Mom was right. Paris, with its sophistication and elegance, its fashion and food and culture, was the perfect transition for me before returning home. The boat ride we took on the Seine is my most visceral memory of that city—the sounds of the water and the birds, the feeling of the sun on my face as we glided past famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame. There were other amazing things to gaze at, too—like all those French boys. I must admit they did divert a large portion of my sixteen-year-old attention from the advertised sights.
Our trip to the Louvre was also memorable. We decided to go straight to the Mona Lisa upon our arrival, to start with the biggest attraction and work our way down from there. There was a crowd behind a barricade in front of the painting, watchful guards hovering nearby. When we got near the front, I told Mom I wanted a picture of Mona and me, but with the people and the barricade, I couldn’t get close enough for a good one.
“Well then, go closer,” Mom prodded.
“But there’s a barricade.”
She raised her camera and lowered her voice. “Just do it fast. It’s only a photo. Go on.”
I quickly stepped over the barricade, trying to be surreptitious and nonchalant at the same time, and Mom snapped the photo. Flash. Which was Interdit! Forbidden! Nishedh! And so was stepping over the barrier. It will come as no surprise to anyone that Mom, Sid, and I were immediately escorted out of the museum. According to my mom, as the security guards brusquely showed us the exit, Sid kept asking, “Why are they being so mean to us?”
And now the Starry Night episode makes so much more sense. #AppleDoesntFallFarFromTree.
* * *
WE LEFT THE warm air of Paris and landed in hot, humid New Delhi. Home. I was finally home. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the sights and sounds and smells of my native country until we emerged from the terminal to look for Dad. And there he was! Looking from Mom to Sid and back to Mom again, puzzled.
“Where’s Mimi?” he asked. He was standing literally two feet away from me.
I looked at him and gave a little wave. “Right here, Dad.”
He cleared his throat and nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course,” he said, offering me a slightly awkward hug.
I’d left India a gawky, almost thirteen-year-old tomboy and was returning a womanly sixteen-year-old. My parents hadn’t visited me in the States because they were just starting their own hospital in Bareilly following my father’s early retirement from the army; a trip to the U.S. would require far more time than they could take off. I hadn’t been home to India because I’d been traveling back and forth between living situations so much that I couldn’t take the long trip home without further disrupting my studies. Just over three years had passed. My hair was long and full and I’d grown several inches; with my big wedge heels, I was almost five foot ten. My body had filled out with curves and I was wearing the clothes to show it. In fact, my mom had repeated the trick that Vimla Mami had played on her when she and Sid had arrived to pick me up. Mami had encouraged me to wear very short shorts and my highest wedge heels when we’d gone to meet them at the airport in Boston. On the strictness scale, she was about halfway between Kiran Masi and my mom. She didn’t necessarily approve of my shortest shorts for general wear, but she thought it would be fun to give Mom a little jolt upon her arrival. She didn’t let me in on her thinking, though.
“These short shorts?” I kept asking her. “These shoes?”
“Yes, yes. You look lovely,” Vimla Mami assured me, smiling sweetly.
Mom was jolted all right, and she decided it would be fun to play the same trick on Dad, so she encouraged me to wear a sleeveless white Tommy Hilfiger dress that was short and tight. Super-high platform shoes and big earrings completed the look. This time I understood what was happening, and I wasn’t surprised when Dad didn’t recognize me. My mom had a big laugh. My dad not so much.
Returning home to Bareilly revived me. Like a withering plant that is finally given water and sunlight, I came back to life. My confidence had suffered a terrible blow from the bullying, but as my father had taught me, with each new experience comes a new opportunity to reinvent yourself. I recognized that as long as I could find the confidence I’d lost, I could then choose who I wanted to be.
The school year had already started at the Army Public School in Bareilly, where I was to be entering eleventh grade. There’s a formality to schools in India that largely doesn’t exist in America, at least not from what I’ve seen. Students in most Indian schools wear uniforms, and the relationship between teachers and pupils is much more formal. The whole atmosphere is generally a little quieter. It was into this environment that I chose to wear tight jeans, a long T-shirt, huge hoop earrings, and some serious swag to the meeting Dad and I had with the principal of the school prior to my starting classes. People noticed. Luckily, Principal Kandpal had been posted with my father in their army days, so he forgave the inappropriate dress.
The more that kids came out of their classrooms into the courtyard to stare at me that day, the more I loved it. I became an instant mini-celebrity. As a result, I walked straighter, taller, bigger. This was how I wanted to feel. This was the New Me. There was empowerment in reinvention. I started to leave behind the narrative that the mean girls in Newton had written for me and began writing one for myself.
It was more than just the clothes that day that gave me my new status, though. Kids in small towns all over India dreamed of making it to the Big City one day, whether that was Mumbai or Bangalore or Kolkata or Jaipur. I hadn’t just left my hometown, I’d left the country. I’d left the continent, and at a time when long-distance travel like that was not nearly as common. I’d made it to the land depicted in all of those bright, shiny TV shows we loved watching. For all my fellow students knew, the high schools I’d attended in America were just like West Beverly Hills High School, the fictional school in Beverly Hills, 90210. After my years in the States, I not only dressed differently but I walked differently, I talked differently, I thought differently. And this time I enjoyed being different.
When I saw how people were looking at me—as if I were a fantastical, brightly colored unicorn—I realized that I wanted to see myself that way, too. I wanted to feel interesting and unusual and amazing, to feel that I was deserving of people’s gaze. I wanted to leave behind my fear of being different, the quality that seemed to cause trouble for me in America. From now on, if I was going to be an anomaly, I was going to be the shiniest damn anomaly around. I had no idea if I could pull off that sort of attitude or not, but I was sure as hell going to try.
I had to wear a uniform at my new school, there was no way around that, but I tried to do it on my own terms. Skirts were supposed to be below the knee, which I thought didn’t look cool enough, so I kept my skirt above the knee. If I could just make it through the morning assembly and into my classroom, I was usually safe; as is true in most schools in India, kids stayed in one classroom for all their academics. Since I was always a back-bencher, staying as far away from the teachers as possible, there was little chance that I’d get in trouble for my skirt length or the fact that I was wearing makeup—very subtly applied—which was not allowed.
Unless I got called upon to answer a question, which meant standing up. There were a couple of teachers who had no patience with my rule-bending. “Are you wearing makeup?” one of them would ask slowly, drawing out the words as she scrutinized my face. Maybe I should be thankful to her, since her attention to my appearance definitely motivated me to perfect my makeup application techniques. My chemistry teacher seemed to love to bust me on my skirt length. One day when she called on me she was in a particularly exasperated mood. She took one look at my skirt, strode to the back of the room, and tore out the hem. “There,” she said. “That’s the length for a good skirt.” I lost the battle on that particular day, but it didn’t matter. I was always going to find a way to get around the fashi
on rules.
I’m sure the pressure of having switched school systems in the middle of high school contributed to my pushing-the-boundaries behavior. When I’d started high school in Cedar Rapids, I’d quickly become one of the best students in my grade because the Indian schools I’d attended were so far ahead of my new high school in terms of content covered. The flip side of this was that when I returned to India three years later, I was seriously behind.
On top of that, my board exams were looming. In most of the Indian education system, the board exams taken during the tenth and twelfth grades are crucial to your academic career, the boards taken in twelfth grade especially so. Not too much pressure. As a future engineering student, I had to study physics, chemistry, math, and computer science. I felt like I was falling further and further behind every day, and in order to close the gap, I got tutored in chemistry before school, and math and physics after school.
At the close of each school day, I would travel to my tutor’s house in an open rickshaw with a few other girls, and sometimes boys would follow on their bikes. I didn’t engage in conversation with these boys—you weren’t supposed to if boys followed you or talked to you, so I dutifully kept my head down and tried to ignore them. But my father was concerned by the attention, especially after the day that a guy who’d followed me home after tutoring jumped our gate and climbed up to the balcony of my room, terrifying us all. Dad immediately had wrought iron bars installed on all the windows of the house. Now my bedroom felt like a cage, but at least it was a safe one.
One day my worried father sat me down for a heart-to-heart talk. “You can’t wear tight jeans,” he said, afraid of the attention I was getting and how out of control it all felt. “Boys are following you, and it’s dangerous.” His solution was to try to convince me to wear Indian clothes.
At first I agreed to the plan, and twelve stylish salwar kurtas were made for me. When I later pushed back against the pant and tunic sets, my parents and I compromised: I would be allowed to wear jeans, but only if I wore loose shirts with them. So I went into my dad’s closet and took out a bunch of his favorite shirts, which I would then tie at my waist. To complete the look, I pulled off a few of the top buttons so the shirts couldn’t be fastened up all the way. Basically, I destroyed his shirts. He was, of course, not happy about that, but somehow—I’m not actually sure how—I escaped serious consequences. Mom ended up buying him a few new shirts, and they kept those purchases locked in his closet. I’m surprised they trusted that solution, given my history of getting into Mom’s closet, but I guess they realized that at this point I was busy getting into other kinds of mischief.
My one true regret about that time was my relationship with Sid. When I moved back home, the age difference between us was great enough to keep us in different worlds, especially since we’d already spent so many years apart. I was busy being a teenager, having friends and going to parties, starting yet another new school and preparing for my pre-boards, which were practice exams for the actual boards; my eight-year-old brother wasn’t really on my radar. My parents’ attention, too, was focused more on me than it was on him, as they dealt with helping me readjust culturally and catch up academically on top of all their responsibilities with the new hospital. Because of that, Sid depended a lot on my mom’s mom, Nani, who had been living with us since his birth. It would be years before he and I would live close enough to each other and spend enough time together to develop the relationship we have now.
While academics were causing me a lot of stress in my junior year, I was having a blast in other areas. I was participating in things I’d excelled at and gotten positive attention for ever since my days at La Martiniere—dancing and singing especially. I had my own tight-knit group of friends at the Army School—Gullu, Karan, Vikas, Avinash, Moniesha, Rajat, and Andrea to name a few—and we did typical teenage things, which I hadn’t done in the U.S. We’d get together and go to friends’ parties; we had crushes; we dated. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to sneak around like I did in the States. I relished the freedom and the feeling of being treated more like an adult.
* * *
IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, the Bareilly Club is where I used to hang out with my friends after class, talking and ambling around the grounds. Now, in high school, I looked forward to spending time there in the evenings, accompanying Dad and Mom, who went there most Friday and Saturday nights. We always dressed up a little, which I loved. Dad had to be in a shirt and a tie or a casual suit, Mom would usually wear a sari, and I’d wear a dressy shirt and nice jeans or a skirt. And my platform shoes, of course. And big earrings. Inside the club’s large, heavy gate was a massive garden on one side where you could eat outdoor dinners and have bonfires; on the other side was another garden for strolling through. The air always smelled so fresh, so sweet. The main building of the club itself was an old brick building, and inside was the dining room and a large space that was used for a variety of functions: Sometimes people played cards there, sometimes an indoor/outdoor bar was set up there, and on important holidays like Diwali and Holi, there would be big parties with a DJ and a dance floor. From time to time Dad would host a night of Tambola, a bingo-like game, but racier when he was running it.
One such festive night at the club in May 1999, after the end of my junior year and two months before my seventeenth birthday, we ran into the local district commissioner at the time, Deepak Shingal, and his wife, Anita, who were friends of my parents. It just happened to be the night of the annual May Queen Ball, and Mrs. Shingal encouraged me to enter the competition, saying I was pretty and smart and that’s just what May Queens were supposed to be. I had never once considered the idea of competing for a beauty title. Sure, some boys followed me on my way to tutoring, presumably because they thought I was pretty, but I didn’t really think of myself as someone who could legitimately enter a beauty contest.
When I voiced my doubts, Mrs. Shingal, who was on the judges’ panel for the ball, responded, “I’ve done this for a few years, and I can tell you from experience that if you sign up for this, Priyanka, there’s a good chance you can win. And tell me,” she added, knowing the answer already, “what’s the worst thing that could happen if you enter and don’t win?” I saw her point.
I told my parents about the contest, and since it was a small event taking place at the club that he knew, and within the community that he knew, Dad was totally comfortable with it and actually excited about the idea. I think he understood how much joy I got from winning, and perhaps, like Mrs. Shingal, he thought I had a chance at it. I really did love getting trophies and medals in debates and elocutions, as well as in dance and singing competitions.
When I was crowned May Queen later that night, the “fake it till you make it” brand of confidence I’d been projecting was somehow transformed into the real thing. The win reinforced the belief that my dad had tried to impress upon me when I was much younger: that if I wanted to, I could reinvent myself when I moved to a new place. When I moved back home from the U.S., I chose to be a new person, and my reinvention looked like it was working. Part of that reinvention, I was realizing, meant continually digging deep for courage, establishing and reestablishing my confidence. Just three hours earlier, when I’d been reluctant to enter the May Queen Ball, I hadn’t had any. Now I did. The idea that confidence is not a permanent state was crystallizing in me, and I was beginning to sense that the harder I worked at being able to access it when I needed it, the better it would serve me.
* * *
ALL OF THIS was well and good, but I still had to take my boards. In a country where so many people are struggling for survival, a lot of emphasis is put on formal education. This pays off because kids in India who attend high school—not all have that privilege—are set up to be so academically advanced that they are able to excel at the college and university level whether in India, the U.S., or anywhere else.
Given the academic struggles I’d had
since returning from the United States, I sometimes berated myself for not having stayed there to graduate. It would have made everything so much easier because I wouldn’t have had to take the boards—but then again, I’d been miserable in Newton at the end. Here I was thriving. When I wasn’t stressed out about academics, I was having a great time with my friends and enjoying extracurriculars.
The Army Public School was divided into four “houses,” or sections, and throughout the year we had intra-school competitions in academics, debates, sporting events, and performing arts. In my senior year I was chosen by the students in my house, Nilgiri, to be Girls’ House Captain. Every fall the school celebrated something called Annual Day, a competition between the four houses in the form of a full day devoted to races, relays, plays, concerts, and dance performances. At the end of the day, the house that had been awarded the most points would get the Winner’s Cup, and as the Girls’ House Captain for Nilgiri—there was also a Boys’ House Captain for each of the houses—I really wanted that cup. I made sure my team was super well prepared for every aspect of the show, and I also inserted myself into just about every performance we did that day—group dance, solo dance, theater, choral. Afterward, I was asked for my autograph by a young girl who said, “I want to grow up and be like you.” And if that wasn’t weird enough, I was soon asked to judge a local dance competition in the city. I felt like I was being treated as more important than I actually was and it was a strange new feeling.
There are always going to be two ends of any particular spectrum, though, and at the other end of this one, there were kids who thought I was being opportunistic, or that I was just showing off. I suppose I can see why some might think that, but for me and my male co-captain, the goal was to win, and that’s what our housemates wanted, too. I might have lagged in my studies because of falling so far behind during those years in the U.S., but I could hold my own with anyone when it came to performing. Occasionally I had the thought that the positive attention I got from all my extracurriculars was a gift from some divine presence who had witnessed the difficulties I’d had in Massachusetts, a way of saying, “You sure had to put up with a lot of crap. Here’s a little something to help make up for all that.” But mostly, I didn’t overthink it. Who knew that within a few years performing would become my way of life?
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