On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  The blog paid enough to give me pocket money for the week, in return for three to four page-length posts about things that mattered to teens. I needed to make some money, but this one was a struggle for me, as I knew nothing of teenagers. I would have liked to use my own experiences in my writing, but I didn’t think I would get much traction with posts like “the best haircuts to mask sideburns” or “one pair of jeans, thirty ways.”

  It would be a challenge to be the voice of a phase of life that I’d wished would end immediately when I was going through it. I spent most of my teenage years with a mustache that I thought was invisible because I had bleached it fluorescent yellow. I worked the early shift at a doughnut shop just to buy myself the same cotton khakis the other girls wore and so I would have an excuse for why I couldn’t go out on the weekends. This blog job would be an exercise in creative writing, as I had a feeling mine weren’t the most common of teenage experiences.

  Packing up my laptop and an equal-size bag of snacks, I took the L train into town, got off at Bryant Park, and walked up the imposing stone stairs of my new daytime refuge. On either side of me, large stone lions kept watch over the building. What more majestic place for a mind to wander than the New York Public Library? There were countless rooms of lovely long tables at which to create masterpieces while surreptitiously shoving licorice whips into your mouth.

  I set up my workstation, and after mindlessly surfing the net for a while, I finally got down to work. But what to say? I hadn’t the slightest idea where to begin. I hadn’t been a teenager for over a decade and so much had changed in that time. I didn’t have a computer with an Internet provider until I was in college, and even there, I didn’t have a cell phone. I was a nerd of a teenager, and not much had changed, except that I now wore contacts, not glasses, when I sat down for my daily hour of Star Trek.

  Each day I took the subway into town, walked to Fifth Avenue, and headed back to my office. Each day I would struggle to come up with topics, doing research by reading other teen blogs and watching the cringe-inducing reality shows that were popular with teens. But the work paid, and this was key.

  I wanted to keep busy and take some lessons in New York. Although I was moving very slowly but surely in everything I had come to the city to do, I knew that there was a chance that living here would distract me from my goal and I sometimes found myself wanting to go to a gallery, museum, or show instead of getting down to work. What I loved about New York was unfortunately going to mean that I wouldn’t be able to get anything done. With little money in my entertainment budget, I would just head home every night and eat my dinner in front of the television, watching episodes of Dallas. I wasn’t exactly living a life out of Sex and the City, a show that wants you to believe that people who are lawyers or own PR firms have time for drinks every night (and that writers who drop a pun into every single conversation don’t get punched out by their girlfriends). In reality, most everyone I knew in New York worked relentless hours to allow them to live in New York. It was the Manhattan catch-22.

  Nonetheless, the lack of social engagements allowed me more time to get down to the task at hand. In my second week, I popped into the Fourteenth Street YMCA and signed up for swimming before I changed my mind.

  I had planned to sign up for a group swimming class but had missed the deadlines for all of them. Not wanting to chicken out, I decided that I would cough up the dough and sign up for private swimming lessons. This was a life skill that I needed to learn. It would be worth dipping into my pocket further than I had expected.

  I had some income coming in from my teen-blog gig, so I allowed myself the indulgence. The trouble was, I was finding it increasingly difficult to brainstorm topics for a teenage audience.

  I would surf Tiger Beat and Teen Vogue and various other publications that I could have a daughter old enough to read and desperately tried to come up with topics.

  “What about back-to-school shopping with your parents?” I would suggest to my editor. “Or how to dress straight out of Gossip Girl?”

  Invariably, the topic I knew least about would be chosen and I would sit down to watch Gossip Girl so I could actually differentiate Blair from Serena.

  My first few posts were sent back to me three times each for revisions.

  “Make them funnier!” I was told. “Make them more relatable and really try to capture the voice of youth.” I didn’t have the voice of youth even when I was one myself, so this was challenging. I continued to rework the pieces until they were finally accepted. The third entry, an opus that focused on the biting teen debate about whether it’s better to date a vampire or a werewolf, I wrote in ten minutes. It was declared a literary triumph.

  From that point on, I stopped trying to write as me and inserted “LOL!” and “OMG!” until I could no longer respect myself.

  “Who else is sick for the Jonas boys?!” I wrote, having heard of them only the day before. “Have you ever IM’d the wrong crush? Were you totally grossed out when your mom joined Facebook? How else can the ’rents embarrass you?!” “TOTALLY!” my audience replied. “Isn’t that the worst?” Personally, the worst for me was sounding like a girl with a backstage pass for a Miley Cyrus concert.

  The more I talked about topics that I hated and inserted a variety of popular phrases that were shredding the English language to bits, the better received was my writing.

  I was writing pieces on subjects I knew nothing about. I actually wrote a post on summer romances: “Danny and Sandy really summed it up in Grease, didn’t they? Nothing adds to the joy of vacation like summer love.” Little did the readers know that I was referring to the one-sided romance I had growing up, with Lucky on General Hospital. I wrote about loving the Twilight film (which I didn’t even see) and how LOLish it was when you and your BFF are crushing on the same guy. I wanted to strangle this teen me I had created.

  It turned out that pretty quickly the readers wanted to strangle me back. I made a very large mistake. A mistake so large that it rocked the world of teen blogging as we know it: I wrote a post on the most sacred of tween/teen literature: Harry Potter books. And it was factually incorrect.

  The pieces I wrote were meant to be humorous, so I wrote jokes about a number of characters, including one that apparently dies in one of the last books in the series. Why didn’t anybody tell me that Dumbledore died! Aren’t wizards supposed to live forever? Gandalf returned for the end of Lord of the Rings, so why couldn’t the Harry Potter readers have faith that Dumbledore could show up for the Hogwarts graduation? I can admit it; I had totally screwed up. The comments linked to the post were nothing short of an online burning at the stake.

  “This writer should be ashamed of herself!” one teen wrote. I was mortified but at least thankful they could tell I was a female.

  “DUH!” another kid wrote. “DUMBLEDORE IS DEAD!”

  “Thousands of people are laughing at you!” another chimed in. I wasn’t sure this was true but I was pretty sure that my next post should be about the horrors of cyber-bullying. In my day, they just yelled “Nice unibrow, Rupinder!” while you waited in line for the drinking fountain, but now they were taking to the Internet to tear you down.

  Not all of the comments were negative, especially a particularly kind one from CatLover4Ever (i.e., Jen), who proclaimed the entry to be genius. But there were enough negative comments to cause me to run home from the library worried that a mob of kids had traced my IP address and would come after me wielding Quidditch brooms.

  I wondered if perhaps the slip had been subconscious, because I had contemplated resigning from this job for a few weeks. A writer needs to learn to write in different voices, it’s true, but I realized a few weeks in that I might never master the voice of a North American teenager.

  When my editor moved on from her position, another one took over and sent me an e-mail saying that I “wasn’t really capturing their voice” and that they didn’t need me anymore. I was upset that my sole income was now gone, but it was a
small price to pay, in the grand scheme of things. Some things in life you don’t want to relive. Teenage rejection is one of them.

  EIGHTEEN

  curbed enthusiasm

  Settling into New York was taking a lot longer than I had expected. My building was generally quiet, but twice I was awakened in the dead of the night by a girl leaving her boyfriend’s apartment.

  “You must think I’m crazy!” she would scream, voicing her disapproval of whatever he had done to irk her that night.

  He would yell at her to stay, she would yell back an expletive-laced tirade, and the whole building would be robbed of that night’s sleep.

  I didn’t find many of the neighbors that friendly, either. I had left notes for three neighbors on my floor, asking if they would want to split their Internet with me for the duration of my stay. All three completely ignored me, even when I saw them in the hall.

  On the other end of the spectrum, the neighbors two doors down from me had an extremely liberal open-door policy. In the same basic four-hundred-square-foot apartment I was renting, a family of at least five had created a home. Each time I passed, the door was open, allowing me a glimpse of plastic tablecloth, an earful of yelling in Spanish, and a delicious whiff of that day’s lunch or dinner. As the washing machine constantly whirred, a middle-aged woman stood above the steamy stove, delicious scents of chalupas wafting out to tease me as I headed to my apartment to eat my third grilled-cheese dinner of the week. We never really stopped to talk but I would smile at whomever’s eye I caught as I passed. They didn’t seem to care who snuck a peek into their private lives.

  In my memories, the two-bedroom apartment that my extended family and I all lived in was five times the size of this one, but I wondered if that was true. If you just exchanged some of the smells of corn flour with that of paprika, their situation was very similar to my life twenty-seven years ago.

  The biggest difference being that my family always kept the door closed, to hide our overpopulated situation, whereas this family wasn’t at all self-conscious.

  One day, as I stumbled up the stairs with my bags of groceries, I looked up and my gaze went directly into their apartment, where a little girl was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. She looked me straight in the eye.

  As her mother yelled, “Maria, don’t we close the door when we go to the bathroom?” the girl kept staring. No blinks. No turning away. I accepted her challenge, walking slowly up the stairs while my eyes started tearing from the trauma of not blinking. I was the new person on the floor and I had to assert myself and claim my space. She was unflinching. I am not sure who won the stare-off. I held my own but she was staring while not wearing underwear, and anyone worth their staring salt knows that gives you an extra five points.

  As I wondered what the rest of the building thought of this family, I began to wonder as well what our building had thought of my own, a family of nine living in a two-bedroom apartment. Perhaps people had thought that we were unfortunate to be living in such cramped quarters, because my parents were new to the country, doing what they could to create solid beginnings for themselves. This family was likely doing the same thing, and after they moved onward and upward, another new family would take their place. They always said hello to me as I walked by, and waved to me when they saw me in the lobby. They reminded me of my family when we lived in the apartment building, poor but happy. I wondered if Maria had a grandmother to watch her TV shows for her.

  There was another factor that made me wonder if I was going to last in the big city. You know there is something wrong when you are bored in New York City. But I was. I was utterly bored some days and mildly bored for parts of others. I would wake up late, wonder how I would spend my day, and be in bed by ten, ready to repeat the process again the next day. I wanted to slap myself for thinking it, but maybe I was a bit lost without a job, and perhaps I should have been clearer with myself as to what my dreams were. It was evident, later than would have been useful, that I didn’t want to just live in New York, I wanted to have a life in New York.

  I wanted a job I loved, a great apartment, and the ability to do whatever I wanted. I guess that is why it’s a dream. Because reality is boredom during the days when you work and extreme boredom during the days when you don’t. It’s realizing that the comedy show costs money and that you have nobody to see it with and that you are not a New Yorker but a tourist with an extremely poorly planned itinerary. And worse, that you are a cliché: a starry-eyed bumpkin who had come to make it in the city, and didn’t know where to begin.

  NINETEEN

  diff’rent strokes

  After registering at the Y near Union Square, I made an appointment to see my swimming instructor, Freddie, for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon. The week before the lesson, I lost my nerve and tried to think of a reason to cancel. I wanted to know how to swim but I did not want to get into the water and learn how to swim in the same way that people you see on reality shows want to be singers but never bother to take a voice lesson. My days became occupied with looking for excuses not to attend. But Monday, Freddie called to confirm the appointment and I was locked in.

  The day before the lesson, I went in search of a swimsuit. I didn’t have an Internet connection at the apartment, so I often stumbled out into the city blindly, hoping for kind strangers to refer me to the particular service or location I required. With this strategy in mind, I started off at a Kmart, where I tested out a series of towels that I made sure wrapped around my whole body. “Excuse me,” I said to a salesgirl nearby. “Do you sell bathing suits here?”

  “Mmm, uh-uh, honey,” she said, shaking her head. “It ain’t the summer.” Apparently bathing suits now went by the same rules that forbid white after Labor Day. No doubt Michael Phelps would top the fall Worst Dressed lists. I wanted to ask her where I would be able to find one, but she had already walked away to tackle the very important task of folding washcloths.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the next salesgirl I encountered. “Do you know where there’s a sporting-goods store around here?”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I don’t live around here.”

  “But you work here,” I replied. “Have you seen any in the area?”

  “No,” she said, looking away. I asked several other salespeople, but nobody else seemed to have seen any stores in the area either, making me wonder whether Kmart was so competitive that its workers were trained never to offer the name of a rival, or whether the Kmart employees were bussed in every day wearing blindfolds designed by Jaclyn Smith.

  The security guard at least offered me a general direction to walk in and I headed back toward Union Square. There, a helpful yoga-store employee pointed me in the right direction and I was soon in a sporting-goods store, staring bleakly at a rack of bathing suits.

  Drowning while trying to learn a whip kick or being seen in a bathing suit: I didn’t know which possibility frightened me more at the time. I gathered eight suits, holding them in my hand with such disdain one would think they were flaming bags of dog excrement. I headed into the changing room, hoping for a miracle.

  The first one sandwiched my breasts so they were nearly spilling out the armholes and the second one had them almost spilling out of the leg holes. Each and every one accentuated the negative and made my legs look like two sausage links that had been crammed into the suit. I was in the changing room for at least an hour, discarding five suits, then crying and begging the remaining three to please cut me some slack and about four inches off both of my thighs.

  “Just yell if you need any help,” said the salesgirl, who, though pregnant, had a smaller stomach than I did. The issue for me was that my problem areas were pretty much everywhere that the suit didn’t cover, which I would normally shield from the innocent eyes of bystanders. I tried on the last three suits four more times each. Each one had a different problem. Only when I noticed that two of the suits were exactly the same did I resign myself to the realization that this was a losing
battle. I picked up the last suit and headed for the cash register.

  “I also need some goggles and a swim cap,” I told the man at the counter.

  “Okay,” he said, pointing out some options. “These should work.”

  I took my purchases home immediately and donned the bathing suit and swim cap before giving up on the goggles. Despite my efforts, I had lost no inches or pounds on the walk home. I just had to get used to the thought that I would be almost completely exposed in front of strangers. I walked around the apartment in the suit and cap. Pausing for a drink in the kitchen, I looked out the window to see a neighbor peering in curiously. I waved and smiled, as if to make him believe that I was aware of a secret pool in the building of which he had not been informed, then walked into my bedroom and collapsed on the bed.

  The first day of swimming had finally arrived. I showed up at the Y early, having arranged to meet my Freddie at 2 P.M. The pool had a giant glass wall on one side so people could sit in the lobby and watch their kids or just stare into the water’s calm reflection after their Pilates class. I had a few minutes and I sat and watched an Indian woman, who looked a few years my senior, taking a private lesson. If she can do it, I can do it, I thought. But the more I looked at the Olympic-size pool, the more I didn’t want to do it. Water, swirling. In mouth. In nose. In lungs. Life over. Swimming really wasn’t that important. I was happy to just hang out on the beach during vacations. Really, it was where the true action was. I would get one of those metal detectors and look for coins or perfect my sand-castle-building technique. Cruise ships were overrated and, at pool parties, nobody is swimming a fifty-meter breaststroke. As long as I could hang out, sans bathing suit, on the pool deck and look good, that was enough. Yes, I had better leave and head off to the gym instead.

  Don’t be an idiot, the voice in my head snapped. You’ve paid for this, you’re doing it. The voice in my head always appealed to the Indian frugality in me. After quitting my job, I was living out the rest of the year on a budget and could not spend hundreds of dollars on a suit and lessons that I was going to abandon. Sigh. I tried to offer myself the whatever-doesn’t-kill-me-makes-me-stronger mantra; then it occurred to me that if my instructor looked away for a second to pinch his bathing-suit wedgie, this could potentially kill me. I headed for an exit, but then I imagined poor Freddie, hanging out in the chilly pool alone, searching for me in the bathing-suited crowd. I grudgingly headed for the locker room.