Nikesh Shukla - Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home

Contents

To all the brown babies out there,

especially my two. This is all for you.

A Memoir of Race,

Family and Home

To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever,

to strengthen you against the loveless world...

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1962

It makes me glad

That you will have things I have never had

When out of mens hearts all the hate is hurled

Youre gonna live in a better world

Brown baby

Oscar Brown Jr

First published 2021 by Bluebird

This electronic edition published 2021 by Bluebird

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR

EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Limited,
Mallard Lodge, Lansdowne Village, Dublin 4

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-5290-3292-5

Copyright Nikesh Shukla 2021

Design by Mel Four / Bluebird Art Department

The right of Nikesh Shukla to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Brown Baby, Written by Oscar Brown, Jr., Published by Edward B. Marks

Music Company, All rights administered by Round Hill Carlin, LLC.

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I never considered becoming a parent myself until my mum died. Id like to think there was a moment when the switch flicked on, or the force field came down, or the upgrade happened (between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m., plugged into a power source, wi-fi switched on). It was nothing like that. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no tearful staring out over a field of bluebells, no Proustian cake-chewing revelation and no need to cement my legacy. You didnt appear to me in a dream. I didnt read a saccharine poem about inheritance. I didnt hold a friends baby and suddenly have the big final chorus of Barry Manilows Looks Like We Made It erupt in my head. Nope. I did not hear that over-the-top big-voiced earnest finale rattle through my ear hairs.

You just arrived. One minute, your mum and I were getting drunk at Christmas and the next, there you were, in my arms. Asleep. Your clenched fists covering your face, much like they did on the ultrasound. Your nails were long. Your eyes were closed. You... looked just like her. Just like my mum. Maybe it was a trick of my imagination. Or some sort of sleep-deprived adrenaline-fuelled tether, to bring you into the family. Maybe you just sorta looked like Mum in the way babies and old people are indistinguishably vole-like in certain lights. I tried to capture it on my camera. But you know how photographs capture moments and never the narratives that prescribe them? Some photographs lack intent. Others capture fragments and only you can zero in on the history of that moment. Everyone else can just see the vole-baby with her claws over her face.

I look at it now and that photo of you looks like you and not like her. My mind was playing tricks on me in those early moments because when I first took in your face, all I could see was my mum. It was like she was alive again and I was whole.

The quick cameraphone photo I took, when I checked it hours later, on the toilet because this was the only sanctum left (how wrong I was; I have no sanctum), in the maelstrom of your first day on Earth, where I could justify looking at my phone looked nothing like what I thought I had captured. It looked like you. And not her. The photograph was of your face, a new entry, something I had not seen before, someone I had not yet met. A stranger. And yet, when I walked back into the bedroom, and saw you, asleep on your back, in your own mothers arms, the only light coming from the landing, I saw it again. I saw her in you.

Were you her, reborn?

I shook the thought from my head. How could I project onto a baby, the blankest of canvases, my own grief? How unfair.

And when you cried, I took you in my arms, and went into another room. I stood in the window and swayed from side to side. The curtains were open and I looked out into the windows of the flats behind our house. The man with the beard was washing up, as he always seemed to do. In the room below him, two people Id never seen before were holding on to a bowl and moving it in a slow, controlled ceremonious circle between them. I dont know what an ayahuasca ceremony looks like but I wondered if the bowl had some sort of hallucinogenic liquid in it. The guy who had his window open every single day all year round for unknown reasons that drove me crazy with speculation had his window open.

I say none of this so you think Im a creep who spends his time staring into other peoples homes.

I say this so you know that, in that moment, as I stared down at you, trying to take stock of the fact that my entire world had changed, my entire life was on a new course, everything else around us was exactly as it should be. The world continued to turn and not move to the beat of just one drum. And that grounded me. It stopped me freaking the fuck out.

In India, the Ganges river is worshipped as representative of the goddess Ganga. Ashes are scattered in the Ganges. People wash themselves as a way of honouring Ganga, hoping to wash away sins, have a new start, change their fortune. Moksha. It is freedom from life and death. Thats what Ganga can bring us. The Ganges descends from heaven to earth. She is also the vehicle of ascent, from earth to heaven, a crossing point of all beings, the living as well as the dead. We scattered my mothers ashes in the Ganges. And here she was, reborn in you, my Ganga. My liberation from life and death. My fortune. You were my Ganga. A renewal. You were my moksha. Bringing me a sense of rebirth, emancipation, enlightenment, liberation and release. I had been knocked off course by my mums death. And now here you were. To bring me back.

My Ganga.

I held you tight.

I sang to you. Quietly. So your mum could sleep. I sang Brown Baby, a lullaby by Oscar Brown Jr, inspired by the birth of his son, Oscar III. I knew the song, Browns first recorded one, from a cover Nina Simone performed live at the Village Gate in 1962. Your mum had heard it randomly one day on the radio, not long after we knew she was pregnant with you. She sent me a link to it and I felt a weakness in my knees, knowing that the sentiment applied to us as well. So I sang it to you on your first night, a way of saying hello, letting you know what sort of world awaited you, who was in your corner and how we were going to get through this.