Hypothetical Biography

Context: I have been thinking of writing a book about some of my past and how I've come to be who I am. This is a start towards that. Enjoy.

The Early Years

I am around 5, 6, or 7. My dad notices that I stutter. My mom makes fun of him and says that it's in his family (supposedly, my uncle and my father both grew up stuttering). This is when I notice that I don't speak like others. I shrivel up. I start becoming afraid of public speaking.

I am in an all-boys military school. I am taking Bengali, Arabic, and English. In each class, the teacher leads students through popcorn reading to make sure everyone is paying attention and is ready to pick up the text from wherever the last classmate left off. I have always been good at paying attention, so it doesn't seem that hard. The hard part is being called and being asked to read on the spot. I start noticing that I stutter more when I have to read unprepared. So, I come up with my first lie. Instead of picking up from where other classmates would stop, I start reading from somewhere completely different. This serves two purpose:

I get to prepare what I am going to read beforehand
I don't have to read a lot, because I am "not paying attention"

The teachers get mad, more and more each time I do it. I tell them that I must not have been paying attention. I get detentions and after school punishments for not paying attention enough. It sucks, but I don't have to stutter in public. It's a win.

Suspension

I am still in the military school. I have made some good friends. There's one who I start spending a lot of time with. His name is Romance. He's a pretty smart guy.

Our school science fair is coming up soon, and for that, Romance wants to build an automated light that works off of a sensor. For it to work, he needs a big battery…

The military school I go to is really prestigious. It's been around since the British rule, and there's a lot of distinction and respect here. Most of the teachers are from the military, including the school administrators. To be able to cater to the high demand of all students, the school runs on two shifts: morning and afternoon. The morning shift comprises of students who live on campus, while the afternoon shift comprises of students who don't live on campus. There are a lot of professors who, like the morning shift students, also live on campus, some with their families. There's an unspoken animosity between the morning shift and afternoon shift folks. Each group thinks that they're better than the other, for some reason.

Around one of these residences, there is an unused car, left from the British. It hasn't been used in 30-35 years.

For his science project, Romance wants to get a battery from this car. He's scouted it before, and it seems like it will do the trick. So, during lunch one day, I accompany him.

Romance is scrounging this old, beat-up car for batteries and anything else that might help him. I am just talking to him and standing around. Suddenly, a bearded, old man comes out of one of the homes. He's a morning shift professor, because I have never seen him. He calls us over and says that we are breaking in and stealing. Romance and I are both afraid, embarrassed, and confused. We are 12 years old, and hadn't thought that taking from an unused vehicle was a crime. The professor asks us for our names and identification numbers. After hesitating, I give my name and number, still thinking that I haven't done anything wrong. To my surprise, I hear Romance give a different name from what I'm used to calling him. He also gives an identification number that's not his. We walk away thinking that nothing will come out of it, still confused that the professor thought we were up to something horrible.

Two weeks later, in the middle of World History, I get called to the principal's office. Just me. The retired Major General expels me from the school for attempting to steal. My mother and father both take time off from work, so they can ask him to reconsider. He doesn't.

Coming to America

During that year while I was still attending the military school, we had all gotten visitor visas to visit my uncle in Texas. My father had lots of friends in California, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Texas, and he had visited so many times beforehand that he was able to get a visitor's Social Security Number (The US Government stopped doing this after 9/11). We had only visited West Bengal the year before, and it was a really good time. My father wanted us to see the world, so when the opportunity came, he took advantage. To be honest, none of us thought that the whole family would get the visa, since immigration was a lot harder after 9/11, especially for a Muslim family. But, we did. And, we were making plans for when to go when I got expelled.

It was shocking to my family. My father and my mother became a lot quieter and stopped seeing as many people. Something about the status symbol doesn't work as well when one of your kids is expelled from a prestigious school. But still, we made plans to arrive in California in May and stay there through the summer, visiting my uncle in Texas and some cousins in New York.

After arriving, my uncle started advising my father about how lucky we were that we could come as a family, and started planting the seed of applying for a work permit, so he could legally stay and work. We were living a very comfortable life in Bangladesh, but since my expulsion, my father wasn't sure what to do with me. So, given this option, he applied.

As our residency papers were being processed, my father chose to go back home and start tying some loose ends. This mainly involved training his replacement and leaving his job, thinking that we would go back as a family once we all had our papers to fully close out our chapter back home. Being separated from the family was hard for him, as he suffered from low blood pressure and diabetes. My father wasn't the epitome of health before, but he didn't have any of these symptoms while we lived together.

After a few months, towards the end of the summer, our applications were approved. At this point, my sister and I had started attending school in Texas, and we were looking forward to uniting with our father. I remember going to pick him up at the airport. He had to go through intense security because of his frequent arrivals and departures from the States. It didn't feel right to me that he had to go through extra security just for visiting a country he liked so much. Once he got out of customs and saw us, he was happy. I remember mentioning that he was looking forward to not travelling for a while. If he only knew…

That night, we had a celebratory dinner. The lawyer who had been processing our application flew out from California. Over the course of the dinner, he was shocked and surprised to find out that my father wasn't living here the whole time. He realized that he forgot to mention one of the golden rules about immigration application: You can't leave while it's been processed. Shit…

Continued Development

At this point, the option was to:

Go back home and start over
Stay here and start over

Remember how I mentioned the societal pressure that my family was always aware of? That societal pressure made them realize that it would be a lot better trying to make a living in the States than going back and restarting in Bangladesh. Instead of one person being expelled, it was the whole family, it seemed like, and we couldn't go back.

So, we stayed. And to protect ourselves, we lied. We didn't tell any of our friends, relatives, or neighbors about our status. We told people that our residency visa was approved and that we were working here.

The pressure was a lot, and as a kid, I started coming up with other lies to blend in. Being a Muslim, undocumented immigrant from a country that not too many people were familiar with, I didn't see any other way to make friends than by being someone different than who I was. So, I came up with a cover, or lots of it.

I knew that I could speak English, albeit with an accent. I knew that I went to an English medium school growing up, and therefore, spoke and wrote in the British English. I took that concept and ran with it. I started telling people that I lived in England. At first, that was enough. But, as more and more people started asking me questions, my one lie became more and more elaborate. Most people knew about London, so I couldn't say that I lived there, because then, I might get found out. So, I remembered one of the teams I would play with in FIFA. They were in Blackpool. Seemed unfamiliar enough, so I started using that as my hometown. I started adding other pieces, like that I lived in Australia (another British Commonwealth country), and because I lived in so many places, I couldn't make friends. I came up with more lies to cover my previous lies, in order to keep my appearance up. I wanted to be liked, and it was a lot easier to be liked when you're a strange kid from England and Australia than when you're an undocumented kid with a funny accent from Bangladesh.

Realization

I kept on like this, for years. And years. That one white lie that I said to feel safe and included became a lot more over the years. I turned it into a really well-memorized, grandiose story about my life and upbringing. I used it to get girls, to break the ice at parties, and anytime I needed an out of my ordinary life.

A couple of years ago, as I was thinking back on my life, I realized that I couldn't fully recall my childhood. Not childhood as in the time when I was a baby, but even during my pre-teen years, a time that I should be able to recall. I had built up my imaginary life so strongly that I was visualizing growing up in the streets of England and Australia, countries I've never visited, more vividly than my real life. At that point, it hit me that I was replacing my own memories. This whole process was internal, so I kept on with the story, but I started being more aware of its impact on me.

The impact fully dawned on me when I met my girlfriend when I was traveling through Kaua'i. We had an instant connection and I wanted her to meet my parents back in LA. The problem that I had was that she was British, and I knew that if she were to speak with my family, my story would come out as false. So, to circumvent that, I had my dream girl not meet my parents. I was planning on moving to Canada with her soon enough anyways, and my hope was that once we did that, her interaction with them wouldn't be long enough for me to be found out.

But, I knew. I knew inside that this was wrong. I was preventing life to be enjoyed because of a protection of a lie.

Atonement

After I moved to Victoria, BC with my then girlfriend (now wife), my story didn't stop. At that point, I connected with that more than my reality. I still question if somehow, some way, it would've been alright to keep going with the story, especially since I connected with that more…hell, I lived most of life at this time telling myself that's the life I lived. But, I knew that I needed to come clean.

One night, I took a few mushrooms. Over the course of the evening, I couldn't think of anything else but this story that all of my close friends know me through. I tried going to sleep next to my wife, but I couldn't. I ended up staying awake all night.

When Jasmine got up early to get a cup of tea, she saw me sitting, facing the outdoors. She knew something was up…she always does. She sat down in front of me. I finally released. I told her everything. I cried. She cried. She held me as I told her how this started, and it evolved, and how it made me feel. She could understand.

And then, I told one of my close friends. And another. And it has continued since then.

Epilogue

I'm still working through coming clean with everyone in my life. To be honest, there's so many people that I've started to lose track of who knows my truth and who doesn't. I've had instances where I've told someone, just to hear from them that I already shared this before. I suppose if this is the only consequence of my story, I've come out winning on the other side.

Also, I haven't gotten the release that I thought I would. I figured that once I shared, I'd feel lighter, calmer, and happier. And while I do feel lighter and calmer on some days, I don't get the jubilation that I thought I would from coming clean. But, maybe that's the true life. All hard things don't always necessarily have to output an equal amount of euphoria.

🍵 x 🐉