On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  “Thanks,” I said. “If I don’t make it home, I’m living in a penthouse with a handsome heir of some kind and will need you to send my winter coat.”

  “We’ll await word,” Jen joked.

  On Monday afternoon, my phone blinked to alert me of a message. It was Freddie. “Hey, Rupinder,” he said. “I have some bad news.”

  This sounded ominous. I wondered if a security camera had caught me helping myself to more than my fair share of lotion in the women’s locker room.

  “I don’t know if I can teach you anymore,” Freddie said. “I just got another job, so am not free on Wednesdays anymore. Maybe we could do evenings if you still want to work with me. We can discuss it on Wednesday.”

  I showed up early for my third lesson. A lane at the end of the pool was reserved for something labeled as “water walking.” A quick survey of the lane revealed this to be anything from floating on your back with a pool noodle immodestly jutting out between your legs to standing and talking to your poker buddies by the ladder while wearing matching Speedos. The mean age for lane entry appeared to be seventy.

  I changed and headed out to the pool area, contemplating a water walk. Freddie waved hello when he spied me swathed in towels and motioned toward our usual lane. “Why don’t you jump in and start practicing your breathing,” he suggested. Shedding the towels, I immersed myself in the water. I stood at the side of the wall, counted, and plunged my head in the water for as long as I could. After a few minutes, Freddie came over.

  “Congratulations on the job,” I said.

  We spent a few minutes revisiting the basics before he challenged me to float, then throw my arms and legs into the mix. Backing up to the wall, I took a deep breath, kicked off with my feet, and coasted just beneath the surface. After a few seconds I started moving my legs and pulling myself with my arms. When the oxygen supplies were beginning to deplete, I surfaced to a hero’s welcome.

  “Great job!” Freddie smiled. “Have you been practicing?”

  “Actually no,” I admitted. “I think I’m just a little less freaked out,” I said.

  “Works for me.” He laughed. “How do you feel about going into the deep end?”

  “Errr…” I stammered, confidence waning by the second. “Do you think I’m ready?”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  I could think of a million reasons why not, the top ten including my watery death and the top hundred including various versions of a scenario in which I pull ten unsuspecting swimmers down with me and/or soil myself in the pool. But I knew that whether I wanted to or not, I was going to have to venture into the deep end. Otherwise, I would pretty much be limited to water walking forever.

  “Jump in,” Freddie coaxed as I stood frozen on the deck.

  “Right now?” I asked.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Freddie said.

  “Hmm…okay, what year is it now?” I joked.

  “Just take your time,” he said.

  I breathed in first shallowly, then deeply, then took a series of shallow breaths, then longer yoga breaths. I looked at the water rippling and wondered if there could be any possible riptides lurking beneath.

  “Just jump,” Freddie said.

  Readying myself another few seconds, I closed my eyes and launched myself into the water. When I hit the surface, I opened my eyes and saw myself sinking lower and lower toward the lines at the bottom of the pool. I prayed it wasn’t like the movie Abyss, where the seafloor opened to show that it extended another thousand or so feet downward.

  I soon bounced back from the bottom and reached desperately for the side of the wall once oxygen refilled my lungs.

  “You did it!” Freddie exclaimed from his safe perch on the deck.

  I had penetrated deep water! This was a feat for me. And although I immediately wanted to get right back out of it, I put my faith in Freddie.

  The rest of the session was occupied by my valiant and fairly unsuccessful attempts at treading water. This was really the difficult part of swimming for me. I didn’t mind swimming underwater; it was the attempt to remain buoyant at the surface that was the problem for me. This is where the flailing and panic would set in.

  “Just be calm,” Freddie said. “I’m right here if you need me.”

  When I was done with the lesson, I felt no more comfortable with the deep end just because I had experienced it. Just because a claustrophobic lives through one elevator ride doesn’t mean she’s ready to jam herself into another one when the opportunity arises. But unfortunately, only repeated exposure would dull my terror, so I would have to jump back in next time and the time after that, until doing so no longer occupied my thoughts the hours prior to each scheduled swimming experience.

  At least I had the sauna to look forward to afterward.

  TWENTY-THREE

  i dream of tv

  The next weekend, my friend Hannah came to visit. She was always great fun, and as an added bonus, her personality consisted of guidance counselor and cheerleader all in one and that meant some good conversations about life and goals. So far, New York and time off work had failed to completely defog my head, so advice from an objective party was going to be beneficial. She and a friend had driven down from Toronto for five days with a full agenda of concerts, meetings, and social affairs.

  An old colleague of Hannah’s had moved to New York to work on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and gave Hannah and her friends tickets to attend a taping. When she extended the invitation my way, I jumped at the chance. Growing up, my sisters and I created a summer routine of staying up to watch every late show and then sleeping until approximately nine hours after whatever time we ultimately called it a night.

  The show was great, but the best part was afterward, when we assembled in the lobby to be taken on a behind-the-scenes tour.

  “This is Rupinder,” Hannah introduced me to our guide, Tim. “She’s a writer, too.”

  I shot her a look of extreme embarrassment, as I didn’t want to stand in the middle of 30 Rockefeller Plaza detailing my blog posts about the best back-to-school binders.

  “Oh, cool,” said Tim.

  He took us back to a studio to show us the behind-the-scenes action, then took us down a floor to the studio where Saturday Night Live was shot.

  “This is the set,” he said, taking us around the set of one of the shows I had watched every weekend of my youth. The cast was in their dress rehearsal, so we all strained to see if we could catch any of the action just as the doors started closing.

  “Was that Bono?” I asked Hannah excitedly.

  “It did look like him,” she said.

  As I walked through the sets and sniffed at the craft services table, I became aware of something that I had kept so deep inside of myself forever: I wanted to do this, too.

  Okay, I admit it: EVERYONE wants to work in show business. I fully acknowledge this fact. Every kid from Missouri on the bus to Hollywood and every waiter, waitress, housewife, and pool boy in the greater Los Angeles area wants it. It was likely one of the dumbest career paths I could ever choose.

  My friend Ilana had recently moved from television production to a job at a talent agency. “I remember seeing a guy I recognized at our Christmas party,” Ilana said when I’d spoken with her recently. “I knew I had worked with him but I couldn’t place him. I asked my boss who he was and she told me that it was one of our screenwriters. It was then that I recognized him as one of the set decorators from the show I worked on last year.”

  Everybody has a streak of the artistic in them. And for every hustling writer and starstruck wannabe actor in Hollywood, there are a hundred more people sitting at home with dreams of it but no plan of pursuit. I understood that, but by this point I had crazy notions about anything being possible.

  Besides my early interest in television, I had Malcolm Gladwell’s assessment of genius on my side. In his book Outliers, Gladwell outlines the path to success by telling the tales of geniuses like Bill Gates and physici
st J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gladwell hypothesizes that outliers are individuals who have the perfect combination of opportunity, timing, and experience to become leaders in their respective fields.

  Based on this equation, this made me predestined to be a TV genius. Because I didn’t have the opportunity to go out, I had the opportunity to watch television for an inhuman number of hours. My timing was perfect because television was evolving rapidly every year. And experience? This is where I really shone.

  In my lifetime, I have easily put in twenty thousand hours watching TV. If that seems an exaggeration, this chart of my average TV schedule will illustrate:

  Summer vacation ages seven to fourteen:

  10 A.M.: Welcome Back, Kotter

  11 A.M.: Three’s Company

  12 P.M.: Lunch—two hot dogs or a pizza pita, based on availability

  1 P.M.: Days of our Lives

  2 P.M.: One Life to Live

  3 P.M.: General Hospital

  4 P.M.: Golden Girls

  5 P.M.: Empty Nest

  6 P.M.: Nurses

  This was strictly my daytime viewing. My sisters and I would likely log another hour or two at night, of Dallas, Perfect Strangers, The A-Team, or Magnum, P.I. Gurpreet and I once cried at the dentist’s office because we were missing a new episode of The A-Team that was airing that night. This was still nowhere near as devastating as when we heard that David Hasselhoff and the KITT car from Knight Rider were coming to our neighborhood Toys “R” Us store. We were driving to visit our cousins north of Toronto, so would pass the store on our drive.

  “Please!” we screamed to our dad as we spied the store approaching on the side of the highway. “Please, we’ll be fast!…It’s our favorite show! The car’s here!”

  My dad was not budging. “We don’t have time.”

  “Please, please, please, please,” we screamed.

  “Who cares about DAZZLE HASSELHOFF?” he said as he drove right past the store.

  We did. We cared about the man he thought was named Dazzle. He entertained us every Monday night and we were willing to wait in a line for five hours for the chance to thank him for it.

  If you multiplied my daily viewing by approximately eighty days of summer, the tally was 800 hours just in three months. In those seven summers alone, the grand total was a whopping 4,800 hours. Even this seemed a conservative estimate, as we went through a phase of a few years when we were heavily into tennis viewing. Adding my school-year viewing to that, in the fifteen years that followed, I could have easily doubled the estimated number. And Gladwell thought that Bill Gates was dedicated.

  My time in New York was drawing to a close and I made a mental note to set up some meetings with people in television when I returned home. After five years in the industry, I had enough of a network to sit down with people and solicit some much-needed advice.

  In my last few weeks in New York, I still had a lot to accomplish. After meeting Natasha and thinking harder about her attitude toward her background vs. mine, I realized I really needed to rediscover my culture on my own terms.

  I had been jaded about my culture for too long. When I was a kid, if someone made a T-shirt that said “My Parents Left India and All I Got Was Nagged Every Day,” I would have bought a dozen. But my general bitterness levels were decreasing over the current year, and with that blossomed a genuine interest in all things Indian.

  I loved the films of Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Satyajit Ray. They helped me gain a deeper understanding of the culture I knew too little of, and opened my eyes to the beauty and complexity of India. I loved great stories about India starring people who looked like me, but I was less enthralled with the modern-day films out of Bollywood. When I was younger I would sing songs from the classic films starring icons like Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor, but the contemporary films were just way too long for my impatience, so I was very behind on my Bollywood knowledge.

  I loved Indian food but wasn’t proficient at making it, and my siblings’ and my conversations with our parents would consist of my parents speaking to us in Punjabi while we answered back in English. My Punjabi language skills had largely fallen away since my dad tried to teach Gurpreet and me how to read and write it twenty years ago.

  We would cringe when we heard him call us for our lessons, mostly because we were caught up in one of our favorite soaps. But he would summon us up to the family room and we would skulk there, with our matching binders and copies of his text of choice, Punjabi Made Easy.

  His exaggerated pronunciation of each word was meant to help us master the phonetics, but what it actually did was make us break into fits of giggles.

  “Ittttttttt-aaaaa,” he would say, pointing to a picture of a brick.

  “Haaaaa-theeeeee,” he enunciated to the photo of the elephant.

  “Stop laughing!” he would yell, but we couldn’t comply. In the end he would give up, assign us homework, and give us a reprieve until the next lesson.

  By the time Navroop and Navjit reached the age Gurpreet and I had been at the time of the language lessons, a real Punjabi school existed, set up by members of our local gurdwara. They met in a nearby hockey arena and worked their way through the Punjabi alphabet with other local Punjabi kids. Although Gurpreet and I became proficient enough to be called up to display our skills to guests, I had now largely forgotten how to read and write the language. Even my speaking skills were becoming more and more rudimentary with lack of practice.

  Riding the L train one night, I saw an ad for a night called “Basement Bhangra” in a magazine, and realized that it was time to finally have that Indian night I had planned. I roped Madeleine and Melissa into accompanying me. Apparently it was the Punjabi party night in New York City, so it sounded like a perfect place for our evening.

  The dance party was held in a Latino dance club, in order to really drive home the multicultural flavor of New York. As we sat in the dining area watching the crowd fill the dance floor, I was surprised that most of the partygoers were anything but Indian. Just when I thought that I had been mistaken about this being the Indian hot spot, three separate posses of Indians entered the club.

  “Okay, everybody,” a petite Indian girl shouted from the stage. “Come on down to the dance floor and let’s all learn how to Bhangra!”

  This would have mortified me as a kid. When my sisters and I were dragged to weddings of people we barely knew, we never felt comfortable dancing and thus would hide out anxiously for hours so nobody would drag us up to the dance floor. We didn’t know how to dance and didn’t want to uncomfortably clap and dance in a circle, just to have some bitchy auntie say, “My, you really looked funny up there,” to us later. We were generally so self-conscious about our very beings that we knew how to shelter ourselves from attention and its related criticism. While cousins and family friends showed off their best Madhuri Dixit–style dance moves, we would stuff ourselves at the buffet and say, “Sure, sure, after we eat,” or pretend we were in deep conversations with a toddler to avoid being pulled up by an overzealous auntie.

  But when I was in India, I grew tired of sitting on the sidelines and just decided to get up and dance, regardless of the fact that I had not heard most of the songs before and had no idea what I was doing. It was a lot easier and more enjoyable than hiding out at the buffet during three different weddings and all their festivities.

  Now, in New York, not only was I going to dance, I had paid twenty dollars and waited in line for the pleasure. I felt like a party girl in Mumbai. As the crowd cheered, the three of us ran down to the dance floor to get our groove on. After teaching us how to properly wind our hips and move our arms, the instructor invited people up to the stage to showcase their new moves.

  Melissa waved her hand and screamed to be invited. Ignoring the backpack she was toting, she ran onstage and linked ankles with the man beside her, hopping around with her arms hoisted in the air. She was hooked. After she’d been dancing for five minutes, they had to ask her twice to leave.
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br />   After the lesson, people were huddled in small groups on the dance floor for further lessons from fellow dancers. Four middle-aged European women were gathered around one older Indian gentleman who was coaching them as they swayed their hips.

  “More arms,” he suggested, throwing his arms up to the heavens, “like you’re offering something to the sky.”

  On the other side of the room, a crowd was gathered around two turbaned men who were putting on an impressive show of Bhangra prowess. Bhangra really is a man’s dance. Women have fun doing it, but at weddings, it is the men who hoist one another onto their shoulders and dance around wildly, doing everything from Ra-Ra-Rasputin kicks to impromptu coordinated routines while singing Bollywood tunes at the top of their lungs.

  The dance floor was now packed and sweat was rolling down our faces. Melissa and I tried several unsuccessful ankle links and we all danced around to Bollywood beats, laughing at the girls who were trying to make it sexy by doing belly-dancing moves instead.

  As the crowd whooped and hollered, we kept dancing and the dance floor became more and more crowded.

  “Should we get going?” Madeleine said.

  “Ya, it’s late,” we agreed, and kept on dancing.

  Half an hour later, I was nearly exhausted. “Okay, we should go,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” they said, and still continued to dance.

  We just couldn’t tear ourselves away. Finally, at two in the morning, we had to call it a night. As a grand finale to our evening, we danced out of the bar in a line, like a Bhangra Soul Train.

  “That was SO much fun!” Melissa said when we got outside. It was busy inside, but nothing compared to outside, where a line of people was snaking down the street.

  “We have to do that again,” Madeleine said.

  “Definitely,” I agreed.

  Had my father never left India, would this be my life? I wondered. Would I be dancing every Saturday night to Bhangra music at my local disco? I knew that in actuality, if my father had never left, we would still be farmers in Punjab and I would never have had the chance to do anything—including attend university or see New York. I would likely already have been married with young children like all of my cousins in India. My marriage would have been arranged, and my days would consist of tending a growing household. In my lifetime, I would likely never leave India or be aware of the world outside of it. I may have unfulfilled desires from my youth, but overall, I was aware that I was pretty damn lucky.