No Land's Man Read online

  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.”

  CURRY POT COWBOY

  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.3

  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.

  It was in that very same cellar that the remarkable event occurred. It was on a Tuesday during recess between arithmetic and P.E. that Mark Delancy discovered the mattress down in the cellar. The mattress! The other kids came running in as he pulled it out from behind an old armoire that the Davises were no doubt going to send to the rubbish heap. Now, to the jaded adult eye, the mattress would no doubt have been viewed as a flea-ridden excuse for a bonfire, but to Mark Delancy and the rest of our class, that dirty old mattress held the potential for a grand adventure.

  As we all discussed what that adventure could possibly be, Mark Delancy looked me in the eye while I stood smiling underneath the cellar window and suggested what he considered would be the best and most fun use of the mattress. Mark Delancy first suggested most things that the other kids would then carry out, especially when those suggestions started, as they often did, with the phrase Why don’t we get Curry Pot to . . . “hold his breath,” “eat snot,” “make himself puke,” “look up Mrs. Davis’s skirt,” “steal a butter knife,” “hold this frog,” and now:

  “. . . kiss Judy on top of the mattress?!”

  “What?” I gasped, as my smile disappeared and my eyes popped open wide.

  Just hearing the words made my blood go cold. I stole a glance at Judy Seaver, whose face was red with embarrassment. I desperately wanted to articulate my objection to the idea and save us both from public humiliation but all I could manage to do was look dumbfounded and utter the word what over and over again. While I remained tongue-tied, the other kids immediately picked up on Mark Delancy’s scheme and began urging me on. The same mob mentality that led to so many innocents in ancient times being sacrificed before the gods was now chanting for my head or worse, my irrevocable shame in front of a girl I secretly massively adored. The motley crew of well-groomed, otherwise well-behaved little English school children began to chant, “Judy kiss the Curry Pot, Judy kiss the Curry Pot, Judy kiss the Curry Pot.”

  So there it was. It had been decreed by the masses and now seemed inevitable. I did not have the character or the fortitude to stand up for Judy and myself against a cellar full of bloodthirsty schoolchildren. Judy looked like she was about to cry as we were led to our execution . . . I mean the mattress. I felt responsible for her humiliation as well as mine. I was used to taunts and teasing, but it seemed hugely unfair that someone as beautiful and popular as Judy should have to be subjected to this kind of experience.
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  It probably goes without saying that I had never kissed a girl on the lips before. I’d never even practiced. I’d thought that one probably wouldn’t have to deal with that level of trauma until they were at least twenty-five years old. But here I was at nine years old, being folded into a doubled up mattress like the contents of a pita wrap with the girl of my dreams, while seventeen children and Mark Delancy pressed their bodies down on top of us so that even if it meant that our very breath would be snuffed out of us, the suffocation would at least happen with our lips pressed firmly against each other’s.

  Above our heads the chant of “Judy kiss the Curry Pot” was getting louder and louder. We could hear our classmates laughing and grunting, fighting each other for the sweet spot, the exact right location from which they could peek through the crease where the mattress folded together. Mark Delancy pushed everyone aside since he was the biggest and strongest of the group and since it had been his idea. Clearly he deserved the bird’s-eye view.

  Judy smelled clean like a girl. Her cheek was smooth and powdery against mine, her brown hair was in my mouth, our arms were contorted into each other’s ribs and stomachs, and her breath smelled warm and sugary. In the time I had known her, Judy had never once spoken to me and, although I didn’t know it at the time, she never would again. But on that day, during those few brief seconds we shared in the mattress, she did.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  I was just about to continue by apologizing for all this and tell her that of course we didn’t have to kiss when something miraculous happened. Judy kissed me. It happened quite suddenly and it was most certainly deliberate. She looked me in the eye, smiled, and kissed me. As we kissed she held on to me for dear life, as if we were taking off together in a rocket ship, or going down together in a plane crash. (I couldn’t tell which.) Our lips were locked and our faces were smashed together so hard that our teeth ached. I squeezed my eyes shut so tight to keep out the embarrassment that my eyeballs even began to hurt.

  High above we could hear the laughter and the roar of the other children as they relentlessly chanted “Kiss, kiss, kiss.” Our kiss seemed to last forever, going on and on and on! As more and more children jumped on top of the mattress insisting that their voyeurism be satisfied, we became locked together, unable to move. As we gave in to our predicament, our desperate kiss seemed to grow into something different. However it had started and whatever the fallout would be afterwards, we were kissing each other. Really kissing each other. Our mouths went from tense to soft, our breathing became deeper and our bodies became relaxed and we found ourselves no longer entangled but rather embracing each other. We were sharing a simultaneously humiliating and beautiful moment. We were together and everything else seemed to disappear: the mattress, the mocking children, the Rose Bank School for Boys and Girls, they all suddenly vanished.

  The truth of this kiss would be our secret from now on and whatever happened in my life, I would know that I once kissed the most beautiful girl in our school . . . and very likely the entire world. Me. Curry Pot. In this moment I was no longer the dorky, overweight Indian kid who doubled as Mark Delancy’s punching bag. Judy had led me into an inner sanctum where all great lovers lived. I was Elvis, I was Travolta, I was Starsky and Hutch (hey . . . it was the 70’s!). It felt like I was in the last scene of a great film where the credits roll up the screen as the hero throws the heroine onto the back of his horse and rides off into the sunset never to return.

  Things would never be the same from this moment on, because no one would ever again taunt me with their name calling, or their chanting, or their Jesus, or their British bulldogs, or their stupid dares, or their bloody noses, because I had conquered them. I had, in one monumental moment, conquered them all! The most beautiful girl in our class and very likely the entire world had kissed me once down in a cellar inside a beat-up stained mattress with seventeen children and Mark Delancy on top of us. I had become the king. I had become the Curry Pot Cowboy.

  3. The British version of tag.

  THE LEDGE

  THE WIND WHIPPED THROUGH the small courtyard below me. I balanced precariously, shivering on a cold, hard cement ledge. I had never stood on a ledge like this before, this high up, and I didn’t know how long I would be standing on it. It was getting very late, almost midnight. At six A.M. the morning bell would sound, signaling that we were to wake up and make ourselves presentable for breakfast. Would I actually be expected to stay out here for six more hours? Surely they wouldn’t leave me out here all night? Someone would have to remember that I was locked outside the fourth floor Southern House dormitory window on this unfriendly ledge.

  Not that breakfast was such a highlight. Undoubtedly I would once again eat dry cereal, because the two prefects at the head of the table would satisfy themselves with almost the entire contents of a single milk jug before handing it down to the third-form students like myself at the other end. The prefects were part of an elite group of sixth-form boys specifically selected by the faculty because of their superior scholastic or athletic achievements. They were in charge of the rest of the student body any time before and after the actual school day and they ran the school like storm troopers with relative impunity. If you ever complained about them or crossed them, it could mean an invitation to Toad Hall, the sixth-form recreational room behind the commissary where busted lips and kicks to the groin were the least of what you could expect.

  In the six months I had been living at Woodhouse Grove Boarding School, I had seen many of my classmates limping or crying as they walked back to their dorms. I, so far, had never experienced this treatment and I intended to keep it that way. So dry cornflakes it was every morning. I had convinced myself it was just like eating a delicious bowl of salt-free crisps. In a pinch there was always water to soggy it up. Although, having tried that one morning, I realized there is nothing more depressing than eating mushy flakes out of a tasteless puddle.

  After breakfast was chemistry. It wouldn’t be so bad to be forgotten out here, I thought, if it meant skipping Mr. Shorey (a.k.a. Smurf)’s chemistry class. He was a fat gnome who waddled around the room and mumbled into his beard. But it was far from comfortable out on the ledge. As far as punishments doled out by the dormitory prefects went (and there were many to choose from), being locked out on a ledge four stories high in the middle of winter in nothing more than my pajamas was the most imaginative and frightening one yet. I may not have been invited to Toad Hall, but I’d already had plenty of run-ins with the prefects who made it their duty to lord their power over the younger boys. For example, there was my first run-in, a few days after I had arrived, when I was forced to hand-wash a prefect’s sweaty jock strap and mud-stained rugby kit because I kept grinning at him. He seemed to be friendly and cordial and I was seeking companionship, but clearly that was not how the hierarchical system worked here and he wanted me to know it.

  Then there was the time my friends Cocker, Rob, Mizzy, and I all had to stand facing a wall while one of the prefects pummeled us with a cricket ball for being late for “prep” (the two hours before bedtime when we returned to our classrooms to do our homework). We were not allowed to scream or act like it hurt; however, the giant stains of urine that spread down our legs were a clear giveaway.

  Another time during prep, the same prefect had invented a far more creative punishment when he asked me to write down as many insults as I could in fifteen seconds, after which he added the words “I am a” to each one and escorted me to every classroom where I was instructed to recite them to uproarious laughter. I am a cocksucker, a motherfucker, a sisterfucker, a faggot, a Paki, a curry-breather, a shit stain, a cum stain, a hairy ballsack, a dothead, a sand nigger, a normal nigger, a piss head, an ass licker, a cunt, a bleeding cunt, a giant bucket of puss juice, a shit pisser, a spit licker, a snot guzzler, a eunuch jelly, and a puke stocking. The last two I stole from the movie A Clockwork Orange and William Shakespeare, respectively.
r />   And the ledge was far more terrifying, although slightly less imaginative, perhaps, than the time I had to pick a playing card from a deck to decide how many lashes I would receive from a broken television antenna for having been caught saying my Muslim prayers after lights-out. This was a classic punishment that many of the boys received for various infractions, but praying “Paki mumbo-jumbo to Allah Walla Ding Dong,” meant that the number of lashes would be doubled. I picked a jack of hearts, so ten lashes became twenty and I lost count after a dozen even though the welts on my behind continued to remind me for a few days following.

  Though there were some punishments worse than the ledge, now that I thought about it. I would have stood out on a ledge in the cold for a month if it meant avoiding what I heard had happened to one of the fourth-form boys in the Atkinson House dormitory. Rumor was that he had been caught masturbating in the bathroom and, to humiliate him, he was stripped naked and forced to parade around the dormitory with his erection on full display while the other boys laughed and jeered and pummeled him with pillows and books. Sitting on a ledge till morning was perfectly fine compared to that.