by Aasif Mandvi
BORN AGAIN
IT WAS HER HAIR THAT I FIRST NOTICED. A giant mound of brown curly hair surrounding a small, thin, alabaster-skinned face, punctuated by penetrating hazel eyes. Flirtatious one moment and aloof the next, they had a paralyzing effect on me the first time I saw them as I walked into the administration office on the second floor of the School of Theater building where I was getting my undergraduate degree, and where she was the brand-new Tuesday and Friday receptionist. Based on her clothes and her poise and the way she smelled, I imagined, in my limited experience with women, that she was older than me and the bubblegum-scented girls who ran around the sun-drenched University of South Florida campus.
I didn’t know what she was studying, but it was clear that she was not one of us. She was not walking around with a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics nonchalantly protruding from her back pocket, she didn’t smell of cigarettes and coffee, she didn’t wear sweatpants, and proudly not wash her hair because it was what the “character” required. She didn’t over-enunciate or feel the need to pick up a guitar and start playing “Stairway to Heaven” during free periods, and she had probably never felt the need to narrate the progress of her bowel movements with improvised Shakespearean verse to the person in the next stall over: Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a . . . poo. In other words she was not a student of The Theater. If she had any of her own obsessions, they were quietly hidden behind a rather unassuming demeanor. She possessed the sophistication of a grown woman, with a kind of self-assuredness that I had rarely encountered before.
I decided I had to know her better. I also knew that she was far out of my league. I say “out of my league” implying that there were women who were actually in my league. The truth is I was eighteen years old and what most people would call a late bloomer. My father often drove this point home by reminding me of the fact that even in birth I had arrived two weeks past my due date, as if seeking an apology from me because his joy at having a firstborn son had been forever tarnished by my tardiness. To make matters worse, my initial lateness seemed to throw off everything in my life by several years. I was late potty-training, crawling, walking, and learning to ride a bicycle; and I was especially late when it came to girls. Of course, when I say girls, I mean the art of talking with girls and when I say talking with girls I mean flirting with girls, and when I say flirting with girls I mean knowing the difference between actually flirting versus buying coffee beans every week just so you can talk to the girl who works at the coffee counter in the mall, even though you don’t drink coffee that much or know how to operate a coffee grinder. But you now have so many bags of coffee beans in the trunk of your car that your friends think you might be an over-caffeinated kleptomaniac.
Anyway, by the time I got to college, unlike my bohemian theater counterparts, who I assumed had had so much sex already that they found the very talk of it passé, I was still very much a virgin. In fact, I had never even really properly kissed a girl.
Being sent by my parents to a British all-boys boarding school at the tender age of thirteen hadn’t helped in this regard, nor had the fact that I grew up in a South-Asian Muslim household with very conservative views of relations between the sexes. For many years as a child, back in England, I thought I might be going to hell for looking at my father’s secret stash of Penthouse magazines. His magazines were the second place I had ever seen a naked female. The first was in elementary school back in England when I sheepishly touched Katie Ashcroft’s vagina. This was an awkward and altogether unimpressive experience, especially considering that Katie hadn’t exactly singled me out for this peer-pressure-fueled favor.
It was common knowledge that Katie regularly invited boys into the school bathroom and lifted up her skirt to show off her prepubescent vagina for reasons only she understood. The boys would line up outside the girls’ bathroom and go in one at a time, which, surprisingly, never inspired an inquiry from the adults in charge. With her tinted glasses, pageboy haircut, and school uniform, Katie was normally a quiet, somewhat mousy girl who resembled Velma from the Scooby-Doo cartoons. But in that bathroom setting, as the dim afternoon light flooded in over the toilet stalls, she seemed to gain the sexual confidence of a Playboy Playmate.
“Are you ready?” she asked me.
I froze.
“Are you ready?” she said again, nodding at me with increasing impatience.
I nodded back politely.
“Well, take your hands out of your pockets then,” she commanded.
I did as I was told although I didn’t want her to see that they were moist and clenched.
“Don’t be nervous,” she said as she lifted up her plaid skirt and pulled down her underwear.
There it was. There was Katie Ashcroft’s vagina. Unimpressive, I thought. That’s it? Seriously? This is why every boy in school is lined up outside the girl’s bathroom? To touch a crease? Was I missing something here? It looked so ordinary.
I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps that my senses would go into overdrive at the sight of her vagina, that I would suddenly be overcome with uncontrollable stirrings and urges that I had never experienced before. The truth was that I was underwhelmed and disappointed.
“Do you want to touch it?” she asked after I had stared expressionlessly for a few moments. Her voice now had a hint of vulnerability. Perhaps she’d noticed my utter lack of enthusiasm.
“Umm, okay,” I said. I reached out and touched it in the same manner that I had recently touched a wounded baby sparrow that had fallen out of our neighbors’ tree on top of our garage: with a level of reservation, frightened that the creature might suddenly decide to attack me. Katie’s vagina did not attack me. Unlike the wounded bird that had twitched and shivered, it made no movement at all. It seemed lifeless and unaware that it was even being touched.
Katie’s sad vagina constituted my entire experience of physical intimacy with girls until college. Armed with that disturbing memory and a trunk load of stale coffee beans, I ventured forth into the world of seducing Diane.
That was her name. I had overheard someone calling her that and made a mental note. I was afraid to actually use her name for fear that she might think I was stalking her since we had never been formally introduced. I found reasons to make copies whenever Diane was working, and eventually I was able to get her attention and even elicit an occasional smile with such classic pickup lines as “Excuse me, this copier is not working,” or “Hi, sorry to bother you, but how do you change the size of the paper on this?” There was also my all-time favorite, the wildly enthusiastic “Hello!” I had many variations of this to draw on. Sometimes I went with the high-pitched “Helluuu!” On other occasions I shifted to a lower register, offering a deep-throated “Hellowwww,” at times tinging it with a British accent, “Ello, ello, ello.” Now and then, for the fun of it, I would just mouth the word “yellow” without making a sound.
All of this displayed a level of perseverance that she apparently found irresistible because after several months of strategic seduction, during which I copied the same scene from Anthony and Cleopatra twenty-three separate times, employed forty-eight differently accented hellos, twelve different goodbyes, and one attempt at physical comedy which I never repeated, where I pretended to bang my head into the door as I opened it, she asked me out on a date. This could not have worked out better. It had become clear that I needed women to make the first move for one reason: I was terrified of them.
My first exposure to women after the onset of puberty was in boarding school, where we had a populace of two hundred boys and six girls. Girls were only admitted starting in the lower sixth form, at around sixteen years old, no doubt to teach a bunch of juvenile barbarians who had spent the better part of their school life freely expressing their teenage male aggression to morph into proper English gentlemen before being thrust out into the real world. The six young women in the school quickly realized that they had become the subject of every boy’s
sexual fantasies, and whether they liked it or not, they wielded an unnatural amount of power. In order to survive and to protect themselves from the onslaught of burgeoning male hormones, they cultivated a necessary detachment, aloofness, and even contempt. Females therefore to me were not earthly creatures. They were more like extraordinarily beautiful princesses who roamed the halls with shiny hair, dressed in brightly colored sweaters and who could, with a mere flutter of an eyelash or an askance look, grant you permission to live, or a reason to die. You can imagine how flattered I was therefore that, years later, just such a princess had asked me to accompany her to something, even though in this case that something happened to be church.
Most guys might have been turned off by this, but not me. The Methodist boarding school my Muslim parents had chosen to send me to required religious studies (i.e., Bible studies) plus chapel every Sunday. I was quite familiar with church. In fact, since there is no separation of church and state in the UK, even secular British schools would begin the day with a form of Christian worship. I was actually more familiar with Christianity than I was with Islam, the faith I was born into. Even today, I probably know more about the Gospel according to Mark than I do about any sura in the Koran. This is not a complaint. My mother and father, as good immigrants are wont to do, scrimped and saved to send me to one of the best educational institutions in the north of England. However it does seem to me there must have been a tacit agreement between my parents and the highly-accredited institution that in exchange for the prestigious opportunity and the education the school was providing, my parents would turn their heads while their son was being introduced to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
It didn’t matter at all to the school which religion you had been raised in. There were students who came not only from Christian, but also from Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and even—God forbid—Roman Catholic families. But every Sunday we would all open our hymnbooks, raise our voices, and sing with a truly assimilated sense of apathy. All of this is to say that when Diane invited me to join her for church service, I wasn’t the least bit put off; rather, I praised Jesus like a missionary intoxicated with the Holy Spirit.
Diane told me that Wednesday nights were youth nights at her church. As I stood next to the copier pretending to review my schedule, she went on to tell me that the entire congregation would be filled with young Christians in their teens and twenties who were all on fire for Jesus.
“That’s great. I think I can make it,” I said, trying not to nod too eagerly. She could have said Wednesday nights are when we all drink cat blood and sacrifice a small child and I would have responded the same way.
“You’ll get to meet Brian, our youth minister. He’s so charismatic! And after the sermon there might be a band. It’s so much fun. You should meet me there.”
“I will,” I said. “I will. I definitely, absolutely will.”
The church was a large modern building located on the north side of Tampa, and the first thing I noticed when I went inside, besides all the white faces, was the energy. It bore no resemblance to the quaint hymn-mumbling Methodist chapel I had attended back in my English boarding school days. The air was electric and everyone seemed charged with a purpose. I located Diane and walked over to sit next to her. She seemed transformed, unlike I had ever seen her before. At the theater building she always seemed somewhat reserved, mysterious, detached. Here she was smiling from ear to ear. She seemed softer and more approachable.
“I’m so glad you came,” she whispered into my ear as I sat down.
For the first time I saw no sign of her usual dismissive eye roll, as if to say, “You are such a clown, Aasif.” To my astonishment, she was looking at me with genuine fondness. I had come to the place where Diane could finally reveal her obsession, her passion, her secret: this church full of neatly-pressed white people. She was sharing something she loved with me.
Going all the way to back to my boarding school days, while I had to acknowledge that Christianity had many wonderful things about it—its inherent message of peace and forgiveness is difficult to argue with—the whole concept of Jesus being the Son of God had somehow never sat well with me. Perhaps it was because I grew up in a culture where Christianity was seen as the faith of the Caucasian man. Since Jesus the Son of God was always depicted as a white Anglo-Saxon, God himself must also be a white Anglo-Saxon. Although it was never something that my parents specifically taught me, growing up navigating between South Asian and Western cultures had made me acutely aware that we were very different from white Anglo-Saxons. Most of my parent’s friends were South Asian—descendants of those who had been colonized and subjugated two generations earlier—and it was hard not to be aware of the contempt they had for white Anglo-Saxon culture when listening to conversations around the dinner table.
I clearly remember learning very early on that while Anglo-Saxons were running around in caves wearing animal skins, our ancestors were living in palaces, wearing silk, and inventing the alphabet. Anglo-Saxons drank too much and discarded their elderly when they became a burden, they were cold and emotionless despite their outward smiles, and they were racist and fearful at their core. They would eat anything, were unhygienic, and lacked a sense of culture or tradition. However, the thing to be wariest of was their insistence that God had a Son who was also a white Anglo-Saxon and if you didn’t worship him, you were someone to be pitied, prayed for, and/or conquered. Sitting in this North Tampa Church of Jesus Christ next to Diane I knew therefore that I was a very unlikely candidate for conversion to Christianity. But the power of Christ works in mysterious ways, and I could not disregard the converting power of Diane’s hypnotic hazel eyes.
During the next few months, I spent as much time with her as she’d let me. Together we went to church gatherings and Bible group meetings and socialized with friends of hers who were youth ministers and Christian camp counselors. I even found myself singing along to lyrics by bands like Petra and Stryper at the top of my lungs after she introduced me to Christian rock. This is a style of music that retains the throbbing bass line and screaming vibrato of traditional rock music but replaces the lyrics about sex, drugs, and rebelliousness with lyrics about salvation and morality. It was an odd yet effective form of marketing, a truly American approach to take the devil’s music and rebrand it with Christ. Christian rock was an oxymoron, I thought to myself, an absurd notion, much like Christian pornography, but that didn’t stop me. I was speaking in tongues to myself, convincing myself that I could successfully feign an interest in a churchgoing life, maybe even genuinely adopt it as my own belief system as long as Diane kept smiling at me . . . and my parents didn’t find out.
Both Diane and I prayed earnestly to the cross, though while Diane’s hung high on the church wall in front of us, mine hung on a silver chain between her perfectly shaped breasts. From what I could tell, however, except for occasionally ogling the scantily-clad underwear models on the cover of International Male catalog, which she claimed was under her coffee table because her roommate got it, she seemed to have no interest in exploring physical pleasures. No matter how much time I spent with her, she seemed only interested in a spiritual salvation.
As I got to know her better I discovered that Diane had turned to Jesus after an overindulgent adolescence. She had spent her teens doing drugs, dating bikers, and getting arrested, while I had spent mine doing school plays, watching movies, and going to the mall. It became clear that I was trying to win Diane for the exact opposite reason she was trying to win me.
It was as if I was finally ready to appreciate Katie Ashcroft’s vagina—but with the wrong girl. Diane kept her vagina quite well hidden from me, as she did her breasts, her arms, her legs, and even the nape of her neck. In fact it was soon clear that Diane’s entire physical body was off-limits. What she was really looking for from me was a friend in Christ. The only fantasy she was hoping to fulfill was to lead another soul to the Kingdom of Heaven. There were times I became so desperate, I would flip thro
ugh back issues of International Male, feigning interest in the latest boxer brief designs just so that she would look over and I could possibly catch a glint of lust flash across her eyes like an accidentally exposed nipple.
After a couple of months of yearning and hoping, I managed to become friends with all of Diane’s Christian friends. I was even able to impress them with my ability to discuss such issues as the controversy over whether, as per the Bible’s Latin translation, Jesus had actually walked on water or merely by the side of the water, or whether the young man hiding in the bushes in the garden of Gethsemane during Jesus’s arrest by the Roman soldiers, mentioned only in the Gospel according to Mark for some reason, is actually Mark writing about himself. Truth be told, I was merely parroting the few things I had managed to absorb from the curriculum of my religious studies class at boarding school. I was surprised I had retained anything at all since I actually spent most of the class carving images of naked ladies into the side of my wooden school desk. This was becoming a pattern, it seemed, for once again, here I was, discussing fellowship and abstinence all afternoon with Diane and her friends while simultaneously fantasizing about a naked woman’s body. Christianity, it seems, makes me horny.
Perhaps in some mysterious way, however, Jesus was winning me over, for the idea of trying to win the heart and body of an alabaster-skinned Christian beauty by faking being a Christian had started to feel distinctly unchristian. This need to seduce her was either an unconscious pathology inherited from my subjugated ancestors or Diane was indeed the most beautifully and sexually inspiring creature I had ever met. Perhaps both things were true. Perhaps both things would always be confused. Perhaps it is a legacy of imperialism and slavery that the descendants of the conquered will forever need to possess the crusader’s daughter.