The Ninja from the Suburbs

Note: Contains scenes of violence and brief mention of mental health

"I am sorry, ma'am, " the out-of-shape, African-American woman FAA officer interjected my mother politely. "We can't let you carry this."

"But why?" My mom interjected. "I am allowed a carry-on. I am 67 year old diabetic patient with heart problems, cholesterol…".

"Ma'am, I am sorry. But these are the rules. Our overhead compartment is full."

"How can it be full? We didn't even go in." She objected.

"Com'on mom, don't be a Karen." I tried to make it light.

"No wait. Why should I allow it? All my medications are in it, my jewelry is in it..."

"Ma'am we can give you a plastic bag and you can take out your belongings."

"No. I refuse."

"Mom, let's go!" I poked since the line was halted. The empath in me was incrementally growing embittered about her narcissism. Her tone was angry whilst the lady-in-charge was quiet, calm, professional, firm, polite, and completely in control.

"Why us? Why us!!"

"It's random."

"Bucchis tara Asian dekhle erokom kore." She turned to me. You see, they do it intentionally when they see Asians.

"Hay. Bhabe amra niriho. Kichu korbo na. Daat nai." I try to validate her for a minute. Yes. They think we are docile. We won't do anything. No weight.

"I am sorry ma'am. Those are the rules. Either you comply or we won't let you fly."

"This is bullshit. You know." My 67-year old Indian lookin' mom said. "This is your bullshit America. Fuckin America. Fuckin America going down. You know, I will go online and I will give review."

That somehow seem to do the trick and the lady let us slide. I see her point, but the overly nice guy in me just pinned the blame on her 'entitlement attitude'. Why couldn't she just comply? It's no big deal. Jesus.

And she wasn't wrong either when it came to...randomness.

Ten years earlier, I go through immigration. Same thing. A smiling heavily-armed god with tattoos pull me over.

"Excuse me sir, can I ask you a question?"

"Yeah sure."

"Where are you going?"

"Ummm...Bangladesh."

"Are you carrying any money on you?"

"What's wrong! Hold on." My mom who was walking ahead turned around and inquired in her sweetest lilting voice.

"No ma'am. Is he your son? You know him?"

"Howay? What's wrong?" She re-asked in her fake American accent with a twang of invite that bespoke danger.

"It's just random check."

"No. This is not random." She bitterly disagreed. I even shaved. I had Muslim surname. And I knew it was random. But then again, can it be proven it was not random?

My mother turned around and came back for me. Just like she extricated me out of the behavioral unit four times. I trained her well. "You need to say you can provide food, shelter, and clothing for me. That will end the 15-day hold. That's legal speak."

Yup. I trained her. She cannot drive freeway, but she sure well can pick me up if I am stranded any 20 miles within radius. The reason is because she once drove through the wrong entrance of the freeway ramp and somehow managed to reverse and reorient. A cop was following her.

This was not the first time a cop followed her. Once the cop followed her home since she didn't have lights on. "Dumb, like a dummy, I get out of the car and approach him." “Ma’am. Do not - do NOT come near- get back… GET BACK to your vehicle.” She has all the charm and guile. She can bribe and manipulate. Most people attribute these as negative traits and qualities. Well, I don't. A master doesn't. A CIA spy or a ninja can precisely use these to her advantage. Art of war is 100% about deception. Turn to any page of Sun Tzu at random. Try to look past a simpleton, binary view of morality.

This is the story of a ninja. Not your ordinary warrior clan from Japan. But the story of an ordinary, rather unassuming person. It's about my mother. Your mother. Everyone's mother.

A mother will climb Everest and go to the edge of the earth to find her daughter. A loving mom that is. In Islam, it is taught that heaven lies beneath mom's feet. Once a nincompoop came and asked the prophet who is the most important person in the world? "Your mother." The prophet replied. Again the man repeated. "Your mother." The man asked again, Again the prophet repeated: "Your mother." And finally on the fourth time he said father and other family members.

She came back for me on the day at the airport. But I didn't go. I took her to Ripley's Believe It Or Not! and Wax Museum tour at Buena Park.

It was I think Year 2 of my mental illness. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Juggling sometimes more than 40 hours of work, my single mother, who was once introduced to other guests as a "divorcée" by her family member, took care of me. She drove me to the doctor, patiently waited for hours in the lobby, cooked for me, and picked up meds before administering them at bed. And then she would doze off to sleep like a baby next bed in a sober living style to wake up at 4:00 AM morning and drive to work... only for me to jackoff to newscasters and porn finding the sweet, Rumi-opening time at dawn.

"Have you seen my mom?" I asked the staff who worked in the Wax Museum. I got distracted as I was walking.

"Where did you see her last?" The staff replied robotically without emotion, continuing to do her job.

"Back there..."

"Well, sir, then you need to go back."

And I went back. But the lesson I learned was from a Navy SEAL boot camp for civilians - a 50 hour onslaught- which I failed and made only 30 or 40 minutes in "half of it was just pep talk" as was reminded by the coach once I tapped out.

There I was the weakest link. No. I am not being overly humble. It was pointed out.

"Crawl to them and say 'I am the weakest'", he bluntly said. One of the coaches at Kokoro 42 of SEALFit camp. Way to rub it in and insult once you are already down.

Yes, as much as I was the weakest, it was forged in steel and pain that the group I was with will never forsake once the mission is complete. This is why when Mark Divine commanded me to go down and give 20, everyone started doing so after I hit 10.

Former platoon commander Navy SEAL Mark Divine still wasn't impressed: "What I don't understand is what took you so long?"

We bleed as one. And just to instill the No Man Left Behind-policy after the qualifying 1 mile race was over all the alpha males were ordered to come back for me who couldn't even finish the first leg of the lap. We move as one. As one team. One unit.

I still instilled that grain in my psyche and thought. How never to leave behind my mom, no matter how toxic, since she was there for me when I got slapped with 51-50 not once but several times throughout the years.

"YOU ARE PLAYING GAMES HERE HUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

She exploded. Rewind back 17 years. We asked the manager of our apartment where we can park our rental car and she pointed to a far port and gave us the slip which we put on the dashboard.

Despite that promise, I wake up to see my car vanish like Houdini. Panicked, I run to my mom. My mom got scared and nervous like a little child. The same child who witnessed massacre and dead bodies and corpses floating outside her Mymensingh home, even though her own narcissistic mother pulled the window shutter and closed the adjacent door overlooking Brahmaputra, just so they are not scalded and scarred - during 1971 genocide where Pakistan raped Bangladesh.

We get the car back finally. We paid the fee and got reimbursed by the apartment management later. But boy. That day I saw my mom's dark side. That "King Kong ain't got nuthin' on me. Y'all be playing basketball in PELICAN BAY when I get finished with you" mode which she presented to the towyard cashier disguised as Ma Kali.

I took karate as a kid, aikido during security guard and coming back home to momma after hospitalization, muay thai, filipino martial arts, a month of krav-maga and even practiced fencing with the Fullerton kids for a month.

I know we live in a safe country. Nothing will happen. But still I try to convey some nuggets of wisdom to my mother which I really shouldn't legally.

"It's deadly. One of the most brutal forms of combat art form." I tell her as I am driving her to UCI for her weekly check-up of thyroid.

She is quiet. She smiles and nods. I know she is just being polite. She lacks complete empathy and is not interested in the story.

"Tumi to janoi na amake ki training dise. You don't even know what training they gave me." I say. And it is true. I myself didn't even know what dangerous teaching lurks deep in me that I subconsciously picked up after clocking in hours and hours of boring, hum drum mechanical weekly routine for my little Level 2A certificate driving to Redhill near Tustin for 30 minutes.

You draw a smiley face around the neck, bring it all the way down the torso sideways to waist, do a kidney slap as you continue dragging the knife behind his back above his butt to the other side, slit his brachial as you slam the knee sideways breaking it with your foot and continuing that one sweeping motion cut below the belly to drop his intestines and if that wasn't enough just for the sake of it you thrust the knife upwards his anus.

The scene flashes back. I try to relay the gist of it. Especially the groin thrust when SHTF. I also mention, picking up a pen from the car compartment, that that itself is deadly enough. "Just imagine you thrust this down below someone's neck. You can easily kill him." I point out.

"You see mom. It doesn't take much to kill someone. This is why I didn't do anything when I got sucker punched in the street. It is very easy to knock someone's head on the concrete, but if you kill him you have to live with it for the rest of your life."

I look at her as I pump up the electronic goa music of Radical Distortion - Sunrise Zone.

"But please, Mr. Patrick. I need to go home because my mother is sick."

"Well Hasina, you have to choose between your job and your family." The regional store manager of Circle K replied coolly, logically, albeit unempathically. He has a business to run. Capitalism and all. Land of the brave. Home of the free.

"You can't make any exception?" My mother pleads.

"If I make an exception for you, I have to make for everyone. You can’t just quit your job for 2 months." I listen on the other line of the phone purchased from Radio Shack.

A little girl who grew up in the 60s in the poorest country of the world to witness genocide, rape, killings, murder, ethnic cleansing of her own family member "Giash Nana" whom the Pakistanis took away to have him "brush fired" exection style just because he was an intellectual during the time of Pakistani ruling... to witness famine, cyclone, bone-counting abject poverty of beggars and amputees, to get beaten cold by her dad with the wooden 'purdah' rod, emotionally abused and neglected by her own mother to marry my verbally abusive father who caused her to separate, get a job and support herself as early as 22 in a country like Bangladesh, where women didn't have it easy in the late 80s and 90s, to see through divorce of her husband who cheated on her, death of both of her parents with the mother rotting away in cancer as well as simultaenously myself getting hospitalized for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to offer nothing but unconditional love and compasison and support to her ex-husband then suffering from colon cancer, someone who did two jobs just to support me and pay $1000 full coverage car insurance bills for her new car "incase" as well as the insane deposits, gasoline, toileteries, groceries and stil come home to cook when not being stopped by immigration or having to stay 12 hours straight in emergency room after only to be kept waiting in rooms behind curtain for hours on end, filling out the same forms and repeating the same questions to the triage for nth time which they asked already and had it in the system, to live through not only war, but witness Kuwait War, stock market housing crash, recessions, pandemic, Russia invasion, Trump election and conviction and receive news about Pilkhana Massacre as well as Artisan Bakery Crisis to having her hand broken in a car accident that left her Honda totalled to wake up every morning at 4 and clean her own toilet just so no one can be held responsible for her actions for a dry and boring avocado and egg white flesh for breakfast along with Tertullian frog of Brian Tracy-- only to stand up straight, with chin up and head held high, perhaps this is why she earns the authority to be called a "Devi".

And this is why I will put my neck on the rail tacks for her like a dog.

Dear readers, this is the story of a ninja. This is the story of a different ninja. Not your ordinary warrior clan from Japan. But the story of an ordinary, rather unassuming person. It's about my mother. Your mother. Everyone's mother. 

Usain Bolt said "I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds". Well, I trained her enough to survive anything.

"Look at you mom. Just look back. You have walked through fire, withstood storms, and crossed seven seas. Now you can overcome anything god hurls at you."

Yes she still fumbles while trying to log into Facebook or confuse her umlauts and call “El Pollo Loco” “Loco El Pollo” when sandbagging and pretending not to understand instructions, say, when being asked her address, she starts reciting her phone number as well, or say forget where she kept her Januvia container even though she has near-perfect episodic memory where she remembers what she did on that particular date in a country where rigor and precision is important, cold, unemotional monotone professionals are lauded and celebrated, as they should, and paperworks impede every step of the way, where all the dot and tittles must be dotted and t's must be crossed.

I trained her well. As they say in Zen: Chopping woods, carrying water is supernatural power. And I know very well if push comes to shove if there is any assailant or ruffian in our house at wee hours at night she may very well do well to take care of herself with the 12 inch by 4 inch meat cleaver she keeps hidden by the door in a country that takes Second Amendment seriously. Because that's what a lifetime of filling out forms, standing in lines, getting cooked in traffic, filling gasoline up day-after-day, cutting teeth through bureaucracies, red tape, and housing affirmations taught one to be a master to annihilate anything.

With the groin thrust and all.