A woman passed racist comments at a celebrated wedding photographer and his Indian-American family while they were in a shuttle bus of United Airlines at the Los Angeles Airport last week.
Pervez Taufiq was accompanied by his wife and their three children when they arrived in Los Angeles from Cancun. The woman, who was on the same flight as Mr Taufiq’s family, boarded the same bus to the terminal.
“Mortified, we just went through this. This lady was harassing our son on the flight, unbeknownst to us, asking him if he was Indian and making comments. When we landed in LA and got on the transfer bus, she told our son to ‘shut up’, I told her she didn’t have a right to speak to my son that way and her husband got in my face trying to tell me to not speak to his wife,” Mr Taufiq wrote on Instagram and shared a video of the entire incident.
In the video, the photographer expressed his outrage over the incident, saying his “blood is boiling right now”.
“I honestly can’t even believe that something like this is a real thing. We were just having an altercation with this lady who was giving us a really hard time telling the kids to ‘Shut Up’, I lost it and said, you know, you don’t have a right to talk to my kids like that.”
The situation escalated after the woman verbally attacked him and said, “Your family is from India, you have no respect, you have no rules, you think you can push everyone, push, push, push… That’s what you think you are. You guys are f*****g crazy.”
In response, Mr Taufiq asked if she wanted him to have “more curry”. To this, she said, “I am going to record your f******g tandoori a**… your tandoori stinky a**.”
As Mr Taufiq asked the security personnel to remove her, she interrupted him and said, “He does not care that I am a racist, you are racist towards me. I am American.”
“So are we,” he replied to her.
She reacted, “You are not American… Not originally no, you are from…India.”
Mr Taufiq insisted he was born in America.
In his post, Mr Taufiq thanked the airline and said the lady was taken “off the bus ultimately and a few fellow passengers stood up for us.”
“Blown away these types of people still exist,” he added.
Speaking with The New York Post, Mr Taufiq, who grew up in Boston, said he first interacted with her during the flight.
Mr Taufiq believed the woman was “clearly” drunk at the time of the incident.
He and his wife work as photographers at events, including over 200 weddings per year, worldwide.