Nikesh Shukla - The Good Immigrant

Editors Note

This book emerged out of a comment on a Guardian article. I know, I know, its easy to say, dont read the comments. But I do. Because I want to know my enemy. The commenter took umbrage at an interview a journalist had done with five authors (including me) about their writing process. The journalist (Asian) had interviewed five or six people of colour. The commenter wondered why there wasnt a more prominent author interviewed for this piece. He supposed (for it is almost always a he) that perhaps we were all friends of the journalist, given we too were all mostly Asian. This constant anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space, to show that we have earned our place at the table, continues to hound us. For while I and the 20 other writers included in this book dont want to just write about race, nor do we only write about race, it felt imperative, in the light of that comment (and the many others like it), the backwards attitude to immigration and refugees, the systemic racism that runs through this country to this day, that we create this document: a document of what it means to be a person of colour now. Because were done justifying our place at the table.

For people of colour, race is in everything we do. Because the universal experience is white. Another commenter (yes, yes, I know) on a short story I once wrote, was pleasantly surprised to see Indians going through the universal experience. Much as I was surprised that I was excluded from the universal experience, it hammered home the knowledge that the universal experience is white. This book collects 21 universal experiences: feelings of anger, displacement, defensiveness, curiosity, absurdity we look at death, class, microaggression, popular culture, access, free movement, stake in society, lingual fracas, masculinity, and more.

Luckily, there are magazines and spaces emerging to give people of colour the space to write about their universal experiences, and not just write specifically on race. Check out sites like Media Diversified, gal-dem, Skin Deep, Burnt Roti, Rife Magazine.

I chose these writers for simple reasons: I know them, I rate them, I want to read more from them. Im happy to admit that nepotism and networks played a part in my selection. And Im happy to create a brand new old boys network that circumvents the institutionalised ones we have to deal with on a daily basis. Because there is a secret cabal of people of colour, and contrary to the stereotypes we like to refute, we do all know each other. But thats because when were the only ones in the room, we gravitate towards each other, and stick next to each other, because we intimately know the balance of race and universal experience particular to people of colour.

Before you enjoy these beautiful, powerful, unapologetic essays, a quick note on the title of the book: Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful The Ungrateful Country closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants.

And we are so tired of that burden.

Namaste

Nikesh Shukla

Namaste means hello.

Namaste means Im bowing to you.

Its a customary greeting.

Its a respectful salutation.

It has become a bastardised metaphor for spiritualism. Its white people doing yoga, throwing up prayer hands chanting AUM and saying namaste like their third eyes are being opened and they can peer directly into the nucleus of spirituality.

You need to know this. Because of your skin tone, people will ask you where youre from. If you tell them Bristol, theyll ask where your parents are from. When they know youre half-Indian, one person will try to impress their knowledge of your culture on you.

I cant sleep.

Its 2am and a party is raging across the road. The flat is rented out to students on a regular basis. Your mother is, sensibly, sleeping with ear plugs in. I can hear you purring in the next room.

I know that in four hours time I have to drive you to London, to take you to see your dada and your fai and fuva. To spend time with the Indian part of your family. To say namaste to your Indian cousins, aunties and uncles.

Im driving so I need the sleep.

It transpires that the reason the party is so loud is because someone on the top floor of the house is leaning out of his window, smoking and bellowing a conversation down to a person at street level, which, due to the peculiarities of the houses we live opposite, is about four storeys worth of shouting. At 2am.

This is silly, I think. Its Friday night, sure, but its a residential street. I may have been these kids once, but now Im in my thirties. Im a man of family now. Im a man of red wine and Netflix. Im a man of nights in and community cohesion. I get it. I get what lifes about. Its about living like your actions affect the people you dont know, as well as the people you do.

Ive done questionable shit, pissed in places I shouldnt have, left detritus for poor working souls to have to clean up the morning after, shout-screamed songs at the top of my voice running down streets where families lived, been oblivious to the rest of the world, carrying on like theres something out there in the rest of the world for me to interact with. Your mother reminds me of this the next morning when I tell her what happens next.

I tell her that I dont want to live with the thought that Im intolerant of other peoples intolerance.

I walk out of the house, just as the conversation, bellowed across four storeys, wraps up and the man on the street level leaves to the sound of his friend hoping he gets home safely. I approach the steps up to their stoop. I notice, in the shadows, a boy and a girl are sitting in the doorway of the main door, ajar, smoking.

Excuse me, I ask. Do you mind continuing your party inside?

Jah bless, the girl in the doorway says. Namaste, she repeats, over me.

I say it again. I change the words to become clearer. More forceful. Can you please continue your party inside?

Namaste, she says again. I hear the boy stifle a laugh.

Namaste, they both say. Namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, namaste, until Im drowned out.

Im standing under a street lamp, wearing my white bedtime kurta and lengha pyjamas. My skin is bleached out by the fluorescence of the yellow lamp. Theres probably no way they can tell Im Indian from the lighting. Its dickery for dickerys sake.

The bellowing man leaning out of his window asks if the musics too loud. I look up to him, the voice of reason and I say again, can you please continue your party inside?

Namaste, namaste, namaste, the girl says.

I shout something wounded, along the lines of this is classy, passive-aggressive, without a target.

I go back inside and I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the arrows of passing car headlights pierce cracks in the curtains.

Eventually the party quietens. My mind doesnt. Im rolling in a quagmire of ways to deal with this slight. Beyond writing Namaste, Dickheads on a placard and placing it in my bedroom window, I dont know what to do.

The house residents go home for the summer, having moved in and warmed the house to celebrate. Any call for an apology I ask for come the autumn will be muted and months too late.

* * *

I walk past an arts space thats part bar/club, part sustainable restaurant, part hot-desking for freelance artists and part dance studio. They host morning raves and yoga classes there. Most mornings, the steps are daubed with hippies, wearing OM and Ganesha parachute pants, their hair in dreadlocks, bindis mark out the third eyes in the middle of their foreheads. They tie their dogs up to the bicycle racks using scratchy sari material and they enter the yoga studios to be natraja and ashtanga geniuses and salute the sun and greet and say goodbye to each other with a solid, heartfelt namaste.