I took you from his hands and lay you down on the floor to change your nappy. I blew a raspberry on your stomach and unstuck the nappy. I turned around to see how your dada was getting on with basting the meat. He was standing over the roasting tin, with an erect spoon, staring. He caught me staring.
‘What is basting?’ he asked.
The things my mum did for him. It’s almost preposterous. The things he managed to skip doing.
Apart from an omelette he made once when my mum was away, his staples were takeaway and slices of cheese and cucumber stacked and peppered. Mum did the cooking. They split the bread-earning. He did all the thinking. The strategizing. The silence.
He had never changed my nappy. Nor my sister’s. This fact was ridiculous. A nonsense. How effectively could someone be a parent if we hadn’t shared any of the intimacy of those early years? Are you really my dad if you’ve not had my shit smeared on your favourite T-shirt, naked thigh or, once, miraculously, nose tip? If your sole purpose was to provide? In my memory, your dada never read to me. We played cricket in the garden a few times. We watched films I wasn’t old enough to watch, together. He had never changed my nappy. Is that so bad?
There’s a bonding going on in the nappy change. We had our little routines. I used to whisk your leggings off like I was a magician whipping a tablecloth from under a set dinner table, before I draped them slowly over your eyes. It guaranteed a laugh. A raspberry on the stomach. The little coin noise/nose touch. A song. These were the moments I sang you Bollywood songs in my half-arsed attempts to teach you your culture. You’d go still each time, and concentrate, listening intently. Perhaps the unrecognizable words, their cadence, you wanted to know what they were because this was a language you weren’t used to the flow of. I used to imagine this was the second that a spiritual connection was forming. But I didn’t know what half the words I was singing meant either. In those moments, we only had eyes for each other.
Once, in the middle of the night, while I was watching Netflix with you asleep on me, holding your bottom to balance you correctly on my shoulder, I felt you poop your nappy. You woke instantly, crying. Which wiped the smile off my face as I sprang into action, leaping off the sofa and placing you onto the changing mat. I whipped off your nappy to watch as a perfect Primula cheese spread of a poo kept coming out of you, flowing around into a spiral. A cinnamon swirl of a shit. It was springing out of your bottom like one of those surprise springy snakes you hide in an old tub, hand to your friend and ask them to open it, so that the thing explodes up into their nose.
It was hypnotic to watch this greeny brown worm keep trailing out of your butthole. You were upset at being woken up by an endless, seamless shit. But after a few minutes, as you emptied, you broke into one of your first smiles. Your eyes as open as you could make them. Your eyes were alive and your gummy smile elicited a high-pitched squeal of delight, one you didn’t mean, one I didn’t anticipate, so when a tear of mine fell onto the worm of shit-cheese spreading from your bum, I realized that it had swelled over the edge of the changing mat, onto my naked knee.
It didn’t matter. You had smiled. The release of this big painful shit from you, that had made you really angry all day, had now given you the sweet release of empty euphoria.
I cleaned you up. I cleaned myself up. I made you a bottle. Soon you were asleep on me again and Netflix was back on, but I wasn’t concentrating. I was thinking about this perfect moment we had had. One of your first smiles. Your first laughs. An unbroken almost impossible long shit. It was the most life-affirming thing that happened to me since you’d been born.
I tried showing your dada how to change your nappy.
He had promised to babysit you so your mum and I could attempt to go out and see a film. It was Christmas. Star Wars time. An event that could only work in the cinema. And your mum and I needed a night out, but perhaps with some entertainment that meant we didn’t sit in silence for forty-five minutes before arguing about something minor and stumbling home drunk on half a glass of wine.
But in order for us to successfully leave you with your dada, he had to be able to change your nappy. What if you shit yourself in your sleep again? And he couldn’t comfort you and he couldn’t change your nappy?
The vulnerability he felt when I showed him, first on your doll, and then on you. You were excited to see him change your nappy, and kicked your legs up and down, pumping them like dancing bowling pins. Frustrated, your dada gave up and handed you over to me.
That night, we got takeaway, cancelling the film.
If my mum had been around, all this would have been different. It would have felt manageable. Maybe she would have lived with us for a bit, made the sleeping easier, given us instruction, passed on tips, been supportive, changed nappies and got us to leave the house without you once in a while.
Like your grandma and granddad do.
Your dada’s love is born out of provision. He sees his role as the bank. The grand adviser. The consigliere. He gives you both a £20 note each time he visits. You have no concept of money. We save it for you. Once, another relative gave you a birthday card with a £10 note in it. You held it up and said, without us reading you the card, that ‘this is from dada’. It wasn’t. But the association with him and money was clear. That’s his role. The provider. And he provided for me. And it wasn’t always easy. And in the moment, I didn’t always understand his choices. But he bit and spat and tore people limb from limb to put food on the table. He drove himself to fatigue and madness to keep the house. He did everything he could to ensure that we had everything we needed. At the expense of things we wanted. But they were just things. Nothing was new. And that was okay. We grew up in hand-me-downs and we borrowed books and comics and videos from richer friends. But there was food on the table and a roof over our heads. He performed his role as an immigrant dad to the letter.
It means he has no idea of our day-to-day responsibilities. Maybe that was because of the pressure of the warehouse. He ran the business and he was a warehouse worker and he was a salesman and he was an accountant and he was the production manager and head of operations and in charge of the import/export division, and so he didn’t have much left in the tank for the day-to-day of being a parent.
There’s no doubt he loves you. Of course. He just can’t change your nappy.
‘Mum,’ I ask one night, to the emptiness of night, ‘how do I raise a brown baby?’
I’m drunk and in despair. The casual encounters of racism are rising. I feel bereft of family to offer me solidarity laden with the understanding of what it feels like to be so nonchalantly racially abused. I am hot and bothered. The holiday home we are staying in has no through breeze and the air conditioning is probably killing giraffes around the world.
Earlier today, Ganga, I sat with your sister on the boardwalk. It was her nap-time and I walked her up and down in the heat of an impending midday sun, deciding to stand in the shade and rock the pushchair back and forth, like I used to, in our hallway, years ago, with both of you, standing still, inching the vehicle back and forth, hoping the momentum would eventually lull you to sleep. Since then, we’ve ensured that you don’t need us to help you fall asleep. I sat on the bench and rocked the pushchair, scrolling mindlessly through Instagram.
She was in a deep stare. Indicating an approaching nap.
A dog approached her, paused and licked her face. I reacted far too slowly for an over-protective dad, grabbing the dog’s collar and lifting it away in the other direction. Now, the hypnotism was broken and your sister was awake, groaning and writhing in her seat. A woman with a plaster between her eyebrows, in a long white shirt with damp patches covering the bathing suit areas, approached and said, first in Spanish then in English, that the dog was harmless.
I was hot. I was bothered.
‘It woke my baby up,’ I said, standing up, resigning myself to walking her up and down the boardwalk, in the midday sun, praying for a quick sleep.
‘It is harmless,
’ the dog owner repeated.
But that isn’t the point, I thought. Dog owners always think people like dogs as much as they like dogs, I thought. Except, I said this out aloud. Passive-aggressively, as is my expertise.
I do think this. I wouldn’t usually say it publicly. It’s just between you and me. But I think dogs are fine and people who own dogs think everyone loves dogs as much they love their dog. If this were made public, people on the internet would excoriate me. They love dogs a lot.
People love dogs.
There’s a joke in an episode of Community where one of the character’s dad appears wearing a pretty bizarre toupee made of ivory. When questioned about it, he says that most toupees are made from the hair of ‘godless orientals’ and so solid ivory is the only way to be assured of ‘true follicular purity’ as well as still looking rich.
Britta says, ‘I can excuse racism but I draw the line at animal cruelty.’
Shirley, a Black woman, says, knowingly, in despair almost, ‘You can excuse racism?’
But that’s the pecking order of cruelty. People will take a stand for dogs quicker than they would brown or Black people.
This may seem like an odd comparison, but you don’t know what happens next, yet.
‘At least my dog is clean. Unlike you. You’re very dirty,’ the woman says as she walks away.
I stop. And turn to her.
‘Excuse me?’ I say. ‘I was talking about your dog waking my child up by licking her.’
‘But my dog is clean. Unlike you, you dirty man.’
I’m confused. Why is she bringing my physical appearance into this? And your sister’s. We’ve been on the beach all morning. We’re on holiday. We’re allowed to be a little rough round the edges. I’m covered in sand. She’s covered in sand. My blue T-shirt has streaks of white from where she’s cuddled me, with sun tan lotion not quite soaked in. In fact, a lot of the sand is stuck to the sun tan lotion I haven’t rubbed in on either of us properly.
But why is this woman talking about that when her dog licked your sister awake?
‘What do you mean, dirty?’ I call out.
‘You’re dirty,’ she says. ‘A shit-skin. Both of you. Shit-skins.’
And with that final word, she parts ways with me and your sister, fully awake. I walk away. Because I could knock her and her dog the fuck out. Sorry, dog-lovers. But I could have done. I was so angry. Especially because this is done in front of your sister and she has no idea what is going on, other than she was nearly asleep and now she is not asleep.
Mum, I think, hours later, how do I do this? What would she have done? She would have told me to forget about it and move on, but you would have given me some direction, a little pep talk, some sort of wonderfully spiky put-down about this woman.
Mum, how do I raise a brown baby?
She raised me and your fai. She did it pretty much on her own. She provided a home for us and she taught us everything. I couldn’t even begin to quantify the gulf she has left by not being here.
Grief is a trickster. It wants you to think you can do this. You are capable. You know what you’re doing. But grief is an onion. The thick skin hides crueller enzymes that sting when you least expect. Grief makes you think, I can chop an onion. Grief will be the nucleus of the tears that fall down your cheek. Grief wants you to have a false sense of purpose and ability, so that grief can undermine you just as you get your feet under the table.
I never thought I’d need my mum to show me how to raise a child. Not all of us have that luxury. It’s the particular-ness of your brownness that makes me not know how to do this. I don’t have the answers. When I speak to your fai about these issues, she shrugs. She doesn’t see what I see. All she sees when she looks at your cousin is a child. She sees herself as the matriarch now. She sees her role as filling the gaps left by my mum. And she sees her daughter as unquestionably a brown baby to raise. There are no questions. No circles to square.
I tell her about what happened to me and your sister on the beach and she laughs.
‘Why does this always happen to you?’ she asks. She thinks about it. ‘Why do you always have to tell everyone when it happens?’ she clarifies. ‘It is what it is.’
‘Do these things happen to you?’ I ask.
She shrugs and nods. ‘Sure, sometimes,’ she says. ‘But why do I need to talk about it?’
There is this theory that trauma can be migrated and then inherited. There are more physical attributes that the children of migrants have to think about, living in England. We have a vitamin D deficiency because of the lack of direct sunlight. We are affected by seasonal affective disorder. We are more prone to diabetes. Refined sugar is more prevalent in the West. Our bodies can’t process certain dietary things. More than that, my mum, your dada, they grew up during the British Empire. They grew up subjugated. What does that do for a mindset? Does that explain why exactly your dada was so terrified of the anti-racism work I did? He wanted me to work hard, earn money, be quiet. Just get on with it. I was being too loud, he felt, talking about race issues publicly. Firstly, he thought I shouldn’t even be talking about those things. And secondly, what good would it do? This is where he came from. This is what I inherited. What was coded into his DNA so that he could not accept the work I did. And my mum, while she never wanted to speak of these things, offered solidarity in the quieter moments.
That evening, after this stranger calls your sister and me dirty shit-skins, I get horrifically drunk and sit on the toilet in our holiday apartment while your mum sleeps, unaware of how much this has affected me, and I cry, asking my mum, begging her, to help me raise you. She is gone and without her, I don’t know how I can do this.
I don’t know why, when I tell your mum what happened, I act like it’s casual. I assume she won’t understand what it feels like. She will know how awful it was, she will be sympathetic but I don’t know if she will know how it feels viscerally within your DNA, to be reduced in this way to a nothingness. It’s unfair of me to make that assumption, or to even be casual in the first place. And while I want to tell her exactly how I felt, I just don’t think I will be able to find the words.
The last time my mum and I spoke, we fought. That frozen moment that defined our relationship. I relive it most nights, Ganga. It’s the last thing I run through before trying to sleep, trying to extract more detail, more information, clues that it might have been not as I remembered. Because how could the last time we spoke be an argument? It was out of love. But it was an argument all the same.
I had been with her, at my childhood home, trying to get her to eat. She had seemingly given up. Your mum and I were frustrated.
‘You have to eat,’ we both told her.
My first novel was coming out the following week and I was torn between my publicity commitments and caring for my mum. My worst nightmare and my biggest dream were colliding. Mum’s cancer had been diagnosed as terminal in the weeks before and we were in chaos. Your dada had drawn up a schedule to look after her when she finally came home after a month in a hospital. We didn’t understand they were sending her home to die. There was simply nothing else that could be done.
I left my mum on a Saturday night. I was appearing on a BBC radio show. I promised mum I would be back that night, late, so I could try again with her at breakfast about food.
I went, did the radio show, talked about the book, and smiled and laughed and was pleasant and passionate, and inside everything in me was wilted. Grey. My stomach churning. My legs floating. I wasn’t there. The presenter read an extract from the book, a scene where the main character and his mum argue. It was meant to be funny, Ganga.
I chose to go back to my flat that night. It was late and I wanted to be in my own bed, rather than my childhood bed in your fai’s old room at home, breathing in the resignation of knowing death was at the door. I chose to go back home to your mum.
And the Sunday morning, I woke up and did Sunday things with your mum: things like brunch, television, ch
ores, a walk, things to remind me of my life. I phoned my mum around midday to apologize, I wouldn’t be there today, and I would come after work the next day.
‘Did you listen to the radio show?’ I asked down the phone.
‘Is that what you think of me?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You wrote a book to make fun of your mother? You couldn’t tell me yourself? Is that what you think of me?’
I could hear her wheezing, catching her breath after the expelled energy of those three loaded, sad questions.
‘Mum, it’s not meant to be you. In the book. It’s a comedy. It’s meant to be funny!’
‘That’s what you think of me? And you want the whole world to laugh at me?’
‘Mum, that’s not true . . . I . . .’
Your dada came on the phone.
‘Mum needs to rest,’ he told me. ‘We’ll speak later.’
I was so angry at her. Sure, she was seriously ill and sure, she had stayed up to listen. But why didn’t she understand comedy? It was about exploring vulnerability and flaws and exaggerating them? It wasn’t her! That wasn’t my intent. How could I manage her feelings if that wasn’t my intent? I was so angry at her for not trying to eat, not wanting to get better, giving up, and I was angry at her for not getting my work, not engaging with it how I wanted her to and not just saying well done, beta, because that’s what I needed to hear.
I was so wrapped up in myself, and then she was gone. It was the last time we ever spoke.
What did my mum give me?
I make a list in my head, staring at the outline of myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m drunk, my head is pounding. My eyes sting. I can hear you shuffling about in your room, the engine hum of the air conditioning unit and my feet, padding on the faux marble floor.
My mum taught me to work hard.
She taught me to code switch where necessary.
She taught me the importance of leaning into myself.
She taught me that love was shown by being harsh, being sarcastic, heck, even being disappointed with those you held affection for.
Brown Baby Page 18