No Land's Man Read online

  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!”

  “I’m an American cowboy,” the boy said in his thick Northern English accent. “Like on the telly. I want to be a cowboy on the telly when I grow up, but my Mum says I can’t.”

  “Well maybe she will change her mind,” I said. She heard me. I knew that she heard me, but still she didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Have you ever been on the tel
ly, mister?” he asked, grinning from ear to ear.

  I stared at him. I had two paths in front of me at this moment. I could lie and deny being on television whereupon, as soon as he was bored, my conversation with this little man would come to an end. Or I could tell him the truth, that I had indeed appeared on “the telly.” This would peak his interest and perhaps turn me into something of a hero, which would then no doubt capture the imagination of his mother and perhaps even make her notice me.

  “Yes, I have,” I replied. No sooner had the words escaped my lips than a shriek of hysterical proportions whistled through the cabin of the train like an alarm. Every passenger was jolted awake, and I had become not only the agitator of said shriek, but also an accomplice to this little boy.

  Worst of all, I knew that she knew that I was attempting to flirt with her, pathetically, through her son. A woman who I clearly would have had as much success with if she had been a Hasidim or Amish. What on earth did I hope to achieve? I was a young, relatively handsome single male, who could be flirting with any number of attractive single women if I wanted to, so why? Why the hijab wearing Muslim girl with the annoying kid? It was a good question, one I had no answer for, but it was clear I wanted more than her attention. Deep down, I wanted to break her. I wanted her to want me. I fantasized about her losing control of her values, her tradition her culture, her faith; I fantasized that not only her clothes but her soul would come undone. I saw her hijab as simply a challenge to overcome on the way to discovering her hidden sexuality. I wanted to touch her breasts, her legs, her skin. I wanted to conquer her and make her mine.

  The boy turned to his mother and screamed, “Mum, that man is on the telly!”

  She simply pulled a handkerchief from her purse and wiped his nose.

  The boy’s big brown eyes locked on me again while his mother put the snot-stained tissue in her bag and pulled out a magazine, some celebrity rag that tracked the torrid goings on of the Beckhams or the Royal Family. I was surprised. In spite of appearances, we were not that different. Like me, she had grown up in the west. Like me, she was seduced by celebrity and pop culture. In the next instant, almost as if he could read my mind, the boy stepped across the aisle and planted himself next to me. He started asking questions in rapid fire.

  “Are you from America, mister?”

  “What’s it like on the telly?”

  “Are you famous?”

  “Are you a movie star?”

  “Are you from Hollywood?”

  “Do you like my gun?”

  Again, I found myself trying to catch his mother’s eye, but her face was frozen, now staring into the magazine.

  “New York,” I said.

  “And are you on the telly in New York?” he asked

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “My mum doesn’t watch the telly,” he said. “She hates the telly. She says it’s full of lies.”

  I smiled at her and, just for a moment, she looked up and held my gaze. It was like the sun peeking out from behind a blanket of clouds, but I knew it was a signal. A recognition of the vast insurmountable divide that separated us. A divide called East and West, Tradition and Modernity, Islam and America. Or perhaps she was just letting me know that she was way out of my league and in spite of my American charm, my celebrity, my seeming playfulness with her son, I could in no way seduce her. She would never accept me because she saw my ultimate intentions as self serving, shameful, and driven by my ego. That I possessed no sacredness, no tradition, no faith. In her gaze I saw her perception of me as a soul that had drifted, seduced by a false world, like the one in the pages of her magazine. In her mind I must have seemed a child, much like her own son, raised on a diet of celebrity, violence, and processed foods, brandishing my American weapon of arrogance and superiority.

  As we finally arrived at our destination, the conductor’s thickly accented voice blared over the intercom, and the red brick station walls took the place of the fields and meadows of the Yorkshire countryside. She grabbed her son with one hand and luggage with the other and made her way through the crowd of passengers exiting the train. Behind her the magazine slipped from the polyester seat and landed atop her son’s forgotten cowboy hat. As I rose from my seat to retrieve my luggage from the overhead bin, I turned and looked out the window to see if I could catch one final glimpse of them, but they were gone. Instead, I found myself staring at a cold blue-and-white sign that read “Welcome to Bradford.”

  NO LAND’S MAN: BECOMING AASEEEEF

  IN 1982, MY FATHER, MY MOTHER, my sister, and I heeded Ronald Reagan’s message to the world that it was morning again in America. We had very little idea what that meant, though we assumed that a morning in America would be much nicer than a dreary afternoon in the north of England, so we came. We replaced our red brick semi-detached bungalow with a chimney for a lime-green stucco house with a swimming pool. We replaced our sweaters and boots with shorts and flip-flops. We replaced the sound of magpies with the sound of tropical insects, and we came to the great state of Florida to embrace the new sunrise called the 1980s.

  Soon after arriving, I found myself a junior in an all-American high school in the middle of Tampa. I quickly discovered that compared to my British boarding school, this new school was like a vacation. There was no official school uniform to speak of unless you included cut-off shorts, T-shirts, and a mullet. I also noticed that there seemed to be a casual informality between teachers and students. American public school students didn’t wait to speak until they were spoken to, and teachers and students seemed to even share laughter and inside jokes, which was frankly unnerving for me, having come from a school where detention was the punishment in store for anyone who dared to speak before raising one’s hand or being spoken to.

  The school was clearly divided into two major groups: athletes and everyone else. The athletes wielded so much power over the goings-on at the school that occasionally actual classes would be cancelled so students could congregate at the football field to watch a pep rally for the upcoming game. Back in England I knew three students who had had been expelled for going to see a Leeds United soccer game during the school day; here it seemed this kind of behavior was mandated by the school itself. Students painted their faces and cheered and screamed for their players, while cheerleaders performed impressive acrobatics, all culminating in a kind of warrior-nation cry for blood and battle against an opposing school.

  The school also had another major division: race. This divide was clearest in the lunchroom cafeteria where, with an occasional exception, white students sat with white students, black students sat with black students, Hispanics sat with Hispanics, and the two East Asian students sat with the math teacher.

  I stepped into this world not knowing where to sit. Since having moved from a city with one of the largest South Asian populations in Europe to Tampa, a city that had maybe one Indian restaurant, I may as well have been the man who fell to Earth.

  I realized I needed my own cafeteria clan-mate, so I tried to befriend the easiest and most familiar target: the one other Indian student in my entire high school. He was in the school band and on the baseball team, so let’s just say he was quite popular. The first time I heard him speak, however, I couldn’t help but be amused that he pronounced his name with a distinct southern drawl. Dilip (d’-lip) had become Dee-leap. I had never heard the Americanization of an Indian name before and even today, many years later, I find it disconcerting when I hear second-generation South Asians pronounce their own names incorrectly. The hard T of Sheetal or Namita is softened and rolls away to sound less ethnic. The clipped vowel of Deepak (dee-puk) becomes Deepaaak, Akbar (uk-bur) becomes Aaakbaaaar. I once even heard of a Pakistani kid named Aurungzeb (ar-ung-zeb) who was named after the great Moghul Emperor of the same name, but in order to avoid pronunciation mishaps, he changed his name to Orange. I don’t even know how you get from Aurungzeb to Orange unless you are a seven-year-old, but nevertheless the image of an emperor who turned himself int
o an orange in order to be accepted has always resonated with me on a very deep level.

  My first conversations with Dilip were awkward, as he always seemed to be looking past me, waiting for one of his friends to rescue him. He had a point, since other than the fact that our parents were born in the same country, we really had very little in common. He was all-American and I was mostly English, and our interactions had the distinct feeling of two brown kids forced to play together because their parents told them they had to be friends. It soon became clear that he saw me as a social liability. After a week or so he stopped acknowledging me in the hallway when he walked by with his baseball buddies. This didn’t surprise me—rejection of one’s own kind in favor of the dominant culture was a survival technique that I had seen before.

  A few years before in England, a Sikh student had joined our school. One day out on the quad the white kids were taunting me with the word Paki, a common slur toward Indians or Pakistanis. The Sikh boy, himself technically a Paki, was also standing within taunting distance. He watched as the English kids shoved and pushed me as I walked to class, one of them trying to trip me, another throwing a soccer ball at the back of my head. In that moment he made a strategic decision. At the time it was confusing, but in retrospect I give him credit for it. He ran over to me, grabbed me by my shirt, looked at the English kids, and then landed his fist right into the side of my face. The English schoolboys cheered as he engaged his boots and his elbows so that I fell to the ground and went fetal until the blows got weaker and the cheers grew stronger and he was eventually hoisted away as their hero. Brilliant. From that day on, unlike me, no one ever picked a fight with him or dared call him Paki.