Yes, My Accent Is Real

by Kunal Nayyar

  I introduced myself and we exchanged hellos.

  Oh my God she’s tall.

  “Have a seat and I’ll buy you a drink?” I suggested, thinking that if we were sitting down, I could level the playing field.

  “Sure,” she said. “I just have to say a quick hello to some other people, but I’ll be back.”

  Sure she would.

  I know that move. I’ve used it myself. The blow-off maneuver where you tell someone, “I’m just gonna run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” and you never see that person again. Your only contact is stalking them through Facebook.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling.

  “Hey,” I smoothly replied. “Have a seat.” I rose ever so slightly, not wanting to expose my height again. I had found a corner table outside on the balcony where it was quiet. She sat down and pulled a cigarette from her purse.

  I had bought us a couple of glasses of champagne and she took a sip. Her lips were glowing in the candlelight.I

  “So you’re an actor?” she asked.

  “I’m on a TV show called The Big Bang Theory.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Okay, so I can’t play that card.

  Instead we talked about our childhoods, growing up in New Delhi, discovered some friends we had in common. Gradually, I think she could tell I was not a creep (despite the trucker hat) and she began to open up. We chatted and chatted, and chatted some more. And then we really talked. “This is my first night out in almost a year,” she said, looking away. At first I wasn’t sure if her eyes were welling up with tears, or if the alcohol had begun to take hold. “I was engaged,” she continued, “and two weeks before the wedding he called it off.” She told me that the entire wedding had been planned. Tickets had been bought, venues had been selected, more than five hundred people had been invited, and then, just like that, it was all off. They were off. With her hands shaking ever so slightly, Neha pulled out another cigarette; I lifted the candle and lit it for her. “Cold feet,” she said, almost to herself.

  I broke the silence by making a joke about feet. Something about how I don’t like them, and how my feet are whiter than Snow White’s bottom. Maybe that sounds crass, given the circumstances, but I was trying to make her smile.

  She explained to me that when it happened, at first she was in shock, and then she was hugely embarrassed, mainly for her family, and how all her relatives still flew in to see her, because they had booked their tickets already. It was exactly like a wedding gathering, just without the main event. She told me that she had embarked on a spiritual path to try to make sense of the circumstances; she had embraced Buddhism, and it had saved her.

  There was something beautiful about the rawness of her emotion, as if she had been to the very depths of heartache and survived, stronger, wiser, and more determined to find true love. Oh man, I had known her for two hours and I was getting hooked.

  Finally it was time to say good night. She leaned in. “Do you want my number?”

  “Nah, it’s cool,” I said. “I’ll get it from someone else.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to take it now?”

  “I’m good, I’ll just get it from my cousin,” I said, trying to be a baller. I was really trying to play it cool, but probably ended up looking like a dumbass jerk.

  Thirty seconds after she left I called my cousin to get her number, and I immediately texted her to say I hope she made it home safe and that it was lovely chatting with her. As soon as I pressed SEND I kicked myself for seeming overeager; so much for being a baller.

  Stupid stupid stupid—

  She texted right back, saying she’d had a lovely night.

  Later that night, my phone buzzed.

  “I’m home safe. Thanks for being a gentleman.”

  I didn’t waste any time. In a few days I had to fly back to LA, and if I didn’t do something, who knew when, or if, I’d see this goddess again? So the next morning I texted her and suggested we meet for dinner. She accepted. Quickly I tapped into my network of friends and cousins to find the best place to impress her, and we settled on a glitzy restaurant in the Oberoi hotel. My brother made a call to book the private glass wine room. I mean, she’s Miss India. I had to bring out the big guns, right? I had to flash the big boys, right? I had to pull out all the stops, right? I had to bring my A-game, right? I’ll stop; you get the point.

  Once again I mused for hours over my fashion choices for the night. It was time to unleash the most expensive piece of clothing I have ever owned. (I mean, I had to whip out the big kahonas, right?) I picked a black wool sweater from Alexander Wang that goes all the way down to my knees. It looked like a woman’s cape.

  I arrived early to the restaurant, standing inside this small glass room and wearing my lady’s cape. I knew there’d be a 50 percent chance she would think she had made a huge mistake, and then another 40 percent chance that she would confuse me for a woman. And a 10 percent chance that she wouldn’t show.

  Neha doesn’t walk—she glides. I suppose she gets this from years of modeling. She glided (glode?) into the restaurant wearing all black, hair straight and flowing, and a hint of glitter on her face. She was a vision.

  “Nice sweater,” she said. I didn’t know if she was being sincere or ironic.II

  It was just a romantic dinner with Neha and me. Oh, and my brother, who wanted to meet her and invited himself into the glass room. Oh, and we had a fourth companion to our budding romance: our waiter. As anyone who has ever eaten in a restaurant knows, typically, the waiter will swing by your table when needed, quickly refill your wine, and then leave you and your date in peace.

  Not this guy. One “perk” of the private glass room is that he’s our private waiter, which meant that he stood right next to us, always, his hands clasped behind his back like Ser Barristan, the Kingsguard from Game of Thrones. After some small chitchat my brother left us, but the Kingsguard remained, impassive, stoic, but inevitably hearing every word of our conversation.

  When I told stories that made Neha laugh I peeked up at the Kingsguard, and when he didn’t crack a smile I almost felt offended. I was speaking for two audiences—Neha and our waiter. He never did warm to me. She did.

  It was a lovely date. Again we talked for hours. There was no licking of eyeballs; this just felt real, honest, right. Afterward we decided to have a nightcap at a bar full of middle-aged people dressed in tuxedos and gowns, dancing. I couldn’t take my eyes off an elderly couple who slow-danced next to us, cheek to cheek. They looked so tender. So comfortable, so happy. I looked at that old couple and I thought, Oh how lovely if that could be me and Neha one day.

  I turned to her and asked, “Tomorrow, do you want to meet my family?”

  Neha glided through the gate with a bouquet of flowers for my parents. They fell in love with her right away.

  Neha is funny without trying to be funny. Some people tell stories at a party and work hard to make jokes. They’re performing. In the past, I had spent a lot of time with people in my industry—actors—and they usually tend to have a funny bone that’s based on performance. It was refreshing to meet someone who didn’t have that bone. Because there are two very different types of laughs:

  1. The “Ha, that’s clever” laugh.

  2. The absolutely unconscious, laugh-out-loud, not-worried-what-you-sound-like laugh. That’s the way I laughed when I met Neha. I genuinely found her funny, even when she wasn’t making jokes. And to be honest, when she tries to make a joke she’s terrible, which I find hilarious. One time at a lake we saw a couple of ducks fighting, and she said, “Look, the ducks are beaking each other up.” Terrible or genius?

  After dinner my mom said, “Kunal, why don’t you bring up the guitar and sing Neha some songs?”

  That’s my mom: the world’s best wingman. I brought out the trusty guitar and played “The Blower’s Daughter” from Damien Rice. “Can’t take my eyes off yooooouu.” Neha was impressed. Cha-ching!

  One tiny p
roblem, of course: my life was in Los Angeles, her life was in India.

  “Do you want to pursue this further?” I asked her, finding a quiet moment after dinner.

  She did.

  “If we want this to go further, you will have to come to see me in LA. I’m filming and won’t be able to come to India again till the summer.”

  Three weeks later she was on a flight to LA.

  At the time, I was living in a loft in LA, and for whatever trendy reason, the entire thing was a massive open space divided only by curtains. So on the off-off chance that in the next two weeks Neha needed to, say, use the toilet, I’d have to go hang out on the other side of the loft to give her privacy. Would the curtains freak her out? And what if she had weird body odor that I somehow hadn’t noticed? Or what if she had weird feet? I’m not proud to admit this, but weird feet are pretty close to a deal breaker for me. Also, I should clarify that almost all feet are weird feet. Feet are gross. I used to date this girl who always wore open-toed sandals, and her feet were so stanky that when we climbed into bed I would casually suggest that she take a shower. The sound of people wearing flip-flops drives me batty, too. It’s this unholy combination of sweaty arches and plastic and sun—puddles of sweat that smack the plastic in unison. Smack, smack, smack. Flip-flops should be banned.

  Neha’s plane was about to land. And truthfully, I actually hadn’t seen her feet. We had kissed in New Delhi but nothing more. What imperfection would freak me out, and what imperfection of mine (I have plenty) would freak her out? There were so many unknowns.

  Except I couldn’t stop thinking, I’ve met the woman I want to marry.

  My friends wouldn’t need to wait long to meet her. Just a few hours after she arrived in LA, the entire cast of The Big Bang Theory was invited to go to dinner at the home of the president of Warner Bros. His dinner parties also included a movie screening, and we were subjected to Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, a four-hour art-house saga as difficult to watch as it is to pronounce. It’s not exactly the perfect date film, especially after a twenty-two-hour flight.

  So is this where the wheels came off? Is this where it all unraveled? Please. She’s Miss India—she’s used to being an ambassador of the country, and the woman carries herself with grace and class. More than that, though, she was kind. That’s an underrated trait. Whenever a friend asks me for advice about someone they’re dating, my first question to them isn’t “Do they make you laugh?” (the usual question) but instead, “Are they kind?” When you’re enamored with someone, you’ll find them funny no matter what. But are they kind? How do they treat strangers? How do they speak to the doorman or the waiter?

  I just knew. We didn’t have a serious DTR (Define the Relationship) conversation where we formally established that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We didn’t need to clarify that we were monogamous. It just happened.

  But what about that 8,490.62-mile distance between us? (I did the math.)

  We had one simple tool: the phone. It doesn’t get enough credit as a means of courtship.

  We talked every day. Video chats? Facebook, Skype, Snapchat? Nope, they’re the worst. When I saw her face on a computer screen, she became somehow there but not really there, and then I became shy, awkward, and instead of the deeper conversations, I’d cower behind small talk and self-conscious, nonsensical yammering. When I couldn’t see her face, it freed us to speak openly and explore our innermost thoughts. We fell in love on the phone.

  I don’t think I would have found Neha if I hadn’t been willing to risk failure. It would have been easy to play it safe and say that she was Out of My League, that we lived in different worlds and had too much ocean between us.

  But you can’t find love if you’re not willing to lose it. You can’t find happiness if you’re not willing to risk being sad. And you can’t find the love of your life without risking breaking your heart.

  Dive in.

  * * *

  I. Helpful hint: Here’s a cliché that happens to be true. Girls love it when you buy champagne.

  II. Fun fact: later, she did ask me if she could borrow “that pretty sweater” I’d worn on our first date.

  Puppies

  RAISING A PUPPY MAKES ME not want to have children. IS that bad? With babies, it’s not even so much the constant waking up at night, or the free-floating anxiety that your kid has just eaten something forbidden, or that he will choke on one of his falling-out baby teeth. It’s really just the all-consuming, aching fear that I’m not capable of taking care of someone who is absolutely dependent on me in every way. What if I fail? What if he does choke on a pebble? What if I forget to feed him and he starves to death? Or, honestly, how long will I have to continue picking up his monster shits?I Maybe that is the real reason why I don’t want children: so that I don’t have to touch another person’s poop for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  I. My dog shits like a monster. Not only the size of his poop, but the amount of times he goes. If I don’t pick up his droppings from the backyard for, say, two days, I end up picking up sixteen shits. SIXTEEN SHITS. Do the math. On the bright side, how he nourishes the garden with his natural fertilizer.

  My Big Fat Indian Wedding

  MY WEDDING WAS JUST LIKE every other wedding. One thousand guests over a six-day period. There were people at my wedding that I didn’t even know. Everyone was apparently my cousin. Strangers would pull me in for a hug and say, “Oh, you don’t remember me? I was just a baby when you left India!”

  We planned the whole thing in six months. We had to. Neha and I were engaged in June, and we wanted to get married in the winter in India. It’s too hot in the summer, and instead of waiting for an entire year and a half, we decided on the coming December. Also when I say, “We planned the wedding,” of course, like every groom, I mean “She planned the wedding.” Neha went back to India for the entire six months and was the general of a wedding-planning army that included colonels like our parents, captains like our aunts and uncles and cousins, and countless hardworking lieutenants. (I didn’t even make rank.) One of my older aunts was in charge of the flowers. A cousin was in charge of hotels. We had no wedding planner. What’s the point? We had an army of a hundred and fifty family members standing by and ready to help in any way needed.

  My job? Stay in America and serve as mediator between the various parties involved. Which basically means that I had no idea what was going on.

  After a day of shooting Big Bang, I would answer phone calls from Neha and from my mother, who would both say things like, “Your auntie isn’t listening. What she doesn’t grasp about the centerpieces is that—”

  “Yes, Mom, I understand . . .” or “Yeah, I hear you, baby . . .” I would say, being as supportive as I could, and then drink myself to sleep.

  Six months later it was time to hop onto the flight to India for my wedding week, and I really didn’t have a clue what to expect. In some ways, I was just a guest at an incredibly elaborate family event.

  Here we go.

  DAY 1: ARRIVAL

  When I landed in India and stepped up to the immigration line, I saw my brother inside the airport waving me over to the special diplomat line. He was somehow not only inside the airport but also at the immigration desk. He had convinced the officials to let me skip the line for immigration by waving around some special handwritten note from India’s vice president (apparently). He also gave an emotional speech to the duty-free manager to allow us to buy more than our allotted quota of booze. “It’s my brother’s wedding, and he’s got a rare terminal disease so this is our last time together. . . .” Once outside, balancing the copious bottles of scotch, I was greeted by Neha and twenty-five cousins (not an exaggeration), who gave me a pointy hat and sunglasses that said “Groom.” They popped bottles of champagne, dousing me with the bubbles and lit firecrackers, right there in the airport parking lot.

  “To the groom!!!!”

  A little jet-lagged, buzzed from the champagn
e, and only a little worried that we might get arrested before the wedding, I drank in the experience and floated back to my family home, with Neha beside me. When we turned onto my street I could see a faint glow of illumination coming from the direction of the house, and as we grew closer I saw that the entire house was covered by a yellow and green and orange tent that looked like Cirque du Soleil, and a thousand shiny lightbulbs that hung from the balcony all the way to the ground. Everything smelled like flowers. Mom had prepared some butter chicken, we broke into the fourteen bottles of Scotch we had purchased at duty-free, and I realized that this massive homecoming—with lights and the food and my cousins and closest friends and Neha—was just a small taste of what was to come.

  DAY 2: COCKTAIL PARTY

  I woke up in a fog of jet lag to a loud, incessant clapping sound coming from the front door. It sounded like the opposite of applause, more like one of those toy monkeys with the cymbals that you wind up and they bang their hands together for hours. I staggered toward our front door and peeked outside. There I saw a crowd of eunuchs creating a ruckus. I hid behind a frosted windowpane and watched the scene unfold. In New Delhi, every neighborhood has a group of eunuchs called hijras, who, according to tradition, show up before the wedding to bless the bride and groom. Except this “blessing” isn’t exactly free; you have to pay them to go away, and if you refuse to give them cash, you not only don’t get a blessing, they will plague your wedding with a curse. We had known this particular band of hijras for years. They’re friendly neighbors. It was a custom to get their blessing, and I didn’t want to start the week with the hijra curse.