My brain is a list of names of those I have lost. I want to be with my family again. I want to see you.
My cousin stops walking towards me. He places his hand behind his back and looks over my shoulder to where Neha and Rakesh stand in the doorway of our bedroom. I turn to them and ask them to close the door.
Rakesh shakes his head but Neha listens to me.
Cousin, I say. You can punish the donkey but you will not punish my granddaughter. She has lost more than you so young.
We have all lost someone, cousin, he tells me. None of this is written in destiny. It is a kidology to believe this nonsense. None of this is happening because it needs to – it happens because it does.
He stops.
She is a child, I tell him.
So was I when . . . He stops and smiles. Do not think you can abandon us here and go and live in England like a gora, then come back and expect me to bow to you.
Men like my cousin give themselves to one god. And that is the amount of their own father they have in them. My cousin’s father was an angry man.
Cousin, he tells me.
I listen. I let him say his words. Words are nothing to the dead. They mean that little to me now.
He says, you expect to bring Angrezi politics back home? You must know where you belong.
He has come for me, cousin, I tell him. I speak quietly. Destiny has called for me.
My cousin laughs. He actually laughs.
Cousin, he says, through guffaws. You are superstitious.
I take my purse from my bra and pull out what shillings I have left with me.
Stop, I say. Ajay bhai, stop. Here. Take this.
This is my property, he shouts.
I hold out the wad of shillings. I do not own much and I do not need much. Not where I am going.
Have it, bhai, I say. We will take Little Vijay with us.
He laughs. Cousin, he says, are you dizzy? Have you lost your mind? How will you get this donkey to the mainland? Is she going to take it back to England on a plane? This is silly. Now, leave me to do my business.
He picks up the panga and raises it once more. I run towards him and as he drops his arm, I catch it with all my might. The force of his blow knocks me over but it is enough to make him hesitate. He throws the panga down again and it clangs on the ground. He raises his free hand to me.
You attack your own brother.
Ajay, bhai, money is more useful than a donkey carcass. Take it, I say, picking myself up.
I look towards the door. Neha is watching us and though I gesture for her to go back inside, she stands still and watches, frowning.
You raised your hand to me, he says. I should beat you here and send you home.
We will leave, I say, standing up and squaring my chest to his. He used to be bigger than me. Now we are both old and slower and roughly the same size. And we will go home safely, taking Little Vijay with us. And you will never touch me again. Cousin.
I drop the shillings at his feet and kneel down to pat the donkey, who I imagine is confused. As I stroke her, Neha runs out to us, blowing on Little Vijay’s nose as she approaches. She hugs her neck and smiles at me.
Thank you, she says.
Ajay marches back into the house, shouting for chai as he enters.
We must leave, I say. Immediately.
I have rewritten Little Vijay’s destiny, I think.
When we leave, I untie Little Vijay on the way. When we leave, my cousin is nowhere to be seen. When we leave, there are no goodbyes, only a handkerchief containing theplas, and one aloo paratha for me, left on the floor near our chappals. I nearly step on it as I walk out of the door.
We progress silently along the waterfront, Rakesh holding on to my hand, Neha to a rope around Little Vijay’s neck. The donkey is slow, for she is old and her back is not in good condition. We walk in silence.
As we approach the docks where the ferries leave from, I point to a pace of donkeys, each one vying for food on a small patch of grass. There are ten of them. Donkeys roam freely here and Little Vijay can be free. I untie the rope from her neck.
Time to say goodbye, I tell Neha.
I do not want to.
We have to go, we have arrangements. Your daddy will be waiting when we arrive back, I assure her.
I need to know Little Vijay is okay. I love him.
I can hear the hurt in her voice.
I promise you, I tell her. Wherever she is, it is the best place for her to be. And look, she will be amongst her own. This is what is written for her now.
I don’t want to say goodbye, she says.
I rub at her back and stroke above Little Vijay’s eye.
We stand in silence.
It is time, I say, fighting back tears.
Neha cuddles Little Vijay. Tears fall from her face on to Little Vijay’s cheek and I cannot contain my emotions. I cry too.
Rakesh squeezes my hand while Neha leads Little Vijay to the pace of donkeys.
Good. Bye, she says. One day you will die. Until then, good. Bye.
Goodbye, I hear Rakesh whisper, standing next to me. When I die, I’m bringing you down with me. Goodbye.
She walks back to us and we watch Little Vijay put her nose down into the muddle of heads trying to find food on this tiny patch of grass. We stand in silence.
Want to hear a joke? Rakesh says. I read it in my joke book.
Yes.
How do oceans say hello to each other? he asks. They wave.
We all laugh, each one straining to make the moment less painful.
As the bus slowly navigates the bumpy road, feeling car sick I turn to my babies and hold out my hand to Rakesh to shake. He looks at Neha, puzzled, and then back at me but reaches his hand out to mine.
Goodbye, until you are dead, I say.
No, Neha screams, laughing. You’re doing it wrong.
I do it wrong again and again, until they are frustrated with me.
I do it right once, for the relief, and Neha gives me a big hug. The next time, I do it wrong. And we fall about laughing on the bus.
Everyone Disperses – One by One They All Leave
The beach is as I remember. Shards of palm trees try to lacerate my feet as I walk along, barefoot. The reef is jagged and treacherous but you can go a mile on to it when the tide is out.
I see something silver glinting in the sand. It looks like a coin but when I pick it up it’s a piece of dagger-sharp glass, so I drop it back into the sand and step over it. I’ve left all my money at home, all my possessions. I’m wearing the saree I wore the day you died. I can see the blood stained into it, still hear the prathna we held in that tiny terraced house in Harrow.
I made everyone sing the Hanuman Chalisa because it was your favourite, and I remember wiping the tears streaming from my face with another saree, one of your cousins’ floral ones. Nisha, just home from work, wore a miniskirt and a white shirt. She lay in Mukesh’s arms and disengaged from the room.
Months later she would be pregnant. Pregnant, cancerous.
This saree is stained with memories. It is stained with you. It seems fitting to wear it now.
The emptiness of my house in the weeks after the twins leave is confusing. When they arrived I felt as though my life of static and solitude had been upturned. Then they showed me joy. Now they are gone, I fail to find instant comfort in the quiet. Instead I feel restless and clear out everything I don’t want.
I take all my clothes to the temple but leave the kitchen as it is. It feels used, as though someone has been here. I leave my copies of Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer on Mrs Chatterjee’s doorstep, with no explanation. It amuses me that she will be shocked and outraged long after I am gone. I have nothing else. I do not have any money to speak of, any books, or any luxury items. My radio I give to the children who play in the street, the ones who come and sit near my veranda when I am listening to cricket.
I look at my room.
All I have left is myself.
I am ready
for you.
I did not bring letters or photographs back with me – I gave them to Mukesh to give to the children. He can live with these ghosts, not me. I long to be one myself. I left photographs of you and Nisha and Chumchee because I could not look at you all any more.
When it comes time to say goodbye to Neha and Rakesh, I give Neha a picture of a donkey that I bought in Lamu, a postcard.
There is post for you, I say.
She takes it and looks at the picture, turning it over to see what I have written: THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME AND FOR LOVING ME I AM HAPPY WITH MY FRIENDS LOVE LITTLE VIJAY.
This is not real, she says.
Are you sure?
Rakesh is talking Mukesh through his joke book and Mukesh is doing his best to laugh. Neha steps out of my home on to the front step. I watch her watching the day pass by and then go out and stand next to her.
I will miss you, I say.
Will we see you again? she asks.
No. I am old, too old to travel now. And I am tired.
I will come back and visit, she says. I want to.
I hope you will. You remind me so much of your mother, I add. You know your own mind like her. Never think that anyone knows it better than you. The world is filled with average white men. You have to be twice as good as them. Okay?
I give her two small pieces of paper.
What are these? she asks, looking down at them. Written in our daughter’s hand are some words. Every time I see her handwriting, I remember everything about her, as though she is still here.
Neha: egotist, hard-working, stubborn, avoid these numbers: 16, 12, 9, 22.
Rakesh: clown, needs validation, lazy, avoid these numbers: 3, 13, 14, 22.
She screws up her nose when she reads them.
She is so much like our daughter. I miss our daughter. I miss when we were together.
I don’t understand, she says.
I tell her about the Bradford Baba and how our daughter asked him to write down the destiny of her children, so that she could know them in some way, what they would become, so she could feel a part of their lives.
What is an egotist? Neha asks.
It means you know your own mind. These are your destinies, the ones your mother knew you would have when she died. She was so sad not to be able to see what you would become. Whatever happens, whatever heartbreak you feel, whatever pain, whatever loss, it was meant to happen. Whatever love, happiness or joy, it was always meant to be. There is a comfort in this. Knowing your destiny is helpful so you are prepared for whatever comes.
Daddy said destiny is not as important as science. Science is real.
That is because destiny is written by people we cannot see.
I don’t want to know what will happen, she says.
Our destiny determines who we are, what we achieve, what we suffer, what we feel. Everything happens according to destiny. We can’t escape from what we have to face in life, no matter how hard we try.
What is your destiny? she asks.
As I hold her I feel myself breaking into tears.
It is to love my family whatever happens, at all costs. I walk towards my destiny with my head held high. I pause. I love you, I add.
I love you too, she whispers, looking over my shoulder.
Rakesh cries when I say goodbye, the poor boy. He wears his emotions like badges. I said to him, embrace your nature, your desire to please. Do something with that. Do not care what others think.
I look at Mukesh and extend my hand to him. He tries to hug me.
We are concluding a business transaction, not saying a tearful goodbye of two loved ones, I tell him.
I want to laugh, saying that the look on his face makes me shiver. As he walks away, I remember my first impression of the boy, setting fire to our toilet door. Chaos follows him.
I reach a mound of jagged rocks slick with sea spray and put my chappals back on, in order to clamber over them, as I have done many times in the past. The trick is to embrace the slipperiness of your chappals and move quickly, use the sliding inertia to push yourself up on to the initial rock. Once you are there, you can get over the rest of them. I try to summon up the strength in my tired legs but I cannot do it. My knees have not been the same since returning here. They feel swollen and inflamed with every move. I have to stand and walk with them bent ever so slightly, to ensure they are not locked in place.
With no reason to go back, unable to move forward, I sing something tuneless, just so there is noise.
There he is, standing next to me, an orange shawl draped over his shoulders to hide his feathered body. He wears those round glasses. At first I think it is him, from the market, Yama, come for me. But now, in the stillness of the moment, I realize that he looks just like you. It is you. It is you who has been waiting for me all this time.
I smile at you.
I am ready now, I say, to break the silence after what feels like a lifetime of waiting.
The clouds close in, black and fuzzy, like a wisp of beard.
I know, you say. That is why I am here.
I have missed you so much.
I have missed you too. I am glad you came home and chose to come here to meet me. I was wrong to be left in England. I missed this.
Our grandchildren are beautiful, I tell you. They have bright futures ahead of them.
Whatever is written for their destiny is what is written. That is how it should be.
I realized something, darling, I tell you. Something I had not realized before about destiny. When I was leading our grandchildren from Ajay’s house, it came to me. The present moment is the only thing that actually exists and so when we have to be fully engaged in what is happening right this second, we have the power to change our future, to change the world. All change comes from this moment.
There is free will and there is destiny, you tell me. They coexist. Some things we write, some things are written for us. Fate is our sanskara. We created some of it in the past, which gives us the experiences we are having now, but we can change what our future self will be experiencing by our choices right now. That is all destiny is: the consequences of choices.
I did not know this before, I say. I know it now.
I walk towards the water. It is cold around my toes. I wade in until it comes to my waist and I feel my chappals slip off my feet, stuck in the muddy sand.
I fall into the water and swim.
I never wanted to be a mother. It was thrust on me. I was told it was my destiny and I accepted this, feeling I had no choice. It was my role, what I was destined to do. There were days I felt I had lost any sense of myself other than being a mother. In my dark moments, I thought perhaps I had killed my children, and punished my husband for impregnating me. The whole time I have been here, in solitude, I punished myself because I thought that I had written their destinies for them. That which was meant for me had consequences for my family.
My mother drowned.
There was too much fluid in Nisha’s lungs when she died.
She drowned.
It feels romantic. How our destinies are intertwined. I smile.
I swim until I feel faint, letting the waves wash over me as the tide ebbs away. You stand on the shore and you watch.
I wave to you. I am happy to see you.
I sing to myself, that song that is always on the radio, and I picture my family, my Chumchee, my Nisha, Neha and Rakesh, and you, and I close my eyes. I am so tired, and I am, finally, so happy. I bob in the water, watching the shore. You are standing still and watching me, waiting for me. I smile and close my eyes.
Ye hum kyaa jaane, ye wahee jaane, jisane likhaa hain sab kaa naseeb.
What do I know, only he knows, the one who has written the destiny of all.
Acknowledgments
Firstly, thank you to James Roxburgh for being a wise, careful and generous editor. Thank you to everyone at Atlantic Books. Thank you to Margaret Stead, also. Thanks for the unwavering support, Julia Kingsford. Thank yo
u to early readers Chimene Suleyman and James Smythe for their insights.
Thank you to Mahesh mama for bringing that case under the Race Relations Act in 1968; to Miss L for running the Casting Call Woe blog (where I plucked some of Laila’s casting calls); to Josie Long and Nish Kumar for insights into the life of a stand-up comedian; to Bahul for his CV, which is Neha’s CV (and I still don’t quite get what either of them do); to Wei Ming Kam, Charlie Morris and Liz Wawrykow for advice; thank you to women of colour for absolutely everything.
Thank you to Coco, who for the first few months of her life would only sleep on me in a sling for entire nights, which gave me the necessary time to edit this. Thank you to Sunnie for telling me you want to read this one day.
Thank you to Jo, Gigi and Katie for a memorable journey to Lamu forever ago. Thank you to Emma-Lee Moss for a tour of New York coffee spots once.
Thank you to the Arts Council for their time to write a grant. I’ve been lucky to receive a few of these over the years and each time, the work I did, the characters and stories I developed got me closer to writing this book. It’s not often, these days, as a writer, that you get time to play and experiment and nurture and be creative and try things out, but these Arts Council grants are invaluable in providing this time. So thank you to them for continuing to make these opportunities available in spite of our current government’s war on the arts.
You can adopt the real Little Vijay at the Donkey Sanctuary in East Devon.
Thank you to the Arvon Foundation centre at Lumb Bank, where I did some work on this in between workshops.
Thank you to Salena Godden and Niven Govinden for mentoring me and giving me time, support and love when I needed it the most.
Thank you to all the contributors to The Good Immigrant, which is a book that has changed my life.
An earlier version of Raks’ chapter, A Man, Without A Donkey, was longlisted for the London Short Story Prize.
Save libraries.
I miss you mum.
Katie, I love you so very much.
The One Who Wrote Destiny Page 28