On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  “One time,” she recounted fondly, “on our way to see a gurdwara, we went to see a Dharmendra film instead.”

  That was one of only two films she ever saw in the cinema growing up.

  Their families lived in neighboring villages and knew each other well enough. And from those auspicious beginnings, a marriage was arranged. Most people’s wedding photos are smiles and embraces. In theirs, my parents are standing at least five feet apart and my mother is wearing a shawl that covers her whole face, making her look like she bought her wedding outfit from the Emperor Palpatine bridal line. At the time, my father was already in Canada, where he took some courses at the University of Toronto before returning home to marry my mom. They then came back together, hoping for streets paved with gold and instead finding streets besieged with snow higher than sugarcane.

  Like many immigrants, they gave up on careers in line with their educations and instead took whatever jobs were available and undesirable to natives of the country. In their case, it was in manual labor. They both worked in auto-industry-related factories. My mom would leave at 6 A.M. every day and my dad would rotate between working day and night shifts in a tire factory. His clothes always smelled like rubber when he came home. Living on an incredibly fixed income, they scrimped to sponsor their families to come over, and on my dad’s side, all but one uncle made it through the immigration scrutiny. It was that uncle’s son who was now getting married.

  Going to India was my idea. The last time I had been there I was eighteen months old. My parents would sometimes tell me stories of how I pulled a baby goat around on a makeshift leash and cried because there was never enough meat on the bone when we ate chicken. But I have no memories of that six-month trip, just photos of a tanned little baby on her uncle’s shoulders, straining to be seen over his turban.

  With my cousin announcing his desire to get married, I knew it could be my last chance to go. My mom agreed to come so I wouldn’t be alone, and at the end of February, we boarded a plane for the long voyage over. We weren’t seated together for the first leg of the flight, so every hour or two I would feel a presence hovering above my seat and look up to see my mom, smiling and asking, “You are okay?”

  I wasn’t particularly a fan of flying, but flying an Indian airline made the experience all that much more memorable. Indians always seem to prefer to fly their native airlines, making it like a sit-down Mumbai bazaar in the plane. My dad had already warned me that since there would be a lot of elderly Indian men on the plane, I should “be careful because the old babas will pee all over the toilet seat.”

  On top of that, there were only three movies to view for the fifteen-hour flight, and all three were old Hindi films. Women shouted everywhere throughout the plane while an army of babies screamed at the top of their lungs.

  After what felt like an unending journey, we neared our destination of Amritsar, the site of a famous Sikh holy shrine, the Golden Temple. It was two hours from my father’s hometown, making it a much easier journey for our relatives than a ten-hour ride to Delhi.

  Unfortunately, Delhi was where we were eventually going, whether we wanted to or not. Our flight was rerouted back there, due to fog. Two hours later, we landed in Delhi but were not allowed out of the plane for another five hours, when we were permitted into the terminal to sit idly for another three hours. I began to wonder if we would ever make it home when a group of male passengers, now inebriated and impatient, started screaming and dancing around the terminal, chanting derogatory yet hilarious-in-Hindi songs lampooning the airline.

  By some strange meteorological coincidence, this embarrassing display of drunken protest somehow lifted the fog, because thirty minutes later we were back on our way, eight hours behind schedule.

  When we arrived in Amritsar, my uncle drove us home in the pitch dark. The fog was still swirling menacingly, which made the shoddily paved drive home just a touch closer to lethal.

  My poor mom’s tiny body had been traumatized by the daylong expedition. The bumpy ride home tipped the scales of aggravation for her and caused her to vomit the whole ride to the village. Each time I turned around, she was clutching a plastic bag to her mouth, her face wincing with agony. When we finally arrived, we went straight to bed, thoroughly knackered from traveling halfway across the world.

  In the morning I went outside to survey my new surroundings. The house was typical of those in the area, built around a paved courtyard. Ours was a bungalow. The main part of the house was occupied by my uncle and his wife and across the courtyard from them was my grandfather’s room. He preferred to have his own area because the rest of the family routinely woke up at 5 A.M. for morning prayers.

  A village in India is considered a large family compound. Marriages between people from the same village are frowned upon, as fellow villagers should only be viewed as an uncle or distant cousin. My grandfather’s brother lived in the house next door to my dad’s cousin, so most evenings the two elders would stand at the foot of our dirt road, talking politics and village affairs.

  Due partially to cost and mostly to the fact that the electricity blows out a minimum of four times a day, air-conditioning was not a standard fixture. Instead, a series of large windows and screened doors let the breezes travel through the whole length of the house. Spiraling stairs led to the roof deck, which allowed a view of the whole village, green pastures dotted with houses, growing more gargantuan with each passing year.

  It was quiet in the village. Noisewise, it was actually quite loud, with the sound of bus horns blaring and parrots squawking constantly. But actionwise, it was sleepy living at its best and worst. We went to sleep when the sky got dark and awoke at ungodly hours when the sun first emerged. Alarm clocks were never necessary. The majority of the time was spent sitting around the house, visiting with nearby relatives, or dropping by to see relatives I had never met in neighboring villages.

  They would smile and nod and offer us the chai to which they were all addicted, then smile again, perplexed, when I said that I didn’t drink it.

  Motioning toward me, they would ask my mom, “How old is the goodie?”

  Twenty-nine was not the answer they expected to hear. “Goodie” was a term of endearment used for a young girl and I was slowly rotting in the marriage basket, likely four years overripe and now fairly classifiable as a “baddie.”

  I have to admit that people were a lot more gracious about my single status than I expected. I had seriously considered whether or not it was wise to even go, because it was an open invitation to be judged on being unmarried by relatives whose names I didn’t even know.

  My cousin, though he had spent the past decade in Canada and dated during that time, felt that the traditional method of marriage was best for him. In fact, not one of my marriage-age cousins on either side has made a love marriage. Whether they lived in the UK or Canada, they have all thus far chosen to marry according to tradition. Most married other foreign-born Indians, but a few male cousins also chose to travel to India to look for a bride. This is most commonly done by men, as India is full of young, beautiful women who can overlook a few flaws in their mate in order to gain citizenship in another country. Like most cultures, Indians also put emphasis on what the man does for a living, with little interest in whether or not the woman is employed at all.

  That wedding would be one of three that we would attend during our month in India. The first of the nuptials was between two nineteen-year-olds from the UK. After learning my age, the bride nudged her friend and said, “She’s twenty-nine!” to her friends, who looked over with expressions of disbelief that my tiny face and childlike balloon hair would be that aged, and pity that I was still unmarried. I was aware, even in that moment, that if we were standing in a city in North America, instead of on a dirt road in India, it would be me and my friends who would have expressions of horror at the thought of being married one year after graduating high school.

  Indians are obsessed with marriage. This has three possible reasons:


  1. Marriage really is the bee’s knees.

  2. Wedding-buffet Samosas are laced with cocaine, leaving the guests desperately anticipating the next nuptials.

  3. They are so miserable in their own marriages that they want to pull you down with them.

  I give my parents credit for not pressuring their kids to marry.

  Although people would make snide remarks about my parents’—or at least my father’s—liberal attitude, they in turn were kind enough to not parlay such criticism into a massive guilt trip on us for being single. Even after our cousins, some younger than us, started down the marriage path.

  To test the waters, we would often ask our parents what they thought of our marrying a man who was not Indian. My dad, educated and so well read that his library contained everything from Kahlil Gibran to the poetry of Jewel (I swear it was on sale), had no issue with it.

  “Marry whom you want,” he would say. “Maybe people will talk about you, but even if you marry an Indian, they will talk about you. They will always find a reason to talk about you.”

  This was true, and hearing it took a certain amount of weight off my shoulders.

  My mom would then load the weight back. She is a lot more traditional than my dad. Where Christians ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” Indians ask themselves, “What will people say?” Both questions offer difficult standards to live up to, but only one offered the promise of salvation.

  “I don’t know,” she would answer.

  “So if we married someone white and had a baby, you wouldn’t love it?” we prodded.

  “Well, I guess I would have to,” she said with a cringe that betrayed her real thoughts.

  Over the years you would think that my mom would have adopted the beggars-can’t-be-choosers mentality toward marriage. Gurpreet and I were over thirty and still nowhere close to donning wedding saris, but still my mom was holding out for those perfect Indian husbands. They would need to be of the right religion, caste, professional and educational background, and for some reason, be interested in brides near their expiration dates instead of nubile twenty-one-year-olds who would much rather whip up a perfect pork vindaloo than order sushi.

  This might be surprising to hear but my feelings toward marriage definitely leaned more to Indian values than North American ones. I think marriage is forever. Indian marriages don’t stop when a person becomes fat. They don’t end because someone wants to “find themselves” or is getting flirty compliments from the new assistant at work.

  Indian marriages don’t carry the delusion of being madly in love forever, or promise everlasting fire in the bedroom. They are based on teamwork, compromise, and the shared understanding that whatever the issue, the couple had to weather the storm together.

  In fairness, it is also true that belief in the till-death-do-us view of marriage can trap people in terrible marriages. And in most cases it is the woman who is stuck. In a society that is still patriarchal, the men call the shots and women are forced to suffer the consequences.

  I recall hearing, when I was a young girl, of female family acquaintances who were in abusive or unhealthy relationships. But even at that young age, I knew that nobody was going to be stepping in to do anything about it. It was also at this time that I realized that I would likely never marry another Indian. Almost every one of my married cousins is married to another Indian, and from the outside, the unions all look to be happy ones. Marriage conventions have advanced somewhat, and the prospective bride and groom now take time to get to know each other through coffee-shop dates, phone conversations, or visits.

  But despite the modernization of the arrangement, I always felt that at some point, in a way so slight that it annoyed me or so large that it drove me to depression, the traditional gender roles would emerge and I would find myself accused of “not respecting his mother enough” or not making chai that was strong enough for his brother’s palate.

  Although we were attending three weddings of people younger than I was, my mom didn’t bring the subject of marriage up with me during the trip, which I greatly appreciated. She did, however, treat me like I was ten.

  I hadn’t spent more than three consecutive days with my mom for a number of years and now I was sharing a bed with her for a month and having to run my plans by her before I acted on them.

  “Okay, I’m going into town,” I announced one day, grabbing my purse. One of my cousins and I would sometimes take the motorized rickshaw bus into town and wander around, eat Samosas, then return home.

  This particular time, I was facing resistance.

  “No, you’re not,” my mom said. “We have to go visit people today and you have to come.”

  “Why do I have to?!” I yelled. “They don’t care about seeing me. I’ve never even met them. Just go yourself.”

  In the end, I had to go, hair plastered down like a five-year-old schoolgirl, nodding politely along to the conversation and slowly sipping my Fanta. If my mom was going to revert back to being the mother of a first grader, I was going to act like that first grader.

  “I’m so bored here,” I said. “Why can’t we travel and see some of India? Are we going to sit in the village forever?”

  “You know,” my mom said, “that’s what people do. We come here to see people, not tour around. I have never seen the Taj Mahal.”

  “Then let’s go,” I said. “Let’s finally see it.”

  She gave in, and with our uncle’s family, we hired a driver and drove from Punjab through to India’s midsection to see the famous sights.

  The Taj Mahal was beautiful and eerie all at once, the most elaborate tomb and declaration of love one would ever see.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “It’s very nice,” my mom responded. “People are supposed to come here on their honeymoons.” I didn’t know if that was genuine Indian tradition or a dig at me, but I let it slide.

  The Pink City of Jaipur was bustling and fascinating. The Red Fort was magnificent and Fatehpur Sikri was an incredible voyage back to the sixteenth-century home of the Mughal empire. My mom was a trooper during the tours, a lot of which involved excessive amounts of stairs and walking, but sometimes she was forced to sit out. Still, she had finally seen some of the highlights of her native country, more than thirty years after leaving it.

  While my mom did get to finally see the Taj Mahal, she wasn’t going to get to see the Statue of Liberty. It was likely for the best, as walking would have probably been an issue in a city the size of New York. But I didn’t want to give up on sharing the experience I was having with my family, in some way. The year had been a great one for me thus far. I had time for truly unabashed self-reflection and focus, a rare opportunity unless you have a trust fund or are on sabbatical at a Buddhist monastery. I wanted to do something for my family as well. We had all lived lives of set-aside dreams and less than happy memories, from my parents right down to my little brother. None of us had ever seen Disney World. In fact, in all my years, we had never even gone on a family vacation together. Never once had we sat on a plane together. Never once had we sat down to a meal in a restaurant together. It had never been economically or logistically possible and my parents never deemed these things anywhere close to a priority.

  But now that my siblings and I were adults, my parents no longer ran our family and I decided that if I was going to Disney World, I would do it as our long-overdue family vacation. I wanted to say that it would be better late than never, but visions in my mind of the fighting, nagging, negativity, and pettiness to come crossed my mind. Still, with so few memories of note from our childhood, why not throw one bittersweet one in from the present? With that plan in place, I sent a note to the PR team at Disney World through their online portal. Now living an unstable wannabe writer’s life, I didn’t have the means to pay for a family of seven’s holiday. But sometimes you have to get crafty to make your dreams come true.

  TWENTY-TWO

  come and knock on my door

>   One of the best things about New York is that someone is always in town. The roaches decided to find a new home, leaving me space for visitors. Jen and Jaclyn came to visit on a sunny weekend in early October. More for my sake than theirs, Jaclyn’s husband and Jen’s mom bought them tickets to visit as gifts. I could tell that they had arrived when I heard Jen’s voice project from the lobby, asking one of my neighbors, “Isn’t there an elevator?!”

  I flung the door open and skipped down the stairs, grabbing their smaller bags so they could lug their giant suitcases to the apartment.

  “You’re just here for the weekend, right?” I said, eyeing the bursting bags.

  “They aren’t full,” Jaclyn said. “But they sure will be when we leave!”

  She wasn’t kidding. That night we met up with Mel and Madeleine for a gastronomic overload and the next day consisted of a shopping marathon. Shopping is not my ideal pastime, especially because my New York sabbatical seemed to be costing me a tenner each and every New York minute, but I obliged my friends because amazing bargain clothes souvenirs are a must for returning home from New York.

  Shopping actually ended up being a perfect plan of action because the day was a steady downpour of rain. It was not a day made for sauntering through the city with an ice-cream cone in hand. Instead, I sprinted between stores while the out-of-towners tried on every pair of shoes and all the cute blouses available in the city. Although the day followed a typical tourists-shopping-madly schedule, strangely it made me feel more at home. I had two more familiar faces in the midst and was easily navigating them around the town that I was getting the hang of. It had taken me a month but I was finally feeling at home.

  When they left the next day, their suitcases were nearly splitting at the seams and I was sad to see them go.

  “See you in a month,” I said as their car pulled up to the curb.

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” Jaclyn offered.