failing and sailing towards my dream

a vivid unraveling of what I embodied as a child and a reconstruction of who I am as an adult

how I conceive of myself these days (Wikimedia Commons)

ascendance

From 2005 to 2012 I was the LeBron James of the Oregon science fair circuit. I won so often and with such bravado that you would think that I, like LeBron, played the game only to win. I study those times only to realize that winning was secondary for young Aishwarya. She was animated by a greater force, a more immediate and animalistic desire to fulfill her destiny. The Americans never stood a chance.

A delusional child of Indian immigrants with a chip on my shoulder, I collected plaques while my peers collected American girl dolls and clandestine kisses. They played on the weekends in wide open spaces, but I had awards to put on the table. It was a privilege to work tirelessly for months. Never do it for the applause Hannah Montana said from one child actor to another, but I had little time for television so I switched her off.

Post-win I walked differently. Everyone here wants to be me I would think. They want to talk to me because I won. I was a child with childlike thoughts, but my parents knew the end-game. An overwhelming sense of victory would reposition my center of gravity. Or maybe it was that gravity stopped pulling me down. It seemed to be pulling me forward. Forward and up. Up and out of Oregon.

Plaques decorated the walls of our home in Beaverton, and I would gaze at their reflective surface, my name echoing back to me. I never won in the swimming pool, soccer field, or track. No one took me to prom, and senior year of high school I received an integrity violation for cheating on computer science homework. I was in the parking lot of this very high school when I received an acceptance email from Stanford University. I ran in circles around my two friends. They cheered. America cheered. India cheered. Only my older cousin frowned. In the real world you don’t get prizes every year he warned.

the decade of failure

In my first year at Stanford, without rhyme or reason, I tried out for the Women’s Crew team. I was the heaviest and slowest, but I learned how to row a boat in the crew-style. Seated low in a white boat with a maroon stripe, nearly level to the water, I heaved and ho’ed on the port side. Hands raw with enraged blisters, eyes blinking at the 4:30AM sun just rising in the distance as cold Bay Area wind whipped us and we rowed, eight at a time, in choppy sea waters like our very souls depended on it. I learned that I was capable of sliding forward on the seat in perfect unison with the woman in front of me. I was a dancer after all so synchronicity came naturally. I watched her upper back reach forward and her taut arms yank on the oar as she propelled the boat, slamming her knees down, and I hurriedly synced my clock to hers lest I catch a crab. I learned that I could flicker on and off emotions as untamed as ocean water. That I could oscillate between machine and woman, woman and machine, and at times be both, and then a third avatar which involved the other seven rowers. I was me and yet I was also us.

After racing in the NCAAs, I quit.

I directed my newfound energy towards mental feats. I took computer science, physics, mechanical engineering, and material science courses, and I received abysmal grades. I sat in class and listened to lectures, I read the textbooks, I went to office hours, I tried solving problems on my own, I tried solving problems with assistance, I sat in libraries, computer clusters, the Stanford Coffee House, and the lounge area in my dorm, but try as I might, as stubbornly as I heaved and ho’ed, this was a boat I could not propel.

I fretted day and night but still I did not lose my sense of destiny.

Why do you have double nose-rings a faux-therapist, also White, once asked me. It’s my culture I retorted. But it wasn’t. It isn’t my culture to have double hoops in your nose. Having a single diamond or a diamond-flower is our tradition. So my sizzling answer not only kept him at bay, it kept me from having to say the truth out loud. I like being unique. Somewhere during those Oregon Catholic school years as the only Brown child in White spaces, I began to relish my difference, and this burning feeling of difference fused with my equally hot notion of fulfilling some karmic cycle in which I accept an offering from my father’s father and that allows me to further the intellectual legacy of our family.

I fretted day and night over my abysmal grades, but I knew I had simply not found my path. Funny isn’t it how we simply cannot shake who we are?

In my second year I developed a self-soothing habit where I would re-watch episodes of Modern Family and eat anything I could get my hands on. Salads with pesto dressing and walnuts. Tate’s chocolate chip cookies. It’s-its. Tortilla chips with cheese and salsa, melted in a microwave. Mini pancakes with whipped cream and strawberry syrup on top. A jar of cashew butter. Trader Joe’s cheese puffs. Domino’s Mediterranean flatbread.

In my latter two Stanford years I tried starting a startup and it failed, I got arrested while protesting on a bridge, and, while penny-boarding to class, I fell, snapped my ankle, and had to defer graduation.

In my latter two Stanford years I discovered that our greatest human gift is the written word. While some students looked backwards into modernity and studied how to build frontier technology, I looked forward into history, curious what wisdom I could find there. I decided to major in art practice which led me to build light installations and try my hand at conceptual art.

In my latter two Stanford years I received a grant to travel across North India and write a novel which would reinterpret Hindu mythology. I plan to publish this novel someday. I learned how to read music, tell stories, and perform for large audiences. I lived in a dirty but radical and incredibly freeing co-operative living house where I cleaned toilets, mopped floors, vacuumed the halls, and cooked for my housemates.

Between 2012 and 2017 there was no applause. Instead there were emails like this that I sent to my family:

Just had my “Caste and Religion in India/Dalit Liberation” class. We had a professor, Aishwary Kumar (a man's name!), come and speak to us. He is a historian on 19th and 20th century thought. He spoke of the complex relationship of Gandhi and Ambedkar, Gandhi's views on caste, Gandhi's reaction to the rise of Fascism, and the role of Western thought in Ambedkar and Gandhi's writings/philosophies. It was fascinating… Gandhi was a strong believer in the Varnas (caste)… he believed that a shoemaker's son was meant to be only a shoemaker… I of course do not believe in this but that's another story for another email :) but what do you all think?

Professor Kumar may not remember me, but I am unlikely to forget him. I still own that thin book he prescribed. Did he know that sitting in his class was a human portal to the realities of the Indian caste system?

Indeed at Stanford I found my political, intellectual, and artistic orientation. Just as my older cousin warned, there were no prizes waiting for me at the end of this considerable effort. In fact what awaited was quite the opposite of a prize. It was a prodigious amount of failure.

the middle is also the end

It was a hot afternoon and my husband and I decided to jog the bit of flat afforded to us in San Francisco. The Embarcadero runs along the water and so did we. Having just gotten off a disappointing call with my manager I huffed and puffed and thought I just can’t catch a break.

My husband ran several strides ahead of me and at one point he became a bouncing black shirt and neon yellow cap, and I struggled in tow. My physical pain compounded with the mental variety. I recounted all my losses, all my failures in the last twenty years of adulthood, all my regrets. I felt so far away from that stage where I won multiple awards.

I propelled my body across the concrete sidewalk, slower and heavier than my husband. With each step I learned what it meant to heave and to ho, to feel the preciousness of sweet air in my lungs and the miracle of my tireless quads. I was neither at the start nor the end of my effort. A breeze pushed me in the small of my back, causing me to gasp a little. I was running away from where I began, I was sailing towards my dream.