You Can’t Be Serious(11)

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?!)

I just couldn’t memorize those equations. If I wanted formulas to make sense, I was going to have to take some of Dad’s advice and define them for myself.



* * *



One night after a particularly huge Gujarati dinner of rotli, daal, bhaat, and shaak (colloquially referred to as RDBS), I was standing in my bathroom shirtless. Staring into the mirror in pajama shorts, toothbrush in hand, I noticed that my tummy looked quite large. Oooh, circle, I thought. Maybe this is how I take Dad’s advice. Maybe today I’ll act math.

Looking at my round belly in the mirror, I came up with a character: Sandra! I was massively pregnant—eight months on, at least. I revealed my two ginormous breasts; not because I was provocative, because of geometry. My belly was the circle I studied earlier: pi r squared. Each breast was a triangle: one-half base times height.

With my toothbrush hanging out of my foamy mouth, I strutted the length of the bathroom like it was a catwalk, rubbing my imaginary pregnant stomach, saying, “Oh hello pi r squared baby. Are you ready to come out of Mommy’s belly?” Acting math was working.

I got deeper into the role. Asking myself character background questions: Who is the father? What are our hopes and dreams for this beautiful little pi r squared baby?

I grabbed my large triangle breasts tightly and screamed, “YOU WANT MOMMY TO FEED YOU HOT YUMMY MILK FROM HER ONE-HALF BASE TIMES HEIGHT BOOBIES?!” Just then, I glanced up to see my terrified parents standing behind me in the bathroom mirror.

“What the hell is going on here?! Stop this business right now!” Mom said. They had heard Sandra’s commotion and saw enough to be concerned. “Finish your brushing and go study!”

I’m not cut out for math.



* * *



February 1992. I can’t remember exactly where we heard about Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala. It must have been either word of mouth or the Indian community newspaper. As the director of an Oscar-nominated movie called Salaam Bombay!, Nair was someone who excited me. Her new feature was about the daughter of an Indian African motel owner who falls in love with an African American carpet cleaner in Greenwood, Mississippi. I had to see it.

There we were: Mom, Dad, me, and my older cousin Shami walking into the cold, dimly lit movie theater, unaware that my world would change forever. I was mesmerized from the start: Here were brown characters who looked like me, were played by brown actors, in a film written by a brown woman and directed by another brown woman! In 1992, the only time brown people would appear in film or on television was if they were a) actually white,5 b) cartoon characters,6 c) doing something deeply stereotypical, d) eating monkey brains, or e) some combination of the above.