Yes, My Accent Is Real Read online

  But you can’t run away from the inevitable, no matter how hard you try. Good-byes happen, but so do hellos. It was time to say good-bye. I zipped up my bags and checked to make sure I had my toothbrush (an odd observation given the gravity of the situation). Dziko was sitting on the bed, his legs crossed Indian-style,VII twirling his dreadlocks.

  I looked at him, not sure what to say.

  He helped me with my bag and gave me a hug. “I love you, man.”

  I told him I loved him. We hugged again, clapped each other on the back, and that was that.

  I called my mother that night from the airport and said that Dziko was leaving, and before I could even get the words out the tears began to stream down my face. I broke down and wept. I felt empty. I missed him already.

  “Why are you crying, Kunal?”

  She didn’t understand. And I didn’t have the words to explain it to her. My relationship with Dziko was in some ways more intimate than anything I had experienced with women at that point. There wasn’t the sex to get in the way. We shared the deepest and most sensitive memories of our pasts. No one knew me like he did. And now he was gone.

  I remained Dziko’s biggest fan. Two years later, I was at a theater party and Cal Poly was playing Duke in the conference finals; if they won they would earn a bid to March Madness. The TV was on mute and I watched it by myself, ignoring the rest of the party, cheering every time Dziko touched the ball. The game was close and with just seconds left on the clock, Cal Poly was down by three.

  “Give D the ball! Give him the ball!” I screamed at the mute TV.

  Dziko posted up and they did give him the ball. For some reason Duke doubled him (honestly, this didn’t make much sense) and D made the right play, passing the ball to his wide-open teammate for a three. The ball went up in a rainbow, the buzzer sounded, up, up, up . . . and clank. It just missed the target. Cal Poly lost.

  After college he tried to play in Germany, but developed chronic foot problems and never quite made it to the European League. But the truth is, I don’t think D ever loved basketball. He cared more for playing guitar, conversation, wine, flowers, and sitting on the beach. He loved the outdoors and good people. Sometimes I’ll think about that smile, and it’ll brighten up my day.

  We stayed in touch, of course, and we still remain very close friends. Years after we both graduated I would travel to Paris with him for his sister’s wedding, and finally I met the family I had heard so much about. I remember doing shots with his ninety-year-old grandmother, Babushka, who carried around a flask of vodka. I met his father, who had been a political refugee. And his Russian mother, who worked as an accountant at Euro Disney. I learnt about their struggles and their triumphs and the eventual reunion of the entire family in Paris after so many lost years. And on the night of his sister’s wedding, on a boat floating down the Seine, we stared at the twinkling dark water as an elderly pianist from New Orleans plucked out blues notes and belted,

  When the night has gone, and the land is dark,

  And the moon is the only light we’ll see.

  “Stand by Me.” In French, no less.

  * * *

  I. Or, what we just call “sitting.”

  II. I haven’t mentioned that one of my dreams was to play in the NBA. I was religious about Michael Jordan, and my American cousins would send me tapes of the Chicago Bulls’ games. If badminton hadn’t panned out, I was going to try my hand at the Indian Basketball League.

  III. See letters H and I in “My A-to-Z Guide for Getting Nookie in New Delhi During High School,” page 17.

  IV. I’m not sure I got that reference right.

  V. That’s what happens when you’re a rookie.

  VI. Right. Her name is not Arisu.

  VII. Again, just sitting.

  The Art of the Head Bobble

  LET’S TAKE A SECOND AND talk about the indian head bobble. Yes, I am going to go there. Because yes, it’s true that Indians bobble their heads all the time. That’s not a racist thing to say because a) I am Indian, and b) bobbling our heads is a very important and sophisticated form of communication. When you bobble your head you’re not really saying yes, and you’re not really saying no. So much is communicated and so much is not communicated by the bobble. It could mean:

  I’m full.

  I’m hungry.

  I’m confused.

  I’m happy.

  I understand.

  Talk to me.

  Stop talking.

  Never talk to me again.

  So how does one decipher the bobble? The truth is, you can’t. There aren’t any bobble variations or inflections, and this one universal head bobble works greatly to our advantage. Imagine you’re trying to buy something from me and you say, “Ten rupees.”

  I bobble my head.

  “Twenty rupees.”

  I bobble my head.

  “Thirty rupees?”

  And so on. I ripped you off for twenty rupees just by bobbling my head. Greatest invention ever. I wonder if the bobble was born from when we were oppressed by the British. Maybe it was just the safest way to avoid getting beaten.

  Subconsciously, I suppose I do the bobble all the time, but I really unleash it when I want to use my Indianness in my favor. For example, if I see a lovely woman and want to stand out from the crowd, I will stand in her vicinity and bobble the shit out of my head and use a thicker accent. She’ll be charmed by my exoticness, she’ll want to know where I’m from, we’ll chat, and she’ll think, This guy’s harmless, he’s Indian! And his head bobble is so cute.

  Garbage, Man

  LIKE EVERY COLLEGE STUDENT, I needed a job for some extra cash. Problem was, I didn’t have any “job qualifications,” because, to be honest, I had never worked a day in my life. So the summer after my freshman year, I decided to take a job in the university’s housekeeping department (because the job description exactly matched my level of expertise). My job was to clean toilets, empty out the Dumpsters, scrub the floors, move furniture, set up chairs for events, and basically do everything else that no one else in the university wanted to do.

  Aaaaaaand I loved it. I swear. I took pride in my ability to stack and unstack chairs. Not to brag, guys, but I might actually be the fastest chair stacker this side of the equator. I figured out a superbly efficient way of folding the chair’s legs in one fluid motion; it must have been muscle memory from all my years of badminton.

  My boss, Luis, looked a bit like the villain from God of War. Or like the genie in Aladdin if he was Satan and Medusa’s love child. He had a very black and pointed goatee, a sharp, hooked nose, a long, skinny tongue that he loved to show off, and a scar down the middle of his chest from triple bypass open-heart surgery. He claimed to have slept with thousands of women and seemed determined to tell us about each and every one. He also would do this weird tongue thing, where he would show us the strength of his tongue by picking up M&Ms off the table without his teeth or lips. It was the most disgusting and yet most fascinating thing I had ever seen. He also drove a red Corvette, which automatically made him very, very cool. There’s cool, and then there’s Luis cool.

  Every morning Luis would give me a new objective for the day, such as: “A professor just died. Go clean out his office.” Not even twenty-four hours after this poor soul had lost his life, I was in his office, packing up his possessions, clearing out all the books and the plants and the memories, and somehow trying to squeeze his couch and table out the office door. It was my first lesson in physics, really; just because you can get something into the room doesn’t mean you can get it out. I spent four hours cleaning that office, and another four trying to squeeze the furniture out the door. Maybe this is what it feels like to give birth.

  Another morning Luis would say, “Empty out the women’s dormitory Dumpster!” So I hopped into my little truck and drove to the girls’ dorm, and scraped the Dumpster walls of gunk. I don’t need to tell you what I found in the Dumpster, right? Let’s just say that I discovered a new
appreciation for people who tie their garbage bags up tightly, because there is nothing worse than actually having to touch, see, and smell what people are throwing away. So tie up your garbage bags tightly, please!

  One member of my daily cohort was this guy whose name was Khrish. He always smelled like fish. He secretly wanted to be a Nepalese pop star, and would always sing us these terrible songs about his love for mountains. Everyone teased poor Khrish about his singing, but he didn’t mind. Because he didn’t understand that they were laughing at him.

  “Cover your ears, Khrish is at it again!” “Run for shelter, here comes the Khrish train!”

  Khrish would laugh and keep going.

  “STOP THE GODDAMN SINGING!”

  And Khrish would raise his voice and belt the tune as loudly as he could. On top of his vocal challenges—that is, hitting a single note on key—Khrish faced an uphill battle, given that he wanted to be a Nepalese pop star who sings Nepalese songs about the Himalayas . . . in Portland.

  I loved those guys. You probably imagine the housekeeping department as a group of people who clean up other people’s messes for money and don’t really want to be there, but in my experience that wasn’t true. We all had fun together. We took pride in our work. It didn’t feel like a lowly job or a bad job; it just felt like a job. And it also taught me a lesson or two about cultural sensitivities, and how race relations can be a two-way street. One day I was joking around with a coworker named Andy, a chubby ex-marine with a soft demeanor. Andy lit up when I told him my mother was coming to Portland for a visit.

  “You bringing her to the company picnic?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t know if she’ll get along with all the white trash,” I said.

  Andy didn’t say much later that afternoon. Or the next few days. At the time I didn’t really understand the full connotations behind “white trash,” and I didn’t know it was derogatory. I suppose, in hindsight, a phrase that uses the word trash can’t really be seen as a compliment, but I thought I was just making a joke. A few days later Andy still wasn’t talking to me, so I asked him if something was wrong.

  “Kunal, don’t you know that I’m white trash, too? Why would you call us that?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I didn’t really know what it meant.” And that was the truth. I sincerely didn’t know that white trash was a horrible term. I explained this in great detail to Andy, and he realized that I didn’t have any negative feelings about him, or about our coworkers, or about white people in general, and soon we were back to being chums again. But it reminded me that words can be hurtful.

  Lunch was every day’s highlight. We had an hour break and everyone shared their food on a big communal table, usually while laughing at the sheer volume of hygiene products we’d found in the morning’s trash; or Khrish’s latest song; or details from Cool Luis’s disgusting orgies. Someone always brought fish, others pasta, some brought chicken salad; I always brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because it was the only thing I knew how to make.

  As the summer drew to a close, on one of my last days on the job, I had to drive the mini-truck to the computer lab, where I was told to pick up a desk. Easy enough. I drove the truck up a long ramp, parked it on the landing in the front of the building, and went inside to help the guys lift the desk.

  Then I heard screaming.

  I ran outside.

  The mini-truck was rolling backward. Down the ramp. With no one in it.

  At the bottom of this ramp is the main university lawn, the kind of picnic area that they show in every college brochure where students are reading and playing Frisbee and sunbathing. The truck careened straight toward this lawn, and before I could make a move, the truck hit the bottom of the ramp, toppled upside down in the picnic area, and flipped on its belly.

  Oh man.

  In my hurry to grab the desk I had forgotten to set the emergency brake, and the truck simply glided back down the ramp.

  Out of nowhere—somehow within seconds—a man came sprinting toward the scene, barking into a walkie-talkie. A short, stocky guy. Looked like a God of War villain. It was Luis. My boss.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Luis asked.

  “No.”

  “Any damage?”

  No damage. Luis immediately took command of the scene. He set the place in order and right there I saw why my boss was the boss.

  In that moment, of course, I was worried about the truck and anyone on the lawn who might be hurt, but later, when the guilt began to creep into the pit of my stomach, I worried this would cause problems with the university and/or jeopardize my scholarship. What if this incident cost me everything that my family had invested? Life doesn’t just fuck you over on a Saturday night when you’re blackout drunk; it can just as easily fuck you over on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re going to lift a desk.

  But Luis took the fall. He wouldn’t tell the department which one of his guys had made the mistake and, as a result, he was suspended for two weeks without pay.

  “That’s not right,” I said. “It should be my punishment.”

  Luis wouldn’t listen to me.

  I felt awful. “Please. It’s my fault. Fire me. I’ll fire myself. I’m fired.” I still feel awful. I pleaded for him to let me take the blame, but no matter what I said, he wouldn’t budge. He insisted on being my fall guy.

  I suppose we all had each other’s backs. We all screwed around and we told dirty jokes and we laughed at each other’s expense, and maybe we all came from different walks of life and places of origin—immigrants, marines, Nepal, Texas, India—but at the end of the day it didn’t matter. At the end of the day we stuck together. We had an unspoken bond; together we were safe.

  Many years later, my wife and I endowed a scholarship at the University of Portland. For the inauguration of the fund I came to the school auditorium to give a little speech to the students. There were about three hundred people in the room.

  In the back of the auditorium, someone raised his hand. An older guy.

  “You won’t remember me, but we worked together once,” the man said.

  It was Khrish.

  We ran toward each other with open arms. It felt like the movies. We hugged in the center of the stage as the crowd erupted in applause.

  Later that night we met for beers and swapped life stories. Nothing much had changed in his life. Except for one thing.

  He had a new song.

  And you know what?

  It wasn’t bad. It was actually, dare I say it, decent.

  And this time no one laughed.

  Holiday Traditions Part 2: Dussehra

  Dussehra (du-SHAR-uh): n. annual Hindu festival taking place in the fall, celebrating the victory of good over evil.

  DUSSEHRA IS MY FAVORITE INDIAN festival because, when I was a kid, at night our family would walk to the nearest public park, where a crowd of a thousand people would watch, spellbound, the burning of a one-hundred-foot, ten-headed demon. The burning of this demon commemorates the victory of King Rama over the demon lord Ravana. Since this occurs near the beginning of the harvest season, some also believe that the religious rituals help to reactivate the vigor and fertility of the soil. Which is great and all. But did I mention the demon was huge and had ten heads and we got to watch it go up in flames? Kick. Ass.

  Dussehra also has a carnival where you wander from stall to stall, buy snacks (not beef, obviously), and waste your rupees on games like shooting water balloons and such. One year when I was about eleven years old, I was asked to volunteer at one of these stalls.

  These are the rules of the exciting game at my stall: for two rupees, you throw a penny in a bucket full of water, and then you have five seconds to dip your hand in the bucket and try to find your penny. Wooo-hooooo, right?! Who wouldn’t want to play this game? My job was to advertise this game to the passersby.

  “Try the water bucket!” I yelled. “Get your hands wet! Win a prize!”

  When people ignored me I screame
d louder. “THROW A PENNY! WATER BUCKET! GET YOUR HANDS WET!”

  At the end of the night, the stall owner was pleased with the results—and she even gave me twenty rupees. But I’d yelled so much that I’d lost my voice and couldn’t even cheer when they burned the demon.

  “Here, gargle this,” my mother said, handing me a glass of warm water with salt when I got home.

  My voice instantly returned. To this day, whenever I lose my voice during a recording session or a play, I still use the remedy of gargling warm water and salt, and I think of pennies and water buckets and ten-headed demons.

  Dussehra (du-SHAR-uh): n. 1. annual Hindu festival taking place in the fall, celebrating the victory of good over evil. 2. Game of Thrones (Real Life Edition). Aka Best. Night. Ever.

  The Forbidden Kiss

  HER NAME WAS JOYCELL HAYDEN. Lovely name. The kind of name belonging to a girl who deserved to be kissed by a prince. And that prince was me. At least, that’s the way I would cast the movie. She had pixie-cut blond hair, a round, golden face, and a bounce in her step. We were in Psychology 101 together. She was always first to raise her hand to answer questions and she never had any sweat stains under her arms. I could smell her from seven rows away, strawberries and cream with a touch of black pepper. And the sound of her voice was a sweet, soft melody. It was like she was always half speaking and half singing.

  I didn’t know how to go about kissing her. It wasn’t as easy as running up to her and planting one on her lips, or asking her for a kiss over coffee, or sneak-smooching her while going for her cheek. This kiss had to be planned meticulously. I had a few ideas running around in my head—playing guitar for her in the moonlight, sitting outdoors on a cold night so she’d snuggle next to me for warmth, sharing a milk shake with one straw. Problem was, she barely even knew my name. We had said hello a few times entering or leaving class but had never really even had a conversation.