Missed Translations - Sopan Deb Page 0,1

to make them laugh.

But I was handing this crowd someone else’s honesty with that joke, telling them what I pictured a stereotypical Christmas with Indian parents to be like. That I didn’t know the first thing about a happy Christmas made me all the more eager to talk about it. It was a paradox: I had spent much of my life running away from my skin color and culture, and yet the thing I felt most comfortable discussing onstage was my South Asian ethnicity. Talking about any version of the brown experience felt cathartic, whether it was the mangled one of my childhood or the way I imagined a happy brown kid growing up.

I had just ten minutes to give the crowd at the Comic Strip a little taste of my truth, and I had more to say. I launched into some jokes I had written about my Indian family. This was the real stuff. First, there was the bitter divorce between my mother, Bishakha, and my father, Shyamal, after a long and ill-fated arranged marriage. Then there was a healthy dose of cultural alienation, a smattering of outlandish (but totally true) stories about my parents, and the father who disappeared to India eleven years prior without telling anyone. No, really. He did.

I had the punchlines down pat.

I love family reunions. Anybody here been to a good family reunion?

When I do this bit, nobody ever raises their hands. It gives me a beat to take stock of the audience before inquiring:

Is this a room of fucking orphans?

That gets a chuckle, but it’s just the amuse-bouche. A warm-up for the appetizer.

I, for one, really love family reunions. Mine are typically in court.

It’s a good, not great, joke. I like it, though. If jokes are comedians’ children, that one would be Cindy Brady: Fine, it gets the job done, but who really cares? The audience at the Comic Strip agreed. A solid Cindy.

But what the crowd never knew, and what I couldn’t bring myself to tell them, was the crippling anxiety and sadness I felt about each of the truths I had morphed into a laugh line. I was comfortable talking about this stuff from behind a microphone, but only to an extent. Sometimes it felt like I was playing the part of a brown guy onstage, but when I dropped the fa?ade and delved into my actual life, the words deflected the guilt and vulnerability I wasn’t yet ready to face. Much of my material—especially the stuff about my parents—resulted from unfamiliarity, both with myself and with them.

Look, stand-up comedy is a mostly masochistic endeavor. That’s why I have a day job as a writer for the New York Times. The Times gig is a fantastic outlet for curiosity and for exploring the humanity of others. I can interview other people and probe them with questions I might not be able to ask of myself. As for comedy, I’m only willing to flagellate myself for free and after hours.

At the time of this set in January 2018, I hadn’t seen my mother or father in years. My relationship with each of them had its own contours but essentially landed in the same place: I considered them distant footnotes from my past. At that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure where either parent was living.

When I started writing this book, right after the Big Brown set, much of what I could tell you about Bishakha and Shyamal could fit into a small paragraph. This one: At some point in the latter half of the twentieth century, they were arranged to be married. I could also say, though without complete assurance, that they were both from India, but I didn’t know where in India they were from. I wasn’t sure how old they were. I didn’t know how many brothers and sisters they had. I was pretty sure their parents—my grandparents—were all dead. I had no idea what they were like as children or what they hoped their lives would be. I never asked; they never told me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Oliver Twist. I grew up with my parents as well as my brother, Sattik, who is nine years older than me. Or, rather, I grew up in the same general time and space continuum as the two people who were responsible for my birth and a sibling who moved out of the house when I was nine. My relationship with my brother has always been warm, in part because the age