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The Indian-Americans

Aasif Mandvi: Story-wallah in the Time of Trump

It was a packed audience at the Minetta Lane Theater, an intimate off-Broadway house in Greenwich Village. Everyone was waiting for the show to begin; the lights had been dimmed. A man with a suitcase suddenly strutted up the aisle, wide-eyed and with an innocent, open smile, waving to the audience.

It was Azgi, immigrant restaurant worker from India, on his way to the America of Dreams.

It was actually Aasif Mandvi, Indian-American actor, traveling storyteller, kathakar extraordinaire, in the opening act of his off-Broadway show ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ – 20 years after it was first seen in New York.

As he alighted the stage, you realized that Mandvi, 52, was not just playing Azghi in this one-man show but his entire world, weaving six different characters into the narrative. You meet the restaurant owner Hakim, his wife Farida, their daughter Sakina and son Samir, as well as Sakina’s fiancé, Ali – each personality brought out by Mandvi with just the addition of a scarf, a pair of glasses or a hairband. So adept is Mandvi at this character manipulation that you never feel the stage is held by just one man but hear a cacophony of voices, of individuals, each with their own dreams, fears and aspirations.

The entire 90 minute play takes place in a small Indian restaurant on 6th street, with the mandatory string of garish multicolor lights and makeshift décor. Through six very different characters Mandvi weaves a tale of immigrants in America in general, and Muslims in particular. Hakim is caught between the lost and the new and negotiating between the two. Anyone who has moved to a new place will recognize the grief of Farida at leaving the sweetness of home for the loneliness of a cold, friendless America; you will see Sakina trying to straddle two different worlds, the America of her friends and the India of her parents’ memory; Ali, her Muslim fiancée is conflicted between attraction to America’s wanton lifestyle and to the puritanical demands of his own faith. And Azgi struggles to find – with humor – his footing in this slippery new world. Each character faces the conflicts of being immigrant and Muslim in America.

Mandvi had written ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ in 1998 and performed it as a young struggling actor in America. Originally directed and developed by Kimberly Hughes and now directed by Kimberly Senior, this testimony to the immigrant life had gone on to win great critical acclaim including two Obie awards. It was the first time anyone had made Indian immigrants central to the story.

Now two decades later, Aasif Mandvi is back on the stage with Azgi’s tale, presented by Audible . A lot of water has flown under the bridge since then. Mandvi went on to became the hugely popular Correspondent on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show – that gig lasted for a decade and got him fame and name recognition. He’s also acted in several movies including ‘Today’s Special’ with Madhur Jaffrey, written ‘No Land’s Man’, a fun autobiography and also acted in several plays including Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced.’ He was the lead actor, co-writer and producer of the web series Halal in the Family which won a Peabody Award, also acted in the HBO comedy series The Brink. Last year Mandvi, a long time bachelor, actually managed to build marriage into his plans, marrying his girl friend Shaifali Puri.

 

So why ‘Sakina’s Restaurant ’ and why now?

In a way it’s a sad commentary on the times we live in that this tale still needs to be told – and yet it is optimistic and hopeful. Still set in the 90’s so there are no references to 9/11, ICE, or Muslim bans, and yet the monologue is very relevant to the times. Mandvi’s is a more innocent America where racism does exist but all the veils have not yet been lifted from the ugliness of the xenophobia in the bones of America. It’s a happier place where immigrants are still harbouring their wishful American dreams – the hopelessness has not yet set in.

As one American viewer confided to me at the end of the show, when she first saw the shiny-eyed blissful Azgi rushing into America, she felt like warning him, “No – no. don’t do it! Don’t come here!”

Azgi, the waiter, is still an innocent and thrilled with the concept of America. There’s a lot of folklorish wisdom in his words as he talks directly to the audience at times, philosophizing about his immigrant life: “Every night I have the same dream. I am a giant tandoori chicken wearing an Armani suit. I am sitting behind the wheel of a speeding Cadillac. I have no eyes to see, no mouth to speak, and I don’t know where I am going.”

So much has happened since Mandvi first wrote ‘Sakina’s Restaurant.’ America seems to have changed drastically. I spoke with Mandvi one night after his long interludes on the stage. Why did he think this story is still important in Trump’s America where the words ‘immigrant’ and ‘Muslim’ have become four-letter words?

“Now we have a very aggressive assault on immigrants and Muslims and it feels like one of the ways that you dehumanize people is by politicizing them,” says Mandvi. “ Sakina’s Restaurant’ for me was always a human story, a nonpolitical story because it’s counter to what’s going on in our culture right now, where we want to dehumanize immigrants.”

“I never thought that 20 years later the story I wrote about an immigrant family would be an act of political resistance against an administration that is at war with immigrants,” wrote Mandvi on an Instagram posting. Ask him about this and he says political resistance comes through such human stories.

“This is what artists and storytellers do – we tell stories. This is the way we counter a political agenda or totalitarian government that puts babies in cages at the border or banning Muslims from the country. The way you counter that is by writing a song or telling a story. This is what artists have been doing for generations. You can’t help but experience it through the lens of today’s culture. I can tell this story again and it has a resonance today in some ways much deeper and more nuanced than it did back then.”

Asked about Islamophobia in today’s world, Mandvi said, “It’s a political tool and it gets used by politicians and government, especially now as a way to scapegoat immigrants. Trump’s entire platform is basically looking at his base and blaming immigrants, terrorists and jihadists for all of America’s problems. It’s very easy to be like, ‘oh, the Jihadis are coming. They’re trying to kill and to destroy our way of life.’ So Islamophobia is a tool that’s used by people who are in power and want to divide and create smokescreens. That’s how racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism all work.”

Recalling the power of The Daily Show he says, “I got to work with some of the funniest people in the business and so it helped me hone my skills and sharpen my comedy as a skill.” It was five years after 9/11 and it gave him a chance to examine his own identity as an immigrant and Muslim and gave him a platform and huge audience to talk about these issues to a national audience. Now the fans from The Daily show have followed him to ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ which brings him back to his roots for he is more of a storyteller and a performer at heart rather than a traditional ‘comedian’.

While ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ is a big success in blue New York, it is a little like preaching to the choir and perhaps needs to be shown in the red states. Mandvi says he would like to make a documentary of taking it to different parts of America to see how it would play out. Currently Audible is doing an audio book version of it and there may also be a live streaming version which could be downloaded and watched, so people in other parts of the US get to see it too.

‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ has moved many people from different walks of life, cutting across ethnicity and gender. Recalls Mandvi, “A young Indian girl came up to me after the show the other night and she said, ‘I just want to say thank you for helping me understand my father a little better.’”

Indeed, the play has changed things for young Indian-Americans actors. As a drama student, Mandvi himself never saw himself reflected in any of the plays he saw, written by white men. So it’s always satisfying now when a young actor comes up to him and says, “I used your monologues from ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ to get into Grad school’. He says, “I think everybody needs to see themselves reflected in the world around them. Especially young children growing up – it kind of legitimizes them in their own mind when they see people like themselves on the screen.”

As he writes in ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’ in the voice of Azgi, part-time philosopher and full-time immigrant, “Once upon a time a man asked God for a new face because he was tired of the one he had, so God granted the man his wish. The tragedy of this story is that now every time the man looks in the mirror, he doesn’t know who he is.”
Aasif Mandvi is intrigued by the immigrant’s endless search for identity and place, and the yearning to find himself. The storywallah in him continues to explore and tell these stories.

(This article was first published in Scroll.in)

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