Yes, My Accent Is Real Page 9

  I’m a horrible manager of pee. I always hold it till the last moment. I’m not sure why. I’m not someone who is usually a procrastinator. But something about peeing . . .

  Kumar Ran a Car

  THE SUMMER BEFORE MY SENIOR year I decided that I was done working outdoors or collecting garbage. I wanted something indoors, preferably work you did while sitting on a chair, in a room with an air conditioner. I flipped through the student paper and saw an opening in the computer lab. Perfect. Except for the fact that I knew nothing about computers, everything about this job was appealing. I mean, I could turn one on, but I didn’t know how to code. Or how to program. Or how to troubleshoot. All I knew was that if something goes wrong, you should probably unplug the computer for thirty seconds. But I thought, Hey, I’m Indian, maybe I can just say that and they’ll trust that I know what I’m doing.

  I interviewed with this quiet guy who wore glasses, named Dominick. He was from China. His hair was perfectly parted to one side, polo buttoned all the way to the top, and he wore light brown khakis and Nike running sneakers.

  “Hi, Kunal, nice to meet you,” he said, in a soft, high-pitched voice that sounded like an adorable old lady. I could tell right away that the poor guy must have had a rough childhood.

  “I am looking for some people to be computer lab managers. What are your skills?”

  “Troubleshooting, programming, Excel, PowerPoint,” I said, dropping in every piece of jargon I could think of.

  “Mac or PC?”

  “I can do Mac, I can do PC, I can do all Cs,” I said, laughing.

  “Can you give me more specifics?”

  “You know how it is. I grew up in India. I’ve been taking apart computers my whole life. I know how the computer thinks. I know how it moves. I’m always one step ahead of it.”

  He nodded. The Indian thing really impressed him. “I like you. I’m going to hire you.”

  We shook hands. Bingo!

  “Given your advanced skill set, I’m going to give you a very special project.” He turned to the computer and opened up a software program I had never seen. “The school is trying to integrate this new voice recognition software. I want you to figure it out, dissect it, and write an entire instruction manual based on what you’ve learned.”

  “Cool, I’m on it.” Kill me now.

  So three days a week, four hours each shift, my job was to sit at the computer and become an expert in this software. Given my advanced-skills status, Dominick gave me my own computer lab—just one room with one computer—so that I wouldn’t be disturbed from my task. My job was to write a thirty-page manual for software that made utterly no sense to me.

  The program, essentially, was an early-early-early version of Siri. Except that it didn’t really work and it had all these complicated menus and options that I found insanely baffling. The first day I took the job very seriously. I spoke into the microphone and compared what I said to the words that appeared on the screen:

  “The cat drank the cow’s milk,” I said.

  On-screen: Kangaroos in Australia are part of the binary world.

  It probably didn’t help that I had an Indian accent.

  I just sat there for hours, carefully repeating sentence after sentence, watching as the monitor butchered every word. I would click menu options and the cursor would just keep blinking, confused. Maybe Raj could have solved this puzzle if he’d existed then, but it was too much for Kunal.

  I spent an entire day just getting the program to say my name correctly.

  “Kunal Nayyar.”

  Kumar. Ran. A. Car.

  Whatevs. I basically gave up on the project after a few days, and each shift I would spend fifteen minutes on voice recognition, then the rest of the afternoon in Yahoo! chat rooms. Those were big in 2000. I loved that you could explore all these subcultures and just start chatting with people anonymously. My screen name was “Tan_Skinned_Man.” I chatted with women all over the world and told them I was a professional tennis player.

  “Kunal?” Dominick asked from outside the door. I always kept the door locked.

  “One minute,” I said, alt-tabbing from the chat rooms and opening the software.

  “Why do you lock the door?”

  “You know me. I can only focus when no one’s disturbing me.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “I understand. Keep up the good work.”

  I felt a little bad for deceiving Dominick, and I also felt bad that he was the butt of many of my jokes. I’m sorry to say, I made fun of his voice a lot. He also had something of a reputation as a mean boss, and I wasn’t the only one doing imitations of him behind his back.

  A week before the project was due, I still had absolutely nothing to show for it. Just a blank Word document. “Do you mind showing me your progress?” Dominick asked.

  “It’s not perfect yet. And I only deliver perfect.”

  “No problem. I understand,” he said, leaving me alone with the cyber-tennis-chicks.

  I realized I would soon be fired. So I decided, Screw it, I’m just going to write something.

  So I just started making stuff up.

  “Once you press File, the Command Screen will open up.”

  “Use the right mouse button to initiate a conversation.”

  “Click the L button three times to indicate that you LOVE this software.” It was practically that bad.

  The week passed and it was time to face the music. I would tell Dominick that I’d been struggling, that I’d given it my damnedest, but it might be too faulty a system to properly document. Tail between my legs, I entered his office.

  “Kunal. I’m glad you came,” he said, shooting me a hard look.

  Shit. Did he find out about the Yahoo! chats?

  “I just got an email from the university. I have some troubling news.”

  Shit. My scholarships.

  Dominick took off his glasses. “The school has decided to recall the software. It’s not working properly. There are some disagreements with the licensor. So there will be no need for the manual.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Kunal, I’m so sorry. I know how hard you’ve been working.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Whatever’s best for the university.”

  “Should we take a look at what you’ve written so far?”

  “Honestly, Dominick, given this development, I’m not sure I feel comfortable with that. Maybe it’s best for me to shred all the documentation so there’s not a paper trail? What if someone sues or something?”

  “Good point, good point. Do that,” he said. “Because of your hard work and commitment to this project, I’m going to promote you to lab manager of the engineering building.”

  He gave me a raise, bumping me up to nine dollars an hour, which was damn good money at the time. I would manage the school’s flagship computer lab, the one that had just received the brand-new translucent Macs.

  And as for the fact that I’m computer illiterate? Well . . . “Your only job is to maintain the lab, make sure it’s clean, manage the technicians,” said Dominick. “If anyone has a real problem with the new Macs, there will be a specialist.”

  “Yeah, those new Macs, I’ve read up on them, they’re a strange beast,” I said.

  “Exactly. Not even I know the ins and outs.”

  Amazingly, it turns out I was a pretty competent lab manager. I was good with people, treated the employees with respect, and most important, was excellent at getting someone else to solve the real problems. My lab even got voted the most user-friendly lab in the university.

  Maybe Dominick thought of me as a protégé of sorts. One night as I sat on the stoop of my house strumming my guitar, I saw Dominick crossing the street in front of me. He wore a red polo shirt buttoned to the top, and it was a little weird seeing him outside the lab.

  “Hey, Dominick,” I called.

  He hesitated for a second, and then came and joined me on the stoop. “Play me a song, Kunal.”


  I could tell something was bothering him. He looked melancholy.

  So I played him a melancholy tune. After I was done, he said, “Beautiful. Play it one more time, please.” So I did. As I was playing, Dominick began to tear up. After I finished, he told me about how he missed his home in China, that he wished he could see his family, and that he often felt very alone.

  “Many people think I’m an angry guy,” he said. “That I fire people because I’m cruel. But the truth is that I have to run a tight ship, because my education is on the line. If I don’t have this job then I can’t pay for my studies.”

  He wiped the tears from his cheeks. And I felt guilty, because I too had made jokes and laughed at his expense. Ha ha, Dominick with the high voice and the face that looks like an owl.

  “It’s going to be okay, Dominick,” I said, awkwardly patting him on the back.

  “Thanks,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. He had opened the door and I just didn’t deliver my support.

  “I’ll see you around,” he said sheepishly as he walked away.

  “Righto,” was all I could manage.

  After he left, I found myself feeling empty. I was disappointed in myself for not lending him more of a shoulder to cry on. I could have said that I understood what it was like to assimilate. Or that I too knew what it felt like to be away from home. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that I myself had worn the ill-fitting shirts and corduroy pants, and people made fun of me behind my back. I could have said all of this. I could have been his good friend. Instead, I just said, “Righto.” And to be honest, I have no idea why.

  Sometimes we have “time machine moments” where we wish we could go back in time and fix our biggest mistakes. But sometimes we wish we could go back in time and fix the tiny ones, too.

  It drives me nuts when Microsoft Word shows me a green squiggly line under something I’ve written. It makes me want to reach through the computer screen and choke the life out of Microsoft Word. As if it were a person standing in my front yard challenging my ability to protect my family. Green squiggly. Huh, I know better than you, stupid machine corrector. I hate you. My sentences are perfection constructed, purely.

  Lollipops and Crisps

  GRACE. A PHENOMENAL ACTRESS, TRULY gifted, the belle of every ball. Big eyes, milky skin, and short-cropped black hair. She was the Audrey Hepburn of the theater department. I wanted to be her. She was, of course, hundreds and thousands of miles out of my league. She was so divine that I didn’t even consider her as a possible love interest. She was just a fantasy, a whispering dream. Also, she was a senior and I was a junior, and I didn’t exactly have the strongest track record with older women. (Exhibits A, B, and C: Ishani.) In three years Grace and I had maybe exchanged eleven words. I basically had Raj’s selective mutism.

  It started on what I will call “Eyeball Night.” We had just thrown a wrap party for our production of The Rose Tattoo, and this night, like every night in Portland, was chilly and rainy. I sat in the backyard next to the keg, on the stoop, tugging my hoodie so close to my body that I looked like an egg.

  Grace sat down next to me.

  She’s sitting next to me.

  “Kooooooonel,” she said, intentionally mispronouncing my name in a deep, cartoonish voice, almost like a female Colonel Sanders.

  HOLY SHIT SHE’S TALKING TO ME. IS THIS REAL LIFE?

  She was wearing a yellow rain jacket, white jeans, and a perfume called Egyptian Musk. (Even now that smell drives me crazy; one of the costume girls on The Big Bang Theory wears it, and it’s a problem.) I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Talk about anything, Kunal! You’re from India, that’s exotic, use it!

  Mercifully it began to drizzle. . . .

  “Wanna go inside?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  We joined the larger crowd inside and she peeled off her jacket. She was wearing a button-down flowery shirt, and since the top three buttons were undone I was treated to a hint of cleavage; even better, as every guy knows, when a woman wears an oversize shirt with a wide collar, if she leans too far to the left or too far to the right, you can catch a glimpse of her body that you are not supposed to glimpse. I definitely glimpsed.

  Grace grabbed a seat on the back of the couch—not sitting on the couch proper, and not sitting on the armrest, but actually perching high on the back of the couch, leaning her shoulders against the wall. I thought that was so goddamn cool that I stole the move from her—I still sit like that on couches. There were a bunch of drunk theater kids and the conversation turned sexual, which it often did at our parties. Someone asked loudly, “What’s the most public place you’ve ever had sex?”

  “What’s your most sensitive spot?” someone else asked.

  “Where’s the weirdest place someone’s ever licked you?” another asked.

  Grace suddenly piped up. “Someone asked to lick my eyeball.”

  “Eyeball?” I said as everyone laughed.

  “Kooooooonel,” she said. “Do you want to lick my eyeball?”

  “Lick your eyeball?” I asked, buying some time before I had to answer.

  “Do you want to lick my eyeball?” she repeated.

  “Okay, yeah, sure, I’ll lick your eyeball.”

  “You don’t sound so sure, Kooooooonel.”

  I took a breath.

  “Grace. I will lick your eyeball.”

  Are people watching? Grace enjoyed a lofty position on the social ladder in the theater hierarchy; all eyes were on her constantly. I was suddenly self-conscious.

  “Do it, Koooooonel.” She opened her eyes wide and lifted her left eyelid with her fingers, the way you do when you’re popping in your contacts.

  She had such big, beautiful hazel-brown eyes. Eyes that always had the glimmer of hope. Eyes that said to anyone she focused her gaze on, You are the only thing that matters to me in this room.

  I stared at that lovely dark left eye and realized that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “Stop being such a pussy!” she said in a gravelly voice.

  “It’s just, I mean, I have a very short, stubby tongue; it might hurt.”

  “Very well then. Be a girl. Would you let me lick your eyeball?”

  “I really wish I could remove the word eye from your question,” I quipped, surprising myself with the bold and clever retort.I

  The crowd around us seemed to fade away into darkness. They were anonymous extras in our big scene—we were in a slow-motion movie bubble; this was my Notting Hill moment; she was Julia Roberts and I was Hugh Grant. I opened my left eye as wide as I could. Huh, funny, we both picked left. She leaned in close as I caught a whiff of that soft Egyptian Musk and extended her adorable little tongue and touched the tip of my eyeball. This was our first kiss.

  My eye involuntarily closed, and she pulled back. I could tell she was a little shy, almost as if we had just made out in church. “I’m going to get some wine,” she said as she hopped off the couch.

  “I’m going to rinse out my eye.”

  Good one, Kunal.II

  As the party began to dissolve I had a quick meeting with myself. Okay, buddy, you’ve just been licked in the eye by the most beautiful girl in all the world; don’t push your luck tonight; go home to bed and leave her wanting more. So I decided to say my good-byes to everyone, hoping that I would have one more interaction with Grace before I left. I saw her standing next to a box of wine. Boxed wine, creating hangovers since 1967. I leaned in for a hug and said, “It was fun hanging out with you tonight.”

  “Same.”

  I loved the way she said that. Not “I feel the same” or even “The same.” Same.

  We parted ways and I went home to bed.

  Then, at 4 a.m., I heard a knock on the window.

  “Kooooooooooonel.”

  Transfixed in wonder, I let her in without saying a word.

  She climbed into bed with me.

  The next morning I woke up wondering if it was all a d
ream. She was still right there. I studied her face as she slept. Painting her portrait in my mind. She was breathtakingly beautiful, at peace it seemed; a steady rhythm to her breathing; gently smiling. She. Was. Perfect.

  “I was a little drunkst last night,” she said when she woke.

  Drunkst. Adorable. I was so hooked already. She liked to make up words. And she did this thing where she’d look down when she was thinking about what to say, and then, just before she was about to make a point, she’d look up at you, like in the movies. Truth is that I fell in love with her the second she asked me to lick her eyeball. I loved her even before I knew her. And since everyone else was in love with her, too, I couldn’t believe my luck that she had somehow picked me. After she left my house, I did a twenty-minute happy dance in front of the mirror. I hopped into the shower with a spring in my step. Later that day I saw Grace again, in the lobby of the theater. We hugged this time, holding on just a second longer than necessary, and I felt her squeeze my back firm enough to signal that something had happened; that something was real.

  We soon began to see more of each other; we even began holding hands in public. Without ever having “the Talk” we were becoming a couple. Grace taught me a lot of things about a lot of things. But she really taught me how to listen to music. Before Grace, for example, I never really thought that deeply about music. I mean I loved music, and I loved playing guitar and singing and such, but I never really had the bandwidth to comprehend how much good music there is in the world. I mainly listened to radio-friendly bands like Dave Matthews and Creed and Jason Mraz, but she introduced me to a darker world of Radiohead and Björk.

  “Listen to the lyrics, Kunal,” she always said. “Listen to what they’re saying.”

  As bubbly as she was, Grace always had an innate darkness to her. It may have been an actor thing. We’re all masochistic.

  “Listen to this song,” she said one day and played me Radiohead’s “True Love Waits.” It didn’t do much for me.