‘DNA and destiny almost seem intertwined because they both pre-write elements of our lives’

Nikesh Shukla’s third novel, The One Who Wrote Destiny, is a sprawling epic of Indian-origin families who migrate from Kenya to the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century. Told from the perspective of four members of a family across three generations, it is a story about the changing face of race relations, the effect of genetics on illness and death, and the consequences of bringing immigrant children into a world one doesn’t completely feel comfortable in. It is a deliberation on the idea of destiny, and how errors, small and large, can be understood retrospectively as willed by destiny.

Shukla’s previous novels include Coconut Unlimited, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011, and Meatspace which received critical acclaim. In 2016, Nikesh edited a collection of essays titled The Good Immigrant, which included work from actor and rapper Riz Ahmed, and journalist Reni Eddo Lodge (who recently published the best-selling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race) amongst others. The collection was a runaway success, and won a Reader’s Choice Award for best book of 2016 in the UK. Shukla spoke to Scroll.in about how the novel was influenced by the story of his own family, the role of twitter in a writer’s life, the effect of fatherhood on how he views his own writing, and more. Excerpts from the interview:

Can you talk to us a little about the title of your book? How did you decide upon this one?
It’s actually inspired by the title track in Naseeb (1981). When Asha Bhosle sang Jisne likha hai sab ka naseeb, I wanted to know who was writing our destiny. Could we personify them?

I’d been thinking a lot about destiny, coincidence and the immigrant story. How things play out through happenstance, or was it meant to be? Why did my uncle shoot for London but end up in Keighley? How did that change the course of my family’s immigration story? And the more I played with these roles that we have, around who we are and who we are destined to be, that song kept coming back to me. And it ends up being a sonic trope throughout the book.

The town of Keighley plays an interesting role in your book – a man moves from Kenya to this town in Western Yorkshire because he thinks it’s close to London, when it’s actually more than two hundred miles away. What made you choose Keighley as a location?
It’s where my family ended up. I don’t have a connection with it as they were in London by the time I was born, but when my uncle first moved to the UK, he ended up in Keighley because he struggled to find lodgings that would accept coloured people. He was coming from Aden and didn’t know many people. And I guess he knew people in Huddersfield and Bradford, who helped him find somewhere. He was aiming for London though. I really wanted to honour these small but significant decisions or forced choices that people immigrating often have to make in order to make things work.

I was engrossed by – and struggled with – Neha’s hatred for her father. Can you talk to us about how you developed that character?
Neha just spilled out of me fully formed. I wanted to explore a familial relationship that was based in a friction that wasn’t the parent being disappointed in the child’s decisions, as per the usual trope of British Asian fiction that gets published (not that gets written, important distinction).

Neha is disappointed in their father and utterly tired of social norms. Also, I wanted to write something static and interior and try to understand someone coming to terms with their mortality. What do we do when we know we don’t have much time left? How do we act? What is our legacy? What do we leave behind and importantly, what do we take with us? Also, I like that I’m playing with disrupting Neha’s very clearly defined view of the world by disrupting patterns they have coded into their everyday life and asking them to look beyond what they recognise as science and physics and reality. I wanted it to feel like there were elements of magical realism that could also just be an altered reality brought on by a terminal illness.

One of the ways in which destiny ties into the plot is the role of genetics in determining whether and how illness and death run in families. How did you get interested in this side of destiny?
My mum died of cancer quite suddenly and the cancer was diagnosed quite late because she had this condition that caused scar tissue forming in her lungs. It made it hard for her to breathe and also it allowed cancer to grow undetected till it was too late, because you couldn’t see it, due to the scarring. Mum noted that the first elements of her condition were small black flecks appearing in her nail beds, which I wasn’t convinced was a real thing. But after her death, and thinking about that condition being a genetic one, I started to notice black flecks on my nailbeds. And I worried that perhaps I too would develop this condition. At the same time, I wanted to know and understand cancer, which is such a mystery to me. So, I was reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s excellent in-depth The Emperor Of All Maladies. And so, when I was formulating what the book would be, I thought, DNA and destiny almost seem intertwined because they both pre-write elements of our lives. I thought that was an interesting comparison.

I notice you stepped away from twitter recently. This appears to happen more and more – writers take breaks from social media for the sake of their mental health. What role do you see social media playing in a writer and editor’s life today? Is this changing as the downsides become more apparent?
I use social media nowadays to promote my work and gather information. I’m a columnist for the Observer magazine as well as a writer, and so having to come up with a weekly thing to have 700 words about means knowing what’s happening in the world. So, I am online for that.

However, social media, for all the good it has done my career and my wellbeing in terms of developing a writing community, has a toxic side. Because I speak up about race issues in the UK, I get a lot of people on my timeline wanting to tell me that I’m the real racist because I notice race, that I’m wrong about this or that or that I love racism because I go on about it so much or what about this or the British colonialism wasn’t the only Empire and other utterly obfuscating things. It reminds me of that incredible Toni Morrison quote: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

The Good Literary Agency opens soon for submissions. When a new endeavour starts, I’m always interested in understanding what gaps it felt compelled to fill, what status quo it was motivated to refashion. Could you talk to us a little about why you co-founded The Good Literary Agency with Julia Kingsford?
I’ve spoken about this a lot, so I won’t rehash all the statistics about how monocultural UK publishing is in terms of the British writers it nurtures. It’s much more likely to buy in diverse talent from abroad rather than nurture interesting British writers of colour or working-class writers or writers with disabilities and we need that plurality of voices. We’ve always needed it but given the crisis of identity Britain is currently in with regards to Brexit and small island syndrome and this wilful denial of its colonial past and the fact that Britain is largely institutionally racist, we need those writers now. And publishing is slow.

So, the agency is designed to blow open the pipeline for marginalised writers or writers from underrepresented backgrounds and do something that I think publishing doesn’t always have the time to do these days: nurture and develop those writers till they are ready and then send their books out. I founded the agency with Julia because I was working with lots of writers and then sending them out to agents I knew but they didn’t get the support they needed or still met with barriers and I thought, why don’t I try and continue and support them. Luckily, my agent Julia believes in that way of working and so we did it.

Several of your projects have the word “good” in it. Could you talk to us a little about what the word means to you?
I guess it’s partly because of The Good Immigrant, but also, it’s because I want to re-examine what we consider good art in this country. Good writing. Good films. Gatekeepers for so long have held on to what is good, and used words like literary merit, which is entirely subjective, to keep people at bay. I think what I want to do is diversify what is good. Also, we are doing this for the good of culture, for the good of people, for the good of writers. I’d rather be writing but I’m compelled to do this.

Kaveh Akbar tweeted last year that we should be asking more men how becoming a parent changes their relationship to writing. Could you talk to us a little about how fatherhood has affected you as a writer?
I’ve certainly seen, given both my kids are voracious writers, the impact of seeing yourself in fiction, or in books. Your stories are valid, your voice is important, you can aspire to be whatever you see when you’re that age. And that has made me think about how doing all this work is important not just for kids, but for adults too, who might come to reading at a later age, or teenagers who need to read for pleasure as well as for school. And it’s important that white kids see brown kids in aspirational roles as well as brown kids. Our role models should be diverse. So, it hasn’t changed my writing. But it has crystallised for me the impact of a book where you can see yourself reflected back.