Yes, My Accent Is Real Page 5

  Dziko and Me

  I SHOWED UP TO COLLEGE a few days earlier than most of my classmates. There was an additional orientation specifically for international students before the rest of the local students showed up, so the dorms were almost completely empty. This was 1999, my freshman year at the University of Portland, and I had just arrived from India. I really had no idea what to expect of college, except what I had seen in the movie American Pie. You know, the movie where everyone’s getting laid? Yeah, this was not like that. The resident assistant, a friendly chap with bright blue eyes called Kaiden (great name), showed me to my room, gave me some paperwork to fill out, closed the door, and left.

  I stared at the bunk beds and the barren walls and the gray carpet and suddenly realized I was absolutely alone. It was finally sinking in that I was eight thousand miles away from home. That I didn’t know anyone. I looked at the empty room and realized that I didn’t even know what to do for the next ten minutes—should I unpack, brush my teeth, wash my face, take a quick nap, fill out Kaiden’s forms?

  Aimless, I headed downstairs to explore the campus. I found Kaiden talking to an enormous black guy sitting on the floor with his legs crossed Indian-style.I He looked like a giant kid as he sat there twirling his giant dreadlocks. Even sitting down, he appeared to be three times my size.

  “This is Dziko; he’s from France,” Kaiden told me.

  Dziko smiled. One of those smiles like a baby, the ones that force you to smile along, too, because it comes from a place of pure happiness. This was Dziko’s smile. Everything about him was serene.

  Then he stood up.

  Dziko rose and kept rising, until it seemed like he would block out the sun. I was awestruck and made the dumb joke that I’m sure every human being had told him his entire life: “Wow, you’re so tall. Do you play basketball?”

  “No,” he mumbled in a gentle French accent. Sarcasm? I thought. Then he smiled and nodded his head. He was making a joke. He, in fact, did play basketball, and at six foot ten with the dreadlocks—he would be our school’s starting power forward. He was 250 pounds of pure, ripped muscle. A giant with the face of an innocent child.

  “This is your new roommate, Kunal,” said Kaiden.

  Roommate? Did I hear that correctly? In that tiny dorm room? Do I get top bunk or bottom? I was both excited and terrified, and probably a little jet-lagged. Kaiden pointed us in the direction of the international students’ orientation and we strolled off together, him in shorts and flip-flops, me in my long-sleeve shirt and corduroy pants, and I could tell right away that we were going to become friends. The rapport was instant. Or at least I thought so, because I basically spent the next several hours just asking him questions about basketball.II He patiently answered in his French accent—I later learned he spoke five languages—and even though he was a man of few words, his calm demeanor and kind smile told me, This is okay; he’s also far away from home, you need each other, you’ve found a friend, this new life can work.

  Our dorm room smelled like the East. Dziko was a devout Muslim and said his prayers every morning, so between my incense and his herbs and tonics, there was this heavy dose of India and East Africa with a subtle hint of beeswax (for his dreads, I think). We spent a lot of time in that little room. He didn’t drink or party and at the time neither did I, so we’d come home from class and basically watch movies, drink Coca-Cola, and scarf down boxes of Pringles. We played guitar together. We scanned the campus looking for pretty girls, spending far more time looking for them than talking to them.

  Dziko was an eater. At the cafeteria he loaded up two trays of food and a third just for drinks. He only had two hands, which meant that I also had to carry two trays—one tray with my little lunch, and one tray full of Dziko’s drinks—water, milk, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, and orange juice as a chaser. (Dziko unintentionally helped me learn how to be a waiter that year.) And in the time it took me to eat my bowl of pasta, he somehow devoured chicken, ribs, and a corned beef sandwich. Seemingly all in one bite. Ten minutes later he’d dash off for six hours of basketball practice, and to this day it still astonishes me that he did all that eating and working out without once vomiting.

  We became notorious around campus as a sort of odd couple. Dziko was more hippie than cool—I mean “cool” in the traditional sense of frat-boy cool—but since he played basketball he had instant street cred. And he could play. Duke University once played us in the Rose Garden in Portland. I had a front-row seat to cheer him on, watching as he ripped down an offensive rebound and then dunked on future NBA player Shane Battier. (I later tracked down the video and framed the dunk, giving him the photo as a birthday present.) When we walked around he slapped high fives with other athletes that I would befriend, too. If someone needed to find me they asked Dziko, and if someone needed to find Dziko, well . . . they could just, you know, see him.

  Dziko helped me deal with some of the culture shocks associated with being foreign. Even if most of the adjustments were subtle. Take cooking. After years of having all the mango milk shakes and butter chicken I could eat prepared for me at home, I wasn’t exactly what you would call an Iron Chef, or a chef at all. One night I was studying in the dorm with some guys from my marketing class, and one of them said, “Dude, I’m starving. Let’s make some ramen.”

  I had a vague knowledge of ramen, as we eat those noodles in India, the Maggi brand. But I had no idea how they were made. Is it even possible to cook them yourself? Can that be done? Like in a microwave? Or do we need cooking oil and stuff? I followed the guys to the community kitchen and watched as they pulled out saucepans and filled them with water. I had no frigging clue what to do.

  “Kunal?”

  “Just give me a sec.”

  I stared at the stove and marveled that my friends knew how to operate such a complicated apparatus.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, unable to tell them that I didn’t know how to boil water, and not even sure that they were in fact boiling water. That was a rare white lie, as I was so thoroughly earnest and determined to play things by the book. For example, during freshman orientation, they gave us the standard lecture about how students were not allowed to have guns or carry weapons or build bombs or whatever. Obvious stuff. But instead of just nodding like the rest of the crowd I thought, No weapons. Wait. WAIT. As a gift, my brother had given me this beautiful hand-carved pocketknife.

  I raised my hand. “What about a knife?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a really big knife. I just wanted to declare it to all of you.”

  The other students looked at me, maybe a little alarmed, although this was pre-9/11 so maybe not so much. They would, however, be alarmed if they knew about the sheets on my bed. Since I was so accustomed to someone taking care of the laundry back home, I had this misunderstanding that somehow, perhaps while I was at class, our bedsheets were being laundered for us at least once a week. Apparently this wasn’t the case. I slept in the same sheets for eleven months without them ever being washed.

  Living in the dorm was weird for me because I was very uncomfortable using the public showers. In India, you rarely see exposed skin unless you’re lucky enough to see all the skin, if you know what I mean. We usually keep our bodies covered. So I would enter the showers fully clothed, head to toe, while the other guys walked around completely naked, balls and all, and I would derobe inside the shower. I even timed my trips to the bathroom at odd hours just to avoid the awkwardness; I was that weird kid from India who took showers at three in the morning.

  The biggest awkwardness, of course, came in my communications with the opposite sex. In the very beginning, the first several months, Dziko and I didn’t flirt with girls at all. He was a devout Muslim and took pains to orient himself away from sin. And me? Well, I was basically useless. I mean, I remember at one party with Dziko I literally asked a girl, “Do you want to do a slow dance with me?” I was still twelve years old when it came to knowing how to talk to women.


  Yet somehow, I lived in the illusion that every girl I saw was in love with me. All it took was for someone to glance in my general vicinity. I was accustomed to the slower-paced dating game in New Delhi, where a courtship takes weeks or months and you do the A-to-Zs of going on movie dates, hoping to hold hands in the popcorn.III In America? Girls would often hug me and walk arm in arm with me and stuff, and then when I’d try to kiss them they’d say, “Ew, Kunal, you’re like my brother!”

  So, yes, freshman year, Dziko and I missed out on the scenes of Animal House–like parties and fratty debauchery, but the truth is we weren’t all that sad about it. We made up for it in other ways. He taught me French pop songs like the hit “Je t’aime,” and I memorized all the lyrics in French even though I didn’t know what they meant. For our school’s “International Night” we threw together a makeshift band—we even had a guy who played the bongos—and did a group number of the song “La Bamba.” Dziko strummed his guitar and wore an African hat—smiling his baby smile—and I wore a bandana with the Indian flag on it. The entire crowd of twelve ate it up and cheered us on, and for one night we were rock stars.

  I came home to the dorm one night to find Dziko in bed.

  “D, why are you asleep? It’s only nine thirty.”

  He looked like he was stoned, but I knew that wasn’t the case because Dziko didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol.

  “I’m drunk,” Dziko said, clearly pleased with himself.

  “You’re drunk?”

  “No more of this religion stuff.” He laughed. “I’m done.”

  Okay, then. Just like that. Everything changed. Dziko and I began a new chapter of our college life. To this day I don’t know exactly why he gave up religion, but I do know that when he changed his mind, suddenly, it was on. Since Dziko gave himself permission to drink alcohol, now I, too, could push my boundaries. He was my compass. It was time to fully throw ourselves into the wild, wild West.IV

  But . . . how? We didn’t know much about drinking or partying. The only parties we knew about were thrown by Dziko’s athlete friends, so imagine all those tall, buff, Adonis-looking jocks and these beautiful, hot girls in miniskirts . . . and me. All these cool people were listening to hip-hop and doing keg stands, and I’d show up in my oversize baggy T-shirt and long hair. I looked like a cross between a hippie and a slum dweller who somehow spoke impeccable English. I just didn’t fit in.

  Through some trial and error, I realized that regular college parties weren’t really for me. I didn’t want to get drunk there. So instead I took advantage of school holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break, when I knew that almost no one would be on campus. In those quiet weeks Dziko and I would throw our own little versions of a dorm party, where there were just a half dozen people sitting around drinking Bacardi Breezers, and with any luck there would be a girl I could make out with.

  Sometimes Dziko and I just went to the all-night coffee shop, playing chess, strumming guitars, swapping life stories until the early morning hours. He rarely spoke about his family or background, but as the months rolled by I learned that childhood had been a traumatic and difficult time for him. Maybe that’s what that ever-present smile was hiding. His father was a human rights activist in Mauritania, North Africa, and one day, when Dziko was ten, his father didn’t come home. He had been extradited to Paris, where there was a warrant for his arrest, and they didn’t see him again for two years. Dziko grew up in the shadow of persecution, imprisonment, or worse every day.

  But I felt safe with Dziko. When I was with this gentle giant, no one could touch me. Years later, when we were in Paris together, we were getting some late-night street food and a few thuggy-looking kids surrounded me with an aggressive look in their eyes. Next thing I knew Dziko was standing over them and calmly saying something to them in French. Within three seconds they were gone. He really was my rock.

  He was also, briefly, my bedmate. Let me explain. In the summer between our freshman and sophomore years, the two of us lived in a house with five girls from the track team. He was friendly with them because of the sports thing and had heard they were looking for a roommate, or in this case, roommates. It was a six-bedroom house and each girl had her own room, so Dziko and I shared a room to save money. And the only place to sleep in the room was on a futon.

  Soon Dziko was kissing girls. This shouldn’t have surprised me, as when you’re six ten with .0000001 percent body fat, girls tend to notice you. Dziko had met these two inseparable Japanese girls, Yasu and Arisu, and I realized that he had leveled up in the video game of life.

  “So you’re having sex with Arisu?”

  He just smiled his baby smile.

  “What’s it like?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I mean, come on, she’s like five foot three.”

  He brushed it off. “Now you and Yasu—you and her, nice.”

  “What do you mean ‘nice’? You want me to get with her? I don’t even know her.”

  “She’ll have sex with you,” Dziko said.

  “What? Stop screwing with me.”

  “She’ll do it.”

  “What if I try something and she says no?”

  “She won’t. She told Arisu she thinks you’re cute.”

  So Dziko concocted this evil plan to get me laid: We’d invite the two of them over to the house, and then he would depart with Arisu, leaving me alone with Yasu. I was so nervous. Not only was I a virgin; we didn’t even speak the same language. I did a condom check, worried that I would put it on inside out.

  The big night comes and D gives me a fist bump and a wink, and then takes off with Arisu. Yasu was very much cool with what was going on. Without much discussion we headed to the futon, switched off the lights, and proceeded to do what college students do. And a second time. And a third time.V

  The next morning I woke up and looked Yasu in the eye. She looked so peaceful. I said, “Good morning, Arisu.”VI

  “WHAT?” she said.

  “I said, ‘Good morning, Yasu.’ ”

  “You said ‘Arisu’!”

  “No no no, I’m just still asleep, I’m mumbling. I said ‘Yasu.’ ”

  For some reason she got really mad. Women. Believe it or not, Yasu and I didn’t make it as a couple, and come to think of it, neither did Arisu and Dziko. Arisu became super-psycho, showing up everywhere we went; she even started popping out of bushes to spook us. I would go with Dziko to basketball practice and watch him shoot free throws—ten in a row, swish . . . thirty in a row, swish . . . and when he had swished forty-nine consecutive free throws, just before fifty, I would wave and yell out to no one, “Hey, what’s up, Arisu!”

  Clank.

  Dziko once helped me become the next Mark Zuckerberg. I had a marketing assignment for sales class, and I had to start a new business that would actually make some cash. My idea was to come up with a matchmaking service that would let people find dates for the university dance. I called the service “Cupid.”

  For the very competitive price of two dollars, people would fill out a questionnaire and submit a photo, and I would use a mathematical algorithm to match the guys and the girls. (The methodology behind my algorithm: I just picked a girl’s questionnaire and stapled it to a guy’s questionnaire, more or less at random.) But how do you find the customers? Who would pay two dollars for a match? Who would trust Cupid? This was still several years before Facebook, so Dziko and I literally had to go door-to-door in the girls’ dorm. We headed over just after 7 p.m., figuring they would have all finished dinner but not yet be asleep or out doing whatever girls did on a school night.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked each girl as she answered the door. If she said yes, I didn’t waste any time, just said thank you and knocked on the next door. Dziko didn’t say a word. He was loving every moment of this.

  In a sense, this was a precursor of what the online dating business would later become—a means of making money from the gathering of in
formation from people based on unlikely promises of an intimate connection. We visited 679 girls’ rooms, and I’m proud to say a full twenty-four women signed up for Cupid. Matching them to twenty-four guys was the easy part; I just walked down my hall. I made seventy-three dollars in profit and received a B. I know the math doesn’t make sense, but I had to pay Dziko 25 percent because he was a junior partner in my venture. (The winning company was a German bratwurst stand that raked in thousands of dollars a week; the dean had to shut it down because it siphoned off too much revenue from the school cafeteria.)

  Obviously, Cupid was just ahead of its time.

  At the end of our sophomore year our basketball coach was let go. I didn’t think much about this at the time, but then one day at lunch Dziko said, “Kunal, the coach is gone.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think I want to follow him.”

  “Okay . . . I mean. Wait. What does that mean?”

  “I want to play basketball at another school.”

  “Um, that’s cool,” I said, masking my anxiety. “I’ll support whatever you want to do.”

  The next few days were a blur. We caught wind of other players leaving and transferring to other colleges, and soon Dziko, too, was receiving offers from other schools. It wasn’t sinking in. Can you really transfer as a junior? Dziko wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t leave. Why would he leave?

  The next day he came into our room, elated, looking as happy as I had ever seen him. “I got transferred! I’m going to Cal Poly!”

  “That’s awesome,” I lied.

  “I’m going to live near the beach, Kunal!”

  My heart dropped.

  It happened so quickly. The semester was winding down and we were packing up the room and peeling off posters and memories from the wall. I was about to head back to India for the summer.

  We only had a few days left together, and we both knew it, and we both must have thought about it, but neither of us said much of anything. We didn’t know how to say good-bye. We did our usual things. We didn’t talk about the future or the past. We watched a few movies and played some chess.