Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  “Brahmins are not supposed to clean other people’s houses, deedee. But this is my fate.”

  One of the few facts of her life that she told me clearly and repeatedly was that she would not be working if her husband were alive. Even when Bhaneshwar’s former employer took pity on her and rescued her from the bamboo shack, the alternative didn’t amount to much of an improvement: He gave her enough money to buy a jhuggi, a rough shack with a tin roof in a slum. Radha’s new home was on the banks of the Yamuna River, a tributary of the holy Ganges. Although it is a sacred body of water, it is best known as Delhi’s sewer, because it is filled with the toxic effluent of thousands of unregulated factories. For Radha, though, the worst part about the slums was not the polluted living conditions; it was being forced to live in close proximity to Muslims and Dalits.

  “In the village, we Brahmins don’t intermingle with these people. If an untouchable passed by my house in the village, he would never expect to be let inside.” Her chin was lifted; she met my eye directly. “Now these people live all around. There is nowhere in the big city you can live alone peacefully among your own caste people, without these others crowding around you.”

  Radha showed up at the apartment one morning with her face tortured into an exaggerated expression of concern. My maid was undeniably filmy, the word Indians use to describe a propensity for melodrama. Even before she spoke, my thoughts flashed to a formula my mother had come up with when she was living in Karachi: one tragedy per servant per month. Her six servants came to her with terrible stories—the death of a four-year-old daughter, an attack of malaria, and one outlandish tale about a brother who’d had all his toes chopped off in a prisoner-of-war camp. They wanted money for funerals and hospital visits, and my mother accepted that her role as memsahib of the household was to hand it out. She settled on twenty dollars each per disaster.

  Because Geeta and Parvati thought I was being ripped off all the time, I was constantly trying to work out whether there was a subtext in my interactions with my servants. It didn’t seem as though Radha was after money this time, though; there was panic in her voice that I hadn’t heard before.

  “They’re saying our jhuggi is going to be destroyed. Some big government babu showed up this morning and told us they’re going to knock down the whole shantytown!”

  She’d paid sixty dollars for her shanty. That was two months’ wages, an unbearable sum to lose. The government routinely bulldozes homes in urban India, because they are illegal structures occupied by squatters. Maneesh told us that her previous home had been destroyed a few years before.

  Some forty million Indians are illegal squatters in bustees. They are the underside of the new India, the migrant workers who fuel the fast-expanding economy. The Indian government never built low-income housing for its rural migrants, as did the United States, Europe, and, more recently, China. Instead, immigrants from the hinterlands rely on city slumlords, who pay off local politicians to protect the slums. The politicians allow the shantytowns to stay standing because that guarantees them the votes of the inhabitants and protects their careers. It’s a perfect circle of corruption, at least until the politician is voted out of power. Then the city comes in with bulldozers.

  This time, the Supreme Court had ordered all “riverbed encroachments” to be cleared, in an effort to save the Yamuna from further pollution. Tens of thousands of people were expected to be moved out of their shanties on the Yamuna Pushta, the embankment of the river. Radha had a flicker of hope in a rumor she’d heard that the Delhi government was allotting alternate land, far outside the city, to jhuggi owners who could produce their paperwork. The idea of trying to negotiate India’s opaque officialdom was deeply intimidating to Radha, though. With neither formal education nor street smarts, she found it a challenge just to get around the city on a normal day. Radha couldn’t tell time, so she had to rely on the height of the sun in the sky, and it was often blocked by buildings or smog. She couldn’t read numbers, so I made calls for her on my home phone. She always asked someone on the street which bus to board; she couldn’t identify the bus routes from the signs.

  Luckily, Radha had her teenage son, Babloo, to help her manage city life. With no other man around, he’d considered himself the head of her household since he could walk. Babloo had grown into a serious fifteen-year-old with his mother’s black emotional eyes. He’d started working in a doctor’s office two years before, answering phones after school a few days a week. He told me that even though he gave all his income to his mother, he wished he could earn more than he did, so that she could quit the job she considered so demeaning.

  Radha wouldn’t hear of it. For all her provincialism, she was a firm believer in the importance of education. She often said that she wanted to make sure her children weren’t moorks, or “idiots,” like her, unable to read or write. She wanted her daughters to finish high school before they married, and she had high Brahminical ambitions for her son. Because Babloo attended a Hindi-language high school, she’d asked me to tutor him in English, which I did for most of the years I lived in Delhi. She hoped he’d achieve what few from the slums manage to do: go to college and pull himself into the middle class.

  It was with Babloo’s future in her sights that Radha endured the daily unpleasantness of her life. At four each morning, she collected the family’s allotment of water from the shared outdoor tap, and woke Babloo so he could take his cold bucket bath before dawn. He combed his hair back with palm oil so it would hold the pattern of the comb’s teeth through the morning. He visited the Sai Baba temple every Thursday afternoon to pray for his family’s health, and never neglected to collect two packets of milk from the local dairy on his way home. His mother’s shame about their low status defined his life. Only occasionally did he act his age. Radha told me, laughing, that she once caught him in front of the cracked mirror in their shack, doing a dance step and smoothing his hair with his hand, imitating his favorite Bollywood hero.

  Babloo had kept the ownership papers for their jhuggi carefully folded under the mattress. He made sure their name was added to the government list so they would be allotted new land, and was advised by neighbors that they could make a profit if they sold it and rented a place elsewhere. Other slum dwellers lost everything during the Yamuna Pushta demolitions, and an unnumbered, unnamed few were even buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes, according to some reports I read. But Radha made out pretty well from the ordeal. With the money they made off the land, they were able to rent a room in a tenement, in a pukka building made of cement.

  When she told me how relieved she was to have moved out of her ramshackle shanty, I’d joke that I was going to follow her home one day and stay with her in her nice apartment. She’d look pleased for a moment, and then add quickly, “No, deedee, you wouldn’t like it. It isn’t in a nice place.” Her reaction reminded me of the obsequious character Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India, the E. M. Forster novel set in colonial India. He’s so embarrassed about his run-down bungalow that he comes up with a complicated and ill-fated scheme to prevent his British friends from seeing it. I didn’t want to imagine that my uppity Brahmin maid harbored similar insecurities about her memsahib. I told myself she was just being modest and pestered her to take me home to meet her daughters until she gave in.

  Radha’s neighborhood was only a twenty-minute walk away, but it was literally on the other side of the Nizamuddin tracks from my middle-class enclave, and I’d never been there. The track crossing was closed when we got there, and the midmorning heat was beating down on the traffic that had accumulated on either side: vendors with wooden handcarts of hard oranges and tiny red onions; impatient families piled on scooters, the men with handkerchiefs tied across their mouths to protect against the dust; a group of boys stacked sweatily inside the cab of an industrial-size rickshaw, its cargo of burlap sacks of flour slowly leaking white dust onto the pavement. Since the rail crossing could be closed for two or three hours at a time, Radha told me that pe
destrians rarely waited for it to lift; instead, they scanned the tracks and darted across. Of course, she added nonchalantly, a couple were killed by oncoming trains each day.

  We tried to make our way across quickly without stumbling on the raised rails. I was eyeing the distance for an oncoming train, so at first I didn’t notice the desiccated feces scattered on the tracks. Since Indian trains don’t have flush toilets, the passengers’ business falls straight down. Radha shot me an embarrassed glance.

  “I hate having to come this way.”

  On the other side, the street shimmied into a crooked laneway. Stagnant gray pools of gutter sewage lay between the sidewalk and the small houses. A stream of dirty bathwater spewed out of a window into the alley below, and I looked up to see a woman swinging her long, wet hair inside the window. Kids squatted in the dirt over their games of sticks and pebbles, their brown hair bleached orange-red by malnourishment. We passed a whitewashed temple, where Radha said a “miracle puja doctor” worked. Through the windows, I could see a long line of patients snaking through the dark interior.

  Her concrete apartment building loomed enormous in the tiny lane. The hallways echoed with the squalor of a refugee camp—the sounds of many families living in close proximity and great poverty. On each of the four floors were thirty apartments, in each of which were crammed as many as twelve people. Radha shared latrines and bathing rooms with sixty of her neighbors. At the entrance to her apartment, I kicked off my shoes and followed her in, but then I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. I’d visited dozens and dozens of shacks and slum dwellings on reporting assignments all across India, and had sometimes wondered whether the tight quarters explained the emotional closeness in Indian family relationships. But my own servant’s home was smaller than most of them. It was shocking that Radha paid any rent at all for this place—a single room the size of my bathroom.

  Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Pushpa, was cross-legged on a cot, squinting at a textbook in the dim light. She smiled shyly, like a much younger girl, and gestured for me to climb up beside her onto the bed, which was raised off the floor with bricks to create space beneath. From this perch, I looked around. Long ago, someone had painted the walls an eerie combination of baby-girl pink and putrid green; now the garish colors were muted by years of soot from the stove. The sole window in the place looked out into the hallway; a curtain was pulled across it for privacy. The only other light came from a fluorescent tube. A shelf shrine with plastic statues of Ganesh and Krishna took up most of the wall space. Stacked in one corner were the family’s electrical appliances: a battered fan and an outdated TV whose enormous antenna was doing little to appease the static snowing across the screen.

  I thought of how pleased Radha had looked when I’d bought my first TV in India. Even though it was no bigger than my laptop screen, it was nonetheless a brand-new television with a cable connection, which seemed to make her feel proud of the home she worked in. Her own set received only the government-run channels—that is, when there was electricity in the building. If Radha finished her day’s duties at my apartment early, she’d crouch on her haunches directly in front of my TV, pushing the buttons on the set—she was intimidated by the remote—until she found a Hindu prayer channel. As the camera panned across tens of thousands of pilgrims trooping toward a sacred site, her features would relax into righteous pleasure. “With God’s blessing, one day I’ll also visit Somnath Temple,” she’d say.

  I recognized my old minifridge crowded into the electrical appliance corner of the room. The power surges had eventually killed it, and I’d thrown it away—or so I’d thought. My heart suddenly pounded. Why hadn’t Radha just told me she wanted the broken refrigerator? She followed my eyes.

  “Deedee, I took your old fridge because we didn’t have one. I was embarrassed to ask you for it.”

  I’d never noticed the streaks of gray in her hair before. We sat in silence for a moment, listening to Pushpa scribbling in her notebook with a pencil stub.

  “Well, if you got it working again, then I’m glad you took it.”

  Radha set her jaw.

  “The electrician wallah was going to charge fifty rupees just to look at it. I told him, I got this for free, why would I spend that much on it? So I just use it for storing food. It keeps the bugs out of the chapati flour.”

  As if on cue, a big brown cockroach scuttled across the floor. Earlier that year, when I’d found roaches in my apartment, Radha and I had spent several mornings strategizing about how to eliminate them. She’d instructed me to buy a chalklike homeopathic remedy, and in my desperation I’d complied. She’d drawn circles with it around the apartment and sworn that roaches wouldn’t dare enter inside the lines because they were afraid of the stuff.

  I’d never have guessed that the woman who bent down on her swollen knees to mop my floors to a luminous sheen lived in filth and squalor herself. Maybe because Radha couldn’t apply her Brahminical notions of purity and pollution to her own home, she applied them instead to mine. I looked away so she wouldn’t see the tears that welled up in my eyes. I wished I hadn’t made her bring me here. Perhaps I really was no different from my great-aunt Edith, the British missionary decked out in a long frock and a European sun helmet who spent her life imposing her religion on the pagans. In spite of all my efforts to tread carefully in India, I was living out my own Passage to India story.

  Female foreign correspondents have a bad reputation in expat circles: For the most part, we’re considered either hard-boiled and callous, or desperate and flirtatious. I couldn’t help but notice that the women journalists in Delhi were disproportionately young and single. Our male counterparts were generally older and more successful, and most of them were accompanied in Delhi by wives and kids. I’d banded together with the few other women my age. We’d often get together for brunches or drinks at someone’s apartment and compare notes. We traveled too much and were beholden more to news schedules than to our own plans; most of us had messy personal situations as a result, but all of us got a high from the overseas reporter’s life.

  My friends and I would talk sometimes about what a rush it was to be intimately involved in the goings-on of the world, not from a newsroom in New York or Washington but from the center of the story. I felt lucky to get to see the wild beauty of places that were difficult to visit as a tourist, such as rebel-occupied Sri Lanka. My job allowed me to feel as though I was seeing the world from the inside out: I got to talk to poppy farmers and politicians, police recruits and militants, people whose dreams and expectations were completely different from my own. Whether I was sitting cross-legged in a Mumbai slum or running toward a building under siege in Srinagar, I was living life intensely.

  Like my friends, I’d become somewhat addicted to the thrills of unexpected travel and reporting under harrowing circumstances. I still believe that working as a foreign correspondent is the only job I will ever truly love—but that doesn’t mean it was good for me.

  One night, curled into comfortable chairs in my friend M.P.’s enormous Delhi apartment, we tried to come up with a list of women who’d succeeded in holding on to both a globe-trotting reporter job and a stable partnership. We expanded the list to include women we didn’t know in person; still, we couldn’t think of more than six names. Adding children to the formula narrowed the list even further, to a mere two. It was one thing to talk abstractly about how being a reporter overseas required a sacrifice. Seeing the hard data inspired a new round of soul-searching.

  My friends and I came up with a code phrase to describe the stark life of the long-term female foreign correspondent: “Miserable Jen,” as we’d nicknamed a journalist we knew in Delhi. She’d been reporting from overseas for more than twenty years, and her skin was leathery from sun and alcohol. At parties, she laughed too loudly and sometimes bragged about flings with her Afghan and Pakistani translators. Miserable Jen was the only foreigner I knew who’d caught dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease also called “breakbone
fever” because that’s apparently what it feels like. When I’d tried to sympathize with her about it, she waved me off dismissively, saying she’d already had it twice before, in Africa.

  Jen was one of the few reporters I knew who actively lobbied her paper to send her back to Baghdad after it became so dangerous that it was difficult to get out and do any real reporting. It was hard to believe it was still good for her career at that point.

  “Maybe she likes Baghdad because the odds are good,” M.P. joked.

  M.P. liked to say “the odds are good, but the goods are odd” to describe the many opportunities for liaisons we had while living overseas. We’d all noticed what Geeta complained about: the paucity of single Indian men over the age of thirty. Married Indian men were more than happy to have affairs with feringhee girls, but that was not what we were after. The single expats we met in places such as Baghdad, Delhi, and Kabul were reporters, UN workers, and security contractors; it naturally followed that they were drifters, swashbucklers, or womanizers, generally uninterested in real relationships. Like them, we, too, were searching for bright flare-ups to grant us fleeting solace from the fear and sadness we so often witnessed and felt.

  Miserable Jen worked hard and was often first on the story, but she no longer seemed to have any real interest in the places or people she covered. She’d get drunk and spit that she hated India and all its whiny inhabitants. Worst of all, Miserable Jen made other people miserable. After she left India, her translator told us that she’d often found her in the mornings passed out in her home office, a bottle of gin under the desk. When she came to, Jen would holler and throw things at her employees.