On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  The next morning I woke up to find them both floating in the bowl, one with a bloody nose and the other just seemingly unwilling to live a life of being constantly stared at and overfed.

  “Oh,” my dad said, looking at their bodies floating around the bowl. “I wonder what happened. I fed them.”

  “So did I!” I screamed. “I told you I was going to feed them.”

  “I thought you would forget,” he said.

  Eight weeks of allowance on two fish, a bowl, the upgraded pretty blue gravel, and extra-protein fish food. Wasted. I was upset but aware that the stress of our household was probably too much for any living thing. I don’t recall who disposed of the fish but there was no ceremony, like sitcom kids always hold. I cleaned out the bowl and shoved it on a shelf in the garage, where it still remains more than twenty years later.

  Later my dad told me a story that illustrated that fish ownership was not in the genes.

  “When I was eight or nine,” he began, “I went down to the village creek.

  “If you stirred the mud up,” he explained, whirring his arms to show the motion, “the fish would all come to the top of the water.

  “I took off all of my clothes and jumped in and stirred the water,” he said.

  “When the fish came up, I grabbed one and put it in my pocket. It was a hot, sunny day and I walked home so excited, almost forty minutes. Bibi had bought me a nice new metal dish, and when I got home, I put the fish in the dish with some water. When I woke up the next day, everybody asked what the smell was. It was so bad that we had to throw out both the fish and the kettle.”

  It was obvious that a fish would never survive more than a day in any Gill household, but when I was in college, my sisters, brother, and I sat down and decided to go big. It was time to stop working ourselves up the pet ladder. We were going to go right to the top of it and finally get a dog. There was some concern because when the dog would be three or four, none of us girls would live at home anymore, leaving Sumeet with the responsibility. But we finally had the money to do it and thought it would be a nice companion for my brother, so we decided to go ahead with it and would deal with the parents later.

  “What do you think they will say?” Navroop asked.

  “Who cares?” Gurpreet said. “They can live with it. If we just do it, they will have to deal with it.”

  We pondered this as we ripped open a giant bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. Chips always made us think more clearly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is a big risk to take in case they don’t accept it. Then what do we do?”

  We decided to err on the side of foolish optimism. Our parents were old and had so many kids, so our hope was that they wouldn’t even notice an addition. Or perhaps they would grow fond of their new canine housemate. All they ever wanted was an obedient child, and no matter how good we were, we would never fetch their slippers.

  After Navroop found us a reputable breeder of chocolate Labs, I sent an e-mail.

  “Hello, Claire,” I wrote. “We are a lovely family of seven who live in a beautiful quiet suburb and would like to add a member of your family to ours. (Preferably a dog.) Yours most sincerely, Miss Rupinder Gill.”

  The attempt at humor must have sealed the deal, as she wrote back and notified me that we could reserve a puppy in their upcoming litter. I sent off a check for a hundred dollars, and with that, we were e-mailed a picture of her last group of puppies, frolicking in a field. We looked at the photo over and over again for weeks.

  “What are we naming it?” Navjit asked, aware of the firestorm this question would bring.

  “I had better get out the registry,” Navroop said.

  The registry was a list of names that Navroop maintained. If you came up with a name that you wanted to save for a future pet, child, car, etc., you had to alert Navroop so she could add it to the registry under your name. The name was henceforth yours until such time as you relinquished it or bartered it for another. It was our rudimentary system of copyrighting.

  Many votes and brainstorm sessions resulted in a winning name: Jefferson.

  Jefferson was the name of a hamster Sumeet brought home for the Christmas break of his first grade in school. After a day, he lost interest in it, and my mother, worried about being branded as the family that killed Jefferson, took over his care. She could be seen around the house, scrounging for toilet-paper rolls for Jefferson’s midmorning recess.

  After months of anticipation, the big day finally came. An e-mail arrived in my in-box announcing that the new puppies had been born. The Gill house was in a flurry. But it was a very muffled flurry, because we were hiding it from the actual owners of the house.

  My siblings made an appointment to visit the breeders and choose our new member of the family. I was away at college so couldn’t go and called for the report.

  “Well?” I asked excitedly on the phone as they were driving home.

  “They were sooo cute!” Navjit yelled into the phone. “They all just kept running up to me.”

  “There was one that liked me the best,” Navroop said. “I think that one’s Jefferson. Yes, that’s definitely Jefferson.”

  They kept speaking over each other to tell me their fond recollections of the newest family member.

  A few hours later we all spoke again for a final check of details, and the reality of taking care of a dog finally hit us. Inevitably, our parents WOULD soon notice something barking in the living room. My mom noticed every time that we hid one of her fifteen silk flower arrangements in the living room, so this was unlikely to escape her notice. We had to let the dream go.

  Navroop was the most crushed, as she wanted a dog more than any of us. In anticipation, she had already bought a leash, having counted her puppies before they hatched.

  “We’ll never get a dog,” Navroop said when I came home for the weekend.

  “You can get one when you get your own place,” I said, looking for the silver lining.

  “Oh, who cares then?” she said. “I want one now. You want one when you’re a kid.”

  She took the leash she had bought and put it away in a box under her bed. It was like her trousseau for her future dog, which she’d been planning for since the age of five.

  Not having met little Jefferson myself, I was the least affected and sent a note off to the breeder full of tiny white lies.

  “Hi, Claire,” I wrote. “Unfortunately we can no longer get one of your lovely puppies, as our grandparents are moving in with us.”

  Claire was gracious and e-mailed to say how wonderful it was that we would have that opportunity. She must have known it was a lie, as nobody sits down to decide between getting a Lab or having Grandma move in instead, but in any case, we were off the hook with the minor casualties of a lost deposit and five broken hearts.

  It had been ten years since the Jefferson fiasco so this time I was determined to do my homework. Before getting up the hopes of my sisters and myself yet again, I needed to do some preliminary legwork. Like a new bride already reading parenting books, I made an appointment with an allergist. My eyes welded shut if I was in the same room as a cat, so I wanted to make sure this didn’t extend to dogs. Why agonize over a decision that might not even be a possibility for me? Arriving at the office, I opened the door to discover what had become of Morticia Addams: she had spent the seventies as a roadie for Kiss, then become a receptionist for Dr. Albert Heywood, allergist.

  With stark black hair and bloodred lips drawn upon the palest of lily-white skin, she looked up at me through her feathered bangs and said, “How can I help you?” Her voice alluded to how I could help her—by slipping her a nicotine patch.

  “Um, I have an allergy test scheduled,” I stammered, waiting for Cousin Itt to come out of a back room. I felt as if my allergies to something were already acting up. Perhaps that was part of the test, or perhaps they needed to invest in a feather duster or sandblaster to remove the foot of dust that lined the tops of all of the furniture.
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  “Go right in,” she rasped, and ushered me into the doctor’s office.

  I’m not good at guessing people’s ages, but I would estimate that Dr. Heywood was between 200 and 250 years old. His office looked as if it had last been cleaned after the First World War, then bombed in the Second World War. Shuffling behind his desk, he motioned to two stained chairs and invited me to sit down. Quickly calculating which of the two would have less likelihood of a bedbug infestation, I sat down gingerly on the edge of one of them.

  Looking at my chart, he said, “Rupinder, is that Sikh?” When I nodded, he said, “Where’s your little hat?” and patted his head like monkeys did in old black-and-white films. Did he just ask me where my hat was? I was so surprised I almost fell off my chair; also because a bitchy cockroach was trying to push me off it.

  “Do you mean a turban?” I said. “That’s for men. And only really religious men.” What a notion—that I would wake up each morning, wash my gargantuan head of hair, blow-dry it, straighten it, and then…shove it under a turban. Did he think I had a denim turban for casual Friday, a light stretch wool turban for work meetings, and Burberry-tartan turban for after-work drinks? I held my tongue. I was here for a purpose. Think of the puppies, think of the puppies.

  Quickly changing the subject, he asked me the reason for my visit and I explained my desire to get a dog. I thought that he would praise me for my forethought, but he decided to take a different route. “WHY?” he said with a look of disgust. “Then you have no freedom. And you don’t even have a husband to help you.” It was a quick segue from my religion to my lack of a mate. I didn’t know if he was joking or not, but I didn’t care to get caught in this particular conversation. Being hassled about being thirty and unmarried was a conversation I saved to enjoy with all my middle-aged relatives. I wasn’t going to enter into it with a nonrelative who was less middle-aged and more from the Middle Ages.

  Seeing my frown, he suggested we get to the actual test. After cutting little lines on my back with a tiny blade and creating a Morse-code pattern on it, Dr. Heywood proceeded to inject each hole full of a variety of irritants to see if anything could irritate me more than his commentary. The itch was indescribable, as dust and pollen and cat dander oozed into my body. I clenched the table tightly to avoid jumping up and rubbing my back furiously against a desk corner. As I expected, my back flared up with the presence of cats…and pollen…but sigh, thank heavens, it was calm in the presence of dogs. Not allergic.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, the itch now consuming me. I pulled down my T-shirt and jumped off the table. As I was putting on my jacket, the itch intensified, now trapped under layers of clothing, no air to soothe it.

  “Don’t scratch,” Dr. Heywood cautioned. “You will want to, but don’t.”

  “Of course,” I said, fully intending to take off all of my clothes on the subway and scratch my back with a pen in my bag. “Bye.”

  On the way out, Morticia said, “Have a nice day” more as a challenge than a good-bye. I couldn’t help eyeballing her nails, those beautiful long scratching tools. I wanted to grab them and run them over my back, but maintained my composure. As I ran out of the office, I thought of puppies, with long scratchy nails on their paws.

  The perfect opportunity for a canine test run arose a couple of months later. I was taking a staycation, which was great. But I wasn’t going away because I had no money to go anywhere, which was less great. This provided an opportunity to finally hang the pictures that had been collecting dust for a year in my closet and take care of important tasks like alphabetizing my breakfast cereals. With me at home, and Jaclyn’s new puppy, Tucker, home alone just blocks away, it was also the perfect time to test out a dog in the house. I picked him up at 8 A.M. and ran him home in my arms because his Yorkie paws were too small to jump the freshly filling puddles. At 10 A.M. he woke up from his nap on my bed. From ten to eleven he sat on my lap as I worked on my computer, and at 11 A.M. he parked himself in front of the television to catch up with the cast of The View.

  It seemed too easy. Tucker was everything I always wanted in a dog—a cute and calm little love bug. This made me think for one moment that I too could have a calm dog. Then my mind went to its comfort zone of the worst-case scenario and painted my canine future, a picture uglier than the one you see of the dogs playing poker.

  In this blurry dream sequence, I would happen upon a basket of Weimaraners and choose the happiest-looking pup of the lot. I would take him home, christen him Dwayne Wayne, and set him down to survey his new home. He would look up at me happily, wag his little tail, then tear into the living room and proceed to destroy it like the Tasmanian Devil. He would jump on the sofa, pee all over it, then rip up the cushions. His tiny puppy teeth would uproot my plants, pull the stuffing from my chairs, and chew up my phone.

  Spotting my important papers, he would run over, change vital information, and walking over to my laptop, disable the firewall and e-mail photos of me from my Frosh 15 phase to various handsome old acquaintances. He would deprogram my PVR, erasing all of the Frasiers I have been saving for my Friday-night treat, and pull apart my bookshelves, tearing the pages from the spines and judging me for the Sidney Sheldons I had hidden behind the Tolstoys.

  I would try to obedience train him and he would yell, “You’re not my mother!” and slam the doggy door. After being awoken by him every morning at 5 A.M. because he wanted to go out for a walk and tell me about his “strange dream involving Ted Danson and a Christmas ham,” I would wander bleary-eyed into the washroom to get ready for work. All the while he would look at my outfit and make comments like “It’s nice that you don’t worry about appearances anymore.”

  I snapped out of it when Tucker climbed up onto my lap. On the one hand, there were so many stories of people returning or abandoning dogs because they became too much work. On the other, dogs were so sweet, and so eager to please. Surely it would be okay? My wavering about getting a dog was starting to annoy everyone, most of all me. I wanted Snoopy, but was terrified I would get Cujo.

  FIVE

  trying-to-stop-growing pains

  Three weeks into tapping, I was feeling the strain on my legs. I feared this would be an issue. One of the reasons kids can dance, do track, skip rope, swim, and basically keep their bodies in a constant calorie-burning state is that they don’t have early osteoarthritis and vein-covered knees.

  Also, a lifetime of junk-food addiction had made me a bit sluggish. When I was growing up, the four food groups on our nutritional chart were: chocolate, fast food, chips, and soft drinks. Everything else was superfluous. Before my parents went grocery shopping, my siblings and I would run up to put in our chocolate-bar order. If it was during a particularly gripping part of a television program (i.e., Sam and Diane’s first kiss, or Sam and Rebecca’s first kiss), one was allowed to order by proxy. “Go tell them I want a Caramilk bar,” I would order Navjit. “Make that two,” someone else would yell when Navjit went up the stairs to relay our choices.

  We knew how to play the game; we always sent the cutest delegate, so when Navjit got older, Sumeet was trained to ask for whatever we wanted.

  “Okay, Sumeet,” we said. “Go upstairs and ask Mom if we can get McDonald’s tonight.”

  “Make sure to ask Mom,” we would remind him, knowing we had hit up our dad just days earlier. “And tell her you want it.”

  “Say, ‘Mom, I want McDonald’s’ and smile,” we said, rewriting the script for ensured success. Flattening his hair and tucking his shirt in for optimal four-year-old cuteness, we would send him on his way and listen at the door.

  It usually started out perfectly well. “Mom?” he would say, approaching her in the kitchen.

  Then a pause before a quickly deflated “Can I have…” Running back to us, he would whisper, “What do I want again?”

  At first my parents thought they could force us to love eating Indian food three meals a day. Although my parents still ate Indian food for at least 90 perce
nt of their meals, they soon realized that we had different palates. Over the years, they slowly expanded their recipe repertoire, knowing we would sit in front of cold saag all night rather than eat it. My mom can make a delicious pizza now, fluffy golden crust and all. But the early incarnations were far from perfect—ketchup stood in place of pizza sauce and the cheese of choice was processed Cheddar singles until we discovered the existence of mozzarella. And they knew we needed to wash it all down with a fizzy sugary bottle of cola. We were two-bottles-a-day past addicted and the mounds of sugar I consumed in my formative years meant I spent too many years of my adult life with the top button of my jeans undone.

  When it came to junk food, we were very orderly. We all had to take turns getting it when there was none in the house, biking to the nearby grocery store with a list in hand and a fistful of pooled money.

  “It’s your turn to go get stuff,” we’d say to the designated runner. “Here’s the list and don’t get the regular chocolate chip cookies. Get the chewy ones or I’ll send you back.” If you paid for the food yourself, it was yours, but if our parents purchased it, everything was distributed in a very communist-like fashion.

  When a fresh bag of chips was opened, we would all pull out a bowl. The bag would be split equally into five bowls. Everybody was given equal opportunity in our quest to raise the national childhood obesity numbers. Chocolate almonds were counted out into people’s palms, leftover cake was cut into equal tiny slivers.

  Where other girls had a date with hunky Kenny or fun-loving Bill to look forward to on a Friday night, we had an extra-tangy bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. Food was our friend, our entertainment, our reward, and our Friday-night date. My adolescent dependence on snack cakes had followed me into adulthood, and if I wanted to continue in any physical pursuits, I knew I had to continue my very slow-going attempt to get in better shape.