No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi Page B

sorry to bother you, but how do you change the size of the paper on this?” There was also my all-time favorite, the wildly enthusiastic “Hello!” I had many variations of this to draw on. Sometimes I went with the high-pitched “Helluuu!” On other occasions I shifted to a lower register, offering a deep-throated “Hellowwww,” at times tinging it with a British accent, “Ello, ello, ello.” Now and then, for the fun of it, I would just mouth the word “yellow” without making a sound.
    All of this displayed a level of perseverance that she apparently found irresistible because after several months of strategic seduction, during which I copied the same scene from
Anthony and Cleopatra
twenty-three separate times, employed forty-eight differently accented hellos, twelve different goodbyes, and one attempt at physical comedy which I never repeated, where I pretended to bang my head into the door as I opened it,
she
asked
me
out on a date. This could not have worked out better. It had become clear that I needed women to make the first move for one reason: I was terrified of them.
    My first exposure to women after the onset of puberty was in boarding school, where we had a populace of two hundred boys and six girls. Girls were only admitted starting in the lower sixth form, at around sixteen years old, no doubt to teach a bunch of juvenile barbarians who had spent the better part of their school life freely expressing their teenage male aggression to morph into proper English gentlemen before being thrust out into the real world.The six young women in the school quickly realized that they had become the subject of every boy’s sexual fantasies, and whether they liked it or not, they wielded an unnatural amount of power. In order to survive and to protect themselves from the onslaught of burgeoning male hormones, they cultivated a necessary detachment, aloofness, and even contempt. Females therefore to me were not earthly creatures. They were more like extraordinarily beautiful princesses who roamed the halls with shiny hair, dressed in brightly colored sweaters and who could, with a mere flutter of an eyelash or an askance look, grant you permission to live, or a reason to die. You can imagine how flattered I was therefore that, years later, just such a princess had asked me to accompany her to something, even though in this case that something happened to be church.
    Most guys might have been turned off by this, but not me. The Methodist boarding school my Muslim parents had chosen to send me to required religious studies (i.e., Bible studies) plus chapel every Sunday. I was quite familiar with church. In fact, since there is no separation of church and state in the UK, even secular British schools would begin the day with a form of Christian worship. I was actually more familiar with Christianity than I was with Islam, the faith I was born into. Even today, I probably know more about the Gospel according to Mark than I do about any sura in the Koran. This is not a complaint. My mother and father, as good immigrants are wont to do, scrimped and saved to send me to one of the best educational institutions in the north of England. However it does seem to me there must have been a tacit agreement between my parents and the highly-accredited institution that in exchange for the prestigious opportunity and the education the school was providing,my parents would turn their heads while their son was being introduced to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
    It didn’t matter at all to the school which religion you had been raised in. There were students who came not only from Christian, but also from Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and even—God forbid—Roman Catholic families. But every Sunday we would all open our hymnbooks, raise our voices, and sing with a truly assimilated sense of apathy. All of this is to say that when Diane invited me to join her for church service, I wasn’t the least bit put off; rather, I praised Jesus