On the Outside Looking Indian

by Rupinder Gill

  I rushed back to my seat before questions could be asked.

  I prayed that the explanation had satisfied them and that at recess, I would gaze across the school yard and see scores of kids sporting kimonos, saris, and dashikis. Even better would be if one of the school’s many German kids had worn an SS uniform, to take some of the heat off me. But when I went into the school yard, everybody but one other poor soul was in his or her normal clothes. Standing against the wall was the matching blindingly yellow suit to mine.

  I waved and looked away as some of the girls in my class drew near.

  “Cool dress,” they said.

  “Thanks,” I replied, wishing the day were finished so I could run home, change into jeans, and eat salt-and-vinegar chips.

  “Can you say something in your language?”

  “Um…I don’t know,” I said, hoping the bell was going to ring soon. I had been Indian every other day, too, but something about seeing me in my salwaar kameez reminded them that I was different, and that day, I was their new exciting toy.

  On a normal day, I would have loved to be the center of their attention, but that day, I didn’t feel comfortable with the reason. I felt like a collector’s-edition doll they had added to the Barbie collection, a brown-faced friend that “Barbie met on a relief mission with Ken!” and was promoted as coming with “ten different colors of bindis!”

  “Oh, please, say something!” they all said.

  They circled me, begging, and I could have just said ethnic-sounding gibberish or told them that they were horse-faced pigs that smelled of cow manure and they would have been satisfied.

  “Say something!” they begged.

  I don’t know why the bell was always ringing whenever Zack Morris needed to be saved by it on TV, because as I stood there, waiting for them to start tugging at my braids, it was showing me no mercy.

  “Say something! Say something!”

  This soon turned into a chant until I finally gave in and just sputtered out the Punjabi greeting Sat-sri-akal.

  “What? Say it again,” they said excitedly.

  “Say it again! Say something else!”

  I wasn’t sure what else I could say. I spoke exclusively Punjabi until I was four years old, and then once we plugged a black-and-white television into the wall, a new language was revealed to me and became my preferred mother tongue. Now I spoke Punjabi only when forced. As I was about to spout some random phrases in the hopes of satisfying my classmates, the bell finally chimed and we all rushed in. When I got home, I pulled off my suit and threw it onto the floor.

  “Hey,” my mom said, seeing the yellow mass of fabric crumpled on my bedroom floor. “Can you hang that up? It took a long time to iron.”

  I looked at my mom, who was wearing a salwaar kameez, as she did every day. She wore them to work, when she left in the morning with her thermos of chai, and she wore them at home, to the mall, and to our parent-teacher conferences. It was the clothing to which she was accustomed and it was the clothing to which I was accustomed to seeing her in. I only wore it when forced, to a wedding, to the gurdwara, or to a relative’s home, because in my mind, my native dress was the same as the rest of the kids in my class: jeans and a T-shirt.

  The next year, my mom asked me, “Are they doing that day again where you wear suits to school?”

  “No, they don’t do that anymore,” I lied.

  “That’s too bad,” she said.

  I felt bad lying to her. I wish I had possessed the confidence to wear a suit to school again, to pay tribute to the culture of which my parents were so proud. But I didn’t, and for that I felt ashamed. I wanted to at least save my mom the shame of knowing that truth. It was better that she thought it was the school board who was no longer interested in us showcasing our culture than knowing that it was me.

  The summer before fifth grade, we moved again, this time just our nuclear family. Aunts and uncles got their own places, as most had succumbed to the time-honored tradition of the arranged marriage. They hopped on planes clutching Canadian passports and returned shortly after with carry-on spouses. The true importance of this segue is that their marriages allowed me to finally get my own room. Personal space is not a virtue in Indian culture, so to have seven cubic feet of my own was like discovering a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. Of course my parents forced me to squeeze a five-piece furniture set into the room, with the dresser pushed up against the bed like a footboard. Still, as I climbed over the side table every night to get into the bed, I didn’t have to scream at anybody to turn off the mixed cassette they had taped off the radio so we could sleep.

  It was at this new house, in a more middle-class neighborhood than our previous one, that I discovered the categories of “haves” and “have-nots.” I undeniably landed in the latter category. My parents liked to tell me that school was not a fashion show, but to a kid, not only is it a fashion show but a beauty pageant, IQ test, fitness assessment, and various other humiliations all rolled into one neat little package marked “Adolescence.”

  I never had the cool clothes. Not only were my and my siblings’ clothes uncool, half of them were homemade or purchased from the fashion capitals of rural India. Our morning outfit choices consisted of dresses made from the same material as our kitchen curtains or separates from such international brands as “Mowgli” and “Star of India.” We begged our parents for the same clothes the other kids were wearing, designer camouflage that could help us blend into the crowd. But they refused to budge, so when all of the other kids were wearing perfectly acid-washed jeans and bright polo shirts, we showed up in patchwork pants and leopard-print velour shirts that declared “Kool Kats Klub.”

  The first year at my new school was also my first introduction to racism, although I didn’t know it at the time. Some classmates and I were standing in a circle telling jokes, most of which had been overheard from adults or older kids. A girl named Lisa was up next and assured us that she had a doozy of a joke but first needed to know a bit of information.

  “Is anyone here a Paki?”

  I had no idea what that word meant or whom it referenced. Neither did Lisa. We all looked at one another, shook our heads no, and she continued on. The gist of the joke was that you would take a bowl of water and pour in salt, which signified white people. Then you would add pepper to signify black people, and the two would mingle at the surface of the water. Then you would add some cinnamon. This represented the “Pakis” in question. Upon the entry of the cinnamon into the water, the other two spices would float quickly away from it. We all giggled slightly, though the joke was weak with the absence of visual aids. But, Lisa assured us, wherever she had seen it enacted, it garnered some big laughs. It wasn’t until two years later that I realized whom the term Paki referenced, when someone shouted it at my sisters and me as we played in a park.

  We had gone to visit our cousin who lived in a suburb of Toronto. The suburb was a lot more multicultural than our town, which helped build cultural identities but also created racial tensions as big groups of different ethnicities struggled for footholds.

  As we all played soccer in a nearby park, we heard someone shouting from the street that lined it. Two teenagers were on their dirt bikes and looking in our direction. We couldn’t hear what they were saying but we knew it was directed at us.

  “What did they say?” I asked Gurpreet.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  As Navroop, Navjit, and our little cousin came running toward us, we all heard it loud and clear.

  “Pakis!” the boys shouted. “Dirty Pakis!”

  We were all shocked and stood there frozen as they laughed. If they chose to ride their bikes down the hill toward us, there would be nothing we could do and nobody who could help us. Luckily the boys kept biking right past us, and once they were out of sight, we all ran back to my cousin’s house and never told our parents what happened.

  At the same time that Sumeet was losing interest in childhood lessons, my si
sters and I were continuing our only available leisure activity—watching TV. Most of our viewing was done in the basement, where we could watch in peace. Two sofas sat a foot from the back walls and created a V, with such intricate floral patterns on them that your allergies could act up at the mere sight. The wood paneling on the walls had only been inflicted on half of the basement, the other half’s walls maintaining their original drywall charm.

  Behind one sofa, on the unfinished ceiling that let us hear every movement in the kitchen above, a coatrack hung, filled with coats that had no purpose but to make our house look like a swap meet. Below them was a veritable repository of used housewares—old toys, a dismantled crib, and piles of blankets. Whenever I visit home now, I have to shield my eyes from the visual assault when I enter the basement. But back then, our eyes were glued only to the television screen, twenty-seven inches of escapism in a box, set atop another television, which, despite no longer working and being wood veneered, was still not deemed trash.

  This is what we did while other kids were out on the weekends having fun. While our classmates spent Friday nights at house parties, we were on the bridge of the starship Enterprise yelling, “Look out behind you, Worf!” to the screen. As our classmates went out on dates, we watched The Golden Girls.

  “Home again on a Saturday night?” Blanche would tease Dorothy. Yes, we would all nod along. Like Dorothy, we spent every night of the weekend at home. Indian parents have a somewhat ironic fear of sexuality, considering that their culture offered the world the Kama Sutra. Not only was there no dating in my household, there was no talk of dating. Luckily, this was no problem, since we pretty much lived in our basement and it was fairly difficult to meet guys there. So we watched TV.

  When we weren’t watching TV, we had to clean.

  The whole place was covered in a protective layer. The sofas had dustcovers on them. The table had a vinyl tablecloth…topped with a clear plastic tablecloth…atop which sat place mats. Every lampshade in our house was still encased in its plastic cover. Our house looked like a furniture shrine. I spent half of my childhood expecting my parents to put red velvet barricades around the furniture and hire a docent to whisper, “Please step back from the coffee table.”

  An outing now and then was permitted, as long as my parents didn’t have to drive, but even this warranted a barrage of questions.

  “Who are you going with? What are you going to see? Isn’t there an earlier movie?”

  After a while we just saved ourselves the exhaustion and stopped asking. Even if we made it to a party, we would have to keep checking our watches and have someone drive us home at nine, before most of the other kids had even arrived. This was so much more conspicuous than not being there at all.

  Ironically, although we always had to decline, the requests still poured in. We were thankful just to be socially nominated, but this required speeches more rehearsed than those at the Oscars.

  When I was out to lunch with Navjit recently, she reminded me of an integral social survival tactic of our teenage years. “I just knew to not ask for anything,” she said, wolfing down her veggie burger. “I knew to say no to any invite I got and I learned how to make lame excuses about why I couldn’t do things.”

  I always thought that Navjit had it the roughest. She was six years younger than me, and seeing three older siblings already go through the motions of wanting things they would not get, she didn’t even bother. She made herself content with having little. She wore three sets of hand-me-downs, and while other kids spent summers at camp, she was pleased to be at home and do the book reports I would assign to keep her sharp over the summer. She would read an old book we had lying around, and synopsize it for me in a report. When we ran out of books, I assigned her a stack of old Reader’s Digests.

  Until she said it at lunch, I had almost forgotten the lies that were the cornerstone of our teenage years. If I had a dime for every time I said our aunt was over, our relatives were visiting from out of town, and a cousin had a birthday, I would have the net worth of Warren Buffett.

  I was so casual about dropping my various prior-engagement excuses that I would never have thought that my friends still remembered them fifteen years later.

  “How many cousins’ birthday parties could you have had?” my friend Jill said.

  “One year we thought we should track all of the cousins’ birthdays to see if they lined up year to year,” Stacey added.

  Oddly enough, their perception of this excuse was not that I wasn’t allowed to go out, but that I wasn’t really interested in going out with them. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not only were my friends fun, smart, and kind, they were the most popular girls in our grade. I often wondered if I had made a pact with the devil in my sleep to gain a spot in their group, but I figured I could sort that out in the afterlife. I was never able to see them out of school hours, so I wasn’t sure why they still kept me around and now here they were, wondering what it was I didn’t like about them.

  “You never blamed not going out on your parents,” Stacey said. “So I figured you just weren’t into whatever we were doing.”

  “I guess sometimes I wondered if you didn’t really like us as much as you seemed to,” my friend Melodie said. “Because you would usually just say that ‘you can’t’ and not something like ‘my parents are being totally unfair and won’t let me.’”

  While I was growing up, honesty was not the best policy for me. I never let on that my parents were strict, because it was so humiliating. I thought that there was no way my friends could understand my parents and their overprotection. I just assumed my friends knew and that we were all avoiding talking about it because it was embarrassing to me. I would never have believed that the real reason they didn’t bring it up was that they were hurt. I wish I could have been more honest as a teenager, but I just wanted to sweep my strict upbringing under the rug.

  It was always perplexing just what exactly my parents thought would happen if they let us loose once in a while. Despite all of my parents’ worries and concerns for the influences that would persuade us to follow them down dark paths, they had no reason to have ever worried. My grades were phenomenal, but I think they could have actually been better if I had been given the benefit of a balanced social life. I often left my homework until the last minute because my whole life felt like one big chore. I had to dry the dishes and babysit my brother on Friday nights. I already felt as if I was living a life devoid of fun, so the last thing I wanted to do was sit down to an hour’s worth of math homework. If I knew I could go to a party or watch movies at Stacey’s after a week of working nonstop at home and at school, I would have worked relentlessly toward that goal. But I had no such carrot dangled in front of me, just the faint scent of gajar daal emanating from under my fingernails.

  I was never going to recover whatever fun I had missed socializing like a normal teenager. In fact, I knew I was never going to be able to go back in time and give myself a childhood out of an Indian Full House spin-off, but it would be fun to shake up my routine and learn something new while ticking off a wish list that was decades old. I was taking the better-late-than-never approach to adolescence, and though the fine lines around my eyes indicated that I was definitely north of “late,” there was no time like the present.

  TWO

  the little indian mermaid

  Now that I had committed to my plan and had a list of things to do over the year, I was itching to get right down to it.

  “Don’t worry,” my friend Jaclyn told me as we sat in a food court one bitter winter day. “I’ll teach you how to swim. I was a lifeguard for four summers.”

  Jaclyn, Jen (who now also happened to be my downstairs neighbor), and I were all publicists at a television company. For some very odd reason, people often asked Jaclyn and me if we were sisters. We both had dark hair and blue eyes, so I guess people thought the fact that we were two different races was merely a detail. Had Naomi Campbell been standing with us and we
aring blue contacts, I’m sure they would have thrown her into the mix. Our love of fluorescent lighting often led the three of us to the food court for a break from talking and breathing TV.

  “That’s not the issue,” I said, dumping half my stir-fry into Jen’s plate. “So many people have offered to teach me. I just need time.” Swimming was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the scariest proposition on my list.

  At our old house, there was a neighborhood pool nearby. It was a small outdoor pool that reached a maximum depth of four feet, but to my sisters and me it was like plummeting into the ocean depths. A few times each summer, when our parents gave in to our tireless begging, we would each scour the house for the dime you needed for entry and go there to spend the day with all of the other neighborhood kids. It was perfect because the pool was so packed that nobody was actually swimming. This meant that our standing in the water gripping the edge of the shallow end didn’t attract any attention.

  In the fifth grade, my class took swimming lessons for six weeks. Most of the kids could already swim, so I was left in a motley group of beginners. During the first class it looked as if not one of us would swim a stroke in our lives, but by the second class, everybody but me was slowly floating along. At ten, my issue was not fear but a simple lack of the necessary mechanics. My body didn’t know to stay straight to float. It refused to simultaneously retain oxygen and maintain calm.

  The instructor didn’t know what to do with me.

  “Why don’t you practice here?” she said finally, giving me two jugs of water that were meant to act as de facto flotation devices. The rest of the group moved on to the deeper waters while I tried to leverage my weight onto the water jugs and become one with the pool. It was proving difficult. More difficult than that was swimming with two rope swings hanging from my head.

  After our swimming class, the other girls would change and quickly put their heads under the dryer before we could head out into the Canadian winter.

  I, on the other hand, would need the full school day for the heat to penetrate the mass of my hair. After the second class, I realized that I could not dry the hair right in the braid, and to the cheers of my classmates, I unraveled my Rapunzel plaits to dry my knee-length locks. I knew I might get in trouble with my mom, who would have to redo them, but the kids were fawning over me like they had just found out I was a foreign princess. I would just tell my mom that my elastics fell out, because a few hours of popularity was worth the risk.