Yes, My Accent Is Real Read online

  “Bring out the groom!” I heard them chanting.

  “Shhhh! The groom is sleeping!” said a cousin, ever protective.

  CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!

  “Bring out the groom!”

  “Come back later!” hissed my cousin.

  CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!

  Then I heard my mother negotiating a price for their blessing, and six hundred dollars later they did a little dance and gave their blessing for Neha and me. (Therefore, if anything bad were ever to happen between us, I’ll blame the gang of neighborhood eunuchs.)

  That crisis resolved, I shook off my jet lag and jumped into my actual responsibilities, which were to make sure that all my guests from America, about thirty-five of them, were taken care of, had hotels, and knew the basics of how to get around. India can be a shock to the senses. If you’re a first-time visitor it’s hard to process the number of people, the endless colors, the exotic smells—it really does feel like a different planet—so I wanted to be there to help everyone ease in.

  I guided my guests to the first official function of the wedding, a small cocktail party at my parents’ house. When I say “guided,” I mean I told them to wash up, get over their jet lag, and get on the bus that would be waiting outside their hotel at exactly 8 p.m. It was like herding cats, if cats were your closest friends whom you’d invited to your wedding. The cocktail party was designed to be the calm before the storm. We only invited our inner family, closest friends, and guests from out of town. Three hundred people.

  Neha looked gorgeous that night (and every night). She was dressed to the nines in a gold shirt, blue suede pants, and high heels—she looked like a goddess. I, on the other hand, looked like I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, and I had one of those beneath-the-skin pimples that I covered with makeup. (Yes, MAKEUP. Get used to it.) Every time I hugged someone, I left a small makeup smear on the clothes of the hug recipient.

  I witnessed the converging of all my worlds—a mix of childhood friends, adult friends, many, many cousins, aunts, uncles, and all my friends from America. I was so high in that moment. But it wasn’t from the alcohol. I had drink after drink but I never felt drunk; instead I felt a clarity about how lucky I was to be with so many loved ones. Once the party dwindled down, around 3 a.m., and I had kissed Neha good night—as per custom, she was staying at her parents’ house for the week—the house became peaceful and quiet. I sat with my dad and my brother at the dining table. It felt like the years of old. It felt like nothing had changed.

  My father took a deep breath. “Isn’t this wonderful? Look at this house. Feel the energy. Feel the joy.”

  I looked around the house. Old photographs of my grandparents, our first family trip to Paris, me in a ninja costume. I sat on my trusted old rickety chair. It had begun to feel the weight of my bum after thirty years of sitting in the same spot.

  “This is a great moment for both our families,” my dad said. “You are a great son to us, and it gives us pride and joy that you have found a great woman, and the two of you will make a great life and family. We are very proud of you.”

  I had known that he was happy for me, of course, but I hadn’t thought about how it truly made my parents happy as well. Their hard work had paid off. In Indian culture, when you are a father or mother, there’s real pressure from society to get your children to marry. It’s something you think about from the day your child is born. Yes, my marriage to Neha was a culmination of my dream, but it was also a culmination of my parents’ dream, too, in ways that I was now beginning to understand.

  DAY 3: SANGEET

  The next day we took things up a notch. On the agenda was the Sangeet. The word Sangeet translates to “song and dance,” and it was a party thrown by my parents in a beautiful large banquet hall. Six hundred people. Neha’s best friend, a fashion designer,I had crafted all these lovely clothes for me, and for this particular function I wore a maroon sherwaniII and looked like a Persian prince. Though I felt like an Indian one.

  As our friends began to enter this massive banquet hall, without any warning I had to take a legendary poop. It was one of those that just come out of nowhere. As the guests filed inside and expected to chitchat with the groom, I was stuck on the toilet for what seemed like an eternity. I now think all the excitement, anticipation, and anxiety were being released from me. After the epic battle in the toilet, I raced back to the hall.

  “Welcome to the party, sir! Would you like some champagne?” one of the waiters asked me.

  A lot of people accepted the champagne. My father had the idea of offering everyone a glass of champagne as soon as they arrived. Fun and festive, right? Yes. Except what he had forgotten is that when people start with champagne and then switch to liquor, they get real sloppy, real quick. So this soon became the Shitfaced Family Party. Things began to turn wild, and soon some of my cousins were insisting that the bartenders pass around shots to all the guests. The shot of choice, a “nuclear burn,” was a hue of neon blue and green and tasted like vodka and sugar and the faintly chemical aftertaste of food coloring. They were being consumed by the hundreds, nay, the thousands.

  “Time for the performance!” the DJ shouted. “Please come to the dance floor!”

  The room exploded in cheers.

  This was the climax of the Sangeet: our cousins would treat us to a dance that they had practiced, a routine that, theoretically, they’d been rehearsing for weeks. Our cousins performed a medley of eight Bollywood and Hollywood songs. They were truly bad. Neha and I choked back our laughter as they flailed about the stage. It was The Full Monty without the stripping. Still, of course, we were deeply touched and charmed by their efforts. It was all in good fun. Next, one of Neha’s aunts wowed us with a beautiful traditional solo dance. She strutted her stuff with vigor as the entire crowd cheered her on. Suddenly she slipped and fell out of sight and the DJ scratched the music to a halt.

  “Are you okay?” Neha cried as we all raced to the stage.

  Her aunt jumped to her feet and sprang back to life. The music restarted with a bang and she finished the dance with even more gusto. I swear our elders are made of sterner stuff than we are.

  We all burst into applause, and the DJ opened the dance floor to the entire crowd of six hundred. The room became an Indian nightclub, with friends and uncles and children and grandparents dancing in one sweaty mob. Even the guests at the food stations were pumping their fists and shaking their hips as they filled their plates.

  At midnight, finally, I had time to eat something. I shoved my face full of butter chicken, kebabs, daal, and naan. As I devoured my late-night meal, I watched my brother calmly deal with the ballroom’s managers. He was sorting out all the bills for the food and the booze, and I realized what I had known all along. He’s a rock. Stoic and strong. Someday I hope to have that much gravitas. I mean he is the older one; I guess it’s his job to be reliable.III

  Later, as in not long before the sun came up, I collapsed onto my bed fully clothed.

  DAY 4: THE MEHNDI

  I woke up the next morning still in my Prince of Persia pajamas. I groggily stripped off my clothes and jumped straight into the shower. The long nights, the jet lag, and the alcohol were catching up with me. But there was no slowing down; we were only halfway there.

  Mehndi is an ancient ceremony where the womenfolk of the wedding congregate to eat, drink, make merry—and, most important, to apply henna to their hands. It’s basically a big henna party for women. Traditionally it’s an all-girl affair, but in modern times the men come, too, and it’s our job to feed the women while they’re waiting for the henna on their hands to dry. The bride’s henna is usually the most elaborate and Neha’s took more than three hours, as four people simultaneously worked on her arms and legs. I’d never seen her look more beautiful—so happy, her skin radiating in the sun.

  Neha’s family had organized the event to create the atmosphere of a village marketplace, inviting a crowd of actual cooks, dancers, and bangle merchants. These weren�
�t some out-of-work actors trying to re-create a village vibe; these were actual villagers from nearby towns. It gave my American friends a taste of real India. No DJ or colored vodka shots; this was the atmosphere of rural India. There was even a local tarot card reader, complete with a green parrot. The parrot’s job was to pick a card from the deck and hand it to the tarot reader, who would in turn tell you your future.

  My friend Jason was first in line. The parrot looked Jason in the eye, considered, and then walked over to the deck and picked a card with its beak.

  The tarot reader looked at the card. “You picked the Card of Death. This is not good.”

  Jason laughed nervously.

  Next up: Dziko.

  The parrot looked at Dziko, thought carefully, and then picked another card.

  “Card of Death,” said the tarot reader. “This is not good.”

  Dziko smiled his baby smile, and then he ate the parrot. (Not really, but I thought he was going to.) That parrot was one sadistic son of a bitch, because he picked the Card of Death for half our wedding party.

  The real highlight of the Mehndi, though, was the Bloody Marys. They were handcrafted by a village bartender famous for making the finest Bloody Marys in the world. His secret ingredient? Curry. Later, when the Mehndi was coming to an end, I decided to ride the private bus that we had hired to transport all my friends back to their hotel. It was a perfect sunny afternoon and we were all drunk from having consumed an average of seventeen Bloody Marys each.

  From the back of the bus, someone started slowly singing, “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me. . . .”

  “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me!” A few others joined in.

  “Spare him his life from this monstrosity!” the group rose in unison.

  The next thing I know we’re all standing in this bus with the windows open, belting out “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of our lungs.

  We could have been anywhere in the world. But we were in New Delhi, on a bus, experiencing unfiltered joy, a euphoric crescendo of friendship.

  Hours later, once I had sobered up, we had one final tradition before the actual wedding ceremony: the family songs. Neha and I had said good-bye that afternoon after the Mehndi—I was not allowed to see her again until the wedding. That night, in our separate homes, all of us had our own versions of the family songs. On the groom’s side, all my aunts came to my house and sang bawdy songs about love and sex, laced with innuendo about the first night of marriage.

  Across town, however, the bride’s family was having a very different tradition. When she wasn’t traveling or staying overseas, Neha, like many Indian women, had lived in her parents’ home most of her life. This is traditional. When she married me and moved in with me, it would be a heart-wrenching moment for her parents. It would be the good-bye I’d had with my family so many years ago. The songs that her aunts sang that night weren’t naughty ballads about the first night of marriage. Their songs were about a child becoming a woman. They were songs about leaving home. They were songs of farewell.

  After the singing, I called Neha to ask her if she was okay. That week we had so precious little time together. Even when we were together in public we weren’t together together; we were yanked in twenty directions at once to chat with a cousin or a friend or pose for a camera or get ready for the next big event.

  Tonight, we could enjoy the simple pleasure of a phone call, like we had so many times from LA to India.

  “How’s your stomach feeling?” she asked.

  “Maybe that last Bloody Mary wasn’t the best idea.”

  “Yeah, you’re always good until you get past sixteen,” she said with a giggle.

  I told her about singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” we laughed about the Evil Parrot, and we tried to figure out whether so-and-so was actually a cousin or a wedding crasher.

  I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

  Tomorrow I would marry Neha.

  DAY 5: THE WEDDING

  The Big Day. I woke up early to prepare for a traditional ceremony in my house, where my immediate family would say prayers and give me a ritual cleansing.

  The ceremony called for me to take off my shirt, and then my brother, cousins, and parents would gently dab my skin with a turmeric-based paste. Turmeric is an Indian spice that’s used in almost all food, known to have healing powers that improve complexion.IV It’s an ancient ritual whose origins go back five thousand years.

  I took off my shirt, self-conscious, feeling that I had packed on the pounds.

  “At least you could have shaved your chest,” said my brother.

  Then my brother grabbed a handful of the paste, and instead of the gentle dabbing, he slathered it all over my face and hair and chest, laughing. The cousins soon joined in, covering me head to toe in turmeric, those wiseasses. The paste is yellow and sticky and feels like spicy honey. Suddenly we were all just kids again, running around chasing each other and screaming.

  “Give me a hug!” I told my brother, and before he could dodge me, I managed to catch him and give him a bear hug, smearing him with the paste. He laughed, and gripped me tighter and pressed me closer. Normally, my brother isn’t a hugger. But today he was saying a lot with this hug. We looked at each other, we squeezed again, and that was enough. No words were needed.

  I jumped in the shower and cleansed myself of the cleansing, then stepped into my Wedding Day Outfit. Neha’s fashion friend had designed an outfit that, well, can only be described as something Liberace would have worn to his wedding. A golden velvet jacket with a flourish of peacock blue. Topped with a red turban.

  “Kunal, nice prince outfit,” said my uncle. (I’m still not sure if he meant Indian prince or the artist formerly known as Prince, but either way he had a point.)

  Then I grabbed my sword. I didn’t make many suggestions for the wedding, but this was nonnegotiable: I wanted to wear a sword. Like the kings of old. This would be Indian tradition meets Lord of the Rings meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—how could you not wear a sword, right?

  I held up the sword and presented it to my best friend, Jason. I looked him in the eye and said, “This sword has been in my family for three hundred years.”

  “I understand,” he said solemnly.

  “When I’m not carrying the sword, I am trusting it to you.”

  “I am honored,” Jason said, almost bowing his head.

  “This is important.”

  He nodded, moved, and I could tell the moment meant a lot to him. We hugged.

  Little did he know that my parents had rented the sword for three dollars from the local antique shop. I grabbed my ceremonial sword and turban, marched from the house like a prince, and prepared to saddle my horse.

  Horse? Yep. It’s tradition for the groom to gallantly enter his wedding on a horse. Except we had two complications:

  1. The wedding was forty miles away.

  2. I’m scared of horses.

  The first problem was an easy enough fix. I would mount this horse (more like a pony) next to my home, heroically pose for the photos, trot the horse to the end of the block, dismount the pony, get in a car, drive forty miles, and then, two blocks from the wedding venue, once again mount the horse (okay, pony) and ride into the wedding.V

  As for my fear of horses? It was made even worse because the guy handling this horse, a fourteen-year-old kid, refused to feed the horse until he received payment. So the hungry horse was freaking the frack out. So I’m starting to freak the frack out.

  “Don’t you have any manners?!” my uncle roared at the kid, who still refused to back down.

  I stared at this horse, which is angrily stomping its hooves and bucking its head, and I visualized my tombstone: KUNAL NAYYAR, DEAD ON HIS WEDDING DAY AFTER FALL FROM HUNGRY HORSE.

  My dad came over to smooth things out, as always, and took care of the payment and the kid fed the horse.

  I don’t have fond memories of horses. Years ago I had taken one riding lesson, and the lesson ende
d when I fell off the horse. That was it. No riding ever again. Except this day. We trotted down one block, which felt like a hundred miles; somehow I didn’t fall, and mercifully I climbed down from that awful beast. Then I hopped in the car with my brother and father and continued on to the wedding venue.

  Halfway to the wedding I realized something. “I need to take a leak.”

  “Can it wait?” asked my father.

  “I’m stressed, Dad. I have no control over my bladder.”

  So the driver pulled over to the side of the road and—right there in public—I unzipped my fly and whipped it out.

  “I need to pee, too,” my father said.

  “Me, too,” said the driver.

  “Yeah, what the hell,” said my brother.

  So the four of us, side by side, pulled down our pants and took a huge group pee.

  Ahhhhhh!

  Game on.

  I had survived the horse, I had been cleansed, I had been relieved of pee, and now it was just butterflies and a marriage.

  When we approached the wedding venue, the driver pulled over and I emerged from the car to find another white horse waiting to take me inside. WTF, is it the same horse? Did the horse gallop its way over here? Is it faster than cars?VI

  Now full of adrenaline, I hopped on that pony. Flanked by my father and brother and friends, my sword at my side and feeling, indeed, like a king, I entered my wedding at last.

  At the start of the ceremony, there’s a lovely tradition, called Milni, that matches up the men from both sides of the family. The name of my oldest uncle would be called out, then the name of Neha’s oldest uncle, then the uncles would meet in the aisle, and then they would give each other flowers and a hug. Amid this embrace they would jovially try to pick the other off the ground. Not literally; this wasn’t a competition of strength, just a ritual that represented the joining of two families. Cousins were matched with cousins, brothers with brothers.