’t expect Kasi to ask for her permission to go on tour with Rukmini. Gigs were how she made her money. Still, discovering this alliance between the two women in her life through a phone screen was unsettling. Their connection had been a secret — not from the general public, clearly, but from Neela. It also meant that, at some point, there was a conversation about not telling her.
“When will we tell Neela?” Kasi would have asked.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. She didn’t react well to the news about Subaltern Speaks,” Rukmini would have responded.
“She didn’t?”
“No. She was obsessed with the idea of starting a band with me and was crushed when she found out I already had one.”
“Oh.”
“So imagine how she’ll feel if we tell her about us.”
“You’re right. She would probably ask to join us.”
Rukmini would have then cackled, which would have made Kasi howl, and after the tears from their laughter had dried, they would have agreed on the need for secrecy.
Why hadn’t Rukmini asked Neela to be part of her tour band? Why had she chosen Kasi over her? Neela was not as good a keyboardist, but she could also play guitar. Did Rukmini sense that she would have more fun on the road with Kasi than with her?
This must have been why Rukmini hadn’t wanted to use Neela’s rehearsal space. She pictured Kasi and Rukmini rehearsing for weeks in her basement while Puna watched and cheered. After they rehearsed, did they go up to Rukmini’s room where Kasi sprawled on Neela’s spot on the floor, listening to records and gabbing about music?
“You would hate being on that tour, Neela,” she said to herself, pushing first her duvet and then herself off the bed. She was a musician, not an entertainer.
The next day, Rukmini posted a photo of herself and Kasi performing onstage in matching green satin jumpsuits. Kasi wasn’t positioned behind Rukmini like a backing musician. Side by side, it looked like the two of them were performing together. A duo.
Feeling nauseous, Neela leaned against the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil, her hand clamped over her mouth. How could they betray her like this? She imagined asking Rukmini this question. Rukmini would respond, “Betray is an interesting word choice.” It’s not as though they were trying to deliberately hurt Neela. Were they?
Neela tried to divert her emotions by thinking about Malika. She hoped Rukmini’s original bandmate wouldn’t see this photo. If she did, her hurt feelings would be more valid than Neela’s.
When the kettle whistled louder than usual, it took Neela a moment to realize that the sound was actually her phone ringing. Seeing Rukmini’s name, she considered not answering.
“Hello?”
“Neela! It’s me. I’m so glad you’re awake!”
She knew she was supposed to now say, “How did it go?” but that wasn’t the question she wanted to ask.
“Last night was incredible!” Rukmini continued without prompting, her tone higher than usual. “Did you see the photos we posted? Did they blow your mind? We so wish you had been there.”
Hearing these words, evidence that she had been missed and maybe not replaced, Neela’s jaw softened. “Tell me everything,” she said, hoping “everything” would include more details about Kasi.
“It’s all a bit of a blur to be honest and I need to jump in the van, but I just wanted to call to tell you that the show went perfectly, thanks to you.”
“You don’t need to thank me. I had a lot of fun.” Neela glanced over at Rukmini’s chair.
“Same. Okay, I should go, but I’ll call again later.”
“Sounds good. Can’t wait to find out more.”
Neela soon regretted her words.
* * *
Once the tour was in full swing, Neela’s feed was flooded with photos of Rukmini and Kasi, forcing her to flex her self-awareness and emotional micro-managing skills. She decided to commit all her focus on her transcribing work, instead of overthinking, but now, instead of the voices in the audio files she was transcribing, she heard her internal Rukmini voice engaging with a second internal voice: Kasi’s. Together these voices had conversation after conversation, and in every one they were colluding against Neela. Aperture, portraiture and even exposure sounded like “don’t tell her.”
She then resolve
d to check Instagram only once a day, right before bed. This way, the surge of reminders of Rukmini and Kasi’s fast friendship wouldn’t affect her mood or ability to work during the day.
“Are you a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda or a Charlotte?” Rukmini had once asked when she and Neela had met for a picnic dinner in Trinity Bellwoods Park. The tattooed bros slacklining and licking charcoal soft serve ice cream around them were blessedly blurred out by the golden hour glow.
“I kind of hate that question.”
“Why?” Rukmini sat up to face Neela, who was leaning against a cherry tree.
“It’s the kind of question that women are supposed to sit around and ask each other.”
“Yeah, because it’s fun, and in my case, as a Charlotte . . .” Rukmini wobbled her head like a loose balloon. “. . . kind of embarrassing.”
“But you’re not a Charlotte,” Neela argued, handing Rukmini the other half of her caprese sandwich.
“Well, I’m definitely not a Samantha.”
“See what I mean though? I don’t want to get sucked into this weird game where we project ourselves onto these white women tropes. Don’t they do that to us enough in our day to day? Expect us to be like them?”
“Wow, shi gaw real,” Rukmini said with her mouthful.
“You know what I mean. What would a brown Sex and the City look like? That’s the question I’m more interested in.”
Revising her Instagram schedule to nighttime inspired her subconscious to punish her with a vivid response to that question. Her insomnia was replaced by lengthy dreams about Rukmini, Kasi, Puna and another brown woman (she assumed this was Malika) going out for brunch, shopping and getting pedicures. Most recently, she had dreamt that the four of them went to the zoo together, but Neela was recast in the role of a caged elephant. Mourning the deterioration of her once invigorating dream life into literal-land in tandem with the tour, she adopted another approach — checking Instagram every other day.
But because Instagram’s algorithm prioritized the most-liked posts, photos of Rukmini and Kasi appeared first and most frequently when she opened the app. She began to follow random nature photographers, hoping that a photo of a ruby-throated hummingbird or a maritime glacier would disrupt her feed and restore her calm.
When this strategy also failed, she briefly considered deleting the app, but she worried that this would be a sign of weakness. “I’m stronger than a fucking photo,” she declared to her phone. But rather than prolong the war, her final tactic was surrender. Instead of looking away or looking less often, she looked more closely — at the numbers.
As she had been when she had noticed the difference between the number of Twitter followers she and Rukmini had, she was once again fascinated but this time by the astronomical like counts on Rukmini’s photos. Many of the selfies that Rukmini posted looked identical — her signature cocked eyebrow, interchangeable hotel room setting and similar captions in the form of short love notes to the audience.
Fun fact: the harder you dance, the louder I sing, the louder you cheer, the harder I love you. #reciprocity #HeyHeyHayleyTour
I can’t believe you knew all the words to Wanting. Can we please sing it together again tomorrow night? #comeback #HeyHeyHayleyTour #Hegemony #SubalternSpeaks
To all the brown girls in the room tonight: you are my ultimate possibility models. You make it possible for me to be me #ThankU #HeyHeyHayleyTour
Sometimes Rukmini posted a selfie with a different setting, the Eiffel Tower or backstage at the O2, but even in these photos, she wore her usual expression and included a love note. These captions were Rukmini at her most earnest and endearing, and initially it made sense to Neela that these posts were so well liked. But thirty sincere selfies later, Neela began to feel as though she had listened to her favourite song one too many times on repeat.
The thousands of people who liked these photos didn’t agree. If anything, the number of likes was only increasing, suggesting that Rukmini’s audience craved more of the same. Why was repetition so satisfying? Was the adoration simply a mindless craving for familiarity?
Occasionally, Rukmini’s captions read more like subtweets.
Hearing you babble through our set made me feel sorry for your date #STFU #HeyHeyHayleyTour
I’m sorry you have never seen a breast before #deprived #depraved #GetLost #HeyHeyHayleyTour
These selfies were liked even more (and admittedly Neela enjoyed them too).
But the measurable patterns were more troubling. She had noted a correlation between the increased frequency of Rukmini’s online postings and the decreased frequency of her personal messages to her. Despite feeling rattled by the tour, she missed Rukmini, missed hearing the many observations she was surely making on the road. To mitigate her missing, and her hurt, Neela liked almost every photo Rukmini posted. The selfies that Neela couldn’t force herself to like were the regrams Rukmini posted with her fans’ comments.
So grateful to finally have a fierce brown role model on stage! #queen #HeyHeyHayleyTour #TransIsBeautiful
Saw @RUKMINI @ #HeyHeyHayleyTour and am finally liberated. How did I survive before this? #WhatATime
Some of the photos even featured fans wearing RUK-MINI mouse ears, posing with their awkwardly smiling brown parents. The images themselves were heartwarming, so Neela strained to pinpoint the real cause of her dismay. Was it that Rukmini had used her merch idea without thanking or crediting her? She eventually realized that neither the merch nor the photos were to blame. It was fans’ repeated use of the word “finally.”
“Finally” implied the end of disciplined, painful waiting through a drought and relief at the arrival of rain. Rukmini was her fans’ nourishment, their cure. And she had indisputable gifts. But “finally” implied “only” — that Rukmini was their only nourishment, their only cure. “Finally” implied there were no others.
Rukmini had been performing her cover of “Every Song” on tour, but she had stopped tagging Neela when she posted links of her live performances on Twitter. Neela assumed this was because Rukmini ran out of characters to include her handle. But maybe now Rukmini really did believe the song was hers, and her fans, following her lead, thought the same.
A month after the tour began, Neela pulled the cleaning supplies and garbage bin out of the cupboard under her sink to unearth the old journals she had hidden there. She flipped through the lined pages, scouring for the handwritten lyrics that would confirm the song was hers. When she located the lyrics, written in her small fine print, she ripped the page out of the journal and taped it to her fridge.
Then, remembering the words of her yoga teacher — “When your emotions are in commotion, just find a floor” — she lay down on the pale parquet tiles. She basked in the midday lemon sunbeams bursting through the skylight, her legs stretched wide like a triangle. She was going to push the soles of her feet together into a diamond pose, but when her right hand grazed her thigh, it tingled. She slowly slid it until it was between her legs. She exhaled. As her fingers began to move, blood pulsed to and from every corner inside her. She moaned. Hearing the sound emerge from her throat and fill her apartment, she remembered the glory of her own body, her voice, her self.
After her pulse steadied, she grabbed one of the dish towels hanging from the stove behind her and wiped her hands and the sweat on her neck. Then she stood up, picked up her phone off the kitchen table and texted Rukmini.
I have an idea.
* * *
Rukmini was reapplying her lipstick in her vanity mirror when she heard her phone ding. From the corner of her eye, she could see a text from Neela. The word “idea.” Her hand jittered and when she looked back at the mirror, she had streaked magenta above her lips. Before wiping it off, she picked up her phone.
Omg tell me!
OK. In person. Where are you? When are you back?
Telll meeeee!
“Fifteen minutes!” the tour manager announced, knocking on their dressing room door.
“Thank you,” Rukmini said, fixing her lipstick. Then she mechanically checked her Instagram while she waited for Neela to respond. Her activity screen was a list of a dozen photos Neela had liked.
“Look at this!” Rukmini turned her phone towards Kasi.
Kasi glanced up from her own phone. “Aww, Neela loves you.”
Rukmini frowned at her phone screen. “She’s been favouriting all my tweets too.”
“That’s sweet,” Kasi said, not catching Rukmini’s tone. Before their set, Kasi preferred to be quiet and zone out.
“Is it? Or is she mocking me?” Rukmini seized the bag of salt and vinegar chips from the rest of their humble tour rider food spread — oranges, granola bars and iced tea.
“You’re her best friend. Why would she mock you?” Kasi asked, putting down her phone.
“You know the whole hate-liking thing . . .” she said in between her urgent crunching and pointed the bag at Kasi.
Kasi shook her head at the bag and then at Rukmini. “Hate-liking?”
“I’m just being silly,” Rukmini lied, realizing that maybe Kasi didn’t know about Neela’s online behaviour. She had been discovering that there was a lot Kasi didn’t seem to know about Neela.
“You miss her. It’s okay. I do too. I actually haven’t heard from her since the tour started.” Kasi got up from the shredded couch. “I wish she was here with us,” she said before retreating into their private washroom.
She didn’t share Kasi’s wish. She was grateful that the Toronto show was still a few months away, giving her more time to perfect her set. She wanted Neela to see her at her best. She opened Twitter, browsed the latest hot takes and then tweeted, IRL like > online like.
“Rukmini, you ready?” Kasi was waiting for her at the door.