Missed Translations Read online

  I called my father. “Yeah, we’re on the sidewalk,” I said.

  I turned to Wesley and put on a brave face: “It’s not that hot here. Not right now, anyway.”

  “I think he was waiting—” I said, and suddenly stopped in my tracks. Wesley spotted a man striding confidently out the arrival doors on a mission, like the brown Kool-Aid Man.

  “Oh my god, I think that’s him,” I said.

  It was an unexpected, remarkable sight. When I last saw him at Noodle Street, I remember thinking how unhealthy he looked. Now, in India eleven years later, he looked tanned, rested, and spirited—with almost as much hair as I have. He wore a white dress shirt with black pants, and he sported a fresh haircut. That he still had hair to cut was a surprise to me—one of many, I’d find out. His muscles had tone. He didn’t have a Dad-Bod. It was just a . . . Bod. He had the kind of glowing, confident tan of someone who had strolled onto a golf course smoking a Cohiba and blasted an 80 blindfolded. He was earnest and genuinely excited.

  “Welcome to India!” he said to both of us. “Said” is an understatement. It was more like a roar. Everything out of his mouth was a yell.

  “WELCOME TO INDIA!”

  He joyfully handed Wesley a dozen or so miniature roses, their stems carefully wrapped in aluminum foil to keep them fresh. I got a pat on the head.

  “WOW, YOU’RE A GROWN-UP MAN NOW! I ALMOST DID NOT RECOGNIZE YOU.”

  “It’s been many years, Dad.”

  “I WAS WAITING THERE WATCHING EVERY DOOR. HOW COULD YOU COME OUT? I’M WAITING THERE LIKE A SECURITY GUARD. A COUPLE OF TAILORS ARE HERE. ONE FOR YOU, ONE FOR HER.”

  “You know we’re not the ones getting married, right?” I answered.

  “I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT YOU! COME ON.”

  Four

  “My son is a star!”

  Wesley and I piled our bags into the trunk of the car and climbed into the backseat, while Shyamal occupied the front. And it began: our first car ride in India, which was really great training for a zero-gravity spacewalk should life ever come to that. There are no driving rules in India, at least none that I could see. Our driver routinely swerved and cut off cars or was on the receiving end of similar chaos. In New Jersey, this could get you killed. In Kolkata, which is located in the eastern part of the country near the border with Bangladesh, it was just a Wednesday.

  Every few seconds, the driver honked. It wasn’t out of road rage. All the other drivers honked too. It was a way of self-policing on the road. Honk or get bonked. We tried to converse in the car, which was an exercise in futility.

  “MY [HONK] TENNIS COURT IS [HONK] JUST BESIDE YOUR [HONK] HOTEL!” my dad yelled.

  “You still [HONK] play tennis?”

  “OF COURSE! [HONK] TODAY, I PLAYED. MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, AND FRIDAY. [HONK] PLUS GOLF TWICE A MONTH.”

  Cutting through all the Kolkata noise, I was relieved to hear he wasn’t the slowly dying man I knew all those years ago, much to my surprise. And as I found out during the cab ride, he had other interests too. Constant activity doesn’t leave time for the mind to wander.

  The conversation turned to Wesley, who, upon interrogation, told my father she had recently graduated from law school at Harvard. Shyamal lowered his voice a bit.

  “Very good! Very good! I am very proud of you. I have taken two courses at MIT and Harvard.”

  “Really?” I cut in.

  “Of course! Have you not seen my résumé?”

  “You know, I have not seen your résumé. Not recently.”

  “My dad was a very good lawyer. Your grandfather. A famous criminal lawyer. He never lost a case.”

  We were twenty minutes into the ride. It was the most substantive conversation my father and I had ever shared. In that moment, it hit me that I had never really thought about my grandparents before.

  Then came this exchange:

  “Sopan, could you recognize me? Have I changed a lot?”

  “I did recognize you, but it was much different than I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. You seem like you’re living your best life right now.”

  “REALLY?! MY HEART HAS BEEN VIBRATING FOR THE LAST FOUR MONTHS. HOW CAN I SEE MY LONG-LOST SON?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting. I’m happy to see you’re so active,” I said.

  “You look much different than when I last saw you.” He paused for a split second. “You’ve put on weight.”

  “Thank you.”

  My father and I were dipping our toes in. We circled each other, a bit cautiously at first, like professional wrestlers before they lock horns. The last time we had an in-person conversation, I was adjusting to life as a freshman in college and being on my own for the first time. Aside from doing well in class, I was singularly focused on fitting in on campus, a daunting task for someone who had always felt like an outsider. I was unsure of myself. I cared a lot about what other people thought. In high school, people my age were still wearing those puka shell surfer necklaces that seemed really stylish. I was so thirsty for acceptance that I’d ask other students if I could wear theirs for a couple of hours just so people thought I had my own. It never occurred to me to just buy one. College was my chance to walk into frat parties and seem cool. I was in the midst of a search for the biggest, coolest friend group in Massachusetts.

  More than a decade later, I was more mature and centered, comfortable with my path in life. The version of myself that Shyamal was seeing had room for him that wasn’t there when I was eighteen.

  “HOW DID YOU LIKE DUBAI?” my dad asked—no, yelled—about the city in which we’d had a one-night layover the night before.

  “Dubai was wonderful,” I answered.

  “Yes, Dubai is one of the leading developing cities in the world. Lot of wealth is over there,” he said.

  “Have you been there recently?” I asked.

  “Not recently. A long time back.”

  Small talk about geopolitics—very good, I thought. Wesley told him we were more excited about India than Dubai, to which my father responded with a hearty laugh.

  I should take a second and describe that laugh. I have a terrible chuckle that often runs on a two-second delay. It’s the kind that embarrasses friends at parties, which probably helps explain why I was rarely invited to any in college.

  But my father’s? Imagine Santa Claus yelling, “HO, HO, HO!” but in a high-pitched staccato and through a loudspeaker. When Shyamal finds something funny, it’s best to board up surrounding windows. It’s actually not too dissimilar from Bishakha’s laugh, just in a higher register.

  “We shall show you India very well. Did you have a little bit of studies about India? The Mughals and all that?” Shyamal asked, foreshadowing an amusing motif of our Indian education.

  “A little bit. Honestly, we wanted to learn as much as we could on this trip.”

  We were both getting a bit more comfortable. My heart was beating at a more normal pace, and I let my shoulders hunch a bit. Shyamal lowered his voice.

  “How about music? Are you practicing music at all?”

  He remembered. My parents, against my wishes, had made me take classical piano lessons starting when I was six. I hated it. I hated practicing Beethoven. I hated how exact you had to be. If Mozart wanted something quick in this section (sorry, “allegro”), it had to be quick. You didn’t color outside the lines. Eventually, after about eight years, I stopped going to lessons and started picking up jazz on my own. I loved the concept of improvisation.

  I was one of the better piano players for my age until high school, but I didn’t practice enough and never improved. Even though I auditioned for the Berklee College of Music, I was never skilled enough to do it full-time. I was, however, good enough to be in several cover bands throughout my life, including one called the Streetlight Band. When my mother and father took me to my lessons, I doubt they envisioned my abilities peaking with a cover of Bryan Adams’s
“Summer of 69” at Edgar’s Pub on the Jersey Shore.

  Shyamal was a musician himself, as he reminded me. An accordion player. He was a less cool version of Weird Al. I have flashes of memories from him playing when I was a child, but it was the same three songs over and over again. One of them was “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music.

  Back to the roar.

  “I’VE GOT A VERY BEAUTIFUL PIANO FOR YOU,” Shyamal said at a busy intersection. “I’VE BEEN PLAYING IT FOR THE LAST EIGHT YEARS. I GOT IT TUNED! THE TUNING CHANGES EVERY THREE OR FOUR MONTHS BECAUSE OF THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE, BUT MY PIANO IS IN VERY GOOD SHAPE. I’VE BEEN WAITING HOURS FOR YOU TO COME AND PLAY. I’LL TAKE PICTURES.”

  In my mind, I quickly ran through the visuals of my father videotaping me at this highly anticipated piano summit, in which I’m yelling, “I got my first real six-string. Bought it at the five-and-dime!” or some other bar-band classic.

  The driver lurched back and forth with no warning, the high-pitched car honks complemented by Shyamal’s energetic squeals. I’ve never done cocaine, but boy, did it feel like it might’ve been the boost I needed to keep up.

  “This is Kolkataaaaa. Did you know six people got the Nobel Prize from this city?” he said. My father has a verbal tic, which was exhibited many times throughout the trip. When he wanted to teach us something, he would elongate the word or subject he was trying to teach us about. So Kolkata became Kolkataaaa. Mughals became Mughaaaaals. Shyamal rambled on about the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, the legendary poet, essayist, and writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first Asian to do so.

  Tagore’s work was formative during my father’s childhood, or so he said. Beverly Cleary was during mine, but I didn’t feel like explaining Ramona Quimby to him.

  “Wesley and I are both excited about the food,” I told Shyamal. We were. I never rejected this side of my brownness. I have always loved Indian food, as does Wesley.

  “My plan is to give you all home-cooked foods. My cook is very good. Yesterday, I bought special fresh fish for you. Various types of fishes. You cannot get this fish in America. Brand-new good fish. We’ll take care of you. I’ve got Indian white wine, red wine, and Indian beer,” Shyamal said. I had never had a drink with him before.

  “Now we’re talking,” I answered. It surprised me to learn that he had his own cook, though we soon realized that this is very common in India. When we were initially hammering out the details of the trip, Shyamal asked us to bring a gift for a woman who stayed with him. I had quietly wondered if he had remarried without mentioning it. He hadn’t. It turned out that Shyamal was referring to his cook, Suparna.

  Part of the reason I resented my father when I was young was that I didn’t feel like I had one. There was a cultural gap between us—his upbringing in India never yielded to American assimilation—as well as a generational one: Shyamal is almost fifty years older than me.

  In high school, I had a friend named Paul who lived down the street. His father, Stan, played the guitar and taught Paul, who is my age, how to play. They were in a classic rock band together, which performed covers of the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Fleetwood Mac—music that I loved. In high school, Stan invited me to be part of the band as the new keyboardist. This was the Streetlight Band. I felt more of a connection to Stan than I did to my own dad. There was no way I could talk to Shyamal about how Rumours was one of the best albums ever made. He didn’t know what Rumours, Fleetwood Mac, or actual rumors were.

  What fatherhood meant in his mind and my desire for what I believed to be the quintessential American experience my white friends had were two vastly different things. To Shyamal, being a father was a black-and-white equation about putting forth the hard work through whatever means necessary so that the family could survive. In America, in theory, it should have been easier to do that. That’s why he immigrated here.

  I never saw it that way. As a kid in a New Jersey suburb, life wasn’t just about survival. It was a kind of privilege I never realized I had. I wanted our relationship to be about playing catch or riding bikes together. I wanted Shyamal to know my friends and teach me how to shave. I wanted someone to talk to about girls and tell me where babies came from. That was America, I thought, especially considering the experience my white childhood friends were having. Where I wanted less from my mother in many ways—less pressure, less interference—I badly wanted more from Shyamal.

  The cultural gap was widened further by my father’s pride in being an immigrant. I saw his pride as a burden, especially in middle school and high school, where feeling like an outsider was a constant. Hardly anyone in class looked like me. If they did, I bet I would have spent time with other parents similar to Shyamal, and my assumptions about race and parenting would have been different. These feelings, specifically the ones I had equating whiteness with being American, weren’t justified or rational. With the benefit of time, I can say they were wrong.

  The truth is that I’m not sure that my relationship with Shyamal ever had a chance. Even if my parents had had a stable, healthy marriage, the gap between my father and me may have been insurmountable. He didn’t understand what it meant to be an American child growing up in the 1990s. I didn’t understand what it meant to be a child in India. Most important, I didn’t understand what it meant to be a father from India to a millennial son here in the United States.

  He certainly made a good faith effort, but the execution was iffy and boy, did I resent him for it. Year after year, my dad showed up to my Little League games without understanding the rules. I struck out early and often. One time, I swear I saw him standing up and cheering for me after I struck out. I am fairly positive that he thought that’s what was supposed to happen. (My son doesn’t have to endure the punishment of running the bases!)

  But my career didn’t make much sense to an electrical engineer from India. He knows that I am a journalist and a writer for the New York Times—but what that means has always been something foreign to him.

  Bishakha understood a bit more, but not too much. Growing up, the television she approved of me watching, outside of 7th Heaven of course, was the news. She didn’t understand what went into a broadcast, but she loved Peter Jennings, the ABC anchor. She liked 20/20 and 60 Minutes. She was a news consumer in a way my father wasn’t. This probably wasn’t Bishakha’s intent, but her appreciation for the news probably nudged me toward being a reporter.

  When I first started at Boston University, my goal was to become a sports broadcaster. I wanted to be the next Bob Costas and call NBA Finals games on television. I was never any good at sports, so this was the next best thing. When I watched games on television, I would mute the television and broadcast the games myself. I would do the same when playing a video game, say NHL 94 on Sega Genesis.

  Eventually, I became a bit bored by sports and shifted to hard news. I was the sports director of the college radio station at BU and found myself disillusioned by just how regular athletes are. They sometimes want to show up late for work and act cranky. Look, Ma! They’re just like us.

  After college, my career took several detours—let’s call them forced detours—including stops at the Boston Globe (didn’t renew my contract), NBC (layoff), Al Jazeera (layoff), and Major League Baseball (this was fine). And then I landed the job of a lifetime in 2015: I was tapped to be a campaign reporter for CBS News.

  One of the candidates I was initially assigned? Donald J. Trump. My initial reaction? I won’t have to cover that guy at all.

  Woooo, boy. Was I wrong.

  I was part of a small group of about five to ten reporters that followed the Trump campaign from start to finish—“embeds,” in industry parlance. We went to more than forty states and hundreds of rallies. Trump even sent some angry tweets my way once, calling me and my friend Katy Tur, an NBC reporter, “3rd rate” and “dishonest,” adding that we should be fired. I’m sure he was just joking.

  Shyamal didn’t know what it meant to be a campaign embed for a n
ational television network. Are you on television? Sometimes. So you’re a cameraman? Sometimes. You write stories? Sometimes. I don’t get it. I know.

  Covering the Trump campaign made me hyperaware of just how brown I am, with or without family ties. No matter how American I felt as an Indian-American, for some, the hyphen mattered more. The political press corps is almost entirely white, to say nothing about the demographics of Trump’s rally crowds.

  At a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, an older white man came up to me as I was doing an interview and yelled that I should go back to Iraq where I came from.

  I am, of course, not from Iraq. That gentleman meant Howell, New Jersey! Although “Go back to New Jersey where you came from!” might be the worse insult.

  Weeks later, the press corps was in Reno. There was a huge line outside the ballroom where Trump was slated to speak. See, that was the thing about Trump rallies: There were always long lines. He wasn’t doing rallies in diners and coffee shops. He was doing them in basketball arenas. People would line up the night before to get a good seat. His supporters would show up dressed like him and holding signs. It was like Republican political Woodstock. I met Trump supporters who would travel around the country, going to every rally. Trump was the political equivalent of the Allman Brothers. Every show was different, and just like the band, some songs would meander on without end.

  I was taking pictures of the line outside of the Reno rally when another older white man, this one wearing an outfit with Vietnam patches on it, said to me, “Hey, what are you doing? Shooting photos for ISIS?”

  How could someone be that brazen in public? I was furious. First, I was mad about the racism. Second, really? Crowd photos? I’m, what, an intern for ISIS? Not even senior management? My goodness. Systemic discrimination exists in places you don’t expect.