It was a bit of a goal-setting stretch for someone who had not achieved the vast majority of goals she set for herself, but if I pulled it off, perhaps I could finally stop looking at the past and move gracefully into the future. Thirty seemed as good an age as any to finish off my youth. And if I had time left at the end, maybe I would learn to do the Worm.
part one
ONE
the facts of no life
When I was twelve, my little brother, Sumeet, was born, changing our family forever. I recall exactly how I got the news. I was shopping at Kmart with my mom when she picked up a stuffed animal and put it into the shopping cart. “Who’s that for?” I asked.
“The baby,” she said in English, which she rarely spoke to us back then.
“Whose baby?” I said. This was a fair question because Indian women were notoriously coy about their pregnancies. Even as their stomachs are near the bursting point, they deny it. “No, no.” They giggle innocently as the baby crowns and reaches out a tiny hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I prodded my mom again. “Whose baby?” I repeated, throwing a bag of licorice into the shopping cart while her head was turned.
“Mine,” she said, with such nonchalance that I thought she was kidding. But three months later, we confirmed that the fifth time was a charm: after four girls, it was finally a boy. The birth of a boy in an Indian home could most closely be compared to winning the largest lottery in the world and then accidentally creating an immortality potion from a mixture of 7-Eleven Slurpee flavors.
He definitely lightened the mood in our house while simultaneously adding another dimension of chores my sisters and I thought were long over. We had a four-person relay approach to changing diapers and incorporated watching over him with our daily activities. I would sit him on the handlebars of the stationary bike while I exercised in the basement and searched for all of the tools he needed to create a fort while I talked through math problems on the phone with classmates.
Having a brother also let me witness firsthand the childhood I had wanted for my own. When Sumeet started swimming lessons, we would take him to the pool each week, watching from the stands. He would jump in, run across the deck, and, every so often, wave at us. During his tennis lessons one particularly sweltering August, we sat in the grass and watched him chase tennis balls around the court. At soccer, we hovered on the sidelines with the Popsicles for the team’s break. He went to birthday parties and had adorable clothing and my sisters and I were so happy about it because he was a sweet little boy whose only fault was a love for turning the garden hose on our unsuspecting grandmother.
Still, no matter how much an Indian girl loves her brother, there are certain instances in her life where she is acutely aware of the differences between their upbringings. Happy as we were that Sumeet had the opportunity to take the lessons, attend the class trips we were denied, and get every toy and piece of clothing he pointed his finger at, it didn’t make us desire that same consideration any less.
“Don’t jealous my son!” my mom would say when we pointed out the inequity of asking us to leave our math homework to walk beside him as he rode his motorized jeep around the neighborhood. The thing is, we didn’t really jealous her son. In fact, we spoiled him almost as much as my parents did because we didn’t want him to feel the way we had, like we were lesser than the other kids.
When I was in the third grade, I would go home for lunch every single day. Our house was just a ten-minute walk from the school, and one hot June day, after a lunch of grandma-grilled parathas and a Scooby-Doo episode, I headed back out to school. As I walked down a shrub-lined path, I saw one of the school bullies approaching. I didn’t even know his name but I certainly knew his reputation. If this was Freaks and Geeks, he would shove me into the bushes, and when I went to his house with my dorky best friend Bill to retaliate with a bag of flaming dog crap, I would see he lived in a dilapidated trailer where he was forced to perform in the family’s knife-throwing circus act. I would pity him and we would bond over a love of sci-fi films, becoming lifelong friends. But in real life, the kid walking toward me was likely just a jerk with no endearing backstory and I knew I was about to suffer a humiliation of sorts. I slowed down so he would end up walking ahead of me. I halted my steps, looking through my book bag as if I was searching for something. I wanted to blend into the scenery, but my shorts set had pictures of bright green cacti on it, shrubbery that wasn’t native to small-town Canada. The bully, who was picking up stones and throwing them at robins flying by, spotted me. I continued slowly down the path, hoping some bodybuilding Good Samaritans would soon jog by, but no such reprieve appeared. He held a stone in his hand and waited. Trying not to make eye contact, I took one step closer to him and readied myself for the inevitable. But instead of tripping or chasing me, as I expected, he launched a verbal attack that struck even harder.
“Nice outfit,” he snickered. “Four dollars at BiWay.”
Although I wanted to cry, I kept my face neutral, as if I wasn’t aware the comment was directed at me. The week earlier I had begged my mom not to buy me that outfit from that store. BiWay was a chain bargain store in which a school-age kid did not want to be caught dead. If a child actress wore a BiWay dress to the Emmys and was asked, “Who are you wearing?” by a grinning Mary Hart, the girl would likely hurdle the barrier to the street and flag down the nearest taxi to the airport.
You see, the only thing worse than being seen in BiWay was being identified as being dressed in BiWay. The bully carried on toward school laughing, knowing he had achieved his goal of pointing out the fact that I must be poor. At the time I was too humiliated to realize that the only way he could have known my outfit was from BiWay was if he shopped there, too.
My family wasn’t poor but the area in which we lived was unquestionably lower middle class. My parents didn’t believe that kids needed brand-name clothes, so when it came time for back-to-school shopping, we would head to the mall, where I would walk at least ten feet in front of my family, not wanting to be seen with them. I tried to lead them past BiWay, but I always knew they were going to turn. I kept dreaming that they would walk right past it and my mother would say, “This year, let’s get everything at Benetton!” But that was never going to happen.
My eyes darting back and forth to make sure nobody was nearby, I ran into the store, taking shelter behind large displays of twelve-for-a-dime juice boxes. Then I tippy-toed to the girls’ clothing section, where I looked for the most generic clothing I could find.
“How about this?” my mom said, holding up a maroon-and-turquoise-marbled sweater that would be loose on an NFL linebacker.
“No way!” I said. “That won’t fit me.”
“Find something, then,” she would say. “Your dad’s coming in ten minutes.”
To my parents, ten minutes was ample time to pick your new school wardrobe, since they assumed that to be exactly one new shirt.
Sweat streaming down my face, I scanned my options and cringed as I moved from snowflake-covered sweaters to sweatshirts with teddy bears silk-screened on. When I found a few items I could live with, my dad, finished with his tour of the mall’s electronics shop, would come get us, point out a crocheted sweater vest, and exclaim, “I wish my dad could have bought me that when I was a kid.”
It was a fair point because likely there were kids at our school who were not even getting the discount-store clothes that we were shunning. I’m aware I was an ungrateful brat, but whether it’s 1986 or 2011, one constant is that kids are desperate to fit in and I was wholeheartedly one of those kids. Despite the fact that most of our school was all in the same sturdy but rust-covered financial boat, we all still wanted to scamper to the dry shores where you wore Nike shoes or Lacoste shirts. My sisters and I didn’t want Sumeet to be ridiculed for his clothes, so we made sure he had Nike shoes. When I had a job in high school, I walked into the two-for-one sale at Beaver Canoe, where the popular kids shopped. I chose on
e T-shirt in women’s medium and the other in boy’s XX-small.
Still, although Sumeet had everything I had ever wanted, it didn’t seem to be what he wanted. In his teenage years, he didn’t want flashy clothes with obvious brand names. But because we did, we kept buying them for him. When I told him about my plan to revisit my youth and asked him about his childhood extracurricular activities, he shrugged and said, “A lot of it was pushed on me. Dad pushed soccer on me, you guys signed me up for swimming, and after a while I lost interest.”
This stung slightly, mostly that he was bored with opportunities we would have cut off our left braid for. I wondered if perhaps I would have lost interest as well, given the same opportunities. What I looked at as a dream come true he looked at as a chore forced on him by people projecting their own youthful yearnings. Perhaps he was correct, as part of my desire to revisit childhood was definitely a yearning to finally have some fun.
Fun wouldn’t be the first word that came to mind when describing my childhood. By white standards (Mormons excluded), we were a big family of five offspring. My older sister, two younger sisters, and I all wore our hair in various numbers of braids. This was mostly to help white people tell us apart. My hair was down to my midthigh and braided so tightly in two braids that the part in my hair still remains, after my follicles gave up the fight against my mom’s comb. Gurpreet (one braid) and youngest sister Navjit (two braids) had brown eyes, while mine (two braids) were blue and Navroop’s (one braid, or two ponytails) were green. Other than that, we likely looked the same to everyone.
The first four years of my life were spent in a two-bedroom apartment with my (two-years-older) sister, Gurpreet, and my parents…and my grandmother…and my two aunts…and my two uncles. It was like a Bombay rooming house in the middle of suburban Canada, but our landlord was kind and turned a blind eye, and that made him happy. My parents took one bedroom, and my sister and I shared the other with our two aunts, who were just teenagers themselves at the time. Each night we snuggled in, one aunt and one niece per double bed, and watched The Love Boat on our black-and-white TV set.
Everyone else slept in the living room like a giant third-world slumber party. When my little sister Navroop was born, the decision was made to move to a larger space because we couldn’t squeeze another person into our room, and in all honesty, babies are known to cry through all the best parts of cruise-ship comedies.
My mom always told me that I had wished for a younger sister because “I didn’t have anyone to play hopscotch with.” Gurpreet was an adult, even as a kid, and didn’t have any interest in the likes of jumping rope or playing house. She did, however, teach me several songs she learned in kindergarten. This was particularly challenging for me, as I was just learning to speak English from watching television, and after she hit me over the head with a slate for not learning a verse about a witch in a ditch properly, I decided I didn’t care for singing all that much.
At that new home, a proper house with a sprawling cherry tree in back, my youngest sister, Navjit, was born. There were now four daughters and no sons—the most undesirable of Indian children ratios. Navjit’s birth resulted in days of violent tears on the part of my paternal grandmother, who took equal opportunity loving and hugging her and yelling common Indian grandmother phrases at her like “may you be drowned in cow dung.”
The year we moved into that house, I started kindergarten and this is where my academic domination began. I’m not really positive how I did finally learn to speak English, but somehow hours of watching Three’s Company and Dallas taught me the full English language, as well as how to properly manage a family-run oil business while dealing with an alcoholic ex–beauty queen.
It was fairly common for me to achieve straight A’s in grade school. I was rewarded with one dollar for each of these perfect report cards. Although it took me over two years to save for a Ghostbusters sticker album, it didn’t take long to develop a reputation as a scholastic whiz kid. I was placed in gifted studies in the first grade due to what must have been my superior coloring-within-the-lines skills.
Despite the shoe box of old report cards highlighting my achievements, there was one major blemish on my memories of academic superiority, and because it was published, it was difficult to forget. Everybody has something from their childhood about which they are ashamed—a wetting of the pants, horrifying braces with headgear, the discovery of a secret crush on the principal. My prepubescent Achilles heel comes in the form of a poem; four stanzas that could be deconstructed as closely as The Inferno to reveal the confusion in my ten-year-old mind. Each year my school board would compile an anthology, showcasing the best in elementary school poetry. My deft wordsmithing made the cut several years in a row, and here’s what appeared in the 1988 edition of the venerable children’s poetry book Within These Covers:
CHRISTMAS IS COMING
Christmas is coming
So you need more pay.
Let’s sit back and remember Jesus
Lying in the hay.
And you can meet Santa Claus
He’s so full of life.
Hurry now, he’s giving out
Pictures of his wife.
Go to the forest
Dig a tree from the soil.
When you get it home
Decorate it with foil.
It’s also time to ask your parents
To work longer shifts.
So they can buy you
Even more expensive gifts.
My pride mostly makes me avoid the exercise, but whenever I do reread the poem, several questions pop into my mind: Where did I get the idea kids wanted pictures of Mrs. Claus? In which issue of Trailer Living Weekly did I see a tinfoil-decorated tree?
Why was I giving kids the impression that my parents would agree to work more shifts so I could get a Barbie for Christmas, when I knew that I’d be splitting a box of Turtles chocolates with my sisters, as I did most years?
Mostly, though, I get stuck on the third line. What a glorious and pure message of Christmas: little baby Jesus in the hay. The problem was that I didn’t believe in Jesus, and worse still, I didn’t know that. Each day at school, I belted out the national anthem of “O Canada,” and gave a shout-out to our father who did some sort of art in heaven.
Nowhere during that morning exercise did they explain that this might not be your religion and never did my parents expressly declare to us that we were Sikhs. Sure we went to the Sikh temple (the gurdwara) when we were kids, but my parents weren’t overly religious, so I thought we were just there because that’s where weddings were held and where the best aloo matar sabji was prepared.
Besides my fervent devotion to Jesus, the poem reminded me of another thing, made fairly obvious by its message: that I had little idea of self-identity, amid a sea of faces so different from my own.
While the other kids would pull out fruit or potato chips for their recess snack, I would hold mine close to my mouth and eat it as quickly as possible to avoid the inevitable questioning.
“What’s that?” a perfect specimen of the Aryan race would ask.
“Oh, it’s barfi,” I’d say, believing for a minute that they might be interested in trying the sweet Indian delicacy.
“EWWWWW, barf! She’s eating barf!”
Even without the taunts, I was aware that what I was eating was unpalatable to my schoolmates. My offers to trade my jalebi for their fruit roll-ups were never accepted. So as they shoved chocolate chip cookies into their mouths, I ate fluffy golden sticks of muttery during recess. Soon I started bringing cookies myself and ate the muttery after school, to be spared the questions.
As my town was mostly German in descent, it celebrated Oktoberfest as if it were a national holiday. As part of the celebration, our school encouraged everyone to dress up in their own ethnic costume.
One festive Oktober in particular stands out in my mind. My mom had pressed and hung both Gurpreet’s and my suits the night before so they would be perfect. She
had sewn the suits herself, a traditional Punjabi salwaar/kameez combination. The kameezes were a sunny yellow floral material and accompanied with plain yellow salwaars and scarves.
In the morning we got dressed, put our fall jackets and backpacks over our suits, and headed to school. The first thing I noticed upon entering my classroom was that nobody else was dressed up in ethnic garb. I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t registered that this would be the case, as I was the only ethnic kid in the class. Everyone else was white—and not white but of Scandinavian origin, which meant they could have worn Viking garb, or Scottish enough to have adorned kilts. Most were just third-generation Canadian white, and thus dressed in their native dress of jeans and T-shirts.
I took a deep breath and tried to make it to my desk without being noticed, but as quiet as my steps were, the yellow tropical material shouted out to everyone. As I slid into my desk, jacket still on despite the fact that I was sweating, the oohs and aahs began.
“What a lovely outfit, Rupinder,” my teacher said. Now everyone’s eyes were fixed on me, which was exactly what I didn’t want.
I smiled and was opening my book to my spelling homework when I heard her say, “Why don’t you come up here and tell everyone about it?”
My teacher was a very nice woman. She was trying to be kind by showing interest in my culture, but to a seven-year-old, attention for being different is as desirable as a pill that makes you wet yourself during every school assembly. I wished I could pummel through the wall like the Kool-Aid man and make a run for it, but knew that there was no way out of this. I took off my jacket and walked hesitantly to the front of the classroom. Thirty sets of eyes stayed glued upon me as if they were watching a live-action National Geographic special.
“Um,” I said, realizing I knew nothing of my outfit’s significance or history. “It’s an Indian suit. Ladies wear it in India.”
On the Outside Looking Indian Page 2