The Outsider, page 7
Those teenage years living with my grandparents were the only time in my life that I had a stable, long-term sense of home. They didn’t move houses; they didn’t even rearrange the furniture. We watched soaps and talked about Bhutan. As an adult, I look back at those years with my grandparents as a magical time. In my career, I’m never really in a place for long at all. Being at Baba and Bari Mama’s might have been the only time (since I don’t remember much before boarding school) where I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, except maybe to the Delhi airport to dream about one day seeing the world. I liken that experience to living in Forrest Gump’s mother’s house. There were always interesting people passing through, heading to faraway places that inspired Forrest (and Vir) to fantasize about exploring the world and having wild adventures.
It’s weird to talk about your formative years in retrospect. It feels like those years are just waiting to be judged, to see if they qualify as a decent childhood or not. My childhood was certainly not normal, but does that mean it was bad? I had Ramesh’s food, Bari Mami’s AC (sometimes), Baba’s stories, American music mixed with Buddhist chanting, and a tiny corner of an overpopulated house. Would it have been any better with just me and two parents? I don’t know. Perhaps I don’t know any better. Perhaps that’s exactly the lesson it taught me.
You’re not normal, this is not normal—now deal with it. And head to the airport.
A SHORT DOSE OF GROUNDING
I was a national gymnast when I was in Sanawar in grade six. We went to Cuttack in Odisha from Himachal Pradesh, which was a forty-eight-hour train ride, to compete in the All India Nationals. We came in second to last.
CHAPTER FOUR FOOL FOR LOVE
Vir and Shivani at their wedding in Sri Lanka. Close your eyes, take a deep breath. Now, when I give you your mantra, I want you to repeat it to yourself and let it sync with your breath… Eventually you will find that you are thinking rhythmically and the mantra will move to the back of your mind.
A fun fact that is not on my résumé, since I’m a comedian and my résumé is basically one promoter telling another promoter that I’m funny, is that I can teach Transcendental Meditation (TM). Well… I tried to teach it. Instead of making me relaxed or wise, though, it just made me sleepy. Honestly, I didn’t learn it for a noble reason. I only learned TM for the money and the girl. That’s something not too many men get to say: I meditated for a girl.
Pretty much anything good or bad in my life, I have done for a girl. I’m an idiot when it comes to love. A pushover, a carpet, a doormat, a hopeless romantic, an impractical fool, and, yes, a Transcendental Meditator. So I can teach you to do TM not because I love a silent repetition of sound. It’s because of Aarti, and my undying (at the time) love for her. See, I went from being that kid with the mushroom cut to a guy who convinced girls not only to date him but to enter into actual, committed, long-term relationships with him. And when I’m in love, I’m all in. It’s my nature to be 900 percent committed. After spending many years in which my relationship was with a stolen issue of Penthouse magazine, I grew up to be a total romantic. I turned into the guy who orchestrated a complex, multipronged marriage proposal that involved four thousand roses, a treasure hunt, and not just a single soufflé but handpicked desserts from ten different restaurants (more on this insanity later).
I love women, and I love being in love. The problem is that I have no idea when I am being hit on, how to hit on someone, how to take charge of a date, how to show women the strong man figure that 99 percent of Instagram videos preach you should show them. I have none of it. I kind of stumbled into sex like you would into a nice restaurant in the West Village in New York. We don’t know how we got here, but let’s try it. Every single woman I have ever been with has had to make the first move, without exception. Getting up in front of nine thousand people and doing that first joke? Not a problem. But saying one sentence to one person about my romantic intentions is pretty much impossible for me.
I guess this chapter is the tea when it comes to my love life. Let’s spill some.
The first girl I ever dated was named Sara. We met when I was in grade twelve and she was in grade eleven. It took me seven months to ask her out. When I eventually did, it was because we were on a school trip and she had fallen sick. I sat down next to her on the bus when she wasn’t feeling well and let her put her head on my shoulder, and it eventually landed on my chest when she fell asleep. Guys, do not underestimate the “shoulder to cry on and occasionally vomit on” move. It’s very powerful. If your woman has a male friend who shows up a lot when she is sick, get that man the fuck out of your life.
When Sara’s clammy, contagious head fell on my lap, I remember every molecule in my body going stiff because I had never had a girl lean on me before. Everything about this bus ride felt magical—the smell of her hair, how she kind of adjusted herself and held tighter when the bus took a turn (thank god for hilly roads). But more than anything, I loved the feeling of being someone else’s safety zone. The fact that holding on to me made her feel like she was going to be okay? That felt like the most massive privilege in the world. All I wanted to do was protect her, while secretly wishing she never got better so this moment could continue.
After she recovered, we became boyfriend and girlfriend. When the final bell would ring in school, we would meet outside and hold hands for twelve minutes while we walked to our school buses. This was all the physical contact we ever had, and it was all I could manage. I believe the word “coward” applies here, although in the 1990s we called it “being respectful.” Sara was from an orthodox Muslim family. I knew her mother had passed when she was only five and she lived with a very strict father and brother. They didn’t know about me, and I was assured that if they found out it would be a massive problem. It’s weird how these little realities of the world don’t hit you when you’re seventeen and in love. Or maybe they don’t hit the person they’re not a reality for. Sara would have this little sadness in her eyes when she told me about them, as if she knew this relationship was doomed. So for twelve minutes a day I would hold her hand, and our religions and our very different realities wouldn’t matter.
Despite the fact that our love was doomed, one day Sara said, “Why don’t you ever kiss me?”
We were about thirty feet away from my bus, which was getting ready to leave. I was going to graduate soon. I had my final exams in one week. Both of us were secretly worried about how we were going to continue with me leaving for college and her still being in school here. I fumbled and said something like “I didn’t know you wanted me to.” She smiled gently and said, “I REALLY want you to.”
I said, “Fine, next week I am going to come over to you and kiss you.” Sara was leaving to go to her family’s house for the summer, which was far from school. I didn’t know where they lived, since we never hung out outside of school, and then of course there was the issue of the dad and the brother. But what’s reality to a young guy who is about to have his first kiss? I don’t know why I needed to wait a week to make this kiss happen. Maybe I needed seven days of prep time, since I’d been fantasizing about kissing her for weeks.
The next week couldn’t come soon enough. I lied to my parents and told them I was going to a group study session. I took three buses for over two hours to the Badarpur border to a colony called Charmwood Village, which was sort of a perfect suburbia. It was summer and about 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.8 degrees Celsius). I carried flowers and a card from Archies Gallery. When we met, we walked around in the heat for a bit until she said, “We have to find a place to hide. Everyone here knows my father.”
Charmwood had these apartment buildings with shaded staircases, and we found a staircase in a building far away from hers. We sat down and talked for five hours. Finally, she put her hand on my knee, and then her head on my shoulder. She looked at me like she expected something, and that something was a kiss. Time stopped, as did my lungs, my brain, and my extremely frozen arms. She started to laugh and then pulled me in and kissed me. Then she said, “You look terrified.” The kiss must have lasted all of eight seconds, and then I had to go. I spent two hours on a bus home with a giant, stupid smile on my face. I couldn’t wait to kiss her again. I planned to go back the next week. At that point I would have climbed Kilimanjaro if it meant I got to kiss her again.
The next day I got a phone call from Sara. She was crying.
“Someone saw us and told my dad. I can’t see you again. I can’t be with a Hindu boy. He’s really upset. He’s threatening to pull me out of school.”
Fuck.
I don’t remember what I said, but there wasn’t much of an argument to be had. She had told me this day would come, and her dad did exactly what she had said he would do. I had just graduated, and she had another year left in school. We cried, and she told me to work hard in college. That night I went out and got drunk with friends. I felt sorry for myself for a long time. My heart was broken. Sara had one of the gentlest smiles I’d ever seen. It was the first time the adult world had slapped me around a little bit, besides those lashes in boarding school, I guess. Now when I think about it, I can’t imagine what she went through at home. Maybe today we’d have had a chance at convincing her dad I was an okay guy. Maybe I should’ve been a man and kissed her sooner. Maybe the Hindu-Muslim divide is too wide for two teenagers to fix.
About fourteen years after I last saw Sara, I was promoting my first Bollywood movie, Delhi Belly. It was my first big release as a movie actor, and it kind of made me who I am today. Aamir Khan (an iconic Hindi movie star), Imran Khan (another gigantic Hindi movie star), Kunaal Roy Kapur (a new guy in films then), and I (also a new guy) were sitting on a news set doing a live interview. By this time Kunaal and I had gotten used to not being asked a single question in the one hundred interviews we’d done so far. Then suddenly, one of the two female anchors looked at me live on the news and said, “Vir, when did you come out of your shell? You were so shy in school.” My coactors looked at me in shock, since this was the first question I’d gotten during our press tour. I certainly hadn’t expected to be asked about my past when in the previous hundred interviews no one seemed to know who the fuck I was. And then the anchor smiled. One of the gentlest smiles I’ve ever seen. Live, on the evening news, I realized I was sitting in front of my first girlfriend, Sara. Her face had changed, her smile hadn’t. I managed some sort of a generic answer: “When I started performing stand-up… blah… blah… blah.” When we finished the interview, we immediately hugged each other—to the surprise of my crew and hers. She told me she put herself through journalism school, stood up to her father, and married a Hindu boy who was a journalist. I held her hand and told her how happy I was for her, how I was with someone wonderful too. I didn’t see a grown woman in a power suit in an expensive news studio; I just saw a girl in her school uniform. Yup. Should’ve kissed her sooner.
Despite being a coward in my younger years, I’m with a wonderful person today. Shivani, my wife and copilot on this crazy ride, is this perfect mix of running hot and keeping me cool. It’s like god took all the passion he could from seven thousand human beings and put it in her without compromising on any practicality. Her passion is contagious, magnetic. She owns every single room she is in. It’s really a marvelous thing to watch. Which I do a lot. Sometimes I will just sit back and watch a room gravitate toward her. We’re this huge contradiction, where I’m an awkward introvert who is a magnetic force at work, and she’s an amazing extrovert who works with animal welfare organizations and stray dogs, where she could not be more gentle. We’re complete opposites, and it has taken me a while to understand that that’s what is required for someone like me. I sometimes say that I made a calculated decision when I chose her. But the truth is, I lucked out and stumbled upon her like I always do. This only happened after many years of dating… and dating badly.
For a guy who loves to travel and roam, to remain untethered to a single location, and who feels most alive when he’s boarding a plane, it’s almost miraculous that I love LOVE as much as I do. I’m not just talking about fleeting love, but long-term, committed-relationship love. I love to pack a suitcase and grab my passport, but I also love to go home to Shivani. It’s a cliché to say that when you find your person, it feels like finding your true home, but in my case, the cliché is true. My relationship keeps me grounded; it gives me that sense of stability that my grandparents’ house in Delhi once gave me. Before I got lucky enough to find someone who would become, in a sense, my home, I had to get smashed on Long Island iced teas, throw up, and make it through what I believe is the worst first date in human history.
This is where Aarti comes in.
It started at a nightclub in Delhi. Picture this: There are flashing blue lights, young people dancing, girls in tight clothes that they’re a little uncomfortable in because it’s a little too hot and crowded in there, and guys in the one set of “going-out clothes” they have who are also uncomfortable, because drinks are really fucking expensive. I was in my first year of college in India, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and looked like a Backstreet Boy fucked a runaway child. I had a middle parting (still) and a baggy-jeans situation going on. The 1996 song “Return of the Mack” was playing. I’d known Aarti for a while because we played basketball together, and I’d had a crush on her through many dunks and three-pointers. She told every single one of our friends that she wanted me to ask her out, so it became a running joke in our college that I did not have the guts to ask this girl out, even though she made it crystal clear that I would get a YES if I did. That night at the club, I finally gathered the courage to walk up and flirt with her for the first time. When I asked for her number, I didn’t pull out a phone or a pen. I was way too cool to record her number. My powers of memorization would surely make me seem like a Marvel hero to this girl. Like an Indian Doctor Strange, an all-powerful dude in a Delhi club with a photographic memory. I asked her for her number and just stood there with my arms by my sides.
“Don’t you want to write it down?” Aarti wisely asked.
“Nah, just tell it to me.”
“Okay. 2752812.”
“Cool. I’ll call you.”
And then I walked off, looking totally smooth and supremely confident in what I’d just done. Secretly my hands were shaking, my legs were shaking, and my memory was… blanking? I completely forgot her number three seconds after walking away. I’m dyslexic, so I’m not sure why I thought I could pull off this trick. Instead of heading out of the club and swallowing my pride, I turned around and approached Aarti. Again.
“Hey. Um. I forgot your number. Can you say it one more time?”
This was not a good look, obviously, but she agreed.
“Do you want to write it down this time?”
“No, I got it.”
I still refused to write anything down, so I guess my pride was still largely intact. She said the numbers again, and this time when I turned and walked away, I repeated 2752812… 2752812… 2752812 until I could exit the club and lunge for the nearest pen. Think about it from her perspective: A dude asks for your number twice in thirty seconds and then walks away reciting it like it’s the answer to a fucking exam question.
It only got worse from there.
I called Aarti and arranged a date. I would take her to—wait for it—TGI Friday’s. What can I say? I was a broke college kid, so it’s not like I could escort her to a Michelin-star spot with white linen tablecloths and a paupiette of Chilean sea bass. TGI Friday’s was as good as it got for me at that time. I put on my best shirt, which was actually a sweater. This might not seem like a strange choice, but it was summertime in Delhi, which means it was eight thousand degrees outside, even at night. I figured Aarti wouldn’t even notice. Fifteen minutes before I was set to pick her up, as I was driving to her house, I decided to call her.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Vir… Remember me?”
“Yes, Vir. We have a date in fifteen minutes.”
“Cool. Cool. Just making sure. See you in… fifteen minutes.”
Now, I had a damn good reason to make that call. A few weeks before, I’d asked another girl out, and when I showed up at her door all dressed up for the date (not in a sweater, mind you), she was wearing denim shorts and a ratty T-shirt, and her hair was in a bun. This wasn’t because that was her style, it was because she’d forgotten all about our date.
“I’m sorry, Vir,” she had said. “I totally forgot. Can we do it another time?”
“Sure, sure. Cool.” I played it off like this happened all the time. I kind of looked away and pointed down her street like I had some business there anyway. This isn’t about you, lady. I was just in the neighborhood running errands and I decided to knock on your door and see if there was any soul-crushing rejection available.
See. Doormat!
That girl was high all the time, so I just assumed that’s why she had completely blanked out on what would have been an epic night with one of the most eligible/eager bachelors in a city of millions. I never went out with the stoner girl, but maybe now you can understand why I felt the need to call Aarti minutes before our date to see if she remembered that I existed? No? Okay, we’ll move on.
