I was performing with a Shakespeare-in-the-Park troupe in a neighboring suburb. It was a do-it-yourself operation in every sense of the word, with the entire company spending two hours setting up the stage, lighting and sound equipment, followed by the performance, and finally another hour or two dismantling the set and loading it into trucks. It was exhausting work, done six days a week, but you’re young and believe you can somehow do it, party afterwards, and show up the next morning ready to go without any lingering effects. Handing off the last of the equipment, I gladly accepted a beer from one of the stage technicians. Succumbing to the darkness and the warm breeze shaking leaves on the trees, I spent hours sitting cross-legged on the grass listening to older actors talk about their lives: the part they’d almost landed, neurotic girlfriends, a great apartment opening up in Toronto. I listened without really absorbing any of it: I was 19. The clock hadn’t officially begun ticking yet.

I left the park around 1:30 a.m. Got into my car, a grey Mazda hatchback with a wheezing engine, and started for home. The moon was full and fat overhead.

It took a few minutes of driving before I realized my vision was pulsing at the edges. I cracked open the window and took a few swallows of air. I turned on the radio. Onto the interstate, mostly empty at that time of night, forcing my eyes to stay open. I took the LaSalle exit and by then it was too late to pull over. I’d be home soon.

The last thing I remember was glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing an SUV’s headlights a few hundred yards away. Then my eyes closed.

I woke to a shrieking noise and actually saw a traffic light pole rip through the left side of the car, inches from where I was sitting. Then the car flipped over, I was screaming, and all conscious thought stopped.

The car landed on its roof and slid down the road, sparks flying out on either side. The windshield shattered. I was hanging upside down, suspended by the seat belt.

As the car began to slow, I could make out duplexes with dark windows beyond the sidewalk, model cars arranged on the lot of a dealership. When it stopped, I unbuckled myself and fell onto the roof. I crawled out of the space where the windshield used to be, trying to avoid cutting myself on bits of broken glass. As soon as I was out, I stumbled away about ten feet and looked back.

The car looked like a giant insect on its back, wheels spinning mindlessly to right itself. The rusted underpinnings were exposed. Oil was spreading out in a pool on either side. A wave of lightheadedness overtook me when I realized I could still hear the radio playing from inside the crumpled cabin.

The SUV I’d seen in the rearview mirror had come to a stop about twenty feet away. A Chinese couple was staring at the wreckage with mouths agape. I watched as the woman ran to a nearby house to call 911. The man spotted me and began to speak rapidly.

“Anyone else?” he asked.

I couldn’t understand. My ears were ringing.

He gestured towards the car.

I shook my head. The man seemed relieved.

I sat down on the sidewalk. The man sat down next to me. The traffic light pole I’d crashed into was bent but unbroken. A sign on the lower part of the pole was completely wrapped around itself.

“You’re okay?” the man asked, in a tone that said he couldn’t quite believe it.

There were bits of glass embedded in my fingers, which I picked out. Blood trickled out of a dozen small wounds. I touched my left shoulder and winced. To this day I carry two scars, each about three inches long, where the seat belt dug in. But aside from that, I was untouched.

“Yes,” I answered, voice sounding strange to my ears. The wail of an ambulance started in the distance. “I’m okay.”

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“How about it birthday boy?” Bren asks.

Normally I’d beg off, but Bren had the unfortunate beginnings of a mustache growing on his upper lip. If I didn’t attempt to knock him down a peg, what kind of a friend would I be?

“Let’s do it,” I answer.

Space is cleared. Elbows are placed. Palms are locked together. Someone counts it down, “3-2-1-go!” and we’re fighting. Bren gets off to an early lead, I get it back, but eventually he gets my arm down. There are cheers, spicy buffalo wings arrive, and the moment is quickly forgotten. Only I can’t help returning to it throughout the night, replaying how it went down in my mind to see what I did wrong. It sounds ridiculous, but I was genuinely perturbed. Here’s why:

Grade 5, Montreal. I’m sitting in the front row during French Class when the teacher, a Falstaffian figure named Guy, shows up nursing what I would later understand to be a wicked hangover. He slumps down behind his desk, squints up at the fluorescents, and proclaims today to be a “Fun Day”.

We exchanged excited looks. Guy was a notorious flake, a subject of open ridicule by other teachers who were simultaneously envious of just how much students liked him. Guy once held a tasting party with fancy hors d’oeuvres and grape juice in place of wine to show us how true Frenchmen ate. Other “Fun Days” were spent having snowball fights outside and watching French New Wave movies we were clearly too young for. But the suggestion he made that day was the weirdest of all: “Which one of you children is the strongest?”

Guy turns two desks towards each other. Then he selects two students to arm-wrestle, with the victor taking on a new opponent. I hooted and hollered during the initial matches while knowing, along with the rest of the class, who the eventual winner would be.

Karl, the freakishly large class bully. Loud, braying voice. Veiny arms like tree trunks. Eating dried Ramen noodles for lunch five days a week yet still somehow managing to beat up Grade 6 kids with ease. I’d gotten into a fight with him a few months back and he’d broken my glasses beneath a large black boot. Sure enough, once he was called upon he won. And kept winning, leaving a trail of vanquished in his wake.

Down went Danny with the puffy hair and breakdancing skills. Down went Mike who only wore football jerseys. A succession of strong kids, all eliminated. And there sat Karl with a maddening grin on his face, basking in the attention. When I got older, I’d realize he was someone to be pitied. After all, Karl didn’t eat Ramen noodles and wear secondhand clothes to be cool. It was because he lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town with a Mom who never attended parent-teacher conferences. But you don’t look at things that way when you’re young.

Guy, fast running out of competitors and facing the prospect of actually having to teach something, decides to call on me. Karl laughs. Even Kam, the pretty black girl I’d nursed a crush on since first grade, rolls her eyes. After all, what hope did a skinny Indian kid with peach fuzz and giant, gold-rimmed glasses (check out Anish’s Timeline for a picture) have against such a behemoth? I wasn’t a contender for anything besides spelling bee contests.

Guy places our hands together. He counts it down. Immediately I feel Karl’s strength like a bludgeon. It should have been over in seconds. But it wasn’t.

I felt myself disengaging from the match and thinking about what waited for me back home. A mother steadily descending into madness, trying on new personalities like a woman tries on clothes before a party. A Dad scrambling to keep things together, heating up TV dinners and meeting with doctors as the ground beneath us fell away. And me in my room, escaping into books and playing music extra loud to drown out the sounds of Mom talking to the voices in her head. That’s all I had. That’s all I was. And I felt a bright, uncontrollable rage well up inside.

Karl had been struggling for too long. In his overconfidence he’d given me his true measure. And my thin brown arm was still up. And the rage poured out, overwhelming him even as I remained in that secret place away from it all.

His arm slammed back against the desk. I was breathing fast.

No one could believe it. Guy was so dumbfounded he insisted on a rematch. Same outcome. And then came a mass rush by the other students to set up matches of their own, rows of desks facing each other, girls versus boys, large versus small. Even when the bell rang for recess it didn’t stop. In fact, the fever spread to the other grades in our school so that when I went outside, clutching a juice box in one hand, I was treated to one of the most surreal sights I’ve ever witnessed:

A playground filled with kids spread out on the pavement facing each other. Arms up, eyes bright with the exhilaration that comes from saying no to everything you believed in, every rule that says you can’t. That you don’t have enough. That the strong win and the weak lose. Because if a skinny Indian kid could beat the class bully, the entire world was up for grabs.

Sitting in a bar 22 years later, drinking beer and listening to Phil Collins, I couldn’t shake the feeling of having lost something. That somewhere in this journey from horror to happiness, in building a life I’d actually regret losing, I paid a price. It’s one I’d gladly pay again, but it doesn’t make the realization easier:

I will never again be as strong as when I had nothing.

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Such an outpouring of love and expectation brings on a crushing pressure to succeed. You’re destined for great things- have to be, otherwise what was the point of it all? Unfortunately, this isn’t the greatest attitude to have when working the “starter” jobs pretty much everyone works as a young adult. Humility is valuable in these situations. Bravado, a gangly 6’2” frame, and a head perennially in the clouds is not.

Here are 3 of the most ridiculous work experiences I’ve ever had. All ended in identical fashion: with me running away. Present Day Anish would tell Young Anish to suck it up. Remind him that a life is built in increments as opposed to wild leaps. But where’s the fun in that?

Parking Lot Attendant, Montreal
Length of Career: 25 Minutes

Parking cars. How hard could it be? While living in Montreal, I came across a parking lot on St. Laurent Street with a “Help Wanted” sign. I met the manager, waxed on about my years of parking experience (untrue), and was hired on the spot. Only problem: I’d never driven manual before and kind of suspected it was necessary for the job. It was.

I showed up the next morning after having studied manual driving on the Internet. I was feeling weirdly confident and made easy conversation with the manager, smoking cigarettes and chatting about the various luxury cars parked in the lot. Soon enough, a new car comes in.

“Want to take this?” the manager asks, rubbing his soul patch.

“Sure,” I answer.

The driver steps out and hands me the keys. He goes off to pay. I enter the car, a tuned-up Honda Civic.

It’s a manual.

Trying to remember what I’d read the night before, I slip the key into the ignition. Press down on one of the pedals. Turn the key.

The car lights up, then goes dark. I do this a second time. A third. Panic starts to set in.

I look towards the booth in the center of the lot, where the manager is talking with the driver. Their backs are to me.

Stealthily, I open the driver-side door. Place the keys, ever so quietly, atop the car. And start backing away towards the street. A little further, shuffling backwards, head buzzing telling me to run, run, just run, the manager glances towards the Civic, notices the open door, starts looking around the lot for me…

RUN!

Bartender, Queens
Length of Career: 1.5 Hours

In 2001 I was a theatre school student in Manhattan who was constantly strapped for cash. My family had extended themselves beyond reason so I could chase a dream, but at the time 1 Canadian Dollar got you around 60 American cents and that made having any kind of life outside of school impossible. Luckily, an Indian can always count on the “Indian Connection” in a pinch. While eating at a restaurant called Baluchi’s in Greenwich Village, I mentioned that I was looking for a job to the Bengali owner. Without further ado, he told me to go to a franchise location in Queens. “We’ll take care of you,” he said with a wink- which only made me worry.

I arrived to find a mostly empty restaurant with the faint smell of cigars in the air. A group of middle-aged Indian waiters loitered in the center of the room wearing yellowed dress shirts and wrinkly vests. They spoke in Hindi about wives and white girls, personal hygiene, customers who were bad tippers. The leader, a man with a sickly pallor and pronounced underbite, eventually noticed me.

“Where’s your uniform?” he asked accusingly.

“No one gave me…”

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” he said. “Get behind the bar.”

The bar? “But…I’ve never made drinks before.”

A hissing noise escaped the leader’s mouth. One of the other waiters made a crack about “silver spoon” Indians.

“Rum and Coke, do you know how to make that?” he asked.

I nod.

“Make me one.”

I get behind the bar, make a drink that’s heavy on the rum and pass it over. He finishes it in three big gulps. “When someone comes in, you make them a drink. If you don’t know how to make it, make them this.” Then he goes back to his friends.

A few people trickle in over the course of the next hour. Luckily no one orders anything too complicated. During periods when the restaurant’s empty, waiters hit me up for drinks. I start to wonder if the only reason I’m here is to make Rum and Cokes for the staff. I start fixating on the fact that once I’m given a uniform, I’ll officially be part of the tribe of middle-aged waiters with beady eyes and bored voices. My life will be crummy tips and gossip and trekking out to Queens while the life I’d dreamt of drifts further and further away.

A trio of Chinese men enter the restaurant and order Singapore Slings. “Coming right up,” I answer heartily. I check beneath the bar for a cocktail list. Nothing.

I grab my coat hanging on a peg nearby and head for the exit. The lead waiter spots me and goes over to block it.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Cigarette,” I say.

I watch his eyes probing my face, trying to pierce the facade of politeness masking a disgust just barely kept in check. I will never be you, I wanted to say. I’d rather flame out chasing something rather than beg for scraps and say “thank you” afterwards.

“Be quick,” he says finally, and steps aside.

I never returned.

Barista, Montreal
Length of Career: 3.5 Weeks

I was working the night shift (10 p.m.-6 a.m.) at a cafe downtown, making beverages for wasted clubgoers, shooing homeless people out of the bathroom, and reading books during long periods where I was the only person in the place. Sure, I smelled constantly of coffee beans and felt a wooziness come quitting time without the nice memories of drinking that typically accompanies such a feeling, but it wasn’t so bad. I loved watching the city’s underbelly growl at night, transforming a shopping district into a kind of Wild West filled with strippers tottering on high heels and French Quebecers driving Escalades and blasting hip-hop. Then an uppity female manager decided to move me to the afternoon shift and it all went downhill. Fast.

Around 5 p.m. the need for coffee grows manic. And not just simple drinks but elaborate ones filled with soy milk and whipped cream and a thousand other tweaks. I was tasked with making them, trying to stem the mob of customers that stretched beyond the cafe doors. Where was the quiet? The invisibility? The sense of having a modicum of control over my life? I kept pumping out drinks, sweat drizzling down my forehead, while the manager stood behind criticizing every move.

“You’re frothing the milk wrong.”

“You’re not smiling when you hand the drinks over.”

“Don’t use so much chocolate syrup- it’s expensive.”

On and on it went, a litany of supposed mistakes while she stood around not doing a single thing to actually help. Finally, I reached for a new cup and she stopped me.

“This is how you hold a coffee cup,” she says, and demonstrates.

I took off the apron all staff was supposed to wear and handed it to her.

“What are you doing?”

“I quit.”

Terror in her eyes, so satisfying. She glanced at the mob of customers and realized, for the first time, that she might actually have to do something. “Do you want to take a break? You can…”

“No, I just quit.”

Some half-hearted clapping from customers who’d been listening in. I head downstairs to get my things while the manager keeps saying, “Wait” and coming up with compromises. Before leaving, I grab a box of 20 muffins (assorted flavors) out of the kitchen locker as restitution for my ordeal.

Running away is hard. Running away with muffins, I’ve found, is a little easier. You don’t know where you’re going. But at least you’ll have something to snack on once you get there.

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Tides from every direction brought memories washing over me. These memories seemed to bring back distinct feelings, however their details were like seashells that appeared to be just below the water’s surface only to be pulled from my grasp by the same tide that brought them in. The mementos that surrounded me in the form of photos, letters, and scraps breathed life into these ethereal memories, bearing witness to my past.

In our mission to sift and purge, we came across several photos of me that confirmed that my awkward period was more of an era – spanning from age 8 to age 18.   What had possessed me to hold onto these photos? I remember having gone through the trouble of stealing them from my parents’ private stash expressly to destroy them and prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.  I’m not sure why I hadn’t gotten rid of the evidence while I had the chance.  Hadn’t I anticipated that a day like today would come?  As I shuffled through the photos, I was overwhelmed with embarrassment when I glanced over my shoulder and found my husband studying them closely.  However, I noticed that he gave these tadpole photos the same look of fondness and sympathy as I did.  I could see things falling into place in his mind, more pieces fitting together and making sense in the puzzle that is me.  Gradually, I was able to laugh at these photos and share my sense of amazement and thankfulness that I had made it out of my adolescence with only minor bumps and bruises to my ego and psyche.

We came across a bundle of cards and hand-written notes held together by a weary rubber band that gave up as soon as I touched it.  Despite my husband’s exasperation, I decided to read through each of them. For me, every pile held potential finds that I wasn’t willing to risk losing forever.  I laughed at the conspiratorial hand-written notes, remembering how my best friends and I had a magician’s slight of hand when it came to note passing.

I’m gonna tell my mom that we’re going to the library – Can your mom give us a ride to the mall? No, I don’t want to invite N***. She’s a pain in the ass. Then there were the candy-sweet cards from friends.  Several of them were from Rachel, my high-school best friend. They were signed with earnest declarations of friendship: “2 good 2 be 4 gotten” or “BFF – best friends forever.” That’s when I came across it.  At first, I mistook it for yet another cavity-inducing card from Rachel but as I opened it, I felt the shock of plunging into cold waters.  I remember feeling tides pulling me towards distant shores, whose existence I had nearly forgotten.  It was a card sent to me by someone I had dated briefly in college.  I opened it to find that his photo was enclosed.  In that moment, I was whisked back to college, to one of our dates.  Looking into the eyes in the photo, listening to his voice echoing from watery depths, I couldn’t keep myself from wondering where he was and if he was happy there.

“Please tell me that Om didn’t see me open this,” I remember pleading silently to myself when I resurfaced.

Om had been sitting across from me.  Frustrated by my slowness in dealing with the mounds around me, he had begun taking a first pass at sorting through a pile of “miscellaneous” papers.  I closed the card and prepared to replace it to the stack in front of me.  I looked up to ascertain that he had missed this latest reminiscence of mine.  However, I found him looking at me with an inquisitive smile.

“Is that Ray?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

I felt sheepish and wished that this card hadn’t washed ashore at this moment.  Surprisingly, I found myself handing the card and its contents over to him.  Dumbfounded, I watched as he looked it over and opened to the photo.

“He was a pretty good looking guy, wasn’t he?” he asked, looking up at me.

“I thought so.”

And then as I watched, he returned the photo to the inside of the card, closed the card and placed it on the “for keeps” pile.

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“What should we do?” Erin asks.

We are sitting cross-legged on the bed in the guest room. The door leading to the rest of the apartment is mercifully closed, offering a few moments to gather our wits prior to being swallowed up by a tidal wave of family get-togethers, excess food, and jet-lagged wandering. The air conditioner is chugging away but I’m already sweating.

“What can we do?” I ask.

Another cry sounds outside. I can hear frying noises coming from the kitchen, where Lokhon, my Aunt’s servant, is preparing breakfast. The heavy stench of mustard oil creeps in beneath the door and stings my eyes. I rub them and try to ignore the low-grade panic in the pit of my stomach.

Erin pulls a backpack onto the bed, unzips it and takes out a few items we’d brought from the States: a granola bar, a fruit bar. “How about these?”

We exit the guest room and inch down the hallway. I’m holding the snacks and Erin is holding a small metal bowl filled with tap water. We draw in close approaching the living room, where Auntie is dipping a biscuit into a cup of tea. Circumventing the tight, predetermined order of events, even with something as simple as feeding street dogs, wouldn’t be easy. Though in her 70’s, my Auntie has strong opinions, boundless energy, and the mildly disapproving air of a former teacher. Will is respected: courtesy is steamrolled over.

She spots the offerings: “What’s that for?” Face open and smiling, eyes sharp. A powerhouse in a faded white housedress.

“We’re just going downstairs for a second, Mashi” I say.

She frowns. “What do you need?”

“Nothing, we just want to…”

“Lokhon!” she calls out. “Oh Lokhon!”

“It’s fine, he doesn’t have to…” Erin begins but it’s too late: Lokhon’s lined face peeks out of the kitchen. He’s been with my Aunt for years, silently carrying out every possible request, but that only makes the situation harder. The last thing we wanted was to add to the burden of a white-haired man who slept in a shed on the roof.

“We’re going to feed the dogs,” I said. “Ourselves.”

“Which ones?” Auntie asks, and, as though on cue, another cry rises up from the alley. “Those?”

“You didn’t hear it this morning?” I ask.

She nods slowly, but it’s clear this is for my sake. Few Indians keep dogs indoors as pets. Instead they’re left to fend for themselves along with other animals and the vast multitudes of the city’s poor. I realized that to her, the mewling was just another sound you learned to ignore, like car horns and loudspeakers and the endless hubbub of conversation. Picking out a few particular dogs to feed was a little like polishing silverware on the Titanic.

Erin unlocks the front door and steps into the stairwell, committing us. She mouths the words, “Come on” and waves me towards her.

Auntie opens her mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. A sly look comes into her eyes. “Try,” she says. “No knowledge without experimentation.”

The dog was leaning up against the crumbling facade of the building next door. Black fur with white spots. Her nipples were swollen an ugly shade of crimson yet her mewling puppies fought amongst themselves for whatever drops they could get. Around them swirled frantic negotiating at rattletrap stalls, a lorry belching gas fumes, men in dirty dhotis smoking cigarettes and watching two foreigners attempt a good deed.

I unwrapped the granola bar and came up close to the dogs. The mother turned her face towards me. Large, liquid black eyes and a lolling tongue. She looked near death but weirdly cheerful about the whole situation. I dropped it a few inches away.

She leaned down with difficulty, took a sniff, then looked back at me curiously.

“Try the fruit bar,” Erin says.

I do the same with the fruit bar. Again, she sniffs but doesn’t eat. A few of the puppies nuzzle the water when it’s offered but no one touches the food.

The dhoti-clad smokers crack up. One of them says something to me, advice maybe, but I can’t make it out. The dogs continue to starve, ignoring the food mere inches away. The sun is glaring overhead and I can feel the heaviness in the air: it’s going to be a rough day in India.

“They didn’t eat, did they?” Auntie asks upon our return. When we tell her what happened, she bursts out laughing, even calling Lokhon in from the kitchen to share in the hilarity.

“They might later,” Erin says.

“Never,” Auntie says. “They won’t eat American food. They don’t even know what it is. Give them rice, a little sauce with meat and they’ll eat it right up.”

“They’re snobs?” I ask, incredulously.

Auntie smiles and sips her tea. “They’re Indian.”