Yes, My Accent Is Real (23 page)

ONE OF MY FATHER'S FANTASIES
is that he is an international
superspy who specializes in outdoor survival. He has never openly confessed this to me, but his actions scream “superspy plus mountain man survivalist.”

For example, every time he comes to Los Angeles to visit, his first request is to shop at an outdoors store. This trip, which requires a three-hour drive to the suburbs, ends up being a whole-day affair. We wake up early enough to have some tea and biscuits and to drop my mother off at Target
^I
and we set off to the wilderness that is the suburbs. Along the way I can feel the excitement building in my father. It is the same excitement he probably sensed in me as a child when he took me to the toy store, or for ice cream, or to play badminton.

It gives me immense pride to be able to do this for my father. After a lifetime of being taken care of, it really is nice to be the one taking care. Halfway through the drive, he is asleep. I, too, am trying to stay awake. I blast some Bollywood hits and focus hard on the road ahead. My mind is drifting, and with every floating leaf, every passing cloud, I reminisce about my father, about this man asleep by my side, the man who shaped my very being, and his childlike enthusiasm for our trip to the outdoors store.

My father always collected guns. We grew up in a household with guns. When I was seven I was called into the gun room and taught how to clean guns. As I got older I was taught gun safety. How to load and unload a gun and, most important, how to make sure the safety catch was always on. The gun room smelled like gunpowder and oil. It was a room with thick steel cabinets. It felt like a bank vault. And it was cold, always cold. But it felt secure. Like if shit went down, this gun room would protect us. It had a personality of its own. It was RoboCop.

One day when I was ten my mother had to go out of town for some work. When Mom was out of town, my brother and I would sleep in my parents' room on the floor. This was mainly to cut down on the cost of running two ACs in the house. The summers in New Delhi were so hot that we needed to run the AC twenty-four hours a day. Obviously all of our neighbors were also doing the same thing, which would lead the electricity circuit breaker for our area to overheat and basically blow up. This meant that depending on what street you lived on, you would lose power for three hours a day between certain hours in order to protect the breaker. Our street was selected for 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., the exact hours when we would be trying to go to sleep. Already hot and bothered, Dad was in a real huff on this particular night. We were on the floor in his room, wiggling around, frustrated by the sauna in which we were stuffed, waiting for the AC to come back to life.
I heard my father tossing and turning, occasionally releasing an audible expletive. I've always been a light sleeper, and I could tell that he was getting more and more agitated. His expletives were getting louder and he seemed to be really angry.

“Goddammit, I've had enough,” he said, and suddenly ripped himself out of bed.

I jumped out of bed, too. “Papa, what happened?”

“
Beta
[son], there is a stupid mouse running up and down and he just got on the bed and ran all over my face! I'm going to kill that asshole once and for all. Go get my rifle.”

He threw me the keys to the gun room, and a rush of excitement ran over me. I always relished a meeting with RoboCop. I was surprised he asked me and not my older brother, but I quickly realized it was because my brother was asleep and snoring. Fat-ass. I ran to the gun room, opened the door, and took a deep breath as the odor of gun oil and gunpowder filled my lungs. I felt alive, like a raging bull. I was ten, high on some mix of toxins, I had a rifle in my hand, and I was about to watch the massacre of a mouse. Best. Night. Ever. Upon returning to the bedroom, I found my brother was awake and shining a flashlight under the bed.

“Is the safety on?” Dad asked.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Good boy, now stand behind your brother. Keep an eye on the mouse; when I shoot it you have to keep track of the splattered blood.”

YYYYEEEEEESSSS
, I heard in my head. I was swimming with adrenaline. Dad effortlessly cocked the gun and took aim. There was silence. Everything suddenly went still. My brother was calm as a horse, steady hands as he held that flashlight directly at the mouse. He's
always been a rock under pressure, I envy him for that. THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! Three shots rang out.
^II

“Did you see the blood, Kunal?”

“No, Dad, I didn't see anything.”

“Can you boys see the mouse?”

“No, Dad,” we replied.

There was no blood. There was no mouse. We damn near turned that entire bed upside down to find the remains of that mouse. But nothing. Not even a blemish of blood on the wall. I mean, three bullet holes in the wall, sure, but a dead mouse? Nope. Where could it have gone? Had this little mouse outplayed the massive aliens with guns and lived to see another day? Was it all a figment of our imagination? Had the heat driven us mad? No one could figure it out.

What we did know is that there was one bullet left in the magazine. Now, Dad didn't want to leave a loaded rifle in the house, and we could not unload it because it was already in the slot. The only other option was to shoot out the remaining bullet. So Dad took the gun into the bathroom and shot into the clothes basket. Not a bucket of water, or into some foam, or the sky, but into a pile of dirty laundry.

When Mom came home the next day she had a lot of questions. We mainly hid from her, and when she asked us why there were bullet holes in all her clothes we played dumb and said things like “Hungry moths, probably.” We never told her the truth. Maybe my father confessed. He was never one to stare death in the eye, and telling the truth was much easier than facing Medusa's wrath.
Maybe when she reads this book it will suddenly all make sense. I sometimes wonder what happened to that mouse. I imagine him sitting on the beach somewhere, in a hula skirt, smoking a cigar, drinking a Corona, reminiscing like me.

Dad has just woken up. We are close and he can probably smell the outdoors store from three miles away. A sense of smell is a wonderful thing to have. Every shop has a smell. Especially the ones we love. Toys “R” Us always smells like flowers and plastic, McDonald's always smells like french fries, and outdoors stores always smell like freedom. I never asked Dad what outdoors stores smelled like, but I'm pretty sure that's the way they smelled to him. We walk into the mega-complex of everything outdoorsy and are completely overcome by the sheer size of this place. Though we have been here before, it always feels like we're arriving for the first time.

When I was growing up in India we didn't have anything like “superstores.” Everything was mom-and-pop owned. Sure, things are changing now, we have huge malls and such, but for someone from anywhere outside America to walk into a place like this is jaw-dropping. America does truly grasp the concept of overabundance. We grab a shopping cart and begin to head down the aisles one by one. Dad is giddy. He is going through all the aisles with an air of pride about mankind. He is proud of the designs and the research and labor that have gone into creating these products that help us brave the elements.

He grabs a headlamp and tries it on. He's always buying headlamps. I don't understand why. We make fun of him for it and he's oddly quiet when we do. Maybe he really does use them. Maybe when
there is load shedding on our street he secretly goes out and helps all the neighbors turn on their generators. Maybe he is “Super Headlamp Man,” protector of all when darkness falls over the neighborhood.

We continue through the metropolis, lamp still on his head, when we land at the outerwear section. This, to my father, is Mecca. My father worked in the garment trade at one point, and he is always in awe of the linings to be found in high-tech outerwear. It's never cold enough in New Delhi to wear any of these things, but still he's touching all of them, letting out oohs and aahs with every caress of stitching. He begins to pull them off the rack and try them on, inspecting every pocket as he does. Just a tip: the more pockets the better. I think I once bought him a jacket with forty-seven pockets. Really.

And then, we see it. The mother lode of jackets! The one that is so big it takes two mannequins to hold up. The one that you can wear in the Arctic Circle, the one that can swallow you whole. Dad tries it on, of course, and his head instantly disappears. I can hear a muffled voice inspecting the inside seams of this masterpiece, this master beast. I can hear him say something about sweating or blacking out or something, and I realize that he is asking me to help get it off him. I manage to get him out of it and we put it back on the mannequin. I think Dad has met his match. That just may be too much jacket for one man, or even two men. As we continue on toward the end of our shopping spree, I take account of the stockpile in the shopping cart. Headlamps, insect repellent (extra strength, obviously, for India), a light Windbreaker that can fold into a small sock, a police baton (why? I don't ask), a few key chain torches, and a bottle of Diet Coke.

As we check out, my father begins to chat with the checkout
lady. He is the king of small talk. Within two minutes we learned that this lady is from Guatemala and her parents came to America when she was a child, and her parents have since gone back to retire. She has two children, both in college, and her husband is the manager of the store. On the way out she invites us over for dinner if we're ever back in the area.

After we load the car full of our goodies, I say to Dad, “Is there anything else you'd like to get, just on the off chance we
never
come back to the outdoors store again?”

He thinks. And he thinks some more.

I know what he's thinking. He is negotiating price points and pondering the logistics of carrying a twenty-pound arctic jacket back home in his luggage. I know he wants to buy it, but he would never use it. We all have things like that.

“No. I'm tired, Kunal. Let's go home.”

I excuse myself and say I have to use the restroom. I run back to the store, holler at my new Guatemalan lady friend, and disappear into the aisles. Fifteen minutes later with the help of the store manager I carry out what looks like the carcass of the Abominable Snowman. I make it over to the car and see Dad beaming from ear to ear. He knew what I was up to, I knew that he knew, and the store manager, who didn't know, now knew.

On the way home Dad falls asleep again. I, on the other hand, am not tired. I think about my mom. It's been almost seven hours since we dropped her off at Target and she hasn't even called once.

I
. An expedition that deserves an entire book in itself.

II
. In case you're worried, there was no real danger of the bullets going through the thick cement walls or the hard marble floors and injuring anyone.

Inside me lives a little boy.

He is the little boy who smiles at strangers.

The little boy who wakes up wanting to play.

The little boy who wants no harm to come to any man.

The little boy who is unwavering in his hope.

The little boy who sleeps in comfort.

The little boy who eats and drinks what he wants,

When he wants.

He wishes all the wars in the world would end.

And that there was no pain.

And no man would die.

He is a shy little boy.

But sometimes he feels not so little and not so shy.

Sometimes he feels like a tiger.

He is the same little boy who is afraid of the dark.

And of monsters, and bears, and spiders.

He is afraid of people wanting to do bad things to him.