Yes, My Accent Is Real

Preface

Everything I Know About Kissing I Learned from Winnie Cooper

My A-to-Z Guide to Getting Nookie in New Delhi During High School

Made in England

King of Shuttlecocks

Holiday Traditions Part 1: Rakhi

A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

Why Being Indian Is Cool

Dinners with Dad

Dziko and Me

The Art of the Head Bobble

Garbage, Man

Holiday Traditions Part 2: Dussehra

The Forbidden Kiss

Chaos Theory

Judgment Day in Boise

A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

The Girl I Went to Mass For

Kumar Ran a Car

Lollipops and Crisps

The Prince and the Pauper

How I Knew

Kunal's Twelve Quick Thoughts on Dating

Holiday Traditions Part 3: Holi

Nina, Why?

A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

Love's Labour's Lost

The Waiting Period (Extended Mix)

James Bond and the Mouse

Always Joy

Thirteen Things I've Learned from Playing an Astrophysicist on TV

A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

And Then I Fell in Love

Puppies

My Big Fat Indian Wedding

Holiday Traditions Part 4: Diwali

Good-bye

A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

Acknowledgments

About Kunal Nayyar

Mom,

Thank you for bearing the pain of childbirth.

And thank you for that one time you gave me money to join a gym for the summer, knowing full well I am incapable of growing a single ab.

Thank you for always protecting me from all the horrible things in the world.

Thank you for being my best friend,

and my rock.

This is for you . . .

SOMETIMES PEOPLE ASK ME, “WHY
are you writing a memoir? You're only thirty-four.”

This is not a memoir. I'm not a president, or an astronaut, or a Kardashian.

This is a collection of stories from my life.

It is not an “I was born in . . .” type of book.

I was born in London and raised in New Delhi. When I was eighteen, after maneuvering my way through a billion people and a few cows,
^I
I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I studied business, cleaned toilets, lied my way into an IT job, and fell in love twenty-seven times. I went on to get my master's in acting in Philadelphia, auditioned for a play in the basement of an Apple Store in New York City, and spent four hours a day commuting on a bus in Los Angeles. Somehow this crazy journey landed me on a little television show called
The Big Bang Theory
.

Here are some things that happened to me along the way.

I
. Obligatory cow joke. The first of many.

NEW DELHI, 1993. I WAS
twelve years old and I had two
great loves in my life. The first was Winnie Cooper from
The Wonder Years
. Cable had just come to India and I was obsessed with
Small Wonder, M*A*S*H, Doogie Howser, M.D.,
and my beloved Winnie.

My second great love was a friend of my cousin's named Ishani. She was two years older than me, she wore shorter-than-normal skirts, she smoked, and she always smelled like cigarettes and perfume. I still clearly remember that perfume—lemony but also just a little masculine, as if she'd finished her morning perfuming ritual with a splash of her father's aftershave. She had a mole like Cindy Crawford's and she was light-skinned, with hazel-brown eyes. Every guy I knew had a thing for Ishani.

But I had one advantage over the other guys: she was my cousin's best friend, and my cousin happened to live directly above me and my parents.
^I
Whenever Ishani and my cousin would hang
out, I would follow them around like a puppy. Even though they went to the girls' school and I went to the boys', I always timed my walk from the bus so we'd somehow wind up together.
Oh, hey there, what a surprise seeing you two on this fine walk from the school bus this morning!
In the evenings I'd be there as they talked about boys and kissing and sex and stuff. Sometimes I'm not even sure if they remembered I was in the room; they would gossip and giggle while I bounced a ball off the wall. Literally. I became Ishani's good friend. A younger brother, if you will. Safe, innocent, G-rated.

“Have you ever kissed a girl?” she asked me one day.

“Never.” I couldn't make eye contact. We were in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, side by side. The curtains were drawn closed, like always, to shield the room from the scorching New Delhi heat.

“
Never?
” she said, teasing.

My father was at work, my mother was taking a nap, and my cousin had gone upstairs to take a shower or something. We were alone.

Suddenly the electricity went out and the room darkened. This may sound overly convenient—and, frankly, a little implausible—but it was actually pretty common to lose power during the summers, especially in the afternoon. The government arranged something called “load shedding” to ration electricity during high-consumption months.

I could barely see her face but I could sense her next to me on the bed.

“Kiss me,” she said.

I froze. My twelve-year-old self was terrified. I didn't know what to do or how to respond.
Is she joking? She must be joking. She has to be joking.

She was not joking.

I
had been dreaming of this moment for months, though I never in a million years thought it would come to pass. So of course I said the only thing that made sense: “No, no, I don't think it's the right thing.”

Kunal, what are these words coming out of your mouth?

The lights came back on. She looked me in the eye and I looked away. I thought the moment had passed . . . and then, just like that, she scooted over to me and planted her lips on mine.

At that point in life, my entire knowledge of kissing came from my true love, Winnie Cooper. I had just watched the episode where Kevin and Winnie share their first kiss, sitting on a swing, and I learned one very important lesson: As Kevin leans in to kiss Winnie, he closes his eyes. And he keeps them closed the entire time. Genius.

So that's what you do when you kiss—just keep your eyes closed. Got it. Easy peasy. So when Ishani kissed me I closed my eyes, kept them shut, and I literally replayed that scene from
The Wonder Years
on an endless loop. I can't remember what I was doing with my hands, or what my mouth was doing, or even what Ishani looked or felt like in that moment. When I closed my eyes, I was Kevin Arnold, and she was Winnie Cooper.

Afterward I opened my eyes. Winnie was gone. Ishani was there.

“Okay,” she said, with no inflection.

Okay.

Dry. Like it was a verdict.

Okay
.

We didn't discuss the kiss. Not in that moment, not later that day, not the next day, not ever.
Okay.

But it did happen. Clearly what we had shared was by definition special, magical, and I didn't want to rock the boat by pushing my luck for an encore.

I gave that kiss a lot of thought. Maybe too much thought. I suppose you're supposed to say that a first kiss is “lovely” or maybe “achingly sweet,” but instead I thought . . .
How weird.

I was hitting puberty and I could have been aroused by a dead duck, but even back then, on that particular day, I felt nothing. Maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I was worried about getting the kiss right, as opposed to just living in the moment. I struggle with that a lot, you should know. Living in the moment. I should have been thinking,
Holy shit, I just kissed a girl,
and instead I'm wondering about the meaning of that noninflected, dry “
Okay.
”

So I took it upon myself and decided the most reasonable interpretation of her statement was, “
Okay,
now we're boyfriend and girlfriend.”

I just assumed we were dating. We had
kissed,
right? When you're twelve, a kiss has the weight of a marriage covenant. It was my signed, sealed, delivered moment. My cousin, Ishani, and I would hang out as always after school, but now I would tell my mother, “I'm going to see my girlfriend!” Since my girlfriend liked cigarettes I decided to take up smoking, stealing little white cancer sticks from my parents so I could practice puffing.
^II

“We're going to a party!” my cousin said to me one day.

“What party?”

“Ishani's boyfriend's party.”

I was confused. Wait, but
I'm
Ishani's boyfriend. Nervous, baffled, and hurt, I tagged along as my cousin's “plus one” to my girlfriend's boyfriend's
party. The room was filled with cool, older, dangerous-looking kids—
grown men,
really, sixteen years old—and they were drinking beer. Real beer. I scanned the crowd of giants and I spotted Ishani. With a guy. An older guy. She was holding hands with him. He was tall, with gleaming white teeth, and he wore Doc Martens, shoes that clearly meant one thing:
I'm a badass and you suck at life
. He spoke in a deep, manly voice that seemed to charm the pants off Ishani (literally, I imagined). My heart plummeted and I stared, speechless.

“Hey!” one of the bigger guys said to me. He must have caught me staring. “I'm going to kill you!”

I panicked and did the most manly thing I could think of: I ran for my life. I ran outside and he followed me. I ran faster. He still followed. Then I ran around a car to hide from him, and then, wait, wait, where'd he go—he ran right past me.

He was chasing someone else.

Who was he chasing, and why? I'll never know. But it taught me at the tender age of twelve that everything in life isn't always about you, even when you're sure it is.

I left the party alone, finally realizing that Ishani was not currently my girlfriend, had never been my girlfriend, and would never be my girlfriend. I wondered why she had kissed me in the first place. Did she see me as so innocent, so G-rated, that I didn't really count as cheating on her actual boyfriend? Or maybe
she
had never kissed anybody, and she knew she would be hanging out with these dangerous old guys, and she wanted to try it out? Maybe I was just some experiment, like a lab monkey. Or maybe she just fancied me. Or maybe she somehow sensed that while the two of us were kissing, I secretly was fantasizing about Winnie Cooper.

Okay.
What a stupid word.