Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  Some are like, stop the noise, I cannot bear that noise.

  Some are like, I could stop the noise. So why can’t you?

  Some are like, you’re a bad parent. Your kid should be making no noise.

  I remember Agnes’s daddy, Gavin, joking that the worst thing about other parents is that they never parent in the same way as you. It’s hilarious, how we have the arrogance to know all the answers, that our problem solving, our routines, our levels of engagement would work for everyone else’s kids as well as our own.

  When you’re out in public, and your baby is screaming, and you can’t make it stop, though, people look at you like you are the worst parent who ever lived.

  So I pick you up.

  I lean back, try to pat you back to sleep across my chest but you’re straining your neck, your small fists against my neck, pushing away, straining your mole eyes to look around you. You’ve stopped crying but now you’re grunting and growling with the strain of wanting to look around. I turn you around, clamp my arm down you, cupping your bottom from the front and pulling you into me. You have just worked out how to look around. Your eye sockets are too small for your eyeballs and you’re looking all around you.

  You’re an inquisitive sort, Ganga. You’re very good at paying attention to ambience. You hear snatches of conversation, you monitor all the goings-on, you see everything. It’s wildly different to when I’m asking you to pay attention to something I have to say. Your curiosity for the world knows no bounds currently.

  Walking back home, you in one hand, the awkward steering of a pram with the other, I see the world through your eyes. I’m whispering about everything we see.

  We discuss the barber’s and how it used to have a bagel shop in the basement and I could never work out how they squared the hygiene levels on that one.

  We talk about that clothes shop that changed its name to a lyric from a Lauryn Hill song. We talk about the emptied noz capsules and chicken bones under my feet. How my ankles feel the terrain of post-Saturday night discard. The patches of vomit I step over. The homeless guy I see every day selling the Big Issue. He fist bumps me as usual and says ‘what’s happening, little man’ to you. We talk about the post summer night clubland detritus all around us. We talk about how this isn’t me anymore. This is my museum of how things were and how they used to be. And while my clublands were across London, the familiarity of detritus is comforting. How it feels dirty and intrusive and am I now becoming conservative with a small c because my baby shouldn’t be in the depths of post-club garbage.

  We talk about the boy, off his face, who sat on the roof earlier. We’re approaching the building and I point you to the sky. A fire engine has appeared, and a fireman, like a sunny yellow orb against the backdrop of a lustrous blue sky, leads this drunk boy towards the ladder, a reflective foil shroud around him. He’s young. He’s shivering. He’s weak. He’s red-faced, off his face. We watch this rescue and I think about how my nights now belong to you.

  Walking starts to feature more and more as a way to get you to sleep for a good four-hour chunk. It’s a particularly hot summer and the house is an incubator. At eight o’clock, I will strap you into the sling, your mum will go to bed, and you and I will go and explore Bristol.

  It’s something I’ve been thinking about. The older you both get, the deeper my roots in Bristol become. Even if I’ve been publicly maligned for being a ‘patronizing cunt’ on Twitter by Bristol’s most-loved (my most-loved) music producer for saying so. But those roots are meaningless if you don’t know your surroundings. As the old rap adage goes, it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at. But you can’t be anywhere meaningfully, if you don’t know where you came from. And you don’t know where you are if you don’t know your area. All I know is where we live, where I work and the gym. I know the chain cinema and I know a few pubs near us. I don’t know it as intimately as I do London. Where I can tell you how to get anywhere on the tube, from memory, with a maximum of three connections. I could emerge in 90 per cent of neighbourhoods in London and know of a decent boozer or caff. In Bristol, all I know is my front doorstep. So the walks become a way to keep you asleep and a way to understand my adopted city more. A way to put down roots.

  The walks are two hours long. I use this as an opportunity to work my way through the entire Wu-Tang Clan discography, in order. From the group albums to the solo ones. In order of day of original release. I even go through the lesser-known lesser-talented affiliates like Shyheim the Rugged Child.

  The first song on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) rattles through my headphones.

  Bring da ruckus.

  Indeed.

  This urban rambling I’m doing needs some guttural dirty music with bass drums so low and muffled and rattly, it’s like someone is being rhythmically beaten to death with a sock filled with coins in the next room. The lyrics give me a contact high as I walk through the streets of my own Shaolin, my mind filled with kung-fu references, and murky drug deals gone bad and the remembered bliss of being too stoned to even think. The walking rules are simple: where I hit a road I don’t know, I have to walk down it. The purpose is to get lost and not use my phone to get me out of trouble. It has to last two hours and can end with a pint at my local pub at ten o’clock. I can then go home and write, with you on my chest, before falling asleep to the blissful sounds of the American Office, the one true Office, the best Office, the humane Office. My light sleep dreams are soundtracked by the mournful piano that painted a picture of everyday drudgery and boredom, before a jaunty accordion punctuates it with some capers and japery.

  The walks keep me moving. They give me space to think and be lost in my thoughts. They keep me fit. They give me time you just don’t have as a parent. And you sleep like you’re still in the womb, your fists up against my chest, your head to one side, our sweat mixing through my various T-shirts to form a vinegar of human stench that joins us together. Even now, if you’re upset or angry, if you’re tired or belligerent, I just have to cuddle you into my chest in exactly the same way and you go still, just for a fragment of a second. As if to say, I remember this feeling. When I ask if I can give you a kiss, you will lean forward and offer your forehead. All those evenings when you were asleep and I would hold your foot and stroke the back of your head and kiss your forehead, they exist as muscle memory for you. People describe the first three months of a baby’s life as the fourth trimester, and I have built a brand-new womb for you. You sleep when I move and you wake when I stop, just like when you were in your mum’s womb. The things we do, the ways we bond.

  Each night I tell you a new story, after the Wu-Tang album finishes. I talk to you as you bob up and down in the sling in front of me. I tell you about our family, I tell you about politics, I tell you about being brown in Britain today. I tell you about my Bristol. I stretch the city a little more each night.

  Each night, on our two-hour walk, I have a new story for you. It’s a comfort for me to have such an attentive audience. When we moved to Bristol five years ago, I felt so isolated from my family, my culture, brown people.

  I tell you about walking through the centre of Bristol with a writer called Luke. I was explaining the minority head nod to him. He has a big beard. We passed my friend Sham, who also has a big beard. (They have the same beard but because Sham is brown, it’s a terrorist beard. Luke has a hipster beard. The cultural capital of skin colour.) We stopped to say hello and Sham noted the lustrousness of Luke’s beard.

  As we walked away, I asked Luke, ‘Do you have a beard solidarity club?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Like the minority head nod but for people with statement beards?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Almost as if on cue, we passed an old South Asian man, standing up, reading a local newspaper, in that odd way men who still read physical newspapers have to stand, legs akimbo with the paper opened in front of them like they’re a spy undercover. Or c
hecking their stock prices while their massive executive balls dangle between their legs. The old South Asian man lowered his newspaper. He could sense my presence. He looked at me and we both nodded at each other, no smile, no other indication of familiarity. Just a quick nod, a mark of solidarity, that says I see you, I’ve got your back, I am here. In his essay ‘The Nod’, Musa Okwonga describes it as ‘a swift yet intimate statement of ethnic solidarity. The Nod is saying, “Wow, well, I really didn’t expect to see another one of us out here, but you seem to be doing your thing just fine. More power to you, and all the very best.”’

  ‘Do you know that guy?’ Luke asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s the minority head nod. You just witnessed it.’

  Luke was astounded, especially when I explained that it was a protection thing, people of colour noting each other in largely white spaces, as if to say, find me if it gets weird, violent or you just want a familiar face. It again reminds me of that Zora Neale Hurston quote: ‘I feel most coloured when thrown against a sharp white background.’

  This is how I feel in Bristol, I tell you one night as we walk. Thrown against a sharp white background. My family, my community, all my brown friends are in London. The minority head nod is a lifesaver, I tell you.

  ‘No,’ Luke finally said, after an awkward beat of him processing this insight into the precarious public life of people of colour in the West. ‘There isn’t a beard solidarity nod. Maybe there should be.’

  It’s Ramadan those precious weeks I walk you and discover my city. We moved to Bristol not long after my mum died. Your mum had always wanted to move back eventually and London felt different without my mum. Also, my mum had left us a little bit of money that meant we could afford a house . . . in Bristol. Maybe a shoebox in London. I went from being gentrified out of London, the city of my birth, to becoming a gentrifier in Bristol. The ultimate chain of complicity.

  But moving came with its complications. I was away from all my family, most of my friends. I didn’t know any people of colour. I didn’t have a community yet. On these walks, I’m thinking a lot about wanting to find a community of people of colour. I walk to the Hindu temple. I’ve not been to it yet. I have avoided it because I know engaging with it will make me homesick. All the temples I frequented back home in London were because of family, and no matter what day you went, you were likely to run into cousins, uncles, aunties, familiar faces. You felt part of something bigger than yourself, even if the religious aspect wasn’t for you. The community tethered you to something greater.

  I’ve been visiting a Gujarati takeaway place since I arrived.

  When I went in for dinner one evening, with your mum, I saw they were serving khichdi and kadhi, my mum’s staples that I always had when I was ill. Seeing them in a restaurant, in Bristol, was incongruous. As the restaurant owner filled up a tiffin for us, he looked at me and said, ‘Gujarati cho?’

  I nodded. I wanted to reply, but standing next to your wife, and with a queue of white hippies behind us, I suddenly felt embarrassed about my command of the language.

  ‘Ha,’ I replied. ‘Maroo naam Nikesh che.’

  ‘Jags,’ he replied. Then, furtively. ‘Jagdish . . .’

  We spoke for a while about being Gujarati in Bristol. It was coming up to Diwali and I wanted to know whether there would be any firework displays. He told me to come to the temple in St George. He told me about the community there. By this point, his wife had joined him, to help out with the even longer queue that had developed behind his. She and he spoke to me in Gujarati, and I replied as best as I could. But my language functions were failing. Also, I felt this burn in my chest.

  He had a moustache just like your bapuji. Her name was Jayshree. My mum’s name is Jayshree, Ganga. And here we were talking a language I chose to forget because it was embarrassing and we were in England and so should be speaking in English, which was what I often thought as a teenager.

  I once told my mum I was no longer a Hindi.

  I announced it like that, out of nowhere. ‘Mum,’ I said, breaking her concentration. ‘I am no longer a Hindi.’

  My chest pounding with fear and defiance as I incongruously told her, while we watched a Bollywood film, that I was beyond religion.

  She laughed.

  ‘Hindi is the language, beta. You are no longer a Hindu.’

  And that was that. She laughed and as we carried on watching Amitabh Bachchan chase a bad guy across the top of a train, I lost my religion. REM-style. That was me in the corner. Losing my religion. Losing language, losing my sense of self, that sense that gave me a home. And my mum laughing at it all.

  The panic and release of saying something so utterly personal and it being dismissed as an audio typo, followed by, on correction, no follow-up chat, gave me the right hump. I stood up and ran to my room, dramatically, putting on Tupac’s Me Against the World as loud as I could, until my mum, who had the ability to scream over loud rap due to the shrillness of her shout, told me to turn it down so she and my sister and father could finish watching their film.

  The day I walk you to temple, I feel ready to be embraced by Hinduism again. I’ve been seeing only white people in my walks. The problem is, as soon as I pass our immediate surroundings of St Pauls, everywhere adjoining is Whitesville, and St Pauls is currently pretty Whitesville. I want to explore an area where there are more ethnics. This involves more of a walk but maybe the temple will have some sort of evening prayer situation. I can be amongst my people, hear the cadence of Gujarati and just feel at home, with my shoes and socks off.

  I walk to the centre of the city and get a bus out to St George. It infuriates me how Bristol bus routes all require heading to the centre, and it irritates me one more time. How can anyone feel ownership of their city if all they can do is get from where they live to the centre? How will we experience culture, art, food, atmosphere in other parts of the city if we have to just drive there? How likely are we to take jobs in other parts of the city if we have to get more than one bus to get there, and the buses sit in traffic because people, annoyed at the ridiculous bus routes, bus prices and lack of bus lanes, drive everywhere?

  When I reach the temple, it’s closed. Which is disappointing. I had pinned all my hopes of feeling less rootless on sitting next to some Gujaratis praying, as you slept clamped to my chest. I begin the long journey home.

  A few days later, still wanting to discover Bristol beyond Whitesville, I check out what time sunset will be, which will fall in the middle of my walk. I head to the mosque in Totterdown.

  It’s a long hard walk with some gnarly uphill, but I arrive at the mosque and circle it until the maghrib prayer ends and people, mostly men, stream out of the doors of the building to head home for lots of food. This is the mosque where white men left bacon sandwiches on the doorstep. It’s a source of tension in the community. One of the men ended up in jail for the hate crime, where he died over another dispute. The EDL faction in Bristol used the presence of this mosque as a reason to protest Islam; not to look within and ask why those bacon sandwiches were left in the first place. It’s such an absurd futile act. Like bacon is a kryptonite that will make a Muslim shrivel with fear as they disintegrate into nothingness, yelling, curse this cured pig meal!

  I arrive as the sun is below the street, casting a blanket of blue over everything. Cars are stacked closely in these dense small streets. I circle the mosque a few times. It’s quiet. People are inside, praying. I turn Ghostface Killah’s Pretty Toney LP off and listen to the air.

  As I walk up and down past the mosque, people start to emerge. Slowly at first, before a spilling.

  In the dusk, I can see the congregation leave as one fluid comfortable blanket, heading towards me, enveloping me in my tired state.

  In the dusk, their long flowing white robes glow.

  In the dusk, their voices, a throbbing iambic lilt of Urdu and Arabic sends me home. I’m listening to the radio. I’m in my mum’s kitchen. Mum is talking to Auntie Shazi
a in Hindi. Not Hindu. Over the phone, her ear clamping the cordless device to her shoulder as she cuts those potatoes, flip-flopped foot up on bench, into the palm of her hand. I’m sitting at the kitchen table. I’m reading. But I’m not. I’m staring at the cubes of potato fall into the steel bowl like clumps of snow.

  In the dusk, I feel less alone.

  As the men head to their cars, each of them smiles at me and gives me the minority head nod. I find it a comfort to be amongst brown faces. I feel less coloured. I feel like a person. This sense of community, this silent understanding, this mark of respect and solidarity, it makes me proud to live here now.

  I have a root.

  I turn up in time to see everyone leave after evening prayer three days in a row. There’s something beautiful about seeing their long white robes reflect the dusk.

  One evening, a particularly hot one, one of the brothers who has said hello to me the previous few nights, approaches me. He’s young. His white Air Force Ones gleam as much as his robe. He has a Golden State Warriors hat on, tilted to the side.

  ‘You okay, bro?’ he asks softly.

  I nod.

  ‘All good,’ I say.

  ‘Want to come in? I can get you a glass of water. It’s a hot night. She okay?’

  He points at you, strapped to my chest, asleep.

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. It’s the only way she can sleep,’ I tell him.

  ‘You’re Sham’s mate, innit. I’ve seen you about.’

  I think about beardy Sham, the only other Asian I know in Bristol. I mentored him as a young person. In the building, the curious amazing building where I did youth work, even though there was about fifteen years between us, and I am grey and he has one of those, what Tommy Robinson dickheads would refer to as a ‘Muslamic beard’, or just a beard, we were mistaken for each other on a daily basis. People would walk into a room, scan it and see him and say my name, or they’d be looking for him and call me Sham, as I walked past. It became a source of hilarity for us, because to acknowledge the truth of the carelessness was to undo the relative safety of the atmosphere of the building. Also, to be mistaken for each other meant there was more than one of us. Safety in numbers.