On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  In truth, I realize that I had felt this at home as well. It wasn’t necessarily loneliness but the general aimlessness of not knowing where your life is heading. But these feelings were amplified tenfold in a place where I had no job, no routine, no money, and a void of the familiar faces that would normally fill my day. I had none of my creature comforts, the things that wonderfully distract normal people from having to fully realize the true mundaneness of their normalcy.

  TWENTY

  blind date

  Perhaps sensing that I was looking for ways to fill my time, a friend set me up on a date. With an Indian girl. This was in ways vastly more important than my being set up with a man, because I did not have one single Indian friend (ever). When I was growing up, this was strictly a supply-and-demand issue. There was neither supply nor demand. Indians always seemed to travel in packs, which was not all that strange, as a lot of people have groups of friends of their same culture. I was never in such a pack. But as an adult, I realized the advantages that having some Indian friends would offer, like being able to be honest about how strict my parents were and sharing the experience of navigating two cultures unsuccessfully.

  So when my friend suggested that I meet Natasha, I sent her an e-mail and planned a date. New York, city of transients and transplants, can often bring out the friendliness in people. When you are new to the city, you are desperate for human contact, and once you are settled in the city, you recall those preliminary feelings and take hosting duties to heart. Dinner invitations are offered, maps drawn, names of contacts and associates freely given.

  Natasha e-mailed that she was heading to a seminar at the New York Television Festival and asked if I would like to join her.

  “Yes, absolutely!” I typed. “I’m a television publicist by day, so would love to check it out.”

  After I hit SEND, I realized that I was not actually a television publicist anymore. A simple slip of the mind. I was now a full-time bum. But at least by meeting Natasha I was making a first step into investigating whether the creative side of TV was for me.

  She and I agreed to meet on the corner of Fifty-first and Seventh Avenue to have dinner before the seminar. I was fifteen minutes early, of course, so I had to stand outside and fight the crowds streaming up from Times Square. Directly to my north stood the studio where they shoot The Late Show with David Letterman. When I was living back in my parents’ basement after graduating from college, I once submitted a joke to the show’s online top-ten list as a lark. It made it on the list and I received an XL Late Show T-shirt as a prize. It was the highlight of that year for me.

  I scanned the flood of people for Natasha. I knew only that she was Indian, so was forced to smile at every Indian, olive-skinned, or Hare Krishna woman that passed by me. After five minutes, I saw a pretty young girl walk into the coffee shop and scan the crowd. I smiled at her and she waved and came outside.

  “Rupinder,” she said, greeting me with a hug. “Welcome.”

  She was like a tiny Indian Barbie doll, with beautiful olive skin and giant Princess Jasmine eyes. She outlined all of our dinner choices and we finally agreed to go to Ellen’s Stardust Diner, a purported favorite among theater-going tourists. We walked into the diner, which was all decked out fifties-style. The waitresses wore poodle skirts and had name tags with ridiculous monikers like P-Nut and Fancy. The waiters were all made up to look like a cross between Richie Cunningham and the Fonz.

  We sat down and I said to Natasha, “So you’re originally from Canada as well?”

  She nodded and launched into her story, which was cut off after the third word by a chorus of waitresses singing “Mamma Mia.” I looked around, confused. The cliché of waiters who really want to be actors seemed to be built into the business plan of the restaurant. While diners munched on oversize sandwiches, the team of waiters and waitresses took turns singing show tunes and dancing from table to table. “Here we go again…” sang one perpetually smiling waitress, her arm around a giggling middle-aged German man with a camera slung around his neck. As the musical stylings continued, loud enough no doubt to be heard on Broadway itself, Natasha and I leaned in and yelled to each other in an effort to trade our stories of Indian upbringings.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, relishing the greasy goodness of my chicken fingers.

  “I was here last year for a six-month trial period,” she said, “but then, of course, I went back home.”

  Of course. The feelings of homesicknesses were definitely starting to subside. I could see myself staying in New York and enjoying it. And it was inspiring, in the way that jealousy can be inspiring, to meet someone who was pretty much a younger version of me, but had beat me to everything.

  I told her of a writer I wanted to meet but who had not yet responded to my e-mail.

  “You’ll soon learn,” she said, “that people here do what they have to do to get what they want. E-mail again.”

  I had always cringed at the word networking and was not a person who was willing to risk personal humiliation to get somewhere, but when I thought about it some more, I realized that risking everything, including humiliation, was the path that had brought me to this point. I needed to learn how to put myself out there. As a publicist, I had always been great at pushing the newest shows or talent, but doing that exercise for myself was a wholly different proposition.

  We walked over to the building where the seminar was taking place. She told me about her dating life. Her parents were aware that she dated but still preferred to avoid the topic. She asked me how I handled the issue with my parents and I told her that under no circumstances would we ever have discussed dating. We had a stricter don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy than the U.S. military.

  As we waited for the elevator doors to open, Natasha turned to me. “Can I ask you something personal and can you be honest?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “How would you feel about having a boyfriend who wants to go back to school at our age?”

  I knew why she asked the question. For an Indian parent, financial stability is the bedrock of a successful marriage, while a man who is a debt-ridden student is more a pool of quicksand.

  Natasha was much closer to her parents than I was to mine. Partially because the emotional tie never seemed that solid to begin with, my connection to my parents loosened a bit each year. It was the freedom that this situation allowed me that made it easier for me to make my own choices, even if they were as ridiculous as quitting a steady job to be a kid again for a year.

  Natasha clearly cared about her parents’ preferences. She reminded me a lot of Gurpreet, who, as the eldest child, always felt it was her burden to respect our parents’ wishes. She thought that if she did what they demanded, no matter how unreasonable, they would like her. This led to some fights between us growing up, as the few times a year I did try to go out, she seemed to side with my parents that it would bring a pox upon their house. I always thought she was simply upset that she didn’t have the wherewithal to just oppose them and go out herself.

  During the question-and-answer period of the seminar, a man stood up to say that he had bought the rights to a story and wanted tips on finding financing for it. The room was full of would-be writers and producers looking to join the glitterati. I wondered if any of them would make it, including myself. I was already in this world, but only as a supporting player. This seminar was about being in the limelight.

  “Excuse me,” Natasha said, tapping the man on the shoulder when the seminar was done. “What’s your background?”

  He mentioned that he was Indian, and like an old Indian man finding a fellow villager in a foreign land, she nodded and leaned in to talk further.

  “You should contact so-and-so,” she said. “Also, try the government grants.” She wrote him a list of leads as he thanked her profusely.

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re so nice.” And she was. But what really struck me was that she was Indian and very, very comfortable with it. She
went out of her way to help this man simply because he too was Indian. During my adolescence, my increasingly cynical views about Indian life had erected a wall of silence between most Indians that crossed my path and me. Now, as an adult, I felt like I would be judged for how culturally unaware I had been for most of my life. Though I still felt like an outsider in my own culture, I was approaching a point where I wanted to just shape my own view and identity.

  As I rode the E train downtown toward Brooklyn, I thought about Natasha again. My attitude toward Indians was mostly shaped around what my parents believed a good Indian to be. But in this, I realized that I was the one who missed out. I could not cook curries any better than my white friends. They could probably out-Bhangra me, and any teen Jeopardy! contestant would pulverize me on my Indian trivia. With this, I sent out a note to my NYC friends: “We’re having an Indian night,” I proclaimed. “All Indian, all night long.” My parents would be so proud/horrified.

  I had been thinking a lot about my parents during my time in New York. Since I left home, they always accused me of never calling them. It was mostly because we always had the same conversation when I did. My dad would ask me how I was, I would ask back, and then there would be an awkward lull. My mom and I would exchange those same pleasantries and then she would ask me if I had eaten, and if so, what I had eaten. It was all very deep and meaningful conversation.

  But when I was living in New York, I actually called home a few times, mostly to try to convince my mom to come visit me.

  My parents hadn’t had much to say about my move to New York. What could they say to me at thirty-one? Besides, they thought I would soon come to my senses, return, and go back to work. Before I left, my mom actually expressed an interest in seeing the city herself for the first time in her life, and I encouraged her to do so. My dad had traveled there with some other Indian men and relatives during the city’s peak crime period of the early eighties, but a group of Indian women would never do the same. It simply wasn’t done.

  Visiting your daughter was done, but my mom always had a reason against it. She wanted to, she said, “but I can’t walk around there.” Five children and a lifetime of manual-labor jobs had taken their toll on her bones. She couldn’t walk very far or climb stairs without strain. Her legs and feet were covered in the veins that drove me to the gym, in hopes of avoiding them. I offered to rent us a hotel room and was looking forward to stealing all their soaps, but she balked at the thought of spending the money.

  Hoping to change her mind, I researched all of the tourist attractions in the city that didn’t require a vast amount of walking and told her that we could do bus tours, take cabs, and make it an experience that would delight her senses but spare her legs. She left me a message on my phone every few days over the next two weeks until I e-mailed my sister and told her to pass on the fact that I only had a phone for emergencies and couldn’t use up the minutes. But after feeling guilty, I added more money to it and dialed our home number.

  My dad, who was always quick on the call-display draw, picked up.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. “How are you?”

  I already knew exactly how he was—bored. He had been forced into retirement the year prior when his factory closed and he was currently banging around the house like a guide dog whose owner had miraculously regained its sight. With his days free, he ran a copious amount of errands, flew through books, and started buying cheap DVDs from the mall. “That In Living Color is funny!” he once told me. I wasn’t sure that a midfifties Indian immigrant really understood the nuances of Homey the Clown, but who was I to question my father’s connection with the Wayan brothers? At least he had found ways to fill his time.

  “Oh, fine,” said Dad. He asked me briefly how New York was before saying, “You want to talk to your sister?”

  “Um, sure,” I responded. My sisters and I could easily make the best bomb-threat call-in team in the world. We rarely stayed on the phone with our parents for more than one minute, thus denying the FBI time to trace the call. “Damn it!” the Feds would say. “Damn, those Gills are the best!”

  Navroop, who was visiting, came on the line. “Mom’s not home,” she stated.

  “She can call me back later, then,” I said. “How are you?”

  Navroop was finishing up her master’s in education and planning on going back to New Zealand, where she had lived for a year as an exchange student, after the New Year’s holiday. On a whim, she had told our dad about it, but asked him to keep it to himself, as she was unsure of the plan. Sometimes he would slip up and say things like “Batteries are on sale. I’ll go get some. You’ll need them in New Zealand.” Then he would say, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry,” not wanting to lose Navroop’s confidence and be thrown back into the ring of the uninformed. He would, of course, still go get the batteries.

  “Can you swim yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m going to get it. It’s just so scary.”

  I called home a few more times and talked to my mom about New York, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to come. As successful as I was feeling about my journey of self-exploration, she was not willing to embark on an adventure herself. She worried about not being able to physically handle the long walks through the airport terminals and explore a city famous for walking. I stopped pressuring her, but I was disappointed. One of the most frustrating parts of going on a positive path is realizing that you can’t drag other people along with you.

  TWENTY-ONE

  everybody loves roti

  Part of my invitation to my mom to visit New York was precipitated by the memories of our time in India in the winter of 2008. When our flights were being booked, there was a possibility of flying through Europe, and she remarked, “Paris looks nice. Kuljit went there last time she went to India.” For my mom to even express interest in a place meant she must have wanted to go there, but given that family always trumped opening new cultural horizons, our stopover was slated for the UK so my mom could visit her sister.

  We traveled to India at the end of February, for a monthlong visit. My mom and I were going with two of my dad’s brothers, one of his sisters, and a gaggle of my cousins. In total, there were thirteen of us, one of the travelers being my twenty-six-year-old cousin who was going to get married. He lived in India before emigrating to Canada as a teenager and was now heading back to where his parents still lived for his wedding. He had only one month to rent a hall, send out the invitations, and most of all, to procure the bride.

  This was still the norm in many parts of India. In bustling cities like Mumbai and Delhi, young people would meet prospective mates in nightclubs and coffee shops. They would date, sleep around, and play the field, looking for that elusive love marriage. Times had definitely changed, despite the desire of my parents to still believe that India is perpetually suspended in the culture of 1971. Whenever they would tell us we were losing touch with our culture, we would fire back that we would be happy to head down to the nearest bar and dance up against masses of sweaty Indian men, if they wanted us to act similarly to our counterparts back in the motherland.

  But in rural Punjab, modernly arranged marriages were still the standard. Families would put out the word that a boy or girl was looking to get married and those with suitable matches would make themselves known. I use the word modern because instead of the parents being the decision makers, as would have been the case many decades ago, the couple now meets, goes on a series of supervised dates, and decides if they feel that they could be a suitable match.

  My parents’ marriage, of course, had been arranged in the traditional way. Their lives had always seemed so different from my sisters’ and mine, and that trip reinforced those differences. Both of my parents were born and raised in rural towns in Punjab, India. “It was a carefree life,” my dad would reminisce. “It was a lot less stressful there, life was very simple. Most of the village lived in mud houses.”

  Mud seemed to have a lot of uses in the
se early days. I vowed never to look at puddles with disdain again. Having grown up with brick and concrete housing me, it was difficult to imagine my father’s family of eight living in a mud house, but my dad always looked back on their life as being idyllic.

  “There was one radio in the village, given by the government,” he said. “We would sit in the main chonk of the village and listen to the news. Not many people had watches. We would just go by the sun. I was eighteen years old when we got hydro for the first time. People were so excited.”

  My dad was a smarty-pants whose father struggled and came up with the money to put him through college, where he was the newspaper editor, class president, and overall best in show. He was the only one of six children who was ever sent to university, which was, back then, largely only for the affluent.

  “Growing up, we were not rich and we were not poor,” my dad would say. “We didn’t have any money, but we didn’t owe money to anybody either. Most of the village was like that.”

  My mother was a math champ, although the ability did not pass on to us. “Didn’t you want to go to university?” we asked her once.

  “Yes, I would have liked to go,” she answered. “I liked school.”

  “What did you do for fun?” I asked her.

  She paused to think it over. She rarely told us stories about her youth. It always seemed much more repressed than the fun we always heard about in our dad’s household, where Bibi would chase them around the field with bars of soap.

  “Marbles sometimes,” she said. “Or we would jump rope. Mostly girls just helped around the house, though; we didn’t have time to play.”

  Her life sounded more boring than watching TV all day.

  “Didn’t you EVER do anything fun?” I prodded.