This American Woman: Aunti Zarna takes the mic and the spotlight

Business Standard

23-05-2025

This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir
Published by Penguin Random House
306 pages ₹799
One often has to be reminded of their talent and told: 'Hey, you have it in you.' In the Indian-American comic Zarna Garg's case, that person was her daughter Zoya, who asked her mother to try her hand at stand-up comedy. It'd have been daunting for Garg to embark on this ambition, 18 'failed LLCs later'. But Garg acted on her 'special gift' and transformed herself into Auntie Zarna, her onstage persona and as her fans love to call her, bursting onto the standup comedy scene after being a 'stay-at-home mom' for 16 years.
Garg's jokes have a near-universal appeal. She encapsulates in them the trials and tribulations of everyday life, enhancing relatability. The avatar of a no-nonsense, middle-class Indian mom further accentuates her screen presence. She's likeable, and the reels and videos she posts are unskippable. But lately, she has been in the news because of her book, This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir.
Comprising 21 chapters, one of which is written by Zoya, the book begins with a question Garg had asked her agent: 'Do Tina Fey and Amy Poehler need an opener for their new tour?' The response to this question paid dividends, though Garg doubted whether these two famous figures were 'ready for a foul-mouthed real-life Indian auntie who hated meditation'. This anecdote in the introduction to this book intrigues the reader to learn about the 'transformation of a loudmouthed, backtalking Mumbai teen into a manic, deranged Manhattan housewife, and then back into her loudest, backtalkingest, most unshutable beast form: a New York City standup comedian'.
The initial chapters describe how Garg was an 'oops' child. Her mother didn't want anything to do with children, for she had already brought her siblings up and gotten them married before marrying herself to a 37-year-old man who had three children from his previous marriage. Perhaps that explains a sort of indifference Garg may have experienced as a child from her mother. However, her siblings, much older than her, mothered and fathered her. Sister Sunita became a friend-cum-confidante, while Suresh acted as that brother-cum-protective figure. Such siblings are comforting when your father happens to be a taskmaster. He wanted to be obeyed. Though Garg admired him, she critiqued him for thinking nothing beyond what he believed a girl child or a woman must do: Marry and rear children.
As one sifts through the pages of this breezy memoir full of interesting anecdotes and life lessons, two subliminally influential experiences that helped shape Garg's life before her marriage can be noted.
First, despite being in the patriarchal strongholds of her husband, Garg, 'the original troublemaker', remained nonchalant. There was something more to her that people got to learn only upon her death — the evidence of her philanthropy. Garg notes that even after 35 years of her mother's death, the ones she helped still think of her.
Second is visiting her sister Sunita and her husband Deepak in Akron, Ohio, in 1983. Experiencing the freedom of roaming freely without thinking of being unsafe or raped or thinking that a 'kid [there] really can be a kid' was revelatory and revolutionary to an eight-year-old Zarna. But more than that, it was an encounter at an American nightclub with a DJ. Upon being asked if she was comfortable, a young Garg replies, 'No, I don't like this at all, but that only proves I am an intellectual destined for great things!' This made the DJ laugh and confused the young girl. Garg writes, 'When I vocalised my opinions in India, people usually told me I was crazy or stupid or to shut up. Only Suresh took me seriously. I wasn't prepared for laughter.'
But there's this third thing that she experiences only after her marriage, noticing the unshakeable belief her husband had in her at a charity event. People were having fun at her expense when her husband, Shalabh, quipped that 'they're all scared that one day you're going to find your thing, and then you'll simply be unstoppable'.
Nothing prepares one for such moments. The thing that this memoir, written in a conversational tone, teaches you is that you must take life as it comes. As in the case of Garg, it may so happen that you may have to escape being married at 14 or find your husband on an 'Indian singles website' or think of everything failing all over again when you happen to make inroads into your calling when the world gets a lockdown because of a pandemic. But then, the only way to respond to tragic situations is not to lose the ability to laugh, which is precisely what Garg has done throughout her life. Even in her writing. For example, no matter whether a chapter technically deals with grief or guilt, Garg's writing has the quality of delivering a joke on paper.
While there's an implicit critique of race, caste, and class, there seems to be a celebration of the American capitalist way of living. There's a moment when Garg notes that now she knows what '[her] price is'. This commonplace acceptance of this notion as a metric to gauge others' success is in many ways problematic. Nonetheless, Garg's memoir is thoroughly readable and keeps you in stitches, inspiring you to take charge of your life. Most importantly, it makes you believe that it's perfectly all right to start again whenever you want, or are ready.