Slow Down, Maurice

“Maurice: An eccentric inventor but loving father who supports Belle's dreams... He is made a prisoner until Belle exchanges her freedom for his.” —Disney Wiki

When I told my father last semester that I was performing in a spoken word play called “Unspoken,” the conversation went something like this:

“What I say about bullshit activities?”

—(Well, bullshit isn’t the most suitable adjective for a visceral art…)—

“What I say, you remember?”

—(You say that you didn’t immigrate for me to waste a Harvard degree or scribble “people notes” on the back of a CVS receipt. That riches to rags is not how the story goes, is not what you bargained for when your left your roach-infested apartment in Karachi for a shoddier dorm room in a more photogenic city, living off Burger King coupons and the distant vision that, just maybe, your progeny would be everything you weren’t...)—.

“Aisha, you hear me? WHAT I say?”

“You say that I shouldn’t do them, the bullshit activities. That I should slow down more, like Maurice.”

He cleared his throat; I sighed; and the call ended just as I heard him say—almost in awe that his words had endured—“That’s right.”

***

In “Unspoken,” I played a character who rushed through life, burning relationships before she ever arrived at their bridges. Longing, through long-form soliloquies, for a deep and raw kind of intimacy. She saw her life as a narrative—easier to write than to live, to backspace away an experience like bad prose than to retrospectively return, again and again, to a taxing psychological space.

The parallels were not lost on me.

I spent rehearsals vacillating between feeling like the shit or just like shit. Between feeling like a fraud, or like an open book wanting for someone to read it all. I lingered there, between two realities; between the lines I memorized and the ones I said in section or to a friend in the Yard.

I lingered there, amazed and confused and disturbed by how closely I identified with another’s script. By how long I’d been living by one. By how much mine needed to be rewritten.

So when I stood on stage—fictitious but authentic—and proclaimed, “I am learning it’s untelling,” I wanted my dad to be there, sitting and listening. I wanted him to hear in those words an apology for how I’d fucked up the South Asian trope with my silly poetry and aversion to chemistry, to hear how it had fucked me up, too.

I wanted him to hear, in this story, a bit of my story. A bit of his own, even.

But once we bowed and the crowd snapped in applause and flowers appeared, there was only this: The director waved to her mother. The tech designer hugged hers. A cast member, speaking in rapid Dutch, answered a call from her parents. And I received my daily text.

“hi aisha. how you been? hope you studying.”

***

On the last day of May, hours before I left home for the summer, I heard some of the screaming that formed, for close to nineteen years, the soundtrack to which I’ve lived.

It was my parents. And, as usual, they were arguing.

My mom was cleaning and had swept my “Unspoken” program into the trash by mistake.

My dad saw. “WHAT you doing?” he cried. “You crazy?”

I didn’t know what to make of his outrage. Was it just a convenient way to blame my mom, again, for something or the other? Did he share my reverence for the thinning and fraying sheet? Did this matter?

My mom, exhausted and weary, retreated to the kitchen. My dad, bitter and strained, asked me to follow him upstairs.

He was cleaning out his closet and needed my help.

I stood there, hands empty, while he emptied out suitcases and shoeboxes and emerged, finally, with a thinning and fraying sheet that looked suspiciously like the one he’d rescued.

“Read this,” he said.

It was a program. For a rendition of “Beauty and the Beast.” Staged by graduate students at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His alma mater.

And, sure enough, there was his name. Not next to MAURICE, though. Or GASTON. But STAGEHAND.

“I carried wood,” he said.

He was an avid reader in Pakistan, he continued. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. He was familiar with them. He’d analyzed them, too—if you can call stumbling over them in breathless urgency a form of literary scrutiny.

So as soon as he enrolled he knew what he’d do: Recite these verses aloud. Act.

“I’m sorry, honey,” the director told him after he auditioned for the lone play produced that semester. She was a little shocked at this brown, middle-aged man saying eagerly, but in broken speech, that he wanted to be the beast. Or, at the very least, Maurice.

“We can’t have you in a lead.”

But he came back the next day. And the next. For callbacks he was never called to participate in.

He lingered, sitting and listening and miming the words delivered by blonde and brunet, hazel and blue-eyed men, whose great-great grandfathers had suffered and thrived and eventually arrived at an unwelcoming island so their great-great grandsons could open their mouths. And speak.

“Fine,” the director said at the end of casting week. “You can help with equipment, handling shit behind the scenes.”

So he did.

“I memorized more play than real beast,” he insisted. “And Maurice.”

And I’m sure he did.

I’m sure that this was some sort of retelling.

I’m sure that this added a few lines to his script, or mine, or some other one; a meta-narrative encompassing all the rest, interwoven with dialogue from here; a plot resolution from over there; a scene in which I’m sitting and listening and hearing in my dad’s words that together we’ve been writing a large and scrawled “fuck you” to the South Asian trope, to the immigrant family trope, to all fucking tropes. That together we’ve been fucked up by writing, ours and that of others, too.

I’m sure that this was long overdue, this beautiful and beastly and intergenerational cyclicality.

I’m sure that me writing this is some sort of retelling, too.

Of a lingering pain from my fractured, but mending, relationship with my dad; of a lingering need for aesthetic validation in spaces meant for unrestrained creation. Of a slow but steadily evolving dream.

Aisha Y. Bhoori ’18 lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.