On the Outside Looking Indian Read online

  on the

  outside

  looking

  indian

  on the

  outside

  looking

  indian

  HOW MY

  SECOND CHILDHOOD

  CHANGED MY LIFE

  Rupinder Gill

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Rupinder Gill

  Cover design by Jaya Micelli

  Book design by Tiffany Estreicher

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Originally published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart: March 2011

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: May 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gill, Rupinder, date.

  On the outside looking Indian : how my second childhood changed my life /

  Rupinder Gill.—1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, c2011.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57525-3

  1. Gill, Rupinder. 2. Women, East Indian—Canada–Biography. 3. East Indians— Canada—Biography. 4. East Indians—Canada—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  CT310.G435A3 2012

  971.00491’4—dc23

  2012001308

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For my parents and my siblings,

  who, in letting me tell my story, let me tell theirs too.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: Girls Gone Mild

  Part One

  One: The Facts of no Life

  Two: The Little Indian Mermaid

  Three: Perfect Strangers Me and Rhythm

  Four: No Animal House

  Five: Trying-to-stop-growing Pains

  Six: Sleepover Club

  Seven: Tennis the Menace

  Eight: Driving Miss Desi

  Nine: Step by Step

  Ten: Dog Meets World

  Eleven: Lady and the Camp

  Twelve: Gimme a Break!

  Thirteen: (Leaving) the Office

  Fourteen: The Wonder (What I was Thinking) Years

  Fifteen: Manhattan

  Part Two

  Sixteen: Movin’ on up to a Deluxe Apartment in the Sky

  Seventeen: Thirty Going on Thirteen

  Eighteen: Curbed Enthusiasm

  Nineteen: Diff’rent Strokes

  Twenty: Blind Date

  Twenty-One: Everybody Loves Roti

  Twenty-Two: Come and Knock on My Door

  Twenty-Three: I Dream of Tv

  Twenty-Four: Give My Regards to Broadway

  Part Three

  Twenty-Five: Let’s Make a Daal

  Twenty-Six: The Wonderful World of Disney

  Twenty-Seven: Holiday Special

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  girls gone mild

  There is a phenomenon in Amish culture called “Rumspringa,” where Amish adolescents are permitted to break free from their modest and traditional lifestyles and indulge in normally taboo activities. They dress how they want, go out if and when they please, smoke, drink, and party like it’s 1899. At the end of their Springa Break, they decide whether they will maintain their new lifestyles or return and join the Amish Church.

  In Indian adolescence, you never break free of the rules. You cook, clean, babysit, clean, get good grades, clean, be silent, clean, and don’t challenge your parents in any way, especially while cleaning. This was my life. I grew up in a town whiter than snow, about an hour outside of Toronto. Like most children of immigrants, I was raised by the rules of one culture and looked longingly at those living a distinctly different way.

  I didn’t have the time for a continent-wide census, but from what I know, this is how the typical North American kid spends its summer vacations growing up:

  July: Summer camp, family trip, or cottage. Activities include swimming, canoeing, traveling, laughter, horseplay, tomfoolery, and general merriment. Mother makes glazed hams while father reads Russian classics and smokes a pipe. Kids dance around maypoles.

  August: Return home and play with friends, have sleepovers, take weekend trips, and shop for fabulous new back-to-school clothes while dreading the inevitable return to academia.

  Here is how I spent my summer vacations growing up:

  July: TV room. Activities include hanging out with my sisters and watching anything and everything on television, including Welcome Back, Kotter; Who’s the Boss?; 227; and various other programs offering canned laughter and some much-needed escapism. Brief breaks for housecleaning and being nagged for not cleaning enough.

  August: Basement TV room (much cooler). Count down the return to school/find blank VHS tapes on which to tape Days of Our Lives (dying to know if Patch and Kayla will get together!). Fight with parents about their annual two-shirts, two-pants, back-to-school shopping policy. Pray that sideburns spontaneously fall off by Labor Day.

  If an Indian version of a Rumspringa existed, a “Ram-Singha” of sorts, I would bet my last rupee that at the end of it, only one out of every hundred kids would return to their traditional Indian upbringings. The rest of us would be hanging at the mall in acid-washed jeans, schooling the younger members of the group on how to undo their parental shackles and integrate into Western society. Sessions would be set up for courses like “You Are Not Your Cousin Ravi: How to Function in a Culture That Doesn’t Compare You Against Everybody Else’s Kids” and “Less Is More: A Workshop in Applying Men’s Musk Oil Cologne.”

  Unfortunately no such program existed during my adolescence, so my parents raised us by the standard rules of northern Punjab nunneries. I don’t wholly blame my parents for my lackluster childhood. Having been to India, I am aware that the majority of kids there don’t spend their summers singing around campfires or learning to play the flute. From a young
age, you are expected to make a contribution to the house, not simply hang your favorite cartoon posters up in it.

  Whenever we complained, my parents liked to remind us that they didn’t grow up like Richie and Joannie Cunningham either. “When I was a kid, we made toys out of mud,” my dad once said. This was the Indian equivalent of the walking-two-miles-to-school tale that white parents used as their trump card. According to my dad, they would fashion mud cars, mud guns, or mud animals and pray it didn’t rain before they finished their game of cops and robbers.

  With their own childhoods so limited, I understood why they didn’t see value in the things we were missing out on. But the fact that they seemed to miss was that they weren’t living in India anymore.

  They tried desperately to hold on to their culture. For years, the only friends they had were fellow Indians. I took the opposite approach. Growing up, I had friends but I didn’t have a single Indian friend. This was partially due to the fact that there were only a few other Indians in our primary school but also because I was not interested in all things Indian. I grew bored of Bollywood films, didn’t listen to Indian music, and ate cereal for dinner so I didn’t have to eat saag. I viewed the fact that I was Indian as the reason I lived my life hanging out in my basement. It was the reason I couldn’t go to dances, go to movies past 5 P.M., take singing lessons, or be friends with boys, so I wasn’t really interested in embracing any more of the culture than I was required.

  In high school, there were a few other Indian kids at my school, who all hung out together, but I never made it into the fellowship. I didn’t know the first thing about the latest and greatest Bhangra tracks and couldn’t roll a Samosa crust to save my life.

  That left my only source of comparison to be with my white friends, and it seemed fairly clear that we had very different lives. For starters, they had two distinctive eyebrows while I had one hibernating slug atop my eyes. Their parents knew the names of their kids’ friends and welcomed them into their homes. But more importantly, they had freedom. My version of freedom, at least. They had the luxury of indulging their interests. They went to “lessons” and “hung out” on weekends. They went on family trips and actually had stories to tell in September when the teacher asked us what we did on our summer vacations.

  I wanted that and didn’t understand why I couldn’t have it. Suffice it to say, my parents were strict. I was rarely allowed to go out. I wasn’t allowed to take lessons, or talk on the phone with boys, or for extended periods with girls. I was discouraged from being too involved in extracurricular activities. I was expected to have good grades, although cleaning and taking care of the needs of houseguests trumped homework. I was not allowed to attend sleepovers nor were my friends ever invited into our home. I was, however, permitted to watch hours upon hours of television because television kept us quiet and indoors. Unfortunately for my parents, it just further exposed us to lives that other kids were leading. Those kids had even cooler clothes and adventures than the real kids I knew, pushing my feelings of unjustness into feelings of anger. I wanted to punch the TV every time those smug Cosby kids were on it.

  One sunny August weekend not too long ago, my high school friends and I went up to our friend Jessie’s cottage. We were celebrating her and our friend Johanna’s upcoming weddings. As I sat on the dock and watched my friends swim in a crystal-clear lake, I felt envious. It was not for their marriages, but for their ability to swim. I couldn’t swim. I had spent my whole life sitting on pool decks, standing in shallow ends, or simply avoiding the situation altogether. If we’d been at an ice-skating rink instead of a lake, I wouldn’t have been able to participate there either. Ditto for skiing, tennis, gymnastics, camping, swapping stories about family vacations, or reminiscing about teenage love. I didn’t have camp friends or photos of me dressed as a bumblebee in my dance classes. Never having been on a team, I didn’t have a rusty Little League trophy.

  I had always joked about how boring and uneventful my childhood had been. That day, the reality of it truly hit me. I had lost hundreds of hours of my childhood and missed countless experiences as I sat in front of that television. It may have been that I had just turned thirty, an age that makes you evaluate your life, whether you want to or not. It may also have been that I was surrounded by the very friends I watched have the childhood experiences I wanted.

  For years I believed that childhood experiences (or the lack thereof) were strictly once in a lifetime. I always thought, When I have my own kids, they’ll do all of the things I never did. But that day, as I contemplated risking death for a few minutes of feeling the water lap around me, I didn’t care about those hypothetical future kids. Those jerks weren’t going to put me through eighteen hours of labor and be rewarded for it with clarinet lessons. Out of a childhood lived in a fun-proof cave had grown an adult who didn’t take chances, who didn’t boldly go anywhere, and who was, well, quite bored with my routine-filled life. I needed to experience what I missed for myself, or I would forever live a life of sitting on the sidelines.

  When I got back to the city, I vowed I would finally learn to swim. As I researched lessons in my neighborhood, I started to get excited at the thought of diving into a pool on a hot day, like they always do in diet soda commercials. I also started thinking about all of the other lost experiences of youth. There were so many other things I wished I had done as a kid, so whenever I would think of a new one, I would write it down. Soon I became overly ambitious. As summer gave way to the cool of fall, and the fall turned to the bitter cold of winter, my list grew. I culled out some items because I really didn’t think it was that important that I learned to tie-dye my own scrunchies, and soon I had created a workable list of goals.

  It wasn’t until January that I started to take action on the list. It was a new year, I was thirty, and it felt like the perfect time for a new start. The items on the list were some of the missing links between the life I had and the one I wanted. A few were life skills, some were just desires, but all of them were important enough that I felt they warranted pursuing. There were a million more items I could have added, but I started by setting five concrete goals to tackle. The list read as follows, in no particular order:

  1. LEARN TO SWIM. Indians don’t swim. They don’t have cottages, they don’t go on cruises, and they are rarely seen basking in the sun at the beach. Indian girls especially don’t swim because only a fool would think that learning a lifesaving skill was more important than keeping your body hidden forever. No doubt the women’s Indian swimming team practices in full snowsuits with matching glittery bracelets. This was a life skill I just assumed I would never have and it was time to change that thinking.

  2. TAKE LESSONS. Oh, how I wanted to take lessons when I was a kid. How I wanted to hate my piano teacher and do dance routines in the junior high talent show like all of the other girls. What I would have given to say, “I can’t, I have karate,” or “No thanks, I have to get to gymnastics,” instead of “I have to go! It’s my night to clean the stove!”

  3. VISIT DISNEY WORLD. Yes, I know, not every kid visited Disney World, but I always dreamed of it. Like many children with boring home lives, my fantasy life was incredibly vivid and involved many imaginary characters from the Disney catalog, children’s stories, and various nonsensical cartoons. We would record Disney specials from TV onto VHS tapes and watch them over and over, fast-forwarding through the commercials for Hypercolor shirts and MiniPops.

  4. GO TO CAMP. I longed to sleep on a flea-bitten mattress on a wooden plank, swim among leeches, and sing “Kumbaya” while roasting s’mores to perfection. In the seventh grade, the junior high school offered an end-of-the-year camp trip. Two weeks before the deposit was due, I took the permission slip to my dad and offered him a sales pitch straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross. “Forget it,” he told me. I was always given the suggestion to “forget” whatever I wanted. If only he could have forgotten to say no just once. As a desperate measure, I went to my mom, who simply asked what
my father had said. Two days before the application was due, I grew frantic. All of my classmates had already committed and the only people outstanding were ethnic girls and suspected bed wetters. Knowing that both of my parents would leave by 6:30 A.M. for their jobs, I woke up at six and went downstairs for one last effort. At least they were considerate enough to yell no in less than a minute, allowing me to go back to bed and get another hour of sleep before school.

  5. HAVE A PET. I have wanted a dog my whole life. All of my sisters have. We would take books out of the library on dog breeds, buy dog magazines, cut pictures of cute pups out of them, and dream of the day that our parents’ tundra hearts would melt. My mom always had the same response: “I have enough animals in this house already!” It was a killer joke in the Indian mothers’ circle. But I was out of her house now, and what would make my house a home more than a furry foot warmer to sit with me while I watched Seinfeld reruns?

  I typed out my list, the same way I had typed out hundreds of lists before it. And like every list I had ever made, I wondered how I was going to really achieve any of it.

  “Set one new New Year’s resolution for each year until you’re done,” my friend Madeleine suggested.

  “You know how that goes,” I said. Madeleine and I met in college and created a deep friendship based on a mutual love of eating, complaining about our weight, and cracking jokes nobody else found amusing. Each year we swapped lists of New Year’s resolutions that we abandoned like clockwork by January 15.

  In fact, I don’t think I ever finished one of my New Year’s resolutions in my whole life. I never learned to do the Worm (1988), alphabetized my VHS movie tapes (1994), read every book on the New York Times fiction list (1998), or lost ten pounds (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006).

  If I tried to do one item on the list each year, I’d have one foot in a ballet shoe and the other in the grave by the time I got around to them all. There was only one logical solution I could think of: I would have to do them all at once.