I was eighteen, from a small city in Canada, and wearing that country’s uniform of large ski jacket, oversize corduroy pants, and a sweatshirt. And yet I felt as glamorous as the women wearing Burberry tweed and walking their poodles on the Upper West side. I oohed and aahed at the majestic twin towers. I asked poignant political questions during the UN tour. I snapped photos of the beautiful tree in front of Rockefeller Center and got lost in the beauty of the majestic snow-covered trees in the park.
On our first evening there, we were all standing beside our bus waiting to travel down to a Broadway show. A comedian from a nearby comedy club saw a captive audience and walked over to entice us to come to his show. After entertaining us with a few prepackaged G-rated jokes, he turned his attention to me.
Studying my a-little-bit-too-light skin and science-experiment-gone-wrong-colored eyes, he looked at me and said, “You’re half something and half something.”
Wanting to clear up that I was in fact 100 percent Indian, I replied, “No, I’m all something.”
“I can seeeeee thatttttt,” he drawled in a flirty tone that made me blush despite the fact that he was brazenly homosexual and no doubt recycling a bit he had used on ethnic audience members a hundred times.
But back then, in my mind, this was classic New York: there were hilarious interactions at every turn, with friendly banter straight out of a sitcom. The mayor would high-five you on the street corners and strangers would link arms and croon show tunes as they rode the subway together.
My vision of New York hadn’t changed since that first visit and I desperately wanted to return. I wanted to feel that same schoolgirl delight and sense of possibility. But it felt as outlandish as Quasimodo coming down from the bell tower and saying, “I’m leaving now, to pursue my modeling career in Paris.”
But then, was it really that ridiculous? My whole year thus far was bordering on the absurd and now I had gone so far as to quit my job to continue pursuing a path that was getting less and less marked. If that wasn’t insane, I didn’t know what was. Moving to New York would be the insane icing on top of my quarter-life crisis cake and yet I found myself seriously considering it.
FOURTEEN
the wonder
(what i was thinking)
years
I had actually made one very ill-planned attempt to move to New York a decade earlier. All throughout my adolescence, I had been a drama nerd. In the fifth grade, I walked home three kilometers, three nights a week, in the stark dark winter nights, all to be in the chorus of our school production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In high school, I was involved in anything and everything, because my alternative was sitting at home watching the same reruns I’d already seen ten times each. Once my parents understood that a student needed to be well rounded to get into a good college, they gave up on trying to keep us at home. We still weren’t allowed to go out socially, but I volunteered twice a week, I worked at a doughnut store on the weekends, and at school I belonged to the poster-making club, the student council, the intramural sports committee, and any other club that would take me.
But the bulk of my extracurricular time went to drama. I was in the school plays, the drama festivals, school assemblies, and any classroom demonstration that might have required my thespian touch. When I graduated high school I was given an award for my dramatic contributions. I even quoted Seinfeld in my valedictory address. Looking back at my old high school yearbook last month, I had totally forgotten the two categories I had won in the all-knowing “most likely to” section. I would have guessed “most likely to grow a handlebar mustache” and “most likely to marry a cousin” myself.
But there I was, listed as both “most likely to become a stand-up comedian” and “most likely to have their own TV show.” This, of course, meant I was destined for success. Although it’s more than likely that at least half of past winners in similar “most likely to” categories at their respective schools are living in their parents’ basements, I have to look at myself as the exception, not the rule.
But to me, writing and doing plays was just clowning around, and college, with all of its competitiveness and costs, was a time to get serious. I chose my major of international relations and headed off to the groves of academe to figure out what the hell that actually meant. I had a great time in college and met some of my closest lifelong friends there. But college was also when I completely lost my focus.
I was so busy trying to keep my head above water in a sea of students so much smarter and harder working than I was. I joined a few extracurricular clubs, particularly those that would allow me to write, but for the most part, I became entwined in the collegiate activities of navel-gazing, oversleeping, and trying to map out a future.
In the end, I graduated more lost than when I began, and returned home to fulfill a cliché of my generation and live in my parents’ basement. While others went off to graduate school or trekked across Europe, I spent months waking up at eleven, avoiding people who might possibly ask me what I was doing, and sending out as many résumés as my dot-matrix printer could sputter out.
One day, after two months of barely emerging from my basement room, I heard a knock on the door. I was working on applying for yet another job, hijacking the phone line to access the dial-up Internet, when my dad popped his head in.
“You know,” he said, “you can go do things. You don’t have to always sit around here. I can take you places if you need to go.”
Sure, I wanted to say, having wished I had been told this eight years ago. Why don’t we go to the new martini bar downtown and get some cosmopolitans?
“I’m okay,” I said as I reread a cover letter. “I need to keep looking for a job.”
It was obvious that my dad, who was usually the last family member to pick up on emotional cues, thought I was depressed. And I no doubt was. University didn’t let me be the shining student I had been up to that point, but it kept me busy and on a track to something. Upon graduating, I was hit with the realization that I could no longer trace the track’s route. This, coupled with being broke and being back at home, created the perfect recipe for Depression Pie. Which I must have eaten a lot of, as I also gained nearly fifteen pounds that year, numbing my boredom with bags of chips and chocolate-covered anything.
Every month or so, Melodie would pick me up and we would go out to a local chain restaurant and talk about life and dreams over spinach dips and large margaritas.
“So what’s new?” she would ask.
After sighing deeply, I would detail my previous two weeks.
“I’ve applied for another fifteen jobs,” I said. “Never heard back from any of them.”
“Are you working on any writing?” she asked.
Since we had both moved back to our respective homes, we decided we would pursue our creative desires in order to have something positive to show for our time there. Looking through my bookshelf one day, I found the birthday gift that Melodie had given me that year. It was a writing journal with the inscription “Remember me when you hit it big!” At that point I just wanted to hit anywhere but rock bottom, which was slowly inching closer.
“Have you seen anyone else lately?” she asked. My answer was always the same.
Other than Melodie, I had very little human contact with the outside world, so I just listened to her stories of the people we knew.
“Thanks for driving,” I would say when she dropped me off, knowing the situation would never be reversed.
“No problem. Let’s do it again soon.”
After I’d been home for almost six months, penniless and now hopeless, my luck finally changed. I got a job interview at a local insurance company, and right before Christmas, I was told I had the job. That was the greatest Christmas present I could have hoped for—finally, I had a reason to wake up in the morning, an answer to the question of what I was doing, and a chance to make some much-needed cash.
I graduated college with a credit-card debt that kept me up nights,
and after months of my hiding it, my parents figured it out via an “accidental” opening of my mail. I would have reported them for this federal offense except that after they lectured me endlessly, they kindly offered to pay the bill. The many-thousand-dollar bill.
Having never amassed consumer debt in their lives, they were horrified at the thought of my having to pay interest for two years, so I gratefully accepted their offer.
The only time I can recall my dad ever telling me he was proud of me was when, after several months at my new job, I handed him a check to clear my debt to him.
“That’s great, kid,” he said in English, to ensure that I understood his happiness. “That’s great.”
He expressed his pleasure at my responsibility, put the check in his closet, and hasn’t cashed it to this day. It was a kind gesture, but I sincerely hope that the time that has passed has also rendered the check void because if my dad tried to cash it now, it would bounce higher than Pam Anderson running on the beach in a Baywatch montage.
Now gainfully employed, I would take two buses to work, rotating a small collection of manly button-down shirts with an even smaller collection of polyester pants. I knew I wasn’t the picture of fashion, but after a fifty-year-old woman I worked with came up to me, pointed to her oxford shirt and ill-fitting black pants, and said, “Look, I’m wearing a Rupinder outfit,” I really had to pause and take stock of my life.
I was in a job that was not for me, wearing the business-casual equivalent of mustard-stained jogging pants. I woke up each morning fifteen minutes before my bus left, slipped on my glasses, adjusted my bun, and grabbed my sandwich. I looked and felt forty years old.
I ate lunch alone, often going for a walk and listening to my Walkman. My coworkers were easily the nicest I have ever worked with, but I never socialized with them outside of work. While other twentysomethings would make plans with their friends for postwork drinks, my phone would ring every afternoon to offer a different proposition. At about 4 P.M., I would look down to see a familiar number pop up on my call display. It would be Sumeet, then ten years old, calling to tell me of the local fast-food specials of the evening.
“Okay,” he would say, cutting out any type of salutation. “There is a two-for-one pizza special but there’s also a meal deal for McDonald’s.”
I would laugh at this daily ritual but occasionally I caved and agreed to treat him to a grease fest. He would wait for my bus at a stop a few blocks from our house and we would walk over together to the mall to rot our stomachs with some form of fast food. Even after we consumed thousands of artery-clogging calories, the phone would ring again the next day like clockwork. I had to give my brother points for persistence.
After nine months of the job, I knew I was wasting the company’s time. I didn’t know what I would do next, but I knew that this wasn’t for me. My parents weren’t enthused when I told them I was going to quit in order to travel across Asia with my high school chums Vern and Jessie. But at this point I was twenty-three years old, so my parents knew that they didn’t have much say in the decision. I had saved enough money from my job to survive for my three-month trip and at least six months after, so I decided to do something daring and act my age again. I worried that my lack of enthusiasm would result in my getting fired from that job in the end, so I knew that I had to preserve whatever self-esteem I had by getting out on my own terms.
This is when I first got the idea in my head to actually make the move to New York. As I walked down Khaosan Road in Bangkok, I imagined myself walking down Fifth Avenue instead, on my way to a great job, then later to meet friends for a great dinner. I didn’t know what the hell I planned to do in Manhattan, but I knew I didn’t want to work in insurance. I wanted to be artistic, and this would require the inspiration of hanging with beatnik poets and Broadway dancers, singing show tunes until the wee hours.
Of course, things don’t always work out as planned, and when I got home, I waited a week, then decided to hit my parents with the news. I knew full well that they thought of New York as a cesspool of crime and depravity based on nothing but their imaginations and a Dateline special or two. Because of this, I knew that I had to soften the blow, and when it comes to blow softening, there’s no better cushion than a parent-friendly white lie.
“I got a job offer!” I told my parents as they were sitting and watching an Indian program on TV one night.
Seeing smiles on their faces, I saw my window of opportunity. “It’s in New York.”
“It is?” they asked, awaiting the explanation of this mystery job that had found me just a week after I returned from my trip to Asia.
“Yes,” I said, lying through my teeth. “It’s in marketing. It’s a great job.”
They looked thoroughly unconvinced as they continued to drink their chai.
Before they could ask me any further questions about my new fictitious employer or my new fictitious job duties, I headed to my basement lair to work out some fictitious details.
I hadn’t yet set a departure date, which was handy, as my plans were soon derailed by the power of parent-induced guilt. Two days later, my dad caught me as I was making myself a sandwich.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” he told me. He didn’t want me to go to New York. To him, New York was scary.
“Fine!” I said through clenched teeth. “I’ll tell them I’m not coming.”
Because of my parents’ neuroses, I had abandoned a great opportunity. It didn’t matter that the job hadn’t been real. It had been real to them, and though I might sit in the basement another six months, unemployed and unhappy, to them this was a lesser evil than living in a big city that they believed to be run by Mayor Beelzebub. I could have argued. I could have extolled the virtues of my new amazing fake job, but I knew it wasn’t worth it. I had lost this battle. Parents always guilt kids with the sacrifices that they made for them. But kids are forced to make sacrifices too sometimes, to help make their parents’ lives easier.
FIFTEEN
manhattan
This time, nothing was going to stop me from getting there. “I’m thinking of coming to New York,” I told Madeleine, who had recently relocated to the Big Apple.
“Do it!” she said.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me,” I said. “Now find me an apartment. And make it cheap.” My savings would only stretch so far, but I could comfortably do two months there. She laughed, so I didn’t tell her that I was serious, and she soon found herself checking out apartments for me like my part-time Realtor.
I decided to waste no time and finish work on a Friday, then move to New York on the following Monday. Jaclyn’s wedding was a few days before my departure, so I would stay for that, then jump on a plane for my own solo honeymoon.
The bird-chirping bright-skyed August soon gave way to frantic weeks of trying to wrap up my job and plan a move to another city. My phone was ringing off the hook, I had committed to finishing two major press announcements, and I was helping a colleague create fall plans to launch several big-budget shows on the networks we covered. I was still researching camps and Disney vacations in my evening hours but now had added the task of trolling Internet sites for New York City sublets below a million dollars a month. After doing this unsuccessfully for a number of weeks, I started to think that maybe a million for a studio apartment in Queens was fair, as long as the utilities were included.
My friend Melissa, who had taken the TV writing program with me, had moved to New York after getting married. She sent out e-mails to all of her NYC friends to ask if they knew of any good places to rent. It was obvious that it was going to take a village to make this happen. In the meantime, I was working ten hours a day to ensure that all of my work was finished, and coming in on weekends to start the daunting process of cleaning out my desk. One drawer was filled with candy. Another contained a pharmacy worth of lotions and potions, while the floor under my desk was covered with pairs of shoes. As I pulled off my nameplate and shoved my shoes in a box, it hit
me that there was really no way to turn back now.
The last two weeks of August were a testament to effective time management, a skill that I will now list on my résumé twice, as I believe myself to be quite proficient at it. Work got wrapped up, plane tickets were purchased, plans were set, arrangements were made, and everything started to fall into place.
During this time, I sent Madeleine out to check out an apartment for me. She had moved to New York the year before and settled in the East Village. The apartment she looked at on my behalf was available until the end of October and was partially furnished, extremely reasonable, and in Williamsburg, the hipster capital of the universe. I wanted to live up by Central Park, but Melissa lived in Williamsburg and Madeleine was only two subway stops away, so it seemed an ideal alternate location. The pictures looked decent—it was a small space but recently renovated and the kitchen looked new.
“Are you sure you want to live in Williamsburg?” Madeleine asked me after seeing the place. She liked it but wondered if I would soon start wishing I were living near the big willow trees that lined the park.
“Oh, I’ll get over it,” I advised. “Just take it.”
Five minutes later she called back again. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You’ve said for weeks that you want to live up by the park. Are you sure you aren’t going to regret that?”
On the Outside Looking Indian Page 12