Sideways on a Scooter (49 page)

He pulled up an image of a girl on his cell phone; she was wearing a fitted, knee-length, modern
salwar kameez
. I complimented her in a way I hoped sounded appropriate, and he seemed gratified.

“I wish you could meet her sometime. She is wanting to meet you, madam. Don’t tell my mother I have a GF, though. Okay?”

I told him I’d never do that and tried to overcome the temptation to ask whether he planned to marry the girl. I didn’t want to undermine the confidence between us. The grown-up Babloo wanted to align himself with me—the sole
feringhee
he’d ever met—and prove himself a globalized citizen of the world. He wanted to leave behind the restrictive ways of his illiterate mother and the old India.

There was no way for me to ask about marriage and not also be asking, as a Bihari auntie would, “Are you protecting the girl’s innocence?” I was quite sure that Babloo had plenty of aunties asking him questions like that, and not enough people complimenting him for making the leap into the educated class. He was dedicated to advancing himself so that he could get the kind of job his mother had always hoped for for him. He said he’d promised his younger sister that he wouldn’t let her be married off before she finished high school, as Pushpa had been. In any case, since he’d carefully mentioned his GF’s high caste, I was pretty sure I knew the answer to the aunties’ question. Of course he planned to marry the girl.

•   •   •

“I’ve let my hair go!” Parvati said as she hugged me hello.

The dusting of white over her thick black braid was an arresting sight. In India, both women and men much older than Parvati consistently dye or henna their hair to cover the gray. Not doing so was practically a political statement.

“I’d been dyeing it for years, but I’d always said that I would go natural when I turned thirty-five. Kind of a depressing way to celebrate a birthday, isn’t it?”

I climbed into the car, and Vijay leaned back from the passenger seat to shake my hand in his odd, formal way.

“Her gray hair actually has a useful function,” he said. “Now when she argues with aggressive
haramis
for trying to rip her off in the market, they assume she’s a crazy woman and get away from her as fast as they can. She doesn’t even have to yell at them.”

Parvati rolled her eyes at me in the rearview mirror as she started the engine. Since she’d been promoted to a managerial position at her job, she said, Vijay had been making fun of her for ordering people around and wearing what he called “power saris.”

“It’s a pain to put on a sari every day, but I decided it’s worth it for the respect I get at work when I do. The boss isn’t thrilled about the gray hair, though. I’ll probably have to dye it again.
If
I stay in my new position, that is. I’ll tell you about my plan over a drink.”

The Press Club looked cleaner than I remembered it. Vijay said that there’d been an influx of new members from the fast-growing ranks of TV correspondents. These journalists were young, good-looking, and well mannered—nothing like Vijay’s cuss-mouthed, hard-drinking newspaper friends. More women had joined, too. I could tell because the outhouse that served as the ladies’ room had been upgraded—now there was a lock on the door and a working flush.

As we sat outside on the club patio, my eyes stung and my throat burned from the particulates in the air. I laughed that after two years in America, I’d become too delicate to handle Delhi’s atmosphere, but Parvati said that the pollution had become much worse in the last couple
of years. There were cranes stretched all across the city’s low horizon, constantly expanding the business district and the outskirts, as well as the Delhi Metro. Rising incomes meant there were more cars and scooters on the streets now, too.

“It’s disgusting—when I blow my nose at night it comes out black and my throat is sore all the time,” she said.

Given the pollution, it seemed strange that the Press Club had decided to drape white tablecloths over the outdoor plastic tables. Parvati said it was the work of one of the beverage companies that had started doing promotional events there in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the club’s new members. If Smirnoff was setting up shop at the Press Club, times certainly had changed, I thought. I’d never seen the patrons of the place drinking anything other than Indian-made beer or whiskey.

A chubby twenty-something kid was dispatched from the Smirnoff booth to our table. He offered us cocktails in an American-inflected English unmistakably learned at a call center job. Parvati dismissed him with a flick of her hand: “No one here wants those chickenshit drinks.” The boy retreated, and she called for Dev, her regular Mao-suited waiter, and ordered us Seagram’s Blenders Pride and Royal Challenge for Vijay.

Vijay wandered off with drink in hand to greet some other friends. Parvati leaned toward me intensely, as she was wont to do over whiskeys at the Press Club.

“I don’t want to grow old here, Miranda. All the new money has changed the city. Look at these poseurs with their vodka drinks. And there’s much worse. Delhi has always been aggressive, but petty crime is rising fast now. There’s so much anger—I don’t think it’s safe here anymore. Recently, a car full of men chased my car along the highway at night, and I was thinking that anything could happen.”

Parvati said she’d recently gotten together enough money to buy an inexpensive plot of land in the Himalayan foothills, not far from the village where she was born. She wanted to save enough to build a house there, so that she and Vijay could quit their jobs and leave Delhi for good.

“It’s in an isolated place, outside the village. Hopefully we’ll be left alone.”

It was hard to imagine Parvati anywhere other than Delhi. I asked whether she’d miss it, and she looked at me sharply.

“Delhi
is
a village, Miranda. It just pretends to be this urbane place, when in fact it’s all the worst things about a village. The idea that you can be anonymous here is bullshit—you know that. Everyone in Nizamuddin knows everything about you. The only thing for us is to leave. It’s the only way to escape the past. I don’t want Vijay to keep feeling like he has to hide his wife and her baby from everyone. It’s just tiring, you know?”

Vijay returned to the table then, accompanied by a meticulously dressed older man with a comb-over and the slightly uneven walk of someone affected by polio as a child.

“Parvati, Miranda, this is Dilip-
ji
—you know, the respected senior journalist.”

The gentleman straightened his back at Vijay’s introduction and folded his hands in a
Namaste
gesture.

“I am so pleased to finally meet Vijay’s
dulhan
. Welcome, welcome.”

His Hindi was formal and slightly drunken. Parvati offered him a plastic chair. Dilip did not want to take a seat, though. He wanted to extend the social flourishes for as long as possible, effusing praise on Parvati. My Hindi was a little rusty, but I was pretty certain that he had referred to Parvati as a “revered bride.” Her stunned expression made me think my translation was correct.

Parvati was in a good mood, though, so she was willing to play the part that this gentleman expected of her. Her patience started to give out only when Dilip-
ji
tried to press money into her hand, a symbolic gift of a hundred and one rupees. He kept insisting that the money was “to bring good luck for the new bride.” Vijay had stopped talking, and his head was in his hands. Finally Parvati placed the money on the tablecloth and turned to me. “Come. I have to go to the toilet.”

I was happy to oblige. My head hurt from trying to follow what was going on. We stood outside the door to the ladies’ outhouse, where the branches of a bodhi fig tree hung low in the courtyard, the leaves coated with a layer of desert dust.

“It is bloody ridiculous. Did you hear him? That old fool thinks I am Vijay’s new bride. For God’s sake, I have gray in my hair!”

“What makes him think you guys just got married?”

“I don’t know! I guess he just assumes it because he’s never seen Vijay with me before. He’s tipsy and overexcited. I was trying to be nice, but God, did you hear the flowery language he was using? I thought I was going to puke.”

“I was pretty impressed at your ability to play along with it,” I told her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you be so accommodating.”

“I know. Even I am impressed with myself. Did you hear me promise to cook for him, like a good Indian wife? So funny! But when he tried to give me that money, it became too embarrassing. I mean, Vijay is married to
another woman
. Ugh. I can’t go back there. Maybe Vijay will work up the nerve to inform that fool we’re not married. Let’s just sit here awhile.”

It sounded like a grand idea to relax underneath the wide canopy of the fig tree in the courtyard of the Press Club, even if we were actually sitting on browned-out grass beside a reeking bathroom. I tried not to inhale through my nose and reminded myself that Buddha achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree in Bihar. Thinking about Buddhism made me realize that Parvati had mellowed a lot in the last couple of years. As we sat listening to the traffic on the street outside, she seemed to find some inner calm. When she looked at me, I saw that the tense lines around her eyes had loosened.

“It’s comical, isn’t it? This kind of thing still happening when I’m in my thirties? It must seem strange to come back to this city of crazy conservative
choot
s!”

I laughed. Parvati knew that situations such as this were inevitable in the life she’d chosen. She’d rejected the easy destiny of a village girl, and what she’d gotten instead wasn’t really all that bad.

In Geeta’s married world, the streets smelled of spicy fish curry and were lined with violet-blooming jacaranda trees. The Bangalore street vendors sold pineapples and coconut water from their wooden carts,
rather than the guava and squash hawked from carts in Delhi. Moving away from her in-laws seemed to have stirred the long-dormant homemaker in Geeta. As we pulled through the gate of her one-story rented house, I saw that the driveway was decorated with intricate blue and pink chalk designs that are popular in South India. Fresh blossoms floated in a ceramic pot of water outside the door.

The house she and Ramesh lived in was light and airy, with white marble floors and fans whirring overhead. There were two large bedrooms, which immediately made me sure that they were still trying to have kids; I knew that Geeta, the consummate bargain hunter, wouldn’t pay for an extra room unless she planned to use it. The sounds of the neighbors floated in from both sides: a woman singing a romantic old movie tune as she moved about the kitchen, and a breathless news anchor announcing the day’s headlines in the Kannada language. Geeta was quick to advertise the advantages of her new place, although I’d never seen her in-laws’ house.

“Even when Ramesh is at work I don’t get lonely,” she said. “I can always hear people around me. Of course, my in-laws don’t believe me. They think it’s miserable that I am here by myself during the day.”

I put my bag down and sank into a black leather couch, which seemed an uncharacteristically flashy touch for a middle-class Indian home; I wondered whether Ramesh’s father had bought it for them. A small Sri Lankan mask was hanging on one of the whitewashed walls of the living room, and I recognized it as the gift Ramesh had given Geeta on their first date, when he’d told her he wanted to marry her.

They’d moved out of the Murthy household just three months before, after two years of trying to make it work there, and the decision seemed to suit Geeta: her skin glowed as it used to, and she’d lost some of the weight that she’d blamed on Ramesh’s parents’ diet. In fact, with her hair curled up in the humidity and her face dimpling with pleasure at seeing me, she looked like herself again, very different from the dissatisfied Punjabi housewife she’d been last time I saw her in Delhi. Nevertheless, the decision to move out of the Murthy household was apparently still raw, because Geeta wanted to explain.

“I feel bad about leaving Ramesh’s parents, but living there was too much. I have different expectations. And then I thought—why should I have to do this? This is the new India!”

“Wait—so it was your idea to move out?”

I didn’t know any of the details. Our contact had been limited to occasional emails since I’d moved back to the States, and I realized, with a flash of shame, that our correspondence had been much more about me than it had been about her. There was a reason for my self-involvement, though: When I’d told Geeta I was undertaking a real marriage—to Ted, the
feringhee
I’d met in Delhi—she’d been so thrilled that she didn’t want to talk about anything else.

She’d helped me organize the ceremony, making sure it had plenty of Indian touches. We’d talked about little other than my wedding jewelry for months. She’d designed a necklace-and-earring set for me and had it made for me in Bangalore, all of which required a great deal of deliberation, debate, and haggling. As she’d often reminded me, the bride’s jewelry sends an important statement about whether she is modern or traditional. We’d eventually settled on a modern design—Ramesh-approved—in the traditional yellow antiqued gold, making me a “modern-cum-traditional” bride. I wore it with a red silk dress, because after living in India, I didn’t want to get married in white, the color of widowhood.

Geeta couldn’t make it to the wedding—which we held in Dublin, where my parents lived—but our first dance was in her honor—the love song from the classic Shah Rukh Khan movie
DDLJ
.

Now that I was emerging from my bridal absorption, I realized I had a lot to catch up on. Geeta had always been an advocate of the extended family, and I’d assumed she would do as her mother advised and adjust to her new in-laws. I was surprised that she’d had the gumption to “do a nuclear” and leave the joint family home. Geeta fixed us a jug of
nimbo panne
, that refreshing lemon drink I’d missed. Ramesh retreated to their bedroom with his, and Geeta started at the beginning.

“The spicy food was only part of the problem. My in-laws are kind of dirty also—there is always laundry and children’s toys scattered
around—and that drove me crazy. And, I had no independence. They were always in my business, asking what I was doing, and always, all day long, praying. There was no relief.”