Supreming humor
Until last year, I didn’t know that there was a word for how I prep oranges before eating. It is a habit from growing up in the old country where we first removed the peel and pith (the white inner part that is closer to the pulpy interior) and then cut up the individual slices that can be separated from each other.
When I came to the US, I found it bizarre that people sucked on the orange wedges or slices that were served with the peel and the pith. At least Americans peeled the banana before eating them, I joked 😁
Last year, after all this time here in America, I came to know that such prepping of oranges is called supreming.
(I don’t do a full-supreming, if that is an acceptable culinary phrase, because I don’t remove the thin skin that envelops the pulp.)
So, there I was supreming the oranges as a post-dinner dessert. One of the downsides of aging is that a sugary dessert like chocolate, as tiny as it can be, somehow becomes a huge fatty deposit on my abdomen. Aging is such a killjoy!
I sliced up the oranges and served them in two glass cups. And then drizzled Grand Marnier over them.
We were all set to watch something comedic.
And that’s how we watched Zarna Garg on The Tonight Show.
She was funny. She knew how to deliver the punchlines. An immigrant stand up comedian. And she was her completely Indian persona, from her name to her outfit to her accent.
In the old days when we brown people came here, there were quite a few who started working on developing a white American accent right from day one in order to mainstream themselves. Channeling Isabel Wilkerson, I would think that immigrants wanted to mimic the upper caste whites and not the accents of the lower castes, right? I mean, come on, have you ever met an Indian immigrant who talked like an African-American from Compton or a Hispanic-American from East Los Angeles or … ?
If you have met me in the real world, well, you know that I was not one of those who practiced to change their accent.
In fact, I am often told that my accent is not the stereotypical Indian accent that people expect to hear. Can't blame them when anything about me is far from stereotypical ;)
A few years ago, at the end of a conference session, as I was exiting the room, another guy who was about my age said that my accent intrigued him. "Obviously you are from India, but you seem to have picked up a Scottish accent too. Did you live in Scotland for a while?" He should know about Scottish accents he said because, and this was the killer, he was from Scotland!
And there were some in graduate school who not only practiced moving their tongues and lips in new ways in order to sound white they were even adopting Christian names so that the natives would not have problems with some strange concoctions of letters.
Of course quite a few natives, even now, can’t pronounce Sriram. Often it is the “r” that follows the “i” that trips them. I tell them to think of two separate words, “Sri” and “Ram” with two “a” in order to lengthen the sound, which they easily do. But when they have to put those sounds together, well, many end up uttering sounds like “Sridam” or “Srilam” or “Sriam.” There was that one occasion that a person called me “Sirhan” perhaps recalling the name of the maniac who shot and killed RFK—senior, that is.
In Eugene, where many are into yoga, there are also a few who immediately go above and beyond pronouncing my name really well. Once, when I was introduced to a white woman on a hiking trail, she immediately chanted, “Sriram, Jayaram, jaya jaya Ram”.
Either the times have changed, or Zarna Garg is my fellow traveler who couldn’t care about her Indian looks or accent. Man was she funny!
I was reminded of another Indian immigrant woman whose stand up routines I have watched and enjoyed, though not anywhere near how much I enjoyed Garg’s bit.
Another immigrant woman in a different country and doing stand up comedy. How awesome is this world!
In 2008, I authored a commentary in the local newspaper about Indian-Americans. I noted how we were moving beyond the stereotypical occupations like physicians or motel/convenience store owners. Jhumpa Lahiri in literature, M. Night Shyamalan in the movies, Bobby Jindal in politics, were some of the examples I gave. “There is no Indian-American equivalent of Koufax. Yet.” I wrote there.
An immigrant woman doing stand up comedy was not in my Bingo card back then. We have truly arrived. Supreme!