Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  Later we stopped at a teahouse in a bustling town. As Najib had predicted, there was no ladies’ toilet to be found, because there were no ladies—not a single billowing blue burka to be seen. Najib convinced the owner to let me use the stinking men’s outhouse—two planks of wood erected around a maggot-festering pile of feces in a shallow pit. It was no worse than dozens of Indian toilets I’d used, though I never got accustomed enough to such outhouses not to gag. When I returned, Najib was making small talk with the men at the next table, large-framed Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan wearing rolled woolen hats, or pakols. They split open fresh apricots to share with us, glowing little suns. I asked Najib to find out whether their wives ever came into town. The men looked surprised at the question.

  “Of course not. Our women stay home.”

  Najib asked something else, and then translated the answer: “If they don’t need to leave the house, then why should they? We do the shopping and bring their relatives to visit them. They have an easy life.”

  The idea of women being completely forbidden from entering public life was less surprising to me after my exposure to Indian villages. Still, rural Afghanistan makes even the most impoverished corners of India seem liberated. After thirty years of war, more than 80 percent of Afghan women are illiterate.

  I continued asking questions, and the men’s voices escalated; eventually Najib stopped translating. The men were gesticulating and talking over one another, and Najib’s expression made my heart beat fast. I’d come to know him pretty well during our long days together, and he usually seemed as cool as the Afghan Elvis he idolized. I could tell from the strain under his eyes that all was not well now. I lowered my eyes, trying not to make things any worse. Eventually, one of the men smiled. Najib pushed his chair back, and they bade each other elaborate goodbyes, wishing each others’ families well, as is polite in Afghanistan.

  When we got back to the van, Najib told me that the men had turned his questions around on him. They’d asked whether he was aware he was breaking the moral code of Islam by bringing a Western woman into a teahouse in their town. Female visitors weren’t welcome, they said, especially if they were “naked,” meaning not wearing a burka.

  “It wasn’t that we were in danger. It was just … better to leave.”

  “I’m surprised they took offense at me. I’m dressed so carefully today.”

  I rarely wore a burka, but Najib gave me an outfit check each morning to make sure I was sufficiently covered. That day my head scarf was tied tightly around my head so that no tendrils of hair could escape, and my wrists and ankles were covered by a long, loose salwar kameez.

  “I know. But they didn’t like your face—seeing it exposed, I mean.”

  I laughed, but I stayed in the van the rest of the ride.

  “Were you worried?”

  Geeta looked interested for the first time since I’d started talking about Afghanistan. It wasn’t actually the most dangerous situation I’d been in there, I said, but it stood out to me because the men seemed so certain about women’s place. It was always a relief to return to Delhi, where at least it felt like the twenty-first century. Driving back to Nizamuddin from the airport, I’d seen a college-age guy with a girl on the back of his scooter. She was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt, and she wasn’t tilting sideways on the scooter, like women so often were. She was straddling the seat, her arms wrapped around the guy’s waist as they threaded through the traffic. She might have been his sister or his girlfriend, but either way it was an unthinkable sight in Kabul—or, for that matter, in many parts of the world.

  Geeta’s cheeks dimpled at this compliment to her India.

  “Yes. India is coming into a modern life pretty fast, isn’t it? Just think. In Nanima’s time, I would have been a scandal—an unmarried girl, at my age.” She paused. “Still, India hasn’t changed that much. Society pressure is tremendous on my parents even now. In Patiala, our relatives ask my parents, ‘What happened? Why isn’t your daughter married yet?’ Even shopkeepers sometimes ask them.”

  Geeta puckered her mouth at the sourness of her lemon drink and stirred in another spoonful of sugar. Something about the curl of her mouth made her look quite young and vulnerable.

  People found it baffling that she hadn’t been married off yet, she said, because she didn’t have any obvious defects that would limit her appeal: She wasn’t fat, bad natured, or dark skinned. A good-looking spinster raises suspicions. Underneath her relatives’ questions were other, unspeakable, ones: Was there a money problem, so they couldn’t afford a decent dowry? Did the girl have past relationships she was hiding? Was she unchaste or infertile?

  Her relatives wouldn’t ask these questions outright, but they felt they had a right to know. An unmarried girl can cast a pall on her sisters’ and cousins’ chances of finding a match. Knowing that her decisions had consequences for others upped the stakes for Geeta.

  “My parents keep telling me this is unsustainable. I need to find a match. I can’t stay unmarried forever; I mean, who wants that?”

  I sipped my nimbo panne, pondering the question. Geeta and I had developed an unlikely, almost sisterly, relationship over the last couple of years, and we’d both learned to avoid talking about issues we didn’t agree on. Although she claimed not to find it offensive that I’d “do a live-in” with Benjamin, she’d started making joking remarks about planning my “real wedding.” And yet I’d started to realize just how much Geeta and I had in common: Both of us were straining to choose between convention and rebellion, between our independent identities and our relationship-oriented selves.

  My stint in Afghanistan had made me feel more exposed than I liked to admit. Sometimes, at night on some military base, surrounded by the army corps reservists I was embedded with, I’d remind myself of a line in a book I’d read as a child: “Aloneness is not loneliness.” I had no problem being alone if I wasn’t also scared and sad, but in Afghanistan, I was lonely for Benjamin and wished he could be a steady presence in my life—though I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  I joked to my friends that Benjamin probably missed his Enfield motorcycle, sitting unused in a rented Delhi garage, more than me. Sometimes I’d catch myself talking about him in the past tense. I wasn’t sure what either of us wanted from the relationship anymore, or whether we even knew the current version of each other. The time we’d spent together, in New York and Delhi, had been intense and short. Had India changed me as much as it felt like it had? Perhaps he’d changed, too, and I was just clinging to a fantasy version of my boyfriend—running toward me, arms spread wide, through Bollywood fields of swaying wheat.

  • • •

  Geeta picked distractedly at her Indian railway sandwich. I could tell she had something she wanted to talk about, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “I’ve never told you about college, Miranda.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a little hard to talk about because now it is all mixed up with the most depressing event of my life. Recently I’ve been thinking I should try to remember the good parts about it.”

  Geeta lived at home through college, and her social revolution came not from dorm life but from the cafeteria. That was enough: For the first time, she was hanging out, unchaperoned, with a circle of friends that included boys. She bought her first pair of jeans and started listening to what she called “American tapes,” cassettes of top-forty singers such as Bryan Adams. Geeta had always considered herself shy, but in college, she surprised herself by making a lot of friends.

  “Especially one boy. He was the one who everyone called my friend—you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t exactly know, but the way she said it made my mind spin through the most melodramatic Bollywood possibilities. I swallowed a mouthful too quickly and felt the crust cut against my throat. Had she broken the vow of chastity of an unmarried Indian girl? Been betrothed to a crooked character? Ended up the vamp in a sad triangle of deceit?

 
When Geeta said, “I first saw Mohan in the cafeteria,” I felt a flutter of impatience. It was going to take a while to get to the climactic love scene, if there was one. Then I considered those words in context. If Geeta had been one of those college girls who’d had a close male friend—even a purely platonic one—it would help explain who she was now.

  Mohan attracted her attention the first time she saw him. He was popular and always told the loudest jokes, “and he was always looking straight at me when he said the punch line,” she said. That, in small-city India, was enough to qualify them as marriage material. Soon, her girlfriends started referring to him as “Geeta’s friend.” Everyone assumed they would marry, including their parents. The only really acceptable form of love is still that which follows marriage, even in today’s India. But love matches—relationships that spring up without family intervention—are no longer unheard of among the urban middle class. If these relationships do not cross religion or caste lines, families may accept them—as Simran’s family finally did in DDLJ.

  There was none of the DDLJ trauma in her own match, Geeta said, at least not at first; she’d been certain from the start that it was fate.

  “It seemed like the most lucky thing that could have happened. Mohan was a good-looking boy—tall and well built. He was a Patiala Brahmin from a good family. He shared all the important things—religion and caste—and on top of that he was in med school.”

  Geeta had conveniently fallen into a relationship with one of the most desirable bachelors in her Patiala community: Every Indian family wants to marry its daughter off to a doctor or an engineer, professions that offer status and security. When she told her parents about him, they agreed that they couldn’t have chosen a better match themselves. Even so, Geeta’s mother reminded her that “until and unless the boy proposed, nothing is fixed.” She continued to set Geeta up on arranged marriage meetings with other potential matches throughout college, just in case; after all, Geeta was her only child. She wanted to see her satisfactorily married off, and soon.

  When Geeta told her parents she wanted to move to Delhi after she graduated, her mother knew it was because Mohan had been offered a residency in a Delhi hospital. She told her the risk was too great without a proposal from the boy. Geeta assured her that times had changed, that it was perfectly normal these days.

  “I should have known better. Nothing was official yet, so it was a bad idea. Still, I wasn’t the only one. Lots of other girls in college had boyfriends. I was insistent on coming to Delhi. Only now … I do kind of wish my mother had stopped me.”

  “So you expected you’d get engaged once you moved here?”

  Geeta looked at me in horror. “Of course! No girl would keep up a relationship unless marriage was part of it. And anyway, why wouldn’t I marry him? He’s from my community. He was working in a top hospital in Delhi. There were no negatives.”

  But in fact there were. As leakproof as the situation seemed, a boyfriend is always an unknown quantity in India. Her mother’s concern about Mohan was based on a timeworn stereotype—that boys do not believe that good girlfriends make good wives. Love matches may be more acceptable in globalized India than ever before, but the Victorian notion of morality—virgin versus seductress-vamp—still holds sway in the India where miniskirts are only sometimes acceptable and chastity is always extolled.

  “My mother kept reminding me not to get … involved with Mohan. I thought that was an old-fashioned idea. I thought things had changed.” She looked at me and corrected herself. “Things have changed. Just … not totally.”

  “Okay, so were you ‘involved’ with Mohan?” I asked, trying to stick with her oblique terminology. I was pretty sure that Geeta hadn’t talked about this to anyone before.

  Her eyes returned to her plate. She and Mohan, she said, were more friends than a couple, even in Delhi. They obviously lived in separate apartments—she with girlfriends from college, he with fellow medical residents. When they hung out, it was usually in a group.

  “But we did sometimes spend time alone. He kissed me, but never anything more—never really involved. At least that much sense I had. That’s why when we split up, his lie made me so angry.”

  I forced myself to wait for her to explain. Geeta got up to make a new batch of nimbo panne, without my asking. From where I sat at the table, I could see her in the kitchen. She squeezed the lemons into the jug fiercely, as though she was trying not to cry. I was glad that Priya was out of town, spending the weekend with her family as she usually did.

  Geeta had collected herself by the time she sat back down again. After she’d been in Delhi a year, her parents gave her the “marriage ultimatum”: They had been patient enough with her love match. If he didn’t propose, they’d resume their own husband hunt. Mohan’s parents were saying the same thing, so he gave in. Only once Geeta and Mohan started discussing the marriage they’d long assumed would happen did she realize that he had very different expectations for his wife than he did for his girlfriend. In Delhi, he liked her to don jeans and come out with him to nightclubs. After they married, he told her, all that would end. They would move into his family home in Patiala, where he would get a new job and she would not. She’d be expected to exchange her city clothes for saris to show respect to his family.

  “I wouldn’t have minded to live with his parents. That’s the normal Indian way. But he couldn’t just forbid me from wearing Westerns and working. Well, I guess that’s normal, too, but not for me.”

  Geeta stewed over their differences for several weeks until, she said, “My Punjabi temper just came out.” She accused Mohan of wanting to marry a backward village girl he could order around. He was shocked. He’d never heard her raise her voice before. He declared that he didn’t want to marry an angry feminist type, adding that a boy should never trust a girl who’d had a boyfriend anyway.

  “He was my boyfriend all that time.” Geeta’s face was twisted with anger. “He was the one who knew my secrets. Now he was making it sound like this was proof that I wouldn’t make a good wife.”

  When he sent her flowers two days later, Geeta did as a stubborn Punjabi princess should and threw them away. She refused his calls. Eventually, she told her parents that the wedding was off. Word spread rapidly around Patiala. Marriage isn’t personal in India. From the outside, it looked as though Geeta’s family had rejected Mohan’s. Mohan knew that Geeta’s family was devastated that she’d wasted the four most marriageable years of her life with a perfectly marriageable guy and that they would be doing all they could to limit the damage to her reputation.

  “He called my father and insinuated the worst thing.”

  Geeta raised her eyes from the table and looked at me expectantly. The motion of the fans had picked up several loose strands of her highlighted hair, and they drifted strangely above her head. I could hear the pained yowl of a sick cow that had taken up residence in the alleyway. I’d been wishing for days that someone would put the sacred beast out of its misery, though I knew no one would.

  “You know, Miranda, he said that we had s-s-sex—to my father,” she said, stuttering on the word sex. I wasn’t making it easy for her; I was having trouble coming to terms with the realization that Mohan was, after all, a crooked character.

  “What? Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t have a good nature! I guess he thought I would have to marry him if he told my father I had gotten involved with him. Or maybe he just wanted revenge.”

  I still found it hard to believe that in today’s urban India, the suggestion that a girl is unchaste can wreck her chance of marriage.

  “Did your father believe him?”

  “I think he did at first. Then he gave it some thought. I am his only child, Miranda, the only daughter he can see married. So he called me and asked whether it was true.”

  “God, that must have been an uncomfortable conversation,” I said.

  “It was awful. But at the end, he decided he believed me
. He said, ‘That boy is trying to ruin your life, and I won’t let him. I’m not going to tell your mother what he said.’ That’s when I knew my father really loves me. And that’s why I say thank God I never got involved with Mohan. Because I couldn’t have lied to my father about it if I had.”

  We sat listening to the cow making its pained plea to the dark street.

  “Did you manage to keep that rumor quiet in Patiala?”

  Geeta looked the vision of a crushed Bollywood heroine, much of her hair now swirling above her head in the breeze from the fan, her eyes in shadow.

  “I don’t think Mohan dared to tell many people after my father dismissed him. Still, some families in Patiala have heard. Even if all they know is that I had a boyfriend and then something happened, that’s bad enough. Believe me. No family wants to align their son with a girl with a past.”

  Saturday afternoons were reserved for Madame X. I’d seen the handwritten signs when I first moved to the neighborhood—“Madame X Beauty Saloon”—and I’d been confused by the double o into thinking it was some kind of middle-class bordello or ladies’ drinking venue. In fact, Madame X was nothing more than a dinky neighborhood beauty salon with a misspelled name. It was two dank rooms that smelled of nail polish and hair dye, decorated with peeling 1980s posters of Bollywood stars. Actually, the stars were the same as those today—just with big eighties hair.