My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

  What’s strangest is that these communities are so strikingly similar. When you think of South Asian Americans,16 you may think of your friend’s parents who are doctors or engineers living in a nice urban environment. They aren’t the people I grew up with. I grew up with farmers. I grew up with very old men in turbans driving tractors very slowly down a rural road. I grew up with old women squatting, their saris pulled through their legs, cutting the wild mustard greens for sarson da saag at the side of the road in January. Guys sitting around a fire by the prune dryer, passing around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They were just as drunk and barefoot and okra-eating and surly as everyone I was related to. I grew up with Punjabi rednecks.

  I guess the most distinct memory I have on this point comes from 1984. I was in fourth grade, and it was the day after Halloween. My class had two teachers; one I’ve mentioned before, Mrs. Sanger, was older, wiser, and astoundingly competent. The other was new, both to teaching and to Yuba City.

  There was news, and this teacher felt she had to share it with the crowd. She later told my mom—who, as I said, worked in the cafeteria—that having lived through the Kennedy assassination in 1963, she thought some of the children of the class might be experiencing trauma from the news. She explained to us that something had happened, then she turned to Sukhbir Badyal, the smartest girl in the class, and asked her to share the news.

  “Yesterday,” Sukhbir began, “our president was killed . . .” I distinctly remember her saying “our president,” and I knew she meant the president of India, even though she didn’t, she meant Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This is what our teacher, whose callowness ran so deep she was even named Mrs. Young, wanted Sukhbir to say.

  “. . . by my cousin, a hero of Khalistan!” Then eleven children in a class of thirty went apeshit. Truly apeshit as they celebrated this glorious victory for the campaign to create an independent Sikh homeland in Punjab. This was not what Mrs. Young wanted her to say. Mrs. Young had no fucking clue what was happening. She understood only that the prime minister of India had been killed, and these kids were Indian. To her, like my parents, like every white person in Yuba City, South Asians were a monolith. My teacher couldn’t imagine a diversity of political perspectives. She had no idea about the massacre of Sikhs that Mrs. Gandhi had ordered scant months before. We knew what religion all the South Asian kids were to categorize them, to know who could eat from the salad bar and who couldn’t cut their hair during a lice outbreak. As kids, we talked and played together, but outside of school, we lived in different worlds.

  Anyone Can Cook Aloo Gobi

  What I’ve taken a long, circuitous road to tell you is that my dad wanted me to be transformed by the cleansing Gatorade of football into a real man who was chill-tight bros with the real men of Sutter Union High School, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t have anyone I could consider a real romantic possibility, I was present for all the high school drama, but I was nonparticipatory.

  What this meant was that in many ways, my chill-tight bros were the other people without a viable sexuality at Sutter High: the Punjabi girls, three specifically—Ravi, Baljit, and Gurpreet. Like me, they didn’t get to have a romantic life. Their brothers were off dating white girls, and each would eventually have a nice wife brought over from India. The girls couldn’t date because it might impugn their chastity. And they couldn’t get an arranged marriage, because being from America also impugned your chastity. I’d grown up knowing women like this, my dad’s age and older. Unmarriageable daughters who kept books for their dad’s farm or helped manage the prune dryer. I knew Ravi, Baljit, and Gurpreet were on that path, and it wasn’t so different from mine.

  We did not discuss this, of course. We didn’t plot or wheedle to try to figure out how our sexual identities could fit into this world that had made us. We just gossiped about movies and celebrities. I made Baljit tell me about England, where she’d grown up, and pronounce silly British words. Mostly, we just did our homework, followed rules, and didn’t think much about why we couldn’t be part of the romantic drama of high school. That, coupled with rich traditions of accessorizing, draping, and dance, made them the finest fag hags a bookish asexual closeted child homosexual could ask for.

  There was one act of rebellion. In eleventh grade, Ravi—who, let’s be fair, was the Carrie—went to the administration and said she wanted to have an Asian club like the one at the big high school in town. The school principal, in direct violation of several federal and state laws, told her that they couldn’t have one, because none of the faculty17 wanted to be the adviser.

  Ravi was pissed. She was in a world that was in the active process of forgetting her. Other Indian girls played along, became cheerleaders or played volleyball and had a lot of fun at the 80 percent of teen life they were allowed to do. Ravi wanted more—she wanted acknowledgment of her space and her place at the school and community. Maybe it was the first time I saw one of my peers being vengefully political, and I was enraptured.

  The rejection of the Asian Club idea had happened in the first three weeks of school. Ravi was fuming, but then morning announcements reminded her that there was one high school club that hadn’t met yet: Science Club. Science Club at Sutter High existed for one reason: to use its budget for a trip to an amusement park in Santa Clara. The official justification was that roller coasters showed us physics in action. Science Club did nothing else. No one cared about it. Since no one from our school went to a real college, no one even used it to pad their extracurriculars—except for me.

  When lunch period rolled around, I went to the Science Club meeting with hopes of getting elected to some nice meaningless office I could put on my résumé. Moments later, Ravi walked in, followed by Gurpreet, then Baljit, then another Baljit, then every Indian girl at the school, plus a boy or two for good measure. It was a coup. Ravi was president, Gurp was secretary, and Sukh Dhillon was treasurer. This was going to be Ravi’s Asian Club.

  (She quite politely had me installed as vice president, not because I was an “honorary Indian” or anything, but because she knew I really wanted it on my résumé for college.)

  These girls were scrappy bitches. The world had forgotten them, but they found places for themselves. Some found nice local Indian guys who were willing to take a chance on a girl with impugned chastity. Some quietly did the books for their dad’s company until they got fed up and started dating white guys. Some found guys in India or Canada who were excited to have a sophisticated American wife.

  I am supposed to be nostalgic for football. I am supposed to watch Friday Night Lights or Remember the Titans and be electrified by its connection to my life. Now, I do miss the grass and the lights and the cold and the excitement. But if I am feeling nostalgic, if I’m missing the world I came from, the football movie I watch is Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham.

  Jess Bamra, the plucky Sikh girl at the center of Bend It Like Beckham, has no role to fill. There is no rubric for a female soccer star. She wants to be like Beckham, but a number of factors make that impossible. It is not sad, though, because she so purely experiences joy in what she’s doing. Chadha’s fast-paced, joyous musical montages of soccer frenetics let us join in Jess’s sense of completion and camaraderie on the football pitch. We get that it’s the only place she makes sense, but for a teenage Punjabi girl, that doesn’t make sense.

  This brings us to the choreographic difference between American football and Association football (soccer). Soccer is graceful, fluid, and long. We see Jess running, jumping, kicking in an orchestrated flow. American football is nasty, brutish, and short. Men are hidden behind pads and helmets, they crash into a scrum, and then as soon as the action has started, it is over. Everyone collects themselves and lines up again. There’s no flow; you can’t make a good musical montage about it because good songs don’t stop every twenty seconds to reposition for the next down. Soccer is a symphony, football is a cacophony.18

  The narratives that were bui
lt for me weren’t built for me. Yes, I’m a white guy who played football, but the simple, boring, patriarchal story football movies offered was never going to satisfy my soul. My family and town would love a Rudy story where I gave my everything to football and burned all my effort to understand it and get better at it. What a fucking waste. Just think of all the cool stuff I read and learned and thought up while I was being a flaky faggot that never would have been if I’d been trying to A-student my way into masculine respectability. I don’t need those stories.

  I needed stories about people who don’t have a place in the narrative yet. I needed to see clever people figure out how they fit in to soccer, or twenty-first-century sexuality, or America. I don’t look like the women in Bend It Like Beckham, or the 1992 Sutter Union High School Science Club officers’ board, but judging people by what they look like is for sad participants in the moribund hierarchy of football in Rudy or Johnny Be Good. Jess Bamra knows you don’t judge people by how they look—you judge them by how they play.

  * * *

  1. There was a different Sutter somewhere in Northern California, so we always had to clarify “Sutter Union.”

  2. I had a hard time bringing myself to call him ’Mon.

  3. Dick slit.

  4. Also boys: There were fourteen-year-olds there. I was thirteen. I was totes attracted to them. If you are going to be scandalized or offended that I was attracted to boys in my class who were my age, you need to step back and seriously reconsider your mental construction of homosexuality.

  5. Though some would argue that one of the advantages of porn is that you can’t smell it.

  6. Visual memories of what the other guys look like naked.

  7. Jackin’ it!

  8. IRONY!

  9. They are named for the Greek letter delta, which is a triangle.

  10. This is a popular version of the story. Is it true? I don’t know.

  11. This point was lost on many Americans who, after 9/11, started targeting turban-wearing Sikhs for violence because they didn’t understand the difference between Islam and Sikhism. Needless to say, attacking anyone for their religion is horrifying, and the aftermath of those murders has deeply affected the Sikh community and Yuba City’s community.

  12. A fun diversion where drunk people go out to a rice field full of frogs and one person shines a light at the frogs to blind them while other people use three-pronged sticks to stab the frogs in the back and put them in burlap sacks. It is a popular activity in Sutter County, and was my parents’ third date. My mother cooked the frogs, but did not eat them because they are not kosher.

  13. Drunk driving your four-wheel-drive truck or SUV around in the mud so that it’s very messy until your car flips over and is destroyed, forcing you to get a predatory loan to buy another car and consigning you to a life of hovering debt that will keep you working at Home Depot for decades. Also super-popular.

  14. It’s like the kid’s version of a turban.

  15. Sikhs are not supposed to cut their hair out of respect for the perfection of God’s creation.

  16. Presuming you’re not South Asian American. If you are, you’re probably pretty tired of this white guy telling a story not his own.

  17. There were no Indian teachers at the school. Indians didn’t teach school, they farmed.

  18. To be clear, I still hate soccer. I like watching American football more than soccer; I just don’t want to watch a movie about American football.

  THE RAGE OF CALIBAN

  IN THE YEAR 1992, my mother arrived home with a video. This was during those loose, freewheeling days when Debbie Branum would still find herself at a video store on her own, before streaming services, glaucoma, and gentle agoraphobia made these ideas comically incongruous. Communism had fallen, Kuwait was free, George H. W. Bush was president, and the world was full of slow growth and sensible promise. Anything was moderately possible.

  She brought home a video and gave it to me and said, “You need to watch this.” This was not unusual. As we have established in this work, my mother sharing culture with me was foundational to our relationship and key evidence of her real and profound love for me. At this point in my life, we could go so far as to say “understanding of me,” though said understanding, like a California poppy, would bloom beautiful but not long. What distinguished this piece of art was that it dated from slightly later in time than most of my mother’s recommendations, and it featured in one of her medium-low rotation stories about her identification as a savvy person.

  I will stop obfuscating. I’m writing a book, not doing a coin trick. It was The Graduate, a film from 1967 directed by the legendary Mike Nichols. Most of the old movies we watched were older than that: classics of the 1940s, ’50s, or early ’60s that she’d watched on TV with her mom. The Graduate was a film from when my mother was sixteen, an age at which she was, by the judgments of her culture, an adult woman. By nineteen, she would have a baby and her life as a breezy, art-consuming adult would be gone. It was from that little window when she could see a sex comedy and just enjoy it.

  And she did. She loved it. At least three or four times in my childhood, she told a story of seeing the film and laughing at a joke before the rest of the audience. Before the punch line of the joke played out. She saw the joke coming, and she laughed at it alone. She told this story rarely but definitively, as proof of her intelligence and sophistication. I loved it. Sophistication can be hard to come by when you’re living in a place that always smells at least somewhat of rotting prunes.

  Another distinguishing aspect of my consumption of The Graduate was that I did not watch it with her. I don’t think she avoided it because of the sexual nature of the film: She would usually fast-forward through anything she deemed inappropriate, and the resounding power of my asexuality at age sixteen could assuage any parent’s fear of awkwardness. I think I watched the film alone mostly because she no longer felt like she had to guide me to things. She’d done her job right; she’d taught me to be an active, intelligent consumer of culture. Here’s the actual best picture of 1967,1 Guy. Go crazy.

  So I watched a coming-of-age comedy from another time, while I myself was supposed to be coming of age. None of this mattered to me. I loved it, but for my own reasons.

  The thing about a cultural trope from your parents’ generation is that you encounter it as a pop culture reference so many times before you consume the original piece of art that there’s the danger of the original feeling like an afterthought. I knew what a Mrs. Robinson was long before I saw Mrs. Robinson.2 I thought I knew what I was going to be watching. Then I watched it, and it changed me. Mrs. Robinson changed me. Anne Bancroft changed me.

  In the film, a younger Dustin Hoffman had graduated from college, and suburban people of a sort who made no sense to me were saying suburban things to him,3 and music cues were supposed to be telling us that he had some sort of ennui,4 I guess. That was happening and I didn’t really care. There was a lot of white midcentury interior design, and I was maybe more interested in that, and I’m almost never interested in design. Benjamin Braddock, the character Hoffman was playing, was a normalish cipher, and I’d given up feeling like there were any similarities between me and normalish ciphers years before, as we will discuss later in this chapter. I mean, it was cool to see a young Dustin Hoffman, but this was no Tootsie.

  Then She stalked in. She was a jungle cat. Later, I’d see her in leopard-print lingerie, and I’d be titillated, but not for any of the reasons a teenage boy looking at a partially clothed woman is supposed to be titillated. From the first moment She spoke to him, She was predator, and he was prey. She was in complete control and completely out of control. I was bedazzled.

  For much of my childhood, the David Lynch film Dune was one of my favorite movies. My childhood was really just a laundry list of sci-fi or fantasy shitshows that I worshipped erroneously,5 and Dune was a magnificent collection of great ideas rendered into turgid crap. The bones of
the story, however, came from Frank Herbert’s novel, which was a smart and sordid injection of realpolitik into genres that so frequently ended up in Tolkienesque moral simplicity. I digress so far simply to say that years after my first viewing of The Graduate, I realized the calm, measured, forceful way Mrs. Robinson orders Benjamin Braddock to take her home is essentially just a Pasadena version of the Bene Gesserit “Voice” from Dune, a hypnotic power of command that badass ladies use to get what they want. I have never wanted to be a Jedi, a Navy SEAL, a Kwisatz Haderach, or any number of other makes of heroes, but I have always wanted to be a Bene Gesserit witch, just like Mrs. Robinson.

  You can see why I fell for her. I also fell for her complexity, her damage, the echoes of what might have been in her life. As Anne Bancroft brings her friend’s son back to her house and tries to frighten a child into fucking her, I, a sixteen-year-old boy, couldn’t stop wondering, “What makes this woman tick?”

  When you watch The Graduate, you watch for the scene in the Robinsons’ den. The windows are glass and surrounded by so much lush tropical foliage that you might as well be in a zoo. You know what happens in a zoo: fighting and fucking, and Mrs. Robinson is ready to do both. Ben doesn’t get this, though. Ben is an idiot, in exactly the way we insist is uniquely true of Millennials now. He’s rude, self-absorbed, and generally so caught up in his own narrative that he doesn’t notice the complex woman he’s talking to. This is not a characteristic of generations; it’s a quality of being twenty-one and dumb. Mrs. Robinson offers herself but denies that she’s offering herself. She needles Ben with desire and frightens him with simply too much truth. Ben is about to turn into a man, exactly the sort of creature who runs society and keeps women like Mrs. Robinson as pets. Mrs. Robinson seduces and tortures him with the powers (sex and truth) that he does not understand. If for only a few weeks, she manages to turn Benjamin into a pet of her own.