Brown Baby

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Brown Baby Page 12

by Nikesh Shukla


  Because the other school of thought just involves lying.

  There are many truths to tell, obviously, but I always wanted to tell you the truth about the world.

  When you and I sat in the armchair, cuddling and slowly waking up one morning, as spring entered the room with the promise of fresh light, you broke the silence by declaring that giraffes were your favourite animal. I asked you why and you said you liked the patterns on their fur and their long necks. I asked if you knew they had black tongues that looked very strange when they nabbed leaves off trees.

  You asked to see a video of one.

  I unlocked my phone and searched for ‘giraffe’. The first search result told me that giraffes were newly declared an endangered species.

  I paused.

  ‘What does it say, Daddy?’

  I didn’t know if this was the right time to tell you about giraffes being endangered. My pride in telling you the truth suddenly had met its match in the poor giraffe, about to breathe its last. I’ve had these unravelling conversations with you in the past. In a book about Diwali your fais bought you, two elephants pray.

  You once asked me, ‘What’s praying?’

  ‘It’s, erm, thinking really good things, and talking to your god,’ I said, panicking.

  ‘What’s my god?’

  ‘Er, not something I believe in. But, like a presence, who made everything in the world.’

  ‘Does god make ice cream?’

  ‘Well, if you believed in god, then yes.’

  ‘Do you not believe in god?’

  ‘No . . . I . . .’

  ‘Do you pray?’

  ‘No, but I talk to other people. Like my mum . . .’

  ‘Is your mum a god?’

  ‘Splutter, splutter, would you like a snack? Let’s go out for hot chocolates!’

  ‘Did god make hot chocolate?’

  Explaining a simple thing like what praying is can end up in an existential crisis about the nature of belief and what it is to believe in something and what it is to not. Explaining that a giraffe is endangered means talking about the depths of human evil when it comes to killing animals for fun, with inverted commas, or climate change. And if I have to explain the evil of humanity or the end of the world, then it’s going to make breakfast a very sober affair.

  I want you to know the truth though. I cannot lie to you about these things.

  ‘I saw,’ I say, ‘a news story that soon there will be no more giraffes left in the world.’

  ‘Why?’ you say, distressed.

  I read from the site: ‘Giraffe numbers plummeted by a staggering 40% in the last three decades, and less than 100,000 remain today. Habitat loss through expanding agriculture, human–wildlife conflict, civil unrest, and poaching for their meat, pelts, and tails, are among the reasons for the decline.’

  ‘People eat giraffes?’ you ask in horror.

  ‘They used to, probably,’ I say, thinking about a restaurant I once visited called Carnivores, where a local had told me about how the menu had changed over the last twenty years to ensure that animals like giraffes were protected. Because they used to serve giraffe meat. The restaurant, in Nairobi, served soups to line your stomach, and provided each diner with a white flag. If it was up, it meant that the waiters, walking around with platters of various meats, were to skip you. You could take breaks or you could admit defeat. It was a Nairobi staple and someone like me, who had been vegetarian for so much of their teens and early twenties, definitely slipped back into meat-eating with the ease and hunger of a man who felt there was a decade of catching up to do.

  I was the problem.

  ‘That’s why they have been listed as endangered,’ I say. ‘So people know that they need to take extra special care of giraffes, or there will be no more left.’

  A script editor I’m working with, weeks later, tells me about the fate of the Asiatic lion, and how it was hunted out of existence. I think about you, my meat-loving, whole-milk guzzling daughters and I think about giraffes and I think about guilt and I look in your eyes and you say, ‘What does men-danger mean?’

  I laugh at your unintentionally wise malapropism and look at opening times for a nearby wildlife park that has giraffes as inmates.

  Your dada comes with us. You tell him over breakfast that you are really excited to meet giraffes. You seem to have forgotten that they are men-danger and that sometimes they are killed for their meat. You’re happy to be in their presence. We drive to the wildlife park and you run along the road in front of me towards the high-ceilinged barn that houses the animals.

  As we enter, you get shy, like you usually do. You grip my hand and press your cheek against it, curving your body into my leg. Your dada encourages you to come with him to the fence and watch closer but you don’t want to. I see the wonder in your eye. That absolute wonder of seeing something you’ve seen in books in real life. Because much as you’ve been to the zoo before, the trips have been sporadic enough that each visit is like your first one. Your memories feel like fever dreams. You know them all intimately and can recall the most innocuous moment but none of them feel as real as the moment you’re in. It’s joyful to be in that moment with you. I crouch down and hug you into me. I can see you peering over my arm at the legs of the giraffe as it approaches the fence. In the corner of the barn, a couple stand with a zoo keeper. The zoo keeper is telling the couple about the two giraffes, how old they are, how long they’ve been at the park, and the couple are feeding the giraffe as it crouches down to pull leaves from branches they are both holding out. The zoo keeper shows them how to stroke the giraffes’ noses. We wander over and I pick you up so you can watch. It’s like every bodily function in you has stopped. You were frozen still. And there, suddenly, a few feet away from you is a bobbing giraffe head. So close.

  We try our best to not interrupt this couple date. The girl is so rapt with the giraffes and the guy is so rapt with her they probably wouldn’t notice you reaching out to stroke a nose, giraffe or human. He has paid a silly amount for this luxury and it was the right choice for their date. Neither expected some wide-eyed interlopers but we stand there anyway. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you stand this close to something so beautiful as a long-necked weirdo pulling leaves off branches with its muscular tongue.

  You and I watch. Your dada takes your sister up to the mezzanine floor to watch the other giraffes feed from a basket in the sky. We watch the giraffes and for twenty minutes, we are there in the moment with them, they are not endangered, you are not worried about things beyond your control, I feel like I can manage the macro-terror of climate change. It’s all going to be okay.

  I think back to that phone call with Josie.

  I should have said to her that we have to strive to be better in ensuring we’re not prioritizing convenience for ourselves over the long-term impact on other people. We have to recycle and clean the bottles and jars. We have to readjust. We also have to be realistic with you, our children. And yes, there are major things we have to do and many reasons why it’s better for the Earth that you do not exist. But you do, and this is your world, and all I can do is present these experiences for us to have together, so that you know the realm of possibility in the world. Some animals can have big-ass fucking necks. Books can only take us so far sometimes. To see the wonder on your face that day, it was to touch God’s feet and believe in something bigger than myself. And I’m not even religious.

  The man starts rubbing his girlfriend’s bum as she pushes a leaf-filled branch onto the black tongue of the giraffe. The magic is broken and you are running for the door, stumbling with excitement.

  Your mum joked once that she was your access point for nature and I was your access point for gritty city living. Which made us both laugh because I’m far from gritty. But she’s right. I’m just more comfortable in cities than I am in the wilds and whims of nature.

  I can’t stop the managed decline of the planet. Nor the unmanaged one. I can’t lie to you. We fucked
this place and now it’s yours. Like a well-worn hand-me-down shoe. You can feel the imprint of someone else’s footsteps.

  I can help you experience as much as possible. It’s all I can do. I can read you Greta Thunberg quotes and be honest but not too honest but honest enough.

  And I can still take you to see a giraffe.

  When you were born and we were struggling with sleep, I used to take you out on urban rambles in the middle of the night. It was often an insight into what used to be. My life before.

  I witnessed, sober, my past, night life, drunk energy, the carelessness of the night, the throb of bass bins and the cacophony of a thousand aimless conversations, pierced through with shrill laughter as friends and lovers rinse each other, one-upping until it’s gone too far and the only thing left to do is make peace over one more, the last one, the next one, the hasty food, then pass out. Only to wake to texts of camaraderie, oh weren’t we the last gang in town, and before your head can throb and eek out a bleak klaxon of ‘I’ve got to make some changes’, plans are made to do it all over again.

  So many weekdays in my twenties lost to the fug of the hangover, bolstered by the feeling of you can’t touch me now, you can’t hold me down. Email trails told of derring-do. I read back those missives the next morning, recounting nights out, flashes through my mind of what went on, and we were heroes, party starters, rebels, night owls, beasts. I cannot be sure, now, we were always nice well-intentioned people, Ganga. I cannot be sure we didn’t do stupid, reckless things, said awful, reprehensible things, spent money on wasteful liver-destroying things. It was a different time. So many evenings lost to this reckless feeling of abandon. It was perfect in the moment. I was exactly where I needed to be. The future was, as Danny Dorling says, another place.

  I’m here in that future now. And almost like Scrooge, as I walk you through those streets, sober, tired, in survival mode, I am witnessing the ghosts of my past, present . . . you, being the future, Ganga.

  And now I walk past the same pubs and the same clubs and they’re still busy, and it’s strange that I was forgotten so quickly, that the hole I left by the bar has been filled by another thirsty person, and cacophony has the cadence of new voices, new laughs, new abandon.

  It’s like a purification ritual. The city is cruel. It doesn’t remember you. It doesn’t need you. You need it. It’ll always find someone else to take your place. And it is far from fussy.

  I feel replaced.

  One morning, after a horrific night of staring at the ceiling as you writhe around unsettled in your room, I bundle you into the pushchair and take you out. It’s summer. It’s hot. The night was still and we all failed to sleep deeply. It’s hot already and I walk down our road, past boys and girls, glitter streaked across their faces, holding trainers and shoes, arms around each other, loudly debating specific moments from last night.

  What did she mean when she did that?

  Why did she go off with Josh then?

  She doesn’t really like him though.

  She’s friend-zoned me.

  Friend-zone is sexist.

  Fuck off, I don’t care. I don’t want to hear that right now.

  They walk past us and they snigger at me, the scruffy dad in his Avengers pyjamas and band-that-was-popular-in-the-Nineties T-shirt, wearing his white toppi, marching down the road with a pram radiating tears.

  My headphones are on to guard me from conversations with drunk people on their way home but I don’t play anything. Today my soundtrack is fresh air. Today my soundtrack is the slow crawl of traffic over scorched tarmac. Today my soundtrack is the snippets of drunk and high revelations from passers-by. Today my soundtrack is the chicken bones I crunch under my creps. Today my soundtrack is the light breathing of you, finally asleep.

  I walk through Stokes Croft.

  The sky is the kind of blue that we imagine when we paint our bedrooms sky blue, never accounting for the boundlessness of the space or the shadows and lighting from wherever we are in the house. This is the kind of sky blue that inspires terrible poetry. That fills our Instagram feeds. That makes me breathe in the thick air of last night’s skunk, hanging over last night’s Stokes Croft like an end-of-night leveller, a cloud of sweet earthiness, and it makes me miss the mornings you’d leave the club and it’d be daylight, and you’d walk home and everyone else would be starting their days, and you’d wonder how you’d get through yours; was today one of the days to use up a sickness chip, or was today the day you plastered on a fake smile and made your way through three packets of Hula Hoops and took long breaks in the disabled toilet because it was the easiest place to contort yourself into a nap?

  Looking up at the glorious sky, I see a boy standing on top of the bakery. There isn’t a roof garden up there. He must have climbed up. He is slumped against a chimney stack, staring out in front of him. He has the vacant look of someone off his face, who used up all the spirit of spirits to get him up there, and now has shut down. Or he’s thinking of doing something stupid. Which, at that height, wouldn’t be fatal, but it would fucking hurt. You’re quiet now. I know that if I stop marching, I’ll wake you up.

  I walk you in a rectangle from traffic light to traffic light, while I’m on the phone to the police. I can’t get the boy’s attention and when I paused, you stirred. You’re not in deep sleep. You’re in a being-rocked-to-shallow-sleep sleep. You’re tricky.

  A policeman eventually arrives, blaring his siren once, to alert me to his presence. You wake up. I fucking hate the police. Every time I’ve had to deal with one of those fuckers, it’s that NWA song through my head on repeat, fuck the police, fuck, fuck, fuck the police. Fuck the police. I carry on walking as the policeman tries to get my attention. I circle back.

  ‘Did you call us?’ the officer asks.

  ‘Yes, and your siren woke my baby,’ I tell him, as a way of trying to explain needing to keep moving. ‘Was that necessary? It’s not even 6 a.m.!’

  I gesture to the empty streets around us.

  ‘There’s someone’s life at danger?’ he asks.

  He says it almost to remind me of the stakes. If it’s save life v. facilitate the sleeping of a child, sense would dictate that this is not really a choice. But when you’re as sleep-deprived as I am, and operating on caffeine and a low power mode that you honed while being a drunk in your twenties and thirties, meaning you could function at a low level on little sleep and a lot of booze and nicotine in your system, you become a little sensitive.

  ‘I need to keep moving,’ I say. ‘But he’s up there.’

  I point to the top of the bakery and the officer, understanding, starts backing up the road to get a better look at him.

  I continue walking down the road. I take a left down past Lakota because I’m going to see if McDonald’s is open and I can sneak myself a breakfast McMuffin and a milkshake to bring me some energy before heading home.

  As I turn down the road past Lakota, there are some post-rave teenagers having a tender group hug in the middle of the street. They’re all wearing shorts and Aztec prints and glitter and are caked in sweat and stink of last night, stink of booze and fags and ebullience and the musk of dancing and snogging and drinking with abandon. As the sun glints off their collective blonde hair, I remark in my brain that you’d never see Asians doing this. And then I spy an Asian in their midst. She has a T-shirt on that depicts Assata Shakur. And she spies me and smiles.

  ‘Guys, there is a man with a baby over there. Am I off my face or is he real?’

  ‘I’m a figment of your imagination,’ I say cheerfully as I walk past.

  ‘Seriously,’ the girl says, walking up to me. ‘Don’t freak me out like that. My system is riddled with reality-bending drugs.’

  ‘What is reality, really?’ I ask.

  She takes this question in and nods. ‘You’re right. You’re probably not real. Which sucks. Because that is a cute baby. Is she mixed race?’

  I nod.

  ‘So beautiful,’ she says. �
�Gather round, friends.’

  Her blonde friends all circle me. I would feel slightly intimidated being surrounded by so many sweaty white people if it wasn’t being orchestrated by a brown girl.

  ‘Regard the brown baby,’ she says.

  ‘Brown baby,’ they all repeat.

  ‘She is our future, and we must protect her.’

  I try to push past them so I keep moving but she stands in my way, wanting me to bask in the moment she is creating for us all. I smile awkwardly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘She’s going to wake up.’

  ‘She is our future,’ the girl says as she taps me on the shoulder. ‘Keep her safe.’

  She stands aside and I move on past her, bewildered by what has just happened. It’s definitely one of those things that, when I report later, your mum questions whether it happened. Our brown baby was pronounced the future by a bunch of pilled-up University of Bristol students, eking out the last vestiges of their loved-up state, before going home to come down in front of Netflix.

  I eat my McMuffin on the move and thank the blue skies I am not one of those kids anymore. I don’t have that bleary-eyed last gang in town vibe, like we clubbed till the very end and then performed a weird hippy ceremony in the middle of the road. Maybe it’s that hippy shit makes me feel odd. Or maybe it’s just I’m not them. I have a different trajectory.

  You wake up as I leave McDonald’s and I shove the food down my throat. I manoeuvre you back up towards home. We pass Lakota again and the only remnants of that group is a flickering of glitter across the floor. Like they disapparated and all that was left was their inner shimmer. You’re crying now.

  I throw half my milkshake away and pick you up. This is the big no-no. You have to learn to settle yourself. But I can’t bear the cries anymore. They’ve gone from disgruntled of Bristol to fuck you, Dad, I didn’t ask to be born.

  People are looking. They always make unfaltering eye contact when your kid is crying. One man is even leaning out of his window, peering around to find the thing that woke him up like, the fuck is this shit?

 

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