Yes, My Accent Is Real (26 page)

Except I couldn't stop thinking,
I've met the woman I want to marry.

My friends wouldn't need to wait long to meet her. Just a few hours after she arrived in LA, the entire cast of
The Big Bang Theory
was invited to go to dinner at the home of the president of Warner Bros. His dinner parties also included a movie screening, and we were subjected to Charlie Kaufman's film
Synecdoche, New York
, a four-hour art-house saga as difficult to watch as it is to pronounce. It's not
exactly the perfect date film, especially after a twenty-two-hour flight.

So is this where the wheels came off? Is this where it all unraveled? Please. She's
Miss India
—she's used to being an ambassador of the country, and the woman carries herself with grace and class. More than that, though, she was
kind.
That's an underrated trait. Whenever a friend asks me for advice about someone they're dating, my first question to them isn't “Do they make you laugh?” (the usual question) but instead, “Are they kind?” When you're enamored with someone, you'll find them funny no matter what. But are they kind? How do they treat strangers? How do they speak to the doorman or the waiter?

I just
knew.
We didn't have a serious DTR (Define the Relationship) conversation where we formally established that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We didn't need to clarify that we were monogamous. It just happened.

But what about that 8,490.62-mile distance between us? (I did the math.)

We had one simple tool: the phone. It doesn't get enough credit as a means of courtship.

We talked every day. Video chats? Facebook, Skype, Snapchat? Nope, they're the worst. When I saw her face on a computer screen, she became somehow
there but not really there
, and then I became shy, awkward, and instead of the deeper conversations, I'd cower behind small talk and self-conscious, nonsensical yammering. When I couldn't see her face, it freed us to speak openly and explore our innermost thoughts. We fell in love on the phone.

I don't think I would have found Neha if I hadn't been willing to risk failure. It would have been easy to play it safe and say that
she was Out of My League, that we lived in different worlds and had too much ocean between us.

But you can't find love if you're not willing to lose it. You can't find happiness if you're not willing to risk being sad. And you can't find the love of your life without risking breaking your heart.

Dive in.

I
. Helpful hint: Here's a cliché that happens to be true. Girls love it when you buy champagne.

II
. Fun fact: later, she did ask me if she could borrow “that pretty sweater” I'd worn on our first date.

RAISING A PUPPY MAKES ME
not want to have children. IS that bad? With babies, it's
not even so much the constant waking up at night, or the free-floating anxiety that your kid has just eaten something forbidden, or that he will choke on one of his falling-out baby teeth. It's really just the all-consuming, aching fear that I'm not capable of taking care of someone who is absolutely dependent on me in every way. What if I fail? What if he does choke on a pebble? What if I forget to feed him and he starves to death? Or, honestly, how long will I have to continue picking up his monster shits?
^I
Maybe that is the real reason why I don't want children: so that I don't have to touch another person's poop for the rest of my life.

I
. My dog shits like a monster. Not only the size of his poop, but the amount of times he goes. If I don't pick up his droppings from the backyard for, say, two days, I end up picking up sixteen shits. SIXTEEN SHITS. Do the math. On the bright side, how he nourishes the garden with his natural fertilizer.

MY WEDDING WAS JUST LIKE
every other wedding. One
thousand guests over a six-day period. There were people at my wedding that I didn't even know. Everyone was apparently my cousin. Strangers would pull me in for a hug and say, “Oh, you don't remember me? I was just a baby when you left India!”

We planned the whole thing in six months. We had to. Neha and I were engaged in June, and we wanted to get married in the winter in India. It's too hot in the summer, and instead of waiting for an entire year and a half, we decided on the coming December. Also when I say, “We planned the wedding,” of course, like every groom, I mean “She planned the wedding.” Neha went back to India for the entire six months and was the general of a wedding-planning army that included colonels like our parents, captains like our aunts and uncles and cousins, and countless hardworking lieutenants. (I didn't even make rank.) One of my older aunts was in charge of the flowers. A cousin was in charge of hotels. We had no wedding planner. What's the point? We had an army of a hundred and fifty family members standing by and ready to help in any way needed.

My job? Stay in America and serve as mediator between the various parties involved. Which basically means that I had no idea what was going on.

After a day of shooting
Big Bang
, I would answer phone calls from Neha and from my mother, who would both say things like, “Your auntie isn't listening. What she doesn't grasp about the centerpieces is that—”

“Yes, Mom, I understand . . .” or “Yeah, I hear you, baby . . .” I would say, being as supportive as I could, and then drink myself to sleep.

Six months later it was time to hop onto the flight to India for my wedding week, and I really didn't have a clue what to expect. In some ways, I was just a guest at an incredibly elaborate family event.

Here we go.

When I landed in India and stepped up to the immigration line, I saw my brother
inside
the airport waving me over to the special diplomat line. He was somehow not only inside the airport but also
at the immigration desk
. He had convinced the officials to let me skip the line for immigration by waving around some special handwritten note from India's vice president (
apparently
). He also gave an emotional speech to the duty-free manager to allow us to buy more than our allotted quota of booze. “It's my brother's wedding, and he's got a rare terminal disease so this is our last time together. . . .” Once outside, balancing the copious bottles of scotch, I was greeted by Neha and twenty-five cousins (not an exaggeration), who gave me a pointy hat and sunglasses that said “Groom.” They popped bottles of champagne, dousing me with the bubbles and lit firecrackers, right there in the airport parking lot.

“To the groom!!!!”

A little jet-lagged,
buzzed from the champagne, and only a little worried that we might get arrested before the wedding, I drank in the experience and floated back to my family home, with Neha beside me. When we turned onto my street I could see a faint glow of illumination coming from the direction of the house, and as we grew closer I saw that the entire house was covered by a yellow and green and orange tent that looked like Cirque du Soleil, and a thousand shiny lightbulbs that hung from the balcony all the way to the ground. Everything smelled like flowers. Mom had prepared some butter chicken, we broke into the fourteen bottles of Scotch we had purchased at duty-free, and I realized that this massive homecoming—with lights and the food and my cousins and closest friends and Neha—was just a small taste of what was to come.

I woke up in a fog of jet lag to a loud, incessant clapping sound coming from the front door. It sounded like the opposite of applause, more like one of those toy monkeys with the cymbals that you wind up and they bang their hands together for hours. I staggered toward our front door and peeked outside. There I saw a crowd of eunuchs creating a ruckus. I hid behind a frosted windowpane and watched the scene unfold. In New Delhi, every neighborhood has a group of eunuchs called
hijra
s, who, according to tradition, show up before the wedding to bless the bride and groom. Except this “blessing” isn't exactly free; you have to
pay
them to go away, and if you refuse to give them cash, you not only don't get a blessing,
they will plague your wedding with a curse. We had known this particular band of
hijra
s for years. They're friendly neighbors. It was a custom to get their blessing, and I didn't want to start the week with the
hijra
curse.

“Bring out the groom!” I heard them chanting.

“Shhhh! The groom is sleeping!” said a cousin, ever protective.

CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!

“Bring out the groom!”

“Come back later!” hissed my cousin.

CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!

Then I heard my mother negotiating a price for their blessing, and six hundred dollars later they did a little dance and gave their blessing for Neha and me. (Therefore, if anything bad were ever to happen between us, I'll blame the gang of neighborhood eunuchs.)

That crisis resolved, I shook off my jet lag and jumped into my actual responsibilities, which were to make sure that all my guests from America, about thirty-five of them, were taken care of, had hotels, and knew the basics of how to get around. India can be a shock to the senses. If you're a first-time visitor it's hard to process the number of people, the endless colors, the exotic smells—it really does feel like a different planet—so I wanted to be there to help everyone ease in.

I guided my guests to the first official function of the wedding, a small cocktail party at my parents' house. When I say “guided,” I mean I told them to wash up, get over their jet lag, and get on the bus that would be waiting outside their hotel at exactly 8 p.m. It was like herding cats, if cats were your closest friends whom you'd invited to your wedding. The cocktail party was designed to be the calm before the storm. We only invited our inner family,
closest friends, and guests from out of town. Three hundred people.

Neha looked gorgeous that night (and every night). She was dressed to the nines in a gold shirt, blue suede pants, and high heels—she looked like a goddess. I, on the other hand, looked like I hadn't slept in thirty-six hours, and I had one of those beneath-the-skin pimples that I covered with makeup. (Yes, MAKEUP. Get used to it.) Every time I hugged someone, I left a small makeup smear on the clothes of the hug recipient.

I witnessed the converging of all my worlds—a mix of childhood friends, adult friends, many, many cousins, aunts, uncles, and all my friends from America. I was so high in that moment. But it wasn't from the alcohol. I had drink after drink but I never felt drunk; instead I felt a
clarity
about how lucky I was to be with so many loved ones. Once the party dwindled down, around 3 a.m., and I had kissed Neha good night—as per custom, she was staying at her parents' house for the week—the house became peaceful and quiet. I sat with my dad and my brother at the dining table. It felt like the years of old. It felt like nothing had changed.

My father took a deep breath. “Isn't this wonderful? Look at this house. Feel the energy. Feel the joy.”

I looked around the house. Old photographs of my grandparents, our first family trip to Paris, me in a ninja costume. I sat on my trusted old rickety chair. It had begun to feel the weight of my bum after thirty years of sitting in the same spot.

“This is a great moment for both our families,” my dad said. “You are a great son to us, and it gives us pride and joy that you have found a great woman, and the two of you will make a great life and family. We are very proud of you.”

I had known that he was happy
for me
, of course, but I hadn't thought about how it truly made
my parents
happy as well. Their hard work had paid off. In Indian culture, when you are a father or mother, there's real pressure from society to get your children to marry. It's something you think about from the day your child is born. Yes, my marriage to Neha was a culmination of my dream, but it was also a culmination of my parents' dream, too, in ways that I was now beginning to understand.

The next day we took things up a notch. On the agenda was the Sangeet. The word
Sangeet
translates to “song and dance,” and it was a party thrown by my parents in a beautiful large banquet hall.
Six hundred
people. Neha's best friend, a fashion designer,
^I
had crafted all these lovely clothes for me, and for this particular function I wore a maroon
sherwani
^II
and looked like a Persian prince. Though I felt like an Indian one.

As our friends began to enter this massive banquet hall, without any warning I had to take a legendary poop. It was one of those that just come out of nowhere. As the guests filed inside and expected to chitchat with the groom, I was stuck on the toilet for what seemed like an eternity. I now think all the excitement, anticipation, and anxiety were being released from me. After the epic battle in the toilet, I raced back to the hall.

“Welcome to the party, sir! Would you like some champagne?” one of the waiters asked me.

A lot
of
people accepted the champagne. My father had the idea of offering everyone a glass of champagne as soon as they arrived. Fun and festive, right? Yes. Except what he had forgotten is that when people start with champagne and then switch to liquor, they get real sloppy, real quick. So this soon became the Shitfaced Family Party. Things began to turn wild, and soon some of my cousins were insisting that the bartenders pass around shots to all the guests. The shot of choice, a “nuclear burn,” was a hue of neon blue and green and tasted like vodka and sugar and the faintly chemical aftertaste of food coloring. They were being consumed by the hundreds, nay, the thousands.