The importance of being Zarna

When Hulu sent me screeners to the Zarna Garg show (Practical People Win) some time back, I watched her doing her thing on stage, this unremarkable-at-first-sight Indian woman in a shiny red salwar kameez and that trademark bindi, working a clearly NRI-heavy room, raising the laughs.

I have to confess I wasn’t madly impressed at that first pass. The act ranged from the usual Indian immigrants’ unshakeable obsession with STEM– liberal arts PhDs, what’s that– getting your kids into the Ivies, the foibles of the super-rich in Delhi, and of course, the perennial mother-in-law problem, a gift that never stops giving.

And then for some reason, I happened to go back to the show (now streaming on JioHotstar) and heard not just what she was saying– nothing madly original about a helicoptering desi mom preventing slack-time while providing snack-time, or picking on the domineering ma-in-law: ‘haye, haye, says Zarna, imitating her ‘saas’, mera beta mahaan, so what if you are pareshaan’, a sentiment every single woman on the planet can relate to– but how she was saying it. And even more importantly, what her confident presence on that platform means for representation, and inclusion.

Even that mother-in-law strand had a jaw-dropping throwaway line about a favoured sexual position, and whether or not the lady actually admitted to it, or it was just a part of the act, the very fact of conflating sex and the sacred in-law bastion, made me look at her again with renewed interest. Not all vanilla there, but something sharper? All right then.

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Now, the more I see her, doing this and that in her Insta posts, talking up her just-out memoir, sharing space on a high-powered TV panel, standing out as the only woman of colour, nattering with make-up diva Bobbi Brown (both talking about their life stories and the books they have written), the more I can see why Zarna matters.

She looks like your average desi aunty, but one who’s amassed a massive social media following. She is an Indian mom who will always know better, on top of what is going on in her childrens’ lives; she is a supportive wife who has used the loss of her husband’s job into an opportunity. Grab a spot on that podcast, and he will fix your finances, and won’t you pay a little for that privilege?

Her family is very much part of the plan, so it is not just her, but the gaggle of Gargs is what you get, if that’s what you want: it may seem overwhelming to some, but the idea of a close family, so integral to the Indian value system, can be rewarding. Especially when it comes to the me-first metrics that much of America is drowning in: out of the house at 18, and only cursorily present thereafter, for Thanksgiving, or maybe Christmas.

To turn a casual let’s-see-where-this-goes stand-up act (after years of being a stay-at-home mom), into a profitable career, is commendable in itself. But Zarna has broken a ceiling, and it’s a good place to be in. Being brown and Asian is still not the easiest calling card in the US, especially in Trumpland and its mounting HB 1 visa woes: Zarna has found a voice, and she’s learnt how to use it. And people, not just brown, are listening. What I’d be really interested in seeing is how (and if) she goes beyond the stereotypes that she mines for laughs: there has to be more to the Indian-American experience than getting the kids into Princeton and nudging them to be doctors or engineers or lawyers.

She’s opened for the established comics– Tina Fey has been on her slate– and now she’s reportedly getting a solo with CBS. She’s already in the movies, playing, what else, a mom in A Good Indian Boy (2024). She’s doing the influencer thing to the hilt, and hanging out with Karan Johar and other Indian celebs while she’s at it, when she visits the motherland. And now she has me using her mom-in-law’s addictive phrase: haye haye Zarna, what have you done?