Sideways on a Scooter Read online

We were headed for Trans-Yamuna Delhi, the distant suburbs east of the river. On the other side of the bridge, the cityscape stretched into pocket-sized fields of crops that were cultivated between small factories and low-income housing blocks. Vijay stumbled out of the car at his apartment complex, and Parvati drove us around the block to her place. As she led me up the open staircase of her whitewashed concrete building, I realized that they live in the only acceptable way an unmarried couple can in Delhi: separate apartments in adjacent buildings. Parvati said they hung out together most evenings, sometimes spending the night together, “if the circumstances are right.” That sounded foreboding, but I couldn’t be sure; I’d become accustomed to hearing a different meaning from the spoken one.

  “I like having my own space so my mother can come stay with me. It’s tiny, but unlike Vijay’s place, it is very, very clean.” That was definitely the adjective that came to mind as I looked around her box of an apartment. Lit by fluorescent tubes, the three rooms had the sanitized glare of a hospital. “My mom comes to stay with me for six months of the year, and she is obsessed with purity. Some kind of Brahminical austerity.”

  She handed me a white Victorian-style nightgown, so crisply ironed that it felt starched, and we passed out on the large daybed that took up the bedroom’s entire floor space.

  When Parvati tugged open the curtains the next morning, the sun was already searingly bright, even at seven A.M. and close to winter. She brought chai in china teacups, steaming with cardamom and ginger, and a thick roll of several newspapers to flip through. Hardly anyone savors India’s tabloid-style papers slowly; most of the stories are no more than a couple of paragraphs long and have little context or history. Parvati was an especially speedy news skimmer. She peeled past the entertainment and sports headlines that so often litter the front pages and found a story she was looking for inside, an update about a politician caught on video accepting wads of rupee notes. She guffawed as she read out details of his political humiliation.

  A wrinkled brown skin formed on top of my chai as it cooled. I pushed it to one side. Its steam, rising in a slot of sun, made me feel comforted and much less alone than I’d felt in many months. I’d first spoken to Parvati only twelve hours before, but I already hoped I’d be able to talk to her as I would to my girlfriends back in New York. I had an instinct that she shared something of my own values.

  I wondered for a moment whether it was wise to bring up her relationship with Vijay so early on in our friendship. I’ve never been especially subtle or oblique, which I liked to excuse by saying that those traits do not suit the job of a journalist. From what I’d seen, Parvati was even blunter than I was. Because she’d talked frankly about one of the greatest Indian taboos—caste—I hoped she would be as easy about discussing another—sex and love.

  She looked up sharply at the question, though.

  “That is a difficult question, Miranda.” She returned to her paper. I raised my eyebrows in mild surprise. It was several minutes before she spoke again. “You know, I haven’t ever been to the U.S.—or anywhere outside India, actually. But from what I can tell, you have many acceptable kinds of relationships there. In case you haven’t realized, there is really only one way in India. And I’ve decided to opt out.” There was a finality in her voice that referred not just to the decision but to our conversation.

  Later that morning, as she was dropping me off at home, Parvati pulled over at a roadside tobacco stand. She rolled down the window and shouted to get the attention of the kid working at the stall: “Han-ji! Hello!” He was maybe fourteen, his bony brown shoulders jutting high out of his white tank top. He stared at Parvati dolefully. She lifted her hand out of the window at him in a questioning gesture, but he didn’t move. She cursed under her breath.

  “Gaand ke dhakan. This happens half the time I try to buy smokes in this town. These village boys land up in Delhi and act like it’s bloody illegal for women to smoke.”

  She pulled herself out of the car. She was wearing another conservative salwar kameez set, complete with a matching scarf looped across her chest. The boy gummed a wad of paan, sizing her up as she approached, as though trying to place her in the hierarchy of the world as he knew it.

  “Ten Gold Flake cigarettes,” Parvati demanded in Hindi. Like everyone else, she pronounced her favored brand of cigarettes “Gold Flack.” He didn’t move. She raised her voice to full volume, drowning out the horns and cow moos of the market: “Ten Gold Flack!”

  I watched nervously from the car window, half expecting her to grab a pack from the shelf and throw it at him. After a long moment, the teenager leaned over, disgorged his mouthful of paan into the street, and set a pack on the counter. Parvati let it lie there for a moment. Then she snapped it up.

  “Thank you, ji,” she said, her voice full of irony as she used the term of respect. She pulled a cigarette out and lit it with the lighter that was tied to the boy’s counter with a piece of string. The lighter tube flashed red and blue, and I could see the colors reflected in his blank eyes. Parvati slammed her money on the counter and marched back to the car, her lit cigarette dangling from her mouth.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cooked by Brahmin Hands

  The crows were cawing anxiously in the top branches of the gulmohar, a tree with fire-red blossoms that Indians call “the flame of the forest.” The tree arched gracefully over the apartment building I’d just moved into, though it looked anything but graceful now, as the winds stripped it of its fleshy blooms. They landed on the concrete with pregnant thuds. An August monsoon storm was coming. The skies darkened, the birds disappeared, and the air became heavy and silent, like the interior of a mangrove swamp. Then the rain came, lashing and slanting viciously at the windows. The drains quickly clogged, filling the gutters with rainwater and stinging my nostrils with the putrid sewage smell.

  I saw Joginder dash toward the market, his head covered with a plastic bag. A delivery boy teetered through the stalled traffic on a bicycle, precariously balancing large metal canisters of gasoline on each side. A taxi swayed through the flood, the driver poking his head out the window to navigate, his hair slick with rain. He couldn’t see through the wall of water on the windshield; his wipers must have been broken. By evening, the last of summer’s gulmohar blossoms were bloody smears on the pavement.

  I’d moved around the corner from my old barsati in Nizamuddin, and although my new apartment was fully indoors, we still couldn’t stave off the ooze and creep of the humid season. The spices disintegrated into a soggy mash in their leaky jars. The chapati bloomed with fungus just hours after Radha made it. Brilliant green mold rose up in a shimmering line along the windowsills. Millipedes scuttled along the walls, and hordes of mosquitoes hovered around the sink. The transparent geckos gorged themselves all day on the insects in my kitchen.

  My second Delhi apartment was four times as expensive as the barsati, which horrified Geeta. Until she saw the place, that is. It was “family sized,” she gasped—three bedrooms, three bathrooms, each with Western-style toilets and actual showers—with an air-conditioning unit in almost every room. It was definitely not the kind of apartment typically occupied by a single girl. I’d justified it to the landlord by saying that my husband would be spending half the year there, but I didn’t really expect Benjamin to be around that much, which meant I’d have a lot of space to myself.

  The thing that I loved best about the apartment was the inverter that came with it. I don’t know how I made it for two years in India without this particular luxury: a device that stores up battery power and switches itself on when the electricity goes out. Because Delhi’s electricity supply is so unreliable, an inverter is as essential as a ceiling fan or a window screen, even though only those in the upper middle class can afford one. For all the discomforts that Delhi’s masses endure, the chronic power cuts seemed the least bearable to me. The inverter is rarely robust enough to power an air conditioner, but it can sustain a couple of fans—and during the almost-dai
ly power cuts of a Delhi summer, a fan’s breeze was air from the flapping wings of a blessed angel.

  In my barsati, the chronic blackouts meant I’d spend my nights awake, sweaty and helpless to do anything other than pray that the Delhi electricity board would get its act together. After an hour of such frustration, I’d flee downstairs to Nanima’s slightly cooler apartment, where she and Geeta were inevitably up, too; without any air circulating, sleep was not an option. Geeta and I would push open the windows in the hope of a breeze and watch the neighbors filtering onto their patios. Often, they’d join Joginder and his family on charpoys in the alley, where the pitch darkness was unrelieved by even the narrow beam of a streetlight.

  In my new apartment, I realized, I might sleep straight through the power cuts. I tried not to rub it in to Geeta as I showed her around, because I could tell she was already jealous of the new place. I think she would have loved to move into the spare bedroom, but she couldn’t leave Nanima. Nevertheless, Geeta made it clear that she intended to spend a lot of time there. She decided that this was a good time for me to learn how to manage my household better than I had in my barsati, which she considered chaotic and understaffed. Geeta appointed herself a sort of household advisor for my new Nizamuddin life. It wasn’t a position I’d realized I needed to fill, but Geeta was determined that I’d be a proper Indian homemaker yet.

  The first step was finding me an Indian woman to show me how it was done. That was easy enough: Geeta quickly got a friend from work, Priya, to move into my extra bedroom. Like Geeta, she was a modern girl from a middle-class family who had been “living alone” in Delhi for a couple years. Her parents were only two hours’ drive from the city, and she spent most weekends with them. During the week, Geeta tasked her with showing me how to run an Indian household. This arrangement had multiple benefits, as Geeta saw it. I wouldn’t be as lonely in my huge family-sized apartment, and I’d have someone to contribute toward my rent, which, at four hundred dollars a month, she considered irresponsibly profligate.

  Radha and I walked over together the day I moved in. The skinny neighborhood boys skittered past us with boxes of my clothes on their heads, perspiring through their polyester shirts to earn their three-dollar moving fee. Radha lumbered beside me, scowling occasionally in the direction of the steel cage in which I carried my howling cats. She was grumpy: She’d lost an argument that morning in which she’d ordered me to leave my cats behind, on the premise that I should not allow them to dirty a second apartment.

  When we stepped inside, her disgusted incomprehension fell away. She stood in awed silence, as though taking in a Gothic cathedral. Then she walked through the empty rooms, exclaiming softly to herself. The place seemed bigger than I remembered, now that I considered that my maid would have to sweep and mop the long stretches of white tile. After she’d peered inside every closet door, Radha sank down on her haunches to digest.

  “It’s going to be lots more work, deedee”—I was about to apologize when she looked up at me, and I saw that her eyes were shining with pride—“but it is so beautiful. I’ve never seen a more beautiful house, deedee.”

  Radha took my apartment upgrade as evidence that I was moving up in the world, and according to the traditional master-servant equation, this meant she was advancing, too. Maybe she’d brag to her friends about the mansion her rich feringhee employer had moved into, I thought; perhaps it would ease some of the humiliation of cleaning someone else’s floors.

  The news that I’d have an Indian housemate blunted Radha’s glee, though. She knew that with an Indian employer around, her reign as head of my household would come to an end, because no Indian woman would endure her imperious behavior. Geeta had long suspected that Radha took advantage of me because I didn’t know how to manage her. She also thought I was crazy to have so few people working for me. It was high time to correct both ills. Like the stereotype of the bossy Indian housewife, Geeta began piling on unasked-for advice about how I should supervise my new home. Under the pretext that Priya wouldn’t be comfortable there without some semblance of middle-class living, Geeta instructed me to expand my employee roster.

  “Having people to do things for you is one of the advantages of India, Miranda. No need to feel guilty about it; just start hiring.”

  With Geeta’s help, I soon had Asma to wash the staircase, Ajay to do odd jobs around the apartment, and K.K., my favorite from the taxi stand, as a part-time driver. Finding people willing to serve your needs, however specific, is never difficult in a city full of the chronically underemployed.

  Learning how to oversee them was more of a challenge. Even with Geeta and Priya’s help, it only seemed to make my life more complicated to have servants around. I’d never managed anyone before, let alone negotiated the complex caste hierarchies among Indian employees, and I was surprised at how much patience and skill it required. For the first time, I could sympathize with Indian housewives’ complaints about how overworked they are—not from doing the chores themselves but simply from managing the servants. I could also understand why expats often hire from embassy-approved lists. Such employees have had a police check, can cook fettuccine Alfredo, and are supposed to take a professional attitude toward their work.

  Most Indian servants behave like poorer cousins who have agreed to be your slave for a year. To Geeta and Priya, who’d grown up with full-time cooks, maids, and drivers, the employer-servant relationship seemed perfectly natural. Both hailed from middle-class Brahmin families, so it went without saying that others would do their dirty work for them, but since both came from the low end of the middle class, they had relied on underage workers from the villages: easily available, cheap, pliant labor. In many Indian homes, servants are essentially indentured. They are kept on call day and night, housed in a tiny slit of a room in the back of the house, and granted meals and vacation time only on their masters’ whims. Yet these relationships are often affectionate. Geeta’s childhood cook, for instance, had witnessed all the major events of her life—always present, never participating—and she considered him part of her family. Of course, she still had to keep him in line.

  “You give a finger and they’ll take an arm,” Geeta informed me. “Even the best servants. You need to show them who’s in charge.” She couldn’t help but add, “Which you have not done with Radha.” I protested that Radha was a good worker, but my self-appointed household advisor was unmoved. “Many things are difficult in India, Miranda, but finding a good worker is not one of them. You’re paying Radha what she’d earn working for a whole family. She knows you aren’t going to fire her, because you let her get away with anything.”

  It was true; I’d failed to play the role of chiding memsahib to Radha. Now that Geeta had urged me to hire K.K. part-time, I was finding it similarly awkward to manage him. Still, having him around was a panacea to many of the hardships of being a single lady in Delhi. He saved me hours I would have spent bargaining with rickshaw wallahs; he could understand my American-accented Hindi; and he knew Delhi’s streets, which was important because I had to drive all over the city for interviews, and the geography of the city still flummoxed me. K.K. also lent me protection from late-night eve-teasing dangers. When I stumbled out of a bar into the hot glow of a Delhi midnight, he was always waiting for me outside. I’d rap on the car window, interrupting his sleepy cell-phone prattle with his wife back in his village. He’d twinkle his eyes at me, never judgmental or annoyed, no matter how late it was.

  “I am paid for the waiting, madam,” he’d say when I apologized.

  If Radha knew the color of my underwear and what I looked like in the morning, K.K. knew me in other intimate ways. He knew how late I stayed out and in whose company; he could tell when I was frustrated or sad, and when I was, he’d sometimes crack jokes at me in the rearview mirror to cheer me up. K.K. and I had quickly bonded over the fact that we were the same age. I kept up a running commentary on this simple alliance between us—“You have three children and I have none!”
and “You own two houses in the village, and I own nothing more than a bicycle back in New York!”—because it would win me a flash of his charismatic smile in the mirror, and I would feel myself soften into his reflection.

  No matter how much I asked him about his wife and kids, there was no way I could ever know K.K. as well as he knew me, or make our relationship more equal. Still, he made an effort to open up his life to me, unlike Radha, who seemed scarcely able to endure my lists of questions. Once, when my mother was visiting, K.K. drove us three hours outside Delhi to his village—“the most best village in India!”—and put us up for an entire weekend in his family’s farmhouse. He stocked up on bottled water, because he knew feringhees couldn’t drink from the village well, and whiskey, because he knew Western ladies drank alcohol, although the idea of my mother—however adventurous—downing shots of Royal Challenge is in the realm of the ridiculous.

  When we arrived, K.K. sent his wife off to bring us fresh buffalo milk in grimy metal cups. There isn’t much point in drinking bottled water if you’re also drinking unpasteurized milk in cups teeming with bacteria, but my mother and I forced it down, warm and frothy and animal-smelling. The satisfaction on K.K.’s face when I complimented the beverage was worth the resultant days of diarrhea, though I’m not sure my mother would agree. She was grayish green for most of the weekend.

  In his farmhouse, K.K. was the confident master of his own domain, receiving foot massages from his wife and ordering his younger brothers to take us on a tour of his fields. But to show his respect for us, he would eat only after we did; he and his brothers sat with us, overseeing each bite. K.K.’s wife waited behind us—her strong body tensed, her hand on the serving spoon—to dish out more matter paneer or egg curry when one of the men saw space open up on our plates. When my mother heard the buffalo baying outside the window, she’d lurch to the pukka Western toilet that K.K. had proudly shown us—complete with toilet seat and lock on the door. I forced myself to eat for both of us.