Yes, My Accent Is Real (9 page)

“You bringing her to the company picnic?” Andy asked.

“I don't know if she'll get along with all the white trash,” I said.

Andy didn't say much later that afternoon. Or the next few days. At the time I didn't really understand the full connotations behind “white trash,” and I didn't know it was derogatory. I suppose, in hindsight, a phrase that uses the word
trash
can't really be seen as a compliment, but I thought I was just making a joke. A few days later Andy still wasn't talking to me, so I asked him if something was wrong.

“Kunal, don't you know that I'm white trash, too? Why would you call us that?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I didn't really know what it meant.” And that was the truth. I sincerely didn't know that
white trash
was a
horrible term. I explained this in great detail to Andy, and he realized that I didn't have any negative feelings about him, or about our coworkers, or about white people in general, and soon we were back to being chums again. But it reminded me that words can be hurtful.

Lunch was every day's highlight. We had an hour break and everyone shared their food on a big communal table, usually while laughing at the sheer volume of hygiene products we'd found in the morning's trash; or Khrish's latest song; or details from Cool Luis's disgusting orgies. Someone always brought fish, others pasta, some brought chicken salad; I always brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because it was the only thing I knew how to make.

As the summer drew to a close, on one of my last days on the job, I had to drive the mini-truck to the computer lab, where I was told to pick up a desk. Easy enough. I drove the truck up a long ramp, parked it on the landing in the front of the building, and went inside to help the guys lift the desk.

Then I heard screaming.

I ran outside.

The mini-truck was rolling backward. Down the ramp. With no one in it.

At the bottom of this ramp is the main university lawn, the kind of picnic area that they show in every college brochure where students are reading and playing Frisbee and sunbathing. The truck careened straight toward this lawn, and before I could make
a move, the truck hit the bottom of the ramp, toppled upside down in the picnic area, and flipped on its belly.

Oh man
.

In my hurry to grab the desk I had forgotten to set the emergency brake, and the truck simply glided back down the ramp.

Out of nowhere—somehow within seconds—a man came sprinting toward the scene, barking into a walkie-talkie. A short, stocky guy. Looked like a God of War villain. It was Luis. My boss.

“Is anyone hurt?” Luis asked.

“No.”

“Any damage?”

No damage. Luis immediately took command of the scene. He set the place in order and right there I saw why my boss was
the
boss.

In that moment, of course, I was worried about the truck and anyone on the lawn who might be hurt, but later, when the guilt began to creep into the pit of my stomach, I worried this would cause problems with the university and/or jeopardize my scholarship. What if this incident cost me everything that my family had invested? Life doesn't just fuck you over on a Saturday night when you're blackout drunk; it can just as easily fuck you over on a Tuesday afternoon when you're going to lift a desk.

But Luis took the fall. He wouldn't tell the department which one of his guys had made the mistake and, as a result, he was suspended for two weeks without pay.

“That's not right,” I said. “It should be my punishment.”

Luis wouldn't listen to me.

I felt awful. “Please. It's my fault. Fire me. I'll fire myself. I'm fired.” I still feel awful. I pleaded for him to let me take the blame,
but no matter what I said, he wouldn't budge. He insisted on being my fall guy.

I suppose we all had each other's backs. We all screwed around and we told dirty jokes and we laughed at each other's expense, and maybe we all came from different walks of life and places of origin—immigrants, marines, Nepal, Texas, India—but at the end of the day it didn't matter. At the end of the day we stuck together. We had an unspoken bond; together we were safe.

Many years later, my wife and I endowed a scholarship at the University of Portland. For the inauguration of the fund I came to the school auditorium to give a little speech to the students. There were about three hundred people in the room.

In the back of the auditorium, someone raised his hand. An older guy.

“You won't remember me, but we worked together once,” the man said.

It was Khrish.

We ran toward each other with open arms. It felt like the movies. We hugged in the center of the stage as the crowd erupted in applause.

Later that night we met for beers and swapped life stories. Nothing much had changed in his life. Except for one thing.

He had a new song.

And you know what?

It wasn't bad. It was actually, dare I say it, decent.

And this time no one laughed.

Dussehra
(
du-SHAR-uh
):
n.
annual Hindu festival taking place in the fall, celebrating the victory of good over evil.

DUSSEHRA IS MY FAVORITE INDIAN
festival because, when I
was a kid, at night our family would walk to the nearest public park, where a crowd of a thousand people would watch, spellbound, the burning of a one-hundred-foot, ten-headed demon. The burning of this demon commemorates the victory of King Rama over the demon lord Ravana. Since this occurs near the beginning of the harvest season, some also believe that the religious rituals help to reactivate the vigor and fertility of the soil. Which is great and all. But did I mention the demon was huge and had ten heads and we got to watch it go up in flames?
Kick. Ass.

Dussehra also has a carnival where you wander from stall to stall, buy snacks (not beef, obviously), and waste your rupees on games like shooting water balloons and such. One year when I was about eleven years old, I was asked to volunteer at one of these stalls.

These are the rules of the exciting game at my stall: for two rupees, you throw a penny in a bucket full of water, and then you have five seconds to dip your hand in the bucket and try to find
your penny. Wooo-hooooo, right?! Who
wouldn't
want to play this game? My job was to advertise this game to the passersby.

“Try the water bucket!” I yelled. “Get your hands wet! Win a prize!”

When people ignored me I screamed louder. “THROW A PENNY! WATER BUCKET! GET YOUR HANDS WET!”

At the end of the night, the stall owner was pleased with the results—and she even gave me twenty rupees. But I'd yelled so much that I'd lost my voice and couldn't even cheer when they burned the demon.

“Here, gargle this,” my mother said, handing me a glass of warm water with salt when I got home.

My voice instantly returned. To this day, whenever I lose my voice during a recording session or a play, I still use the remedy of gargling warm water and salt, and I think of pennies and water buckets and ten-headed demons.

Dussehra
(
du-SHAR-uh
):
n.
1. annual Hindu festival taking place in the fall, celebrating the victory of good over evil. 2.
Game of Thrones
(Real Life Edition). Aka Best. Night. Ever.

HER NAME WAS JOYCELL HAYDEN.
Lovely name. The kind of
name belonging to a girl who deserved to be kissed by a prince. And that prince was me. At least, that's the way I would cast the movie. She had pixie-cut blond hair, a round, golden face, and a bounce in her step. We were in Psychology 101 together. She was always first to raise her hand to answer questions and she never had any sweat stains under her arms. I could smell her from seven rows away, strawberries and cream with a touch of black pepper. And the sound of her voice was a sweet, soft melody. It was like she was always half speaking and half singing.

I didn't know how to go about kissing her. It wasn't as easy as running up to her and planting one on her lips, or asking her for a kiss over coffee, or sneak-smooching her while going for her cheek. This kiss had to be planned meticulously. I had a few ideas running around in my head—playing guitar for her in the moonlight, sitting outdoors on a cold night so she'd snuggle next to me for warmth, sharing a milk shake with one straw. Problem was, she barely even knew my name. We had said hello a few times entering or leaving class but had never really even had a conversation.

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.