When I thought everything was working out for once in this eighth-grade Indian boy existence, there came an Indiana Jones marathon weekend on cable TV featuring Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on two straight days of broadcast. Two days of everyone’s hero, getting the girl, saving the village of tattered clothed Indians, and battling the crazed Mola Ram. That villain ruined life for all us dark-skinned, misanthropic boys who already had trouble fitting in. Over the years, every time the movie came on, the most relevant part of the story for my classmates was the dinner of gruesome courses consisting of live snakes, giant bugs, and finally, the dessert of chilled monkey brains, joyously eaten by a big fat Indian man. I always dreaded the day after the movie played when I was relentlessly asked, “Do you eat monkey brains?”
Today, I made it all the way from the bus to my first-period class and slinked down next to the door without being mocked. I took out a sharpie pen and began blacking out any trace of my cheap, knock-off Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers with its X logo instead of the well-known star. This would give people one less reason to mess with me. They were the best sneakers my never-home, security guard father could afford. “School is more important than sneakers,” he said in the accent I had managed to replace in my own mouth since we moved to Miami when I was nine.
Maria was the first to ask the question that day. Can there be anything worse than the girl you like, imagining you dining on an open monkey head? “But they really do eat monkey brains, right?” Maria inquired loudly.
“Maybe, I guess so,” I answered, my integrity disintegrating.
Everything looked big on Maria. No matter what she wore, from her real Chuck Taylor sneakers to her NO DOUBT concert t-shirt, she was small enough to fit even into my world.
“Like, if you wanted to, you could right?” she pressed as if it were a matter of timing, not taste. “Would your mom know how to make it? Like kill a monkey?”
I couldn’t make her see it any other way: I eat monkey brains.
Leaving class, I ran into one of my bullies and braced in the usual manner with my head turned and eyes half shut, but the blow did not come. I opened my eyes and found him waiting for me to stop cringing. Puzzled, he asked, “Do y’all motherfuckers eat snakes, beetles, monkey brains, and shit?”
“No,” I answered, waiting for his hands to find my neck.
“Nasty.” Again, after Maria’s interrogation, the answers I gave did not matter. “That shit is gross,” he finished and walked away. I was glad to have missed out on the bullying for that day but couldn’t help feeling lousy from the cultural beating I was enduring thanks to filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
At lunch, Emiliowho sat next to me in our science classroom, asked, “So, monkey brains for lunch?”
There was no escape from the monkey brain storm, even among best friends. There were monkey brains in the world and as far as my peers were concerned, the monkey brains would be consumed by me. I walked out into the hallway to be greeted with, “Hey! Apu! How were your monkey brains?” The group of boys slurped as they walked past, pretending to devour the imaginary edible with an invisible spoon and bowl. When the next class began, I prepared with pen in hand and notebook at the ready, hoping to lose myself in the lesson.
In past grades it was never this bad. Surely Indiana Jones and his brain-eating adversaries weren’t going away. What did the future have in store for me when my only cultural touchstones were Apu from The Simpsons, the evil Mola Ram, and the village of starved, tattered clothed Indians offering the hero their last bits of rice?
So how about if one of those skinny villagers got off their butts and rescued the Sankara Stones, defeated Mola Ram, won the girl, and had that last bit of rice himself? Instead of waiting for Indiana Jones to swoop in and save the day. More heroes should look like me, I thought.
Across the classroom, Maria sat with her friends and I realized there was no hope for us if all she saw in me was the wild-eyed Mola Ram falling into a pit of crocodiles. The class began and I sank into my seat, wishing I had shared the fate of Mola Ram being torn to shreds, tearing fabric and skin from flesh and bone. As the teacher turned his back and began the lesson, a folded piece of paper landed on my desk. I looked around and saw only Maria smiling. Would she have written a carefully worded recognition of her false assumptions and apologized? I unwrapped the tightly concealed note to reveal a drawing of what appeared to be me, gorging myself on an open monkey’s head. I examined the picture, my cartoon eyes wide and excited, my mouth and tongue dripping with delight, and a spoonful of monkey brain in my hand. I felt myself begin to cry. I felt myself crushing the note in one hand and my other balling into a fist. I heard a muffled laugh behind me. This let me know that it was not Maria, but that did not matter now.
I couldn’t take it. I stood up. I screamed, “I-DO-NOT-EAT-MONKEY-BRAINS!”
The class paused in deep silence then opened itself to laughter. Waves of laughter hit me as I stood with angry tears in my eyes and the crushed paper in my shaking hand. The teacher took my arm, asking without wish for an answer, “What is wrong with you?”
I sat in the principal’s office and waited for my mother who would have to leave work as a receptionist to come get me. Watching her in the administrator’s cold office clad in her bright orange sari, nervously pulling the material over her shoulder while she talked to the principal about my outburst and the reason for it, was far more painful than anything I had endured that day. Unknown to my mother were the years of bullying and tauntings of A-rab and A-pu. She was now subject to the frightful depiction of our people eating monkey brains in a movie she had no reference for as the growing look of confusion enveloped her.
When we left the office, I awaited the inevitable embarrassing conversation, but none came. We took the bus home with the barest of exchange, her saffron eyes avoiding me. In our building, my mother hurried us past the apartments of other Indian families that might emerge to inquire as to why we were home in the middle of the day. A community of women, awaiting husbands who work with little time off, and children who always do the right thing. Not unlike the village from Temple of Doom, awaiting husbands and children to return from the pits of the forbidden temple.
In our small apartment, Mom sat on the fraying couch and took a deep breath without raising her head. She was pushing the world off her back with a deep inhalation, then relenting with her exhalation. She finally looked up, delivered a weak smile, and patted the couch, inviting me to sit.
I sat down as she rose and walked to the bedroom, returning with a large scrapbook bursting with clippings. I had never seen the scrapbook and found myself shocked at its existence. Neon colors exploded as she opened it and flipped through the years of extracted magazine articles and photos of Indian starlets. None of which I recognized until she came to the page with Amitabh Bachchan, my lost Indian movie action hero, forgotten amidst the ones that awaited us in America like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. I remember little from the last days living in Delhi, but my parents were excited and happy. I remember Dad making a list of all the great things there were to look forward to, mostly because he knew I was scared. He said there would be good ice cream, McDonalds, rock and roll, and movies that were better than the ones in India. My father hypothesized all the wonderful things we would have from living in America, most importantly, the education I would receive.
On another page, she proudly pointed at a picture of The Beatles sitting with the smiling spiritual teacher, Maharishi. She reverently placed her finger on the face of each Beatle and said their name as a question, looking to me for verification, but I didn’t care about The Beatles or the foolish-looking Maharishi.
As I began to forget the day’s events among the pictures of cheesy Indian actors, my mother broke. She held back a sob and tears welled in her eyes. “I am sorry we brought you here and you are so embarrassed to be so different,” she said. She paused, collected herself, then continued to search through the book of ridiculous smiling faces. “But we have much to be proud of.”
As the last glue encased page turned, an avalanche of unglued pictures spilled out onto the thick carpeted floor. A look of failure came over my mother as I bent down, picking up the faces, some older but still exuberant as the first images of them in the scrapbook. Each one a testament to India’s love for celebrity. I picked up one clipping that surprised me, newer than the rest, the copy at the top of the picture read, GWEN STEFANI AND TONY KANAL WITH ‘NO DOUBT’ AT THE AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS.
Among the fake smiling Bollywood angels was one of my favorite rock bands. “Mom,” I asked, “Why do you have this?”
“The man, he is Indian. His name is Kanal. But what Indian man is named Tony and has blonde hair? I don’t like it. And the white girl is wearing a bindi but she is wearing a tracksuit instead of a sari. I don’t like that either.” She took the photo from me with scornful fingers and soured her face to the awkwardly dressed band.
“But Mom, these guys are awesome!”
“Does he sing?”
“No. He plays the bass guitar.” It then occurred to me that she had never heard their music. “Wait here,” I said, running into my room and returning with the Tragic Kingdom CD case. Forcing it into her hands to look at the posing Gwen Stefani in a 1940s dress, holding a rotting orange in her hand, my mother’s face was still sour. “Here, let me play it.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said as I put the CD into the player and began with the first track on the album. Immediately she covered her ears and laughed. “You can’t dance to this!” she yelled as I clicked to, “Just a Girl.” “Take it off, please!”
“One more, you’ll like this one,” I said while I clicked the player ahead to track 10, “Don’t Speak.” The gentler guitar and Gwen Stefani’s softly rising, sad ballad voice convinced Mom to take her hands off her head and listen. As the song crescendoed, she closed her eyes and smiled. At the end of the song she asked me to play it again and by the third time she sang along to the music with her own made-up lyrics as it was difficult for her to parse the words in American songs.
“Kanal must have written this song,” she said. “He must be brilliant, like Ravi Shankar.” The one lyric she seemed to grasp was, “Don’t tell me because it hurts.” Far more indignant in her rendition. I tried coaching her but it was useless. In her mouth, the song sounded like the hundreds of whining Indian ballads of love-lost-and-found I had heard my whole life from the back seat of the car. Her singing then came from her belly, it became deeper and more beautiful than any of those songs. There, in the little space of our living room.
Arvin Ramgoolam was born in Trinidad and Tobago, raised in Miami Beach, and has lived in Crested Butte, Colorado for 17 years. He is the recipient of the 2020 One Story Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship. He owns and operates Townie Books and Rumors Coffee and Tea House with his wife Danica. Together, they are raising twin daughters at the edge of the Colorado wilderness.
Twitter: @ArvinRam1 Instagram: @towniebooks
Photo by mharrsch on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA