Nikesh Shukla

I'm here because of Nii [Ayikwei Parkes] and Niven [Govinden] and Salena [Godden] and Courttia [Newland] and Rajeev [Balasubramanyan] and Deeder [Zaman] and Lenny Henry and Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi and Colson Whitehead and James Baldwin, but I know that like because of me, not just because of me, but like, I've helped people like Liv Little, I’ve helped her to set up gal-dem, like, down the road. She was at this uni [University of Bristol], setting up gal-dem, in my co-working space, down the road. I, you know, exchanged loads of helpful messages with Candice [Carty-Williams], when she was writing. I helped so many people get published, you know. The Good Immigrant, like, introduced loads of those writers into the public consciousness.

That's not because I played any particular role, it's just when you are writing from the margins, invariably people help you, and then you can't pay them back, so you help the next people, and they help the next people, and they help the next people. So I feel less like, maybe I feel less like I'm writing in a tradition and more like I'm just taking up space in an industry that is hostile, to bring people through in the way that I was brought through.

It didn't seem a big deal at the time, but my best friend since I was 4 years old was a Muslim guy called Junaid, and obviously understanding that there are tensions between Indians and Pakistanis, between Hindus and Muslims, particularly between Gujarati Hindus and Pakistani Muslims, because of the proximity of the border, and stuff like that, he was my best friend, his mum was my mum's best friend, we were so close, and...The other thing that I started to notice was that there was, that there was just this real, I’m just being honest here, like hopefully it's not like a triggering thing, but like, there’s this horrible Islamophobia spouted by Brown people, and I was like, where the fuck’s the solidarity, you know, and like they'd be this horrible thing where like Junaid would come round for Diwali, he’d come round on Christmas Day, he was always at our house. And, you know, my uncles would be cussing Muslims, and then like look at him and go, ‘Except you, you're alright. You’ve come from a good family.’ He was like the model Muslim for them, because he'd sat in our house and eaten our food, and that just left such a sour taste in my mouth, that there was this ease. And one of those uncles, you know, he grew up in the UK in the '70s and early '80s, he went through, you know, he and my dad both had run-ins with the National Front, with Combat 18, my dad nearly died because of an attack by a National Front member who bottled him at a bus stop.

And so when, when people today, people in 2020, 2021, 2018 talk about how sad they feel that terms like politically Black don't feel relevant to today's generation, I really understand the limitations of it because I've seen like how my uncles could be, you know – we just want equality, and racism is bad on the one hand, but then with the same breath be saying awful things about Muslims in the other. It was just, it never sat right with me, so I feel like all these things kind of built up in my head, contributed to like a big political awakening, I think for a while it made me feel very disenfranchised from my family and not want anything to do with them because I just thought they were a bunch of sell-outs for thinking these things. I wasn't mature enough to (a) do the work to change their mind without shouting at them or (b) understand that people are complicated and fucked up and there are historical reasons why divisions have been sown between communities to kind of keep us apart, and all the rest of it, and I could've been building bridges rather than just running away from my family because I was embarrassed. I could be angry with them or I could be horrified with them, but I was embarrassed. And running away from that, I think, was cowardly on my part. But I was in my teens so it's okay to be a bit cowardly in your teens, I think.

NS: But I really remember an incident. It was around 2021, so we’re recording this in Bristol. At the bottom of the hill that we’re on is the Colston statue that got pulled down during the Black Matter protests, got thrown in the river, and you know that became a big talking point for the city and my kids' school has an association with Colston and so the school wanted to involve the kids in a conversation about what they did about the name of the school. And part of that was to talk to them about Bristol's long history of civil rights action, and so my daughter came home one day and had some questions about the Bristol boycotts. And you know, typical of children, they ask you these things at really inopportune times, and you never really feel like you have the, you know, when you’re like, 'Let’s sit down and talk about X’, they’re like, ‘I don't wanna do that’. So it’s like right before bed, she's got one foot out of the bath, her baby sister’s in the bath, crying because she's cold. And she’s like, ‘Daddy, can you tell me about the Bristol bus boycotts?' and so I started to talk to her about it. I talk to her about what she was told at school, and we get to the thing that is confusing her. She doesn't understand what racism is. And so I start to explain to her what racism is. And then she goes, ‘That sounds stupid. I don't, I don't understand that, sounds stupid. Why would anyone be like that?’ And my response was, ‘Well, someone might be racist because’, and then I stopped myself because I was like, ‘oh my God, I'm trying to justify why someone might be racist in order to explain racism to my child.’ When actually I'm the jaded one. I'm the cynical one. I'm the one who's experienced racism and combated racism, and called out institutional racism and called out, like, interpersonal racism and I'm tired of all this shit and I'm justifying why it exists to my daughter in order to explain to her why she needs to be terrified of it but actually she's right: it's stupid.

It was just a big moment for me, when I realized that the grander project of wanting them to be empowered to find their way through their own identity was sort of working because I think part of me did come to my sense of self through an opposition to racism, and to like people putting those labels on me, whereas hers has just been just a pure thing of I’ve been presented like...I can show you that, you know the Aladdin thing, I can show you the world: ‘shining, shimmering, splendid’. And that's what we did and she’s...I mean she still has questions about racism but she understands it's an external thing. I don't think I ever understood it was an external thing.

I remember like when I was 16 years old and I got knocked off my bike by a car, and the person ran out of the car took one look at me and they were just really angry for whatever reason they just screamed ‘You Paki’ at me and got back in the car and drove off. And that was devastating because I was like, what the fuck...I didn't understand it. I had no context for it. I didn't, I had never seen this person before, like, it was that sort of thing, like, they would've forgotten that that happened, maybe a day later, a month later, certainly now thirty years later they won't remember that happened, but that lived rent-free in my head for years because I went from being Nikesh the guy who bought Paranoid Android, CD1 and CD2 from Woolworths, to Paki, in such a quick switch...Sorry for slurring so much by the way, I think it's relevant.

RA: Do you know how your daughter would describe herself, in terms of her heritage?

NS: Yeah, they talk about it all the time. She talks about being Indian all the time, and then sometimes she’ll throw a concession to her white mother and say ‘I’m half Indian, half English’. I think, yeah, both of them I think, it’s really funny, like I really remember we invited some neighbours round for a play date about three or four years ago. Didn't know them very well, a white couple and their child. I was standing in the kitchen watching our kids play in the garden with the guy. I don’t know why we were talking about Dishoom, the restaurant Dishoom, and we were talking about how delicious their chilli cheese...I know what it was, I just got the recipe book for Dishoom and I was like, ‘Can you believe there's like, they’ve dedicated a whole page to their chilli cheese toast? It’s literally like chilli and cheese on toast.’ And he was like, and he just suddenly went weird on me and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, who thought up doing chilli cheese toast at Dishoom. You can imagine the chefs going [puts on accent] "Oh, shall we do chilli cheese toast? Oh yes. Yes, we should do chilli cheese toast".’ And I just said, ‘What are you doing with the accent, dude? I don't understand.’ And then he got embarrassed and then we had this silence and then the kids came in. They were like, ‘Oh, can this child stay for bedtime stories?’ Because it was like towards the end of the day. I think to get out the situation, the guy went, ‘I'll do the stories' and we all went upstairs and my daughters went to pick the books and they both picked, I don't know why, but they both picked some of the books by Indian authors, that have lots of Indian words in them, just randomly, and they gave them to him, and he like looked at them, and then looked up at me and I was just, sort of like, standing in the doorway going, 'This would be a delicious episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, this is so funny.’ And he went, ‘I don't know if I can read that, some of the words...’. And my daughter went, ‘Don't worry, I'll explain them to you, I'm Indian.’ And I just burst out laughing because it was just the most absurd situation. And she had no knowledge of what had happened in the kitchen, also she wouldn't have understood what had happened in the kitchen, but it was just like this delicious moment. But it was like just such a pure moment from her of her declaration of who she is.

• Nikesh Shukla

Coconut Unlimited (London: Quartet Books, 2010)

(with Kieran Yate) Summer of Unrest: Generation Vexed: What the English Riots Don't Tell Us about Our Nation’s Youth (London: Vintage Digital, 2011)

The Time Machine (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013)

Meatspace (London: The Friday Project, 2014)

Shukla, Nikesh, et al., How Much the Heart Can Hold: Seven Stories on Love (London: Sceptre, 2016)

The Good Immigrant (London: Unbound, 2016)

‘A Bird, Half-eaten’, in I am Heathcliff, ed. by Kate Mosse (London: HarperCollins, 2018)*

Run, Riot (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2018)

(with Claire Heuchan) What is Race? Who are Racists? Why Does Skin Colour Matter? And Other Big Questions (London: Wayland, 2018)

The One Who Wrote Destiny (London: Atlantic Books, 2018)

The Boxer (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2019)

(ed. with Chimene Suleyman) The Good Immigrant USA: 26 Writers Reflect on America (New York: Dialogue Books, 2019)

Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home (London: Bluebird, 2021)

Your Story Matters: Find Your Voice, Sharpen Your Skills, Tell Your Story (London: Bluebird, 2023)

Stand Up (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2023)

The Council of Good Friends (London: Knights Of, 2023)

Spider-Man: India – Seva: 1 (New York: Marvel, 2024)

Image credit

Abi Bansal

Entry credit

Karishma Kaur