I have always called Calabasas “the town where I grew up”, but apparently it’s a little more serious than that. Wikipedia calls it an “affluent city in Los Angeles County”, and it can even lay claim to notable residents such as the Karadashians, Cameron Diaz and Britney Spears, too.
Calabasas is also home to Australian satirist Chris Lilley’s only American character in his television series Angry Boys. The character in question is S. Mouse, a 24-year-old African American rapper who claims to be from the slums but actually lives in one of the city’s many gated communities. Far from the ghetto (and probably never having stepped into one), S. Mouse recreates an identity for himself as an underprivileged kid whose unfortunate background has led him to musical genius. In reality, he’s grown up with thousand-thread-count sheets and Rolex watches. Oh, and his music is terrible.
How Lilly so poignantly captured what growing up as a minority in Calabasas (affectionately coined Calablackless by some) can do to a person I’ll never know, because I didn’t offer him my memories as research. But as one of the only non-white and non-Jewish girls in a school of 2000 students, I got Angry Boys in much the same way subjects do when they realize that the novel is about them.
I grew up in two bubbles – one was my Indian household, and one was the city outside it. Calabasas is home to many industry descendants, but the Hollywood lights simply didn’t exist in my family. They were replaced with Bollywood starlets, turmeric-stained bench-tops and MBA placards. My world inside was completely disconnected to my world outside, just as Calabasas was completely disconnected to Los Angeles and beyond.
There is an allure to the area. It’s quieter than the city, prettier than the valley and it’s only a short drive over the canyon to Malibu. The streets of Calabasas are wide and welcoming, so long as you can get through the gates in which they often belong. This isn’t a walking distance town, but if you have a spare hour or two and some calories to burn, you may find yourself at the fancy-looking Commons near the Parkways or at the Gelson’s on Mulholland Highway, depending on where you’re coming from. You’ll almost always find a nail salon and a clothing boutique there, but be sure to bring some spare change, as stepping inside can cost you.
It’s rare to walk inside a home without a swimming pool, and the bedroom space will stick to you as desperate longing when you move across the world and into an inner-city apartment. Calabasas is a place for home-lovers; the houses are big, pretty, and they stand in lines, row after row, street after street. Some look the same but you can be sure that their insides aren’t. One may have a kitchen where the other’s dining room is, and visa versa.
My father grew up in a village in India and my mother grew up in Kenya, so Calabasas was the ideal setting for their American dream. They started with a home close to Topanga Canyon, until all the weekends spent looking at and then for properties inside the gated communities paid off and we moved to the highly coveted Mountain View Estates. It was my father’s way of saying, “I have made it!” Our new home replaced the MBA placard as his declaration of success.
But we weren’t like the other families in the area. Cultural communities stick together for a reason, and this usually has to do with cultivating a sense of belonging. Within this world of Hanukkah celebrations and Bat Mitzvahs, we couldn’t find any. And so I tried to make do with what I had.
Most of the girls at my school were thin and pretty and most of the boys were, too. Common afflictions included anorexia and less than perfect noses, but the latter were easily amended with a short stay at the local doctor’s surgery. Fellow families joined country clubs and had Mexican housemaids, and Swingers Parties were (allegedly) a common occurrence. I grew up alongside directors’ daughters and composers’ sons, and even the odd actor. Topanga from Boy Meets World graduated with my brother.
And so fitting in was impossible.
We were stuck somewhere between East and West, and neither side wanted us all that badly. The one time my father tried to join a country club my mother screamed at him and made him cancel his membership. The Indian friends I made in the Valley lived a seemingly foreign existence to mine, and when I started to listen to Dave Matthews Band, they forever referred to me as a coconut.
I wasn’t the only minority in Calabasas, but most of the other ones went the same route that Lilley’s S Mouse did – by defying their environment and pretending they were somewhere else. I briefly tried to do that, but it didn’t work. I guess I just really liked Dave Matthews Band.
Needless to say, when I graduated from high school, I made a run for it – all the way to UC San Diego, then London, and then Sydney. I soon discovered that the East and West I knew weren’t the only directions out there in the world, and gradually, I found a place where I could fit. Naturally, I blamed the narrow-minded options of my youth on the whole city of Los Angeles itself.
It’s been a few years since I’ve left, and little by little, I’m getting over my grudge. Sometimes, you have to leave a place before you can truly appreciate it, and something I have learned in my recent trips back to Los Angeles is that the city isn’t merely one great big gated community. It’s pretty easy to miss it when you’re rolling around in your parents’ BMW, but LA is actually pretty diverse, and as the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America taught me, apparently gangs live there, too. The most prolific beauty is often found in madness, so it is precisely its adversity that makes Los Angeles such an intriguing, intense, insane and all around incredible city. From Calabasas to Compton, you would think you were crossing continents, all in a 20-minute drive along the 405.
Then there are the colorful streets of Venice, the haunted hills of Hollywood, the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway, and nearly 10 million stories to choose from, scattered throughout Los Angeles County. And I’m almost positive that in one of them, another Indian girl is listening to Dave Matthews Band, and struggling to fit in.
Even Calabasas isn’t just the setting for my identity crisis as it once was. The supermarkets are big and stock everything and I almost always run into someone I know in them. If it’s a sunny day (as it so often is in LA), I sit in my teenage backyard and lounge out by the pool with a book in one hand and a cocktail in the other. It’s impossible to miss the scent of jasmine in the air come spring, and at night, if it’s really quiet, you can often hear the coyotes howl. And sometimes, when life feels so big and powerful and complicated, it’s awfully nice to go back to your hometown, crawl inside the comfort of its bubble, and leave the real world outside, for just a little while.
The gates are wide and welcoming! Or at least the Mexican security guards that work on them are.
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