No Land's Man (18 page)

“Happy New Year! How was the brownie?” she asked.

“Horrible,” I said. “I’ve been smiling for the last three hours.”

She looked confused; I told her I would explain later. I wanted to meet Brooke and thank her for inviting me. Suddenly, there she was, standing by the buffet speaking to a friend. Young Aasif started dragging me over to her, saying, “Letsgoletsgo!” But this time I told him to shut up and sit down; the grown-ups were talking.

I excused myself and walked across the apartment toward her. She had not made eye contact with me yet, but just like that night many years ago at the NBC upfronts event I was sure that she would
look up in the next moment and wave me over. Only this time it would not be about getting her a glass of wine.

Then the buzzer rang.

I stopped in my tracks. I turned and saw Brooke’s husband greeting a hodgepodge motley crew of sweaty, stoned, drunk brown people as they tumbled into the apartment, laughing and singing, wearing New Year’s Eve hats and blowing noisemakers. My friends had arrived.

I turned and marched toward them to warn them that perhaps we had miscalculated the tone of this party and that maybe they should in some way bring it down a notch or two, but I was too late. My friends raided the buffet table, stuffing mini quiches in their mouths and grabbing handfuls of chocolate truffles and sushi. One even dared to raid Brooke herself, taking selfies with her and telling her what a huge fan he was of her work, at a decibel level that ensured the rest of her guests knew it as well.

I stood paralyzed in the middle of the floor, wanting to talk to Brooke but also wanting to disappear, as what seemed like a drunken Bollywood wedding party invaded this mostly Caucasian, patrician cocktail reception. I had a dreadful premonition that I had made a terrible mistake by coming here and was gripped with an unsettling conspicuousness that made me retreat toward the door. Food was being eaten, pictures were being taken, loudness and drunkenness abounded until after a few minutes Carol appeared by my side with an apologetic expression.

“Umm . . . I’m sorry, this might have been a bad idea,” she began. “Brooke doesn’t know these people and she doesn’t feel comfortable having all these strangers in her home. She told me to tell you that you are welcome to stay, but your friends, unfortunately . . .”

“I completely understand,” I said, cutting her off. I looked at Brooke as she stood by the buffet table in mid-conversation and I looked at my friends, who were stuffing their faces with cupcakes.

“But I want to stay,” I heard young Aasif say. “I don’t want to leave. It’s Brooke Shields! The girl on your wall, remember? And she invited you to her house. We’ve arrived.”

I looked between the elegant Brooke and my disheveled friends.

Suddenly I felt the sting of a half-eaten sandwich hit me on the side of the face. With it came a familiar voice that I had not heard in many years.

“Yeah, get out Monday-wala,” Brian called to me from across the room as he stepped out from behind the curtains. “You and your curry-breathing friends don’t belong here. Pathetic little Monday-wala, still getting chased away and still can’t get the girl. Boo-hoo.”

“Shut up, you wanker!” I heard young Aasif scream, as he charged at Brian from across the room and leapt on him, throwing him against the buffet table. I had a momentary heart attack as I watched the two of them careen around the living room, punching and kicking each other until it became clear to me that no one else was seeing what I was seeing. Just as I vowed that I would never eat another pot brownie ever again, Carol suddenly came back into focus.

“Aasif,” she said, “did you hear me? I’m sorry. Your friends need to go.”

“It’s totally cool,” I said calmly, watching the melee no one else could see. “We’re all gonna go.”

I gathered up my friends, in some cases taking stuffed pastries and deviled eggs out of their hands and mouths and ushered us all to the door. As I walked out, I looked over to where Brooke was standing, but she was nowhere to be found. I had an impulse to go
search for her and explain myself, but I didn’t. Instead I stepped into the elevator with my posse and went down to the street.

Unfazed by the experience and still wanting to party, my friends talked about how the night was still young and where we should go next. I walked silently for a few blocks until I saw younger Aasif standing on a street corner. His hair was a mess, his lip was bleeding, he had a black eye and his clothes were torn.

“How’d you do?” I asked him, smiling.

“I kicked his ass,” he said.

“Good for you,” I replied.

“Did you get to talk to Brooke?” he asked.

“No.”

“Bummer,” he said.

“Not really,” I replied putting my arm around him. “Turns out, there was nothing I needed to say.”

I
S THIS
J
ON
S
TEWART FELLOW CRAZY
? How can he hire a guy who doesn’t even know how to do a proper salaam to his parents to be his senior bloody Muslim correspondent?”

“It’s a comedy show, Dad.”

“I hope so,” my father said. “Is he expecting you to be funny?”

“Yes,” I said defensively. “Why is that so hard to believe? I’ve done a lot of comedy. You saw me do street improvisational comedy when I worked at Disney MGM Studios. I was in a very successful sketch comedy group in New York and remember on Broadway when I did
Oklahoma!
? I was hilarious as the peddler.”

“Beta, we loved you in
Oklahoma!,”
my mother chimed in on the other line. “Don’t listen to your father. You were very funny in that. The scenery was amazing. It was incredible. You really felt like you were
in
Oklahoma.”

I sighed.

“Remember this,” my father continued. “If Jon Stewart asks you any questions or your opinion about Islam, don’t you say a word, just have him call your mother, she knows everything.”

“Yes, beta,” agreed my mom. “Just tell him to call me, because you don’t want to say the wrong thing on television and then get your entire family in trouble.”

“Don’t humiliate your entire family!” continued my dad. “Otherwise we will be a laughingstock from here to Mumbai. By the way, congratulations! This is very exciting. We are very proud of you!”

The day that I became the senior Middle East/Muslim/All Things Brown correspondent on
The Daily Show
was just like any other day. Kind of. It began with me sitting in the park with my laptop writing a letter to my ex-girlfriend who I had recently found out was engaged. I had been in a miserable funk about the engagement for about a week, and when I say funk I mean not eating and listening to Ben Harper’s “Another Lonely Day” on an iTunes loop. Sometimes I would talk to friends who would listen to me go on about my pathological inability to truly commit to someone who loved me, which would then launch me into singing Ben Harper’s “Another Lonely Day.” The letter I was writing was incredibly cathartic. It felt deep and meaningful and said all the things I had never said when we were together. It was the kind of letter that I knew my ex would probably skim through and then throw away, because she had not been living in denial for the past year, had actually moved on, and didn’t want to explain to her fiancé why her ex-boyfriend was writing a ten-page letter to her a year after their breakup.

Then my cell phone rang. It was my manager’s assistant.

“The Daily Show
is looking for someone who looks Middle Eastern,” he said. “Do you want to go down and read for them?”

Well, here we go again, I thought to myself. Even though this sounded like it could be some bizarre Homeland Security sting operation, I knew what it really was. This would be no different than that time I was the voice of Saddam Hussein on the David Letterman show or the time I played a tech support agent from Bangalore for Jimmy Kimmel. I knew if I said yes to this, my day would end with me either wearing a fake beard yelling, “Death to America!” or worse still, wearing a turban, sitting on a carpet, and pretending to fly.

Filled with a surprising fortitude and a devil-may-care attitude that was no doubt the direct result of heartbreak, I said, “Tell
The Daily Show
to go fuck themselves.” And hung up the phone.

It rang again a few minutes later.

“Actually, they would like you to come in and read for the role of a correspondent,” my manager’s assistant said when I finally picked up.

I thought about this for a moment. I had watched
The Daily Show
, I was a fan, but even though I had done a lot of comedy, I mostly associated it with stand-up types. I was a real actor, I thought to myself. I had cut my teeth on Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare.
The Daily Show
seemed like the last place I wanted to be.

“Well, I am very sad today,” I said. “I don’t think I can be funny. Perhaps I can go in another day. You see, I found out my ex just got engaged and I am in the middle of writing a heart-wrenching—”

“Sorry,” he interrupted, “I have another call coming in, but they are only seeing people until three today, what time should I tell them you will be there?”

“Two forty-five,” I said.

Three hours later I walked into
The Daily Show
building. After a brief wait I was called in to the studio. Jon Stewart stood up from behind his desk wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, shook my hand, and introduced himself.

“Thanks for coming down,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied. “I’m a big fan of the show.”

“We tape the show in front of a live audience,” he continued, sounding somewhat concerned. “Have you ever performed before a live audience before?”

“I’ve been on Broadway,” I responded, eager to let him know that he was getting prime “actor” rib, not some cheap flank steak.

“Oh, great,” he responded. “Well, let’s do this, then. Just stand on your mark and look into the teleprompter and here we go.”

“Do you want me to do an accent?” I asked.

“No, no,” Jon replied. “We don’t need an accent. I don’t think we need an accent. Just as you are.”

This was something brown actors don’t hear all that often when auditioning for television so I was pleasantly surprised, even though I had been practicing my go-to generic Middle Eastern accent for the last fifteen minutes in the green room. Instead, consummate professional that I am, I thought, “Fuck it, I’m just gonna impersonate Stephen Colbert.” I cocked my eyebrow, assumed a rather arched comic tone and spoke with faux seriousness as I said the words that came up on the teleprompter.

Jon stood up from his desk and turned to me after the audition. He was smiling from ear to ear.

“Welcome to
The Daily Show
!” he said. “Do you have plans this evening? We tape at six.”

That was it. At first I thought I might be part of a weird
Daily Show
gotcha prank, since jobs don’t usually happen like that, and to be fair I spent the next several months in trial mode until they offered me an official contract. But in that moment, just like that, I became the Gupta/Zakaria/Velshi/Amanpour masala on the
Daily Show
smorgasbord, which at that point mostly consisted of white people. More significantly, however, I also brought the halal factor by becoming
The Daily Show
’s ironically named “senior Muslim correspondent.” This was all in spite of the fact that I was a terrible example of a Muslim and knew nothing about the news except what I learned from watching
The Daily Show
. The last thing I had any knowledge of was how to be a “Muslim comedy journalist person.”

I spent the first year on the show convinced that I was the wrong guy for the job and that they would soon discover they had made a terrible mistake. I flashed forward to the end of my career and saw the highlight reel run through my mind:
Aasif Mandvi played more doctors than any other actor in the history of American cinema but the pinnacle of his career came when he was fired by Jon Stewart
.

But after some time I became aware of the fact that people seemed to be responding positively to what I was doing on the show and something started happening that had never happened to me before: I began getting shout-outs on the streets. I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time, so it was mostly liberal Jews, unless I went downtown, where it was NYU students and the occasional hipster wearing a top hat riding a skateboard. This wasn’t so odd in and of itself—it kind of comes with the territory. But then brown people started to recognize me: Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, and Muslims. Muslims began to come up to me
on the street and would say things like, “Thank you for what you are doing,” “Keep it up,” or worse still, “A salaam alaikum.”

My experience with Muslims before this was mostly at my parents’ mosque, where, judged for my spouseless-actor-in-New-York lifestyle, everyone treated me as if I had a bottle of whiskey in my sock and a pig for a best friend. But now, suddenly, Muslims began to treat me as if I was one of their own. They wanted to hug me; they wanted to tell me how using satire to address the issues of the Middle East and the war on terror on
The Daily Show
was oftentimes more effective than the work they were doing through the “Islam Anti-Defamation League.” They also wanted to know if I was married, because they would like to introduce me to their daughter.

It all made me incredibly uncomfortable for two reasons. Firstly, I realized that they thought I was like them and I was not. My relationship with Islam was complicated and contentious. I had taken great delight in arguing with conservative Muslims who would tell me crazy shit like, “Eating pork will make you want to sleep with your mother,” or in provoking imams by telling them that they could learn as much about the human condition by reading Rumi or Shakespeare as they could from reading the Koran. I rarely went to the mosque, I never fasted, and I only prayed
namaaz
on the holy nights because my mom bugged me about it.

The second reason it made me uncomfortable was that I liked it. I liked knowing that what I got to say on the show, even though I didn’t always write it, was having an impact. Not in terms of policy, or to lawmakers, but to Muslims in America. The fact that there was a brown person, openly identified as Muslim, on national television, talking about the relationship between America and the Muslim world from a vastly underrepresented point of view was a big deal
for them. That that brown person happened to be me was absurdly bananas but it started to make me feel, dare I say . . . Muslimy. The whole thing was very unsettling.