Missed Translations Read online

  He had fallen asleep.

  Come on, man. Jerome had one job. The minimum baseline for a therapist is to stay awake while getting paid two hundred dollars an hour. And besides, he was the one with the bedtime voice. I’m the one who should’ve been sleeping. For five minutes, I sat there confused, wallowing in my inability to date coherently and keep my therapist entertained. I had bombed in front of my own therapist!

  Yet I didn’t bother finding a new one. I kept seeing Jerome. What does that say about me? (Jerome never could figure it out either.)

  You’re still awake, right?

  Great.

  What do other sad people do? Aside from writing Dashboard Confessional songs, some become comedians. Or try to become comedians, which is what I did. (I should note here: Plenty of happy people become comedians too.)

  I started with an improv class at the Magnet Theater in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and instantly fell in love with it. Improv is about creating whole new worlds from scratch. Whatever you want. Whenever. And everyone else onstage is forced to go along. Sir, you’ll “yes and” and like it.

  Around that time, I met Manvi Goel, who was also interested in comedy and eventually started improv classes as well. We clicked immediately and became fast friends, talking constantly. We couldn’t have been more different, aside from being around the same age. Manvi had been born in India and had grown up there for a while until moving to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She was technical and academic, where I was impulsive and scatterbrained. She’d attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a school I could get into only with a visitor’s pass. Manvi worked as a consultant when we met, a profession I could not have found more unappealing. She was even a Fulbright scholar, which resulted in her spending time conducting research in India. She was Spock; I was Kirk.

  Even though we were opposites, she was my best friend. Many of our mutual friends thought we should date, a suggestion we both found ludicrous even though we spent as much time together as a romantic couple would. But we were truly platonic: I thought of her as a sister I could call up any time and make laugh with total non sequiturs for hours. She was also a shoulder to lean on, someone who saw me at my worst and accepted it. We had a running joke that I wouldn’t be up to her standards anyway: I went to BU and she only went for Ivy Leaguers.

  One time I called her during a particularly tough breakup and said, “Manvi, I just need you to be a friend right now. Don’t ask me what happened. Don’t ask me to talk about it. I just want to be on the phone and that’s it.” She didn’t say anything. She just sat there on the other end of the line.

  We were tempted once, after several glasses of wine in my Harlem apartment, to heed our friends’ advice and try to be together. We went to my bedroom and started kissing.

  Within seconds, Manvi started cracking up. She started losing it. I had never seen her laugh like that before. So I started laughing too. We couldn’t take it seriously. Have you ever kissed your sister? Yeah, I didn’t want to either. We never tried again. Laughing that hard isn’t healthy.

  Speaking of unhealthy, after a year or so of improv, I decided to try stand-up. Why share the attention with teammates when you can bask in the glory by yourself? I took a class at the Gotham Comedy Club and started doing open mics. New York City mics, by the way, are brutal. They’re terrible ways to test material because the audience is made up of other comedians who don’t care about your set. Most aren’t paying attention because they’re going over their own notes. It was a useful exercise—for a time anyway—because I got used to the feeling of stage discomfort.

  In my early attempts to do stand-up, I mostly stuck with observational material, which I found exceedingly difficult. I wasn’t good at it. (My first stand-up joke earned a deafening silence: “I’d like to say a few words about race relations. Has anyone here ever had sex while watching NASCAR? No? Then I guess we can’t talk about race relations.”) I was trying to be Mitch Hedberg, one of my favorite comedians, or Seinfeld, shoving these wry, witty observations into the lexicon rather than talking about myself. It felt like a parody.

  As I started exploring more personal material, I found myself strangely comfortable writing material about being South Asian, despite my thorny relationship with being South Asian. Such went a couple of early jokes:

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the first Indian president. He’s always going to be late. Because he’s always being “randomly screened” getting onto Air Force One.

  The Ebola crisis was the only time in America when a white doctor was considered more dangerous at an airport than a brown person.

  One of my favorite jokes came from the failure to write a bit. Around Christmas one year, I was at lunch with another comedian friend, Nick. We were trying to write material for a show I had that night. The premise of the joke was “What would happen if Santa Claus was Indian?” I kept coming up with bullshit punchlines: “Oh! Santa would get stopped by the TSA! Oh! You’d have to leave out chicken tikka masala instead of milk and cookies!” None of them were any good. After we paid the tab, an older white woman, who appeared to be in her seventies, ambled over to us.

  “Excuse me!” she said in a thick Long Island accent. “I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying. What if, instead of Santa’s workshop, it was a call center?”

  Then she walked away.

  I was about to tell her that this was racist, but how could I? I loved the joke. I was trying to find my voice, though at that point I wasn’t exactly sure what my voice was. The incongruity of talking about being brown while avoiding my brownness nagged at me. If I talked about it long enough, maybe it would magically fill the holes left by a rocky childhood. I wanted my life to be funny, more comedy than tragedy.

  Shortly after I began doing open mics, my father, Shyamal, called me one morning while I was practicing my routine for a show later that night. The phone rang as I silently ran through my set alone in my bedroom, complete with wild gesticulations to an imaginary crowd. At this point, he had been living in India for several years. I didn’t know where, mind you, but this was one of his occasional check-in calls that I dreaded. They were short and full of forced chitchat. But this time, I had something more to say than the usual pleasantries about the weather.

  “What are you up to, Baba?” my father said. “Baba” is a pet name that Bengali parents often call their children. It also means “father.” So, really, we are each other’s Baba.

  “I’m doing stand-up comedy tonight,” I answered.

  “What is stand-up comedy?” Shyamal steeled himself. He pronounced “stand-up comedy” as if conquering a complicated word for the first time.

  “Oh! It’s when you stand onstage and tell jokes in front of people,” I said.

  I knew my father wasn’t impressed when I heard him take a deeeeeeeeep sigh. I hadn’t thought it was possible to hear a brow furrow.

  “Okay. Next topic,” Shyamal said, waiting for me to oblige.

  I didn’t have any other topics, though. Our worlds felt too far apart, and neither of us had ever laid the groundwork to build a bridge between them. “Okay, next topic” should’ve been the tagline to all Deb family conversations, a perpetual ignorance of the questions that were right in front of us. We never tried to understand each other and never examined who we were as people. Of course my father didn’t ask me why I was doing stand-up. Shyamal and my mother, Bishakha, never knew how much joy I found in making other people laugh, maybe because we were rarely in situations to tell jokes to each other. “Professional comedy” was not even a phrase that made sense in their worlds. But I was just as guilty. In all the check-in calls, I had never even asked him why he had moved to India without telling anybody. I “next topiced” that too.

  It would be years before Shyamal and I touched the topic of comedy again, even as it became a bigger part of my life. I never discussed it with my mother either, but then again, I never discussed anything with her because we had fallen out of touch
. We had stopped speaking entirely several years prior to that 2018 set.

  When I walked off the stage after that performance, I did feel funny. Just not funny in the way you’re supposed to feel. In a room full of people who looked like me, where I was supposed to feel comfortable being myself, I felt like an outsider. I had a sneaking suspicion that many of them had a deep bond with their own family and their culture.

  Bishakha and Shyamal briefly flashed in my mind, each alone on opposite sides of the globe. Was my father alone in India? Did he have anyone at all? Was my mother even still alive? I was about to enter my thirties and neither parent was a presence in my life. Maybe there was nothing to be done at this point. Maybe it was already too late. But for the first time I didn’t want to say, “Okay, next topic.”

  Soon, I wouldn’t have to.

  An envelope from Manvi arrived a few weeks later. She had moved out of New York in 2015 or so to work at a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she met a cute guy named Jayanth on a dating app. Clearly, making out with him didn’t crack her up, because they ended up getting engaged.

  The elaborate red-and-gold wedding invitation was inscribed:

  WITH THE BLESSINGS OF THE ALL MIGHTY AND

  LATE SMT. BINO DEVI AND LATE SHRI INDER KRISHNA

  (LALA BABOO MAL)

  SMT. AMITA GOEL AND SHRI ANIL GOEL

  REQUEST YOUR PRESENCE ON THE OCCASION OF MARRIAGE

  CEREMONY OF THEIR DAUGHTER

  MANVI

  WITH

  JAYANTH

  I had known this was coming. Manvi had mentioned to me in the fall that I should save the dates. Normally, it would be “save the date,” singular. But this was to be an Indian ceremony, meaning festivities could go on for days and would likely break several fire safety regulations. The wedding was slated for Bengaluru in July, five months after the Big Brown show.

  When Manvi initially broached the topic, I wasn’t sure whether my girlfriend, Wesley, and I would go. It would be expensive. And it was a summer wedding in India.

  My god, I thought. I mean, maybe Manvi and I weren’t that close. She moved out of New York a while ago. How many people will really go from the United States? I’ve never even been to India. Do I even have the vacation time?

  But then another thought came.

  Shyamal was in India. I hadn’t seen him in eleven years, and by this time he must’ve been in his midseventies, or older? I didn’t want him to pass away before I got to hear his story. I wanted to get to know him, I thought, and it was time for him to get to know me. As if reading my mind, Wesley readily agreed to go. But I still needed to gather the courage to email him and let him know. I finally did, almost a month later.

  It said:

  Baba,

  do you by chance live in bangalore? i am planning a trip to india next summer and a friend of mine is getting married there. i will likely have a chance to come see you then.

  Shambo

  Shambo is my Indian nickname. Most brown kids have one that their parents gave them. Mine is a reference to the son of the Hindu god Lord Krishna. Shyamal wrote back the next day:

  Hello Shambo Baba

  I am glad to hear from you. I am very glad to know that you are coming to visit Bengaluru in summer. I lived in Bengaluru for some times when I started my first job in September 1967. I still have contact there. Where do you plan to stay there? I shall book the Hotel in advance. Please let me know your schedule in advance. I was not well for some time.

  BABA

  (Shyamal K. Deb)

  I didn’t know what “not well” meant. I also didn’t know that he had ever lived in Bengaluru. Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t exactly know where Bengaluru was. But the “not well” line from the email was jarring. I suddenly felt more urgency about the trip. “Not well” holds a different connotation for septuagenarians. I realized that I may have less time than I originally thought.

  After a few more rounds of emails in which he insisted he would meet us anywhere, my father told us that he lived in Kolkata. He added:

  I am already excited to know that I can see you again. Take care.

  Two

  “White people have the best lunches.”

  I told my first joke when I was about six years old. I was in the backseat of a car sitting next to my mother as my father drove us to a family friend’s house. A kaku was sitting in the front seat. Classic Indian family weekend: get in the car, drive to a relative’s house, sit, talk, eat, sit again, talk some more, drive home. I’m generalizing here, but a family weekend for lot of my white friends seemed to involve doing things, like hiking, going to the movies, or hanging out at Six Flags. My family just went to suburban sit-on-the-couch-togethers.

  These car rides were mostly silent, with a dash of bickering, and though the silence between my parents increased as I got older—the pauses more prolonged, the gaps more awkward—this experience was tolerable enough. We were still at the point in our lives where we could exist in the same physical space together.

  My father had a notoriously terrible sense of direction, and, as usual, we had gotten lost. Shyamal could get himself lost driving bumper cars. As we tried to find our way back to the correct road, something came over me: a true gust of inspired comedy.

  “You know, Dad could turn a shortcut into a long cut,” I blurted out.

  My mother cracked up. My first joke. My first open mic. My parents as my first audience. This was easy. Even then, I loved the feeling of making someone laugh, especially my mother. She had a deep belly cackle that registered as a five on the Richter scale.

  But after that first joke landed, I thought I’d push my luck. I don’t know, man. I was six.

  “Yeah. AND THEN WE COULD ALL EAT EACH OTHER!” I said.

  Bishakha looked at me strangely. Shyamal didn’t hear the joke. He was trying to get us wherever we were going only to get us more lost, a metaphor for life if there ever was one. I slunk back in my seat. All right, it was a bomb. What was that line about telling the audience what is funny rather than trying to make them laugh? That first chuckle though, so good.

  Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” was number one on the Billboard charts when I was born in 1988 in Lowell, Massachusetts. I was the original Rick Roll. My birthday is March 15, the Ides of March. The 1980s were weird.

  When I was about three, Shyamal moved us to the mean streets of Randolph, New Jersey—the meanest street being the one by the Pathmark where the traffic jams were brutal. Until I was about twelve, armed with a middle-class suburban upbringing, I was the model Indian child. There was a vibrant Bengali community in the area, and I became a favorite of all the aunties and uncles—mashis and kakus in Bengali parlance, typically for close family friends and extended family. (Generally mama is for mother’s brother, kaka is father’s brother, mashi is mother’s sister, pishi is brother’s sister, mama’s wife is mami, kaka’s wife is kaki, and so forth—and all can be applied to family friends.) I spoke Bengali fluently. I took classical Indian vocal lessons and learned how to play the harmonium. At the various annual festivals honoring Hindu deities (known as pujas), I performed what I learned in front of those mashis and kakus. It was what my parents wanted. For a while, I was proud of it too. I liked speaking another language and impressing the rest of the Indian community by performing songs they all knew by heart. In turn, my mother enjoyed being able to show me off to her friends.

  Our apartment in Randolph was a small two-bedroom, where my mother, brother, and I shared one room, and my father took the other. I shared a bed with my mother, probably far past the age I should have. At the time, I didn’t recognize the setup as strange.

  Saying my parents had a tumultuous marriage is like looking at a redwood tree and remarking, “Boy, these trunks are elevated.” Most of my memories are of the constant fighting. Fighting with each other, with me, with Sattik. At times, it got physical.

  There was a coldness that cast a permanent cloud over the house for all of us
. This often manifested itself in the mundane. When I came home from school, I felt anxiety, a sense of foreboding, about walking in the door. Not because I was worried about walking into the shouts of fighting parents, but because of the silence. When there wasn’t fighting, there was just uncomfortable stillness. We rarely talked about our days. My parents never talked about their past. The future was a nonstarter. One time, when I was about ten, I was playing outside, and I locked myself out of my house on purpose so I had an excuse to go to a family friend’s place down the street. It felt safer there. The mashi served me dinner. All I really needed was warmth.

  Shyamal and Bishakha always wanted to provide a safe place, but they didn’t know how to do it together. Sometimes their efforts went awry.

  In the third grade, while attending Center Grove Elementary School in Randolph, my mother signed me up to be a Boy Scout. As the only brown kid in the troop, I felt like a fish out of curry. At the time, Bishakha had also enrolled me in piano, violin, wrestling, karate, baseball, basketball, soccer, and, in one tragic mishap, advanced figure skating. My schedule was stuffed.

  As any Scout knows, the pinewood derby is a big deal. For the uninitiated, the pinewood derby is a Scout event dating back to the 1950s in which the Scout, with the help of his parents, designs a miniature car from a block of wood, which is to be propelled only by gravity. For Shyamal, this was his moment. You see, he was an engineer by trade, and he saw this as a moment to bond with his son. He couldn’t teach me how to make a layup on a fast break or torque my hips to properly bash a line drive. But design an aerodynamic car? This was his house, baby.

  Shyamal took the block of wood and painstakingly carved it so that it sloped in the front and arced upward in the back. He spoke with poise and authority, traits I rarely saw from him, and explained that carving the wood this way would make the vehicle go downward on the racetrack with more velocity. I was skeptical, not because I didn’t believe what he was saying but because I was just generally wary of conversations with him. After the car was sculpted, Shyamal took a can of silver spray paint and gave the block of wood a shiny coat. The car looked amazing. I was proud of it and I was happy that, for once, my father was involved in this creation.