The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  If you can’t beat the numbers, the statistical inevitabilities, that pepper history, is there ever any point trying to live your life? Would you pursue your same hopes and dreams if you knew, statistically, you would end up childless and unmarried, or would that spur you on to be the best you could be in that particular inevitability you were cursed with? It becomes a rod for your back. I don’t know if my family members have the brain space to handle such information. It’s like time travel.

  I think of that moment in Back to the Future, when Doc Brown talks about the catastrophe that awaits anyone who meets themselves in the future. Or in the past.

  ‘I foresee two possibilities. One: coming face-to-face with herself thirty years older would put her into shock and she’d simply pass out. Or two, the encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe.’

  Destroy the entire universe, I think. I smile. Now there’s a legacy I can live with.

  But then Yinka said to find the patterns. The patterns are important to recognize. We can only break them once we are aware of them. They are important to disrupt. Let’s imagine this: if out of the eighteen people I’ve looked at so far, six of them have had this condition, that means, in our family, one third of us is afflicted by this bad DNA. If we then analyse the medical records of those who have the same condition outside my family, what does this mean for us? Can we trace the condition back to the source? Can we identify it in children before it manifests itself and have it prevented? What I’m considering is bigger than me, perhaps. Bigger than my family.

  My ba believed in destiny, my father believes in coincidence, I believe in patterns and consistency, and my brother believes in the manifest destiny of his own male ego.

  This isn’t destiny and this isn’t coincidence. This isn’t the male ego. This is a pattern. I can do something for the world.

  All those years I hid at my desk, building hardware systems to improve voice recognition for cinema booking systems, to improve remote cellular tinkerings when your smartphone goes bust, to make the algorithm on Shazam faster and more accurate, and I thought I was doing good. Maybe this is my manifest destiny. Maybe this is my purpose. To identify every child in the world who will have this condition, and get it identified early.

  Save the universe. Doc Brown, I need to save it, not destroy.

  START: MONDAY MORNING. END: FRIDAY EVENING

  GoTo: Phase 1 – Montage

  My daily patterns emerge; my cough worsens. Data is successfully entered by hand and virtually ported; I scope out a plan to track cancer locally, then regionally, then nationally, then continentally, then internationally, through various hacks to medical and insurance databases; my breath gets shorter and shorter. There are four answerphone messages from work asking for help with bugs found in the Glendale rollout. There are two emails from my dad asking for dinner. There is food ordered through websites, which goes uneaten. There is no one else I contact aside from this. I spend four days on phase 1, which is the basic data sets, and they all contain enough information to build a framework. I lose weight. I attempt a hack into more records held in the local authority database. I’m able to access library records, council tax records, school records and health records. The latter is easier to get hold of than I realize because doctors, it would appear, didn’t think too much about their passwords. I lose my appetite. The idea of chewing food feels revolting. I order some protein shake powder from Amazon. I dream of Ba and I think about calling my dad but don’t. I find oral accounts of immigrants moving on to the same four streets our family lived on in the early days. I match up quantitative remembrances with facts and cross-check them with other data paths to ensure I’m not assuming things, that I am entering only fact.

  The family tree is built. Every breath I take is now audible. I have everyone who lived in the UK entered. I have photographs associated from specific ages for all: two years old, twelve years old, twenty-two years old, and older where relevant, up until current age. I note with interest that my generation has been childless. The Jani family is dying out and there is nothing to stop their tale of mediocrity and immigration from being forgotten by a history that prizes only news and big wins.

  I half remember a proverb that I think Ba told me.

  Until the lion learns to speak, the tale of the hunt will glorify the hunter.

  I search for Kenyan proverbs trying to find this one, but I can’t. Instead I come across one that simply says, a man without a donkey is a donkey.

  I think about a donkey called Little Vijay that I met in Kenya. How much I loved it. I can trace my feelings of coldness towards people to that donkey’s demise. Whatever kindnesses Ba and Raks showed me in the aftermath of the incident pale in comparison to the memory of a relative beating that animal to death.

  I widen my searches. I start hitting increasingly fragmented search results hoping for more than just listings of names or caches of articles.

  And then I find one about my dad making history in 1968, years before I was born.

  SATURDAY MORNING

  GoTo: Shock. Awe

  I dream that I’m asleep and I can’t breathe.

  I don’t subscribe to dreams being anything other than a warning from your body.

  I dream literally. That’s fine. I don’t need to swim in jelly to know that I’m anxious about something.

  I wake myself so I can sit up and breathe.

  Once I’ve caught my breath, and my survival instinct has stopped pulsating, I think about my dad.

  I pick up my phone and look at the scanned newspaper clipping again. It’s still on my browser.

  Dad, you tiny goat.

  In 1968, he tries to buy a house, is refused sale on account of the colour of his skin, is convinced by the newly formed Commission for Racial Equality to bring the case to court, making it the first-ever case to be tried under the recently instituted Race Relations Act.

  He loses.

  On a technicality. According to the news story, the potentially landmark historic case was lost because lawyers were so quick to bring it to trial, to try and showcase the powers of the Race Relations Act, that motions weren’t filed correctly, a key witness was not interviewed, and crucially, the barrister was not fully briefed. And so they lost. My father lost.

  He never told me about this.

  I don’t subscribe to the theory that, being children of immigrants, my brother and I are any different from anyone else and owed more or less. I want and expect the same. I create and uncreate my own opportunities. I am afforded the same, legally protected potential for advancement as everyone else.

  This case, my father never talked about it. It feels important. This is the burden of immigrants, to be good immigrants. We only become the good type once we’ve transcended the stereotypes of benefit-scrounging and job-stealing. And we can only do that by being successful at sports, or winning national talent shows, or by baking delicious cakes. I am not a good immigrant, because my skills aren’t transferable, in a broad sense. No one is standing over the coders of tomorrow saying, well, this young South Asian coder, she is a good model for her people. I can never transcend.

  The more I think about it, the more I realize that I wish not to outstrip race. I can never truly reach a point higher than the one that belongs to my skin tone. And that is enough.

  Even though I was born here, I can never be a good immigrant. My father, if he had won this case, would have stayed a bad immigrant. Because he was challenging the system by showing that sometimes people aren’t afforded the same safe space to create and uncreate their own opportunities. Instead, my father was highlighting societal, institutional barriers in place to stop us from running the same race with the same trainers and the same conditions and the same training. The best thing he could have done in that situation was not let anyone know he had even been involved in such a challenge.

  I used to won
der why these insular communities and networks of immigrant families spring up and why they never want to integrate, let alone assimilate.

  Now I completely understand their mentality.

  Why put your head above water? You’re not wanted here. The systems are there for equal opportunity and for social mobility and for the advancement of man, but not you.

  It’s like a secret life of immigrants. We create magic and pretend it’s mundane. When Raks told me how much he was offered to do an advert for an Indian lager as opposed to a regular one, I wanted to tell him it was worth selling out over. My brother has principles, he says. He doesn’t want to be seen as an ethnic comic. When I explained to him that ethnicity is irrelevant in this context, that everyone is ethnic, his reply was, we’re not talking about ethnographic socio-demographics here, Neha. We’re talking about the language people use to attack you and make you feel shitty.

  I read through the NIB about my father again.

  I start to imagine what my father could have changed. Maybe we would have been brought up in a better house. I could have grown up not the type to want to run off and find my own space as soon as possible.

  I try to imagine my father as anything other than a buffoon.

  Raks once asked why I hate our dad.

  ‘Because he never asks questions. He always tells us stories. He’s more in love with himself as this great storyteller than his own children,’ I told him.

  ‘He’s just an oddball,’ Raks said. ‘He’s ultimately harmless.’

  In the news story, I see something in my father that I’ve never understood before become clear. I understand his need for invisibility. He told us that we had it easy, that things like racism were now unsaid, so at least you could pretend the world was on your side. He had the scars on him to show that it was worse in his day.

  I feel a tear.

  I don’t cry.

  As in, it’s not something I do. I don’t think human emotion should be allowed to be manipulative like that.

  I stare at the faded glow of the monitors working away in the next room.

  The rattle is back. In my right lung. It feels like a thick wet piece of bubblegum, stuck to my bronchioles.

  I fall forward till I’m on all fours, kneeling. I force a cough.

  SATURDAY EVENING

  GoTo: Accident. Emergency

  Waking up in a hospital feels like opening your eyes inside a coffin. You realize the lack of air flow very quickly. The stray beeps of machines in the near distance is calming at first, then suddenly alien. People move with such grace and quiet, they could be ghosts, harbingers.

  Waking up in a hospital and not immediately knowing how you got there is even stranger.

  We open our eyes expecting familiarity. This is why I can never sleep in hotels. They’re anonymous carcasses with the occasional dash of indistinguishable humanity, a television, insipid art, the buzz of other rooms.

  In movies, people open their eyes in hospital with a jerky start, seconds away from ripping the tubes from their body, their nerve endings coarse with survival mode.

  In soaps, people open their eyes quietly, because there is usually a revelation happening in the room, between the doctor and their wife, husband or parent, and they’ll need to reveal they knew that information in fifty episodes’ time.

  In this moment here, I take a second to work out where I am and five more to remember how I got here, before my brain can acknowledge that it’s encased inside a body in considerable pain.

  I remember calling the ambulance, I remember pocketing my phone and my charger.

  I remember lying on the floor.

  I remember the paramedics walking in through the open front door.

  But I don’t remember opening it.

  I realize I am holding something.

  I hope it’s my phone.

  I look down, hoping my eyes will focus.

  I’m holding a hand.

  I look up to its owner but my eyes take a second to refocus. I’m not wearing my glasses.

  The smell of starch and cleaning fluid hits me.

  It smells comfortable. Like home.

  Like my home away from home, for want of a lesser cliché.

  ‘Mika?’ I ask, stupidly.

  Are you to be written with me or not?

  ‘Oh. You’re awake. Spectacles, I was just about to leave. I have a shift. Now you’re awake, I suppose I can’t go. Oh, well. Maybe you can tell my boss.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I cough.

  ‘You okay, Spex?’

  ‘Water,’ I croak.

  ‘Always a barmaid,’ Mika sighs.

  I watch as she lets go of my hand, lifts it up and drops it on my chest. I have no muscles to stop it slapping down on me. She pours water into a plastic cup, lifts my arm off my chest and places the cup in it, squeezing till I grip. I lift the water slowly to my chin, touch, and then lift it to my bottom lip, ensuring it is pouring into my mouth. She stands, watching, impatient.

  ‘Glasses,’ I say into the bubbling echo chamber of the water.

  I manage a tiny sip down my throat. The rest trickles either side of my neck.

  I gulp frantically as I feel the cool liquid soothe my hot neck.

  I let go of the cup when it’s empty. My pillow is soaking. I turn my head sideways so my cheek can be cooled by the damp material.

  Mika puts my glasses on me when I return my head to neutral position.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Should you call a nurse?’

  ‘I guess.’

  She stands to leave.

  ‘Don’t be late for your shift,’ I whisper. ‘Your boss is a massive cunt.’

  ‘Can I ask you a really depressing question?’ Mika asks.

  I nod.

  ‘Why is Pivo your in-case-of-emergency number? What about your dad? Don’t you have a twin brother? Your local pub? Spectacles, that’s crazy.’

  ‘You’re the closest to me,’ I say. ‘Geographically. In an emergency, you’d be first on the scene.’

  ‘It’s not in my job description.’

  ‘They called you?’

  ‘Yeah, said you were stable. But when they found you, they said you were pretty weak.’

  I watch her push her glasses back up to the top of her nose and I have a memory of Ba doing the same thing to me, pushing the glasses up my nose, and smiling kindly, as we left the donkey Little Vijay to die. I’m remembering all these simple things. You tend not to remember the smaller things. Only the big ones. But watching Mika push her glasses up her nose makes me remember. It makes me realize.

  I’m not ready to die.

  My ba may not exist any more. But I do and I have things left to do. We accepted her lack of existence as easily as we accepted her as a relative. My father experienced so much anger and destruction in the years he was here. He fought for things I didn’t know about. He watched his wife die, knowing from the second he met her that he would outlive her. My ba watched Bapuji die and returned home to escape the demons of his violent demise.

  And me, what have I done? Who have I saved? Who did I fight for?

  Peter Glendale and his cinema ticketing project? Miles?

  No. I have work to do.

  ‘Do you want me to call your dad? I can,’ she says, looking at her fingers.

  She has black ink on her right hand. She licks at her palm and rubs at it.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Why won’t you call him?’ Mika asks.

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘I don’t think he would care that much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s more invested in the ideal of his dead wife than his living children. This is my dad’s folly, to relive the past, night after night, picturing every scene, every spoken word of dialogue, every moment, like it’s a Bollywood film. He plays it back in his mind’s eye, as he listens to Lata and to Kishore. We’re burdens to his perfect memory of his beautiful amazing dead wife. My mother, supposedly. Though I know nothing about her other than the stor
y he gives us every time we see him, about how they survived a horrific attack and fell in love at Diwali. My twin and I remind him of her imperfections.’

  ‘He’ll still want to know. You’re his kid.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He killed me just by having me. He doesn’t get to say goodbye.’

  Depression

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  GoTo: Initial Rollout

  The beta test is complete. The initial projections come back, throwing up some errors.

  I knew there would be some issues around Ba’s disappearance. I can account for everything except the date and cause of her death.

  I assume she’s dead.

  We haven’t heard from her since we were in Kenya. Dad let that side of the family fade into obscurity. No love lost. He told me that we reminded them all of what they had lost, not what they gained.

  We wondered about Ba through the years. That week Raks and I had spent with her was so life-changing for me, that I couldn’t understand Dad’s resistance to contacting her. Raks and I wrote her letters, but as the months piled up, we stopped. Years later, as teenagers flicking through a photo album, Raks found a photo of us on that Kenya holiday, and asked Dad what happened to her.

  Dad told us a long story that didn’t go anywhere, about how Ba was born on a dhow to a mother who drowned, then left for the UK where she watched her husband and children die, before moving back home because she wanted to be near where it began. I stared at the photo. I tried to see myself in her but I couldn’t. All I could see was someone who was fading in my memory till she became a still image. And my mother was a still image. I hated that. How quickly time slips away for us. We forget. Things cease to be real other than in the moment. Dad was convinced that Ba died the year we came to visit. He suspected she killed herself. I barely knew the woman, but it feels like an adequate explanation.