No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi Page A

the trunk of your car that your friends think you might be an over-caffeinated kleptomaniac.
    Anyway, by the time I got to college, unlike my bohemian theater counterparts, who I assumed had had so much sex alreadythat they found the very talk of it passé, I was still very much a virgin. In fact, I had never even really properly kissed a girl.
    Being sent by my parents to a British all-boys boarding school at the tender age of thirteen hadn’t helped in this regard, nor had the fact that I grew up in a South-Asian Muslim household with very conservative views of relations between the sexes. For many years as a child, back in England, I thought I might be going to hell for looking at my father’s secret stash of
Penthouse
magazines. His magazines were the second place I had ever seen a naked female. The first was in elementary school back in England when I sheepishly touched Katie Ashcroft’s vagina. This was an awkward and altogether unimpressive experience, especially considering that Katie hadn’t exactly singled me out for this peer-pressure-fueled favor.
    It was common knowledge that Katie regularly invited boys into the school bathroom and lifted up her skirt to show off her prepubescent vagina for reasons only she understood. The boys would line up outside the girls’ bathroom and go in one at a time, which, surprisingly, never inspired an inquiry from the adults in charge. With her tinted glasses, pageboy haircut, and school uniform, Katie was normally a quiet, somewhat mousy girl who resembled Velma from the Scooby-Doo cartoons. But in that bathroom setting, as the dim afternoon light flooded in over the toilet stalls, she seemed to gain the sexual confidence of a Playboy Playmate.
    “Are you ready?” she asked me.
    I froze.
    “Are you ready?” she said again, nodding at me with increasing impatience.
    I nodded back politely.
    “Well, take your hands out of your pockets then,” she commanded.
    I did as I was told although I didn’t want her to see that they were moist and clenched.
    “Don’t be nervous,” she said as she lifted up her plaid skirt and pulled down her underwear.
    There it was. There was Katie Ashcroft’s vagina. Unimpressive, I thought. That’s it? Seriously? This is why every boy in school is lined up outside the girl’s bathroom? To touch a crease? Was I missing something here? It looked so ordinary.
    I don’t know what I had expected. Perhaps that my senses would go into overdrive at the sight of her vagina, that I would suddenly be overcome with uncontrollable stirrings and urges that I had never experienced before. The truth was that I was underwhelmed and disappointed.
    “Do you want to touch it?” she asked after I had stared expressionlessly for a few moments. Her voice now had a hint of vulnerability. Perhaps she’d noticed my utter lack of enthusiasm.
    “Umm, okay,” I said. I reached out and touched it in the same manner that I had recently touched a wounded baby sparrow that had fallen out of our neighbors’ tree on top of our garage: with a level of reservation, frightened that the creature might suddenly decide to attack me. Katie’s vagina did not attack me. Unlike the wounded bird that had twitched and shivered, it made no movement at all. It seemed lifeless and unaware that it was even being touched.
    Katie’s sad vagina constituted my entire experience of physical intimacy with girls until college. Armed with that disturbing memory and a trunk load of stale coffee beans, I ventured forth into the world of seducing Diane.
    That was her name. I had overheard someone calling her that and made a mental note. I was afraid to actually use her name forfear that she might think I was stalking her since we had never been formally introduced. I found reasons to make copies whenever Diane was working, and eventually I was able to get her attention and even elicit an occasional smile with such classic pickup lines as “Excuse me, this copier is not working,” or “Hi,