No Land's Man (11 page)

So it was ironic that after twenty years of living in this country, during which time he ran several failed business ventures including an import-export business, an auto paint shop, and a multilevel marketing business, my father found himself having to use the English language as his primary tool when he took a job as a customer service rep. He used to joke that he would be perfect for the
job: After living with my mother for more than three decades he had become an expert at listening to people complain. Truthfully, it was the most relaxed he had been in many years. He seemed glad to be away from the expectations and stress of owning a business, and he was content to be a voice on the other end of the telephone, a problem solver. He had never really had a penchant for business; his talents would have been far better suited to being a doctor, or a mechanic, a plumber, or even a musician. He actually taught himself how to play the harmonium and many times when I was in high school he would sit on the floor in the evenings, shirtless, his tanned belly hanging over his shorts like some kind of Florida Buddha and play tunes from old Bollywood classics. He was a pretty good singer and if it had not been for years of smoking when he was a young man, he would have perhaps kept the sharp pitch of his melodic voice.

When he was not singing, he was working in the garage, fixing the car, or cooking. Often happy to step up when my mother was too tired to cook, he would whip up some sub-continental concoction that was both mouth-and nose-watering. My father loved spicy food; he would in fact often eat raw chili peppers. Not swallow them whole, so as to avoid the burn, but actually bite into them and masticate them to mush.

At Verizon, my father worked in a small cubicle where he took about thirty to forty calls per shift. When the call that would be his last came in, it was halfway through his shift and it began like every other call: with someone upset that they were being overcharged, or someone claiming they never made any calls to Maine, or someone whose call kept getting dropped, or someone not understanding what the extra charges on their bill were for, or someone wanting to talk to
a supervisor, or someone claiming their five-year-old had made these calls by accident, or that their teenager had visited those websites without permission. Whatever the complaint, the customer service representative’s job was to stay calm and problem-solve. Periodically the supervisors would listen in on random calls, so you never knew when you were being evaluated.

This caller’s name was Carl, and he was already upset that he had been kept on hold for as long as he had. My father apologized for the wait, to which Carl informed him he had to get to work and didn’t have time to be sitting here dealing with this shit. My father said he understood and asked Carl for his account number, however, Carl didn’t seem to understand.

“Can I have your account number?” my father repeated.

“I can’t understand what you are saying,” said Carl.

My father attempted to speak more slowly, but it didn’t help.

“I’m sorry,” Carl interrupted, “Your accent. I can’t understand your accent. Look, I don’t have time for this. Honestly, why can’t Verizon hire people who can speak English?”

“I am speaking English,” my father said, “and I need to know your account number.”

“What is your name?” Carl inquired.

“My name is Hakim.”

“Shit,” said Carl, “have I been transferred to someone in India or Pakistan or some Arab country? I can’t understand what you are saying and honestly I don’t have time for this. I have called three times about this and I just need to get this bullshit resolved. I didn’t make any calls to Palo Alto, wherever the fuck that is. I keep getting these charges on my account and I just want to talk to someone who I can understand, someone in my own fucking country, someone
who I can trust, someone like me, someone who is an American. Now can I please talk to an American?”

“I am in America,” my father replied, “I am in Tampa, Florida, and you can trust me. I work for Verizon and I can deal with your problem.”

“Well, I don’t care where you are and honestly I don’t mean to say I can’t trust you. I apologize. I’m very frustrated and I really just want to talk to someone else. Not to be rude but can you please just transfer me to someone who speaks English?”

“I do speak English,” my father answered. “You are assuming I am a foreigner, because I have an accent, but I am an American just like you.”

“You don’t know what I am assuming,” came the reply, fast and furious. “Now I didn’t want to be rude to you, but here’s what
you
can assume. Assume my son died in Iraq, killed by one of your people. Assume that I work for the FBI and I can have you sent back to wherever you came from before you can say ‘camel shit.’ Assume I am the fucking president of the United States and I want to exercise my right in the land of the free to speak to someone I can understand. Am I making myself clear?”

There was a moment of silence as my father stared into his reflection on his computer screen.

“Hello? Hello?” Carl repeated on the other end of the line.

“No problem,” my father finally responded. “Let me see what I can do.”

“Thank you” said Carl. “I appreciate that, I just really need to get this resolved.”

Objectively, it was a perfectly reasonable request, my father thought, one that could have been easily rectified. He looked up from
his computer at the other operators smiling and conversing with customers. He could see Joan, the young woman who was working her way through college, and Mike the middle-aged dad who had been laid off from his job selling insurance. They were typical Americans, who could have handled this call with aplomb. There was also Barry the supervisor. He could hand the call to Barry—that would be the procedural thing to do in a situation like this, he thought. My father smiled, put his headset on, and pressed the button to take Carl off hold.

“Unfortunately, no one else is available to help you, so it’s me or no one,” he said.

Perhaps it was the anonymity of the experience, neither man needing to see the other’s face, that allowed them to throw civility out the window and say what they said in the following five seconds.

“Listen, you lying raghead kabob-smelling shit-for-brains sand nigger,” Carl’s voice came back through the phone line, strong and rattling like machine-gun fire, “I want you to transfer me to your supervisor in the next three seconds or I will fly down to Tampa fucking Florida and kick your shit-stained ass back to the shithole you came from, do you understand?”

That’s when it happened. It was as if one of those chili peppers my father had eaten all those years ago came up through his stomach, through his throat, and out through his mouth. With it, it brought the power of profanity and poetry together in a single moment, like an orgasm thirty years in the making. My father took a breath.

“Shit damn!” he yelled. “Fuck to you!” And he hung up the phone.

Barry, the twenty-something supervisor sitting a few feet away, dropped his headset and came storming out of his office.

“What happened? Why didn’t you transfer the call, Hakim?” he asked. “If a customer is belligerent you just transfer the call to a supervisor, you know the rules. Under no circumstances is it okay to tell a customer to . . . to . . . whatever it is that you even said.”

“I know,” said my father.

“You know we can hear you, Hakim,” explained Barry. “Why would you say something like that when we can hear you?”

“He called me dirty names,” said my father.

“Yes, that’s right, he did,” Barry replied, “and that was not right, and we all understand, but under no circumstances, I mean no circumstances are we allowed to swear back at customers. It’s policy. I mean, what would happen if we swore at everyone who called us names?”

“I don’t know,” said my father, “what would happen?”

“We wouldn’t be America’s number-one cell phone provider, Hakim. That’s what would happen.”

My father smiled in agreement. He knew what was coming next, and yet ironically he had not felt this good, this energized in many years.

“You realize this is grounds for termination?” asked the supervisor, trying to sound as authoritative as he could.

“Understood,” said my father, still smiling as he collected his things.

“This is not a laughing matter, Hakim. The caller could place an official complaint. He might even switch to another provider. We might have lost a customer.”

My father stood up and shook his hand.

“Thank you for this wonderful opportunity,” he said.

“We are very sorry that we have to let you go,” Barry replied. “I mean, unfortunately due to this incident I will be unable to give you a positive recommendation.”

“I won’t need one,” said my father. “I am going into retirement.”

“Oh, what will you do?”

“I’m going to grow chili peppers,” said my father. “I’m going to grow hundreds and hundreds of chili peppers. The hottest fucking chili peppers anyone has ever tasted.”

Then he picked up his belongings, walked through the exit doors, and disappeared into the humid Florida night.

T
HE MOST ROMANTIC THING
my parents ever did during my childhood involved urine. I was not there when it actually happened. I was in rehearsal for a play at school, but the story has been told to me many times and has been recounted at many family gatherings over the years. It is the stuff of Mandviwala legend.

Like many South-Asian second-generation children my sister Shabana and I grew up seeing little or no physical affection between my parents. Unlike the parents of my Western friends, who seemed incredibly comfortable with outward displays of affection, pecking each other on the lips or calling each other “Sweetie” and “Honey” and “Darling,” my parents never did any of that. If my father started a sentence with “Darling” or “Sweetie” it meant he was attempting to mitigate the fact that the content of the sentence was probably about to make my mother very angry. There were rarely impromptu flowers, there were never date nights, and if my father ever told my mother she looked beautiful, or she ever told him he looked handsome, it was done in the privacy of their bedroom or they were saying it for the benefit of their Caucasian friends. They were
raised in a culture that valued collective duty over individual desire, in which marriage and family were not a romantic, individualistic venture. Perhaps this is why divorce is generally so infrequent in traditional South Asian homes. The purpose of marriage is not to make you happy or fulfilled—for that there is work, religion, friends, even Bollywood—the purpose is to create family.

There was love between my parents, but the devotion came from commitment, not romance, and love was shown through actions and sacrifice. They each had specific roles. My mother took care of the home and the children while knowing she could run my father’s business better than he could. My father worked and brought home the money while knowing he could cook better than she could. They behaved like partners but rarely like friends. Except for on this particular evening.

Having grown up in a family that spent the majority of its time outside of the Indian subcontinent—we only visited our relatives back home about once every decade—my sister and I did not know very much about our homeland and culture. The only parts of Indian history that we knew about were: Partition, the British Raj, and the story of the Taj Mahal. We knew the names, like every other Indian kid growing up in the West, of those Indians who would be immortalized on India’s version of Mount Rushmore: Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Amitabh Bachan. However, the Indian historical figure we were most fascinated with was not that famous at all: Morarji Desai. In history books he is recorded as the former Indian prime minister who served for a mere two years from 1977 to 1979. But in our minds he loomed large, not for his political career, but because of a strange, and some might consider a dangerous, practice. He drank his own
urine. Not once, by accident, but daily as part of a medicinal regimen that he swore by.

My sister and I first heard about Desai and his urine drinking from one of my uncles when we were visiting our cousins in Bahrain back when Desai was in office. The image of this old man drinking his own urine had completely captured our imagination. It was absurd and disgusting, though perhaps the strangest thing was that, when we told our parents, they were not more appalled.

“Don’t you think it’s disgusting, mom?” I asked.

“Well, beta, many people in India do those kind of things,” she replied. “Who is to say?”

“The man has grown to be very old,” said my father, “so who the hell am I to judge him? To each his own, I suppose.”

Urine-drinking was one of those things that, as an Indian kid, you hope your friends never find out about your culture—bathing in the Ganges and cows in the middle of the highway are already difficult enough to explain to your western friends. So it was soon put aside as a topic of conversation, but my sister and I never forgot.

Many years after Desai was out of office, and after we had moved to America, my sister sat watching television one afternoon in our modest two-bedroom home. The bathroom door was to the right, just visible in her peripheral vision. She heard the toilet flush and soon after my father exited the bathroom with a glass of liquid in his hands. Clear yellow liquid. She looked at my father, puzzled, as he stood watching the television casually drinking his beverage.

“What are you drinking?” she asked.

My father looked at her for a moment, then glanced at the liquid and sighed.

“Do you really want to know?” he replied.

“Yes,” said my sister, becoming ever more curious. She was beginning to suspect something very troubling.

My father sighed again and then uttered the word.

“Urine.”

My sister leapt to her feet.

“What? Are you serious?” she squealed.

“Just calm down,” he said. “It’s not that big a deal, Shab.”

“Not a big deal? Not a big deal? You are drinking your own urine! That is disgusting.”