New Skin for the Old Ceremony is Arun Sood’s debut novel that 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 remembering their pasts and looking to the future the friends explore family, friendship, race and belonging. In this extract, we introduce Rajeev Sabharwal, an anxious, expectant father.

Extract taken from New Skin for the Old Ceremony
By Arun Sood
Published by 404 Ink

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.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony by Arun Sood is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician and academic working across multiple forms. He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland Mother and Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, DC, and now Plymouth, South Devon. Arun’s critical and creative practice ranges from academic publications, editorials, poetry and fiction to ambient musical tapestries. Broadly, his varied outputs engage with diasporic identities, mixed-race heritage, ancestry, language and memory. @arunskisood