On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  TEN

  dog meets world

  I wasn’t the only one who was making my childhood dreams come true. Gurpreet helped me tick a goal off my list one month in the summer. She had become smitten with a Norfolk terrier in her neighborhood and contacted his breeder to get one of her very own.

  “Should I do it?” she asked us.

  “Yeah, do it!” we all said, so we could play with a dog that we could then return.

  “I don’t know,” she said. I encouraged her but understood her hesitation. The puppy was expensive and she would be doing it alone and we had all talked ourselves out of having a dog for years.

  When a litter was born, she decided to take the plunge and become the first member of our family to have a pet.

  “There’s never going to be a perfect time,” she said.

  “Sometimes you just have to do something.”

  That was pretty much my mantra for the year, so I was very excited, partially because I would be able to test the waters by being a pet aunt. The Gills were FINALLY getting a dog!

  The breeder lived an hour and a half out of the city, so Gurpreet, Navjit, and I piled into a car to go visit the newly born litter. After we exited the city, I thought we might as well kill two birds with one stone.

  “Pull over,” I said to Gurpreet.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes, pull over.” We ran out of the car and exchanged seats on the side of the road. I took the wheel and drove the rest of the way, which was smooth sailing…except for one very sharp turn onto a country road where I swerved with the speed and aggression of someone being chased by the Dukes of Hazzard.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said as the tires kicked pebbles into the air. “I should have slowed down.”

  “It’s fine,” Gurpreet said. She was so excited about seeing the dogs that I could have driven the whole way wearing a sleep mask over my eyes and she’d never have noticed.

  At the house, we were like kids in a candy store, picking up puppies two and three at a time. With two in my hand I would go outside and watch two others playing in a wading pool. Navjit and I handled the puppies while Gurpreet asked the breeder her large list of questions. The breeder would decide which puppy would go to which owner and which would be left to become a new show dog.

  “Oh, look at this one,” Navjit and I would squeal to each other as one of the puppies did something unspeakably cute. Then we began the photo-shoot portion of the day, where we posed with various pups snuggling up to us. After that we commenced the impatient portion of the visit, where we just stood around feeling bored, hoping Gurpreet’s long list of questions was near its completion.

  After finally signaling to her that we were perhaps overstaying our welcome, we headed out and I drove back up the country highway toward home.

  The next week Gurpreet’s new dog arrived at his new home. Auggie (a name similar to one I had added to the name registry, but I let it slide) spent his first few days dragging a blanket around and sitting inside a duffel bag on the floor.

  I offered to puppy-sit for Gurpreet one day in order to get a feeling for the demands of being with a newborn dog. Auggie arrived for his day with me and was so excited that he peed right in the hallway upon entry. Fair enough, I thought. I am very fun and he wants to mark his territory in case another dog tries to claim me for its own. Then he decided to be cautious and mark the whole living room by peeing four separate times in every corner, and as often as possible, on the legs of my beloved dining table. When he was done with that, he topped it off by pooing right beside the sofa and showing it to me, as if he had brought me a hostessing gift. I held him back as I tried to mop the floor, made more difficult by the fact that riding mops seemed to be his preferred method of transportation.

  When I tried to walk him, he stopped to sniff and chase everything or would just sit on the curb to stare at people. If they didn’t stop, he would sit in their way and wait for them to notice him.

  “Come, Auggie, come,” I would say, pulling gently at his leash as he stayed firmly planted. “Come on! Do you want treats?” I said to bribe him.

  He wasn’t all that motivated, though, as his favorite snack was cigarette butts, and lucky for him, they were laid out on each sidewalk block like a buffet. “Bad boy!” I said as he continued to lunge for garbage to eat. After fishing a cigarette out of his mouth for the tenth time, I took him back inside. He thanked me by spitting something up on my arm. After fighting a teddy bear and barking at the door for twenty minutes, he finally curled up in a ball on my carpet and slept, no doubt to regain his energy for his next bout with the bear.

  When Gurpreet came to retrieve him, I was bedraggled.

  “How was he?” she said.

  My arms quivered from pushing a dog-topped mop around as I handed her the leash.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. I bid Auggie farewell and invited him back when he could present me with evidence that he had successfully graduated from obedience school.

  The toilet-paper ads that show puppies chasing rolls down the hallway of a mansion do not properly convey the reality of life with a puppy. I didn’t know if I was ready for it. Navroop would be disappointed to hear that I was now firmly ensconced on the fence. The flames of my lifelong desire were not being stoked by seeing and playing with other people’s cute dogs. In reality, the sheer exhaustion that went along with the task had the opposite effect, that of dumping a pile of sand on top of the fire.

  And yet there had been so many great moments. As I thought back on the day, it was not the vision of Auggie peeing all over the living room that stuck out, but of him sitting at my feet and looking up at me. When he gazed up at me with his head cocked and eyes full of wonder, I couldn’t help but forgive his using my living room as his private restroom.

  Everyone in my family was falling madly in love with Auggie. He was the dog we had waited our whole lives for. Whenever my sisters and I spoke, a single subject often dominated the conversations.

  “Auggie peed on the paper today,” Navjit said. Navjit was a cat lover herself, but she had worked at a vet clinic for years, so was our resident Dog Whisperer.

  Unfortunately Auggie didn’t seem to care whether someone whispered or yelled, because he had no plans to follow any commands. Although we didn’t want to let him become spoiled, it was hard because like Michelle Tanner saying “Cut. It. Out.” to Uncle Joey on Full House, Auggie seemed to know that his cuteness was going to get him anything he wanted.

  Luckily, his cuteness got us something we wanted too: my parents were slowly turning into dog people. When Gurpreet brought Auggie to their home, their reaction made us wonder what their issue had been all those years.

  “That’s a good boy,” my dad would say as he passed Auggie in the hall, even if Auggie was only sleeping.

  “See?” we said to him. “Dogs aren’t that much trouble.”

  My dad would shrug and walk away. Auggie mainly stared up at my dad, no doubt wondering who the giant man in front of him was. But it was a different story with my mom, as Auggie followed her everywhere.

  “Who’s in there?” we asked one another as Auggie sat in front of the washroom door.

  “Mom’s having a shower,” someone would answer.

  When my mom sat down on the hallway stairs to tie her shoes before leaving for work, Auggie would jump up and wedge himself behind her back.

  “See? Dogs are fun,” we would say to our mom.

  “Yes, he’s nice,” she would answer, patting him on the head like he was a small child. My parents still didn’t want him drooling on the furniture or peeing on the carpet, but their actions spoke louder than the words they wouldn’t say: despite always dissuading us from the thought when we were kids, they liked having a dog around.

  ELEVEN

  lady and the camp

  In the seventh grade, the end-of-the-year trip was to a camp situated on a beautiful lake. It was to last a full week and was the first time in my and my fellow students�
� academic careers that we had ever been presented with the option of a school-sanctioned co-ed overnight trip. We were alerted of the trip at the first assembly of the year.

  “Some of you may have heard of the end-of-the-year camp trip,” the principal announced at our opening-day assembly. A buzz of excitement ran through the crowd, while my stomach sank at the battle I would have in persuading my parents to let me go.

  “It’s a lot of fun and you can fund-raise to help offset part of the cost.” Offset costs! My parents liked phrases like that. I leaned forward in my seat to catch the vital information that would get camp closer to my parents’ very favorite price of “free.”

  “In one week,” the principal continued, “we’ll begin fund-raising. This year we’re fund-raising with almond chocolate bars.” He held up a chocolate and I leaned forward even farther, in case he was going to throw it out into the crowd, like Steven Tyler did with his scarf at Aerosmith concerts. “The chocolates are three dollars apiece, and for every dollar you raise, you get twenty cents’ credit that you can use toward the cost of camp.”

  The camp was $175 for the week, so at twenty cents a pop, I was going to have to pray that a sumo-wrestling convention came to town so I could raise enough to make a dent in the cost.

  “Are you going to camp?” a girl in front of me asked her friends as we filed out of the assembly.

  “Oh yeah,” her friend answered. “I hear it’s the most amazing week ever. My sister said you get to choose who’s in your cabin and you swim every day and get to see all the guys in their bathing suits.”

  This presented a world of problems for me. What if nobody chose me for their cabin? Seven days of swimming meant seven distinct chances to drown, or seven excuses that needed to be made about why I wasn’t going into the water. And if we saw the boys in their bathing suits, that meant my ultimate fear, that they would be seeing me in mine, would be realized.

  But still, if people’s sisters were still talking about the trip, it must be pretty epic. It could change my boring life in so many ways. There was a chance I would get to bunk with girls who would become my new best friends. We would reunite every summer as adults and recall that fateful trip that brought us together while we planned our annual trek to Lilith Fair. Maybe I would find my long-lost twin sister like the character did in Parent Trap and she would teach me all of the cool hairstyles she had learned to camouflage her sideburns. But the most exciting thing was not what could happen, but what I knew couldn’t: my parents could NOT run out to the lake every day and yell, “Come in now, you have to vacuum the basement!” I didn’t know what was going to happen; the opportunities seemed endless. I just knew that I had two months to fund-raise before the deposit was due and I had to get moving.

  “How many boxes?” the secretary asked when I got to the front of the chocolates pickup line.

  “I’ll take fifty please,” I said.

  “Fifty?” She laughed. “Most kids take two or three.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, disappointed. “I guess I’ll take three.”

  I walked home with my three boxes after school. Two were in my knapsack, causing my shoulders to hunch back under the pressure. The other was in my hand, already opened. I thought it wise to sample the merchandise before I took it door-to-door, in case of questions. Now, after eating two of the family-size bars, I felt I was ready to answer any queries from prospective clients.

  “How many nuts per bar, you ask? They average from nine to twelve.”

  Or: “I’m glad you asked that, Mrs. Sanders, this is definitely one of the milkier bars I have tried. I would say creamier than a Hershey, more comparable to a British Dairy Milk.” I was going to sell out of bars by week’s end.

  “Is that chocolate?” Navroop asked when I got home.

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s to fund-raise for my camp trip, so you have to pay if you want one.

  “Mom,” I said, spotting my mom in the kitchen. “Can you buy some chocolate bars? Navroop wants some.”

  “Okay,” my mom said. “Give her one.”

  “Well, I want one too…” I said.

  “Oh, okay, buy two and share them.”

  My first two bars had been sold without effort. Really, it was four, because I assumed my parents would cover the cost of my test bars too.

  “I’m fund-raising for our class trip,” I said to my mom to gauge her reaction.

  “Don’t eat them all,” she cautioned.

  When my sisters heard that there was a full carton of chocolate bars in my room, I began steadily moving product. Deals were cut, allowing IOUs until allowances were given, and exchanges were allowed for room cleaning and extra dish-drying shifts.

  “Shouldn’t you sell them to other people, instead of just us?” my mom asked later that week, when she saw my sisters and me nibbling on another bar while watching The Hogan Family.

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll sell them all on the weekend.”

  When the weekend rolled around, I finally pulled out the remaining two boxes and headed out to court some new sales.

  “Hi, Mrs. Clarke,” I said when my next-door neighbor answered her door. “Would you like to help me raise money for my class trip by buying some chocolate bars?”

  I reached into the box, anticipating that she would want a couple. “Oh no,” she said. “Some kids came around here already. One came on Tuesday and another on Thursday and we already bought some.”

  “Oh,” I said, my weeklong sugar high finally wearing off.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m sure we could use another.”

  “Thanks,” I said, handing her a bar. “If you need more, you know where you can find me.”

  As I made my way around my street, I cursed myself for not having hit the pavement the very first day.

  “Oh, sorry, love,” neighbor after neighbor said. “We already bought a bunch.”

  After two hours of ringing bells, I had sold only six bars.

  I went out the next day as well and sold bars to relatives here and there, but many of the chocolates ended up being consumed over the next month by the seller and her three sisters. Of the thirty-six bars I brought home, my parents ended up buying ten for us to eat.

  I had raised a grand total of $7.20 toward my goal. Despite the setback, the week that they handed out the camp permission slips, I took one.

  “Aren’t you excited?” my friend Jen asked me as we looked at the forms in our history class.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s gonna be so fun. I just hope I can go, because my cousin is getting married that week.”

  I knew by this point that there was a chance that I wouldn’t be going, so I had to get my excuse ready early.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Jen said. “We could be in the same cabin.”

  I thought about that fun proposition all the way home from school.

  “What should I say?” I asked Navroop and Gurpreet as we watched our after-school Amen marathon.

  “I don’t know,” Navroop said. “They’ll probably say no.”

  “I didn’t go to mine,” Gurpreet said. “So I don’t know.”

  Not only did Gurpreet not go, she didn’t even ask to go because she was not interested either in singing “Cat’s Cradle” around the campfire or in fighting with our parents. She knew what they would say no to (pretty much everything) and didn’t press it, in the hopes that they would later remember her forbearance and award her a Daughter of the Year award.

  I, on the other hand, knew that winning over the kids in school would be a hundred times easier than ever winning over my parents, and had no choice but to exhaust myself with begging, if it was something I really wanted.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask them after we eat roti.”

  When my mom called us for dinner, I tucked the permission slip in my pocket and ran down the stairs.

  “Should I put out the plates?” I asked my mom, grabbing cutlery from the drawer.

  We ate dinner in silence, as
we always did, and I was so nervous I thought I might choke on my paneer. After dinner, my sisters quickly scattered so as not to be caught in the cross fire of what they knew was coming.

  “Dad,” I said, when it was just my parents and me in the kitchen, “at the end of the year, they have a camp trip and we can fund-raise cheese in the winter to pay for some of it. If I can help pay for it, can I go?”

  He looked at the permission slip I had put in front of him and said, “Forget about it.”

  “But why?” I pleaded. “Everybody else is going to go.”

  “Your sister didn’t go on hers,” my mom said.

  “Well, she didn’t want to,” I said. “I really want to. I’ll help pay for it. See, it’ll only be a hundred dollars.”

  “No,” my dad said, pushing his chair out and walking away.

  “Please, Mom,” I said as I helped her clean up.

  “Your dad said no,” she said.

  My parents always said no. We were never allowed to question why. A no was a no and you were supposed to then quash the desire in your heart, nod, and say, “Okay, that seems fair,” and bow to acknowledge their wisdom.

  I went up to my room and stared at the slip. It was due in one week, and if my parents didn’t fill it out, I would spend the rest of the school year listening to kids plan their cabin mates and decide who to sit beside on the bus.

  I was relentless all that week, hoping I could break my parents down, and I was also incredibly desperate. Not going to camp would be social suicide for me. Everybody went. If you didn’t go, it was for one of two reasons: your parents couldn’t afford it or your parents wouldn’t let you. I was in the combo category.

  “I can get a paper route,” I said to my dad the next evening. “Then I can pay for the whole thing.”

  “I said no,” he said. “No.”

  The next night I put the permission slip up on the fridge with the due date highlighted. On Thursday night, nearly in tears, I enlisted my sisters’ help for a final attack.

  “Just let her go,” Navroop said.

  “I hear it’s nice,” Gurpreet added. “Lots of teachers supervise,” she added, knowing what my parents would want to hear.