No Land's Man (7 page)

“I’m an American cowboy,” the boy said in his thick Northern English accent. “Like on the telly. I want to be a cowboy on the telly when I grow up, but my Mum says I can’t.”

“Well maybe she will change her mind,” I said. She heard me. I knew that she heard me, but still she didn’t meet my eyes.

“Have you ever been on the telly, mister?” he asked, grinning from ear to ear.

I stared at him. I had two paths in front of me at this moment. I could lie and deny being on television whereupon, as soon as he was bored, my conversation with this little man would come to an end. Or I could tell him the truth, that I had indeed appeared on “the telly.” This would peak his interest and perhaps turn me into something of a hero, which would then no doubt capture the imagination of his mother and perhaps even make her notice me.

“Yes, I have,” I replied. No sooner had the words escaped my lips than a shriek of hysterical proportions whistled through the cabin of the train like an alarm. Every passenger was jolted awake, and I had become not only the agitator of said shriek, but also an accomplice to this little boy.

Worst of all, I knew that she knew that I was attempting to flirt with her, pathetically, through her son. A woman who I clearly would have had as much success with if she had been a Hasidim or Amish. What on earth did I hope to achieve? I was a young, relatively handsome single male, who could be flirting with any number of attractive single women if I wanted to, so why? Why the hijab wearing Muslim girl with the annoying kid? It was a good question, one I had no answer for, but it was clear I wanted more than her attention. Deep down, I wanted to break her. I wanted her to want me. I fantasized about her losing control of her values, her tradition her culture, her faith; I fantasized that not only her clothes but her soul would come undone. I saw her hijab as simply a challenge to overcome on the way to discovering her hidden sexuality. I wanted to touch her breasts, her legs, her skin. I wanted to conquer her and make her mine.

The boy turned to his mother and screamed, “Mum, that man is on the telly!”

She simply pulled a handkerchief from her purse and wiped his nose.

The boy’s big brown eyes locked on me again while his mother put the snot-stained tissue in her bag and pulled out a magazine, some celebrity rag that tracked the torrid goings on of the Beckhams or the Royal Family. I was surprised. In spite of appearances, we were not that different. Like me, she had grown up in the west. Like me, she was seduced by celebrity and pop culture. In the next instant, almost as if he could read my mind, the boy stepped across the aisle and planted himself next to me. He started asking questions in rapid fire.

“Are you from America, mister?”

“What’s it like on the telly?”

“Are you famous?”

“Are you a movie star?”

“Are you from Hollywood?”

“Do you like my gun?”

Again, I found myself trying to catch his mother’s eye, but her face was frozen, now staring into the magazine.

“New York,” I said.

“And are you on the telly in New York?” he asked

“Sometimes,” I said.

“My mum doesn’t watch the telly,” he said. “She hates the telly. She says it’s full of lies.”

I smiled at her and, just for a moment, she looked up and held my gaze. It was like the sun peeking out from behind a blanket of clouds, but I knew it was a signal. A recognition of the vast insurmountable divide that separated us. A divide called East and West, Tradition and Modernity, Islam and America. Or perhaps she was
just letting me know that she was way out of my league and in spite of my American charm, my celebrity, my seeming playfulness with her son, I could in no way seduce her. She would never accept me because she saw my ultimate intentions as self serving, shameful, and driven by my ego. That I possessed no sacredness, no tradition, no faith. In her gaze I saw her perception of me as a soul that had drifted, seduced by a false world, like the one in the pages of her magazine. In her mind I must have seemed a child, much like her own son, raised on a diet of celebrity, violence, and processed foods, brandishing my American weapon of arrogance and superiority.

As we finally arrived at our destination, the conductor’s thickly accented voice blared over the intercom, and the red brick station walls took the place of the fields and meadows of the Yorkshire countryside. She grabbed her son with one hand and luggage with the other and made her way through the crowd of passengers exiting the train. Behind her the magazine slipped from the polyester seat and landed atop her son’s forgotten cowboy hat. As I rose from my seat to retrieve my luggage from the overhead bin, I turned and looked out the window to see if I could catch one final glimpse of them, but they were gone. Instead, I found myself staring at a cold blue-and-white sign that read “Welcome to Bradford.”

I
N
1982,
MY FATHER, MY MOTHER,
my sister, and I heeded Ronald Reagan’s message to the world that it was morning again in America. We had very little idea what that meant, though we assumed that a morning in America would be much nicer than a dreary afternoon in the north of England, so we came. We replaced our red brick semi-detached bungalow with a chimney for a lime-green stucco house with a swimming pool. We replaced our sweaters and boots with shorts and flip-flops. We replaced the sound of magpies with the sound of tropical insects, and we came to the great state of Florida to embrace the new sunrise called the 1980s.

Soon after arriving, I found myself a junior in an all-American high school in the middle of Tampa. I quickly discovered that compared to my British boarding school, this new school was like a vacation. There was no official school uniform to speak of unless you included cut-off shorts, T-shirts, and a mullet. I also noticed that there seemed to be a casual informality between teachers and students. American public school students didn’t wait to speak until they were spoken to, and teachers and students seemed to even
share laughter and inside jokes, which was frankly unnerving for me, having come from a school where detention was the punishment in store for anyone who dared to speak before raising one’s hand or being spoken to.

The school was clearly divided into two major groups: athletes and everyone else. The athletes wielded so much power over the goings-on at the school that occasionally actual classes would be cancelled so students could congregate at the football field to watch a pep rally for the upcoming game. Back in England I knew three students who had had been expelled for going to see a Leeds United soccer game during the school day; here it seemed this kind of behavior was mandated by the school itself. Students painted their faces and cheered and screamed for their players, while cheerleaders performed impressive acrobatics, all culminating in a kind of warrior-nation cry for blood and battle against an opposing school.

The school also had another major division: race. This divide was clearest in the lunchroom cafeteria where, with an occasional exception, white students sat with white students, black students sat with black students, Hispanics sat with Hispanics, and the two East Asian students sat with the math teacher.

I stepped into this world not knowing where to sit. Since having moved from a city with one of the largest South Asian populations in Europe to Tampa, a city that had maybe one Indian restaurant, I may as well have been the man who fell to Earth.

I realized I needed my own cafeteria clan-mate, so I tried to befriend the easiest and most familiar target: the one other Indian student in my entire high school. He was in the school band and on the baseball team, so let’s just say he was quite popular. The first time I heard him speak, however, I couldn’t help but be amused that he
pronounced his name with a distinct southern drawl. Dilip (d’-lip) had become Dee-leap. I had never heard the Americanization of an Indian name before and even today, many years later, I find it disconcerting when I hear second-generation South Asians pronounce their own names incorrectly. The hard T of Sheetal or Namita is softened and rolls away to sound less ethnic. The clipped vowel of Deepak (dee-puk) becomes Deepaaak, Akbar (uk-bur) becomes Aaakbaaaar. I once even heard of a Pakistani kid named Aurungzeb (ar-ung-zeb) who was named after the great Moghul Emperor of the same name, but in order to avoid pronunciation mishaps, he changed his name to Orange. I don’t even know how you get from Aurungzeb to Orange unless you are a seven-year-old, but nevertheless the image of an emperor who turned himself into an orange in order to be accepted has always resonated with me on a very deep level.

My first conversations with Dilip were awkward, as he always seemed to be looking past me, waiting for one of his friends to rescue him. He had a point, since other than the fact that our parents were born in the same country, we really had very little in common. He was all-American and I was mostly English, and our interactions had the distinct feeling of two brown kids forced to play together because their parents told them they had to be friends. It soon became clear that he saw me as a social liability. After a week or so he stopped acknowledging me in the hallway when he walked by with his baseball buddies. This didn’t surprise me—rejection of one’s own kind in favor of the dominant culture was a survival technique that I had seen before.

A few years before in England, a Sikh student had joined our school. One day out on the quad the white kids were taunting me with the word Paki, a common slur toward Indians or Pakistanis.
The Sikh boy, himself technically a Paki, was also standing within taunting distance. He watched as the English kids shoved and pushed me as I walked to class, one of them trying to trip me, another throwing a soccer ball at the back of my head. In that moment he made a strategic decision. At the time it was confusing, but in retrospect I give him credit for it. He ran over to me, grabbed me by my shirt, looked at the English kids, and then landed his fist right into the side of my face. The English schoolboys cheered as he engaged his boots and his elbows so that I fell to the ground and went fetal until the blows got weaker and the cheers grew stronger and he was eventually hoisted away as their hero. Brilliant. From that day on, unlike me, no one ever picked a fight with him or dared call him Paki.

I had even done it myself. When I was ten years old my cousin Munir came to visit us in England from Bahrain, where his family lived. I despised him. I didn’t want to be associated with him or his accent. I treated the poor kid with contempt, making fun of him among my friends. I didn’t know why at the time, I just didn’t like him. In retrospect I realized I was jealous. Munir seemed to be okay with the person he was. He was okay with his accent, he was okay with his fashion sense, he was not trying to fit in, not trying to be accepted by anyone. He was just a kid and he didn’t think much about it. It was baffling to me that he had not learned something that I had learned very early on: The world is a much easier, friendlier place when white people like you.

Munir didn’t know this for two reasons. First, he was brought up in a world where everyone looked like him. Second, his family was wealthy. His father (my uncle) had made quite a fortune as a successful businessman. While my father stood behind the counter
of his own store, Munir’s father employed ten men like my father standing behind the counters of many stores. I admired Munir for his self-confidence, which I expressed by punching him in the mouth when I found that he had decided to borrow my five-speed British-made VMX bicycle.

So, following my failure to become friends with Dilip, I found myself without an ally or a group that I could call my own in this new American petri dish. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before I got involved with the wrong crowd: The Actors.

My mother had suggested that I take a course that hadn’t been offered in my British school. She had spotted acting on a list of what American high schools call “electives.” Knowing that I’d enjoyed being part of a children’s theater group back in England, she suggested that I sign up. I did, and in doing so I found my true cafeteria clan-mates.

I became one of the drama kids, those histrionic thespians, comedians, tech nerds, and attention-seeking dorks, drawn to the limelight of the high school auditorium. We were all shapes and sizes and had varying degrees of talent, but drama class was not about talent, it was about celebrating our individual uniqueness amid a high school culture of conformity. We were residents of the island of misfit toys, a place where you could exchange the skin you came in for the possibility of becoming anything and anyone. The drama department did manage to put on a couple of plays each year, which we all got to participate in one way or another, but classes mostly consisted of games and improvisation exercises. It was a sanctuary of play and freedom where there was no right or wrong way to be.

Unlike the well-travelled offspring of business tycoons and diplomats back in boarding school, the drama kids I befriended
were mostly middle-class American kids who hadn’t met many Indian people before. And even fewer like me with a thick English accent, which is probably why during improvisations I often ended up playing either an alien or an English lord, or an alien who happened to also be an English lord. I even developed my own go-to character: a half-lizard, half-human with a funny walk that made everyone laugh and let me finally feel accepted in this foreign land. Perhaps I’d been too quick to judge poor Aurungzeb.

Truth be told, I was wholeheartedly accepted by my new drama buddies, and except for my accent and the occasional question about life in England, there was not a whole lot of conversation about my background pre-Florida. It didn’t seem to matter that I was Indian or English or Muslim because like everyone else it was assumed that eventually, I would be readily absorbed into the tapestry that is Americana.

The difference between being an Indian immigrant in England and in America was that in England, despite (or perhaps due to) the long history between the two cultures, no matter what I did to be accepted, I was never considered truly British. In fact, as far I can tell, the British are mostly mistrusting of foreigners. Perhaps it’s understandable, after defending their tiny island from invasion again and again for thousands of years. The irony about America is that even with all the flag waving and overt nationalism, I found the opposite to be true. Generally speaking, Americans are open, accepting, and un-cynical people who take to new things quickly and easily. The downside of this seems to be that in a country made up almost entirely of immigrants, there is little curiosity about other cultures. Perhaps because the American identity has been so tied
to self-sufficiency and exceptionalism, many Americans assume that everyone would be American, if they had the choice, surely.