No Land's Man (6 page)

“I just want a medium soda,” I said.

“Get the large,” he said.

“I don’t want it.”

“You get the Extra Large Gulp for only thirty-nine cents more.”

“No, I just want the medium.”

“It is only thirty-nine cents more and you get twice as much. We will take the large one.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Damn it, son!” he yelled.

His voice was starting to attract the attention of the other customers in line. I could feel the back of my neck getting flushed with embarrassment.

“When will you become an American?” he continued. “Okay, pour the extra thirty-nine cents-worth into a cup and I will drink it later.”

I turned on him, furious. “See? You’re doing it again. You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“What happened? What did I do? It’s only thirty-nine cents more,” he said. “What is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
me
?” I laughed. “What is wrong with you? When will
you
become an American? An American who lives in the land of plenty but knows how to practice a little moderation and restraint. Someone who doesn’t have so little dignity that they are willing to siphon off a half-liter of soda just to take advantage of a stupid thirty-nine cents saving?”

My father looked at me without saying a word. His face was expressionless for a moment and then slowly he began to smile.

“You think Americans practice moderation and restraint?” he asked.

“Umm . . . yeah,” I nodded, knowing I might have made a strategic error in saying so.

“Are you a bloody idiot?” he asked, his usually high-pitched voice now dropping an octave, giving gravitas to what he was about to tell me.

“Son, this is a country where you can walk into a grocery store and purchase a ‘turducken.’ Have you ever heard of a turducken?”

I shook my head.

“A turducken is a turkey that is stuffed with a duck that is stuffed with a chicken that is stuffed with a sausage. No one except an American would think of eating such a thing. I have never sent a picture of one to your aunt because I am afraid if she knows something like that exists, she will kill herself. Do you get my point?”

His face was deadly serious. I did get it.

“And as far as dignity goes,” he continued, “no one had more dignity than your grandfather, a man who woke up every day and could only afford chai and bread for breakfast, and yet he dressed in a clean starched white shirt and held on to his briefcase and stood with dignity as he hung on to the side of a train on his way to work.”

I stared at the ground for a moment collecting my thoughts. I had been schooled.

Then he put his hand on the back of my shoulder.

“How about we forget the pizza? Instead, in your grandfather’s name, let’s go eat a ridiculously large brunch.”

B
ANG
! Y
OU
’
RE DEAD
!”

The source of this sudden assault was a boy with olive skin, perfect white teeth, and big brown eyes. He lifted his pistol and fired at me with the plastic toy.

“Bang! You’re dead!” he yelled out again. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”

He kept firing, creating a level of imaginary carnage that rivaled the bloodiest video game. He was about seven years old and his banging had disrupted the peace and quiet of every passenger in the railroad car. Most were business men on their way home from meetings at their head offices in London, attempting to read or work as they passed away the two hours and change that it took British Rail to get from London’s King Cross Station to the North of England.

I was among the weary few trying to sleep, still fighting the jet lag that always felt like it lasted two or three months for me when I travel eastwards across the Atlantic. The last thing I needed was to be yelled at by some doe-eyed, dimpled assassin who was both an incredibly cute little bastard and . . . a little bastard. I played dead
and closed my eyes as soon as the shooting started, hoping he would realize he couldn’t kill me any more than he already had and let me rest in peace. No such luck.

The ineffective maternal reprobate responsible for this little devil was a beautiful young Muslim woman. At least her face was beautiful, for she was otherwise covered in a hijab from head to toe. I had seen her and her son earlier on the platform while we waited for the train. Our eyes had met for a brief moment and I had smiled and stepped closer to make a comment about the weather, or train travel, or anything, but it was not to be. As soon as our eyes met she had immediately looked down and away. Humility? Pride perhaps? Or perhaps it was just the natural reaction of a woman, especially a Muslim woman. Looking a strange man in the eyes might be unseemly or even dangerous. Perhaps she was warding off my overly friendly American demeanor that is so often discomforting to Europeans. I couldn’t tell. I knew nothing about her, but she was familiar, a part of a world I had left behind when we moved to America.

She was a grown up version of the daughters of the Pakistani shopkeepers from whom we would buy candy when I was a boy. I recalled the way they would stare at us from their upstairs bedroom windows, watching us play football or cricket on the street below, unable to come down and join the game. Like them, she now sat a few feet away in the seats facing mine, close enough so that our feet might have brushed against each other, and stared out the window at a world passing by. She seemed deep in thought or worry as she stared at the English countryside, or perhaps she was just trying to enjoy a few moments of bliss while her son was otherwise engaged. After a moment, instead of demanding peace and
quiet from her rowdy son, she suggested that he not only continue his rampage, but now do it while sporting a brand new cowboy hat, that she had no doubt purchased from some cheap street vendor in Piccadilly Circus.

Our eyes connected again for a moment as she turned to watch her son. As large and open as they were, they also kept something hidden. She held my gaze for a moment and looked me up and down. I was about to smile, to say something humorous, something that might make her laugh, but in the next moment she looked away again. Damn, she was beautiful. Flawless, like a painting. The fact that I couldn’t stop staring at her, and she knew I couldn’t stop staring at her, was making me well . . . it was pissing me off.

She was young, probably in her late twenties. Too young to have a child that old, I thought.

“Put on your cowboy hat, Ali love,” she said as she handed her son the hat. Her West Yorkshire accent gave away that not only were we both from immigrant Muslim families, we grew up in the same region. I might have still sounded like her had my parents not taken me to America as a teenager where, perhaps due to my penchant toward mimicry, I lost most of my Yorkshire brogue for a distinctly American drawl after just a few short years.

It seemed to me our similarities were limited, however. Though we came from the same part of the world and the same religion, I had risen above the parochial upbringing I felt I had been born into. I prided myself on being an artist and had seen the world. I stared at her now as one would stare at a recreation of a different hominid species in a display at the National History Museum, knowing that there is some root gene that connects both of you, but recognizing that you took very different paths in your evolutionary history.

In the last two decades I had become disillusioned with my relationship to Islam–in truth I had seen the inside of more bars than mosques. I mostly defined prayer as an excuse to ask God for things:

“Please, please, please, Allah, let me get this part. I promise I will give to the poor,” I would say after an audition. “I will pray five times a day if you just make it so they cast me as Islamic terrorist number 3.”

Or whenever I was afraid: “Please, Allah, let that just have been turbulence and not the explosion of an engine,” I would say as I clenched the armrest of my airplane seat.

“Please, Allah, let this HIV test be negative,” I would say after a night of poor decision making and drunken sex. “I promise I will give to the poor and marry a nice Muslim girl and always use a condom from now on.”

I treated the creator of the Universe as my very own personal spiritual Santa Claus, showering me with good fortune if I was a good boy. It felt selfish and dirty and I wanted it to be different but I didn’t know how. The upshot was that I couldn’t live with Islam and I couldn’t live without it so I mostly just ignored it.

I found myself making assumptions about the young Muslim woman, probably because I figured she was making assumptions about me. She was subjugated, I decided, un-liberated, forced by tradition or fear to dress the way she did. Though it did occur to me that I was the one who, as a younger man, had worn Islam as a costume. I remembered a gold pendant that I had worn discreetly around my neck for some time in my twenties. It said Allah in Arabic. It was a gift from some relative and in the times that it caught the attention of my caucasian and/or Judeo Christian friends, I felt like I was subtly expressing some deep truth about my dislocated identity;
a gang sign of sorts that identified with my core culture and religion. This was before Sept 11th when many Americans thought the word “Muslim” referred to a type of cloth. They tried to be respectful.

“That’s beautiful,” they would say. “Is that your name in Indian?”

“No, it says Allah,” I would reply.

“Allah? What’s that mean?”

“It’s the name of God.”

“Which God?” they would ask.

“The Muslim God.”

Then came the comment that I hated the most:

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“I’m not,” I would shoot back, looking down at the pendant and realizing that even I didn’t know why I wore it. Perhaps I simply wanted them to recognize the inherent contradiction I felt inside me all the time. That my seeming similarity to them and their traditions and their culture was as much a costume piece as this pendant was. The question they asked was valid. If I didn’t identify with Islam, then why did I wear a pendant that said Allah around my neck? I suppose it was for the same reason I wore a baseball cap when I knew nothing about baseball.

As I watched the beautiful young mother it became clear that I was the one who struggled to reconcile my identity with the western world around me. She seemed perfectly satisfied to sit on a train and have people assume she was living in the middle ages. Perhaps that’s why I was fascinated with her. She seemed comfortable with who she was and what she believed. The more I studied her the more I knew that it was me, not her, that was weak. I had been blown this way and that my entire life, wearing whatever identity I could in order to be accepted. Perhaps this was why I had chosen
to become an actor. Seeking invisibility and notoriety at the same time is something actors understand. I was always jealous of those people that knew who they were. That knew what they believed and didn’t care who agreed with them or not. Perhaps I was the one that would eventually die out from natural selection, not her. But having said that, she was also just really fucking annoyingly beautiful.

“BANG! BANG!”

He was at it again. He realized that he had not finished the job the first time since my eyes were open and looking in his mother’s direction. This time he snuck up, peeking his tiny face and giant cowboy hat over the seat behind her. I wanted to snatch his stupid pistol and throw it down the aisle in the hope that he would go running after it, but instead I just smiled at him. She noticed me smiling and for a moment I thought I had traversed the divide that separated us. I noticed that I was not smiling at her son but at her, right at her, right at her face, right into her eyes. She did not smile back. Once again, she looked away. “Fuck you!” I thought to myself. There are no points in heaven for not smiling at someone. I stared at her reflection in the window as English trees and cottages and farms hurtled across her perfectly shaped nose, her smooth cheeks and her full lips. A small lock of dark brown hair that should have remained hidden peeked out from the edge of her hijab. That soft brush of hair was incredibly erotic. I turned away, embarrassed at my reaction, and found myself staring into another, smaller set of big brown eyes.

Since he was not going to let me sleep, I decided to engage with the little brown cowboy.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked.

The young boy rolled his eyes and then burst into tiny giggles like his body was being riddled with the very same bullets he had been firing at me.

“No,” he said, going beet red and answering with the kind of tone reserved for adults who ask stupid questions. “No. Duh. I’m only seven.”

“Mum,” he yelled, “that man asked me if I had a girlfriend!”

I was mortified. I felt her eyes shift as she continued to look out of the window. Like a lioness sitting in the grass, seemingly unaware, but completely focused on her cub, she watched my reflection for any signs of misconduct. Hearing my question out loud like that made it sound far more incriminating than was my intention. I could feel other eyes on me. The older woman sitting across the aisle looked up from her book and made note of the potential child molester on the train. The man behind me stirred ever so slightly from his nap and accidentally on purpose kicked the back of my chair as if to say, “Are you a fucking moron? You had him in the palm of your hands. You could have kept him quiet, done the parenting that his mother refuses to do and instead you ask a little boy the one question that will drive him into a hysterical fit of confusion and embarrassment. Idiot!”