Free No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi

looked more like those of a beautiful Indian girl.
    That same year the drama department at my high school decided that instead of producing a traditional fall play, they would put on a variety show in collaboration with the music department. The drama students were asked to perform some kind of musical number, even if their lack of singing ability left them to resort to lip-synching, for which there was an actual category. This was absurd to me, since lip-synching requires no talent at all; I would rather listen to bad karaoke than watch pretty good lip-synching. Initially I decided to boycott the show entirely, but a few weeks before the performance I changed my mind . . . because of Michael Jackson.
    It would be fair to say that most Indian immigrant parents would assert two important restrictions on their sons before entering high school: “No dames and no drugs.” I use the word dames here simply for alliteration purposes—no Indian parent would use the word
dames
. To be fair, no non-Indian parent would use the word
dames
, unless your dad happens to be a James Cagney impersonator. My larger point is that up until my senior year I had never partaken of either. However, as my interest (and frustration) in the former increased, my attraction to the latter did as well. If only being a 125-pound geeky Indo-British theater nerd with anAfro who specialized in funny walks had somehow made me more attractive to women, I may never have settled for drugs as my act of rebellion.
    When I say drugs, I don’t mean hard drugs, or even medium-soft drugs; I mean marijuana. This probably sounds innocent enough, but for someone who had never even kissed a girl or tasted wine, it might as well have been crack. Actually, it was not the pot that I was drawn to; in fact, for a long time I refused to inhale and only pretended that I was high. I just wanted to hang out with the guys who were smoking pot because they seemed cool, funny, and intellectual.
    Unlike the rest of the kids in high school, Roy and Rick, my soon-to-be stoner friends, were not listening to Duran Duran or going to the mall to play video games and watch Molly Ringwald movies. They were two handsome white guys with 4.0 GPAs who had given up student government to be actively counter-culture. They didn’t care what anyone thought of them as they passionately discussed for hours on end the literary merits of Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison. I realize now this is just what happens when you are stoned, but at the time they seemed completely unlike myself and the other kids in drama. Most importantly, unlike me, Roy and Rick seemed to be having lots of sex . . . with dames.
    Roy and Rick reminded me of some of the boys in my British boarding school, super-smart kids from wealthy families who would snort glue behind the cricket field. I was never foolhardy enough to join them, but I wondered what it must take to risk being suspended or even expelled. Perhaps you had to be incredibly angry, I thought, to be able to say “Fuck you” to the school, to your parents, to risk ruining your future. As an immigrant kid whose parents had sacrificed so much to give me the life I had, I never felt I hadthe luxury to express my anger in that way, but I was nevertheless envious of those that did.
    In Roy and Rick I found a similar expression of anger and rebelliousness. They both came from wealthy, divorce-traumatized homes. Unlike at my house, where my parents had never heard of personal space and if I had a friend over my mother would walk in to my bedroom every five minutes with offerings of Indian delicacies or random food items like peaches, Roy’s parents never seemed to make an appearance. We would spend hours after school and on the weekends getting stoned in Roy’s basement bedroom and freaking out on the few occasions the front door slammed. We spent a lot of time driving around in Roy’s beat-up sky-blue Volkswagen Bug blasting Beatles tunes and discussing Nietzsche