Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  Like many modern girls, Taani is tempted by the idea of love. She considers rejecting her parents and her marriage and running away with the dancer. Then she realizes that her marriage is sacred, and her sense of duty to her husband begins to transform into other emotions: “I see God in him,” she says. She experiences not a heady Bollywood romance but a gradual warming toward the man she married, a warming that is, in the lyrics of the film’s first love song, “soft, sweet, and slow.”

  When Geeta threw up her hands in frustration over her husband hunt, Nitin Shourie was happy to pick up the reins.

  “Who could know better than her father the right boy for her?” he’d say to his family. Geeta’s father sometimes joked that it was his own fault the girl wasn’t yet married: He’d spoiled her, and now she couldn’t leave him for a husband. This was a conceit they both liked, because it reinforced their special closeness.

  Nitin was a compact, solid man who believed firmly in his own achievements. When members of the Patiala community referred to him by the respectful term Nitin-ji, it gave him great pleasure. As a young man, he’d passed competitive exams to secure a lifelong position in one of India’s highest-status, if lowest-paid, professions—a doctor in a government hospital. Nitin-ji was not too shy to remind his neighbors and family, if they seemed to forget, that he’d dedicated thirty-eight years of service to the best hospital in Punjab state. He noticed that he had to remind them more often since he’d retired.

  Nitin also liked to tell anyone who would listen that he’d had his pick of Patiala girls in his time—or, more precisely, that his father had the pick on his behalf. It wasn’t until his engagement ceremony that Nitin met the girl who had been chosen for him. But his father had done his due diligence—ensuring that the girl was pleasant looking, that she shared their Punjabi culture, and that she “had a good nature,” meaning she was quiet, amenable, and family oriented. It had turned out well, Nitin thought. Even though his wife had been a schoolteacher—in an era when Indian women rarely worked outside the home—she’d never neglected her wifely duties. Each morning, Pooja offered a quick prayer at her bedroom shrine for the family’s health and happiness, before overseeing the cook’s duties around the house. She had never once called Geeta’s father by his name, instead addressing him as aap, the respectful form of you.

  “Sometimes I wish I lived in my mother’s time—or even my grandmother’s. Things were so much simpler then.”

  It was a rather random thing to say. Geeta and I were sitting in the stultifying heat, the fans whirring overhead as we waited for our sandwiches to be delivered. On Sunday nights, she often joined Priya and me at my apartment, and we’d order in from Subway. On weeknights, Geeta wanted to eat Punjabi home cooking and would occasionally compromise by agreeing to Radha’s Bihari meals, but on Sundays, what she craved was an Indian version of the classic sub. Geeta always ordered the same thing: the slightly spicy Veggie Patty sandwich from Subway, one of her favorite indulgences of the newly globalized India. The choice sang to her of Americanized cool, though it tasted more Indian than American to me.

  “Back in those days,” she continued, not noticing that I was still trying to catch on to what she was talking about, “everyone still believed that love follows marriage. Now we’ve all been influenced by the American idea that love comes first. I’m not sure this is a good thing.”

  Geeta had reason to be skeptical about adopting the Western relationship model: At least on paper, arranged marriages have a much better track record than love matches. Couples rarely separate or divorce in India; 30 percent of American relationships collapse within ten years of marriage. India has never been accepting of separation of couples. When the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began trying to legalize divorce in India, it caused a fury. In 1954, one minister spoke up in parliament with this view: “The bill is inspired by the Western view of life which attaches more value to the romance of marital relations and married life than to parenthood in which marriage attains its function. The Hindu system conceives of parenthood as something which is permanent, unchangeable, and inviolable.”

  Divorce was made legal a year later, and yet you still hear a similar sentiment in the India of today, a time of almost equal social turbulence as the postindependence years. The highest estimates peg India’s current divorce rate at a mere 6 percent nationwide. Because the courts in India move at a glacial pace, it often takes fifteen years for a divorce to go through; more to the point, though, most couples are unwilling to break the cultural taboo against it.

  How do you tell the difference between a good Indian marriage and a bad one? The cynical punch line to that joke is that you can’t: Both are grim tests of endurance. Women at domestic violence shelters almost always say they are simply resigned to returning to their abusive homes. Urged by both sides of the family not to bring shame on them by leaving their husbands, unable to survive financially on their own, and unwilling to deal with the humiliation of ending the marriage, most see it as their fate to stick it out in a bad home.

  The Indian government doesn’t track the national divorce rate—which is a telling fact in and of itself—but independent research shows that its incidence is rising. According to some studies, divorces actually doubled in Delhi and Mumbai in the two decades after 1990. Sociologists attribute it to the growing number of financially independent women, and to the new cultural emphasis on romance and happiness in marriage—which is exactly what Geeta was always saying.

  “My girlfriends joke that if divorce was socially acceptable in India, 95 percent of marriages would end up that way,” she said. “But I don’t agree. I see my parents, and they don’t talk all romantic like on American TV shows. Still, they are perfectly happy. That’s the difference: With the arranged kind of marriage, you don’t have such high expectations.”

  Her voice was somber when she spoke again. “Actually, I have been feeling very upset the last few days. A girl I know from college is getting a divorce. And, of course, it was a love match.”

  This was probably the first time Geeta had ever had a personal link to a divorce, and she seemed to find it deeply destabilizing. To her, marriage had always been a refuge from the conflicts of modern-day singledom. I’d never had such high hopes for the institution, myself. Even though my parents are still married, they seem the exception, not the norm. I’d never really considered marriage to be the goal in itself: more like the protective bubble wrap around a delicate china jug. You couldn’t assume that the wrapping would protect the jug in a hurricane; you still had to hold it close. But in India, the wrapping itself is considered as precious as the china inside.

  I didn’t succeed in keeping my views to myself.

  “Even if your family helps you choose a guy with a good reputation, how can they predict what will happen between two people?”

  “They can’t tell everything, it’s true,” Geeta said. “But it’s something. Your family looks into the background and personality. At least they provide some kind of network to help you know whether the boy is good or not. After that, it’s up to you only.”

  “Do you think that’s why the girl from your college is getting a divorce—because the guy wasn’t tested out by the family?”

  “It must be the reason. Why else? He was a perfectly nice boy.”

  The glibness of this remark made me wince, but I said nothing.

  “My mother always said that getting into a relationship is like heating water: First simmer, then boil. The only way to be sure is to marry first and wait for love to come later. Americans have it backward—you expect the water to come to a boil first. When the relationship cools down, you’re disappointed, and you break it off.”

  This bit of metaphorical wisdom gave me pause. I was relieved when the Subway delivery boy arrived with our sandwiches. We sank onto cushions on the living room floor to eat, and I was silent for a while, thinking over what she’d said. When I first moved to India, I’d felt a classic American revulsion fo
r arranged marriage. The lack of choice made it seem loveless; the emphasis on caste and dowry seemed crass and monetary; the classified marriage ads in the Sunday papers read like a spooky, parent-sanctioned meat market. I couldn’t fathom the idea of my mother picking my mate for me, and it seemed fundamentally unfair that the girl had to abandon her independence and her past in order to enter the next stage of life.

  A couple of years in India had softened my views. For one thing, I’d realized that India is scarcely alone in its interest in aligning the backgrounds of married couples. Statistics about U.S. marriage show that the vast majority of people choose a mate whose income group, race, and education match their own. When I thought about it, most of my boyfriends had mirrored my race and socioeconomic status. I’d been raised to think I should find a partner whose experiences and tastes matched my own, so that I wouldn’t have to compromise my essential self.

  “What will you do if he wants to watch sports all the time and you want to listen to jazz?” I remember my mother saying. “You’ll have to spend your life in different rooms. How awful.”

  I’d focused my efforts on searching for someone whose beliefs lined up with my own, and I’d chosen men who were, in fact, too much like me. If Benjamin was emotionally distant and independent to an extreme, he was no more so than I. We were a perfect example of the “boil first and simmer later” model. I think I must have read too much of John Keats’s poetry as a teenager, because I seriously believed that a romanticized idea of love was the highest pinnacle of human relationships. Issues such as timing, life goals, and even monogamy all seemed pedestrian.

  Talking to Geeta made me wonder whether I might have something to learn from Indian marriage after all. She’d grown up believing that it wouldn’t matter if she and her husband had different likes and dislikes; it was in any case a wife’s duty to adjust to her husband’s preferences and fit in with his family. Although that sounded a bit much, I had to acknowledge that there was something to be said for compromise. If my boyfriend was openhearted and caring, it might not matter whether his political views or taste in clothing perfectly matched my own. Maybe a little simmering wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Brahmin Versus the Untouchable

  Marriage, for Radha, was a matter of pure practicality. When I would ask her to describe her wedding or her husband, she’d shrug me off with “What is there to say?”

  Hers was a traditional village event, planned and executed by her relatives, and she had been too young to remember much about it. She doesn’t know her age at the time, because like most people in rural India, her parents didn’t keep track of birthdays. She did tell me that her family had had to compromise on the match. They didn’t have the means to offer a substantial dowry, which most families require if they are to bring a bride into their fold. To try to get the price down, Radha’s parents opted for “a boy with faults.” This narrowed the field of potential grooms to lower-caste boys, the disabled or mentally slow, widowers, and much older men. Of these unappealing options, Radha’s family chose the last: a poor Brahmin, never married, named Bhaneshwar Jha, who was twenty years her senior.

  Radha’s parents considered it “watering somebody else’s garden” to send their daughters to school, since they would inevitably leave the natal home to join another family. Although the government school in Radha’s village was free, books and uniforms were not, and her parents didn’t see that it was worth the investment. Already, they had to send Radha’s brothers out to the fields to earn something toward their sisters’ dowries. At home, the girls were sent into purdah, or seclusion, when they reached puberty, as was the custom among Brahmins in their area—the Madhubani district of Bihar. Radha always identified herself as a Madhubani Brahmin, as though it was important to distinguish herself from other Bihari Brahmins.

  Purdah in this region meant she covered her face with her scarf, or dupatta, in front of her elders. The only occasions when she and her sisters were allowed to leave the family home were for religious events. Before she moved to Delhi, Radha had never heard of a woman who worked outside the home. She’d spent her days learning the skills that would make her a more desirable wife: pounding dried chili into a fine powder and forming chapatis into perfect, slightly puffed circles.

  During the marriage rites, both her and her husband’s faces were covered by veils. Even after Radha’s world opened up dramatically—after she moved to India’s capital and was exposed to so much, including my rather untraditional household—it was as though she continued to live behind a veil. She was startlingly unsure about both her history and her present world. When I asked for her husband’s name, she had to think a minute to come up with it since she had never used it, either to his face or behind his back. Radha didn’t know the name of his village or how much schooling he’d had, either; her cousin-brother, Joginder, told me all that. In fact, Joginder seemed to know more about most of the events of Radha’s life than she did. History was a fairly irrelevant blur to her. Most of her memories were sketchy, undated, and closely held.

  One morning Radha was bringing the day’s milk to a boil, which she did every day because it is sold unpasteurized and is unsafe to drink. I joined her in there and started cleaning out the stove-top espresso maker I’d imported from the States—one of the kitchen tools Radha considered high-tech and refused to touch. She seemed to be in a good mood, so I asked her about the tattoo on her arm. I’d wondered about it since she’d started working for me. The pale, inexpensive ink was faded like a prison tattoo; the Hindi script was blurred and illegible. Radha waved me off, but when I persisted, she leaned against the kitchen counter. Soon after she was married, she said, she’d seen the tattoo wallah outside the temple in her husband’s village and had been tempted to make an unlikely romantic gesture. She’d asked him to inscribe their names on her arm.

  “I was naïve and silly. I didn’t know he was going to pierce the skin with those needles to make the picture come! It hurt!”

  She’d hurried back to her husband’s house to dunk her arm in cold water. Only later did Bhaneshwar look at it carefully and inform her that the tattoo wallah, who was probably as illiterate as Radha, had tattooed the wrong name on her skin. According to her arm, her husband was married to a woman named Devi.

  In ancient times, Bihar was a great cultural empire. During Radha’s lifetime, though, her home state was famous for the wrong reasons: endemic corruption and extreme political instability. Now the adjective most often used to describe the place is backward. Only 5 percent of households in Bihar have electricity, compared with 40 percent nationwide, which is a fairly miserable starting point. Education levels are lower in Bihar, infant mortality is higher, and more of Bihar’s citizens live below the poverty line than in the rest of the country. Indian intellectuals joke that the government would happily hand off the long-disputed region of Kashmir to Pakistan—if Pakistan would only agree to adopt disastrous Bihar as well. One Bihari politician liked to quip that kidnappings were his state’s sole industry.

  Bihar remains as feudal as medieval Europe; land is the primary source of power. The landowning castes have never been Brahmins, though. According to the laws of Manu, members of the highest caste were supposed to live in poverty, collecting alms in return for priestly work. These days, there are other acceptable Brahmin occupations for the educated, such as accounting work and government jobs. But undereducated Brahmins such as Radha’s late husband are pretty much relegated to joblessness in India’s caste-based economy. He was as landless as the Dalits who toiled in the fields, and unlike the merchant and warrior castes who fell beneath him on the hierarchy, he had no traditional occupation except one that required an education. Bhaneshwar’s last name guaranteed him nothing other than a sense of entitlement.

  Like so many others who could not survive on the land, Bhaneshwar fled Bihar for Delhi in search of work. It took him more than three days to get to Delhi by the cheapest bus and train tickets. When h
e arrived, he tracked down Joginder, who found him work as a chowkidar—a neighborhood guard—with a monthly income of eleven dollars. This he supplemented by selling roasted corn from a stall on the side of the road: six rupees for two ears. It took Bhaneshwar many months to be able to afford to send for Radha, and when he did, they began their married life in a tiny bamboo shelter offered to him by his employer. Radha could cook only one meal a day—though this was an improvement, because even that much was not a certainty in the village.

  When Bhaneshwar fell ill, he didn’t want to take a day off work to see a doctor, so he ignored his fever. By the time Joginder took him to the hospital, he was unable to walk. He had some kind of infection that spread to his brain—Radha and Joginder called it “brain fever.” He slipped into a coma and died a few days later.

  Radha scarcely remembered anything of the days after that.

  “When they told me he wouldn’t survive, I went into a trance. I was three months pregnant with Sujla. Ay, bhagwan.”

  Joginder remembered, though. He told me he escorted Radha and her two young children back to her husband’s village. They performed the cremation rituals, and she sat through the mourning period. Six months later, she gave birth to her daughter Sujla.

  Radha’s parents-in-law granted her a few days to recover from the birth before they kicked her out. They’d done their duty while she was pregnant, they told her, but they couldn’t be responsible for feeding her and her children anymore. Among strict high-caste Hindus, women who have lost their husbands are considered bad luck. Traditionally, Brahmin widows were forced to shave their heads, join an ashram, and give their children away to their relatives. But Bhaneshwar’s parents didn’t want the children, so Radha piled everyone onto a bus back to Delhi.

  Joginder, the neighborhood advocate for Bihari immigrants, found Radha a job doing the only thing she knew how to do—housework. That took only a few days; she needed much longer to snap out of her self-pitying daze. The ignominy of her life as a working widow haunted her, and was made much worse by the kind of work that she did. Radha described her life after her husband’s death as a series of humiliations.