On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  “Please, Dad,” I said. “I’ll never ask for anything again. I promise. If you let me go…”

  “Enough!” he said. “I already said no. You kids are driving me crazy.”

  “Okay, okay,” my mom said, trying to defuse the situation. “All right, kids. Rupinder, you’re not going.”

  Sometimes it seemed, as I was growing up, that my parents just said no, regardless of whether or not the decision actually meant anything to them. It was just the easiest way. It saved them money, it saved them the worry, and they seemed to think that I and my siblings would easily get over whatever we were denied, and forget that we were ever denied it.

  I went up to my room and stayed there the rest of the night, not even coming down when Gurpreet called me to watch a new episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  “I’m sorry,” Navjit said, coming to my room with a stick of her Kit Kat bar.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the stick.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, and lay in bed worrying about how I would be able to get the slip in tomorrow. I set my alarm and had barely slept when it rang at 6 A.M. At six-thirty both my mom and dad would leave for work, so this was my very last opportunity to wear them down. I walked slowly down the stairs, already feeling defeated but determined to give it one last effort. When they saw me walk into the kitchen, they already knew why I had woken up that early.

  “I told you once, twice, every time,” my dad said in Punjabi. “You are NOT going.” I climbed back up the stairs, ripped up the permission slip, and cried until my alarm rang at seven-thirty.

  People talked excitedly about camp for the rest of the year, while I tried to tune their discussions out. The week of the trip, I had to choose from a number of other activities the school offered as compensation. I already knew to sign up for the cheapest options, so I drew pictures in the art room, visited a local farm, and toured a miniature village, all the while imagining all my friends bonding and creating memories they would reminisce about for years to come.

  Years later, Navjit and then Sumeet managed to persuade my parents to let them attend the very camp I had cried over not attending for a whole week. My parents had somehow come around to the realization that the place wasn’t the Manson Family cult lodge they originally thought it to be.

  “Why didn’t you let me go?” I asked my parents as they signed Navjit’s permission slip.

  “I don’t remember you asking,” my dad responded.

  My parents had softened a lot as the years went by, realizing the world wasn’t the frightening place they had always imagined when we asked to step out into it. But it was still annoying that my dad had taken his own advice and “forgotten about” something that I had thought about every day of seventh grade. Nonetheless, I was sincerely happy that my younger siblings had won that battle, and eighteen years after my first attempt, I was looking far and wide for a camp to finally attend.

  This was by far the most difficult of all of the activities on my list to coordinate. Camps for adults do exist, of course, but I wasn’t willing to spend five grand to have Slash show me how to rock at a rock-’n-roll fantasy camp and too many of the options were basically Zen-based fat camps.

  I spent months trolling for a camp that fit my schedule and desire for an authentic camp experience, but nothing seemed to fit the bill. “This is an unusual request,” said the customer-service representative from a science camp I found outside of Montreal.

  “Oh yes, I understand,” I said, having encountered this response enough times now to anticipate it.

  A few camps never responded to my queries, some responded and let me know that they had no space or anything scheduled, and some let me know that I was just plain weird. My usual script sounded something like this: “I’m just looking to have a camp experience. I always wanted to go when I was a kid and didn’t, so I thought I’d go now. Do you have any programs for adults?”

  “Hmm…let’s see,” the woman from the science camp said. “We have the explorer afternoon, for kids and adults together. You could come to that.”

  “I don’t have a kid,” I said.

  “Could you borrow one?” she said.

  “I think people who borrow kids are called kidnappers,” I joked.

  She transferred me to her boss.

  I gave my same speech and she was sympathetic, but said, “We just couldn’t have an adult here with the kids. It would be weird.”

  After months of researching, reaching out, and rejections, I was officially weird. I had almost given up when an Internet search led me to a volunteer posting for a summer camp run by Gilda’s Club. Named after Gilda Radner, Gilda’s Club had, for many years, been providing those stricken by cancer with support and various programs. I was familiar with the organization, having volunteered for one of their variety-show fund-raisers. For kids, they offered camps in the summer and over March break, with a variety of activities within the city. The minute I saw the posting I realized that this was what my experience was meant to be. Perhaps my lack of success with finding a camp for myself was karmic; the universe’s way of telling me that this was not something that I could go back in time and re-create, but I could most certainly help a group of worthy kids have the chance to experience it.

  The camp was to last a full week and started bright and early on a Monday morning in early June. As kids started streaming into the playroom, I was reminded of how long it had been since I was the cyclone of energy known as a child. The kids were between four and eleven. Some had diagnoses of cancer themselves, whereas others were coping with a diagnosis in their family. Gilda’s Club provided them with an environment of support and a group that could empathize, but camp was their time to just let loose and be kids.

  Most of the other counselors had a lot of camp experience and at least half were studying early childhood education. I knew I would be at a disadvantage unless I found a kid who was fascinated with the intricacies of press releases for new British TV shows.

  “How are you at making buttons?” my leader, Amy, asked me.

  I had never made a button. Perhaps I was out of my element. I was already lacking in camp-counseling savvy. I also had no idea how to layer a s’more, make hemp bracelets, or sing the lyrics to “Cat’s Cradle” at a fireside sing-along.

  “It’s easy,” Amy said, demonstrating how to layer the button elements into the button press. “Every kid’s going to make a button and you just put it together for them.”

  It looked and sounded easy enough, but by the third button I was already a colossal failure in the world of button-crafting.

  “What happened?” one girl said, looking at her freshly pressed button. Her delicate splashes of glitter paint had flattened in the press and smeared across the surface of the button, covering the design she had so carefully drawn.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Do you want to make another one?”

  The next button didn’t adhere correctly, leaving the two pieces of plastic with gaping holes.

  “Oh my,” I said. “You might have to make a third.”

  Two buttons were already ruined. I started putting every ounce of my being into pressing the buttons, and as my body is composed of a lot of ounces, we’re talking a lot of manpower.

  “Great button, Roy,” I said to a boy after checking out his name on the paper. “That’s a cool football.”

  “It’s a dog,” he said.

  I was off to a great start.

  I was relieved when it was announced that button time had ended and I went off to meet my group of four. This was the group I would be responsible for all week and it contained two five-year-old twin girls, Erin and Caitlin. The other two girls in our group, Marnie and Sally, were both six years old. We were alerted in advance that Marnie had leukemia, but I still wasn’t prepared to encounter someone so young that she didn’t even know the terminology with which to describe her affliction. We were making puppets that morning in preparation for a puppeteer company that was coming to put on a play for
us in the afternoon. The morning was two hours of glitter explosions, felt mishaps, and questions like “what happens if you get glue in your eyelashes?”

  By lunch I was wiped out and the kids were starved. Erin only wanted to eat croutons, Sally requested crouton-less salad, and three different kids spilled the juice from their fruit cups onto their pants. Then they all abandoned their food for a raucous game of hide-and-seek. Miraculously they all settled down when the puppets arrived. The puppet show was tailor-made for the crowd and dealt with two schoolkids who had cancer. Looking over the crowd, I could see that they were captivated, and some even went up at the end to high-five the puppets. When their parents came to pick them up, the kids showed off the puppets they had made and dragged me over to meet their parents. “See you tomorrow,” I said, hoping I’d have the energy for another round.

  The next day we headed to a spring fair. When I was younger, every summer my parents would buy discounted tickets from their workplaces, pack my siblings and me up in the car with juice boxes, and take us for a day at a nearby amusement park. We always complained that we didn’t have time to do enough when there, not noticing that my parents rarely went on the rides themselves, following us from one to the other and holding our visors and jackets as we stood in hour-long lines. That would be my role today.

  When we got to the fair, we surveyed the carnival games, rides, and row upon row of candy vendors. We were going to have a great time, if only we could decide where to begin.

  Every kid wanted to go on a different ride. If Erin wanted to go on the monkey scrambler, her twin, Caitlin, vetoed it. Marnie and Sally wanted to go on the scarier rides, which led to tears for little Sally. At six, she had the guts for it but unfortunately not the height. Finally we all settled upon the giant slide, which required you to slide down in optimal comfort and style in a burlap sack. “Come with us!” the twins said to me. I wasn’t particularly interested in a ride made just for kids, but as Amy had told us in training, “Think about what the kids want.” The kids wanted me on that slide. So I sat down on the center of the three slides, grabbed my burlap, and said, “Here we go!” As the little girls raced down their respective slides, their giggles of delight followed them over the bumps. I pushed off, expecting a leisurely ride down, but was immediately alarmed at how much speed I was picking up. As I went over the first bump, I lifted off the slide an inch and landed with a thud, continuing at breakneck speed. Conscious of the campers waiting for me at the bottom, I plastered a fake smile on my face that was masking my sheer terror. When I hit the bottom, my burlap death trap kept sliding so far that I had to put my feet up to break my momentum at the fence.

  “Wasn’t that great?” Caitlin said, grabbing my hand. I was too shocked to respond.

  That was the first of three slides I went down at the fair. I also went into fun houses and held shoes while various jumpy castles were tested. Although we were there for only five hours, I felt as if I had been born in the spring fair, attended school there, been married and divorced twice, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro within its precincts. The kids, however, were as energized as when we arrived, and turbo-shocked by a treat of cotton candy at the end of the day. If this was the energy level we would hit every day, I wasn’t sure I would make it through the week.

  Marnie closed her eyes on the streetcar ride back and I worried that a full day of walking had tired her out. “Are you okay, Marnie?” I asked, kneeling by her seat.

  “That was the best day ever,” she replied. And with that one remark, all of my energy returned.

  By midway through the week, I was in the swing of things. And I was so grateful that this was what my camp experience had ended up being. Not only was I getting to spend time with an amazing group of kids, I was getting to participate in a lot of the activities I had wanted to do when I was a kid.

  On Thursday we were going to Medieval Times. This was a first for most of the kids, and for me as well. There had been only one opportunity to visit Medieval Times when I was in school—it was scheduled as an alternative to the senior prom. The guys who chose to go considered it a no-brainer. Watching jousting was a better use of an evening than standing against a wall in an uncomfortable tuxedo. For girls, it was considered social suicide. You would likely be the only member of your sex there. And regardless of whether you were a geek in normal life, on that night you would be considered a loser for not bringing your own sword.

  “Will you sit beside me at the show, Sally?” I asked her on our bus ride over. She had spent the whole week glued to her brother Matthew’s side and I was hoping the show would make her feel more comfortable relating to the others.

  “Can I sit with Matthew?” she said.

  We had made ourselves flags to cheer on our knights, avoiding the costly souvenir flags that they sold at the venue. I pointed Sally to the seat beside mine, which she took, but she kept looking back to keep an eye out for her brother.

  The lights started dimming and the kids knew the main attraction was about to begin. Sally and Marnie, on either side of me, started to wave their flags as the knights rode out into the dirt arena. In perfect dinner-theater timing, the garlic bread also arrived at this same moment. The horses pranced around while the knights hammed it up for cheers from their sections. When the Red Knight stood in front of our section and raised his arms like a victorious gladiator, the kids screamed and clapped.

  A tiny finger poked my left arm. “Is it done now?” Sally said, concerned that the show was over.

  “Oh no,” I said. “There’s so much more. Don’t worry, it just started.”

  “Okay,” she said, smiling.

  Little did Sally know how much was left in the show. As we ripped our food apart with our hands, the knights all fought wildly choreographed fight scenes, straight out of a Dark Ages WWE match. Punches would send them flying across the arena. A sword that grazed them lightly sent them to their deaths. And all the while the kids cheered the Red Knight and booed his opponents.

  “Is it done?” Sally said after the Yellow Knight fell to the ground.

  “Nope,” I said, “There’s still more.”

  “Okay, thanks,” she said, focusing back on the arena.

  Before the final battle, the show took a pause for the king’s servant to give shout-outs to various members of the audience.

  “Lady Stephanie and Lady Mona are both turning seven today,” he said. “And Lord Vijay is nine. Happy Birthday with love from Mummy, Daddy, and… Bibi…ji.” His pronunciation was horrifying, but as there wouldn’t have been any Indian knights in medieval times anyway, it was forgiven. “Lady Catherine is thirty today,” he said as a group of drunken adults jumped up to point out the birthday girl. I wondered why Lady Catherine and her friends weren’t at work, as we were at the 2 P.M. show, but the fact that two of her friends were play-fighting with swords behind her made me realize they might march to the beat of a different social norms drum.

  “The Crescent Hill Day School’s here today,” the announcer continued, “as well as the Bay Ridge Day Camp.”

  “Will he say Gilda’s?” the kids asked me. “I hope he says Gilda’s.”

  Hoping for their chance to be recognized, the kids listened intently as he rattled off names. They wanted to cheer. They wanted and deserved the chance to cheer and be cheered by the rest of the auditorium.

  “St. Anthony’s Camp’s here,” the announcer said as I grew anxious.

  The announcer continued to rattle off the list of school and camp groups and I could feel myself tensing up with each subsequent name, fearful that the list was ending. Were we supposed to have told them it was a special trip at the door? I wondered. Was there a way I could tell them now? All of the other kids in the stadium were standing proudly as their respective group names were called.

  “What about Gilda’s?” Marnie said to me.

  Yes, what about Gilda’s? I thought, looking up at the podium. Please say it, please, please say it. Let them have their chance to be cheered.
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br />   “I don’t know,” I said, clutching the extra flags I had made.

  “Will they say it?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “Our Lady of Lourdes Day Camp is here,” the announcer said, “and Gilda’s Club!”

  The kids jumped out of their seats and waved their flags for everyone to see. “Wooo!” they cheered. “Wooooooo, Gilda’s!”

  Then, to top it off, the Red Knight won the tournament.

  The kids were brimming with excitement on our way out. Like every other kid waiting in the foyer, they started fighting each other with their flags.

  “Take that!”

  “I’m the Red Knight!”

  It was easy to forget that they weren’t exactly like every other kid in the arena that day. They had the same love of candy and joy for life, but they had one thing that separated them from others, a weight on their tiny shoulders. For the most part, we didn’t talk about the C-word at camp. The children had weekly meetings where they talked about their feelings, and this was their week just to have fun. But if they wanted to talk about it, we did.

  “Why did you come to Gilda’s?” a girl named Lillian asked me on our bus ride home.

  “Camp sounded like fun,” I said. “I wanted to come be a part of it.”

  “No,” she said. “Why did you come to Gilda’s?”

  “Oh,” I said, finally understanding. “My grandmother had cancer. And two of my friends.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Are they okay now?”

  “Not my grandmother,” I said. “But she was grandma age,” I added. “But my friends are both great. They’ve been fine for a long time now.”

  “That’s good,” Lillian said, smiling.

  My grandmother was actually only in her early sixties when we found out she had a brain tumor. The week before she had been moving sofas in the basement of my uncle’s house and slipping us money to order pizza when our parents wouldn’t allow us to get any. She was fit, still adept at transcribing our soaps for us, and only recently started wearing eyeglasses, as well as the dentures that we would find sitting on tables sometimes because she didn’t like the way they felt in her mouth.