Yes, My Accent Is Real (8 page)

Dziko once helped me become the next Mark Zuckerberg. I had a marketing assignment for sales class, and I had to start a new business that would actually make some cash. My idea was to come up with a matchmaking service that would let people find dates for the university dance. I called the service “Cupid.”

For the very competitive price of two dollars, people would fill out a questionnaire and submit a photo, and I would use a mathematical algorithm to match the guys and the girls. (The methodology behind my algorithm: I just picked a girl's questionnaire and stapled it to a guy's questionnaire, more or less at random.)
But how do you find the customers? Who would pay two dollars for a match? Who would trust Cupid? This was still several years before Facebook, so Dziko and I literally had to go door-to-door in the girls' dorm. We headed over just after 7 p.m., figuring they would have all finished dinner but not yet be asleep or out doing whatever girls did on a school night.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked each girl as she answered the door. If she said yes, I didn't waste any time, just said thank you and knocked on the next door. Dziko didn't say a word. He was loving every moment of this.

In a sense, this was a precursor of what the online dating business would later become—a means of making money from the gathering of information from people based on unlikely promises of an intimate connection. We visited 679 girls' rooms, and I'm proud to say a full twenty-four women signed up for Cupid. Matching them to twenty-four guys was the easy part; I just walked down my hall. I made seventy-three dollars in profit and received a B. I know the math doesn't make sense, but I had to pay Dziko 25 percent because he was a junior partner in my venture. (The winning company was a German bratwurst stand that raked in thousands of dollars a week; the dean had to shut it down because it siphoned off too much revenue from the school cafeteria.)

Obviously, Cupid was just ahead of its time.

At the end of our sophomore year our basketball coach was let go. I didn't think much about this at the time, but then one day at lunch Dziko said, “Kunal, the coach is gone.”

“Okay.”

“I think I want to follow him.”

“Okay . . . I mean. Wait. What does that mean?”

“I want to play basketball at another school.”

“Um, that's cool,” I said, masking my anxiety. “I'll support whatever you want to do.”

The next few days were a blur. We caught wind of other players leaving and transferring to other colleges, and soon Dziko, too, was receiving offers from other schools. It wasn't sinking in.
Can you really transfer as a junior?
Dziko wouldn't leave. He couldn't leave. Why would he leave?

The next day he came into our room, elated, looking as happy as I had ever seen him. “I got transferred! I'm going to Cal Poly!”

“That's awesome,” I lied.

“I'm going to live near the beach, Kunal!”

My heart dropped.

It happened so quickly. The semester was winding down and we were packing up the room and peeling off posters and memories from the wall. I was about to head back to India for the summer.

We only had a few days left together, and we both knew it, and we both must have thought about it, but neither of us said much of anything. We didn't know how to say good-bye. We did our usual things. We didn't talk about the future or the past. We watched a few movies and played some chess.

But you can't run away from the inevitable, no matter how hard you try. Good-byes happen, but so do hellos. It was time to say good-bye. I zipped up my bags and checked to make sure I had my toothbrush (an odd observation given the gravity of the situation). Dziko was sitting on the bed, his legs crossed Indian-style,
^VII
twirling his dreadlocks.

I looked at him, not sure what to say.

He helped me with my bag and gave me a hug. “I love you, man.”

I told him I loved him. We hugged again, clapped each other on the back, and that was that.

I called my mother that night from the airport and said that Dziko was leaving, and before I could even get the words out the tears began to stream down my face. I broke down and wept. I felt empty. I missed him already.

“Why are you crying, Kunal?”

She didn't understand. And I didn't have the words to explain it to her. My relationship with Dziko was in some ways more intimate than anything I had experienced with women at that point. There wasn't the sex to get in the way. We shared the deepest and most sensitive memories of our pasts. No one knew me like he did. And now he was gone.

I remained Dziko's biggest fan. Two years later, I was at a theater party and Cal Poly was playing Duke in the conference finals; if they won they would earn a bid to March Madness. The TV was on mute and I watched it by myself, ignoring the rest of the party, cheering every time Dziko touched the ball. The game was close and with just seconds left on the clock, Cal Poly was down by three.

“Give D the ball! Give him the ball!” I screamed at the mute TV.

Dziko posted up and they did give him the ball. For some reason Duke doubled him (honestly, this didn't make much sense) and D made the right play, passing the ball to his wide-open teammate for a three.
The ball went up in a rainbow, the buzzer sounded, up, up, up . . . and clank. It just missed the target. Cal Poly lost.

After college he tried to play in Germany, but developed chronic foot problems and never quite made it to the European League. But the truth is, I don't think D ever loved basketball. He cared more for playing guitar, conversation, wine, flowers, and sitting on the beach. He loved the outdoors and good people. Sometimes I'll think about that smile, and it'll brighten up my day.

We stayed in touch, of course, and we still remain very close friends. Years after we both graduated I would travel to Paris with him for his sister's wedding, and finally I met the family I had heard so much about. I remember doing shots with his ninety-year-old grandmother, Babushka, who carried around a flask of vodka. I met his father, who had been a political refugee. And his Russian mother, who worked as an accountant at Euro Disney. I learnt about their struggles and their triumphs and the eventual reunion of the entire family in Paris after so many lost years. And on the night of his sister's wedding, on a boat floating down the Seine, we stared at the twinkling dark water as an elderly pianist from New Orleans plucked out blues notes and belted,

When the night has gone, and the land is dark,

And the moon is the only light we'll see.

“Stand by Me.” In French, no less.

I
. Or, what we just call “sitting.”

II
. I haven't mentioned that one of my dreams was to play in the NBA. I was religious about Michael Jordan, and my American cousins would send me tapes of the Chicago Bulls' games. If badminton hadn't panned out, I was going to try my hand at the Indian Basketball League.

III
. See letters H and I in “My A-to-Z Guide for Getting Nookie in New Delhi During High School,”
page 17
.

IV
. I'm not sure I got that reference right.

V
. That's what happens when you're a rookie.

VI
. Right. Her name is not Arisu.

VII
. Again, just sitting.

LET'S TAKE A SECOND AND
talk about the indian head bobble.
Yes, I am going to go there. Because yes, it's true that Indians bobble their heads all the time. That's not a racist thing to say because a) I am Indian, and b) bobbling our heads is a very important and sophisticated form of communication. When you bobble your head you're not really saying yes, and you're not really saying no. So much is communicated and so much is not communicated by the bobble. It could mean:

I'm full.

I'm hungry.

I'm confused.

I'm happy.

I understand.

Talk to me.

Stop talking.

Never talk to me again.

So how does one decipher the bobble? The truth is, you can't. There aren't any bobble variations or inflections, and this one universal head bobble works greatly to our advantage. Imagine you're trying to buy something from me and you say, “Ten rupees.”

I bobble my head.

“Twenty rupees.”

I bobble my head.

“Thirty rupees?”

And so on. I ripped you off for twenty rupees just by bobbling my head. Greatest invention ever. I wonder if the bobble was born from when we were oppressed by the British. Maybe it was just the safest way to avoid getting beaten.

Subconsciously, I suppose I do the bobble all the time, but I really unleash it when I want to use my Indianness in my favor. For example, if I see a lovely woman and want to stand out from the crowd, I will stand in her vicinity and bobble the shit out of my head and use a thicker accent. She'll be charmed by my exoticness, she'll want to know where I'm from, we'll chat, and she'll think,
This guy's harmless, he's Indian! And his head bobble is so cute.

LIKE EVERY COLLEGE STUDENT, I
needed a job for some extra cash. Problem was, I didn't have any “job qualifications,”
because, to be honest, I had never worked a day in my life. So the summer after my freshman year, I decided to take a job in the university's housekeeping department (because the job description exactly matched my level of expertise). My job was to clean toilets, empty out the Dumpsters, scrub the floors, move furniture, set up chairs for events, and basically do everything else that no one else in the university wanted to do.

Aaaaaaand I loved it. I swear. I took pride in my ability to stack and unstack chairs. Not to brag, guys, but I might actually be the fastest chair stacker this side of the equator. I figured out a superbly efficient way of folding the chair's legs in one fluid motion; it must have been muscle memory from all my years of badminton.

My boss, Luis, looked a bit like the villain from God of War. Or like the genie in
Aladdin
if he was Satan and Medusa's love child. He had a very black and pointed goatee, a sharp, hooked nose, a long, skinny tongue that he loved to show off, and a scar down the middle of his chest from triple bypass open-heart surgery.
He claimed to have slept with thousands of women and seemed determined to tell us about each and every one. He also would do this weird tongue thing, where he would show us the strength of his tongue by picking up M&Ms off the table without his teeth or lips. It was the most disgusting and yet most fascinating thing I had ever seen. He also drove a red Corvette, which automatically made him very, very cool. There's cool, and then there's Luis cool.

Every morning Luis would give me a new objective for the day, such as: “A professor just died. Go clean out his office.” Not even twenty-four hours after this poor soul had lost his life, I was in his office, packing up his possessions, clearing out all the books and the plants and the memories, and somehow trying to squeeze his couch and table out the office door. It was my first lesson in physics, really;
just because you can get something into the room doesn't mean you can get it out.
I spent four hours cleaning that office, and another four trying to squeeze the furniture out the door.
Maybe this is what it feels like to give birth.

Another morning Luis would say, “Empty out the women's dormitory Dumpster!” So I hopped into my little truck and drove to the girls' dorm, and scraped the Dumpster walls of gunk. I don't need to tell you what I found in the Dumpster, right? Let's just say that I discovered a new appreciation for people who tie their garbage bags up tightly, because there is nothing worse than actually having to touch, see, and smell what people are throwing away. So tie up your garbage bags tightly, please!

One member of my daily cohort was this guy whose name was Khrish. He always smelled like fish. He secretly wanted to be a Nepalese pop star, and would always sing us these terrible songs about his love for mountains. Everyone teased poor Khrish about his singing, but he didn't mind. Because he didn't understand that they were laughing at him.

“
Cover your ears, Khrish is at it again!” “Run for shelter, here comes the Khrish train!”

Khrish would laugh and keep going.

“STOP THE GODDAMN SINGING!”

And Khrish would raise his voice and belt the tune as loudly as he could. On top of his vocal challenges—that is, hitting a single note on key—Khrish faced an uphill battle, given that he wanted to be a Nepalese pop star who sings Nepalese songs about the Himalayas . . . in Portland.

I loved those guys. You probably imagine the housekeeping department as a group of people who clean up other people's messes for money and don't really want to be there, but in my experience that wasn't true. We all had fun together. We took pride in our work. It didn't feel like a
lowly job
or a
bad job;
it just felt like a job. And it also taught me a lesson or two about cultural sensitivities, and how race relations can be a two-way street. One day I was joking around with a coworker named Andy, a chubby ex-marine with a soft demeanor. Andy lit up when I told him my mother was coming to Portland for a visit.