Sideways on a Scooter (4 page)

T
here is no word in Hindi for
boyfriend
, so the English word is dropped into Hindi sentences, and once there, it rings like a curse. Being boyfriended implies a depraved, decadent life; a girl with one boyfriend is sure to have many others. During my first year in India, when the language rang strangely in my ears, just a rhythmic patter of unfamiliar sounds, I would clutch onto the word as I did to other recognizable scraps inside speech. When non-English-speaking Indians use English words and phrases—such as
tension, operation
, and
by chance—
it is either to emphasize a point or to impress someone. The word
boyfriend
is different; it is always heavy with ugly connotations.

I’d been living in seedy hotels for several months while I made exploratory reporting trips around India, still waiting to find a landlord in Delhi who’d agree to rent an apartment to a single foreign lady. My unmarried status wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been able to afford a place in one of the city’s elite enclaves, where the moneyed Indian classes stretch out in spacious colonial homes beside those of foreign diplomats and businessmen with generous expat packages. In
lower-middle-class Indian neighborhoods, though, the landlords are unaccustomed to the wild ways of Western women who live by themselves or—worse—with a boyfriend. So I was scrutinized just as are Indian women when they try to break the grip of tradition.

The surges of electricity from Delhi’s irregular power supply had decimated my laptop battery. I was living on cheap street food—fried potato patties with tamarind sauce, lentil dal in leaf bowls, thick
parantha
breads right off the iron griddle. It was all delicious, if not very good for my insides: I’d become accustomed to regular bouts of diarrhea. The drug-addled Europeans at the Lord’s Hotel were getting to me, too, so I asked around for a hotel in a nontouristy part of town. At the New City Palace, a tiny single room was only four dollars a night, so I didn’t mind that this hotel didn’t live up to its name any more than the Lord’s did. The only thing palatial about the New City Palace was the view: It faced directly onto the Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India.

My first morning there, I was woken by the call to prayer before dawn, amplified through tinny loudspeakers projecting out of the building. I pulled on my clothes and ventured onto the hotel’s balcony. Early-morning mist was floating across the red sandstone minarets, and the lanes echoed with the rough voice of the imam compelling worshippers inside. As I watched, the red sandstone steps were washed out with white, as men in flowing white kurtas climbed up into the mosque’s great courtyard for morning prayers. The hotel proprietor sent out a wrinkled male servant in a Muslim skullcap to offer me tea. Even though the servant was over sixty years old, the proprietor called him a
tea-boy
to denote his low rank. He managed to take my order and refill my cup without once meeting my eye.

The New City Palace was undoubtedly a more authentic experience, as all the guests were Indian. It was also less comfortable, since they were all strictly observant Muslim men. I imagined that everything they knew about Western women they’d learned from reruns of
Baywatch
, which, to my bafflement and dismay, are broadcast daily on Indian cable even today. My fellow hotel guests treated me as though I were perpetually clad in a skimpy bikini, either completely avoiding
me or eyeing me with undisguised lust. The Sikh landlord’s question—“Are you alone?”—made much more sense now that I’d separated myself from other female
feringhees
. Women rarely live alone in India unless they are for sale. Realizing this made me see that a girl alone in Delhi is more exposed than she is in any of the other world capitals I’d ever visited. It also gave me a rush of adventurousness; I liked believing I could fend for myself wherever I ended up.

One morning I hit upon the legitimization I needed. I would make it known to the hotel staff that I had a boyfriend back in America and prove, for once and for all, that I was no wandering prostitute. I strode over to the hotel receptionist to deliver the news. He was the owner’s son, I’d gathered, and had a long, untrimmed Muslim beard and serious black eyes. With the conviction of someone on the right side of moral law, I made my announcement in loud and ungrammatical Hindi: “Soon, my
boyfriend
will be coming to stay in this place.”

I gave the English word the emphasis I thought it deserved in the sentence. For a moment, his expression was unchanged—he’d been giving me the same disbelieving gape every time I came in and out, since I’d first marched up to his desk and asked to check in to his cheapest room. As my words settled in, though, they provoked a different response from the one I’d intended. A slow, sleazy smirk broke across his face, revealing two terrible things: that his teeth were rotting inside his mouth and that he was probably the same age as I was.

My arms prickled. I had just sexualized myself to him, I realized, and in his almost certainly repressed world, it was even possible that I had made him an offer. I walked back to my room, where I sat on the edge of the bed cursing myself. That evening, I reemerged into the small lobby—the rooms didn’t have phones, so I couldn’t call down to the front desk—and asked for an extra lock for my door.

So much for the exhilarating reporter’s life I’d envisioned for myself in India: I spent most evenings barricaded into my cramped hotel room, afraid to venture into the lobby after dark. I’d pass the time transcribing my interviews from underneath a mosquito net, watching the insects pool greedily on its surface, and reading novels by Indian writers, searching for clues to help me market myself to Delhi’s landlords.
I’m not sure why I was so slow, but it took me weeks to see my mistake. In India’s realm of stark Victorian morals, what I needed wasn’t a boyfriend but a husband. It was too late to redeem myself to the New City Palace, but from now on I resolved that Benjamin, my boyfriend back in New York, would become my unwitting husband in India. He’d be like the fake engagement ring some women slip on before they head out to a bar, except rather than warding off preying men, I hoped my husband lie would draw in those prying Delhi landlords. I decided not to inform Benjamin of this counterfeit change in our relationship status, since pretending we were married, even in a distant country, was liable to scare him off.

I began to take other steps to transform myself into a proper married lady, starting at the local tailor shop. The hippie-girl-in-India look wasn’t doing anything for me, anyway—it was neither especially attractive nor useful at helping me fit in. I needed to get some
salwar kameez
outfits made for myself—the loose, pajama-style pants, or
salwar
, and knee-length tunic called
kameez
or kurta, which, along with a matching scarf, comprise the most common daily uniform of women across India. The costume is tailored differently depending on the region, religion, and modernity of the woman wearing it. A Muslim pulls the scarf across her head to completely cover her hair; a rural Hindu drapes the scarf across her face to demonstrate respect to her elders; and a middle-class city girl wears her tunic short and fitted over jeans, a gauzy scarf tossed over a shoulder.

It was dim and grimy inside the tailor shop. A silvery rendering of the holy Islamic city of Mecca lit one wall. The tailor, a tiny, exhausted-looking man, stood up from his stool when I came in. Wordlessly, he gestured for me to spread my arms so he could take my measurements. There was something deeply respectful in the care he took never to touch my skin or my clothes even as he inched his tape alongside my body. He beckoned, and a small boy emerged from a corner and began pulling bolts of material down from the shelves—sudden, energetic colors in the gloomy store. I made my choice: saffron and peacock blue.

When I showed up to my next apartment viewing, I wore my
salwar kameez
in a traditional village style, the scarf folded modestly across
the chest so it functioned as what I called—to myself, because I had no one else to say it to—a “boob remover.” I smiled shyly to emit what I imagined was a wifely aura and dropped an early mention of “my journalist husband” who would soon be joining me in Delhi. To my relief, the landlord accepted this without questioning. Achieving a façade of moral respectability turned out to be as simple as shedding my Western skirt and reciting the words
“Mehre patee aungi.”
My husband is coming.

Now that I had my pick of lower-middle-class real estate, I started trying to make sense of the city’s sprawling series of neighborhoods. It is impossible to know how many millions live in the slums. With no official addresses and no social security numbers, the vast majority of Indians cannot be tracked; they are chronically unaccounted for. There are somewhere between twelve and eighteen million residents in Delhi, which I could well believe when I looked out upon the heaving, flowing crush of humanity from the balcony of the New City Palace.

In the seventeenth century, during the Islamic Mogul dynasty, Delhi was said to be the world’s most populous city. The Moguls built a settlement there in concentric circles, the inner core of which was a glorious walled city. After the British took complete control of India in the nineteenth century, they brought in their own architect, a man named Edwin Lutyens, to remake Delhi as “an empire in stone.” He was to create a capital that would befit the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. Lutyens dismantled entire sections of the old Mogul city, replacing them with an inner core that looked more like Europe than India: monumental buildings, handsome white bungalows, and ceremonial boulevards laid out on a grid plan. But outside the colonial center that is still known as New Delhi, the British made no attempt to impose order. Subsequent planners have also failed to do so. The city quickly degrades from spacious avenues to narrow laneways crammed with Soviet-style cement apartment blocks. Farther out, the paved roads become dirt lanes, the sewer systems disappear, and shacks of cardboard and aluminum siding take over.

“Ostentation and wasteful extravagance” is how independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described the British-designed
capital. Moral rectitude was the ruling sentiment in postcolonial India, as learned from the independence leader Mohandas Gandhi, universally referred to by the honorific
Mahatma
, or “Great Soul,” by the end of his life. When Gandhi arrived in London to negotiate with world leaders for India’s freedom, he was shirtless, a dhoti cloth wrapped around his waist and legs. British prime minister Winston Churchill scorned him as a seditious, half-naked fakir. To the India of the 1930s and ’40s, though, Gandhi’s traditional garb and scant vegetarian meals seemed to prove that he embodied the principles of the nationalist struggle: nonviolent resistance, self-rule, and self-reliance. Even as today’s materialistic India moves away from Gandhi’s culture of self-denial, he is still canonized in school textbooks as “the father of the nation” and extolled in biographies for his frugal lifestyle and commitment to India’s high principles.

Gandhi was assassinated only five months after India declared its independence in 1947, leaving Nehru and other independence leaders to shepherd India into nationhood without their most beloved figure. Rather than revolutionizing the flaccid colonial culture of British rule, India’s babus—its bureaucrats and civil servants—just took over where the elite imperial servants of the British Empire had left off. The new government simply moved into many of the existing British power structures. For instance, in spite of Nehru’s distaste for British-designed New Delhi, he allowed it to become the seat of power of independent India. The magnificent 340-room palace that had been built as a home for the British viceroy wasn’t torn down but rather reclaimed as the official residence of the president and renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan, Sanskrit for “president’s house.” In a rather unsatisfactory nod to Gandhian parsimony, Indian presidents are expected to occupy just a single wing of the palace.

Nehru faced bigger problems than these symbolic ones. The newly independent nation was deeply divided, impoverished, and uneducated. There were millions of homeless Hindu refugees from the now-Muslim Pakistan crowding into India’s streets. At independence, only 16 percent of India’s population could read and write—and only 7 percent of women.

Nehru was resolved to create a secular and equitable democracy out of what one historian calls an “unnatural nation.” He devoted his early years in office to trying to pass social reforms, outlawing polygamy and increasing Hindu women’s share of family property, although different laws applied to Muslims. The 1950 constitution is one of the world’s most progressive and enlightened. But I would learn that all this enlightened reform had a negligible impact on women’s lives. Now, as it did then, what determines acceptable behavior in India is not national law but thousand-year-old social customs. However fast the country is changing, this much is not: Nothing is sharper than the tug of tradition and family.

Eight months after I arrived in India, I moved into Nizamuddin West, a residential neighborhood just outside British-built New Delhi. It’s a leafy little enclave, a world apart from the poverty and tumult of the area around the New City Palace. My neighbors were pilots, engineers, and government employees whose iron gates protected their carefully swept patios from stray dogs and beggars. A cobbler, an electrician, some convenience shops, and several press-wallah stands crowded the market, at which the concave-chested wallahs bent over the planks of wood that served as ironing boards. They used old-fashioned irons filled with hot coals. In Nizamuddin, as in the rest of the city, the
bustees
, or slums, are strictly segregated from the wealthier areas—but they are never far away, because they house the maids, sweepers, and drivers essential to the middle classes. Although I tried to ignore the servant and caste system as I set up my home in Delhi, I couldn’t shut it out for long.