Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  In the morning, after stuffing us with his wife’s paranthas—thick, fried breads filled with cauliflower or potato—K.K. swallowed a few mouthfuls of chai and nodded a formal farewell to his family assembled at the gate of his feudal farmhouse. Then he opened the car doors for his two memsahibs, and I was no longer the guest in his domain, but once again his employer.

  When I reported from Pakistan or Afghanistan, my drivers would join me in casual restaurants for kebabs, but that isn’t acceptable in class-obsessed India. K.K. insisted he preferred the drivers’ canteens to sitting at a table with me in a restaurant. I can remember us eating together only once in public. Even though it was a cheap roadside café, so deeply entrenched are India’s hierarchies that the tea-boy actually scoffed when my driver sat down beside me and ordered chai. I wanted to smack that boy, but K.K.’s lowered eyes spoke of such shame that I quieted myself. It wouldn’t have helped his case to have a feringhee girl trying to defend his manhood.

  Geeta and Priya had been conspiring. One morning, Priya informed me that she and my household advisor had decided it was time to present Radha with her own key to the apartment.

  “We’ve decided it’s the best way to give her a sense of her responsibility to the household,” she said.

  I’d long ago decided to surrender to the two of them when it came to household stuff. When it came to managing the staff, they were almost always right. When I handed Radha the key, a rare smile escaped as she tucked it into her choli, as though her smile had been released with a puff of air from inside her sari blouse.

  “Now I won’t have to wait for you to wake up and let me in,” she said.

  Priya didn’t allow Radha to linger in the moment, though. She and Geeta had a precise, multistep plan of action, and she’d reserved this morning for informing Radha of her new status and the accompanying duties. Next up was to inform Radha that she was to be responsible for buying the vegetables and dusting the bookshelves and tables. She was to adopt the role of press wallah as well as dhobi and iron our clothes after washing them and hanging them to dry. No more would our clothes smell of the press wallah’s hot coals; Priya had an electric iron, and she dedicated several mornings to showing Radha how to plug it in and work the buttons.

  Last of all, Priya informed our maid that she would have the honor of cooking for us. Upper-caste Hindus consider the kitchen the most sacred and pure part of the house, and, Priya reminded Radha, many do not like non-Brahmins to even set foot inside the kitchen. Priya made a real effort to impress on Radha that she should be flattered by this new chore.

  “I grew up with a Brahmin cook, and I prefer to eat food cooked by other Brahmins. So it is only because you are Brahmin that we want you to cook for us. Geeta will be having meals here too, and she’s traditional like me. In fact, she will prefer to take her meals here now, because Nanima’s maid isn’t a Brahmin like you.”

  Radha’s expression was solemn. She knew well how momentous this occasion was: being handed Brahminical responsibilities by her new Brahmin employer. My maid already proudly adhered to the strictest upper-class rules about maintaining the purity of the kitchen. She’d only eat food she’d cooked herself or that had been prepared by Brahmin hands on the grounds of a temple. After her husband died, years before, Radha had restricted her diet further; Brahmin widows are supposed to live a life of deprivation. Even on the hottest of days, she would refuse a glass of water from my apparently impure kitchen, preferring to go thirsty until she could drink water from her own. It didn’t make any sense, because her water came from the same filthy municipal source as the water in my taps, and, unlike mine, was not filtered. But I guess she believed her Brahmin sink somehow made the city water more pure.

  I had to hand it to my household advisory committee: Radha actually thanked Priya for adding to her workload. I’d never have guessed it would happen, but the new tasks seemed to make my uppity servant feel more important: She started arriving to work earlier, humming to herself as she set the day’s vegetables on the counter and planned out our meals.

  We invited Geeta over for our first Radha meal: a creamy spinach dish called palak paneer, slightly sweet tomato chutney, and hand-rolled chapatis. Although it was pure vegetarian North Indian food, cooked by the immaculate hand of a fellow Brahmin, Geeta just picked at it.

  “It’s hard for me to get used to Bihari cooking.” She curled her lip as she said the word Bihari. “My mother taught me our family recipes. That’s real food—the Punjabi dishes I grew up with. Not too spicy, not too oily. Priya will tell you. She’s just as particular as I am about having her own kind of regional cooking.”

  Priya nodded sympathetically, though I was relieved to see that she’d made more progress than Geeta had on her plate. I dreaded having to explain to Radha in the morning why so much of her food had gone uneaten. I didn’t really understand how they could have such a problem with Radha’s cooking—to me, Punjabi vegetable dishes tasted scarcely different from Bihari ones—but I’d learned that many Indians have exacting palates. Radha was honored to cook for us, for instance—just as long as she could cook the dishes she’d grown up eating. She would argue fervently that Bihari food was better than Punjabi food, as though it were an objective matter.

  Food has long been the custodian of regional, religious, and caste specificity in India. It is only in the last three decades that globalization has started to take its uniforming toll on Indian cuisine. In the years that Geeta had lived in Delhi, her friends and colleagues had started eating out more regularly. Even in restaurants that advertise themselves as “pure veg” or “pure Brahmin,” they cannot know the caste of the kitchen workers. Geeta had made it clear that she considered this a negative side effect of India’s modernization; still, she wasn’t a purist like Radha, who claimed she’d never once been spiritually polluted by “taking a meal outside.”

  Parvati had little in common with Radha other than her preference for traditional home-cooked vegetarian food. She and Vijay would happily “take whiskey” at the Delhi Press Club, but rarely would they eat there, because they considered restaurant food inferior in quality and cleanliness. Parvati went to extremes to keep globalization out of her kitchen. Like Radha, she shunned store-bought and packaged ingredients. She made her own yogurt out of fresh milk, and chapati out of wheat she bought in bulk; the vegetables she prepared were all fresh and locally grown. Her kitchen was as low-tech and traditional as Radha’s: She cooked exclusively out of three tin pots and had no electric mixers or processors.

  Parvati was also particular about doing the cooking herself—she only occasionally outsourced sous-chef duties to her part-time maid. She never used a cookbook; she’d memorized dishes by watching her mother as a child. And yet each of the North Indian dishes she made—lentil dals, bean dishes, vegetable curries—required half a dozen spices to achieve a subtle complexity of flavors. Even though she used the same spices night after night, somehow each dish tasted different from the other. She’d begin by roasting them in a pan, then grind them with a mortar and pestle; she’d fry them in a specific order to achieve the right blend of flavors. Parvati measured in pinches, handfuls, and lidfuls and seasoned the dishes instinctively, by taste and smell.

  It was intimidating, watching these two very different women roast, grind, fry, and stir. Although my mother had cooked fairly complicated vegetarian meals for us growing up, and a lot of Indian food, it didn’t compare. A Western kitchen inevitably includes canned and processed ingredients to save money and cut down on cooking time. In any case, I hadn’t picked up my mother’s skills in the kitchen. When friends had stopped by my Brooklyn apartment, I’d offered them a glass of wine and some nuts.

  In Delhi, I was alarmed to discover that no social call is complete until a hot meal is offered. Of course, this is less of a burden in a city where almost everyone employs a cook, but starting the day out by planning major meals with Radha was more than I wanted to take on. It was easier to plead American ignorance and let Parva
ti entertain me.

  Because Vijay’s apartment was larger, we’d spend a couple of nights a week there. I loved staring out into the dusk from his window at the glowing white dome of the sixteenth-century Humayun’s Tomb, far away in the center of the city. We’d replace our outdoor shoes with clean plastic chappals from the pile Vijay kept by the door, and Parvati would exchange her salwar kameez for a T-shirt and a pair of his knee-length shorts. She’d only expose her legs if it was just the three of us, but even so I found it disconcerting—that’s how quickly I’d become accustomed to women’s lower parts always being covered.

  One night, Parvati stuck a cassette of 1950s Bollywood songs into the tape deck—they both refused to buy CD players, let alone iPods. We headed into the kitchen to start dinner before Vijay got home from work. Because his kitchen windows didn’t close completely and there were no storage cupboards, my task was to rinse the dust off the pans while Parvati took a blunt knife to an onion. I found myself thinking of the fancy tools most Westerners rely on in the kitchen, and considered how different my own experience of food was from hers. She was surprised when I said that most urban Americans grow up eating many different types of cuisine and buying vegetables without any idea where they are imported from.

  “I guess we are still a very insular country compared to the U.S. or Europe,” she mused. “Maybe it’s because India was colonized for an entire millennium: first by Muslim invaders, then by the British. We held on to whatever we could of our regional and religious specificity. Most Indians don’t think a meal counts unless it involves rice or chapati.”

  “But that’s totally changed now,” I prompted.

  “It’s true. We are in love with your American fast food. College kids rush to McDonald’s after class to eat their McAloo Tikkis and all. But you know what? I guarantee you they all go home and eat rice or roti bread with their families. They all want a proper Indian meal.”

  It took McDonald’s decades to break into the Indian market. When it finally succeeded, it was by Indianizing its brand. McDonald’s adopted the slogan “As Indian as you and me” and catered its menu to Indian tastes—no beef burgers, and a long list of spicy vegetarian items. Now every Delhi McDonald’s is crammed with teenagers celebrating a very Indian version of globalization. Parvati, predictably, found it disgusting.

  “All this makes me feel like I belong to the old India. Do you know that before I went to college I’d never tasted any kind of food except Indian? When I landed up in a bigger town, to start college, one of the first things I did was try out the Chinese fast-food place. I’ll never forget the taste of those greasy noodles—so different from anything I’d had before.”

  When Parvati and I were alone, the conversation almost always turned to her childhood, a subject we both loved. In spite of her unconventional lifestyle, Parvati believed much was right about her traditional village upbringing and liked to talk about it, as though to come to terms with how much she’d changed and the person she’d become.

  “We lived in a big joint family, so my mother and aunts had to cook enormous quantities of food. Hot meals a few times a day and everything from scratch—that was the only way. I loved it when my mother made green mango chutney: She’d lay out salted slices of unripe mango in the courtyard so they would dry in the sun. My brothers and I grabbed it when she wasn’t looking.”

  I tried to picture Parvati as a village girl in a government-issued school uniform.

  “My mother never once cut my hair. Every day she braided it down my back. By the time I got to be a teenager, it was below my waist. That was how all the girls in the village had their hair, so naturally I hated it. One day, I hopped on a bus to the next town and got it all chopped off. Just like that.” Her mother didn’t speak to her for days, she said, beaming with satisfaction at the memory.

  It struck me that Parvati had reverted to the village-girl hairstyle in her adult life; she almost always wore it in a long braid down her back now.

  I could understand wanting to stand out from the family; as a teenager, I’d done my best to resist my parents’ view of life, too—but, to my constant annoyance, my aesthetic and political choices had hewed pretty closely to theirs. They’d scarcely blinked when I dyed my hair red, pierced my ears multiple times using a needle, an ice cube, and a potato, and spent my high school weekends slam-dancing at punk rock shows. I’d had to work hard to come up with ways to piss them off, like cutting school and dating an alcoholic high school dropout. Of course, none of that was anything serious, whereas Parvati’s rebellions had actually shaken the foundations of her family traditions.

  She tossed the diced onion into a pan already fragrant with mustard and cumin seeds and said that as a teenager, she’d once confronted her grandfather, the grand patriarch of her Brahmin clan. He was showing them a diagram of their family tree. When she saw that her two brothers were listed under her father’s name, she asked her grandfather why her own name was missing.

  “He told me, ‘Well, betee, that’s how it is with women. When you marry, you will go to another family, and you will no longer have this name.’ So I just said very respectfully, ‘Dada, I am not going anywhere. This is my family. Please put my name in.’ And he did. He wrote it in under my father’s.”

  After that, Parvati declared that she wouldn’t take her husband’s name even if she did get married. She also informed her family that she did not want them to arrange her into marriage, the only acceptable destiny for a village girl.

  “My father convinced the rest of the family to let me be. He was the one who understood that I am different. Now I guess the family just considers me a lost cause. My dad was the only one who would have dared to ask me about Vijay. The rest of them are afraid of me.”

  The dark lines of kohl under Parvati’s eyes had smudged where she’d rubbed them, giving her a haunted aspect. She had rarely mentioned her father, other than to say that she’d adored him and she wished I could have met him before he died a couple of years before. I wondered whether his death had somehow made it easier for her to refuse to meet the family’s expectations.

  She and Vijay had been together for four years, but I’d never seen them hold hands or nestle up to each other. Their Press Club friends must have assumed they were a couple, but I don’t think Parvati talked about him to anyone. In India, I was discovering, liaisons are given the “don’t ask, don’t tell” treatment, and even close girlfriends don’t confide in each other about their romantic lives. Sometimes, Parvati would call Vijay by a Hindi endearment, but he seemed ill at ease with her displays of affection. At the end of an evening in his apartment, she’d occasionally slide over to Vijay, but he’d remain rigid in his seat. It made me wonder why they didn’t just get married for the sake of practicality, if nothing else.

  The earthy smell of cauliflower curry filled the kitchen. Parvati left it simmering and poured ghee, clarified butter, into another pan to start on the next dish. I worked up my nerve.

  “Have you guys ever considered doing a live-in?”

  Parvati tossed a handful of cumin seeds into the mortar and leaned hard on the pestle, grinding them into powder.

  “You know what?” she said, her voice live with anger. “Forget call centers and fast food, okay? This country is stuck in medieval times in so many ways. The trouble you had here, trying to get an apartment—it’s typical. If I was to live with Vijay, I would have to say we were married. Otherwise it would just be so much worse.”

  Although she’d been living in her building for several years, Parvati said, her landlord still asked when her family was going to find a husband for her. Her neighbors were a little scandalized by the unmarried lady who worked in an office, drove her own car, and regularly entertained a male visitor. She said they would wait to hear her footsteps on the stairs, and then swing open their doors and invite her in for chai.

  “Believe me, I always tell them I’m too busy.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad to me,” I said. “I like that sen
se of community you have in Delhi.”

  Parvati had a habit of swiping her loose strands of hair back with her fingers when she was annoyed.

  “You have to realize what it is they want from me, Miranda. It’s not just nice neighborly stuff. I know they will find a way to ask why I am alone. The moment they have a scrap of information, the rumors will start flying. Next thing you know, they’ll be calling me a slut behind my back.”

  I thought about it.

  “It must mean you have to put up a lot of walls.”

  Parvati came from a village where everyone knew everything; having escaped to Delhi, she had no intention of explaining herself to the people around her. But my own break had been from a life of not especially belonging anywhere. In Brooklyn, my only reason to talk to my neighbors had been to complain if they left their trash in the hall. It was already different in Nizamuddin, and even though I knew I wouldn’t ever really fit in, I wasn’t about to let go of the hope of familiarity.

  Parvati poured herself a whiskey from the bottle on the kitchen counter and gave me a sour smile.

  “Just you wait. You’ll see. Delhi is an aggressive, conservative place. To survive on your own, you have to be a bitch.”

  • • •

  Diwali was coming, the biggest Hindu celebration of the year. Geeta cautioned that although it’s traditionally known as the festival of lights, in Delhi, Diwali is all about noise.

  “In the old times,” she said, referring, as she often did, to a simpler India of the unspecified past, “it was supposed to be a celebration of good prevailing over evil. Now people have too much of money. They aren’t satisfied with candles—they go crazy bursting firecrackers.”

  A week before the festival began, I started to wish I’d gone with her to Patiala for the holiday after all. Delhi became an explosives free-for-all, the noise intensifying each night, so that by the time the festival arrived, it felt like a full-scale insurgency. There was no city-sponsored fireworks display, just black vapors spreading out over the dusty flat plain of the city. In fact, the pollution and noise got so bad that in subsequent years, the city initiated a public campaign against firecrackers and limited their availability.