You Can’t Be Serious(3)
“Mommmmmm! What’s a hooker?”
“Where did you hear that word?!” she asked in shock. At school!3 Mom explained that a hooker is someone who sells her body. It’s not okay to ever use that word or refer to anyone by it. And that was that.
The explanation created more questions than answers.
What parts of her body does a hooker sell?
Also, how can she sell her body? Doesn’t she need it?
WHAT IS THE HOOK FOR???
It was clear I wasn’t getting any more info, so I didn’t ask. I didn’t feel any less guilty. In my heart, I knew I’d have to come clean the next morning. I’d need to tell the teacher that Randy—the fastest and worst-behaved boy in fifth grade—was actually telling the truth this time, and maybe didn’t deserve a week of detention alone. I would admit that I didn’t know what a hooker was when I said it on the playground. I had merely repeated it to fit in.
On the walk to school, my thoughts wandered back to the time Randy had called me the n-word on the playground. I should have said something to the teacher then too, I thought to myself. That was not okay. Facing my moment of truth and realizing I had the upper hand here, I felt my first tinge of vindication. I walked into the classroom and confidently kept my mouth shut. I let Randy take the fall for the hooker comment.
At the age of eleven, my curiosity led me to learn the power of words. The beauty of imagination. And the consequences of silence.
* * *
By middle school, I looked like this:
I’d be sitting on the couch laughing at The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, crushing over Candace Cameron in Full House. I’d mimic Steve Urkel in Family Matters with zero sense of irony, thinking, Nobody has glasses that thick in real life (I must have been blind). What a photo! You likely have one of two reactions to how I looked. You’re either in the category of “Oh man, I can totally relate, middle school was cruel to me too,” or you’re saying, “Hahahaha, you were the kind of kid I used to pick on!” If you’re the latter, then you loved middle school, and I urge you to google all the people you made fun of as a kid just to see how much more successful we are than you.4
As a newly teenaged nerd struggling to find his place in the world—or at least in Marlboro Middle School—I regularly got book-checked in the hallways, tormented in the lunchroom, and picked last in gym class. Every time. I was also lucky to grow up in a diverse New Jersey town, with kids from lots of different spiritual backgrounds.
At thirteen, this meant that I was an active participant in the Central New Jersey bar mitzvah scene. I attended countless bar and bat mitzvahs over the course of my middle school years, interacting with large families who were a lot like mine: They were boisterous, liked to eat, and loved asking deeply personal questions in as loud a voice as possible.
“Are you Jewish?” Aviva Finkel’s eighty-year-old grandmother shouted to me across the rectangular wooden seder table one Passover. “Because you look like ya could be hay-uff.”
“No, Bubbe,”5 I said, “my parents moved here from India, remember?”
“Well,” she complimented, “you could pay-uss for Sephardic.”
My friends’ families were so relatable, so wonderful. My own grandparents taught us to be proud of who we are. They regaled us with stories of marching with Gandhi and being thrown in jail by British soldiers for participating in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. When a section on Gandhi appeared in my sixth-grade history book the year before, I processed for the first time the direct connection between Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: that King had taken Gandhi’s model of nonviolent disobedience and applied it to our civil rights movement.
We were assigned an accompanying class project, and I jumped at the chance to record a video interview with my seventy-eight-year-old grandfather. I put a glass of water on a beige, oval folding table. Grandpa (Mom’s dad) walked with the help of a stainless-steel cane that had a brown plastic handle. He moved slowly. At five ten, it took him some extra time to comfortably tuck his legs around the chair.
I had heard bits and pieces of the stories as far back as I could remember. My grandparents had a framed photo of Gandhi on the wall of their humble one-bedroom apartment in Mumbai. The house was where my mom grew up with her three siblings. When we’d visit during summer vacations, I remember gazing at the photo as we’d fall asleep under a mosquito net on the cool tile floor of the main room. In the mornings, I’d ask for stories about the man in the photo. When our grandparents stayed with us in New Jersey, their tales of marching against British colonialism were used to coerce childhood-me into eating my vegetables at the dinner table. I thought all of this was just normal. I grew up oblivious to how extraordinary my grandparents were.
This time felt different. I was the one asking to sit down with Grandpa, recording his answers, tying his experiences so explicitly to a history that I was automatically a part of. I asked what it was like to fight for his freedom. And, in a way, for mine. My grandfather lifted his pant leg to show me a long, deep scar from where a British soldier beat him, and broke down in tears. I had never seen him cry before. Fifty-five years on, the emotional marks seemed much fresher than the physical.
It would be decades later, as a young adult, when I’d connect my mom’s father’s sacrifices to those of Bapaji, my dad’s dad, who had not been a freedom fighter. Bapaji was a tall, talkative man with a fascination for travel, riddles, and spelling. When he was ninety-two, I visited him in Ahmedabad, the largest city in India’s western state of Gujarat. Dad’s mom, who we called Ba, had passed away some years prior, so Bapaji lived there with my aunt. On this particular visit, I asked Bapaji if he’d like to come along for a rickshaw ride to Gandhi’s nearby Sabarmati ashram.