Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  Geeta would spend whole Saturdays there, gossiping with the owner, Sameena, her hands and feet proffered for a ten-rupee manicure and pedicure. I was amazed to discover that there was anywhere in the world where you could get your nails done for a quarter, even if the arm massage was listless and the polish chipped off the next day. For Geeta, being pampered badly was better than not being pampered at all. Like many middle-class Indian women, she’d grown up relying on “beauty saloons” for personal rituals such as body waxing and facial hair threading, a way to remove hairs with two cotton threads.

  The latest tidbit from the Madame X proprietress was that a women-only gym had opened up in Nizamuddin. The Fitness Circle was “completely American style,” apparently, with machines and trainers imported from the United States. I was skeptical: The health craze had been much slower to catch on in India than had other influences of globalization. Delhi could boast a couple of dozen European restaurants, lounge bars, and nightclubs, but its fitness facilities were limited to men’s boxing clubs and prohibitively expensive hotel gyms. If a state-of-the-art facility had sprung up in Nizamuddin, it definitely warranted checking out.

  LADIES ONLY warned a sign outside the gym. Several black burkas hung on the wall like so many molted snake skins. The gym probably catered primarily to Muslim ladies from the bustee, I thought as we entered, since many are forbidden to interact with members of the opposite sex. I thought I saw Geeta stiffen as she had the same realization.

  Growing up in a close-knit Brahmin community had shielded her from much of India’s diversity. Although we lived only a few minutes’ walk from one of the biggest Muslim enclaves in Delhi, Geeta never ventured back there. When I tried to get her to visit the Sufi Muslim shrine with me, she’d plead, “I can’t help it. I was brought up to be afraid of those people.” Islam is India’s biggest minority religion, but she’d never even spoken to a Muslim until she met Sameena, and the experience astounded her.

  “Sameena is a Muslim, but you know what? We eat the same vegetarian breakfast,” she pronounced in a voice of amazement.

  Geeta had more than once recited the clichéd anecdote that when India and Pakistan play a cricket match, Indian Muslims root for Pakistan’s team. She’d long heard this rumor cited as evidence that Indian Muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country. It’s a fear that has plagued Hindu-Muslim relations since partition: that Muslims are less patriotic than Hindus. In fact, in 2010, when Shah Rukh Khan—who owns an Indian cricket league team—suggested that Pakistani players should be included in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, there were protests on the streets. One parliamentarian declared that Khan “could go play his matches in Lahore, not in India,” insinuating that SRK took this position because he was a Muslim.

  The Fitness Circle was a small, fluorescent-lit basement room with water stains creeping along the baby-pink walls. It was crowded with weight and cardio machines, none of which looked as if it was intended for commercial use. I noticed immediately that the gym had neither a generator nor an inverter; living in Delhi had given me a keen eye for such details. Clearly all activity would grind to a halt during the routine midmorning power cuts. Red FM, the Hindi pop radio station, was blasting out of a cheap boom box in the corner.

  Having shed their burka skins, the gym members were clad in unlikely outfits—sweatpants over close-fitting silk tunics, for instance—not clothing that seemed conducive to hard workouts. These women seemed unenthusiastic about their fitness regimes in general, which was a disappointment for Geeta.

  The owner came over to show us around. Leslie was American—that much of Sameena’s description was true—but she was hardly a top trainer; she had no experience teaching classes or anything.

  “I got the idea to open a gym from my neighbor. She was one of the first people I met after I moved to Delhi, and I felt really sorry for her. She was cooped up at home all day, not even allowed to walk around the local park unless a male relative came with her.”

  After the birth of her son, Leslie said, she’d felt trapped indoors, which made her want to open a place where it would be acceptable for neighborhood women to get out and about. She started learning Hindi and Urdu, the language spoken by many Indian Muslims; she invested in treadmills and a hydraulic resistance weight-training set and rented a basement space in Nizamuddin. The husbands and fathers considered the windowless room an advantage since their wives and daughters would be safe from prying male eyes.

  Leslie decided to charge just seventeen dollars a month for membership, and partly because it was so cheap, the Fitness Circle had turned into more community center than gym.

  “In the States, everyone shows up determined to burn calories, sticks their iPods in their ears, and runs hard on the treadmill. No one talks to each other. It’s the opposite here—I can’t convince the ladies to stop chatting! I figure that even if they barely break a sweat, at least they’re telling stories and getting advice.”

  The gym ladies spent most of their time lounging on the gym mats, complaining about their husbands and exchanging tips about physical ailments. For most of them, it was the first time they’d done so out of earshot of their husbands and in-laws. Leslie was taken aback at the intimate stories that poured out onto the gym mats. They wanted advice on everything from how to lance an unsightly boil and how to shed twenty-five pounds to how to end bad dreams. The gym members assumed that because Leslie was a health-conscious American, she was also qualified to dispense advice on all matters nutritional and medical. After a couple of months of insisting she was neither a neighborhood health consultant nor a nurse, Leslie gave in. She’d look up stuff online and come back the next morning with suggestions for how to ease back strain or cook low-fat curry recipes.

  By far the most popular class at the Fitness Circle was a yoga stretch session led by a timid slip of a woman, Usha Gotham, who Leslie had hired after a fruitless search for an experienced female trainer. Usha’s classes were not what I expected in the land that gave birth to yoga. There was an emphasis on breathing but no sun salutations or vinyasas. The gym ladies loved it because they could intimidate Usha into conducting the class they wanted. When they thought a move was too tough, crows of protest would rise from the back of the room, and Usha, whom everyone knew was a pushover, would modify it.

  One of the loudest voices in the back was that of Azmat, a young Muslim girl who cleaned the gym each morning. Leslie had not hired Azmat for her meticulous cleaning abilities—there were always dust bunnies floating in the corners—but because she wanted to help her family out. The boy at the door was Azmat’s brother. The parents had died before Azmat or either of her two sisters had married, so Azmat’s forty-dollar monthly salary was being saved toward her dowry.

  Since she didn’t have to pay for membership, Azmat was unconcerned about getting her money’s worth from the classes or machines. After she finished her mopping duties, she would clamber onto an elliptical trainer and do a few turns before pausing to inform the room of her most recent scrap of news: “Nasmeen won’t be coming to the gym for the next week because she has relatives in town” or “Leslie-deedee told me she stayed up late watching a movie, so she already had three cups of chai this morning.” If she got any response at all, she’d eagerly fill in other details for the room to hear. After a while, she’d remember she was supposed to be working out and absentmindedly move her legs again.

  The only time Azmat moved energetically was during the ladies’ impromptu dance circles. One of the women would lumber over to the boom box and raise the volume. Azmat didn’t need to be persuaded off her machine. Soon the bass was distorting and the mirrors were trembling on the basement walls, and all the ladies were making their way out to the “dance floor.” Once there, the ladies would break out grinding and shaking in their uncoordinated workout clothes. I preferred to watch from the machines, but I was rarely spared.

  “Come on, deedee, show us your stuff!” the ladies would shriek as Azmat dragged me in
to their midst.

  Azmat was the Fitness Circle’s self-appointed social secretary. She organized gym parties any time a lady shed ten pounds and for Muslim, Hindu, and Christian holidays. One Saturday my first year at the gym, the ladies showed up in especially jazzy outfits for Leslie’s birthday celebration, carrying plates covered in aluminum foil. Class was particularly short that day. As soon as it was over, Azmat laid out the spread the ladies had brought, of homemade mithai and fried snacks. Leslie jokingly despaired at the caloric feast—“What about all my suggestions? What about fruit?”—and Usha laughed as she handed around plastic cups of chai. “It’s just one day, deedee! Let the ladies enjoy,” she said. They’d clubbed together to get Leslie a peacock-blue salwar kameez suit. When Azmat presented it, with a little speech about how Leslie had inspired them to be healthy, the unsentimental Leslie had tears in her eyes.

  Afterward, Azmat sidled up to me.

  “More chai?” she shouted above the music.

  I nodded, and she sweetly poured half of her cup into mine. We leaned against Leslie’s desk. Azmat was wearing her most prized workout T-shirt, a gift from one of the other ladies. “Only One Angel” it said, in pink cursive letters. Her English was as bad as my Hindi, but she must have been practicing, because she managed to ask, “Have you done your marriage yet?”

  It was a direct translation from Hindi, in which you say that a marriage “has happened” or “is over,” which seems appropriate since it is, after all, a foregone conclusion in India.

  “Um, yes,” I said uncomfortably. “My husband is in New York now.”

  I switched to Hindi and to Azmat’s own marriage plans. Her older brother, Mehboob, was overwhelmed by the responsibility their parents had left him with—of finding matches for her and her two sisters and funding three weddings. Even though siblings are supposed to be married off in chronological order, he’d decided to look for husbands for Azmat and her twenty-four-year-old sister, Rhemet, simultaneously, to minimize time and cost. If it depressed Azmat to be half cheated out of the most important event in an Indian woman’s life, she didn’t show it.

  “This is the simplest way. And he’ll easily find a match for Rhemet. Even though she’s two years older than me, she’s slim, and she makes the best biryani in the neighborhood. Her only problem is the mole on her face. Still, I don’t think it will be long before we’re both married.”

  The more Azmat talked, the less I believed that. I was hardly an expert in arranged marriage, but the odds didn’t seem to be in her favor. She and her sister were uneducated, they had next to no dowry to offer, and they wouldn’t marry anyone who didn’t meet their religious and caste criteria. Azmat informed me that as a member of the rarefied Syed caste—“the top rank of Muslims”—she would never consider marrying a boy from the butcher or barber caste; such boys fought constantly inside their families, she told me with authority.

  For centuries, marriage brokers took care of such concerns, pairing off couples based on their caste and horoscope. Each community in India had its own version of the matchmaker: In some villages, it was the barber’s wife, in others, the Hindu priest, or pujari. Then, a couple of decades ago, the classified pages of the Sunday newspapers broke the matchmaker’s monopoly, widening the pool of potential partners. With access to the classifieds, families could choose from hundreds of listings for girls and boys from across the country. In theory they could pick a match from a different religion or caste, but they rarely did.

  Mehboob had first put the word out in his mosque and then around the rest of the neighborhood. When no boys appeared, he tried to hire a local matchmaker, a Muslim woman who had a reputation for making quick, caste-specific alliances via cell-phone calls to the families. She demanded more than a hundred dollars per girl, though, and wouldn’t give a discount for sisters—which Azmat thought was terribly cheap of her. Mehboob seemed at a loss.

  I came into the gym one morning to find Azmat holding court. Her face was flushed with excitement. She’d stumbled on a juicy piece of neighborhood gossip, and she’d clearly been milking it for all it was worth. It was an update on a story we all knew: A Muslim boy had eloped with a Hindu girl the previous year, and it had been the talk of the neighborhood. The girl’s family had promptly disowned her, and the couple had disappeared from Nizamuddin. Now Azmat had found out that the girl had resurfaced, eight months pregnant. The gym ladies were all abuzz. The boy’s family had agreed to take the couple in, but the girl’s family continued to refuse to acknowledge the marriage. This was only natural, according to the gym ladies, who spoke up from their various exercise-machine perches.

  “The girl must have got herself pregnant to try to get sympathy from her family.”

  “It’s much harder for the girl’s family to accept such a match, because she’s the one who converts to his religion. A Hindu girl raising her child a Muslim—no one wants that in their family,” another said.

  Azmat nodded knowledgeably from her cross-legged position on the gym floor.

  “It’s very difficult for the girl’s side. If I ran off with a Hindu boy, my family would have to leave our mosque. The boy’s family gets a new wife and child, but the girl’s family gets nothing from an interreligious match—nothing but shame.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A Million Matches

  The home page of Shaadi.com exhorts the unmarried to have faith: “20 million miracles and counting: Register free.” Shaadi, named after the Hindi word for “marriage,” styles itself as an online wedding clearinghouse: Members can search among 450 castes, sixty-seven regional languages, and every possible Indian religion for a match. It provides much the same service as the village barber’s wife—aligning couples based on community and background—just online.

  Despite India’s renown—or notoriety—as the world’s IT helpdesk, only about a third of Indians have Internet access. The percentage is growing exponentially every year, though, and more than a hundred websites have popped up to cater to the Indian matrimonial market. Although Azmat liked to drop the English word computer into her sentences—she pronounced it robotically, in three distinct syllables, “com-pooh-ter”—neither she nor her sisters had ever used one. The relatively savvy Mehboob spoke English and had learned to type in college, but he didn’t own a PC. So when a friend convinced him to fill out the online form seeking husbands for his sisters, he did so from an Internet café.

  Even while matrimonial sites such as Shaadi retain the most traditional aspects of Indian marriage, they are revolutionizing the institution. They are the portal for the new generation of arranged alliances, striking a compromise between love matches and pure arranged marriages. Ungracefully called “love-cum-arranged marriages” in Indian English, these are Indian marriages with Western influences, like Pakistani-style democracy or capitalism with Chinese characteristics. Theoretically, at least, the couple can have as much input into the process as their parents do. Traditionally, the boy’s parents would send an inquiry to the girl’s parents, but now the boy can now do it himself by clicking the “express interest” button on Shaadi—the less playful equivalent of a sending a “wink” or a “poke” on Match.com or Facebook. Like many American dating sites, Shaadi also features its own instant messaging feature, a socially acceptable form of direct, live communication. It’s virtuous virtual dating.

  In Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come), which is best abbreviated to KHNH, Shah Rukh Khan shows us that this, the compromise method, is the way to be modern. Until recently, the only acceptable expression of love in Bollywood was karmic, family-approved marriage—but in this film, the heroine meets SRK’s character without family intervention and falls for him on her own. Standing in front of an elaborate Hindu shrine, her grandmother chastises her. “There is no such thing as love. If there is marriage, it is always arranged!” she says, and in the film’s progressive eye, she becomes a caricature of the old, slightly embarrassing India.

  Later in the film, the heroine describes the sensation
of love to a girlfriend.

  “Before, I used to get annoyed with all the little things he did … and now I love those same things!”

  “This is what love is! Oh my God, I’m so excited!” her girlfriend shrieks.

  Geeta had said unequivocally that she’d never again “spend time with any boy without a proposal.” Being burned by Mohan made her feel she should seek the safety net of a marriage with parental sanction, but she was also struggling with the idea of spending her life with someone her mother selected for her. I thought Shaadi seemed like a promising alternative to her mother’s endless stream of chaperoned arranged marriage meetings, and the day Azmat told me about it, I went straight from the gym to Nanima’s apartment.

  Her maid let me in, and I tiptoed past the old woman sleeping on the sofa. Geeta was on the floor of her bedroom amid stacks of clothes, looking overwhelmed as she tried to clean out her overstuffed closet. I leaned into the doorway and asked, rather breathlessly, whether she’d heard about the site.

  Geeta eyed me suspiciously over the piles of clothes. I felt suddenly silly for rushing over before I’d even changed out of my gym clothes.

  “Of course I have. I already have a profile up on the site.” She returned to her folding, but I came in and sat down on her bed anyway. After a moment of trying to ignore me, she sighed and spoke up again. “My dad thinks Shaadi is great. But that’s because he likes anything to do with technology. You know how we were the first family in our neighborhood to have a vacuum cleaner or a TV? It’s the same with this. He thinks that because it is modern and up to date, I’m going to find my husband this way. But I’m not so sure.”

  “It seems like if you do it online, you get a lot more freedom and control of the whole process, right?”