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  Contents

  Preface

  Everything I Know About Kissing I Learned from Winnie Cooper

  My A-to-Z Guide to Getting Nookie in New Delhi During High School

  Made in England

  King of Shuttlecocks

  Holiday Traditions Part 1: Rakhi

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  Why Being Indian Is Cool

  Dinners with Dad

  Dziko and Me

  The Art of the Head Bobble

  Garbage, Man

  Holiday Traditions Part 2: Dussehra

  The Forbidden Kiss

  Chaos Theory

  Judgment Day in Boise

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  The Girl I Went to Mass For

  Kumar Ran a Car

  Lollipops and Crisps

  The Prince and the Pauper

  How I Knew

  Kunal’s Twelve Quick Thoughts on Dating

  Holiday Traditions Part 3: Holi

  Nina, Why?

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  The Waiting Period (Extended Mix)

  James Bond and the Mouse

  Always Joy

  Thirteen Things I’ve Learned from Playing an Astrophysicist on TV

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  And Then I Fell in Love

  Puppies

  My Big Fat Indian Wedding

  Holiday Traditions Part 4: Diwali

  Good-bye

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  Acknowledgments

  About Kunal Nayyar

  Mom,

  Thank you for bearing the pain of childbirth.

  And thank you for that one time you gave me money to join a gym for the summer, knowing full well I am incapable of growing a single ab.

  Thank you for always protecting me from all the horrible things in the world.

  Thank you for being my best friend,

  and my rock.

  This is for you . . .

  Preface

  SOMETIMES PEOPLE ASK ME, “WHY are you writing a memoir? You’re only thirty-four.”

  This is not a memoir. I’m not a president, or an astronaut, or a Kardashian.

  This is a collection of stories from my life.

  It is not an “I was born in . . .” type of book.

  I was born in London and raised in New Delhi. When I was eighteen, after maneuvering my way through a billion people and a few cows,I I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I studied business, cleaned toilets, lied my way into an IT job, and fell in love twenty-seven times. I went on to get my master’s in acting in Philadelphia, auditioned for a play in the basement of an Apple Store in New York City, and spent four hours a day commuting on a bus in Los Angeles. Somehow this crazy journey landed me on a little television show called The Big Bang Theory.

  Here are some things that happened to me along the way.

  * * *

  I. Obligatory cow joke. The first of many.

  Everything I Know About Kissing I Learned from Winnie Cooper

  NEW DELHI, 1993. I WAS twelve years old and I had two great loves in my life. The first was Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years. Cable had just come to India and I was obsessed with Small Wonder, M*A*S*H, Doogie Howser, M.D., and my beloved Winnie.

  My second great love was a friend of my cousin’s named Ishani. She was two years older than me, she wore shorter-than-normal skirts, she smoked, and she always smelled like cigarettes and perfume. I still clearly remember that perfume—lemony but also just a little masculine, as if she’d finished her morning perfuming ritual with a splash of her father’s aftershave. She had a mole like Cindy Crawford’s and she was light-skinned, with hazel-brown eyes. Every guy I knew had a thing for Ishani.

  But I had one advantage over the other guys: she was my cousin’s best friend, and my cousin happened to live directly above me and my parents.I Whenever Ishani and my cousin would hang out, I would follow them around like a puppy. Even though they went to the girls’ school and I went to the boys’, I always timed my walk from the bus so we’d somehow wind up together. Oh, hey there, what a surprise seeing you two on this fine walk from the school bus this morning! In the evenings I’d be there as they talked about boys and kissing and sex and stuff. Sometimes I’m not even sure if they remembered I was in the room; they would gossip and giggle while I bounced a ball off the wall. Literally. I became Ishani’s good friend. A younger brother, if you will. Safe, innocent, G-rated.

  “Have you ever kissed a girl?” she asked me one day.

  “Never.” I couldn’t make eye contact. We were in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, side by side. The curtains were drawn closed, like always, to shield the room from the scorching New Delhi heat.

  “Never?” she said, teasing.

  My father was at work, my mother was taking a nap, and my cousin had gone upstairs to take a shower or something. We were alone.

  Suddenly the electricity went out and the room darkened. This may sound overly convenient—and, frankly, a little implausible—but it was actually pretty common to lose power during the summers, especially in the afternoon. The government arranged something called “load shedding” to ration electricity during high-consumption months.

  I could barely see her face but I could sense her next to me on the bed.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  I froze. My twelve-year-old self was terrified. I didn’t know what to do or how to respond. Is she joking? She must be joking. She has to be joking.

  She was not joking.

  I had been dreaming of this moment for months, though I never in a million years thought it would come to pass. So of course I said the only thing that made sense: “No, no, I don’t think it’s the right thing.”

  Kunal, what are these words coming out of your mouth?

  The lights came back on. She looked me in the eye and I looked away. I thought the moment had passed . . . and then, just like that, she scooted over to me and planted her lips on mine.

  At that point in life, my entire knowledge of kissing came from my true love, Winnie Cooper. I had just watched the episode where Kevin and Winnie share their first kiss, sitting on a swing, and I learned one very important lesson: As Kevin leans in to kiss Winnie, he closes his eyes. And he keeps them closed the entire time. Genius.

  So that’s what you do when you kiss—just keep your eyes closed. Got it. Easy peasy. So when Ishani kissed me I closed my eyes, kept them shut, and I literally replayed that scene from The Wonder Years on an endless loop. I can’t remember what I was doing with my hands, or what my mouth was doing, or even what Ishani looked or felt like in that moment. When I closed my eyes, I was Kevin Arnold, and she was Winnie Cooper.

  Afterward I opened my eyes. Winnie was gone. Ishani was there.

  “Okay,” she said, with no inflection.

  Okay.

  Dry. Like it was a verdict.

  Okay.

  We didn’t discuss the kiss. Not in that moment, not later that day, not the next day, not ever. Okay.

  But it did happen. Clearly what we had shared was by definition special, magical, and I didn’t want to rock the boat by pushing my luck for an encore.

  I gave that kiss a lot of thought. Maybe too mu
ch thought. I suppose you’re supposed to say that a first kiss is “lovely” or maybe “achingly sweet,” but instead I thought . . . How weird.

  I was hitting puberty and I could have been aroused by a dead duck, but even back then, on that particular day, I felt nothing. Maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I was worried about getting the kiss right, as opposed to just living in the moment. I struggle with that a lot, you should know. Living in the moment. I should have been thinking, Holy shit, I just kissed a girl, and instead I’m wondering about the meaning of that noninflected, dry “Okay.”

  So I took it upon myself and decided the most reasonable interpretation of her statement was, “Okay, now we’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  I just assumed we were dating. We had kissed, right? When you’re twelve, a kiss has the weight of a marriage covenant. It was my signed, sealed, delivered moment. My cousin, Ishani, and I would hang out as always after school, but now I would tell my mother, “I’m going to see my girlfriend!” Since my girlfriend liked cigarettes I decided to take up smoking, stealing little white cancer sticks from my parents so I could practice puffing.II

  “We’re going to a party!” my cousin said to me one day.

  “What party?”

  “Ishani’s boyfriend’s party.”

  I was confused. Wait, but I’m Ishani’s boyfriend. Nervous, baffled, and hurt, I tagged along as my cousin’s “plus one” to my girlfriend’s boyfriend’s party. The room was filled with cool, older, dangerous-looking kids—grown men, really, sixteen years old—and they were drinking beer. Real beer. I scanned the crowd of giants and I spotted Ishani. With a guy. An older guy. She was holding hands with him. He was tall, with gleaming white teeth, and he wore Doc Martens, shoes that clearly meant one thing: I’m a badass and you suck at life. He spoke in a deep, manly voice that seemed to charm the pants off Ishani (literally, I imagined). My heart plummeted and I stared, speechless.

  “Hey!” one of the bigger guys said to me. He must have caught me staring. “I’m going to kill you!”

  I panicked and did the most manly thing I could think of: I ran for my life. I ran outside and he followed me. I ran faster. He still followed. Then I ran around a car to hide from him, and then, wait, wait, where’d he go—he ran right past me.

  He was chasing someone else.

  Who was he chasing, and why? I’ll never know. But it taught me at the tender age of twelve that everything in life isn’t always about you, even when you’re sure it is.

  I left the party alone, finally realizing that Ishani was not currently my girlfriend, had never been my girlfriend, and would never be my girlfriend. I wondered why she had kissed me in the first place. Did she see me as so innocent, so G-rated, that I didn’t really count as cheating on her actual boyfriend? Or maybe she had never kissed anybody, and she knew she would be hanging out with these dangerous old guys, and she wanted to try it out? Maybe I was just some experiment, like a lab monkey. Or maybe she just fancied me. Or maybe she somehow sensed that while the two of us were kissing, I secretly was fantasizing about Winnie Cooper.

  Okay. What a stupid word.

  Fast-forward seventeen years. Season three of The Big Bang Theory. We were prepping an episode called “The Psychic Vortex,” and I picked up the script and glanced at the casting list. One name caught my eye: Danica McKellar.

  The actress who played Winnie Cooper.

  Holy shit. Danica was slated to play a character named Abby, and I flipped through the pages of the script to see if I would get to share any scenes with her. I learned that my character, Raj, would meet her at a party, bring her back to Sheldon’s place, and then, in the episode’s final scene, they would make out.

  I was going to get to kiss Winnie Cooper.

  And this meant only one thing: God is real.

  I’d like to say that as a professional actor I was far too mature to geek out over this, but the reality is that I immediately googled her. I learned that in addition to acting, she had written well-received books about math, including Math Doesn’t Suck and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape. I also learned that she had a husband, which immediately took any actual romance off the table; that’s a line I would never cross. But still, even if it’s totally innocent and just pretend . . . I was going to get to kiss Winnie Cooper.

  On the morning before we were to meet at the table read, I spent no more than seven hours thinking about what to wear. I decided to dress down. So, in true LA fashion, I wore a pair of expensive torn jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers, and to really complete the look, I wore one of those ridiculous LA beanies that hipsters wear in the summer. I didn’t shave, because I wanted a little bit of scruff; it takes a lot of effort to show you’re not expending any effort. Such is life.

  I casually strolled into the table read, avoiding her, hanging around the breakfast buffet, and making small talk with the writers. I was saying things like, “Hey, Dave, really hot today, huh?”

  “Um, then why are you wearing a beanie?” Dave said.

  “Because I’m having a bad hair day, obviously.”

  Meanwhile I’m looking over his shoulder for any sight of Danica. Everybody has been to a party with “That Guy” who talks to you but really isn’t interested in what you’re saying; he’s just saying words in your direction while scanning the crowd for more desirable company. Today, I was totally That Guy. The writers were probably thinking, What the frack is wrong with Kunal?

  Did I want coffee? No, no coffee. I didn’t want to be jittery. I wanted to be cool. Just a cool guy in a cool beanie on a hot day.

  Finally I saw her . . . and she looked exactly the same as Winnie. She was perfect. She wore a white dress and had her hair up in a band. Her hair smelled like Head & Shoulders in the best possible way, though I’m sure it wasn’t Head & Shoulders.

  I introduced myself. “Hi, I play Raj, my name is Kunal.” Funny that I said that in reverse. “That’s me,” I said, pointing to my assigned seat at the table, which had a big card that read “Kunal” on it. I tried not to giggle like a schoolgirl.

  She smiled, we made some chitchat, and for the most part I avoided saying anything creepy. We sat next to each other at the table. When the director introduced the guest actors for that week’s episode, I clapped harder than everyone else when her name was announced, and nudged her with my elbow. Dork. During a table read you don’t actually kiss, but when we did get to that blessed scene in the script, I did a silent happy dance for myself. You know that dance, the one you do in your heart, just for yourself, for no one else to see.

  I spent most of the week hogging her time, chatting, soaking up every second of her glorious smile. “I understand that you’ve written a bunch of math books,” I said casually, not mentioning that I found this out through Google at 2 a.m. “It’s so nice that you’re on the show, because we have a big following of math and science fans.” Was I laying it on a little thick? Maybe. But anything was better than getting nervous and blurting out, “Danica, oh sweet Danica, the first time I ever kissed a girl I closed my eyes and pretended I was kissing you, and I fantasized about you for most of my boyhood and sometimes still do even now in my adult life.”

  And honestly, even though I had this massive crush, it’s still my TV show (along with the rest of the cast and crew, of course), and when someone is my guest, I’m going to take care of that person. I want them to be at ease. I want them to be comfortable. I was just happy to be a butterfly in her lovely presence.

  Kiss Day was Thursday, during the show’s run-through. They served Lebanese for lunch—hummus, tabouli, tzatziki—yummy!—Hell no, I’m not touching any of that! I even avoided coffee so I wouldn’t have coffee breath, and then I popped seventeen Altoids. My brain hatched all these scenarios of things going tragically wrong: she’d be repulsed by my breath, I’d be overly aggressive, or maybe accidentally miss the target and kiss her on her nose or left ear or eyelid. . . .

  And then the moment arrived. No more excuses. It was time for the big
scene. Sheldon enters the apartment, he doesn’t get along with his date, and then Abby sits on Raj’s lap. (She’s sitting on my lap!) As soon as the director says “Action!” we’re supposed to start kissing. While Sheldon is talking to his date, Danica and I have to kiss for the entire time in the background. (Note to the writer of this episode: I owe you a Rolex.)

  “Aaaaaaaaaand . . . action!” said the director.

  Before he even finished saying “And,” we started kissing.

  Allow me to point out that stage kissing, in itself, comes with an inviolable and highly sophisticated set of rules that must be honored 100 percent of the time. The number-one rule of stage kissing: No Tongue Without Permission.III There was no way I was going to push the boundaries or do anything disrespectful, so I erred on the side of caution and kept my lips sealed like a fish. It was a long, loooooong kiss.

  Take two! We kissed again. Take three! We kissed again. And again. And again. When it was all said and done, we did six takes. And, to be honest, I was kissed out.

  Okay!

  I don’t have any illusions that it meant anything more than just a stage kiss, as she was married and she’s a pro. This is what pros do. They make out passionately and pretend to fall in love with each other and then they go home to their happy wives and husbands. That said, I do happen to know that exactly nine months later, Danica had a baby. Did she race straight home from our kiss and make passionate, unrestrained love to her husband? I’m not saying that’s what happened; I’m just saying we have no evidence that that didn’t happen.

  “You know, this might sound funny,” I finally told her the next day, “but I have you to thank for my very first kiss.”

  She looked at me. Those eyes. “Really? How?”

  I told her a short version of the story, playing up the angle of “I learned to close my eyes from your scene with Kevin,” and glossing over the specific facts of “I visualized you and replayed the scene on an endless loop.”