The One Who Wrote Destiny

by Nikesh Shukla

  The more I am with them, the more they remind me of what I have lost.

  Rakesh shakes at my hand and calls out to his sister who holds up a palm to say, don’t hurry me.

  She finishes and walks back to us.

  I did not like the Kenya display, she says. There was too much fighting.

  Come bedtime, the children are sitting on the bed, watching me fold their clothes. Rakesh has not spoken for most of the day. He is quiet. Needy. A chumchee. Neha has not stopped talking since we arrived at home. This museum, it has unlocked something within her.

  The world is so big and everything is so different, she says. Why would we want to go anywhere different? I cannot wait to go home. Why do you stay here?

  I shake my head and shrug.

  Nowhere I go feels like home to me, I tell her. I understand myself here.

  Do you not miss England?

  No, I say. It reminds me too much of everything that I have lost. Here, I feel most like myself. It is familiar.

  Neha cries.

  What is wrong? I ask her.

  I miss Daddy. I don’t want to be here.

  Of course. He will return. Until then, we are stuck with each other.

  Rakesh holds his sister’s hand in solidarity. I wonder if they realize I will never see them again after this. I will never return to the UK, a country that doesn’t want me. And I cannot leave this country. Not while I wait for destiny to come and collect me. Or is it death? Are they sometimes the same?

  Will you make me lots of sugar rotlis before I go? Rakesh asks.

  I could show you how to make them, I say. That way, whenever you eat one, you will be here. With me.

  That is not the same, Neha says.

  She jumps off the bed and runs into the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back to me.

  I go to the kitchen and sit down next to her, taking great pains to cross my legs.

  I put an arm around her.

  Your destiny is not with me, I tell her. But I will always guide you when I can. Do you miss her?

  Who? Neha says.

  Your mummy.

  No, she says.

  Why not? I whisper, trying to calm her, feeling the tension across her shoulders.

  She was never my mummy.

  I turn away so that she does not see my tears. I have not cried since I came home and realized I was alone, except for the stories I tell you.

  She will not see me cry.

  I can hear Rakesh sleeping and Neha squirming about next to him. She insists on wearing trousers to bed as she is worried about mosquitoes, but they make her knees sweat. I lie with my back turned to them both, on the double mattress we all share in the middle of my one-room house, staring at the text on the page – none of the Mills & Boon book enters my brain. Their presence is an irritation. Every time one of them breathes, I can feel the room get hotter, and when they shift on the mattress, the fat rolls on my stomach shake. I tremble with irritation and tut loudly at their every infraction. I look down my body to my grey toenails, remembering when I could wear chappals and not feel embarrassed. Now I wear socks so no one can see that my body is beginning to crack, starting with my feet.

  Go to sleep, I whisper to Neha, without looking at her.

  No, she replies.

  What’s wrong?

  Did you know my mummy was going to die? she asks softly.

  No.

  Rakesh mutters something in his sleep. Gibberish.

  No, I say. I didn’t know any of them would die. Not before me. I did not think about it.

  I sit up, and turn to face Neha on the mattress. She stares at me passively. Her eyes have dark circles under them and they are red from where she has scratched her tears away. I sit cross-legged and she does the same, facing me.

  I did not think about death till it came to find my family, I say. I only knew about destiny.

  What is destiny?

  Destiny is . . . cruel. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel – Oscar Wilde said that. I read it on some toilet paper in a hotel I stayed in with your bapuji and I remembered it. It is not my place to question destiny. Everything is pre-written, pre-judged. Why fight it?

  Does that mean it is decided how I will die?

  I nod, conscious that, years later, I am going against my daughter’s dying wish. Yes, I say softly. There is comfort in that. To know that it is beyond your control. Live your life. The wind is blowing; those vessels whose sails are unfurled catch it, and go forward on their way, but those that have their sails furled do not catch the wind. Is that the fault of the wind? I smile. Bedtime, I say.

  I’m scared, Neha says.

  Of what?

  I cannot control anything.

  No, I say. I have lost enough people to find this comforting. Your daddy, you know? He moved to England to be with my nephew, Sailesh. He was going to live in London, working in clubs, earning money as a juggler, a clown. And your daddy was going to come with him, to study. So he came, because he got the visa quicker. And he lived in Keighley, because he could not find anywhere in England that would accept darkies, like you and me. And if he hadn’t gone to Keighley, he would not have met your mother. Is that coincidence? Or is it destiny? If his friend, Sailesh, had not died, your daddy might have moved quickly from Keighley to London, and he might not have started a relationship with your mummy. You can believe it is coincidence. Or it is fate, destiny? But you can control neither.

  Maybe she would still be alive if he hadn’t met her, Neha says. Maybe I would have a mummy.

  Maybe. But if he hadn’t met her, then you wouldn’t have been born. It is not for us to question the one who writes destiny, only to honour their wishes.

  Who is the one who writes destiny?

  Some say he is the cousin of death. Others say he is the accountant of our life, sitting there, making note of everything we do, checking it against a balance sheet.

  I do not understand.

  You are young, I tell her.

  It’s not because I’m young, she hisses. It’s because you talk in funny riddles.

  Neha lies down, turning to face Rakesh. She closes her eyes.

  That night, I tell her softly, in the maize factory, while we waited for the British never to arrive, your bapuji asked me if I believed in fate. I said no. He told me, fate is comfort. And your bapuji, he knew more than anyone. I remember talking to one of the soldiers, who walked and walked all day to get to us. He told me, a man’s actions are more important than his ancestry. Your DNA, your genes, you worry too much about them. Worry about what you do in life. Please. Do not worry about anything other than what you do with the time you have. Me? I have done everything I wanted to. I’ve lost everything. Now, I’m just waiting to die, to be reunited with my three loves. And then you two come into my life, and I can see your amee and your papa and your mama in you. And it makes me angry because I look at you both and all I can think about is what I have lost. But I should not be this way. You are children. You are my grandchildren. Please, do not worry about anything other than what you do.

  Neha is snoring.

  I look back at my book and whisper the lines of dialogue to myself.

  Rakesh is already awake when I sit up.

  Neha is lying in bed reading one of the comics I bought for her. When she sees me, she drops it and pretends to be asleep.

  On the other side of the room, Rakesh is standing over one of my steel mixing bowls. He is cupping his hands full of flour and dropping it into the bowl, spilling grains all over the floor. He looks up at me and smiles, then lifts a cup of water.

  Only enough to bind the flour, I say. Just a little. And even though I say it in English, I can still hear my mother saying this to me, me saying it to Nisha, and imagining Nisha saying it to her children.

  He pours in a large drop and smiles, expectantly.

  Now knead, I say. I stand up. I kick Neha with a foot and she opens one eye. Sugar rotlis for breakfast? Made by your brother?
/>   She rolls her eyes, but I know she’s hungry.

  God Knows My Past, but Not Today’s Separation

  My mother told me what it was like to give birth on a dhow.

  She said, she cared not for privacy. She waited for the waves to be hypnotic, for the ebb and flow of the horizon to be calming, for the cool breeze to soothe her nerves.

  I was her first child and so she did not know how I would emerge. Despite being a small baby, I came out with a hand over my face, shielding myself from the world. She nearly bled to death because my elbow tore at her like a metal rod.

  She said I was quiet. She said I was alert very early on and that I watched everything. She also said it was the first time she’d appreciated that she would always be closer in age to her first-born than to her husband. She was a teenager when she had me, a teenager when I was conceived, barely out of childhood when she was married.

  Sometimes I think, if I had not moved to the West, would I have accepted that as custom and tradition? Tradition is very important, it upholds structure. But it is static.

  I try to picture this dhow birth.

  I want to tell these children about their family. They find the way I live hard. They are not used to the lack of space inside when there is an abundance of space outside. We live in one room, it houses part of a kitchen. The toilet is outside, the bath is a cup and a bucket wherever you can find space. I have no television, I wear two sarees. Most of the space in my house is taken up by their suitcases. Even so, I do not want to be seen as a savage.

  Neha and I surface at the same time the next day. I know she’s awake because I can hear her shuffling about under the sheet.

  I roll over to face her. She is lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, and does not notice that I am awake. Her entire body is straight and stiff.

  Raks snores.

  Pani? I ask.

  She turns her head to me and nods.

  Pani, she repeats.

  If they leave with one lesson, it’s the lesson of nouns for proper things. Pani, gadi, gadhero, keree, chumchee, for starters.

  I remember when our Chumchee died. I had already lost you and Nisha. I was there, in the hospital with him. I sat with him while he stared out of the window, held his hands and read the Gita to him. His body never recovered from the collision. I tried to rescue his mind but he was slipping away from the moment of that accident.

  Dehino’smin yatha deha kaumaram yauvanam jara tatha dehantara praptir dhiras tatra na muhyati.

  Just as in the physical body of the embodied being is the process of childhood, youth, old age; similarly in the transmigration from one body to another the wise are never deluded, I whispered – in case he had forgotten how to speak properly.

  Na jayate mriyate va kadacin nayam bhutva bhavita va na bhuyah ajo nityah sasvato yam purano na hanyate hanyamane.

  The soul never takes birth and never dies at any time, nor does it come into being again when the body is created. The soul is birthless, eternal, imperishable and timeless and is never terminated when the body is terminated.

  Jatasya hi dhruvo mrtyur dhruvam janma mrtasya ca tasmad apariharye’rthe na tvam socitum arhasi.

  For one who has taken birth, death is certain, and for one who has died, birth is certain. Therefore in an inevitable situation understanding should prevail.

  I repeated my favourite bit to myself.

  The soul is indestructible, the soul is incombustible, insoluble and unwitherable. The soul is eternal, all-pervasive, unmodifiable, immovable and primordial.

  Acchedyo’yam adahyo’yam akledya’sosya eva ca nityah sarva-gatah sthanur acalo’yam sanatanah.

  I do not know at what point he died, but I know when I realized he had. I pretended I had not noticed, not until I had finished reading. Years later, I was able to admit to myself that I had noted the point at which he was no longer with me and decided, consciously but with the overriding feeling of subconsciousness, to ignore this and carry on reading the Gitas to the end.

  I did not cry when Chumchee died. I was prepared for the loss of another child. Nisha I never recovered from.

  Neha looks like her mother.

  When Nisha died, I was sitting next to her, quietly. I had been sitting up with her all night. She told me she could see her father, her grandmother, her grandfather whom she had never met before, her cousin Sailesh, and she was talking to them – in tongues. It wasn’t Gujarati and it wasn’t English but it seemed like a pleasant conversation. I sat next to her and watched. I called for Mukesh and he came into the room and held her hand. It went limp early on but he stayed holding it for as long as she wanted to talk.

  When she was finished, she smiled at him and closed her eyes.

  I spent much of that time just quietly watching her. I wish I had let her know it was okay, that victims of cancer had a good reincarnation in front of them. That it was all going to be okay. Whether I believed it or not, I needed for there to be that option.

  Most of them did not even know she had cancer till afterwards.

  They blamed me.

  It was Mukesh’s decision to not tell anyone. Why should we let people know our business? he said to me. Your family is filled with hypochondriacs. They all play that game with each other. I am ill. No, I am more ill. My son has a cold, my daughter has typhoid, my cousin has dengue fever, my mother has malaria, I am dead. Why should we subject Nisha to this scrutiny? She had years longer than we thought she would have. We lived knowing this day would come. It’s not a surprise.

  This is the fallacy of our family. We play league games with our health. It is the only status we can afford – and instead of banking good health, we want to be the ones with the most suffering. So we count out maladies like coins and play card games to see who has been through the most, who has suffered the most, who requires the most sympathy.

  Nisha hated this way.

  She told me off when she found out I had idly given away her diagnosis to her mami and mama, because my brother’s wife had been diagnosed with lupus. I wanted them to know that I understood the struggle.

  We make life difficult for ourselves in order to relate to each other. We live miles away from each other, often in different countries. We don’t have cars or degrees or kitchens that look like the pages of catalogues. We have health. Health can be measured.

  We see suffering as karma. To suffer is to gain something in the next life.

  We walk together in a line.

  The fruit market is busy at this time of day.

  It should smell like magic but instead, it smells like rotting mounds of discarded fruit. I squeeze mangos and melons, look at papayas. Each one is decaying, dying. Like me.

  I buy Rakesh and Neha a mango each. It is a luxury. I show them both how to eat the fruit without cutting it up into pieces.

  We sit on the steps of the fruit market as I squeeze one of the mangos in its skin. I squeeze and squeeze until I can feel the mango meat underneath getting softer and juicier.

  When it feels as though the flesh has been loosened and pulped underneath my warm hands, I tear off the top of the mango and pass it to Neha. I tell her to suck it, and push with her fingers, so that the pulp erupts straight into her mouth like squeezing toothpaste.

  The look of pleasure on her face is worth it.

  She is tasting mango the way it should be eaten. She squeezes till the flesh is spilling out on to her fingers, over her mouth, down towards her chin. I wipe her with my hand.

  Rakesh does the same as I did. He smiles at her.

  I have done something right.

  We watch the world go by and I notice an old Indian man, bald, wearing round glasses, his dhoti folded up into itself so it looks like pants.

  He stands next to a little boy who is looking around, bemused at what is happening to him as the old man stands with one hand on the crown of his head. His other hand stretches up, cupping the sky, straining for water, or sunshine, or something.

  His eyes are closed. He mutters sile
ntly.

  He is in a trance.

  The boy is bewildered by what he’s doing.

  The old man opens his eyes – they are glassy – and looks at me. He does not break the stride of his muttering.

  He smiles, revealing separated teeth, mostly white, a front one missing. It gives his face an impish look.

  He smiles by trapping his top lip behind the erratic arrangement of his bottom teeth and waggles his head.

  I turn away, back to Rakesh and Neha. She has finished half of her fruit, a sated mess. He is eating as quickly as he can, as if someone is about to take mangos away from him for life.

  Daddy says we cannot buy these at home, Neha says. This is the last one I will eat.

  What is that man doing? Rakesh says, lifting the mango from his mouth; a dumping of flesh falls into his lap.

  The old man is walking towards us, smiling.

  Jay Shree Krishna, he says, as he approaches. Gujarati?

  Swahili, I reply.

  I was never born in Gujarat.

  Gujarati bole che?

  I nod, down once, then up, to ask what he wants.

  Su? I say.

  The old man holds his hand out to Neha who looks at me, confused.

  Take it, he says. Take it.

  I put my hand under his and gesture for him to drop whatever he is offering into my palm.

  What do you want? I ask.

  Beek lage che? he asks. Don’t be frightened. I am not to be feared.

  I keep my hand there, waiting for him to drop the object into my hand.

  He swivels his hand around and shows me. It is one petal of a bougainvillea plant, faded pink like his palm.

  What is this? I ask.

  I see sadness in you. All of you.

  Thank you, sahib. We are going home now, I say.

  I usher Neha and Rakesh to stand up. They both do, lazily, as though their limbs are stuck to the floor. It is midday now and the sun is streaking down in waves of unbelievable heat. I want us all to stay here until it cools down.