Sideways on a Scooter Page 12

  My cats retreated to a far corner of the apartment. I felt like huddling with them under a sheet until morning, but Parvati’s mother was visiting, and they’d cooked a special meal of festival foods. I forced myself out of the apartment when I heard K.K. pull up with a squeal. He had his own stockpile of firecrackers on the passenger seat and was eager to get back to the taxi stand to set them off.

  “Top-class crackers, Miss Mirindaah! Pukka quality, making many bangs all in one go.” K.K. sped us through the smoky streets, only adding to the sensation that we were trying to escape to safety through a war zone.

  Parvati’s place was a white sanctuary, lit only by small oil lamps and flashes of color from the firecrackers outside. She and her mother were on the bed, which served as a sort of family den, much like Joginder and Maniya’s charpoy. Parvati’s mother was a tiny, elegant woman in a crisp white sari, her hair neatly combed back from her face. I folded my hands into a respectful gesture of greeting: “Namaste, Auntie.”

  “Namaste,” she replied, and then corrected herself with an English hello. I sat down and practiced my Hindi sentence structures on her until Parvati rescued us both by reverting to English. Her mother picked up a Hindi-language magazine.

  Although Parvati’s father had learned English in high school, her mother’s education had ended in the fifth grade, when she was expected to prepare for marriage by mastering domestic skills. You wouldn’t know it from educated middle-class circles in Delhi and Mumbai, but fewer than a third of Indians speak English. There are twenty-one other official languages in India, not to mention 844 officially recognized dialects and thousands of other unofficial ones.

  English was, of course, the language of the British colonialists, but Indians used English words to communicate with foreign traders as far back as the seventeenth century. They spoke a pidgin dialect known as Firangi, which has the same root as feringhee. During the independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi called the English language a symbol of colonialism, even going so far as to say, “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.” But when India’s leaders proposed Hindi as an alternative, South Indian politicians denounced that, too, as “language imperialism.” Because Hindi has never been spoken in South India, choosing India’s official language was the single greatest controversy in the writing of the Indian constitution. Since no single tongue could satisfy India’s heterogeneity, Hindi was named the “official language of the union,” with English to be used for “official purposes of the union.”

  Today, English is spoken in the courts and financial markets. It is much more than bureaucratic babu-speak, though; it is the language of those who aspire to a better life. Like many lower-middle-class Indians, Parvati had spoken her local dialect at home and learned Hindi at school. English was her third language, and it was only with persistence that she became fluent. For many Indians, the effect of the fractured language policy is that they end up speaking multiple dialects badly.

  Judging people’s speech is a quick way to take a measure of their class and caste in India. If you can’t tell their upbringing from their clothes or occupation, you can tell from how strongly accented their Hindi or English is. Both Radha and Maneesh spoke vernacular Hindi speckled with only the occasional word of English, though they both longed to be familiar with the tongue that they associated with well-paid jobs in the private sector. Of course, neither of my maids could afford to send their children to private schools, so they had resigned their children to the limits of the Hindi language.

  The Hindi speaker’s world may be one of smaller job horizons, but it is far from restrictive when it comes to culture: It’s the tongue of politics, Bollywood, cricket, and religion. Parvati’s mother lived a full life inside the language, avidly consuming Hindi news shows, magazines, and books. She was closed off from fully half of her daughter’s experience, though, because Parvati worked for an English-language paper and spoke the sassy urban patois of Hinglish—delivering most of the information in English and the punch lines and curses in Hindi.

  Sitting on the bed with the two of them, I had the thought that Parvati might actually prefer to keep her English-speaking life separate from her mother; it probably made it easier to dodge uncomfortable topics. I noticed that the bottles of Blenders Pride and packs of Gold Flake cigarettes were gone from her kitchen and that Vijay’s jacket was no longer hanging on a hook in the entranceway. It reminded me of how I used to hide my journal and beer bottles from my parents in high school.

  I followed Parvati into the kitchen so she could warm up the dinner. Cleansed of signs of her unconventional lifestyle, it looked much like those in other cramped Delhi homes. The cooking space was now dominated by a shrine. Alongside the jars of lentils and spices on the newspaper-lined shelves were a couple of sandstone statues of gods. I noticed that the long trunk of the elephant god, Ganesh, had been rubbed to a shine. A sketch of the goddess Lakshmi hung on the wall above the two-burner stove.

  “My mother did that sketch for Diwali. She really would like a separate room to do puja, but I don’t have the space.”

  Luckily, it’s acceptable, in Hinduism, to stick a shrine just about anywhere, and Parvati didn’t seem to mind it encroaching on her kitchen. Unlike Vijay, who was a staunch atheist of the Marxist variety, Parvati liked to be reminded of the good things about her religion—its openness, its mythological tales. Sometimes she even told me funny stories about the gods, as though she were talking about her friends, always sounding more irreverent than earnest about Hinduism.

  In the week leading up to Diwali, Parvati said, Hindus clean their houses and leave the front door ajar so that Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune, will come in and bless the place. She chooses the cleanest house first. Parvati smiled a little as she said her mother had spent the day getting the apartment ready, even painting a path of tiny red and white footprints to represent the delicate feet of Lakshmi.

  We sat cross-legged on Parvati’s bed for the festival meal: fried golden puffs of poori bread with spicy potato curry and grilled cubes of paneer, a ricottalike cheese. I watched Parvati tear off pieces of poori, scoop up the curry, and wipe the plate clean with the bread, and wondered at how graceful she made it look. I tried to mimic her rhythm of scooping and wiping, but I longed for a fork. Watching me eat without silverware was a regular source of amusement for Radha; luckily, Parvati was too focused on the food to notice.

  When we’d finished, Parvati handed us a plate of her mother’s homemade sweets, or mithai: ground cashew-nut cakes coated in edible silver foil, big round laddoos, and halwa made from red carrots. I fell back on a pillow, dizzy from overeating. Parvati looked at her watch. It was a little after ten.

  “Chelliye. Let’s go.”

  When I didn’t stir, she shot me a look that made me feel like a teenager and told me to take a handful of fennel seeds to help digest the meal.

  The air outside was still thick with the smoke of explosives as we walked to her car.

  “Even though Vijay’s house is just around the block, it’s not safe to walk there at night. Everyone will be out carousing on Diwali night,” Parvati said, as though driving there was the only surprising element of our outing.

  “Wait, doesn’t your mom wonder where we’re going so late at night?”

  “Oh, she knows.” She started the car, deliberately ignoring my confusion. Then she shot me a sideways glance and softened.

  “Look, I just assume my mother has figured out that Vijay is my boyfriend. But we don’t talk about such things. I certainly can’t even use the word ‘boyfriend.’ ”

  I thought of my own misadventures with the word in India.

  “Yeah, I can understand why you’d avoid it.”

  “I don’t want to lie to my mother, so I can’t bring it up at all.”

  “Has she met Vijay?” I ventured.

  “There’s no way she couldn’t. She lives in my apartment for months at a time. That’s one of the reasons I could never have a live
-in with Vijay. Well, there’s lots of reasons why, actually.” She laughed sardonically, more to herself than me. “But sometimes Vijay comes over for dinner with us, and then I’ll go with him to his place afterwards, so we can have a couple pegs of whiskey.”

  “Do you ever stay over at Vijay’s when she’s here?”

  Parvati pursed her lips.

  “No. I can’t do that to her. When I say I’m a bitch, that doesn’t include how I act with my family. It means a lot to me to have my mother in my life, to have her accept me mostly as I am. If I can’t be one hundred percent truthful with her, that’s a small price to pay.”

  I knew I should drop it, but I couldn’t restrain myself.

  “How do you refer to Vijay when you are talking to her?”

  Parvati sighed. Her eyes glowed yellowish in the dark of the car.

  “I just call him ‘my friend.’ In India, everyone knows what you mean by that—even your sweet mother who doesn’t want to know.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ladies Only

  It was too hot to stomach one of Radha’s Bihari curries, so I was fixing a light Saturday lunch for myself and Geeta, who’d stopped by that afternoon. I switched on both overhead fans in the long kitchen in a mostly unsuccessful effort to counteract the muggy monsoon air. Outside, the chaos of midday Delhi: old movie tunes blasting from a neighbor’s window, a servant clattering the pots in the sink of the apartment below, the vegetable sellers competing with one another’s cries. I dug through the minifridge for a handful of hard Indian lemons and handed them to Geeta with a hopeful smile. I loved it when she made nimbo panne, a summery lemon drink that she flavored with both sugar and salt. Then I pulled out the ingredients for the Indian railway sandwiches she’d taught me to make—thinly sliced tomato and cucumber dashed with pepper and salt, laid on white bread, and coated with a layer of Maggi Hot & Sweet, a spicy Indian tomato ketchup. Geeta liked to say that the Indian railway network and the sandwiches it had inspired were the best legacies the British left India.

  “What an improvement over Afghan rice and mutton stew.”

  Geeta made a face. Like Radha, she was disgusted by my occasional lapses into meat eating for the sake of convenience while traveling in the meat-centric Muslim world. To them, even eating eggs was a violation of upper-caste Hindu vegetarianism, and it seemed heretical to undermine the Brahmin-friendly vegetarian diet of my upbringing. This was just one of the many aspects of my life as a reporter that Geeta didn’t get. I’d started working full-time for a public radio show and traveled about eight months of the year, much of it outside of India—especially Afghanistan and Pakistan, because that was where the news was. Geeta thought my new life sounded uncomfortable and frightening; what she didn’t see was that this was probably the proudest achievement of my career.

  I’d moved to India without real cause to believe that I’d succeed in getting my stories on the air in any regular way; and after a couple of years of unheeded story pitches, living off my savings and less than regular assignments, I’d scored a contract with one of my favorite radio shows. Now I was expected to cover major stories for them. The thrill of that pretty much eclipsed the difficult parts—my thoroughly unpredictable schedule, the regular travel to dangerous places, and the inevitable loss of friendships.

  “Why don’t you just tell your boss that you won’t go?” Geeta would say. “Isn’t there plenty for you to report on here in our India? At least you won’t be killed here. You won’t be forced to eat meat, either!”

  Geeta had left India only once, to visit an uncle in Texas. Although she dreamed of seeing Thailand’s beaches, she had no interest in India’s Muslim neighbors—or in hearing about them, for that matter. Geeta had learned about Pakistan from her grandparents, who were born there before India was divided. Like most Hindus who fled to India during the 1947 partition, they’d never returned. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the latter was formed, and the enmity between the countries is still so great that Geeta’s grandparents would have been unlikely to be granted Pakistani visas even if they’d wanted to return, which Geeta made clear wasn’t the case. The two governments have been in a diplomatic standoff for decades, which means it is virtually impossible for Indians to visit Pakistan and vice versa. In 2004, the countries began a slow and inconsistent process of détente, but it started to collapse after Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was removed from office. Everything worsened again after Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai in 2008—two years later, relations were still toxic.

  In school, Geeta had learned that Pakistan distinguished itself from secular India by calling itself “the land of the pure,” a homeland for Muslims. Her grandmother told her that Pakistan had become a fundamentalist state and that women weren’t allowed out—even in Islamabad, the capital—unless they were wearing a burka. This kind of stereotyping was pretty common. In the Indian media and Bollywood films, Indian Muslims are more often portrayed as criminals and terrorists than anything else, and Pakistani Muslims as long-bearded militants who fantasize about murdering Indians. Geeta, like many middle-class Hindus, didn’t have many opportunities to develop a more nuanced idea, or to know when to separate fact from overwrought fiction. Not that she seemed especially interested in doing so. She’d never followed politics or foreign policy very closely.

  Still, I couldn’t think about much else that day other than my recent trip to Afghanistan. I professed not to want to live in the foreign correspondent bubble, the state of mind that means you are always thinking about a different country than the one you’re in, but it took me a while to digest and download my experiences before I could feel normal in my Delhi life again after being somewhere intense, such as Afghanistan. Still, I knew that if I started talking about the spread of the insurgency or of the poppy industry, Geeta would gulp down her sandwich and take off, back to Nanima’s. So as I poured us each a glass of her nimbo panne, I tried to come up with anecdotes that would hold her attention—the stuff that hadn’t made it into my radio pieces.

  I told her about driving out to Bamiyan, a lush valley of the Hindu Kush, in the central part of the country, whose ancient Buddha statues carved into sandstone cliffs had drawn tourists and religious pilgrims for centuries. During the years of Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, pilgrims of a different sort traveled to the Bamiyan Valley. Taliban soldiers would climb up into the caves and shout “God is great!” as they shot at the wall paintings to disfigure them. Images of humans and animals were banned under the Taliban regime. A few months before the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban stuffed the statues with explosives and dynamited them into a pile of rubble at the bottom of the cliff face.

  I wanted to see the United Nations’ effort to restore the statues, and to get a sense of what had happened there under the Taliban. It was only a couple of years after the 2001 U.S. invasion, and it wasn’t yet too dangerous to make this kind of reporting trip. The insurgency was only starting to spread around the country. Western journalists traveled without the military or armored cars, relying solely on “fixers,” basically Afghan translators with extra responsibilities. My fixer, Najib, was a young medical student who’d figured out that putting foreign journalists at ease could make him a great deal of money. We paid guys such as him a hundred dollars a day, sometimes more, for their skills: smooth-talking in both of Afghanistan’s national languages, scoring meetings with warlords, informing us about the country’s complicated tribal history, and checking out whether it was safe to meet with a former Taliban official or take a certain route out of Kabul.

  Najib was worldly by Afghan standards, though his experiences were limited—he’d grown up in one war after another and had never left Kabul during his childhood. He’d honed a distinctive look during those years, modeled on the singer Ahmad Zahir, or the Afghan Elvis, who lived on through Najib’s pompadour and his close-fitted shirts with the top three buttons left undone. Najib’s cell-phone ringtone, when I first met him, was a song from the Bollywood hit Kal Ho Naa Ho.
Shah Rukh Khan played an important role in Najib’s life during the Taliban regime, when TV and radio were forbidden. He and his teenage friends had managed to acquire a stockpile of Bollywood DVDs, smuggled across the border from Pakistan.

  The Taliban also considered fashionable hairdos degenerate. Najib’s vanity more than once got him in trouble with the Taliban’s moral police, the infamous Vice and Virtue brigade. For a while he’d styled his look after Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the 1997 movie Titanic, with one long piece of hair flopping over the forehead. He assured me he was not alone in mimicking the Leonardo flop: black-market videos of Titanic made the movie so popular in Afghanistan that there’s an outdoor shopping area in Kabul named after it—the Titanic Market. Vice and Virtue used to patrol the streets searching for Leonardo mimics, with hair too long or beards too short.

  It struck me that Najib’s current hairstyle wouldn’t be popular with today’s incarnation of the Taliban, either, if we were unlucky enough to meet them on our journey to Bamiyan. He assured me that central Afghanistan was relatively free of insurgents, and he was right. Our trials were of a different nature. I’d told Najib to rent a battered van rather than one of the more expensive Toyota Land Cruisers used by the UN and the military, a frugality I soon regretted. It took us ten bone-rattling hours to drive only ninety miles from Kabul, along shattered, pockmarked roads ruined by decades of shelling.

  Not being able to relieve myself made the ride seem even longer than it was. Ladies in Afghanistan certainly do not crouch behind trees to urinate. Of course, in rural areas, ladies rarely leave their compounds. The few times we passed women walking on the road, they turned their burka-clad backs to the car, to further conceal themselves from the eyes of strangers. When I traveled with the military, the soldiers would hold up a blue plastic tarp as a shield for me to pee behind, but Najib thought this was dangerous since it only drew attention to the foreigner humiliating herself on the hillside. Several hours into the drive, though, my discomfort started to outweigh my sense of propriety. Najib took pity on me and walked me out to a remote dirt pathway away from the road, checking for signs of uncleared land mines. Just as I was about to crouch down behind a stone wall, we saw an old man leading his donkey up the path and dashed back to the van.