Krishna is a happy person.
He isn’t predisposed to moping, and he doesn’t like to sit around wringing his hands over all the things he has no power over. He has friends, and he genuinely enjoys making new ones. Going to restaurants or bars or bookstores alone is fine with him because he is always confident that he can talk to strangers if he starts feeling too lonely.
The problem with being a happy person, he has found, is that a happy person is usually expected to go on being happy all the time. A happy person feels pressured to act happy even when he might not be feeling at one hundred percent. A happy person has no toolkit for how to deal with waking up one day to find himself not such a happy person after all.
Or maybe that’s just Krishna.
Seemingly out of nowhere, someone’s meaty shoulder rams into Krishna’s and sends him stumbling back. The wall catches him before he can fall completely over, something for which he is immensely thankful.
“Get out of the way, Paki.”
The epithet is so unexpected that for a moment Krishna doesn’t truly hear it. During the second it takes for him to digest it, Archie has already stepped in, snarling. “He’s Indian, you mental deficient!”
But the boy is already halfway down the hall and careless. Verbal accuracy had not been his purpose, and he had hit the bullseye with his real intent.
“It’s fine, leave it,” Krishna says, rolling his eyes. A strange feeling creeps up his spine, but he grins. “That guy’s an idiot. Who cares that he has no idea that India and Pakistan are two different countries? Never mind the extreme irony of it all. No wonder his marks in history are so rotten.”
When he goes back to his uncle’s house after school, he drops his bag near the entryway as usual and, also as usual, makes a beeline for the refrigerator. He waves to his uncle before rummaging through it until he finds something worthwhile: leftover samosas from dinner the night before.
It isn’t until his uncle finally says, “Okay, what’s going on?” that he realizes he’s been mostly silent for the duration of his otherwise normal daily ritual.
“Nothing,” he says. The lady doth protest too much. “Well.” He sticks his thumb in his mouth, swirls his tongue over the tip of it to catch crumbs from his snack. “Some guy called me a Paki today. At school.” He shrugs one shoulder and shakes his head. “It was so stupid.” He rolls his eyes about it again. “It’s like, doesn’t he know anything about the world? I thought this was supposed to be a good school. You can’t just go round calling all brown people Paki, I mean. How ludicrous is that? And I thought nobody even said that stuff anymore.” For the third time, he rolls his eyes.
His uncle doesn’t say anything, and when Krishna finally looks at him properly, he finds the man frowning faintly. Like this, he looks a lot like Krishna’s father, which is kind of weird.
“What?”
“Are you all right, Krishna?”
That feeling creeps up his back again. “Of course I am. It’s just stupid stuff, that’s all.”
Lying in bed that night, he stares up at the ceiling thinking about the word - actually thinking about it this time. It is, he finds, a strange thing to call anyone, regardless of their country of origin. He is not, however, an idiot, and he knows that the boy who called him that isn’t an idiot, either.
He likes his school, he really does, but sometimes, when he thinks about his East London accent and his skin color and the fact that his distressed jeans for the weekends are self-distressed, not industry distressed, he wonders whether he really fits in.
At the end of summer term, Geoffrey Hallewell has a party for all the Year 13s. Krishna goes because fuck if he’s going to turn down an open party invite just because things are tense between him and the host.
It turns out he shouldn’t have gone after all, though, because all everyone talks about is their plans for uni.
It’s 2:39 AM, it’s raining, and he’s thoroughly drunk. As far as Bridget Jones moments goes, this is a fairly hefty one for him - the only thing missing is Jamie O’Neal and a flat that isn't what he has, with false affection, described as a shithole. He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and is glad that his flatmates aren’t home to see him presumably crying over having the spins.
He could stay here and fall into a sleep either fueled by exhaustion or more alcohol. Or he could get up. He gets up.
The trip to his parents’ house is a blur, mostly accomplished by muscle memory. It’s easy enough to fish through his pockets for his keys, but it’s harder to actually unlock the door. In the end, he doesn’t have to, because the door swings open with an abruptness that nearly makes him stumble backwards.
“Kanna, do you realize what time it is?” his father asks him in Marathi.
Krishna wavers on his feet. “Don’t tell Ai,” is the first thing he can think to blurt out. He wipes at his eyes shakily.
He realizes, as his father ushers him inside, that as familiar as their little house is to him, he has never entered it like this - beyond drunk and in tears. He sequestered both of these things for secrecy, sneaking in when he got too drunk at pubs with his friends and crying alone in the safety of his room. He doesn’t presume that he was actually very covert, but the point was that he was afforded at least the illusion of privacy.
His father fixes him tea and sits him down on the couch.
“Tell me.” Ramesh is direct, as always. Problems are either solvable or they aren’t; there isn’t any use wasting time trying to fix situations out of one’s control. They don’t touch; his mother is the tactile one.
“I don’t know,” Krishna admits helplessly. He ignores his tea to instead hunch into himself, forming a neat cocoon by bringing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around his legs. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Why didn’t I go to uni? Why am I - nothing makes any sense.”
He fully expects an I told you so in some form or another. He expects a you should have gone to university on time or even an it’s okay, you can apply for next term.
What happens is that his father puts his hand on Krishna’s shoulder. “Kanna, there isn’t just one path for everyone. You have to take your time and figure things out. You know Ai and I want you to be in university, to get a good education, and if you did that right now we would be very happy. But we wouldn’t be happy for the right reasons, do you understand? Because you wouldn’t be applying genuinely. You can’t create purpose synthetically.”
The advice is so far from anything either of his parents has told him that Krishna is intensely sure for a moment that the conversation is a drunken hallucination. But it isn’t.
Instead of leading him up to his childhood bedroom, his father drives him back to his flat and puts him to bed with a pint of water on the nightstand.
“Would you shut the fuck up for one fucking minute? Christ. I can’t fucking think with you nattering on.”
Krishna’s expression wavers for a moment before he firms it up. Sal is stressed about work stuff and is probably worried about how long his alibi will hold up with his wife; his irritation makes sense. Instead of asking whether Sal would like for him to put the kettle on he instead busies himself with doing so unprompted.
The next day at work, Krishna asks a coworker if she thinks he talks too much.
“Of course you do,” she laughs. Somehow, her three extra months of life over his make her seem so much older than she is on paper, so much wiser. She pinches his cheek. “You just don’t know when to shut up, Krish. You’re such a goof.” The crinkles at the corners of her eyes are fond.
He manages a smile despite the cloying feeling rising in his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “I should probably work on that, huh?”
Touring is a new and exciting experience, and one that Krishna wouldn’t pass up for the world. He still can’t believe he’s lucky enough that this music thing has taken off, that he gets to travel all over the world singing songs he wrote with a couple guys he met relatively recently.
Those guys are now two of his best friends, though, and he is constantly shocked by just how intensely he needs them in his life at this point. Never mind that they’re a team now - if he couldn’t nap with Emre or complain with Mikey, things would be very bleak indeed.
Sometimes after shows, though, he wants to be alone. This is a new feeling for him. Or perhaps it isn’t a few feeling; perhaps he’s felt this throughout the years and had ignored it, because his matrix of self does not include the need to be alone.
He watches Mikey talk on the phone to his girlfriend. He can’t hear what Mikey is saying, but the slow, sweet smile on his face says it all.
The bus jolts, and he braces his hand against the wall as he moves towards the back.
“It’s possible I didn’t anticipate how terrible it would be to sing about all my failed romances every single night,” he says to Emre, who is lounging in his bunk.
“You’re also getting to stick it to them,” he replies. “‘Hey, losers, I’m a fucking pop star, eat shit and die.’”
Krishna laughs. “Yeah.” Their beds are absurdly comfortable, and he stretches out to enjoy his own fully. He props his chin in his hands. “Fuck them. I’m clearly winning the breakup games.”
But it doesn’t feel to him like he’s winning at all. It feels like he’s the loser, this asshole who can’t let things go. An immature brat who can’t control himself, who deliberately walks into trouble and then cries about it.
His phone lights up.
Heard you're in Bristol, want to meet up
received 23:19
Paddy. Krishna swallows thickly. His fingers hover over the keyboard, momentarily hesitant before he types out a quick reply. Technically, he does want to be alone, but maybe this is a good thing. He's wallowing in self-pity, after all; talking to an ex of sorts might put his mind at ease. Paddy was a decent guy, too, aside from the fact he'd been cheating on his girlfriends. (It wasn't like Krishna had been blameless there himself, anyway.)
yeah okay we're not leaving for a while
sent 23:20
where should i meet you
sent 23:20
we could get a drink maybe? catch up?
sent 23:20
A bubble pops up that indicates Paddy's writing something. Then:
I have a room at the Bristol
received 23:21
Prince street
received 23:21
Krishna feels like the pit of his stomach drops out. He stares at the words until they go blurry, then drops his phone unceremoniously into the little drawer by his bed.
“You okay?” Emre asks, in a tone of voice indicating he knows very well that Krishna is not okay.
“Yeah, just tired. You know me, I need like twenty-three hours of sleep to be a fully functional human being. And sometimes I’m still not one even then.” Krishna says all of this perfunctorily. “Goodnight, Em.”
There is a brief pause before Emre wishes him a good night back.
Krishna pulls the curtain closed, lies down, and puts his pillow over his head.
In July 2015, Communion drops.
After having spent the last couple years slaving away at a dream that seemed more like a pipe dream than anything truly feasible, Krishna is astounded that things have fallen together like this.
But everything is ephemeral. Always, he knows that.
He scrolls through his Facebook feed after the release party, pleasantly drunk for once as opposed to gut wrenchingly, sickeningly so. His relative sobriety just makes everything that much more uncomfortable.
His fellow RGS alumni are all over the world. Technically, he is also all over the world. The difference is that they are making an impact; they are positively affecting the societies around them. Medical students, law school attendees, nonprofit founders.
Why hadn’t he done more, he wonders. Why hadn’t he gone abroad to teach English? Why hadn’t he gone to India to learn more about his own roots?
Things, he finds, are always a mess of could’ves and should’ves. This is a fact of life, and not a very novel one, and yet he finds himself feeling sick to his stomach. He isn’t under the impression that he’s as much of an idiot as some people have asserted in the past, but he is smart enough to know that he isn’t brilliant, either. Krishna finds himself perfectly, painfully average.
He is, for all intents and purposes, all but clutching the dream he’d worked towards. It just turns out that maybe the dream isn’t as admirable a white whale as he’d thought.