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Addressed to Shukla’s young mixed-race daughter, these reflections – with rage and humour – consider the world into which she is growing
Nikesh Shukla begins Brown Baby by confessing that, when he was younger, he never considered becoming a parent. Then, in 2010, just a week after his first novel was published, his mother died of lung cancer. She was “the linchpin of my family”, he says. “Its heartbeat, its core. I was thirty. And I was most definitely lost.” Ten years later, he is the father of two young daughters. He is working very hard and mostly very tired. He finds himself spending the time he’s not thinking about his children thinking about his mother. He is caught between grief and wonder, endless memories of her and endless hopes for the grandchildren she never lived to see.
Shukla’s Gujarati mother liked to wear miniskirts. He says she “broke patriarchal taboos in our culture in the Sixties”. She did charity work and rebuked relatives who voiced anti-gay sentiments. Her brother was feisty too, making legal history as the first person to bring a case under the Race Relations Act when a house owner in Huddersfield refused to sell to “coloured people”. Yet she also had a vicious tongue that, growing up in Harrow, Shukla was often subjected to, not least when he insisted to her that he wanted to be a writer. “Tell me ten writers who look like you who make enough money to do this for a job,” she demanded. His naming Hanif Kureishi didn’t change her mind. Continue reading...