No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi

Author:Aasif Mandvi [Mandvi, Aasif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

THE CHILI PEPPER

AT THE AGE OF SIXTY, my father was fired from his part-time job as a Verizon customer service representative for using profanity. Even though she had heard him swear before, my mother was outraged and couldn’t believe he would use such language at any time for any reason in a professional setting.

“Why does your father have to use such bad words?” she remarked while sitting in her armchair reading her copy of the Koran, as she did most afternoons. “The rest of the people who work there are young enough to be his grandchildren; what kind of example is that setting?”

But I was secretly proud of him. Not because he swore, but because of the reason he did so.

Let me first say that I am a huge fan of profanity. I know many people consider it to be coarse and uncivil and I would agree with them in most cases, but it can also be one of the most powerful tools we humans have to express something that cannot be expressed in any other way. Profanity is the chili pepper of language. If used by an idiot or a clod, it can overwhelm the discourse so the meaning is lost, but if used by a linguistic master chef, it can insert a piquant passion to the point where even though your ears may burn and you may want to rinse your mouth out, you cannot say it doesn’t sound delicious.

Now, it was not out of character for my father to swear—he has used profanity for as long as I can remember, but only at home with us, his family. He would often mispronounce the swear words, much to the amusement of my sister and myself. He could rattle off quite a tiger-like roar of curses in Gujarati or Hindi, such as bhenchod (sister-fucker), madarchod (mother-fucker), gadhero (donkey), and buckwaas (bullshit), but his command of English profanity was less sure-footed. More often than not he would end up stringing together the wrong words: “I am shitting on you” or “I will fuck your shit” or “Bloody shit damn.” It would just make us laugh, which was clearly not the reaction he was attempting to elicit. Sometimes he would just shorten it to “shit damn,” which means even less. You wouldn’t really call someone a “shit damn,” though I suppose there could be such a thing as an actual shit dam that keeps a river of shit from flooding a nearby town. Perhaps my father was referring to the great shit dam that lays somewhere out in the American West, an ecological eyesore where he intended to throw the lawn mower he was yelling at, or where he would like to send my sister and I when we used up all the hot water and he was forced to begin his day shivering naked under what felt like the receiving end of an ice cold shit dam.

In spite of all that, I had never seen him swear in front of his customers or his colleagues.

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