On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  If I took a place by the park, it would be more expensive, and I would regret the extra cost. If I took the place in Williamsburg, I would likely wish I had lived by the park. I was already aware of this. “Just take it,” I said. “I don’t want to spend forever on this and I’m sure you don’t want to look at ten more places for me.”

  And with that, I now had a roof over my head and my relocation to New York had turned from fantasy to reality. The next week I was duly honored at work with not just one farewell event, but four: there was the official work good-bye meeting, the official work good-bye party, the good-bye lunch, and the after-work good-bye karaoke. The official good-bye took place on the beautiful patio attached to one of the upper floors of our office building. In the scorching-hot sun, my coworkers and I stood in a circle while a cake melted behind us and held up plastic glasses of sparkling wine. My bosses and managers all praised me and said good-bye. I inadequately reciprocated, as there was no way I could summarily express my feelings.

  “Thanks, everyone,” I said, looking out at the crowd of people in front of me. “I really can’t express enough how much I’ve loved working here. I’ve learned so much. I’ve met some amazing people here, some of whom are now among my closest friends. Every day I walked into this building, I walked out loving my job. Not many people can say that.”

  I paused when it finally hit me that I was giving my good-bye speech.

  “I’ll really miss all of you so much. This has been an amazing five years, and I wish you all so much success and happiness in life.”

  I hoisted my glass and they followed suit. I was closing the chapter on five years of my life and five years is a long time, as Josef Stalin knew. It was a bittersweet farewell, I thought, sipping my now hot white wine. And sigh, I would miss the free wine.

  The after-work good-bye party is really where the action happens. The party during the day is a one-drink-and-back-to-the-desk affair. It’s after work that people let loose. And on a scale of one to ten, this one registered a twelve. The fact that a minitornado was ripping through the city of Toronto and rendering it wisest to stay at the bar and not venture outside acted to ensure that the night contained all of the ludicrous, alcohol-fueled moments that are features of every decent work party. Bottles were ordered, shots were consumed, speech became slurred, confessions were shared, and the general merriment frequently crept past the fine line between endearing and inappropriate.

  “I wish I could do what you’re doing,” one coworker after another said after a few too many beverages. We would clink glasses and express our mutual admiration before I headed to the next person to do the same. It was like a positive-affirmation square dance. After far too many beverages, some told me of their own plans to leave, or their desperate desire to do so.

  This was not a shock to me. Every lottery commercial ever aired on television has the winner indulging in the same fantasy: leaving their job. Whether it’s early retirement or a marching band announcing that they quit, the second their numbers are called, they get the hell out of cubicle Dodge. It is the true North American dream. As the trees were felled and power lines struck down, we all continued our lovefest, comforted by the barely depleted supply of alcohol surrounding us.

  On my official last day on the job, I woke up earlier than normal with a weird sensation in my stomach. It was similar to the first-day-of-school butterflies I had experienced as a child, but this time the decisions involved had more serious consequences than deciding whether to wear the blue or orange turtleneck. I pulled on a dress and swept my mass of hair into a ponytail. Brushing some color onto my face to erase my lack of sleep, I spent a good minute staring at myself in the mirror. The woman looking back at me appeared the same as always, but inside I was completely new. Five years ago, I would have given anything for a full-time job that allowed me to sock a few dollars away into retirement funds and enjoy a dinner out with friends once a month. Now I was throwing everything I knew away and was unafraid of what that meant.

  “Let’s go,” I yelled to Jen, who was waiting for me downstairs. I wanted this day to be done.

  “This is our last time walking to work together,” I said as we strolled our usual path to work. “This is the last croissant I’ll get from this store on our walk to work,” I noted as we entered my favorite bakery. I really loved those croissants. Although I was excited to embark on an adventure that would lead me in new directions, I knew I would miss the comfortable familiarity of my daily routine.

  Luckily, I had done all that I needed to do ahead of schedule, out of sheer panic and a desire to make my absence less of a burden on others. This worked out well since my last day consisted of about two hours of official meetings, one hour for a lovely sushi meal with all of my fellow publicists, and three hours to clean out the dregs of personal items that were still left in my desk. For my good-bye tour, I bid farewell to as many people as I could. After my arms were exhausted from hugging, I packed up the last of my belongings, left my BlackBerry and access pass on my desk, and walked out of the office into the beautiful sunshine.

  What the hell was I thinking? There was no turning back now. Security would tackle me if I tried to go back to work on Monday. Likely I would never see some of my coworkers again and I now was running the risk of being back where I was five years ago, working temp jobs and wondering if it would ever get better, but I had high hopes. This year was really opening my eyes to my own abilities. I was proud of myself for taking charge of my life and attempting to steer it back in the direction I desired. I wasn’t just a dreamer; I was a person who was willing to work hard, who was aware she had a lot to learn, and who knew that people out there had exactly the lives they wanted. So why not me?

  That night was the height of my weeklong good-bye extravaganza. A crew of my close work friends met for the ultimate in farewells: the karaoke. We sang until our throats were hoarse in a room that was private enough to make it appropriate to add coordinated dance moves.

  I was going to miss this. Coworkers really make or break a job. We all took turns keeping a candy dish supplied and met for monthly sushi dates to get out of work once in a while. I would now have to eat lunch by myself, crack jokes to myself all day, tell myself to be quiet in meetings with myself, and gossip about myself to myself. I hated myself for still wondering if I had made a grave mistake.

  The night ended with everyone singing Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” as a farewell and good-luck gesture to me. We stood up, kicked our legs like chorus girls, and sashayed in a big finish. I was sure at this moment that I had made the right decision. Nobody ever sang about sitting in a cubicle.

  part two

  SIXTEEN

  movin’ on up

  to a deluxe apartment

  in the sky

  Not wanting to waste any time, I boarded the plane for New York first thing Monday morning. I had just finished work on Friday, but when living a dream is involved, there’s no time to spare. Having mapped out the area around my new apartment, all routes to it, and the nearest decent restaurants, I landed at the airport and did what I always did in a city to feel like a local: I took the subway. This would have been a breeze had it not been for the two giant suitcases I was lugging.

  The apartment was a walk-up, like many in the city. Huffing and puffing my way up five flights, I walked into an apartment that was cute, but lacked the comforts of home. The bedroom contained a bed with no sheets on it, and the only other furniture was a sofa and coffee table.

  There was not one picture on the wall or rug on the floor and the cupboards contained a skeleton crew of dishes. No TV, radio, or Internet assured that I would be both undistracted and unaware if Godzilla attacked the city. The place had all the warmth and coziness of a drug front, but I would make do for two months.

  Madeleine had asked me several times if I was sure I wanted to live in Williamsburg, and in the end, my budget won out over my desire for leafy green beauty and ivy-covered town homes. Williamsburg offered me t
he maximum bang for my minuscule buck. But as I stood in my new apartment, I recalled why I’d wanted to live in Manhattan in the first place. I had never desired to live in hip Manhattan—SoHo, the Lower East Side, or the East Village. I wanted to live in the quiet, senior-citizen and family-filled upper Manhattan, where the nightlife was limited to restaurants and wine bars, the museums were all within walking distance, and in every direction there was the park. To me, Manhattan was all about the beautiful, glorious park, where families sat with picnic baskets, new love blossomed in the winding paths, and children pushed sailboats in the pond.

  Williamsburg is incredible. It’s where all the newest bars and coolest restaurants open. It’s where everyone wants to be on Saturday nights and where old couch potatoes like me who like to go to sleep by eleven are just wasting real estate. In Williamsburg, graffiti-covered walls adorn the exteriors of the coolest concert venues, thrift shops, and bars. It has its share of adorable families and people of all ages, but it can definitely also claim more than its share of men with giant beards, walking with their arms draped around the shoulders of teeny-weeny girls with messy hair and thick-framed glasses, wearing tiny thrift-shop dresses. One person outcooled the other and I looked like Steve Urkel from Family Matters in comparison.

  I was more than fine with that, as I already knew I wasn’t cool. I didn’t desire to be cool. I hadn’t the patience for making sure my bangs were just so, researching the latest and greatest bands, and wearing barely-there leggings as if they were real pants.

  My first evening in New York consisted of sweeping, mopping, and trying to arrange bits of my clothing and books to give the apartment a lived-in feel. Later I met Melissa for some much-needed sushi at a local restaurant. As I didn’t really know my way around Williamsburg, I wandered the deserted streets for a while to get my bearings. This is a major difference between Williamsburg and Manhattan. Whereas Manhattan is always a sea of people, parts of Williamsburg are so quiet you can hear the crickets being mugged by the cockroaches. There are one or two main drags that are always busy, but parts in between are perfect if you want absolute quiet or an ideal location for your new home in the Witness Protection Program. No matter, I told myself while walking to meet Mel. I was going to head into the city most days, as I had no intention of sitting around my abandoned apartment.

  “Welcome to New York,” Melissa exclaimed when she saw me. “We’re happy to have you.”

  “I’m happy to finally be here!” I said.

  After we stuffed ourselves with sushi, I returned home, threw my new bedding onto the bed, and dove into it. At least the bed was comfortable. I can deal with anything if the bed is comfortable.

  In the middle of the night I got up to get a glass of water. I flipped on the kitchen light and opened the fridge. Beside my water jug was a cockroach.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I said as I slammed the door shut. I was aware that roaches were common in New York, but in the fridge? That was just too much.

  The fridge was my sacred place. How could I ever buy an on-sale birthday cake again and joyfully lick its icing and eat a slice each night alone? Now a roach would be sitting on its plastic casing, assuming that it too would receive a piece. I knew that New York had lenient rules for squatters, but no way in hell were these roaches going to stay.

  “Get out!” I screamed, opening the door and swatting at it. It scurried in circles on the fridge shelf but did not retreat. I finally steeled myself, seized a wad of paper towels, and grabbed the roach. Depositing it in the garbage, I went back to the fridge, used paper towels to hold the water jug, and poured a glass. I stumbled back to bed, resetting my alarm for an hour earlier so I could clean out the whole fridge.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I was worried that I had uncovered the reason that this was the city that never slept. The next day was beautiful and sunny, so I shook off my bad first night and headed into Manhattan to run errands, browse through the endless stacks of books at the Strand, and have dinner with Madeleine. It was a perfect New York day, but that night brought back fears of cockroach invasions. My skin was so itchy that I was up half the night listening for roaches and scratching. Now my paranoia had moved on to my ultimate fear—bedbugs. The few hours I did sleep, my feverish dreams had bugs crawling all over me. I missed my roach-free apartment. I missed lying on my sofa watching TV. I missed being able to make myself a nice dinner. The kind of dinner that required pots and pans, herbs and spices, and a fork to shovel it all into my mouth. I had none of that here.

  The third night I cried. Not a tiny woe-is-me cry but the kind of giant messy sob fest where you find yourself in front of a mirror just to see how much the hardships of your life have reddened your eyes. The mirror revealed a justifiably puffy tear-streaked face of a person who may have made the biggest mistake of her life.

  The days were fine, but the second I set foot back in the apartment, my homesickness awoke with a vengeance. Maybe I wasn’t as tough as I’d thought.

  I was mistaking myself for the younger me who had slept on bunk beds in Bangkok and peed into holes without a second thought. Now I couldn’t even handle a bug or two. I had to get it together. I calmed down and took stock of the situation. I was going to make this work. I was not going home with my tail between my legs. I was a grown woman. Most important, I was way too cheap and now too poor to pay to change my flight.

  I recleaned the apartment the next day, finding a storehouse of dust I hadn’t previously noticed. I also acknowledged what it was I was really missing.

  “I want to buy a TV,” I told Madeleine.

  “Pardon?”

  “I want a TV,” I said. “I miss the noise. I miss watching things. I can buy some DVDs and not sit in silence all the time.”

  “You moved to New York. There are a million things to do here. And you want to sit and watch TV?”

  Madeleine was not a fan of television. She worked in advertising and had once told me that she never watched TV, only the commercials. I told her that was the dumbest thing I had ever heard in my life and to never repeat it in public. Commercials were what allowed you to refill your popcorn bowl and get back to the show without missing anything. What lunacy.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “So what? I’m going to be home for an hour or two a day and I don’t want to sit in silence. Plus, you know how much I love TV.”

  When I was a child, I started watching TV as an escape from my uneventful life, but that soon evolved into a love for scripted television. I could sit on a sofa for a full weekend watching a series whose characters and story lines sucked me in.

  That night I lugged my new television up the stairs. I had found it online; the seller was a girl who had upgraded her set. It was a full-size TV with DVD player built in for only forty dollars. I had spent more on T-shirts I wore only once, so this was, to me, a great investment.

  Then there was the cherry on top. As I passed a street vendor the next day, a case full of DVDs caught my eye.

  “That’s a great show right there,” the vendor said, nodding toward the DVDs. “Classic stuff.”

  “I know,” I said. “I haven’t seen it in years.”

  Ahhh, Dallas—my family’s Friday-night tradition for most of my childhood. I couldn’t resist. When I got home, I popped in a tape and reacquainted myself with the complexities of J. R. and Sue Ellen’s relationship and the family dynamics between Bobby, J.R., and Jock. Then there was good old Cliff Barnes.

  When my sisters and I missed an episode, my grandmother would watch it for us. Although she spoke no English, she was able to accurately sum up the story for us.

  “Then J.R. was with the cheerleader,” she would tell us as we listened excitedly. “Sue Ellen slapped him, then the old man fell down a hill.” She was better than TiVo and she often added some colorful commentary about J.R.’s indiscretions, complete with a litany of Punjabi swearwords. She did great reviews of many of the shows we liked to watch. She didn’t like how short Wonder Woman’s shorts were, so call
ed her Bandhar Woman, meaning monkey woman. She felt similarly about the tightness of Superman’s eighties aerobics look of thong over Lycra and called him Stupid Man. Stupid was one of the English words we felt it important that she learn, so we taught it to her. She really spoke only a few words in English, the most important two used for when she was home alone and the phone rang: NO ENGLISH.

  Though Bibi would tsk and wave her hand in the air every time J.R. was with a new woman, every Friday night she was right there alongside the rest of my family to watch the latest episode. Even a grandmother from a rural farming town in India wanted to know just exactly who shot J.R.

  As I sat alone in my New York apartment, listening to the opening theme music of the show, I remembered sitting on the floor in a house full of family, enjoying our Friday-night ritual. I watched a couple of episodes, then drifted off to the sound of the catchy disco-infused theme song. It was the best sleep I had since landing in the city.

  SEVENTEEN

  thirty going on thirteen

  By the next week, I was in a good frame of mind. I had a phone, I was getting settled into my apartment, and I was looking forward to creating a routine. I joined the local community center, which cost an unheard-of six dollars a month. For that bargain-basement price, you were given access to a steamy weight room and a scalding-hot cardio room where an average of two of the ten machines would be out of service at any given time. One stair climber had a piece of paper taped to it that read “Only Works on Manuel.” I kept waiting for this elusive Manuel to come and rouse the exercise machine back to life, but he never showed.

  Another important element of getting myself settled was creating a proper space to get some work done. After having worked in the same work space for so many years, I vowed to create a new office for myself.

  I had applied for a job blogging for a website aimed at teenagers, and was thrilled when they hired me to be part of the team.