“Come downstairs, Pussy Auntie is here!”
The other aunties would call this out to us as her cream-colored Ford Taurus station wagon pulled up to our house. We’d descend the stairs amid the mouthwatering scent of samosas sizzling, listening to the uncles’ jovial greetings,
“Hi Pussy!”
The aunties—wholesome immigrant women—never could figure out why the kids snickered and giggled every time Pussy Auntie visited.1
Pussy Auntie was hardworking, like most of my parents’ friends. She’s a pediatrician who came to America in search of a better life, and she was adamant that her kids—and her friends’ kids—study hard and pursue careers in the sciences. To an outsider, it might seem a bit invasive to hear that family friends would take such intimate interest in the personal lives of kids who aren’t their own, but that’s not really how the Indian community views things. Culturally, having your parents’ friends dispense advice about how you should live your life is supposed to feel far less like an imposition and more like the blessing of extra community support—from their perspective at least. I had the benefit of love from people we called aunties and uncles—not related by blood, but by an even closer bond of immigration experience, language, and culture. Like my parents, they risked it all, sacrificed, and worked toward a better life for their kids.
But as a teenager, having so many concerned adults around just felt like extra pressure, and these family gatherings grew tricky for me to navigate given my growing interest in the arts. On one hand, all the parents would encourage me to do a monologue or stand-up routine （which usually consisted of a John Leguizamo sketch I had memorized）。 That was always the clear high point of the evening for me. After that things went downhill.
Pussy Auntie was known to corner the high school kids in small groups while other aunties and uncles watched her orchestrate an impressive quizzing on which practical plans they had. Here’s how I remember it:
PUSSY AUNTIE: What’s the latest, kids? Where is everybody applying for the college?
VARUN: Well, my first choice is Princeton for premed, but my safety is Hopkins.
I roll my eyes. This kid’s fucking safety is Hopkins?
PUSSY AUNTIE: Very nice! So many choices. When we were young, we did not have so much choice. Aarti?
AARTI: I’m still a junior, Auntie, but I want to go to Boston University…
Disappointed nods from several aunties and uncles while they share concerned looks around the room.
AARTI:… for their seven-year combined medical program!
Dramatic sighs of relief, followed by excited nods of affirmation.
PUSSY AUNTIE: Wow! We came here with nothing, and you are going for seven-year medical program! Good plan, good plan. Nikhil?
NIKHIL: I got into Yale early. I’m premed.
This dude is worse than Varun.
PUSSY AUNTIE: Wonderful news! Very practical. Kalpen?
All eyes on me. Do I lie? Do I tell the truth? At sixteen, the pressure feels ridiculous.
ME: I um… I think I want to go to NYU or UCLA. I’m going to become an actor and filmmaker.
Freeze frame, record scratch. Everyone stares at me for what feels like forever. Pussy Auntie bursts out laughing.
PUSSY AUNTIE: Very creative! Very creative response!
Her smile curtly disappears. Her eyes narrow.
PUSSY AUNTIE: Seriously, what are you going to study in college?
Like a great many immigrants, the Indian American community considered my passion for the arts a perfectly nice hobby—an uncomfortable phase that I’d God willing grow out of when I became older and sensible. Sort of a professional puberty. The pressure to conform to their aspirations of careers in medicine or engineering was enormous—anyone who wasn’t pursuing these professions was considered to be going after “a nontraditional field.” And it was strange how intimately these professions were tied to the community’s shared identity.
Whenever I’d talk about my love for film, I’d hear, “We don’t do those things. We are Indian.” Why was being Indian mutually exclusive from having a career in the arts? If I became a professional actor, would they suddenly not call me Kalpen Modi?2
This is probably a good time to talk about the sacrifices my parents and their friends endured to make it in America. My dad, Suresh, was born a small blond boy in Kansas and adopted by an Indian family in Mumbai. No, he was born a black-haired boy in a small village in Gujarat, India, and raised primarily in a studio apartment in Mumbai with four sisters.
When I say Dad and his sisters grew up in a studio apartment, I’m being generous. It was closer to what we might call a tenement. Each of the two identical buildings in their complex had four stories. Each story had thirty, one-room units. The front of the room had two single beds and a door that opened onto an outdoor walkway lined with entrances to the other studio apartments. This overlooked a courtyard. The walkway and courtyard were where the kids from the units in both buildings would play together; I loved hanging out with them when we’d visit Bapaji and Ba over the summers. Toward the back of the room was a kitchen area with a narrow ladder that led to an open-railinged platform with a double bed and small closet; it was my favorite place to sleep because you got a bird’s eye view of the apartment. The unit had no toilet. For that, you had to walk out the back door next to the “kitchen,” pass the large drum used for storing water （running water only came for a couple of hours a day）， and go down the length of the rear outdoor walkway, where you’d come to a room subdivided with communal concrete holes in the floor （squat toilets, sandas） for each level’s thirty studio apartments to share.
When you did have to use the sandas, it was a whole ordeal. For starters, you’d have to put on slippers specifically set aside for the purpose. Toilet paper was a luxury that was hard to come by in India in those days, so after putting on your sandas slippers, you’d need to stop at your unit’s drum and fill your own bucket of water, which you’d carry with a bar of soap and small plastic cup to wash your little butt with. Anyone you passed would know exactly where you were headed. There was—obviously—no privacy anywhere, which I guess explained why years later, when I was a teenager, my dad would knock on my closed bedroom door and say things like, “Why do you need privacy? You are fourteen.” I’m lucky he never said, “Why do you need toilet paper? We have running water.”
Anyway, that’s what life was like when I’d stay with Bapaji and Ba, and how Dad lived until he immigrated in the early 1970s to pursue a graduate engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology, just outside New York City. The day he left India, a contingent of extended family members—aunts, uncles, and cousins—joined his parents and sisters at the airport to see him off. They came dressed in their best suits and freshly pressed saris. The entire family’s hopes, dreams, and finances were resting on my father. He had to succeed in America.
The story goes that because Bapaji was a manager in the accounts department of Air India, my father managed to get a free flight to the States. Among the first in our family to leave India, he landed at JFK Airport with the equivalent of twelve dollars in his pocket and dreams of opportunity that were only possible in America: financial stability, new discovery, access to the best education for his future children. The first few nights, he stayed with a college friend who had immigrated earlier, before finding a small, shared apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. Dad lived simply, eager to study and work hard—both full-time. He patiently climbed his way up the ladder of the American dream, toiling and saving so that he could build a life for himself. After graduation and a little over a year into his first professional engineering job, he followed an adventurous streak and took a six-month sabbatical to backpack through Europe on a microbudget. After resuming work in the States, he would periodically return to visit his family in Mumbai. On one such trip, he met and married my mom in a beautiful, if hastily put together by today’s standards, ceremony. （Hey, Dad had to get back to America! Work was waiting!）