New Skin for the Old Ceremony E-Book

Arun Sood

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 293

Beschreibung

New Skin for the Old Ceremony follows four estranged friends reunited for a motorcycle trip up the Isle of Skye in the hope of coming to terms with how their lives have splintered since a transformative ride in Northern India years earlier. In their fumbling attempts to spiritually reconnect, expectant father Raj, recently widowed Vidushei, perpetually youthful Liam, and perpetually fragile Bobby test the limits of their friendship around campfires, on twisty roads, in unexpected Ayahuasca ceremonies, and against discussions of belonging, race, and identity. A novel about youth, the ghosts of friendship, and growing up as a mixed-race person in a small but fiercely proud nation, the characters exorcise past ghosts in order to face the present.

Leseprobe

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Published by 404 Ink

www.404Ink.com

@404Ink

All rights reserved © Arun Sood, 2022.

The right of Arun Sood to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Editing: Craig Hillsley

Proofreading: Hannah Hazel & Heather McDaid

Typesetting: Laura Jones

Cover design: Rafaela Romaya

Co-founders and publishers of 404 Ink:

Heather McDaid & Laura Jones

ISBN: 9781912489534

ebook: 9781912489541

404 Ink acknowledges and is thankful for support from Creative Scotland in the publication of this title.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

Arun Sood

Contents

THE PROLOGUE

A Roadside South of Old Manali

THE KIRTANKARA

Rajeev Sabharwal (Raj)

Dr Robert Milne (Bobby)

Vidhushei Yogeswaran (Viddy)

THE KIRTAN

Liam McManaman

The Royal Enfield Bullet

Is This What You Wanted?

Delhi Motel

Lover Lover Lover

Lieutenant Liam

Why Don’t You Try?

There Is a War

A Motorcyclist Must Die

I Tried to Leave You

Who by Fire

Take This Longing

Leaving Green Sleeves

THE EPILOGUE

A Roadside South of Staffin

About the Author

The Prologue

A Roadside South of Old Manali

The four of them sat smoking charas on a roadside somewhere south of Old Manali. Liam thumbed through a pamphlet he picked up in McLeod Ganj. It was called The Universe Unfolds Itself. He read from it softly.

—When stars die, particles formed within them are flung out into space. The stardust gets incorporated into new stars, planets, moons, and meteorites. Matter arises from death.

Liam looked skywards. Bobby broke his silence.

—Aye, and people think reincarnation is stupid?

Viddy and Raj stretched their backs, Virabhadrasana I, Warrior Pose.

The mountain ridge dimmed to a turquoise silhouette.

The bikes glowed orange as the sun slipped away.

The Kirtankara

Rajeev Sabharwal (Raj)

A silent sterility fell over the dusking second bedroom of Raj and Ibti’s third-floor Deptford apartment. Grey streaks of late London light added colour to porcelain walls, provoking an undefined melancholy over the failings of the powder spray paint can Raj was wielding. He was trying to decorate what had recently been dubbed “the baby room”, and previously called “the art studio”. But for every snowy ejaculation of glow-in-the-dark paint, the stencil frame of stars lifted to reveal his creations flake and flounder and disintegrate into the nothingness of the too-white walls. It seemed like a futile exercise, and Raj was glad to see Ibti’s vibrant green eyes glance around the bedroom door.

—Don’t bother too much with that, love. Just relax tonight. Before you go.

—Ach, I just wanted to get a bit done, y’know. Feel guilty as it is, leaving.

—Raj, I’m not popping anytime soon. Just go. And be careful.

—Not sure what we’re even doing, to be honest.

—Well, you can stay and watch birth partner vids with me instead then.

—God, they’re shite, eh.

—Hey, if I can get a back massage out if it…

Raj smiled at Ibti as she slinked back around the narrow corridor in her loose black pantsuit and headed towards the exercise ball in the small square living area overlooking cranes and KFC and, in the distance, a murky bend of the River Thames. For all his love and well-meaning articulations of guilt about swanning off to Skye, Raj was feeling more fragile about his ongoing numbness towards impending fatherhood than he was about leaving Ibti. It was the unexpected anaesthesia of it all. It was unsettling. No dread nor excitement, no fear nor quiet confidence. Nothing. Just a dull acknowledgement of what many call a miracle. The thought of Ibti glowing, happy, and plump in belly kept him going; but it had little to do with fatherhood or facing the unprecedented flurry of first times that are supposed to be exciting or scary or special or… something. He didn’t really feel much at all.

Raj fell back on the floor, supporting himself with one arm and using the other to gently spray a star-stencil banner onto the left shoulder of his black slim-fit shirt. It disintegrated to a stain of faded particles that would probably never wash away. He wouldn’t be wearing it to any more PR meetings at Whitehall. Tracing the outline of five forgotten points, he remembered the red stars he used to sew into vintage army jackets back at uni; the lively pride with which he espoused communism, anti-fascism and realpolitik! in the face of disinterested peers and pub-goers.

Raj brushed over the snowy particles with a nervous index finger, unsure if his guttural recoil was shaped by retrospective naïvety or a shrinking inability to reconcile his past self with who he was now. Shared homeowner in a gentrifying suburb of South London; financially secure; tenured to Her Majesty’s government; married to a brilliant middle-class Brazilian immigration lawyer engaged in social justice struggles from the NGO ivory tower of a Regent’s Park mansion. And now… soon-to-be father. Only the latter news had sparked unrepentant flashbacks. A pining for the irretrievable past. A hazy mist causing a cold in his soul. A malady of longing to feel life like you once did whilst simultaneously spluttering at the person who felt it.

Raj ruminated as the particles faded and freckled and streaked. A verse he once read by the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross came to mind. It described – as Raj thought, at least – some kind of temporary spiritual crisis. An emotional vacuum that was necessary for one to live through before the birth of a new belief, bond, or perhaps being:

In an obscure night

Fevered with love’s anxiety

(O hapless, happy plight!)

I went, none seeing me

Forth from my house, where all things quiet be

The sound of crushed ice avalanched into the room and Raj wiped his shirt clean. Ibti, his sublimation, called into the wilderness from the small square living area.

—Raj, come through. Made you a marg. Even did a non-alcoholic one for me!

—Thanks, ma love. You’re right. Let’s make a night of it. I’m gonna miss yi.

Dr Robert Milne (Bobby)

Raj arrived to find Bobby creased into a dusty brown bean cushion, thoughtfully stroking the ivory horn vessel that nestled into his coarse chest.

—Aye aye, Bobby.

—Arite.

—Nice horn.

—Am I gien yi the horn?

—Nit.

Raj wasn’t taken aback by the bearded, bean-bagged, half-naked being before him. Even though it had been a couple of years. Even though he was sipping from an ivory horn.

Even though his pungent single-skinner was uncomfortably Proustian, the mood between them was relaxed. The type of relaxed only possible among estranged friends whose past overrides the necessity for polite conversation. Teuchtergreetings helpedtemper reunion formalities. Raj had always thought of these customary utterances – “Arite, min?” “Phoos yer doos?” “Like en?” – as uncanny markers of familiarity in unfamiliar circumstances. He imagined it might have been the way nineteenth-century emigrants greeted new arrivals; ushered off the boat with words and vowels that burred beyond estrangement, before a more lucid slip between registers emerged.

—Is that actually an ivory horn?

—Aye.

—Thought you were vegetarian?

—It’s a cup, nae a burrito.

Bobby had found the ivory horn in a charity shop up the West End a few weeks ago. He frowned through his circular wood-frames for approximately twenty-five seconds before buying it, twizzling the stray ends of his beard as he contemplated the ethics of the purchase. He thought of a gaunt, moustached viceroy plundering the object from some Rajasthani villager, and an imperial policeman shooting the elephant. But it was dead now. They were dead now. The horn was here now – and so was he. It would be a good re-useable cup. Much better than the bamboo ones from the organic supermarket. It might even make the do-gooders who bought them reconsider notions of primitivism and progress and time and ethics; and make them realise that their great-great-great grandfather should have left that Rajasthani villager alone. After those twenty-five seconds of contemplation, he nodded approvingly, bought it, and strolled across to Costa for a frothy pumpkin latte, spiced with cumin.

Bobby’s ivory horn rested, when not dangling from his wide neck, on a custom-built wooden cradle placed on the centre of his living-room mantlepiece. Just above it, there was a framed picture of a cartoon octopus in a gentleman’s top hat, sitting on top of a gentleman’s top hat. Its tentacles were slathering around the regal man’s ears and mutton chops. Raj was curious.

—S’at, like?

—Octopus? Ah up in eh boy’s heid, like.

—Aye.

—Nae pint in fichtin it!

—Aye, righto. Okay, Bobby.

Much had happened since the last time Raj and Bobby met. That had been after an intensive week of therapy in the psychiatric ward at Queen Margaret’s Hospital, which Bobby now preferred to call by a more nineteenth-century name: the Royal Lunatic Asylum of Scotland. He felt “lunatic” afforded a charismatic gravitas lost to an overly polite modernity, and he was comfortable now, even proud, to have a handle on his self, health, and personal history. It was different to the days when intrusive thoughts dictated his mind, body, and every move. He’d come a long way: steadied by CBT, Krishna Das, magic circle meet-ups, badminton, and turning to a plant-based diet. Except bacon (“because bacon is cultural and ca be replaced”) and fish (“because Kurt Cobain said they didn’t have any feelings in ‘Something in the Way’”).

Bobby sprung from his dusty brown beanbag with the gait of a large but technically proficient gymnast. Despite his large frame, he moved with acumen and purpose. He looked leaner than Raj remembered.

—Lookin trim, min.

—Aye. The Chinese.

—Phit?

—The Chinese. Chinese International Students’ Badminton Society.

—Phit are you on?

—Badminton wi the Chinese international students. Need to be quicker than a ninja.

—Bit racist, Bobby?

—Da put me doon with yer politically correct posturin. Yer better. But aye. Am jokin. Nae think ah ken Ninjas were covert mercenaries in feudal Japan. Nithin much adee with the Qing dynasty. If onything, ma self-conscious conflation o ethnicities and cultural stereotypes wiz merely a nod towards the stupidity of ithers. So, aye, keep yer high-minded posturin in yer pipe and smoke it.

—Righto, Bobby.

Bobby performed some form of faux tai chi gesture with his hands before turning towards the small open-plan kitchen area adjoining his living room in one swift pirouette. An army marches on its belly, he assured Raj, so he’d got the messages in for breakfast.

—Bacon bap for now and a rowie for the road?

—Aye, Bobby, that would be good.

They finished breakfast, picked up their bags, and left the flat. A few seconds out the door, Bobby stopped in his tracks and about-turned, prompting a confused look from Raj.

—Where yi goin now, min?

—Forgot something.

Vidhushei Yogeswaran (Viddy)

The twins vaulted macaroni at each other’s rabid faces before slumbering. Viddy left them blanketed, asleep, and crept out the back door of the croft. She listened to the lambs’ spluttery hunger-moans, burst dew bubbles on the mossy bricks, and allowed the crisp air of silage to sour her nostrils. She found glimmers of peace on bright Skye mornings like these. It was eighteen months since John’s accident. The ropey python lashing his ankles. Blue lights swirling the croft. The analogue crackle of that Radio Scotland headline.

A crewman on a creel boat died after his leg became entangled in fishing gear and he was dragged overboard, accident investigators have said.

It was dead now. He was dead now. She was here now – and so were the twins. She had been doing some writing in these brief moments of respite from the yelps of Adeepa and Angus, and even considered producing some kind of memoir with a marketable back cover:

Born in London to Tamil refugees, journalist turned crofter Vidhushei Yogeswaran was raised in Scotland and had always felt a sense of otherness. When her husband tragically dies in a fishing accident, Yogeswaran embarks on a trip around the Isle of Skye, delving through layers of memory, language, and natural history to try and come to terms with her grief. With an unusual but timely eco-spiritual edge, and an alluring blend of memoir and nature writing, this powerful read touches on themes of identity, belonging, and loss, as it charts how a recently bereaved, restless spirit puts her next foot forward in life.

But the thought of profiting creatively, financially, or therapeutically in any way from John’s death, from trauma, and from making other trauma-survivors feel small in the face of a glossy paperback, made her wince. Besides, she cringed at all those books written by over-privileged arseholes who commodified the healing powers of travel, nature, forest bathing, foraging, and Romantic Scotland, and had little sense of their own entitlement. How wonderful it would be for us all to heal in nature, apparently unencumbered by time, money, dirty nappies, spew, and tantrums. It induced her own tantrum. Her own spew. She knew it was irrational. Probably just jealous. She was nowhere near ready to face up to herself that way. Face outwards that way. Face inwards that way. And that was okay.

Caring for Adeepa and Angus was enough for now, and they also provided shelter from the well-meaning support of her friends in the Skye Craft and Wild Swim Collective. The candlelit vigil they organised in Staffin; daily visits from Freya; yoga groups; tea parties; sympathetic smiles; knitwear for the twins; wild swims; help with the cows; muffins; teacakes; cards; more knitwear for the twins; more wild swims; and more… could they all just fuck off for a minute? Empathy was asphyxia, and she just wanted to breathe in the silage alone. John never really liked the SCWSC much anyway. He was from Strontian, Ardnamurchan, and was no more Sgiathanach than the rest of them. But he didn’t share their university backgrounds, woke sensibilities, champagne socialism, and penchant for oversized knitwear and ethereal electronica. Fishing was just what he did, what he had always done. It wasn’t some political statement about climate or sustainability or libertarianism. He wasn’t interested in posting pictures of himself cleaning up cow shit to make friends in the city marvel at the dirt under his nails. And it was this sense of himself that Viddy loved most, but also what made some of her older friendships hard to maintain.

She thought of the time John met Raj, Bobby, and Liam back in… when was it now, 2008? It felt like an unstated ending, a sobering up from the haze of youthful energy that intoxicated them through the previous few years. Student hols, India, library binges, arguing, drinking, grieving, mourning, Valium, laughing, getting high. All that seemed far off, naïve, immature that day. Most of the boozy lunch was taken up by Raj awkwardly asking John about life on a fishing boat. Nobody was comfortable, everybody was tipsy, and mutual bellows – “Great to finally meet you!” “Aye, can’t believe it’s taken us this long!” “Was great seeing you again!” “Safe trip back to the island!” echoed around a dusky Ashton Lane as they hugged and parted ways, relieved, hollow, nervous, a little sad.

In time, a warmer nostalgia superseded sadness. But Viddy was still anxious, or excited, or maybe an unsettling combination of both. She rested her head against the mossy croft wall and started laughing. She laughed louder, combing her fingers through thick black hair in some strange, nostalgic relief. The thought of Liam hungover and ill-equipped for the weather, in gutties; Raj pretending he was way more outdoorsy than he was; and the likelihood of Bobby showing up in 1890s deerstalker garb for his “Highland Tour”. Preposterous.

The twins were grumbling, so Viddy slipped back inside, patchwork gown flailing in the wind behind. She needed to get them dressed, packed, and write a list for Freya of what they needed to eat.

Liam McManaman

Liam leafed through the back pages of the Daily Record in the corner of the Dalmuir Diner. He cut an oddly elegant figure – cross-legged, slick black hair, lean leather jacket – and might be vulnerable if it were not for the radiant, edgy confidence that kept the burly workies at bay. It had been a tiring few days, and he needed the greasy decompression – coffee, full breakfast, paper, old hen patter – before heading over to James’s garage in Drumry.

The diner had become something of a morning ritual since he’d moved back to renovate, but today the faint clangs of cutlery and fragmented grill sizzles were particularly therapeutic. Liam’s mum, Rhona, had been done for breach of the peace earlier in the week. It was a good outcome, and he was glad the debacle was over. One of their neighbours in Bearsden had, apparently, been taking photos of children from his window, taps aff, as spotted by Liam’s wee sister, Ashlene. Rhona’s reaction, somewhere between measured and red mist, was to turn up on his door and beat his mouth bloody with a black stiletto. Knowing who she was, and who her sons were, the man’s red lips remained sealed about the beating, and she got off with a minor public disturbance. Liam smiled to himself, thinking about James’s initial reaction to it.

—Yi can take the girl oota Drumchapel, eh…

Liam feigned a laugh but felt uneasy that Ashlene, just eleven years old and sole witness to the lewd photographer, had developed a habit of lying compulsively in recent weeks.

Moving back had been hard. Liam felt guilty for feeling the oppression of familial love. He’d felt closer to them all when their relationship was less defined by physical location and more by the memories and imagined bonds which became real in times of mutual need, happiness, even tragedy. Nowadays their paths were intersecting in spatial arrangements that infringed upon his sense of freedom and identity, though it was hard to know what those things even meant anymore. An unnerving vulnerability simmered beneath Liam’s performative confidence; a confidence that had always paved his rambunctious way forward in life. In fact, there was a creeping sense that the very need to perform, to seem authentic and rebelliously true, had left him lagging behind.

To be true to oneself, if such a thing as personal truths exist, meant – for Liam, at least – maintaining the narrative of a rebellious self. And that was a hard bargain, particularly when it came to conceding the transmigrations and narrative ruptures of the old ghosts dancing around his own spirit. Raj’s well-paid job, Bobby’s recovery groups, Viddy’s kids – and then there was Liam. The sad last rebel. Childless, jobless, and eating cheap diner breakfasts funded by black-market motorcycle sales. Surely free will should amount to something more than becoming a parody of a person intent on exerting free will?

It was good to have the Dalmuir Diner to mull this over on a daily basis. Clanging cutlery, echoes of older ghosts. Perhaps they would make him smile again. Remind him of who he was or who he might want to be now. James was doing him a good turn anaw.

The jangle of Liam’s knife and fork against the crimson-streaked plate broke his reverie. He should make tracks.

Liam arrived at the garage to find James’s stout figure hunched under the bonnet of a rusty red Fiesta. Tanned orange, six foot three, blackened hands, bald head, boiler suit, neck tattoos – James was imposing, but a bright flash of white teeth quickly turned intimidation to charm.

—Awrite, wee bro, off on adventures again, eh? Quite right, ma man.

—Aye, bruv. When yi comin along?

—Am no sure am cut oot fur bongs under a banyan tree these days.

—Were yi ever?

—Aye, mate, yi missed ma hippy days. Lang hair, spliffs, and aw that.

—That before or aifter yi started tyin cunts up in the forest?

—Ssshht, wee yin. Ah wiz no saint, but am no proud o it either.

—Aw the reason to hit a wee bong under a banyan tree, bruv!

James was full of admiration for his wee brother’s way of winging it; out the scheme, Glasgow uni, ashrams in India, yoga in South America. He would do anything for Liam, including, most recently, helping to restore and sell old motorcycles that were being shipped over from Mumbai. Between the part-time charity gig, canvassing, and renovating old council flats in the Drum, it was just another one of Liam’s turns that allowed him to float on without a full-time job, free to up sticks to an ashram or meditation retreat whenever he felt the whim. It was a well-rehearsed form of free will, but also a well-loved act most of the time.

But recently it had all become a little tiring. This performance.

James walked his younger brother over to the three Royal Enfield Bullets.

The Royal Enfield Bullet

The Royal Enfield Bullet.

Indian?

British?

Or Anglo-Indian? A term that “refers to at least two groups: those with mixed Indian and British ancestry and those of British descent born or living in India”. No, the primary focus on “Anglo” sounds too English. And it’s not like these machines were born out of some harmonious union that transcended imperial culture, capitalistic gain, and exploitation. But we tend to forget about that in love and lust and sex and death and riding around pretending we have free will on the the oldest global motorcycle brand in continuousproduction.

Global.

That most nebulous of illusions that makes it sound like people across cultures can belong together. But where? The ghosts of those Bangladeshi border corpses might have something to say about the global merits of a machine that buzzed the Border Security Force around as they papped out rounds and cleansed their new country of veil and scripture and calls to prayer.

Strange how something so British could become so Indian.

So militantly Indian.

And still the Republic Day Daredevils ride Enfields on their heads and loop and toot and shoot to celebrate the collapse of crown rule whilst simultaneously revving up their own yoke of tyranny, home, and Hinduism. Hard to know who to be sometimes. Especially in a new home. Globally exhausting.

So, anyway, to sustain this song of freedom, let’s just say that the Royal Enfield is made up of some British parts, its birthplace is in Chennai, and its spiritual home is the Himalayas, where the wheels seem to lift and levitate above the rocky terrain that cuts up, down, and around hemp-smelling hills that swirl in supernatural wonder. It’s a strange term, though, “spiritual home”, as if everyone has some place to go to appease their spirit, find their sense of self.

For surely there’s a great tyranny in binding a person or thing to a physical place. The question is not “How” nor “Who” nor “When” but Where is your home? What an oppression.

An existential crisis in a “local” café you have come to hate. Arriving in a new town to “build a home” only to be smacked with regret. Moving “away” then missing “home” to the point of petrification.

What a tyranny.

Swimming eyes. Tortured fragility. Weary loneliness.

An old song from the “homeland” played on a broken violin by a broken man who left home and could never return. Like all the old songs. Like all the old broken men. Like all the longing.

All this is exhausting. This tyranny.

It certainly begs questions about “spirit” and “home” and “imagination”. It begs questions, too, about whether machines might also need, like humans, a sense of journey, transcendence, and community to exist with any purpose. An imagined place where they belong – not by birth or nation or blood or bolt – but by virtue of myth, narrative, song, and imagination. Perhaps this is some small salvation: the idea that we might share our predicament with objects and machines in mutual wonder, mutual crises.

This is particularly true of the lost and weary legs which were, and will, sooner or later, be wrapped around Royal Enfield Bullets in search of a song to sing for themselves.

There is a great salience in listening out for these songs.

Songs that allow for the silences, murmurs, and offbeat syncopations of undefined relationships. Relationships that run parallel to, or even apart from, family, politics, sex, and love; forged by that irrepressible human instinct that binds us to ornament, art, and machine. We leave them, return to them, leave them again, then return and take for granted the perpetual “home” provided by a world that transcends love and lust and skin.

It’s hard to know where the Royal Enfield Bullet really belongs or who it belongs to. But it has powerful notions. Powerful imaginings. Beyond borders. Beyond nations. Beyond our world.

Perhaps we all have the capacity for this. These notions that fade to silence in the clamour of the human world.

The tyranny of home, or the torment of who and where one belongs, then, can only be healed from within.

This was true of the pale-brown-skinned (or brown-pale-skinned) children left behind by regal East India Company merchants in purple flowing gowns and bejewelled turbans.

This is true, too, of the Royal Enfield Bullet, and its companions.

The Kirtankara.

The Kirtan

Is This What You Wanted?

What are estranged friends if not ghosts? Real ghosts aren’t dead people. Dead people haunt our memories, our minds, our strengths, our regrets, our aspirations – but they haunt from a lifeless place. The life they had is over, fragmented into ethers which might join with other ethers to make something new one day. And so their hauntings are always partial, fragmented, a dim murmur of imagination. They comfort us, sadden us, please us, but rarely frighten us – because life has transformed, and we know they can’t return. Not like real ghosts. Real ghosts operate in a space where the over and done with is always apt to return. Where the possibilities of another past haunt our present or threaten our future. Where absent presences disrupt our sensibilities and send us into frenzies of indecision about who we are and who we once were. These ghosts aren’t dead people; nor are they apparitions, wailing ghouls, screeching banshees, or befallen creatures trapped in an unrequited search for vengeance. These ghosts are old friends. We pass real ghosts every day; they haunt others who we’ll never meet or know. We all live in houses that are haunted. By the ghosts of ourselves. Them and us. Is this what we wanted? The Kirtankara sing, dance, fall silent, and sing again.

It was 2008 when things first started to change. Each of them felt the entropic fragmentation of friendship, inevitable and disorientating. Liam was increasingly absent, moving in different circles, and he had developed a habit – at least, that’s how they saw it. He was trying to convince Raj to stay around the West End to make a mint off selling weed to undergraduates. It was easy money. Liam had the contacts, and Raj could be the link to the off-kilter haircut creatives. But Raj had other ideas. There was a clash of sensibilities, potentially class, potentially cultures. Raj was moving to Berlin to study photography part-time and live out his boho-barista dreams. Money was a worry, as were the pressures of ever finding a “proper job” given his Oedipal rejection of law, medicine, and rising to meet the paternal demands of caste in the imperial metropole.

Viddy felt similar anxieties, but she was, and always had been, happier in her own skin. She was spending more time at a co-operative allotment in the Southside than with the others, and planned to WWOOF around farms for a while, learning, growing, learning how to grow, and living for herself instead of for others.

Amidst organic vegetable allotments and Berlin squats, Liam felt adrift. He was tired and fatigued by the increasingly flaky realm of liberal cosmopolitanism that surrounded him; a realm that once seduced him into thinking he could be something, or someone else. He began to feel detached from his life at uni, which, in retrospect, seemed increasingly like an ideological bubble that he was forced into by the establishment. A bubble people like him should be trying to burst, not float around in before crashing back unconscious in the harmless gutters of passivity and getting pissed. Passive. Harmless. Back in place. It was all too much. For want of a better way to articulate himself – actually, perhaps it was the best way – he needed to get tae fuck. So, he got tae fuck. Oot his nut. Brown. Green. Carlos Vallies. But it couldn’t last.

Bobby was the most composed of them all that year, deciding to extend his undergraduate research project into a Masters, which led to a PhD on The Literary and Cultural History of the Potato in Aberdeenshire c.1845–1848. His argument hinged on the historical neglect of the effects of the potato famine in North-East Scotland, and he mostly enjoyed those years spent researching and writing about the price of oatmeal and tatties to the crackling sounds of bothy ballads. The work had purpose. He dug with his pen. He felt close to his people.

Sadly, his efforts were misunderstood and much ridiculed by his friends back in the Shire. It started in jest and, at first, he wore the title of “Doc Tattie” with a smile, even felt a little pride in it. But it wore thin, especially coming from overpaid, red-faced rigger pals with fat necks and fatter wallets. It was hard. They had little understanding of scholarship or folklore or anything beyond the fact that it was daft that Bobby had chosen to pursue something that didn’t make money. How would he ever get his Audi, mortgage, and second mortgage? Wankers. Bobby felt torn. Would they ever understand the deconstructivist underpinnings of his scholarship and capacity for deep philosophical concepts? Probably not. Rig pigs. Ach. That was too judgemental on the brethren. So, regardless, Bobby committed to ancestral songs of the soil, to stoicism, and to the strange conservatism that emanates from generations of Picts who became generations of Presbyterians who became generations of dour pricks. He embraced the frosty silences, frowny nods, and the perceived “honest worth o it a”. His ancestors spoke to him. Jimmy MacBeath growling ‘Hey Barra Gadgie’ on Granda Duthie’s old records; Bennachie sunsets; and young fairmers spewin outside the Belmont chipper on a Saturday night in shite cheque shirts. The sincere humility of it all. People don’t have to make the Deen; they don’t have to pretend to be the “friendliest city in the world” – they just are. Weegies, min. Burring vowels and big egos and nae sincerity, nae substance. Funny cunts, though.

Raj had a different experience growing up in the North-East. He made some good friends – Bobby, Duncan – but always felt dislocated. His ancestral soil and songs were elsewhere, or nowhere. Conversations with Bobby over the years about colonialism and kinship made him reflect on the reasons for this spiritual vacuum; an inability to connect family with place. Raj’s mother, Morag, was a native Gaelic speaker who grew up in Oban and moved to Glasgow where she met his dad, Vishal. She followed him, Raj plump in her belly, up to the North-East where he worked at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Raj didn’t speak the native tongue of either parent, let alone know their ancestral songs. And his restlessness, his discontent, was just a manifestation of longing to be somewhere else, without knowing where. Bobby, in all his intellectual nuance, was one of the few friends who understood this, which explains why they formed such a bond in the latter years of high school; smoking, playing music together, and eventually going on to study degrees in Glasgow – Bobby opting for history and Raj English.

The move to Glasgow offered Raj a sense of belonging, for a while. He was closer to the Gàidhealtachdand, whilehe still didn’t understand the songs, he felt warmth in the echoes of The Park Bar and Islay Inn, and also enjoyed better Indian food and bigger Asian communites without ever being part of them. He found his own people for a while. It was Bobby who introduced Raj to Viddy, who also studied history, and Raj started to bring Liam along to the pub after English classes. The four of them got close quickly. A swift coalescence of friendship that rarely occurs outside the intensity of shared new collective experience in tender or transitory moments. A swift coalescence that feels magic, tingly; an ecstasy of the mundane, immediately etched into our forever-consciousness, forever-memory, unlike the sum of our day-to-day coming and goings. A rare friendship. A ship that would soon sail.

It was just a year after meeting they decided – on a whim, drunk in The Arlington, The Maytals’ ‘It’s You I Love’ pulping bassy under their shouty conversation – to splurge their student loans on a trip to India the following summer. They all wanted to find something, somewhere else. Together.

Curls of tobacco-stained wallpaper crusted across the floor of the musty flat. Rain chattered against a single-glazed window. White paint cracked across four square frames divided by a cold brass lever with several little holes in it, each encircled in a crown of rust. There was much left to do but Liam was done for the day. He collapsed back, uncrumpling his bag of chips on the sofa-bed, which lay sparse and lonely and fragile like an island. He closed his eyes in a moment of great weariness that fast became one of great ceremony when Leonard Cohen appeared promising dawns and morning afters. It had been a while. Liam clicked the little + button on the tinny speakers, recrumpled the soggy grey paper, and spread out as if he were someone else. Then, closing his eyes, he returned to what he once was, or what he dreamed he once was, or still was, perhaps.