No Land's Man (2 page)

My path to this awkward and fumbling moment began years earlier. In the summer of 1977, when I was eleven years old, I decided I was going to become an actor. I confided my plans to my mother one day after watching an episode of
Happy Days
, the one where Fonzie tries to be a normal person like Richie Cunningham and fails miserably. I related to Fonzie not because of his cool factor, which he obviously had in abundance, but because his real name was Arthur Fonzarelli, which I knew instinctively, even as a naive eleven-year-old, was a name almost as unusual and uncool as my name, Asif Mandviwala.
²
Even with this liability, Arthur Fonzarelli was still the epitome of coolness. All it took was that observation, along with
a belief that TV acting involved no more than putting on a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to persuade me that Asif Mandviwala was destined to become the Monz.

As I shared my thinking with my mother, she lay back on the couch and applied an ice bag to her forehead. Her eyes closed, she remained very quiet. My mother suffered from recurring migraines, which usually required that I rub Tiger Balm on her forehead just at the moment I was about to go and ride my bike. This particular headache, though, was no doubt brought on by the fact that my friend Sean and I had spent the entire morning driving tanks through the dining room, quite successfully defending our modest three-bedroom bungalow from a river of molten lava, an alien invasion, and three hundred and thirty-two tiny green soldiers. As a warrior returning from battle, and a Monz-to-be, I needed attention from my mother, so migraine be damned, I yelled at the top of my lungs.

“MA! I WANT TO BE AN ACTOR!”

Now, my mother has only ever said two things to me as a child that I didn’t understand. The first was, “Why do you have to go out to play?” and the second was that afternoon, when she sat up, opened her eyes, and while sounding (and some would say even looking) remarkably like Yoda, she uttered the following words: “Omar Sharif–like actor?”

I don’t know what I had hoped for in response, but it certainly wasn’t that. I had never heard of Omar Sharif. I assumed he was someone my parents knew, most likely the son of some other Indian family.

My parents were always comparing my behavior and successes or lack thereof to the behavior and successes of children of other
Indian families we knew. “Sunil doesn’t talk to his mother that way,” they would comment. It was the perfect parental inadequacy monitor that Indian parents could train on their kids whenever they were feeling pretty good about themselves, guaranteed to take the wind out of their sails. If I brought home Bs on my report card, Alpana was certain to bring home As. If I took out the garbage for my mother, I found out that Raj didn’t have to be told, he just did it. If I helped my dad clean the garage, Milan, I was reminded, had cleaned the garage when his parents were on vacation so that it would be a surprise for them when they returned. So naturally I assumed that once again, my mother was resorting to inadequacy tactics by bringing up this overachieving Omar Sharif kid who had no doubt played the flute or recited a poem at some cheesy local Indian community talent contest.

This time, I thought to myself, it’s not going to work. My mother would not inadequate my parade.

“I hate that kid!” I shouted.

My mother just smiled sweetly at me and stroked my hair while my eyes burned from the reeking Tiger Balm she’d smeared across her forehead.

“You don’t know him,” she whispered. “But if you want to be an actor, you should try and be like him.”

“No, Ma, I want to be like the Fonz,” I declared. For emphasis I put my thumbs at right angles and with the deepest, sexiest voice an eleven-year-old boy could muster while wearing red polyester shorts and a turtleneck, I delivered Fonzie’s signature of coolness.

“Heeeeey . . .” I said. It was a long drawn out
hey
just like Fonzie’s. I held it for a good ten seconds, just to the point of possibly needing to use my asthma inhaler if I continued much longer. When
I was done, my mother was at first silent. Then suddenly, she burst into a fit of laughter. Again, that wasn’t the reaction I’d expected from her. I guess I’d hoped she would be impressed, even astonished, by my dead-on Fonzie impersonation. Instead, she couldn’t stop laughing, as if she had never seen anything funnier. I waited for her to collect herself, to dry the tears of laughter that were running down her cheeks, and notice my piqued expression, which she finally did. Taking my face in her hands, she then said something that haunted me for the next several months.

“Omar Sharif is better than Fonz,” she observed knowingly.

What? Had my mother even watched
Happy Days
? No one was better than the Fonz, especially not this stupid Omar Sharif kid. Was she out of her mind?

For the next several months, the name Omar Sharif kept popping up. He seemed to be everywhere, upstaging me and my brand-new determination to be an actor. Between deep breathing exercises, I proudly announced to my asthma doctor that I had decided to become an actor. Before my father could get out the words that were on the tip of his tongue whenever I mentioned my desire to follow in Fonzie’s footsteps—”My son will go to medical school and become a doctor”—my friendly Indian doctor perked up while removing his stethoscope from my chest.

“You want to be an actor, is it?” He asked. “Omar Sharif–like actor?”

Again with this Omar Sharif! Before I even had the chance to stick out my thumbs and impress them both, I was being ushered out the door. I was devastated. Why did everyone think this Omar Sharif kid was so great? Why didn’t my dad and my doctor understand? The bus driver, the woman at the grocery store, my neighbor,
the milkman, even the man who came to inspect our gas meter all seemed to love Omar Sharif.

After hearing about my Fonzie dreams, the gas guy told me the story of how his brother had met Henry Winkler getting out of a taxi in New York. I was riveted by his story until my mother ruined it by interjecting that her son would not be an actor like Henry Winkler, but instead like Omar Sharif. In response, the gas meter inspector almost cracked his skull on the pipes under our sink when he straightened up and declared, “Omar Sharif! I love Omar Sharif!”

Since I was way too young to hire a private investigator, and this was before the internet, there was no way for me to find out on my own who Omar Sharif was. I was afraid to even ask about him, fearing that I might discover he really was as handsome and talented as everyone thought, at which point my jealousy would know no bounds, and my fragile dream of becoming an actor would be forever punctured and deflated. I couldn’t risk that, so instead I comforted myself with fantasies of us confronting each other on the playground, where I would punch him in the nose so hard that he would run home crying. No doubt Omar was fat from stuffing his face with sweets all day, but still arrogant because inexplicably everyone seemed to love him despite his grotesque obesity. One day I would triumph over Omar Sharif.

A few months later, on Christmas Eve, we were at the home of another Indian family, with whom my parents played cards every Sunday. The living room of the tiny house was packed with brown faces, aunts and uncles from four or maybe ten or so different families and their kids, all gathered around one tiny television set. It was time for the main event, the BBC movie of the night. That night, there was an excitement and anticipation in the air that I had not
noticed when we had watched movies together before. The MGM lion roared, and the music began to crescendo. My mother passed around napkins and Indian snacks. I sat in front of the screen sullenly, having been dragged up from the basement, away from Anil’s Formula One race car tracks where for once I’d actually been winning. As the BBC announcer introduced the movie for the evening and announced the next few words, something happened inside my head. It was not unlike when Roy Scheider finally sees the shark on that crowded Long Island beach in the movie
Jaws
, a technique I believe was invented by Spielberg and adopted by my mind’s eye for this momentous occasion. My consciousness dollied backward while the focus zoomed forward as I heard the words “
Dr. Zhivago
, starring Omar Sharif.”

At first I was stunned. I thought I must have misheard, but after the announcer talked a little about the director and the making of the film, I heard it again.
”Dr. Zhivago
, starring Omar Sharif.” Are you kidding me? I thought. You have got to be kidding me! But this was clearly no joke. The minute the movie began I stood up as if I was about to confront Omar Sharif with that long-awaited punch in the nose he so richly deserved. After a few minutes, my vision returned to normal and I watched the film, finally beginning to understand what everyone had been talking about when they said the name Omar Sharif.

That night, as the aunties served up bowls of bhel puri and chaklis and some uncles passed out on the sofa while others stayed up smoking cigars and playing gin rummy on a blanket laid out on the floor, I sat rapt in front of the television. I was not watching a movie called
Dr. Zhivago
, an epic about love, war, and revolution; I was watching my own dream come to life, in the form of a
man whose face looked like no other lead actor I had ever seen in an English-language film. This man was not playing a servant or a savage like in Tarzan movies. He wasn’t Gunga Din or Tonto or a Bedouin. This man was the epitome of a gentleman, albeit a brown gentleman, who spoke smoothly before kissing the beautiful, blonde, white Julie Christie. My mother was right. Omar Sharif was better than Fonz.

Many years later I was a young twenty-something actor who had just arrived in New York City, carrying my Screen Actors Guild card in my back pocket, standing face-to-face with that same brown gentleman who had somehow helped make my own dream possible.

“
Dr. Zhivago
. It changed my life,” I repeated once more.

As I stood there not knowing what more to say, enveloped by the din of a Manhattan rooftop cocktail lounge, Omar Sharif smiled back at me. Nodding in recognition, almost familiarly, he leaned in to me and whispered, “Really? Mine, too.”

2
. My parents named me Asif, which unbeknownst to them at the time, means “sorry” in Arabic. I lived with this apology of a name until my mother finally discovered that if you just add an extra “a,” slightly changing the pronunciation, it becomes “the chaos of a big wind.”

I
WAS NINE YEARS OLD WHEN
I
STARTED
at the Rose Bank School for Boys and Girls, nestled deep in the heart of the English countryside. I mostly remember being there in the autumn, specifically during that particular kind of English autumn that one reads about in James Herriot books like
All Creatures Great and Small
or sees in the background of Merchant/Ivory films. I remember green hills, gray factories, and the sound of golden crispy wafer-like leaves crunching under my feet as I walked to school.

We were all dressed identically in maroon blazers and emblemed caps, gray shorts, and neatly-polished brown or black shoes. As we carried our shiny leather satchels filled with schoolbooks and homework for Latin, French, maths, and science up the school driveway, it was clear to anyone who saw us that we were England’s future. We would gather every morning for assembly, during which our high-pitched, well-behaved voices would rise angelically over the Pennine hills and float through the crisp North Yorkshire air as we sang our hymns.

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam
,

to shine for him each daaaaay
,

In every way try to pleeeease him
,

at home, at school, at plaaaaaay
.

Being groomed for grammar school, we were mostly the children of bankers, lawyers, and doctors, all benefitting from the upper-middle-class privileges of private school. We imagined ourselves to be Wendy and Michael before they were visited by the infamous shadow of Peter Pan. We devoured Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. We watched
Black Beauty
and
Blue Peter
on television. We ate cheese on toast and chased each other around at recess playing British bulldogs charge.
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However, as much as we may have dressed alike, talked alike, and played the same games, I am pretty sure I was the only student at Rose Bank School for Boys and Girls whose parents were shopkeepers and whose nickname was “Curry Pot.” Due to my strict fish-and-chips upbringing, I had never actually seen a curry pot, and to be honest, I didn’t even know if there was such a thing. If it did exist I imagined it must look a great deal like a chubby nineyear-old Indian boy. One who couldn’t play football, always came home with a bloody nose on Fridays (courtesy of Mark Delancy), and once during arithmetic (much to the amusement of the entire class) had become tongue-tied and crumbled under the pressure of asking Judy Seaver if he could simply borrow her pencil.

There were many good reasons for me to be nervous around Judy Seaver. First of all, she was the most beautiful girl in our school . . . and maybe the entire world. Second, whereas I was “Curry Pot,” Judy was “Maid Marian.” Third, back when I was eight and Judy was eight and three-quarters I had embarrassed myself by making an attempt to engage her in conversation, emboldened by the fact that I was convinced she had smiled at me. I was wrong. Me rambling like an idiot to the back of Judy Seaver’s head was the sum
total of our relationship, until the autumn of 1975, when something remarkable happened.

Rose Bank School for Boys and Girls was a seriously atypical small English private school run by Mr. and Mrs. Davis, an always grumpy and slightly loony husband-and-wife teaching team. The school actually existed inside their three-story home. Educating a total of about thirty students from ages five to eleven, the couple lived upstairs while classes were conducted downstairs in their living room and parlor, perfectly furnished with desks and chalkboards. The backyard doubled as our playground, morning assembly was held in the piano room, which doubled as the cafeteria, and P.E. was down in the cellar.