Poonam Sharma - Girl Most Likely To

This was the problem with being Super Woman’s only daughter. With thirty months to spare until age thirty, my mother had fine-tuned the balance of home and career, secured the illusion of waking up with meticulous makeup, and mastered the art of willing my pancakes down off the kitchen ceiling mere moments after I threw them up there. I, on the other hand, at the same point in my life, was reverse-sexually-harassing my way out of a career I didn’t honestly enjoy and while swooning over one homosexual man, was failing miserably in my attempt to win the affections of the wheezing, fifteen-pound cat of another. Honestly, it was a wonder that I could even feed myself.

Whether or not I look the part, I hail from a long line of loan sharks. My father has planned to make this one of his sound bytes when the New York Times interviews him in ten years, for a two-page spread about his daughter, the globe-trotting financier. Betel-chewing, bindi-wearing, and almost always below five feet tall, most of the women in my ancestral tree had arrived at their careers in high (or more accurately, low) finance by way of necessity, rather than choice. Practicality rules when you are widowed young in parts of Punjab where remarriage is as much of an option as a sex change. The tradition was to borrow against what little land their husbands had left them, and then loan to the poorer of their villages at three times the banks’ normal rates. Pragmatism is what we know. So it was probably less than incredible that, despite my skant affection for the industry, I had managed to thrive on Wall Street.

Most people in my life had no idea what I actually did for a living; nor did they care to find out. And I didn’t blame them. They were better off clinging to some airbrushed notion of what my days as an investment banker were really like. Essentially, I did the research that helped my bosses decide which stocks to invest in, and when. Sometimes it involved speaking with the management of public companies, who either eyed me like an Omaha Steak or dismissed me entirely. At other times it involved combing through mountains of reports on an industry to develop a reasonable opinion about where it was headed.

Typically, I would spend a week researching before I presented a conclusion to my bosses, who often patted me on the back, or otherwise told me the reasons why they believed that I was wrong, if they felt like explaining themselves. Soon thereafter, the market would always prove them right. Apparently, this was good training for the day when, if I was lucky, I would become one of them. It wasn’t being corrected that bothered me so much as it was being wrong. Regardless, my plan was to stick with the job, act like I enjoyed it and apply to business school within a few years.

After earning my MBA, I could start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I would have been a supermodel, but the six-inch heels I’d need just to reach up to the average model’s elbow ended that fantasy. Thanks to the same genes, I was far better suited for sneaking under turnstiles than for strutting across runways.

And I would have been a novelist, but there were other genetic predispositions to consider. My father hadn’t come to this country with eleven dollars in his pocket thirty years ago, mopped floors at a supermarket, begged for an entry-level engineer’s position, tolerated racism and ignorance and decades of struggle, started a business and saved enough to send his daughter to an Ivy League college, only to watch her give up a career of which he could only have dreamed all those years ago.

Another reason why I survived in investment banking was because early on I had learned the folly of questioning the judgment of the people in control.

“This is a waste of her time,” I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother, when she mentioned my excitement over the prospect of entering a poem in a fifth-grade writing competition. “It is not practical, and we should not encourage her in it.”

“Oh, don’t be so serious, Sushil,” my mother replied from the kitchen, while I squeezed my head through the bars of the banister to get within closer earshot. “It’s just a writing contest.”

“It is not just a writing contest, Shardha. It is a signal. And it is a waste of her time. These are important years. She should be working on her Math Olympiad, or on the Spelling Bee. Why should we train her to care what these so-called judges think? Her teacher is no Professor of Literature. He is there to teach her Mathematics and Science and History. Anyway, writing is something where there is never an absolute score. It cannot get her into good colleges. It is a waste of her time.”

“Sushil, be reasonable. I cannot tell her no after I have already told her yes. She’s very enthusiastic. She wrote some poem about Reality, and I think it’s very clever for her age.”

“That is all fine. Yet I do not agree with it. You and I both know that the world does not value these things. They value success that can be measured. We know this. We have seen this. Why should we send our daughter into such a struggling life?”

“Teekh hai,” she agreed. “Perhaps you have a point. Though we cannot do anything about it now. And keep your voice down. She just went up to bed.”

“Chuhlow, fine. But my daughter will not be a writer.”

“And I will not reheat your Rotis if they get cold while you are prolonging this discussion. Let’s eat in peace, okay?”

To my eleven-year-old ears, the distinction between a father’s protectiveness and dismissal of my interest in writing wasn’t exactly clear. What was clear was that he had tried to prevent me from doing something, so I had to do it anyway. I proudly entered my poem “Is This Reality?” into the contest. Based on a dream I had, the poem was made up of questions about what proof we had that our world wasn’t some other child’s dream, and whether or not that child could end our world just by waking up.

The next day, Mr. Kronin called me over to his desk to tell me that it was all right to feel angry and confused about the world, and to ask if I was interested in speaking with the school psychiatrist. Obviously, this was not the response I had hoped for. You talk to the psychiatrist, I screamed, before running to the bus and crying all the way home. If this was what writing would lead to, I told myself, I wanted no part of it.

“Sometimes it’s not the best thing to share these kinds of feelings,” my mother tried to console me. “Because it is not always guaranteed that everyone will understand it. And that can hurt your feelings. But I’m sure that Mr. Kronin didn’t mean it. Not everybody knows what a special girl you are, beti…like we do.”

Burying my head in my pillow, I scooted closer to my Nani. Mom and Dad took the hint and left us alone.

“Vina, you must not be angry with your parents.”

“I hate it that they were right,” I told her defiantly.

“Beti, they don’t want to be right. They want you to be successful.”

I pulled the covers over my face.

“Try to understand….This is the way that it is in India. Boys and girls must choose which line they will take in the eighth grade…either science for medicine or math for engineering. They start preparations for college early. And your parents want to make life easier for you. It’s the same way as they corrected your hands.”

I came out from under the covers. “What?”

“You don’t know this, but you were naturally left-handed as a child, so they corrected you.”

“How?”

“When you were very small, they told you ‘No’ every time you used the left hand. They wanted to make your life easier because the world is built for right-handed people. See? You don’t even remember being left-handed.”