On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  I was so hungry that I grabbed a plate and actually jumped ahead of the first station to butt into line at a less trafficked area. “Oh, sorry,” I said to my fellow buffeters, as if I didn’t realize how the system worked. Layering veggies over couscous over salad over soup bowls over a plate of side dishes, I made my way back to the table.

  The couple beside us was eating their dessert in utter silence. The man, who wore a button saying “It’s My Birthday,” had a plate laden with pastries and a napkin full of cookies for the road.

  “Don’t you love this soup?” I asked Navroop as I scraped my spoon vigorously around the bowl.

  “It’s delicious,” she said. “Did you try the roast beef? It’s so tender.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “It’s great. But I think I like the couscous the best.”

  “Barry?” said the woman beside us to the birthday boy. “Could I have a cookie?”

  Barry reluctantly slid the napkin over and they nibbled cookies in silence, both staring off into the distance. I wanted to take a photo of them and put it up on my fridge to remind myself of the realities of marriage whenever I daydreamed of my future husband.

  “Round two?” Navroop asked. We both went back up to the buffet, our eyes darting back and forth between the buffet selection and our plates to make the best plan to maximize the capacity of the plate.

  Back at our table, we moved around the water glasses and saltshakers to allow enough room for our toppling plates.

  “This is just what I need,” I said. “The one thing I don’t like about traveling is that you always end up eating more fast food than you want. It’s nice to have fresh food.”

  Barry didn’t agree. When the bill arrived, he took a look at it and shook his head, even though the per-person price is a flat rate that’s written on the wall, and the drinks are free.

  His wife looked uncomfortable as Barry reached for his wallet. “I just think,” Barry said, “that for this price, there could be more of a selection.”

  Navroop and I looked at each other and made silent eyes; nonverbal gossiping is a skill Indians could trademark. More food for us, our eyes whispered.

  We had saved the biggest for last. The next day we woke up early and prepared ourselves for the ultimate in magical experiences: the Magic Kingdom. When we were kids, it was the ads showing the Magic Kingdom that were particularly effective marketing on us. The castle looked enchanting. We longed to ride on the Dumbo ride and make terrified faces on Space Mountain. When I was in kindergarten, one of my favorite toys was a plastic radio that played an instrumental version of “It’s a Small World After All,” and when I saw the actual attraction in a commercial, I wanted desperately to be riding in that little boat through a cave of international wonders.

  Arriving on Main Street USA, we didn’t know where to begin. I was more than a little tempted to make my way over to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and have my hair princess-styled, but I knew it would likely take them three beauticians and multiple hours to fashion my hair into any semblance of a royal style.

  We could see Dumbo swirling off in the distance, so made our way over to the ride. As expected, a number of Belles were in the line, but the costume prize of the day had to go to a preschool-age boy in a full Buzz Lightyear costume. The best part of the costume was that it had obviously been made at home. He wore all white, including tights that looked to be from a jazz-dance recital, and had strapped a surprisingly authentic-looking jet pack to his back.

  “Hi there, little pilot,” the ride attendant greeted him. “Would you mind taking off your helmet for the ride?”

  Buzz nodded and climbed aboard a Dumbo with what was likely his long-suffering-at-the-sewing-machine mother. Navroop and I ran to the other side to find our own Dumbo, then wondered if two grown women could really fit into one tiny circus elephant together. Squeezing ourselves in, we pushed the lever to ascend higher and surveyed the rest of the kingdom.

  “Let’s do the ghost house next,” Navroop said.

  The ghost house featured a dark anteroom before you lined up for the ride. We could barely hear the spooky ghost sounds over the voices of the parents who were reassuring their children.

  “Don’t worry, Sean,” one woman said. “It’s just all make-believe. And look, there’s another little boy up there.”

  Sean was not convinced, but his mother was not about to leave after waiting in line twenty minutes, so Sean was getting haunted whether he wanted to or not.

  A toddler Minnie Mouse behind us pressed her face into her father’s chest and shook her head.

  “Don’t worry,” her father said. “Just keep your eyes closed the whole time.” The father was holding Minnie as well as the hand of another little boy, so getting onto the ride looked as if it could be a more frightening experience for that family than the ride itself.

  The ride attendant motioned to a specific cart and then you had approximately ten seconds to step onto a moving sidewalk and jump onto said cart before it disappeared into the darkness.

  “Run for it,” the father instructed his young son, hurling his son, daughter, and himself toward their cart.

  The father and Minnie jumped on and the little boy just made it, an extra hoist from his father securing his footing.

  There were at least ten motorized scooters parked outside the ride’s entrance, making me wonder how somebody with limited mobility would suddenly have the lightness of foot to hurl themselves into a moving vehicle, but grandma after grandpa seemed to find their way onto a cart.

  After hurtling through space on Space Mountain and spinning wildly on the teacups, we paused for a couple of mandatory parades before heading back to Hollywood Studios. At Navroop’s insistence, we were going to the megashow Fantasmic, a pyrotechnic extravaganza where Mickey must escape the clutches of a selection of Disney’s most wicked villains.

  “Hurry up,” Navroop said. “We’re not going to get a seat.”

  The stadium could have easily held a thousand people, but Navroop did not want to leave it to chance. We ended up finding seats in the “Jafar” section and hoped nobody mistook us for costumed extras.

  The show was as grandiose as expected, but the most spectacular thing about it was that every other person there was viewing it through the lens of their digital camera. This was an occurrence I noticed more and more at live events. Why enjoy the moment at the time when you can tape it and watch it at a subpar quality later?

  But in this case, I did see the relevance. If you had carted your family of five from France or Nebraska and wandered around after your kids for five days while they rode every ride, you would want to record every moment. The second they forgot the fun they had and begged to return, you could pull out the tapes and let them relive it from the comfort of your living room.

  As much as I was having a great time at Disney World, being there made me see that I would only want to return with kids of my own. And I still wish I had gone there as a kid myself. Magical experiences are most effective for people who still believe in magic, not those who are trying to get a spark back into their aimless lives.

  In being honest with myself, I had to admit that part of my motivation for this year of adventures was not just to do all of the things I hadn’t done when I was a kid. It was because I hadn’t done any of the things I thought I would do as an adult.

  I was thirty-one years old, and while everybody around me was getting married, buying homes, and having kids they would soon sign up for lessons and take to amusement parks, I was nowhere close to achieving any of it and I wanted it. But I wasn’t going to find a husband or save the funds to buy a home in a year. I wondered sometimes, on days when I would surround myself with sugary reassurances, if that was ever going to happen.

  Deep down, I knew it would, but at times, a lot of it felt largely out of my control. And on the off chance that those things weren’t going to happen for me, I had to feel as if I had some semblance of control over my own life. And in ways, I thought that correcting
the past would somehow alter my DNA to make me the adult I wanted to be.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  holiday special

  Right before the holidays, my hometown friends and I gathered at Johanna’s house. It was at her bachelorette weekend over a year ago that I had decided to set out on my quest, and now, at the end of it, I was at a surprise baby shower for her. She was due on Christmas Day and her giant belly swelled out from her tiny body.

  “Do you have a good nipple salve?” our friend Sarah asked her. Sarah was already on baby number two, so was the expert of the group. I would have never believed as we sat around the school cafeteria table twelve years ago that one day we would be discussing nipple salves. But here we were, eating baked goods, trading recipes, and generally acting like civilized grown women.

  Melodie was also hugely pregnant and due in February, so there was a lot of impending excitement for the group. I was bursting because I knew of another piece of incredibly exciting news, but Jill, the friend whose secret I was sworn not to reveal, was taking her time and it was driving me crazy. “Come onnnnn,” I said, making crazy eyes at her. Finally, she cracked and told everyone she was engaged. The year ahead was going to be a great one for everyone. I didn’t know what next year held for me, but if it would be anything close to as life altering as this one had been for me, it would be something worth waiting for.

  Although Christmas was fast approaching, I wasn’t dying to go home for the holidays. When you don’t believe in Jesus and are too old to believe in Santa, what necessity is there to go home? My family didn’t put up a tree, our gift exchange was pared down each and every year, and our holiday dinner was usually supplied from a fast-food establishment. I would have been just as happy to sit in my apartment eating bag after bag of nacho chips while watching reruns of 227.

  But guilt is a powerful motivator. My parents saw it as vacation time, thus offering no reason why we wouldn’t come home. And people seemed to raise their eyebrows when I even mentioned sitting around alone instead of going home for holidays that we barely celebrated.

  “Even if you don’t celebrate,” they would say, “don’t you want to spend time with your family?”

  Um…yes?

  The foremost cause of stress for people in the holiday season is spending time with their family. I anticipated three days of reverting back to childhood behaviors. My sisters and I would sit in the basement, eat junk food, watch movies, play Scrabble, and make many, many jokes, mostly at the expense of one another. In our house, there was no turkey dinner to devour or cashmere sweater waiting for me under the tree, so the normally motivating factors of gifts and gluttony had no pull. But this year, going home for the holidays did have one major selling point.

  Auggie would be there. Auggie had become our new bag of chips. We all wanted our equal share. He gave me my fill of canine fun. He wasn’t my dog, yet I wanted him around all the time. “I’m going to the library,” I would call Gurpreet and say, as I was already walking over. “I will pop by on the way in.” When I got there, I would run around so Auggie could chase me, and throw him his ball. He would sit at my feet and I would stroke his long teddy-bearish hair, then reluctantly leave when I noticed the time.

  When we would meet at the shopping center equidistant from both of our apartments, he would pull the leash out of Gurpreet’s hand and come tearing toward me. When I took him to the dog park, I stood proudly while everybody showered me with compliments on his cuteness, then giggled every time he ran after a ratty tennis ball, as if he was the only dog with that ability. I got the perfect amount of canine interaction being a dog aunt, so for the time being, I decided to put my own plans of dog ownership aside. I would likely waver on this decision each day of the coming year, but with new goals in mind that could leave my life up in the air for the foreseeable future, I didn’t want to take a poor pet along for the ride.

  When Navjit asked if Auggie could come home early for the holidays, Gurpreet knew she had to oblige. Navjit had made the exciting decision to go along with Navroop when she moved to New Zealand. They were leaving in two weeks, so this was possibly the last Christmas we would all spend together for a long time. Most important to Navroop and Navjit was that they wouldn’t see Auggie for a long time.

  My mom brought out a bag one night and presented us all with our gifts. We all got a plain long-sleeved shirt. For Navroop, she also bought a cookbook with instructions on how to make exciting incarnations of Navroop’s favorite food, cupcakes. She called Auggie over and presented him with his gifts, a multicolored ball and a Christmas place mat on which we could put his dog bowls in the front hall. We giggled to one another when we saw him run away with the ball in his mouth. No matter how many times my mom yelled, “He needs to go to the washroom. Someone take him to the washroom!” in the hope of sparing her carpets, it was obvious that she loved her furry new family member. This love may have also been due to the fact that he followed her around everywhere she went and would bark at my dad to leave the family room every night so he, Auggie, could watch the 11 P.M. news alone with my mom. That was her favorite trick.

  My parents actually wanted to hear about New York. Unlike eight years ago, when they thought it was the land of muggers and street gangs, they now liked to hear about the city. They wanted to hear about my apartment and oohed and aahed when I told them the appliances were stainless steel.

  “You can come to visit when I go back,” I told my mom. She agreed. Though I already anticipated a New York visit filled with arguments and sideways glances at suspicious-looking hobos, I wanted to have an apartment that my parents would see was nice, and a life that they would see I had done well in, and feel proud that I was living a good life.

  Most important, I wanted them to accept me and whatever choices I made in my life, rather than push on me the ones they wanted.

  When my dad was growing up, my grandparents saved every dime they had to give him the money to go to college. They didn’t get to be educated, but they saw the potential in him and wanted to nurture it, knowing it would pay off. Because of their sacrifice, my dad was able to move to Canada and sponsor his whole family to join him. Because of this, instead of toiling away on the farm, making roti for a family of ten every night, my grandmother rode a plane for the first time in her life, saw snow for the first time in her life, and still got to go back to India when she desired, holding court in her courtyard as her old friends came to see her and hear tales of her new life.

  When my dad was in college, he saw an advertisement for a car that he thought was the picture of American luxury: the Chevrolet Impala. “I told myself, one day I will drive that car,” he said. It was a giant box of a car, nothing glamorous or exciting, but he bought himself one and carted us around in it during our childhoods, feeling like the picture of success. He and my mom, like my grandparents before them, saved their money to give us the opportunities that they never had themselves. My grandmother never thought she would see the mythical land of Canada and my mom never thought she would see the famous city known as New York, and I didn’t want to leave that wish unfulfilled.

  I had been unabashedly selfish for a year, pursuing the childhood I had always wanted, having wished my parents had done right by me. Growing up, I always wished they could have been more supportive, they could have been more understanding, and they could have said “I love you” just once. But now I knew that they did what they could and that it was time I did right by them, as they had neither the childhoods nor adulthoods that they had wanted for themselves.

  Mostly, though, I had a desire to keep doing right by myself. “You look so happy,” people would remark to me after I left my job and moved away. I looked happy because I actually was. I had a life that allowed me a brief pause to live a dream, and I had people who went above and beyond to keep my head dreamily floating in the clouds that whole time.

  I’d felt fairly unsupported in my desires as a kid. As an adult, I had more support in my life than most people. From encouragement fr
om strangers in Speedos, interest in my next activity from colleagues, friends and family who offered everything from dog loaners and driving lessons to tennis partners and travel companions, it was taking a village to make my childhood a reality and I had to keep going forward.

  If I have kids, I can only hope that one day, after they finish with the child beauty-pageant circuit I force them into, they will look upon their lives and feel that they are fulfilling and full. I will tell them stories of their great-grandmother watching soap operas, and when they ask me why grandma keeps making them clean the house on their visits, I will tell them the tale of two young people who left India to make brighter futures for themselves.

  “Did they really not have electricity?” the kids will ask.

  “Yes,” I will say. “And their whole house was smaller than your basement playroom. Now let’s go over the Punjabi alphabet again before you forget.”

  They will travel, they will take lessons, and when we sit down to dinner together every night, silence will never be allowed. We will talk about our hopes and dreams and be a team whose members are there for one another. And our family motto will be to never, ever stop pursuing the lives we want, no matter what.

  That is the vision I have for the future, but getting there means continuing to have years that build upon this one. With the new year fast approaching, I knew I had to keep motivated. My greatest fear was to have this amazing, eye-opening year and then slip back into my former life the next year. I could see myself walking to work in my long down jacket, stopping for my morning croissant, sending out and reading hundreds of e-mails, and jonesing for my afternoon chocolate pick-me-up. I wanted to avoid that at all cost. If it somehow happened, it couldn’t be because I had just given up when the calendar struck December 31.

  My Christmas gift to myself was booking a trip to L.A. I was going to finally go to L.A., call every Tom, Dick, and Harry in town, and hope that somebody, anybody would meet with me. If not, perhaps it was the harsh lesson in the competitiveness and difficulty of the business that I needed to learn.