On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  The point of a sleepover is togetherness, fun, and feeling like you are definitely a part of something. When you are an adult and have friends so willing to participate in idiotic activities just to let you have the experience, you are a part of something great.

  We were all asleep by 2 A.M. In our respective beds.

  After I cleaned up the nacho-chip crumbs the next day, I started firing off e-mails to people to set up informational meetings on TV writing. After so many years behind the scenes, I had contacts but no real experience, though I had done some work in my postgrad class.

  Unlike New York, where you had to send e-mails three times, everybody I wrote to got back to me right away and was willing to impart their wisdom.

  Hannah insisted I meet her friend Vera, who was also Indian and was producing her own tween comedy about life for an Indian teenager.

  “The family on the show is the best possible version of my family,” she told me.

  “Didn’t your parents mind you making characters out of them?” I asked, imagining my parents’ reaction.

  “It took them a year to get used to it but they did,” she said. “But then it took them years to get used to the fact that I was working in television. They kept telling me to go back to school to get a teaching degree as a backup.”

  Vera told me that she too spent her summers watching TV while growing up. I laughed when she told me her favorite shows. “I used to watch Three’s Company and Love Boat every day,” she said. Something about an apartment complex in Santa Monica and comedy on the high seas must have really appealed to Indians in the eighties.

  I asked Vera what prompted her to create her show, and she paused.

  “Growing up in the eighties and nineties, I never saw anybody on TV that looked like me, except for Apu from The Simpsons. I wanted kids to see people who looked like them.”

  Vera generously gave me a list of books I should read, then e-mailed me later in the day with a list of websites I should check out and an offer for any further help I needed.

  Everyone was so generous that it made the task ahead seem a little less arduous. But I didn’t let myself forget that it would be a hard road. The year was coming to a close. I set out wanting to try a few lessons and now I found myself wanting to pursue a part in the most coveted industry around and relocate to a country famous for showing foreigners the door. It was like the difference between setting off to hike up a hilly trail and finding yourself at the foot of the Andes.

  But before I could fully commit to this new mountain to climb, I had to tie up some loose ends with my original goals. Did I really have time to have a dog? This is a question dog owners don’t seem to ask themselves enough. I wanted a dog, but whether I had the time and energy to give the dog what it wanted was questionable. Perhaps I was a better dog sitter than owner at this point. For the five years before this year, I had a life that was settled and ready to “insert dog here.” No doubt a couple of years from now I would be back in that same position. But for this crazy year, I had to think about me and only me.

  Did I really need to go to Disney World? That one was a no-brainer. Yes, I really, really needed to go.

  TWENTY-SIX

  the wonderful world

  of disney

  When we were younger, every single Sunday night my sisters and I would eat roti and then settle in front of the television for the 6 P.M. Disney hour. We would beg our dad to tape us some of the programs, and viewed Mickey and the Beanstalk a dozen times. The tape of our favorite program, in which the characters do music videos, was almost worn out. For the longest time, I thought it was a female chipmunk that sang “Dress You Up in My Love,” not Madonna. We later taped shows for Sumeet, who could not get enough of watching Lambert. When he was five, I was in my first year of college and came back at Christmas with something he had always wanted: a pair of Mickey Mouse ears. I had just bought them at the mall, but now that I was going to Disney World, I could finally get an authentic pair.

  I had extended the invitation to all my siblings to join in on the trip. I contemplated extending it to my parents, but missing out on Disney World had never been a major regret of theirs, and we knew they would not go on a single ride. As the months passed, everybody’s schedule became more hectic until only Navroop was left. I was disappointed that we couldn’t all go together, but the list of places we had never been was astronomically long, so no doubt we would be able to have another voyage of mutual discovery sometime in the future.

  Navroop and I headed to Orlando the second week of December, after she had completed her master’s degree. I was finally going to see Disney World. After a childhood of watching our televised Disney cartoons, we were going to get to experience the mythical place that our schoolmates used to tell us about after every summer vacation.

  The second we stepped off the plane, I felt stifling in my sweats tucked into my boots. My winter coat itched as it rested on my arm, heated by the thick Florida air. We made our way to the unsurprisingly named Magic Express, a convenient free bus that shuttled us to the hotel. I watched anxiously out the window as the sun started descending. By the time the bus dropped off all of the passengers, it was dusky, but the residual vitamin D floating in the air triggered the pleasure centers in my brain.

  “Can you feel the heat?” I asked Navroop.

  “I sure can,” she answered, pushing back the nest of baby hair that always tormented her on humid days.

  We checked in and I immediately changed into sandals and a T-shirt so we could go out exploring. As we were staying at a Disney resort, we were eligible for their complimentary transportation around the theme parks. It was 8 P.M., so we were advised that the only thing we could properly see in a couple of hours was downtown Disney.

  “Sounds good,” we said, imagining a swinging downtown center where the characters went to unwind after a long day marching in parades and taking photos with crying toddlers. I wondered if Mickey drank a tumbler of scotch before bed. Donald struck me as a real partier, but no doubt Goofy turned down their many requests to “hit downtown” in favor of going home to his family. I base this on nothing but the characters’ performances in Mickey and the Beanstalk.

  Disney World is a magical wonderland. In fact, that description would be highly endorsed by the Disney Corporation, as magical is their magic word. Everywhere we went, we were told to “have a magical day” or “a magical meal.” The phone operator wished us a “magical evening” and a buffet attendant described the custard tart from a dessert table as “a magical experience.”

  “Let’s not stay too late, though,” I told Navroop. “I really want to swim tonight in that pool.”

  She rolled her eyes and nodded. When we were exploring the hotel grounds, I discovered a small and completely secluded little pool in the courtyard directly behind our room. It had no deep end, rendering it virtually impossible for me to drown. I had packed my whole swimming kit and pledged to get in that pool and practice swimming.

  I had mentioned this to Navroop more times than I had realized.

  “Dear God, I get it,” she said. “You want to go to the pool. We’ll make sure you go to the pool. You’re like a little baby.”

  After a fifteen-minute bus ride, we were downtown. My vision of downtown failed to take into consideration that Disney is created for family enjoyment. Instead of the casino and dance club I expected to find, it was wall-to-wall stores, a movie theater just in case hours of rides and attractions didn’t entertain you enough, and a row of restaurants.

  As it was almost Christmas, the stores were jammed with Disney-themed ornaments that did make it look quite fun to have a tree on which to place your glitter-covered Tinker Bell. We wandered around from store to store, where almost every living consumer product out there had been Disney-fied. There were Mickey-ears Rice Krispie Treats, Aladdin boxer shorts, Cinderella charm bracelets, Pinocchio glasses, and Little Mermaid toys and games.

  Some stores were dedicated solely to one character, some sole
ly to a certain category of merchandise. Whatever you wanted, Disney had it.

  I imagined how we would have reacted here had our parents taken us when we were younger, and can admit it would have been mayhem. I recalled a woman on the New York subway berating her young son, saying, “Jeez, Norman. You’re so single-minded. All you want are toys. It’s so sad.”

  If she had remembered childhood, she would have realized that Norman was not alone in this desire. All kids want toys. All the time. That is the nature of being a kid. There is no understanding of money, and it’s not that they are materialistic. It is that toys are shiny, sparkly, exciting, and enticing.

  When I was seven, my parents took us to the science center and my dad said we could all pick out one thing from the gift shop. My sisters all chose little toys and trinkets, but I chose a solid wood jewelry box with a maple leaf on the center of the lid. I had to have it. My dad pulled me aside and said, “That’s expensive.”

  I nodded, thankful that he had filled me in on that fact, but wondered why he wasn’t telling the shopkeeper to wrap it up.

  “Do you like it that much?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I responded, having liked it for the past one minute and considering that a substantial period of time.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just don’t tell your sisters.”

  When we got into the car, I wanted to play with everyone else’s toys.

  I now see how it would have been impossible for my parents to take us all to Disney. There were a lot of us, and after flights, accommodations, park entry for seven people, not to mention meals and the countless toys we would no doubt have cried for, it would never have made sense to people who paid for their cars in cash and sewed clothes for their daughters.

  After multiple-scooped ice-cream cones and a tour of all of the greatest merchandise that Disney had ever made, we caught our bus back to the hotel, which, at ten-thirty, was dead silent.

  “Okay,” I said to Navroop. “It’s time.”

  It was more than eighty degrees still and one of the things I always dreamed of when I couldn’t swim was a dip in a pool on a warm night. Changing giddily into my bathing suit, I grabbed a handful of towels from the counter and headed out the door.

  “Oh,” I said. “I just realized I won’t be able to see anything once I take off my glasses. You’re going to have to come with me.”

  “Oh, man.” Navroop sighed, grabbing a magazine from her bag. “Let’s go already.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to swim, too?” I asked her. “I brought two bathing suits.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “You know I can’t swim.”

  I offered to teach her, but in the end we both agreed that my eight hours of tenure in the pool would not be of much assistance to another beginner.

  The pool was completely empty when we arrived. Navroop made herself comfortable on one of the chaise longues while I handed her my glasses and groped my way over to the pool.

  The water was warm. I glided onto my back and looked up, gazing at the stars I rarely saw in the city.

  “Do you want me to show you my swimming skills?” I asked Navroop.

  “Okay,” she said in a tone that conveyed a desire for rain to begin.

  “Just let me get warmed up here,” I said.

  After a warm-up that was longer in minutes than the pool was in feet, I put my head under the water, pushed off the edge, and began the art of swimming.

  “Refreshing!” I exclaimed as I wiped the water from my eyes.

  “You splash a lot,” Navroop said. “Are you supposed to splash that much?”

  “Oh, what do you know?” I snapped, going back to the serenity of floating on my back. For the next half hour I practiced swimming in exactly four strokes. Right arm forward, left arm forward, right hand forward, head out to breathe and sputter. Then I would stand up and heave in ten breaths and start again. The water and I were going to have to build up our mutual trust, hopefully without the aid of “trust falls” at a corporate retreat. But I was willing to keep going.

  The next day we woke up bright and early and walked over to the Epcot Center. As it was the middle of the week, and kids were still in school, the lines were manageable. In three hours, we traveled across the world, taking a jaunty boat cruise through Mexico and a more treacherous cruise through Scandinavian history, and watching Asian acrobats. I stood in line to get a photo with a princess and wandered over to the area designated for Canada, hoping to find some poutine but instead only finding large nightshirts with photos of grizzly bears on them and cutesy sayings like “I’m Beary Tired!”

  For lunch we headed back to our hotel, which was situated on a makeshift boardwalk. Ferries would pull up to transport you to the adjacent hotel, fifty feet away. The boardwalk was littered with seniors in motorized scooters, zipping along at a steady clip of 5 mph. One of the hotels had a fake beach that led to water you were not allowed to swim in, which was just as well, as somehow a pirate ship had become marooned on the sand. We treated our stomachs to a greasy, heavy meal to ready them for the rides we were going to hit at Hollywood Studios.

  The studios were easily accessed from the ferries, which we had ridden the night before just for fun. When the captain, dressed in his nautical white culottes, mentioned the studios in his audio tour of the area, he said that they were “just a short walk of about a mile.” The crowd’s gasps made it obvious that they would be frequenting the ferry system for the duration of their stay.

  We walked over, on a lovely trail beside a little creek. At one point I looked down and a tiny little bunny was sitting quietly beside the path.

  “Do you think Disney put that there to make this a ‘magical’ walk?” Navroop asked. We weren’t sure. We were changing hotels that day, but the hotels kindly sent our luggage over so we could check in later; with this taken care of, we were able to plot out a full afternoon of amusement.

  The first order of business was hitting the rides with the greatest nausea factor. Gills don’t scream on rides. We are not those people with their arms up and smiles on their faces. We are the ones who look as if an assassin is choking them from behind and simultaneously pushing on their bladders. After two rides of plunging and one roller coaster where Navroop and I both reached out to grab each other’s arms, not as a sign of solidarity but more as a declaration of if-I-die-on-this-you’re-coming-down-with-me, we decided to give our stomachs a rest.

  It’s in the territory of the calmer rides that you encounter the children. Pardon me, the princesses. Every other girl under the age of ten was dressed as one of the Disney heroines. Belle from Beauty and the Beast seemed to be the reigning queen. That made me happy, because any story that extols the beauty of a really hairy paramour is tops in my book. Besides Belles, there were plenty of Minnie Mouses, Princess Jasmines, Pocahontases, and some generic haphazard princess outfits that parents had obviously slapped together themselves.

  I had a list of the classic rides I had to visit, so we made our way over to the Star Wars flight simulator. Standing in line with mainly five-to-eight-year-old boys and their parental guardians, we smiled when a boy said to his mother, “I hope the pilot stays on course this time,” not realizing that the pilot would veer off course this and every other time he boarded the flight to Alderaan.

  When the robot usher’s voice alerted us that the flight was leaving, we all scrambled to our seats. A boy with his face painted like a tiger’s sat behind me at the edge of his seat.

  “When do we take off?” he asked his father impatiently.

  “Oh my,” said the woman on the other side of him, who seemed to be trying to help create an air of danger.

  “We don’t have a captain. Whoever will be our captain?”

  The boy thought for a minute before responding, “Whoever is the biggest.”

  What classic kid logic. I recall having that mind-set myself when I was a child, that whoever was a year older or two inches taller was the unofficial leader of us.

  Whe
n we exited our rocket ship, the sky was looking ominous, so we ducked into the safety of the Hall of Presidents. I admit I don’t know the names of all of the U.S. presidents, but I let myself off the hook, as studies show most Americans don’t either. Luckily a twenty-minute animatronics presentation was going to give us our historical education.

  I was worried that as a show of patriotism, some guys in the audience would pull out their muskets and offer a three-gun salute, but the beautiful emotional sentiment of the history of the world’s superpower was jarringly interrupted when a voice boomed over the loudspeaker, “We said NO flash photography!” He didn’t sound like he wanted us to have a magical experience.

  After several more hours of rides and shows, we jumped onto the bus that was heading to our new resort. The first resort had been quiet and white-duveted, exactly what I wanted as an adult, but for our second night, I chose a hotel that I would have wanted to stay in as a child.

  The hotel was African-themed and boasted its own wildlife reserve. If fifteen hours of shows, parades, Dumbo rides, and photos with Aladdin were not enough to entertain a family, they could return to the hotel and watch zebras and giraffes frolicking in their native habitat—a hotel courtyard.

  Starved from our day of sightseeing, we put our names on the reservation list for the hotel’s impressive-looking buffet and were nearly salivating on the floor when they called us for a table. Well schooled by the competitiveness of Indian wedding buffets, where aunties will elbow you to get another piece of chicken tikka masala, we bolted right for the line before our waiter even had time to take our drink order.

  “Mmm, it all smells good,” Navroop said, wafting in the aromas from the various meat slabs. Navroop had recently returned to eating meat after ten years as a devout vegetarian and was determined to make up for lost time.