Mom had grown up in that one-bedroom apartment in Mumbai with the photo of Gandhi on the wall. She had three siblings of her own. Their apartment had the luxury of a separate kitchen, but like Dad’s apartment, no steadily running water or toilet.3 She had completed her master’s degree in chemistry and was working for an international company when she left Mumbai to join my dad in New Jersey a few months after they married. It was Mom’s first time living anywhere else. That’s how my parents began their modest lives together, hoping to save up a few bucks and push out a few American anchor babies like me one day.
Their story is classic: It’s the journey of immigrants who come to America with nothing but an education, a mammoth work ethic, and a willingness to sacrifice. When they make it—when they finally achieve some hard-won stability after years of uncertainty—they’ll fight to make sure nothing jeopardizes it. For a lot of Indian immigrants, stability came from careers in medicine and engineering. As you may have heard, this is entirely because of genetics.
The three things scientists have found Indians possess in greater numbers are: 1） a predisposition to excel in the sciences, 2） a high tolerance for tremendously spicy gossip about other Indians, and 3） exceptionally large testicles.
As much as I would love to let you buy into this, the real reason for all those Indian doctors and engineers is that the US government changed immigration laws in the mid-1960s to allow people from Asian countries to fill dire labor shortages in fields that didn’t have enough native-born Americans. If you were from one of these countries （like India） and wanted to pursue a degree and career in a field in which we needed professionals, you could come to the United States. Together, America and the sciences gave my parents and their friends a home, a job, a life. Given how they got here, and how much their new community of recent immigrants shared, it must have been impossible to divorce their professional identities from their ethnic ones. Even more improbable that their large-balls child would gamble it all on a career in the arts. Of course, I didn’t understand immigration laws or sacrifice as a high school kid. I didn’t even understand basic geometry.
* * *
I have always been awful at all things math and science. I could pull a solid B in those subjects. It’s just that by brown people standards, a “solid B” is an “Indian F.” In early childhood, I was used to bringing home minor disappointments in the form of all those recurring report card comments about daydreaming in class. As I got older, showing my parents my grades would usually go something like this:
MOM: A in history.
DAD: A in English.
MOM: What’s this? B in geometry?!
DAD: Oh God.
MOM: How could you get a B?!
DAD: How did this happen?!
ME: It’s not a bad grade, a B is like an 87.
MOM: Eighty-seven?!
DAD: Out of one hundred?!
MOM: What happened to the other thirteen points?!
Between my mom’s master’s degree in chemistry and my dad’s in engineering, it was inconceivable that their eldest son could get anything other than an A in geometry, right?4
For my Bs, I wanted to blame my boring teachers—like Mrs. Teller, who stood five feet tall, was rumored to be ninety-four years old, and taught both physics and math. Mrs. Teller had tiny, arthritic hands—especially tiny, I should say, for an already diminutive woman. When I was bored, I would stare at her unmalleable fingers as she hobbled back and forth at the front of the classroom, admiring how the white chalk made her already pale and wrinkled paws look indecipherable from the hands of a mime. She once cut her thumb on the edge of a chair back and tracked droplets of bright red blood all over her desk for fifteen minutes before noticing. Several students, myself included, tried to get her attention, but she acknowledged neither our raised hands nor her cut finger. That’s how observant she was.
The bigger problem with old Mrs. Teller was that she didn’t enjoy curiosity. She’d drone on about abstract concepts without grounding them in anything concrete or interesting. This drove me totally insane. I’d take out my frustrations in a nerdy, productive way and raise my hand to ask if she could expand on a topic that I found fascinating. “Mrs. Teller,” I’d say, “how do we know the theory of relativity is correct? How much are scientists still trying to prove?” She was always belittling, “My deah boy,” she’d scold while cupping a little piece of chalk in the palm of her amphibious doll hands, “these are questions you will never need to know the answers to unless you intend to pursue a PhD in physics, which I assure you… you will not. The only thing you should be asking today is whether you have memorized enough fuh the test.”
Back at home, “It’s Mrs. Teller’s fault. She’s so boring! It’s all memorization” didn’t go over particularly well. My parents grew up without excuses. Coming from a country that is so highly populated, competition drove not just success but daily survival. Their parents sacrificed basic recreational comforts （they never so much as went out to the movies） in order to put their kids through school. So, when I’d blame my teachers, my dad’s rebuttal was quick: “Mrs. Teller is right! You do have to memorize for the test! It’s a multiple-choice test! The answers are right in front of you, you just have to circle the right one! If you can memorize lines for your school play, you should easily be able to memorize an equation. Why don’t you at least try?” By tenth grade, this was an especially common tactic from my parents: If you can do it with your passion for acting, why are you choosing not to do it with science and math? Why don’t you at least try?
If an exam had an essay component, I had a great shot at a near-perfect score because I could describe all the things I knew. Throw a multiple-choice test on my desk and I was totally stuck. How can anyone possibly quantify the answer with just ONE of these choices? I’d say to myself. I can create a story in which a portion of each of the choices is true.
I’d plead with my Dad to understand: “In acting, the stuff you’re memorizing always makes total sense. Monologues and scenes have logical character arcs. Plot points motivate an actor’s words. I have been trying! Why else would I ask Mrs. Teller so many questions? I want science and math to make sense to me so badly.”
“Science and math do make sense,” he said. “If the issue is the story, find a way to create a plotline or character for math too.”
I began to process Dad’s advice.
When normal people study something, they usually opt for rote memorization. In prepping for a dumb and useless geometry exam, for instance, they might recite “the area of a circle is pi r squared” and “the area of a triangle is one-half base times height” over and over until the formulas stick to the right part of their brains. The problem with me is, I don’t have that part of my brain where formulas stick. It’s missing.
When you memorize lines as an actor, you’re really memorizing a story and a motivation. You’re invested in it. In The Wiz, it was easy to memorize “All you fine ladies out there… ha ha ha… watch out!” because my character is expressing confidence after finally getting his heart. I knew what those words meant. They advanced a plot, a story. In fact, I understood their significance so deeply that I even added a pelvic thrust. What the hell does “the area of a circle is pi r squared” and “the area of a triangle is one-half base times height” mean? Nothing! It means nothing. And teachers would acknowledge nothingness saying, “There’s no story here. You’ll only understand how equations are applicable years from now, if you continue to pursue science.” （But why would I pursue science if you’re not telling me how the equations are applicable now?!）