No Land's Man Read online

  I looked at them in the eye took a deep breath and said, “Okay, I think I know what you want.”

  I sat down and assumed the lotus position. I wobbled my head from side to side. I channeled the broadest Indian accent I could think of by pretending to be Peter Sellers in The Party. I channeled Apu from The Simpsons. I even channeled Fisher Stevens in brown face from that ’80s robot movie. I was actually trying to appear on national television doing the same accent that, if someone had done it in front of me, I would have punched them in the mouth.

  The whole thing worked like a snake charm, for the more I did it, the more the producers smiled and soon they were laughing uncontrollably, especially when I smiled and stared at them as if I didn’t understand what they were saying. I attempted to soothe my humiliation by focusing on how much money I would make by hitting what was clearly the brown cash cow jackpot.

  “Dude, that was so funny,” said the director when I had finished. “Thank you so much for being a good sport. I know it is probably a little politically incorrect, but it’s comedy, right?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I totally get it. Anything for a laugh.”

  I did not get the job. I assumed that they had cast some other brown actor better studied in the art of snake charming, and to be honest part of me was relieved. However, when I saw the commercial a few months later I saw to my horror that they had cast a swarthy looking white guy. There he was, bobbing his head from side to side, smiling and talking with a broad, terrible Indian accent without a care in the world as to what his parents would think of him as he charmed the shit out of that rubber snake.

  Though I was never asked to play a snake charmer again, I soon noticed a peculiar pattern in the roles I auditioned for—cab drivers, deli owners, doctors, and terrorists. As time went on I became more and more numb to what was being asked of me. My friend, Sakina Jaffrey, a South Asian actress, even coined a name for it: Patanking. The word is derived from parodying the sound of an Indian accent to the ear of a white person: “patank patank patank.” Say it to yourself. Did you do it? (Yes, this part of the book is interactive.) Now try saying it with an Indian accent. Give it a shot. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Did you do it? Now wobble your head from side to side. (This will be difficult if you are not South Asian since it’s a motion that is confounding to westerners but is instinctively understood by anyone who has even one drop of subcontinental blood in their veins. Don’t worry if you don’t do it perfectly. You never will.) Okay, now that you are saying “patank patank patank” and wobbling your head from side to side like a dashboard bobble head you are experiencing what my first few years as an actor in New York felt like. (If you are laughing right now, you’re a racist!)

  Patanking was not just a dialect. It happened when an Indian character in a movie or a TV show or a commercial was void of any human element, and became simply a disembodied accent, head wobble, or turban. It was also sometimes the only way to make a living, and I was completely culpable for I gladly patanked my way as far up the ladder as I could.

  Eventually I didn’t even think about it. I gladly served up a one-dimensional cartoon of my culture and family for the entertainment of Middle America. I turned a blind eye to things that I could not justify, such as why a character born and raised in the west would even have an Indian accent. Why a character that was clearly Indian would be named Epstein. Why a Muslim character would have a Hindu name. Why an Indian would be speaking Arabic. Why a character originally written as black or Hispanic or Jewish could just as easily be played by an Indian without needing to change a single piece of vernacular. Why a tanned white actor could play South Asian, but a light skinned South Asian could not play white. Why an Iranian accent sounded identical to an Indian one. Why South Asian actors could be funny or nerdy but never sexy, yet South Asian actresses had to be. I got so used to twisting myself into a metaphorical pretzel in order to fit in to the way that Hollywood portrayed South Asian or Middle Eastern characters that I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

  But then something began to change. After playing countless South Asian stereotypes, I began to feel a need to create something real. If I was professionally not able to play anything more than a peripheral and undeveloped character (except for some reason in Shakespeare and in school, because apparently nontraditional casting is okay if the audience doesn’t know what the actors are talking about or if it’s for educational purposes), then I would tell those stories myself. I started writing characters from my ethnic and immigrant experience, in hopes of creating a one-man show. The characters were unlike any that I had ever had the chance to play. They were as complicated and conflicted as the people they were inspired by. For the first time the audience would not think, “Look, nontraditional casting. Good for them, that’s very progressive,” when they saw me walk on stage, as they had in every play I had ever done. This time they wouldn’t even notice. They would just see a South Asian actor portraying three dimensional South Asian characters. There would be no suspension of disbelief. Except for the usual kind.

  With this in mind, I began to write what would become my one-man show Sakina’s Restaurant. The first character I developed, Sakina, was a combination of me and my sister. I quickly realized that though the play would enable me to return to my roots, it would require me to do some nontraditional casting of another variety—I would have to play all ages and genders. So one of the first things I did was put on a pair of heels and a mini skirt and walk around my apartment to see how it felt to talk and walk like a teenage Indian girl.

  After Sakina, I wrote a character based on my father and for the first time I tried to reveal him, rather than lampoon him. I attempted to give the character of Mr. Hakim an authentic immigrant voice, to uncover how he might actually feel about the emotional and cultural price he paid for his American Dream. I wrote a character based on my mother’s experience of being a young woman seeking romance within an arranged marriage. I continued writing characters and eventually crafted an entire family made from bits and pieces of my relatives and others like them.

  The last character I wrote was a South Asian Muslim medical student who has sex with a prostitute the night before his wedding. The monologue’s literal and metaphorical climax involves the prostitute performing oral sex on him while he prays to God for forgiveness. I was very proud of it and so when my girlfriend at the time, an actress herself (no doubt sick and tired of coming home to the sights and sounds of her boyfriend either wearing heels or having loud sex with imaginary prostitutes), told me that Wynn Handman, the artistic director of the American Place Theatre, had an acting class and that I should audition for it, I leapt at the chance.

  Wynn had helped develop the careers of hundreds of notable actors, but more important to me, he had helped develop the solo performance careers of monologue-makers such as Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo. The prospect of auditioning for him was intimidating, but it was kismet that he also owned the same theater that I had seen Malkovich walk out of a few years earlier.

  Upon entering his studio in Carnegie Hall, which was a small black box type space with about forty or so wooden seats raked up toward the back wall where the students would sit, I spotted Wynn seated in what I would come to know as “his” chair, off to the side, next to the light board. He was an older man in his seventies and he didn’t seem to have a lot of patience. So after the perfunctory hellos he got right down to business.

  “So what are you going to do for me?” he asked.

  “I’m writing a one-man show,” I told him. “I have written an original monologue.”

  “Okay, go ahead,” he said with no enthusiasm whatsoever as he dimmed the lights in the studio.

  “I have to take off my pants,” I called as the stage went black. “It’s part of the piece. I’m going to be receiving oral sex from a prostitute.”

  Wynn was silent. In the darkness I heard him shift his weight and sigh. Then, without a word, he slowly turned on one blue stage light, enough to see
that he wouldn’t have to call Carnegie Hall security. He saw me standing there smiling in my boxers with my pants around my ankles.

  “Are you going to be removing any more of your clothing?” he inquired.

  “No, just my pants,” I responded.

  “Tell me when you are ready to begin,” he said and turned off the blue light.

  I spent the next several years in Wynn’s class honing and developing the characters I had written. Wynn gave me the tools to take my raw material and insert dramatic tension, to create real characters and not just mouthpieces for a point I wanted to make. He helped me shape my ideas into human beings. The act of revealing real South Asian characters on stage that were not caricatures or peripheral brown people in some white writer’s POV but actually the focus of the story, was transformative and empowering and validating in a way that nothing I had done up to that point had been.

  When I was finally ready, after workshopping the play in various downtown theaters, Wynn offered to premiere Sakina’s Restaurant at the American Place Theater. It was 1998, almost seven years after I had gone to that audition for a snake charmer. I had been unable to appreciate or access my own accent and cultural identity when I first came to New York and now I was standing on a stage portraying a South Asian American family for a New York City theater audience.

  As soon as word got out about the show, South Asian audiences came from all over the tri-state area. Many of them had never seen a story that reflected their experience, their culture, or themselves on stage before. It wasn’t just South Asians, either. I was surprised to find how much Indian immigrants had in common with Greeks, Italians, Arabs, and even a family of Russian Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. They came and kept coming, and a show that was supposed to run for two weeks managed to stay open for six months.

  On the night the show closed, I walked out on to 46th Street and stood staring at the poster on the front of the theater for one last time. Suddenly I heard my name. I turned around and saw a lanky Indian kid in his early twenties.

  “Hey,” he said nervously. “I just saw your show. It was amazing and I wondered if you would sign my program.”

  “Sure,” I said, and while I did he told me he was an actor and had just arrived in the city.

  “My parents didn’t want me to be an actor,” he explained, “but I’ve wanted to since I was a kid.”

  “Great,” I said. “I wish you the best.”

  “I played so many great roles in college,” he continued, “but now, it’s hard. I only get auditions to play stupid roles. I’m sick of only being a cab driver or your friendly neighborhood terrorist. It’s so humiliating. How did you manage to avoid it?”

  The question made me smile.

  “Do you want to get a drink?” I asked as I handed the program back to him.

  “Really?” He asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t have to be anywhere and I’d like to tell you a story.”

  “Sounds cool,” he said, falling in step beside me. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a story I call Patanking.”

  MOVIE STAR

  HE WAS HAVING SEX ON MY CHAIR and he broke it,” screamed Ismail Merchant as he picked up the two pieces of wood that just moments before had comprised his priceless antique piece of furniture.

  The entire dinner party turned to me, horrified. The same people that had been congratulating me for being picked to be the star of Ismail’s new movie were now looking at me with confusion and disgust, as if I was some kind of ungrateful sex addict. The kind of person who would have the audacity to stay as a guest in someone’s home and then repay them by having sex on—and breaking—their antique dining room chair. I stood in stunned silence staring at Ismail, not knowing quite how to respond.

  I had met Ismail Merchant almost two years before, in 1998, during the run of my one-man show Sakina’s Restaurant.

  Several weeks into the run, the New York Times gave the play a superbly generous review. That night the manager of the theater ran excitedly down from her office while I was doing my vocal warmups.

  “Guess who is coming to the show tonight, to see YOU?” she exclaimed.

  My heart stopped for a minute. I had already been reeling all day from the review that had in twenty minutes that morning caused my answering machine to fill up with messages of congratulations.

  “I don’t know if I really want to know,” I said. “Not right now, since I am about to perf—”

  “Ismail Merchant!” she screamed. Then very fast and in one breath, “He’scastingamovieandhe’slookingfortheleadandheiscomingtosee YOUOhmyGodRemainsoftheDayismyfavouritemoviebutldon’twant todisturbyousol’msorrymaybeyoucanjustpretendlikeyouneverheard thatandbreakalegtonight . . . by the way it’s sold out!”

  Then she disappeared.

  I looked in the dressing room mirror and remembered that eight years earlier I had attached on my bedroom wall a poster board on which I had written, in blue marker, that I would be a movie star by the year 2002. I felt nauseous.

  Ismail introduced himself after the show. I was in the middle of a conversation with a couple of audience members when he interrupted with his signature bombastic post-colonial Indian lilt.

  “My name is Ismail Merchant,” he said with arms outstretched as if he were Moses triumphantly parting a very small group of people, “and I would like to take you to dinner.”

  A few days later I met him at an Indian restaurant he claimed he owned, although none of the waiters seemed to recognize him. As we finished eating he gave me a copy of a book called The Mystic Masseur.

  “V. S. Naipaul,” he said, “Trinidad’s greatest author. This was his first book, set in Trinidad in the late fifties. Have you read it?”

  I told him I had not.

  “Well,” he said, “you must absolutely read it immediately, because you are going to play the lead in the film I am making of this book.”

  Simple as that? I thought. Wow. I really should have written more stuff on that poster board.

  “Now you really have to try the gulab jamun in this place,” he said as he called the waiter over. “Manish, please tell the chef to bring us some gulab jamun.”

  Manish went to put in the order for our desserts after explaining that his name was actually Suvir. Meanwhile I stared at the glossy paperback cover of a book that I would read and finish that very night.

  After that dinner, I did not hear from Ismail Merchant for a year. I eventually concluded that I had been taken out to dinner and offered the lead role in a movie as a practical joke by an incredible impersonator.

  However, the following summer, after my show had closed and I was back to doing my most interesting work in acting class, I got a call from Ismail Merchant’s secretary.

  “Ismail would like you to go down to Twenty-Eighth Street and Lexington tomorrow and get fitted for a turban,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  “They will see you tomorrow at 6 P.M.”

  “A turban?” I asked, infuriated. “No, I will not.”

  I had left Ismail many messages, none of which he had bothered to return, and I was not about to jump at his beck and call.

  “I won’t go,” I continued, “unless I can speak with Mr. Merchant himself.”

  Before I could even finish the sentence, Ismail was on the line, speaking to me as if we had had dinner just the day before.

  “Aasif, how are you?” he exclaimed. He sounded cheery and enthused. “Now you will be wearing a turban in the film for some of the scenes, so you must go down to this wonderful sari shop on the east side and they will fit you. The owner is expecting you.”

  “But are we even doing this film?” I asked. “The last time we spoke was a year ago and you’ve never even showed me a script.”

  “Are we still making the film?” he asked, seeming genuinely hurt by my lack of faith. “Of course we are making the film and you will have a script as soon as it’s ready.”

  “Ok
ay,” I said, flustered. “It’s just, I thought maybe the whole thing had fallen through.”

  The disappointment in my voice must have been evident because he reassured me that nothing had fallen through and principal photography would start in no time. I smiled with relief like I was speaking to an absent girlfriend who had told me she still loved me.

  “Okay, so if this is happening then I am going to mentally prepare myself. I am going to invest,” I said. I wanted to add, “So please don’t fuck with me,” but I didn’t. Ismail’s voice came through loud and clear in response.

  “Invest! Invest! Invest!” he said.

  I seem to remember the conversation trailing off, probably because I was so giddy that I don’t actually remember hanging up.

  After that conversation I did not hear from Ismail Merchant again for another six months. However, a script arrived by messenger a week later. For an actor who had mostly done theater or played the occasional shopkeeper or medical expert on shows like Law & Order, I still could not fathom that I would be the star of a Merchant/Ivory film. As I read the script for the first time I don’t think I even comprehended it. Turning the pages I found myself constantly distracted by the MANDVI watermark and simply marveling at the fact that my character continued to have more lines.

  To calm my anxiety about having to carry a film and working with such Academy Award—winning talent right out of the gate, I decided my course of action was to become the consummate professional. I would access all that I had learned in school, all that I had learned from Wynn Handman, all the speech and vocal exercises I had ever done and hated doing. This was my moment and I could not afford to fail. I would become a master instrument.

  I began by adopting a technique that Anthony Hopkins had said he used when approaching a role. He would read the script a hundred times before the first day of shooting; that way he knew the character inside and out. I made it to eighteen before rationalizing that Sir Anthony must have very little else to do in his life. I worked on various scenes in my acting class with Wynn, who did some character interviews with me, which is an exercise where an actor is interviewed while in character. Working on the role with Wynn made me realize a few things: I needed to spend more time listening to the dialect tape that Ismail had sent over to master the exact idiosyncratic specificity of the dialect; I needed to know a lot more about Trinidad’s culture, its food, and its people; and I also probably needed to sign some kind of contract.