by Aasif Mandvi
“You realize this is grounds for termination?” asked the supervisor, trying to sound as authoritative as he could.
“Understood,” said my father, still smiling as he collected his things.
“This is not a laughing matter, Hakim. The caller could place an official complaint. He might even switch to another provider. We might have lost a customer.”
My father stood up and shook his hand.
“Thank you for this wonderful opportunity,” he said.
“We are very sorry that we have to let you go,” Barry replied. “I mean, unfortunately due to this incident I will be unable to give you a positive recommendation.”
“I won’t need one,” said my father. “I am going into retirement.”
“Oh, what will you do?”
“I’m going to grow chili peppers,” said my father. “I’m going to grow hundreds and hundreds of chili peppers. The hottest fucking chili peppers anyone has ever tasted.”
Then he picked up his belongings, walked through the exit doors, and disappeared into the humid Florida night.
LOVE, INDIAN-AMERICAN STYLE
THE MOST ROMANTIC THING my parents ever did during my childhood involved urine. I was not there when it actually happened. I was in rehearsal for a play at school, but the story has been told to me many times and has been recounted at many family gatherings over the years. It is the stuff of Mandviwala legend.
Like many South-Asian second-generation children my sister Shabana and I grew up seeing little or no physical affection between my parents. Unlike the parents of my Western friends, who seemed incredibly comfortable with outward displays of affection, pecking each other on the lips or calling each other “Sweetie” and “Honey” and “Darling,” my parents never did any of that. If my father started a sentence with “Darling” or “Sweetie” it meant he was attempting to mitigate the fact that the content of the sentence was probably about to make my mother very angry. There were rarely impromptu flowers, there were never date nights, and if my father ever told my mother she looked beautiful, or she ever told him he looked handsome, it was done in the privacy of their bedroom or they were saying it for the benefit of their Caucasian friends. They were raised in a culture that valued collective duty over individual desire, in which marriage and family were not a romantic, individualistic venture. Perhaps this is why divorce is generally so infrequent in traditional South Asian homes. The purpose of marriage is not to make you happy or fulfilled—for that there is work, religion, friends, even Bollywood—the purpose is to create family.
There was love between my parents, but the devotion came from commitment, not romance, and love was shown through actions and sacrifice. They each had specific roles. My mother took care of the home and the children while knowing she could run my father’s business better than he could. My father worked and brought home the money while knowing he could cook better than she could. They behaved like partners but rarely like friends. Except for on this particular evening.
Having grown up in a family that spent the majority of its time outside of the Indian subcontinent—we only visited our relatives back home about once every decade—my sister and I did not know very much about our homeland and culture. The only parts of Indian history that we knew about were: Partition, the British Raj, and the story of the Taj Mahal. We knew the names, like every other Indian kid growing up in the West, of those Indians who would be immortalized on India’s version of Mount Rushmore: Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Amitabh Bachan. However, the Indian historical figure we were most fascinated with was not that famous at all: Morarji Desai. In history books he is recorded as the former Indian prime minister who served for a mere two years from 1977 to 1979. But in our minds he loomed large, not for his political career, but because of a strange, and some might consider a dangerous, practice. He drank his own urine. Not once, by accident, but daily as part of a medicinal regimen that he swore by.
My sister and I first heard about Desai and his urine drinking from one of my uncles when we were visiting our cousins in Bahrain back when Desai was in office. The image of this old man drinking his own urine had completely captured our imagination. It was absurd and disgusting, though perhaps the strangest thing was that, when we told our parents, they were not more appalled.
“Don’t you think it’s disgusting, mom?” I asked.
“Well, beta, many people in India do those kind of things,” she replied. “Who is to say?”
“The man has grown to be very old,” said my father, “so who the hell am I to judge him? To each his own, I suppose.”
Urine-drinking was one of those things that, as an Indian kid, you hope your friends never find out about your culture—bathing in the Ganges and cows in the middle of the highway are already difficult enough to explain to your western friends. So it was soon put aside as a topic of conversation, but my sister and I never forgot.
Many years after Desai was out of office, and after we had moved to America, my sister sat watching television one afternoon in our modest two-bedroom home. The bathroom door was to the right, just visible in her peripheral vision. She heard the toilet flush and soon after my father exited the bathroom with a glass of liquid in his hands. Clear yellow liquid. She looked at my father, puzzled, as he stood watching the television casually drinking his beverage.
“What are you drinking?” she asked.
My father looked at her for a moment, then glanced at the liquid and sighed.
“Do you really want to know?” he replied.
“Yes,” said my sister, becoming ever more curious. She was beginning to suspect something very troubling.
My father sighed again and then uttered the word.
“Urine.”
My sister leapt to her feet.
“What? Are you serious?” she squealed.
“Just calm down,” he said. “It’s not that big a deal, Shab.”
“Not a big deal? Not a big deal? You are drinking your own urine! That is disgusting.”
Questions came to her that she didn’t dare ask. How long had he been drinking his own urine? How often had he planted a huge kiss on her cheek, telling her he loved her? Just last week she had shared half his ice cream. Not to mention the time that she had eaten his leftovers from the doggy bag of Chinese noodles. She began to itch uncontrollably.
“Mom!” she screamed.
Our mom ran into the living room to see what the commotion was.
“What’s wrong, what happened?”
“Look what Dad is doing. Can you believe it?”
Mom looked at the glass of yellow liquid, looked at Dad, and said, “Oh, Hakim, are you drinking your urine again?”
My sister’s jaw dropped to the ground. How long had this been going on?! As she looked on with horror, Mom reached over and took the glass.
“Well, Hakim, don’t keep it all to yourself, let me have some,” she said, and proceeded to take a big swallow. My sister started to dry heave.
“It’s a little spicy,” she said as she handed the glass back to Dad, “but it’s actually not that bad.”
Shabana could not believe what she was witnessing.
“Have you lost your mind?” she screamed. “What are you guys doing? That is disgusting!”
Our parents just looked at each other, puzzled.
“What’s wrong, beta?” Dad asked. “People in India have been doing this for years. Remember Morarji Desai? He lived to almost one hundred! I mean, if it was good enough for him, then it’s good enough for us.”
My sister began to back out of the room, unable to process what she was witnessing, but our mother grabbed her gently by the arm.
“Come on, beta take a sip,” she said. “We are family. It’s fine. And besides, you don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings. Are you really going to tell your father that his daughter thinks she is too good to drink his urine?”
My sister was speechless, unable to believe this was happening. Her own parents had turned
into monsters right in front of her eyes.
“Now stop being difficult,” mom insisted. “Just try one small sip, it’s good for you.”
“Aaaaaaghh,” Shabana screamed, as they wrestled her onto the couch.
My mom held her down as my father brought the glass up to her mouth. Shabana shook her head frantically from side to side to escape the putrid liquid. Finally a few drops fell onto her lips. Bubbles of carbonation fizzed and popped into her nose and she smelled the familiar smell of Mello Yello soda.
“You guys are jerks!” she screamed. “I hate you!”
But it didn’t matter. Our parents were overtaken with peals of laughter, both of them more proud of this practical joke/one-act play than they were of anything they had ever done together, including raising two children and emigrating. It was a moment of complete abandon. They turned to each other and did what we had almost never seen them do. They kissed each other. On the mouth.
My sister walked out of the room and went to her bedroom and slammed the door.
At this point, my mother has always claimed that my father turned to her and said, “Well done, darling. I never knew you could be so devious.”
My father has always claimed that my mother winked at him and said, “You are a very bad man. Hiding your own bottle of soda in the bathroom from the kids.”
My sister claims that while she sat sulking in her bedroom, she heard my father usher my mother into the bathroom and lock the door. There was the fizz of carbonation and they giggled and whispered like two teenagers raiding a cheap motel mini bar.
All I know is that when I got home later that evening, my parents were nowhere to be found. However, a note on the fridge read, “We went to bed early. There’s a plate of food for you in the oven and some nice cold urine in the fridge. Love, Mom and Dad.”
Part III
WELCOME HOME: THE EMPTY SPACE
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON AS I STOOD peeking into the front window of my childhood home on Frensham Drive on the north side of Bradford. I thought I might say hello to the current owners, but since no one was home, I fleetingly wondered if saying “I used to live here” would be a sufficient excuse when the neighbors reported the presence of a potential burglar.
Though it was too dark to discern much more than silhouettes of furniture inside, my memory filled the rooms with the images from my past.
My mother, a young Indian wife standing in the kitchen with a rolling pin, slapping dough in her powdery hands making roti for that night’s dinner. Her children, myself and my sister, watching Top of the Pops5 on a brand new color television set. Their father and her husband wearily returning home from standing behind the counter of his corner shop on Great Horton Road all day. A few years later he would return from a grocery store in Shipley and then later still, after having given up on those businesses, he would return weary from a long day as a door to door salesman driving his van around West Yorkshire selling plastic and paper bags to South Asian shopkeepers.
She would put a bowl of daal, some chicken with roti and rice on the table, and he would eat it. Often, as if having been starved for sustenance, he ate so fast that the food would lodge in his chest and he would inevitably motion frantically for one of his kids to get up from—TV—run to—kitchen—fetch—glass—water—so that he could breathe again. After everyone was fed and the house was clean, she would lay down with Tiger Balm smeared across her forehead, simultaneously attempting to battle and ignore the untreated hypertension that would lead to kidney disease and dialysis later in life.
I spent the entire morning walking around the city of my youth, visiting the haunts of my childhood. I had come home to this northern England mill town after two decades of living in America and ventured forth on a pilgrimage to touch again the people and places that had shaped me. As an adult, they had dissolved into gauzy memories often leaving me with a feeling of being untethered and disconnected from my past. In returning I hoped that perhaps I would be able to, in some way, reclaim a part of me that always felt missing, although what that was, I didn’t really know.
I stood in the parking lot of my old school, trying and failing to generate a feeling of familiarity and warmth about the swings and slides I had played on as a boy. A teacher approached me, perhaps wondering about a grown man loitering outside a school, and asked me if I needed some help. I told him I used to be a student, expecting a delighted grin or slap on the back. But he just shrugged and walked off muttering, “Great, you and a thousand other people.”
I stood outside my dad’s old corner shop which was now a Halal butcher, taking pictures. The bearded blood-covered butcher came out holding a meat cleaver and asked suspiciously why I was taking pictures of him. I explained that this shop used to be named after me: Asif’s News Agency. Instead of offering me chai, he seemed annoyed, but then mustered a smile and curtly said, “You have five minutes to look around, sorry, we are very busy, there’s a big wedding tomorrow.”
I walked up to the reservoir where my friends and I would go sledding in the winter, but the shimmering wonderland I recalled from my childhood was just a dirty and overgrown piece of municipal property looking out over factories and council estates. And now, here I was clearly trespassing by staring into someone else’s windows and standing in someone else’s front yard desperately looking for something that I could not even name, but felt bereft at not having found.
As I looked up and down the street I remembered how excited they had been about this small, unremarkable, semi-detached, red brick bungalow that sat unremarkably in the middle of an equally unremarkable subdivision. A lawn and a driveway, a fire place and an attic—it was certainly less cramped and much nicer than the tenement flat above his newspaper shop in a Pakistani ghetto. It was the American style upwardly mobile dream . . . in England.
She had grown up the feisty daughter of a well-to-do merchant family in India, her younger days filled with the finest clothes, jewelry, and lifestyle that could be afforded a young Dawoodi Bohra6 Muslim girl.
She would often talk about the culture shock she experienced after emigrating, coming from a sheltered and chaste world where manners and propriety were everything and having to work in a television factory with young working class English girls who threw out racial slurs, smoked, cursed, drank, and talked openly about sex.
Perhaps had she been born the opposite gender or into a different culture, at a different time, she might have joined the men in her family and become a business mogul herself, for she certainly had the acumen. But forget CEO, or even flight attendant. She had had the audacity to secretly date a man whom her father deemed unsuitable, so dutiful wife was the only option for such a rebellious spirit. She was therefore soon married off to a more appropriate candidate.
For his part, he was a handsome, creative country boy, who loved painting and singing. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, artist, or musician; professions that would have been more suited to his tinkering and introspective nature. He was even accepted into medical school but was unable to go because his family couldn’t afford it. Taking the lead from his wife’s family, who saw success in business as the only source of masculine pride, he left his job in textiles at the local university, (which is the reason they ended up in Bradford in the first place) and became a small business owner. Embarking on a profession for which he had no passion or aptitude.
Their respective disillusionment meant that for many years thereafter she saw him as weak and he saw her as impossible to please. It was only in later years when she became ill and he was her caretaker, that their dysfunctional love story would blossom, as she would finally be willing to acknowledge his strength and he her sadness.
They struggled financially and money was always an issue. She dealt with it by being contemptuous but resourceful. She attempted to make her family’s lower middle class life seem far more affluent, in part to keep up with her other Indian friends who were mostly doctors and . . . actually they were all doctors. But mostly she did this to maintain
a personal aesthetic. There was nothing that she couldn’t recreate better than what was on sale at Marks and Spencer’s. Consequently this little house—from curtains to tablecloths, comforters to tea cozies, pillow covers, and lampshades—had been filled with her inspired and original creations.
He dealt with the frustration of failing at a profession he never desired and his wife’s evident disappointment in him by being rageful and sometimes violent. Looking down the driveway I could still see him barreling out of the front door, chasing his son with belt in hand. Often she would run after them, leaving their five-year-old daughter crying in the house and try to stop him. As they would scream and fight on the back lawn for all the neighbors to hear she would grab his arm and scratch his face knowing all the time that it was not their son, but each other that they wanted to beat.
In that same backyard a few years earlier they had plucked out the hundred rose bushes beautifully planted by the previous owner. He claiming that he didn’t leave India to tend to flowers all day and she claiming that her children needed a lawn upon which to play. So out came the fragrant blooming bushes that were soon replaced with square sods of grass, laid slapdash. They were left untended and were soon overgrown, resembling dozens of dead chia pets of various sizes.
It was here that their children were raised, playing, running and jumping on this broken, misaligned, transplanted earth. It was also on this sodding earth that their son discovered his penchant for imaginative wanderings and performing. Escaping the pall of disappointment and the din of anger that hung over their family, it was in this backyard where the world of imaginary wizards and wars, islands and pirates made up the seeds that sprouted into the desire to become a professional actor.
Upon hearing this from his son, he reacted by being passively unsupportive, mostly by letting her deal with their son’s pestering entreaties and questions on how one could become an actor. At least he wasn’t forbidding it, he thought to himself, the way his own father had done when he told him he wanted to go to art school. She was reminded of how she swore to always allow her children to have the adventures in life that she had been denied. To never deny them their passions, although she had naively thought that meant permitting them to go on school trips to Scotland or learning the piano.