When I first heard about comedian Zarna Garg — she was born in a rich family with servants, drivers, cooks, nice cars and air conditioning — being homeless on the streets of India, I was perplexed. I wondered what circumstances could cause a person born in a family that lived very well indeed end up in such dire straits. But we’ll come to that soon enough.
Stand-up comic and author Zarna Garg (Courtesy zarnagarg.com)
This American Woman opens with Garg sharing her experience of being the opening stand-up act for Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. She is ecstatic. It was at this moment that she knew she had arrived. She takes us back to her younger days when her father, TJ Mehta, a rich Gujarati businessman, was insisting that she get married early. Having lost her mother to an illness, Zarna rebels and decides to leave home. She ends up broke and hopping from one relative’s house to another as she had no fixed place to stay.
“I couldn’t get rid of a new un-rich smell that had completely enveloped me, no matter how much I scrubbed myself and my clothes. I could hear other people whisper about it,” Garg writes. Personal hygiene does go for a toss when you are fighting for your survival. She wasn’t just homeless in a way we would expect a rebellious child of a rich baron to be homeless — living in a somewhat humble yet cozy apartment instead of a mansion — but “shitting behind a car with dingoes sleeping under it” homeless. Garg had become a traitor, “the golden child who turned against his creator” and she was facing the consequences.
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On a poignant note, she writes, “Running from guaranteed security in a developing country is like pulling the plug on your own life support just to see what happens”. Garg had done exactly that. “Even those close to me didn’t understand why I fought so hard, because they all fell in line and were largely happy,” she observes. “All these people with big degrees will sign away their whole life of freedom for an ounce of security,” Garg’s father had said when she was a child, rather ironically.
I couldn’t help but see a bit of myself in Garg. As a rebellious kid who once refused to ‘fall in line’, I too paid a heavy price until, again much like the author, I decided to go back. My first meal at home made me cry happy tears. “I slept like I was drugged by a serial killer,” Garg says. The feeling of sleeping on a comfortable bed after months of lying on back-breaking, pain-inducing mattresses will make any rebel ‘soft’ and compromise on their ideals.
“I will marry Hitler for this,” says Garg as she stuffs her face with gajar halwa and gobhi parathas. She gives in to her father’s demand but just before her wedding day — in what can be best described as divine intervention — she receives her student visa from the US Embassy. She spends the next few years in Detroit, trying to get a degree and a job.
As someone who struggled, Garg does talk about money in her memoir, but not in the way the average finance influencer does. She isn’t here to give wealth management lessons. She talks about the privilege of having enough money to have one’s basic needs met. It wasn’t until she was a paid stand-up comic that she realized she had been living in survival mode for 30 years, waiting for the next disaster to strike. She wanted to taste American freedom, but it didn’t come easy. She was so consumed with food, clothing and shelter that she didn’t get a chance to live.
She married her husband Shalabh, whom she met via a matchmaking service, shortly after she arrived in Detroit. They moved to Zurich, had kids and Garg decided to pursue her dream of being a stand-up comic. The memoir reverberates with the pain of losing one’s home and the guilt that comes with prioritizing oneself and rebelling against parental authority. The memoir is also very funny. I burst out laughing when Garg described her experience of visiting a parlour for her bridal session. She describes it as essentially two women in hazmat suits swabbing her with “a homemade brew of drain cleaner and industrial fertilizer”.
In possibly the most unhinged lines from the memoir, Garg says: “...go ahead and bleach that ass****! So what if I’m on fire! More! How white can we get it? Make my ass**** look like the ass**** of an American ghost!” Another crazy moment has her mother-in-law’s mother lining up the family’s daughters-in-law according to their beauty. “You’re not the ugliest. You are the second ugliest,” the woman tells Zarna as everyone cheers.
Garg isn’t an ABCD (American Born Indian Desi) but an NRI (Non-Resident Indian) so her observations on the peculiarities of Indian culture are quite tongue-in-cheek. Her humour is similar in its themes to that of Aziz Ansari, Russell Peters and other Indian stand-up comics but stands out for being irreverent, occasionally bashful and (sometimes) foul-mouthed. Before opening for Poehler and Fey, she wonders: “India is incense and chanting for them. Were they ready for a foul-mouthed real-life Indian auntie who hated meditation?” She then decides to give them what they want and meditates on stage.
Garg and Shalabh embody the NRI couple who have embraced the parts of their culture that they most identify with. This memoir reads like a film made by Gurinder Chaddha in collaboration with Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta. It is poignant, somewhat provocative, insightful, and as one would expect from a stand-up comic, full of pithy observations and rib-tickling humour. It is also an ode to believing in yourself when no one else does. The final pages feature an image of Zarna at her first stand-up special. It’s captioned: “If you don’t look up, you may never know there’s a big glittery sign with your name on it.”
Deepansh Duggal writes on art and culture. Twitter: @Deepansh75.
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