Yes, My Accent Is Real

by Kunal Nayyar

  And then, just like in the movies, an opportunity presented itself. It was during Thanksgiving week. I obviously stayed at the school; since we only had a week off, it would have been madness to fly back to India. Plus I thought it would be a good time to soak up classic American familial culture. Secretly, though, I hoped there would be a plethora of lonely beauties looking for companionship. One in particular. The university had planned a turkey dinner for all the students who couldn’t leave campus, and one day when I was “casually” hovering in her presence, I’d overheard her telling a classmate she wasn’t going home for Thanksgiving. Joycell was going to having Thanksgiving dinner at the university? How convenient! We were all to be seated at this really long table. I had been standing close enough (but not too close) to figure out where Joycell would sit. The plan was to fake-pull-out the chair she was going to sit in, pretend I was going to sit in it, and then offer her the seat, pretending to be both chivalrous and adorable at the same time.

  When I saw her heading toward her seat I stealthily slid into position. But before I could reach the chair, I tripped over my feet, and instead of pulling the chair out, I had to use it to break my fall. This, however, worked to my advantage. She saw me stumble a bit and it made her giggle. She even offered me a seat next to her, which I gratefully accepted, of course. Apparently tripping and falling is funny in any culture. Finally we were sitting next to each other. Before the meal we had to say a prayer.

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

  We all held hands; her hands were clammy, but I didn’t care. I would have held her hands even if they were soaked in pee. I was amazed at the smell of rosemary emanating from her hair. Actually, everything smelled like rosemary. When the food came I made some joke about how turkey tasted like rotting chicken, which made everyone around me laugh, though I’m not sure they understood English. Truth is, I really just don’t like the taste of turkey. Other than Thanksgiving or on a sandwich, does anyone really eat turkey? Over dinner Joycell told me that she couldn’t make it home to Utah because of a lack of funds.

  “Things happen for a reason,” I said, trying to be supportive and secretly making my move. “If you want company, do you wanna hang out after dinner?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation at all in her reply.

  “Your place or mine?” I joked, testing the waters.

  She laughed, but I’m not sure she understood the connotation. I suggested we watch a movie, Ghost—genius!—and she invited me to watch it in her room. Everything was falling into place. I was so excited I almost couldn’t sit still. When the apple pie came I ate it so fast that I almost blacked out from the sugar rush. I didn’t even wait for everyone to finish before I was saying the quickest good-byes of my life. I would have run to my room if I hadn’t felt like barfing from all the turkey and anxiety playing nookie in my stomach. I picked up the DVD, applied some deodorant to my armpits, and skipped back to her dorm.

  Her room smelled like cinnamon and sugar. Like a candle you get on sale at Target. There were family photographs everywhere. She had a very large family, it seemed. It was dimly lit and cozy. Strangely quiet.

  “Thanks for inviting me over,” I said, then pointed at the candle. “Indians don’t usually like cinnamon because we are not exposed to the scent much. But this candle smells divine.” I was lying. It smelled awful to me. We both were nervous. We put the movie in and as the opening credits rolled she settled on the floor, with her back resting against the foot of her bed. I sat above her on the edge of the bed. I was trying to play it cool. Didn’t want to come off too desperate.

  She asked me to join her on the floor. I asked for a cushion; I was skinny and was familiar with butt-bruise syndrome. I settled in next to her. For the second time that night we were sitting side by side.

  During the movie our elbows were touching. Her knees were facing me, which I once read in Cosmopolitan was a good sign. Anytime you’re at a bar and a girl has her knees facing toward you, she wants you. Problem was, we sat there, stuck like that the whole long-ass movie, and no one made a move. Not when Patrick Swayze lifted the coin with his finger, scraping it against the wall. Not when Whoopi Goldberg first made contact with the ghost; not even during the clay-spinning scene when all the mud and clay ends up on Demi Moore’s naked body. Nothing happened. But her knees were pointing toward me! Stupid article.

  The movie was coming to an end, and it seemed, too, that my window of kissy-kissy time was quickly closing. I had to move to Plan B.

  “Do you want to listen to the soundtrack?” Conveniently I had the movie soundtrack CD in my pocket. (Genius!) I played “Unchained Melody” and told her it was my favorite song of all time. Truth is, that song traumatized me. I did love it once. I loved it so much that I sang it in a high school singing competition. Problem was, the high part was too high for me, so when it came I dropped an entire octave and sang it in a deep voice. The students laughed and laughed. To my credit I did come in third place . . . out of three contestants. I told Joycell none of this. I made up some stuff about how it got me through tough times. I kept using phrases like silky vocals and smooth lyrics, hoping word association would work on softening her up. When the high part came I sang along in a deep, off-key baritone. This made her giggle. She had a lovely giggle. Cute, shy, and sexy all at once.

  I saw an opening. “Would you like to do a slow dance?” I asked. It wasn’t even correct English. She obliged. I took her hand and pulled her in close. I could feel her heart throbbing; sweat had collected on her upper lip. This was the moment. I made the move. I leaned in and kissed her lips softly. She hesitated at first, but then she slowly kissed me back. Our lips were locked. She was a good kisser. Aggressive when there was a lull, passive when the moment overheated. I trailed my fingers down her lower back. She tensed up, I apologized, and I told her I would take it slow. I went back to kissing her lips. I kissed her cheek, making my way to her earlobes. She wasn’t resisting. I nibbled on the bottom of her ear. She let out a little moan. I continued to her neck and suddenly she tensed up again and pulled away. She sat down on the bed, her cheeks flushed; she turned her face away and began to cry.

  “Was it that bad?” I said as a dumb joke. This time she didn’t giggle. I kept apologizing. She kept crying. I stood there, not knowing whether to sit, or stand, or leave. And then she said, and I’ll never forget it till my dying day, “But you’re a Hindu.”

  Now, a few thoughts crossed my mind. Was she asking me? Was she telling me? Did she not know? Was she doing research for a paper? Did my mouth taste like cumin? Confused, I muttered, “Yes, yes, I am, I am a Hindu.” Almost reaffirming to myself that I hadn’t changed religion.

  “But I’m a Mormon,” she said.

  I didn’t really know what that was, but I guessed it was a religion. Either way it was clear she didn’t dig the interreligion saliva swap-fest that just occurred.

  “My parents would not be happy with me,” she said. “They warned me about becoming this kind of girl.”

  “But nothing happened; we just kissed,” I said.

  “I know, but you’re not even Christian.”

  Picture this: A Mormon girl sitting on the edge of her bed. Silent. Tears flowing gently down her cheeks. A Hindu boy standing aimless in the middle of the room. Erect. A forbidden kiss transpired only moments before. “Unchained Melody” in the background. On repeat. It was like a scene from a very funny movie. Only it was real. And I was living it. See, it wasn’t my awkwardness, or my looks, or my accent, or the color of my skin that stopped Joycell from wanting me. It was my religion. All those other attributes are malleable; you can break them down, remold them, and change them forever. Even skin color can be altered. But the one thing you cannot change is your past, your cultural background, where you come from. There we were, sweaty, yearning, fumbling, longing to connect, and the only thing that got in the way was the one thing I could not do anything about
. But seriously, what had she been thinking this whole time? That I was a Jehovah’s Witness?

  After a silence as long as my penis, and almost as hard, I decided to leave. I thanked her for her hospitality and bent down to retrieve my DVD. I pressed eject and went to grab it, but the stupid-ass DVD would not come out. It was stuck. I kept tugging at it, trying to pry it from the death grip of the Mormon DVD player. But it wouldn’t give. So I just left it there, half-stuck. I even left my CD in her stereo. It wasn’t a graceful exit, but I was out of there nonetheless.

  On the walk home I was hurting. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong. I felt upset that I might have caused someone pain. I felt sheepish about my behavior with Joycell. I’d preyed on her loneliness, used it to my advantage. But the truth is, I was lonely, too. I was also away from family and friends and food I liked, and the warmth of my childhood bed. I was in a foreign country and I was trying so damn hard to fit in.

  See, it was never really about getting a kiss; it was always about sharing a moment of intimacy with another person. To be touched and looked at and held like a living, breathing human being. We all want that. We all need that.

  I often wonder what became of Joycell; I wonder if she’s happily married to a nice Jewish guy and living in Brooklyn. I wonder if she ever thinks of that Thanksgiving we spent together. Most of all, I wonder if when she reads this she’s going to sue me. And what became of my DVD? Crumpled and destroyed, probably. Fragments of it disintegrated into the earth. Forever sealed in the soil with a forbidden kiss on its lips. I imagine my CD still spinning, “Unchained Melody” forever stuck on repeat.

  Chaos Theory

  GROWING UP IN NEW DELHI was noisy and chaotic. This is part of India’s charm. Driving through New Delhi is like driving in a video game, because you’re not only weaving through cars but also bicycles, cows, beggars, rickshaws, horses, and an occasional elephant. I love it. Honk honk honk! Everyone smashes on their horns nonstop, which creates something of a melody. The toot of a horn, much like the head bobble, can mean so many different things. We’ve created an entire language with how we toot our horn. You honk when you’re overtaking someone, you honk when you’re ten cars deep at a red light, you honk when you’re feeling lonely. In India if you don’t hear a horn, the only explanation is that the entire city has been blown up by a nuclear bomb. Or that you’ve lost your hearing.

  There is constant noise in Delhi. At 5:30 a.m. the praying in the mosques starts, and they play this over loudspeakers so you can hear it in every corner of every neighborhood. The guy who collects the garbage comes by on a rickshaw, yelling. The guy who delivers the bread is shouting at us to come outside and pick it up. And since every house is stacked on top of each other, sometimes literally, we hear every neighbor’s argument.

  But you know what? I love the music of this noise. Back in LA, life is too quiet for me, even though people in smaller American towns think it’s crazy to call LA “quiet.” It is, though. And I miss the noise.

  Judgment Day in Boise

  “I’VE WANTED TO BE AN actor since I was a little boy.” That’s what some people say. Or maybe, “I’ve always had a calling.” Or better yet, “I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes.” Not me. No calling, no lifelong dream, no feeling in my toes, no inkling whatsoever that this was what I wanted to do. I had enrolled in the University of Portland’s business program, focusing on marketing, because I was always fascinated with commercials, and thought maybe someday I’d make them. I wanted to be like those cool marketing executives at Nike who have handlebar mustaches and exhale smoke from the sides of their mouths.

  Toward the end of my freshman year, on an evening stroll around the campus I decided to explore the theater building. In the lobby I saw all the head shots of the actors who were starring in the current play. So many pretty girls. Underneath the pictures a particular sign grabbed my attention. It read: “Auditions for Ring Around the Moon, Saturday, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.” I looked at the sign. I looked at the head shots. I looked back at the sign. I thought to myself, Wait a minute; if I want to meet these pretty girls with the pretty head shots, then I should audition for this play! And they will all inevitably become my friends and subsequently my girlfriends!

  I went to the audition without a clue about what I was getting into. A crowd of theater students—older, cooler, theater-ier—huddled together in what, even then, I recognized as a clique.

  “Hop up on the stage!” cried the head of the theater department, Dr. Ed Bowen, who also happened to be directing this play. (And no, he wasn’t that kind of doctor, and yes he did have a PhD. And yes, you can get a doctorate in theater.)

  “Hop up onstage!” he bellowed again.

  I climbed up with the rest of the students.

  “You’re in the jungle! You’re a monkey! Act like a monkey!”

  So I flailed my arms and acted like a monkey.

  “Now you’re a dog!”

  “You’re a snake!”

  After watching our movements for a few minutes, he sat us down on the stage and gave us the spiel about the play, explaining the parts that we could audition for. Ring Around the Moon is a 1950s British comedy of errors by Christopher Fry. I decided I would audition for the part of the elderly British butler. I was born in England and I could pull off a British accent pretty decently. (I don’t have a British accent. I can just do one. All Indians can; we are taught the “Queen’s English” in school.) And as for being an old man? No problemo. For my old-man audition I basically crouched down low and hunched my shoulders, fake limping with an imaginary cane. I looked like a 117-year-old grandpa who had Parkinson’s on top of his leprosy. It was not my most finely honed or nuanced portrayal. Especially since the character, as written, was only in his sixties, with just a bit of stiffness to his walk. I played him like British Yoda.

  I must have done something right, though, because the next day I showed up at the theater to look at the casting list, and lo and behold, there was my name. Must have been the accent.

  When I saw my name right there on the list next to the character of Joshua the Butler, I got incredibly excited. Not because I thought I had “found my calling” or anything, but because this meant, basically, that the other students would be forced to interact with me, and I would have more than one friend! They had no choice! I daydreamed about spending rehearsals and evenings with these artsy, exotic, theatrical people talking about music and poetry and right-brain things like that.

  It’s funny: if you look at the stereotypical hierarchy of high school and college social groups, theater kids are almost always viewed as the “weirdos” or maybe the “alternative kids”; they’re certainly not viewed as being as weird as, say, the debate team or chess club kids, but they’re still not really considered cool. But to me? This was Mecca. They were so confident and funny and different, and they dressed in things like Converse sneakers, torn jeans, and thick black-rimmed glasses before glasses were a thing. They all smoked cigarettes and had this blasé attitude about the world. These were the cool kids, in my book, and I wanted to join their gang.

  Let me just be honest and say that when it came to my acting, no one was calling me “the natural.” I was pretty terrible. But at the time I didn’t know it. There was a comfort, almost, in my ignorance of how badly I overacted. During rehearsals I remember thinking, Oh my God, everyone here is such a good actor, and the only way I knew to match their intensity was to BE LOUDER. They must have all wondered, Why is Kunal always shouting?

  The more “famous” actors in the school (mind you, the entire theater program consisted of only forty kids) got all the lead parts and would walk away with all the glory. During rehearsals I would watch these other actors from afar. I made friends with a few of the lost souls like me. But what I really wanted was to be accepted by the guy and the girl playing the leads. I wanted so badly to be liked by them. I would stand in earshot of the famous ones and try to join the conversation every time they said something I understood. Th
e truth is I wasn’t great at understanding sarcasm, which seemed to be the root of all their jokes, so I just ended up laughing constantly at things I had no idea about. And because I was not standing directly in front of them or in the circle of people surrounding them, I now realize I just looked like a guy who enjoyed laughing at walls.

  One day I asked one of these famous actors for some acting advice. “Is it funnier if I say this line in a high pitch like a girl? Or a low baritone pitch like a macho dude?”

  The two of us were standing apart from the group, in private.

  “Kunal,” he said, louder than he needed to, “it’s not how you say it; it’s about the motivation of what you’re saying. Ugh.” He spoke so loud that the other actors turned around to listen. “It’s not about saying the line high, or saying the line low. It’s about what you really mean in this moment. Stop trying so hard to sell the joke.” He stormed off with an air of indignation.

  I felt naked and on display. It seemed like the entire room was judging me, mocking me, and making me the butt of their sarcastic jokes. What he said made sense, actually, and it wasn’t bad advice, but ironically it wasn’t what he said; it’s how he said it. He could have said, Hey, Kunal, I know you’re trying really hard, but here’s something you could think about.

  You know that feeling when you really look up to someone, and you muster up the courage to ask them what, in your mind, is a great question, and you play that moment in your head over and over again, and you fantasize about how that person is going to think you’re so smart for asking this great question, and how you’re going to become best buds, but instead they make you seem dumb and small and unworthy? Like asking for an autograph from your favorite celebrity and they not only roll their eyes and keep walking, but they also go on live television and call you a mumbling, bumbling idiot of a fool? This was that moment. I felt like a mumbling, bumbling idiot of a fool.