The Outsider, page 1
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
Listen…
I’m not sure you should be reading this book. The only reason to do it is if you’re not sure… about ANYTHING.
This is not a success story, it’s a search. There isn’t a hero in this book, just a fool. All you will find in this book is someone who is lost. It doesn’t go in the right order, it’s full of distractions, and most of it is random. What I’ve learned is that life is also full of distractions. This book is about someone in the middle of their life with no answers, just more questions.
If you’re a winner, this may not be your book. Just to make sure, after every chapter I have included a story of failure. Call it a short dose of grounding. I hate an arrogant memoir.
This book is for fellow wanderers, complete vagabonds, utter idiots, committed clowns, and lonely people looking to belong. Always looking, never knowing.
If that’s you, this book belongs to you.
Here’s looking at you.
For my parents, Ranu and Madhur.
See? I FINALLY did some homework.
All of my love.
INTRODUCTION FUCK THIS SHIP
Vir as a child on vacation in Italy. Picture, if you will, the most beautiful sunset you have ever seen. Each shade is perfect. It’s fading, but it hasn’t quite disappeared yet, this blurry ball of orange in the sky that ripples into pink and purple shimmers. Imagine golden clouds over an ocean with water so still it’s like god’s mirror. There are no Instagram influencers taking selfies, no TikTok trends compelling you to stay glued to your phone. Zero distractions.
The scene is accompanied by tinny dance music blaring from unseen speakers, which is slowly drowned out by the sound of the waves. A luxury ship sails away into the distance, taking the music with it. A lone lifeguard scans the coast. A Mexican man sits at a tiny plastic desk on a pier, checking passports and visas as tourists enter and exit the next ship coming to port. Beside him on the pier, watching all of this, is a young Indian man. He’s laughing, thinking: Fuck this sunset. Fuck this beach. Fuck Carnival Cruise Line. Instagram influencers didn’t even exist yet, but if they had, he would have said fuck them too, on principle.
That young Indian man is—surprise!—me. I sit on the pier and let the warm water wash over my feet as I sob with laughter. I am looking at the most beautiful thing I have ever seen (the sunset, not the cruise ship), yet I feel completely broken. The tragedy of the situation is so deep, it becomes hilarious. I am bankrupt, hungover, dumped, lost, fired, I have sand in my trousers, and I just want to go home. It is both humorous and sad.
The ship that was supposed to take me home is sailing away, getting smaller with each wave that crashes into its hull. Somehow, despite the fact that I’m stranded in a foreign country, I know that it is going to be okay. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be laughing, right?
If this logic makes zero sense to you, then your logic would be correct.
In case you’re getting excited that you’re about to dive into the pages of a riveting tale about a mysterious ship and the handsome Indian man who’s supposed to be on it—chill. Just so we are clear, this book is not The Da Vinci Code. There is no murder, no historical saga, very few chase scenes (unless you count multiple instances of me running from malicious boarding school teachers), and no discovery of god. Okay fine, there is one discovery of god.
But back to that young man who is laugh-crying/cry-laughing on the beach.
I am in Cozumel, Mexico, one of the most beautiful places in the world, listening to a six-star luxury ship blow its horn as it heads back to the United States with a thousand drunk Indians on board. Sadly, I am not one of those drunk Indians, even though I am supposed to be on the ship.
I am the ship comedian. Or, I was the ship comedian.
During the forty-eight whole hours I spent on the ship, it felt weirdly ironic to be part of a group of a thousand Indians planning to invade a Mexican island to blare Hindi music while having a dandiya dance party for six hours dressed head to toe in heavy Indian clothing. I’ve never seen white, mostly naked tourists look as confused as when they saw an army of naked local brown people dancing next to overly dressed foreign brown people, on the same beach. It was like the global extremities of brown had collided and the Indians had won for a night… but then retreated. The retreat makes sense because we’re not historically known for our colonizing abilities.
This dance party happens once a year, thanks to a few rich Indians from Texas who rent out a luxury Carnival Cruise Line ship. They change the menu, the staff (to Indian chefs who make legit Indian food), the music, the entertainment—pretty much everything but the captain and the design of the ship. Then they go on a three-day “family” retreat, where old people mingle, matchmake, and pretend that their kids aren’t doing drugs and having sex in every corner of the ship that has low lighting.
For the amusement of the young people, this “family” took a punt and decided to hire a young comedian who had just graduated from a small Midwestern college. I had done stand-up comedy exactly once before the trip. I said yes not for money but for the alleged “exposure.” Of all the “red flag words” a freelancer can hear, “exposure” is the biggest one. NOTHING good comes after that word. The logic is that because Indians are so well networked, if you perform for one group for next to nothing it will lead to word-of-mouth publicity, and therefore more offers to entertain the next group. What they don’t tell you is that the word of mouth mentions that you perform for next to nothing. As if performing for a bunch of cruise ship guests would land me an Emmy. I took the ship gig to see something new. To feel something new.
I needed a change because I had spent the last four years hopelessly in love with someone who I’d recently found out was cheating on me. Making a roomful of captive rich people laugh (or really, failing to make them laugh) barely dulled the pain. Nor did bingeing on kulfi at the buffet or dancing with an Indian cougar mom who was struggling to not spill piña colada all over herself.
Unfortunately, I was only becoming more miserable by the day. When we had gotten off the ship for the “Cozumel excursion,” I had called my bank from a pay phone (yes, a pay phone) to learn that I was two thousand dollars overdrawn. Now imagine me—scared, heartbroken, and at a loss, literally. My two shows for the one thousand Indians had mostly gone disastrously, with old people scoffing and young people too scared to laugh in front of the uptight elders. I had had sex with a stranger on the ship, and it had NOT gone well. I’d spent my last dollar trying to contact my family, and I couldn’t reach them. And then, as I’d attempted to get on the ship to depart, the tiny Mexican man at the desk on the pier had informed me that my I-20 student visa was expiring and because I had technically left American waters, he couldn’t let me back on.
I was stuck on an island in Mexico that was the size of a public park in New Delhi. Not one of the hundreds of Indians on the ship tried to save me. Thanks, guys.
I asked the man at immigration what I was supposed to do, and he said, “I don’t know, but you have to stay here, outside.”
I was twenty-two years old, exactly half my life ago. I was told I had to stay outside the boat, the country, everything.
As I write this, I am forty-four, and I am still outside.
We live in the future, so we all know I eventually made it back to India.
But I’ll get to that later.
You can probably guess that, aside from not being an action-mystery-thriller full of chase scenes, this isn’t a story about a man who started a comedy scene in Cozumel and grew to be the most beloved (and only) comedian on the island, his humor being the perfect intersection of local and foreign brown.
Rather, it’s about being a perpetual outsider, and finding hope and humor in my alienation and through my failures, which is the story of my life. I’ve lived between countries and continents; I’ve played roles that never really fit but always gave me a clue about the cultural mores of each place I was in. I’m a citizen of everywhere and nowhere all at once.
I’m going to tell you about being an Indian child growing up in cultural confusion, in Lagos, Nigeria, and feeling about as African as I did Indian. And later being a kid from Africa, enrolled in an Indian boarding school (slash ex–military academy) where, let’s just say, “individuality” was not a high priority. And then being thrown out of said boarding school and making my way to a public school in Noida, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where I was the “English speaker.”
My childhood was one of constant transition, relocation, and cultural adaptation. When we left my childhood home in Lagos, I moved from a big, privileged African house to a tiny Indian one, with aging Buddhist grandparents. Later I left Delhi University to go to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois—the Mecca of civilization, if you’ve never left the city limits of Galesburg. I had the honor of being their first-ever Indian theater major.
Later, when I helped build the continental Indian comedy scene from scratch (with the help of thousands of handmade flyers), I was the guy from the U.S. in Mumbai. Or was I the guy from Mumbai in the U.S.? The guy from a Western drama school
I was all of those things at one point: the Western guy for Indian audiences, the Indian guy for Western audiences. The guy outside.
In these pages, you can follow a line zigzagging across the globe and experience my life of cultural confusion firsthand. We will be bullied, we will fall in love, we will fail (and fail hard), we will fuck up, we will fuck around, we will sell out, we will struggle and get famous, we will get rich and declare bankruptcy, we will get charged up, we will be charged with sedition, and we will be celebrated and canceled and reborn. Thrice. At the end of the chapters, you’ll hear about the times I screwed up, said the wrong thing, humiliated myself, and generally did not succeed. Sure, I’ve had successes in my life, and I’m fucking grateful for all of it. But between those successes, there have been many moments that have grounded me and reminded me that I still do not have my shit together. But I’m trying.
Maybe you’re reading this book because you know who I am and want to find out more. Maybe you have no clue who I am, and my face looked funny or mildly appealing as you were glancing at the books in the airport. I’m in the middle of my life, on a journey that has no logical end point. I’m not writing as an eighty-year-old who’s learned all the life lessons, but as a guy who has done some great things, had some wild experiences, and is always striving to find his place. I’m not writing from a place of glory; I’m writing because I know you can relate.
Let me tell you why you should stick around. The comedian in me knows the first five minutes of the show are the promise, and the rest of it is the prestige. So, I tend to come out onstage and just get honest with the audience about what the show is, and then they can decide whether I lived up to it.
I have spent my entire life feeling like I do not belong. I am still searching for a feeling of home, and I do not have all or really any of the answers yet. Maybe I have a few answers. One or two.
Actually, I’ve come to the conclusion that the outside IS my home. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s yours too.
This book is for us, the outsiders.
If you know nothing about me or my story, just know this: Through all of it, I have felt like a boy sitting on a pier, watching a ship he is supposed to be on sail away, with all the dancing cougar moms and horny teenagers in tow. And somehow, I have always managed to notice something beautiful and laugh.
Laughter truly has saved my life.
So let the warm water wash over your feet as you look at the orange sun setting in the sky.
And all together now, let’s say: Fuck this ship. It’s not where we belong.
CHAPTER ONE COMMITTING TO THE BIT
Vir in The Lawrence School, Sanawar. When you’re a kid, you’re supposed to be climbing trees, riding bikes, playing cricket (or baseball, if that’s your poison) in the streets, and getting tucked into bed each night by your family. This is what commercials for everything, from Tide to Disneyland, sell us—one big blissful childhood jumping through sprinklers and riding roller coasters. You’re not supposed to be sitting on a pile of laundry, alone, two continents away from your parents, crying over a beating you received with a hockey stick, which made a perfectly formed Nike sign on each of your ass cheeks. That image of childhood would not sell a lot of detergent.
Why was I sitting on a pile of laundry, you might wonder. It was the only thing soft enough to sit on, given the state of my rear end after the beating. Let me be clear, this is not a ploy for self-pity. It is too early in the book for that. I can promise you, any pity I earn will be purely unintentional. One of the big things I’ve learned along the way is that pity carries zero currency unless you’re trying to do anything but get laid, and that’s usually a one-time thing. No one bangs the person they feel sorry for a second time. I don’t think there is a single Indian reader who will feel bad for me having a sore ass. For most Indians, ass whoopings are a big part of our childhoods. Americans kneel down to eye level and sternly (but gently) tell a child to “make better choices.” Indian parents do a surprise full-body assault with a rubber slipper, so the child stays alert until they are eighty-five years old. My grandfather once legendarily tied my father to a tree and beat him; he then took a break from beating my father to go drink some water. Who hydrates mid–child abuse?
Many Indian kids from my generation had two states of being: high-alert ninja… and dead. My parents, however, never hit me, not once. They hired someone else to do it for them.
Welcome to boarding school, where for the past hundred years, young, impressionable Indian children have been thoughtfully molded into raging adult assholes. Perhaps some kids do thrive in this environment (and by “thrive,” I mean develop military-level discipline, graduate with top honors, and make millions as deeply repressed surgeons, engineers, or politicians). As a child who enjoyed scaring the hell out of my mother by walking along balconies and railings four stories high, I probably would have benefited from acquiring some sense of discipline. I am not condemning all boarding schools. They produce many great leaders and successful people who win awards, run countries, and harbor serious anger issues, having internalized the idea that a B+ will equal sudden death. In essence, my theory is that boarding schools produce two types of people: happy conformists and miserable misfits.
If you’re reading his book, you already know which one the author is.
My boarding school was called The Lawrence School, Sanawar. To this day, it’s beautiful in structure and location, with historic brick buildings covered in lush ivy and surrounded by forests of towering pine and other conifer trees. The school is nestled in the gorgeous Kasauli hills in northern India and spreads over more than one hundred acres. It’s probably the most stunning campus you will ever see in your life, a lovely place where, in my time, children were beaten up regularly. It is technically one of the oldest private boarding schools in the world, an ex–military academy founded by Sir Henry Lawrence and his wife, Honoria, more than 175 years ago, back when women were sucked into corsets and a French astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier told everyone there was a planet named Vulcan hanging out next to Mercury (there’s not).
The campus includes about thirty grand buildings that look just like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, complete with British architecture and pointy roofs and turrets. There are sweeping views and painstakingly detailed staircases everywhere you look. There are five hockey fields, two swimming pools, tennis courts, soccer fields, and a chapel with stained glass windows.
It was a place for the privileged, the one percenters. My mother attended the school, as did all her siblings and relatives going back several generations, which is why my parents sent my sister, Trisha, and me there when I was only nine years old. We elite children would wake up to the sound of a bugle at 5:30 in the morning, do our physical exercises, march to breakfast, and attend class in the most pristine colonial building you’ve ever seen. After class, we’d march, literally, military-style, to lunch. We’d have sports in the afternoon, “enjoy” supper and tea in the communal rooms, and be marched back to our architecturally superior dormitories by 7:00 p.m.
The dormitories were basically long hallways. Each was a room that was fifty feet wide and four hundred feet long, with rows of beds on either side along the longer walls, and next to each bed was a tiny locker that held all your belongings. So, at any given time you were surrounded by about fifty boys. If you cried, they could hear you. If you were homesick, they could hear you. If you wet the bed, they would know. I sometimes think back to my first year at that school and remember how many young boys I could hear quietly sobbing because they missed their moms. It also makes you realize crying is kind of contagious. You’d wake up in the middle of the night because someone else’s crying woke you up, and then you’d miss your mom too. Plus it’d be dark and kind of cold. Now you’re crying in a chorus of eight other boys. God forbid one of you should make the walk over and console even one of the others. You just lie there in the dark, kind of comforted by the fact that at least you’re not alone. Some of those scared little boys would go on to become brave little soldiers who marched in lockstep through the campus to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Some of them, like me, would be thrown out of boarding school by the time they were thirteen.
