Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  After a quarter of an hour of bumping along the maze of streets, I realized my rickshaw wallah had retraced his steps more than once. He actually had no idea where he was going. He was just sputtering gamely down the center of the road, ignoring the lane divider. We both stared at the haphazardly numbered houses piled atop one another: “432-L” announced one house; “34-B” read the number on the building beside it. I groaned in frustration—“How could 432-L and 34-B be neighbors?”—but my driver was undaunted. He slowed near a boy pushing a cart of mangoes and shouted the house number we were looking for. The boy couldn’t hear him above the engine’s explosive stutter. He heaved his cart to the side of the road and sidled over as he scratched his groin absentmindedly through his polyester pants.

  Only when my driver cut the motor did I realize that my head was pounding from its staccato clatter and the searing heat. My driver was suffering, too. He wiped his face with a corner of his grubby kurta, the long, loose shirt worn by both women and men in India. Then he reached below his feet, pulled out an old Coke bottle, the paper label long ago peeled off, and poured a stream of water into his mouth, making sure the rim didn’t touch his lips. He offered the bottle to me, and turned back wordlessly, unsurprised, when I declined: Foreigners never drink Indian water unless they can vouch for its origins. The mango boy, however, took a grateful swig, using the same germ-free Indian technique. He had the sunken-eyed look of the hungry that I was becoming accustomed to on the streets of Delhi. Giving directions was probably a welcome diversion from the sapping blaze of a 120-degree spring day.

  In the afternoons, when it is too hot to work, the solidly employed retire to their homes for lunch and a siesta, as they do in southern Europe, where lives have long been patterned around making the seasons livable. This civilized luxury is not an option for Delhi’s underemployed immigrants, many of whom have no home to retire to. Some 70 million immigrated to Indian cities from the impoverished hinterlands in the decade before I moved to the country in 2002. Still more poured in from India’s poorer neighbors, Nepal and Bangladesh. They come in search of urban wealth and opportunity, which, sadly, they rarely find. Instead, they take whatever bits of work they can get—serving chai or cleaning toilets. In the afternoons, they seek out fellow villagers, squatting in companionable clusters in scraps of shade, or walking together with their arms draped across each other’s shoulders. Sometimes they hold hands loosely, in the village boys’ sweet, casual gesture of friendship.

  The undereducated village boys stop and stare at anything slightly out of the ordinary. Even if it is the capital of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Delhi has a decidedly uncosmopolitan feel. It is, after all, a magnet for the rural poor. Eyes followed me everywhere unless I was safely ensconced inside a five-star hotel. Feringhees, or goras, as foreigners are called in Hindi slang, stand out in a city with little immigration from outside its national boundaries. The word gora is straightforward: It means “white.” Feringhee stems back to the time of the Crusades, when Indian Muslims used the word to refer to Christians; the base of the word is Frank, once used for people of European descent. India has been home to dozens of ethnicities, skin colors, religions, and castes for centuries, but in spite of all the invasions and colonizations, the polyglot culture has still almost always been Indian.

  The mango boy and my driver pondered our destination, and others strolled over to join the discussion, pointing here and there with lackadaisical arms. When one of them realized that the rickshaw contained a feringhee, they began popping their heads inside to peer at me: The effect was of a comic puppet show. Their expressions bore no hostility, just curiosity and surprise, as they took in the white face and platinum blond hair, which I’d dyed that color soon after college in an effort to stand out. The goal was easily achieved in India. After a couple of months of being treated like a freakish celebrity, inspiring turned heads and double takes on Delhi streets, I would decide to return to my natural brown.

  From the backseat, I could see my driver nodding disinterestedly at the crowd of volunteer guides. He was getting comfortable, slipping off his chappals and folding his feet beneath him. I despaired that I would ever make it to the apartment viewing. Even with only three weeks of Hindi lessons, I could tell that my driver’s conclave was more idle gossip than route planning. I hadn’t learned enough of the language to ask directions for myself, though, and my driver was indifferent to my restlessness, so I just sank back to wait for the socializing to conclude.

  We lived in semidodgy urban neighborhoods growing up; I wrote about gang violence for the newspaper at my public high school. I liked to think of myself as capable and street smart. During crises, such as the time I was robbed in Brooklyn by a neighbor wielding a gun, I’d been pleased with myself for staying levelheaded. But now, with the heat rising inside our steam box of a rickshaw, I had a fantasy of slamming my rickshaw wallah’s head against the hot metal dashboard. Of course, then I’d probably destroy his already half-broken glasses, and I’d be not just a yellow-haired weirdo but a wild-eyed crazy one.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself what an Indian friend in New York had told me: If I was to make it in the “real,” unsanitized India, I had to be willing to surrender control and waste a lot of time. There was nothing for it but to swallow my impatience.

  Eventually, the rickshaw wallah spat a trail of tuberculean red paan onto the road: “Han-ji, madam. Chelliye!” We were off, at the top auto-rickshaw speed of twenty miles an hour. Soon, we came to a halt again, beside an excited crowd of men. I craned my neck: A utility pole had collapsed, tipping a knotted mass of power lines onto the road, and a crowd of random guys was tugging the wires out of the pole, in the Indian spirit of any business is everybody’s business.

  When we finally arrived at the house, I peeled my legs off the ripped plastic seat. As I pulled myself out of the rickshaw, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side mirror: Strands of hair were plastered to my head with sweat, and the rest had been swept up into a bouffant by the wind. The rickshaw driver extended his hand—stained black from engine grease and red from paan—demanding double the fare because of the detours. He spun off in his Indian helicopter without returning my dollar-fifty change.

  I threw up my hands and turned toward the house, where I thought I caught a flash of a woman peering at me before she dropped a lacy white curtain back into place. I rang the bell, trying to smooth out my creased skirt and wild hair with my fingers. A small, dark-skinned servant girl of about twelve came to the door, her face a mask of learned indifference. I could smell incense from the morning puja, or prayer session. Upstairs somewhere, there were young kids playing.

  I was still blinking to adjust my eyes to the dimness of the unlit hallway when a Sikh man in a commanding blue turban strode toward me. He gave me a quick unwelcoming nod, and my disheveled clothes suddenly felt too tight, too hippie, too Western. I swallowed into my dry throat, hoping the servant girl would reappear to proffer cold water on a small plastic tray. I’d already become spoiled by the rituals of Indian middle-class hospitality: the servant who presents you with a glass of water and ushers you to the living room to relax for a moment. There, you will be served either a cold drink, as Indians refer to soda, or a small china cup of sweet chai, depending on the season. Yet the landlord met me in the hallway and didn’t even ask me to sit down.

  “Sorry I’m late. We had some trouble getting here—”

  I stopped when I realized that his gaze was carefully averted from me and fixed above my shoulder. I turned to see whom he was looking at, but it was just the door frame.

  “We?”

  I could tell from the single word that his was the British-tinged English of India’s elite prep schools. His brow was arched. I was unsure where to look.

  “I mean, me and the rickshaw driver.”

  “Hmmm,” he said to the door frame. “So, are you alone?”

  I paused. The question, issued from this imposing figure in a gloomy hall
way, seemed calculated to inspire an existential crisis. In fact, it was only evidence of how different the average Indian’s attitudes to family and relationships were from my own. Most Indians I’d met found it incomprehensible that I would choose to live so far away from my family, which, at the age of twenty-seven, should have already included a husband, if not also a child.

  At the very least, I should be able to rely on my parents and siblings for housing. Even in the new, globalized India, family governs most people’s lives. Many upwardly mobile girls I’d met in Delhi had the appearance of independence—they wore jeans to college and went out to movies with their girlfriends on Saturday nights—but they didn’t plan to move out of their parents’ houses before they married. When that happened, they would stop working and move into their husbands’ parental homes.

  Over the next several years, I would be asked about my aloneness countless times in various ways—“Do you have your family here?” or “Do you have anyone?”—and I eventually became accustomed to the sorrowful looks my response elicited and learned not to be thrown off by the questions. I had close emotional relationships with my parents, my sisters, and my aunt—but it struck me now that we’d long lived in different countries and spoke only occasionally. My face flushed hot with embarrassment as I stood in front of the Sikh.

  “My family doesn’t live here, so I am looking for a place on my own.”

  The landlord straightened his posture.

  “This flat is not for single girls. We are not interested in girls of your type here. Good day.”

  And he turned on the heel of his carefully polished shoe.

  The servant stepped out of a shadow, and I realized she’d been there all along, waiting for the cue from her employer to usher me in or out of the hallway. She opened the door, her eyes following me impassively, as though I were of another species. I felt sure that even though she didn’t speak English, she understood what had just transpired. I wanted to plead with her: “What can I do to be the right kind of girl?”

  Months later, when I had made Indian girlfriends, they told me this was standard treatment for any woman attempting to rent a place without a husband in tow; there are even Bollywood films that show young women battling landlords when they move out of their parental homes before marriage. As I skulked back out into the heat, I could feel four eyes—those of the servant girl and the woman behind the lace curtain—boring into my back.

  I should have known better, perhaps; after all, I had grown up hearing stories about the challenges of working in India as a single woman, though in a very different era. Aunt Edith, the missionary, lived in India from 1930 to 1966—staying even as the British Empire declined and India won its independence, through the bloody and tumultuous partition that led to the creation of Pakistan. Unlike most of their British compatriots, she and the other “lady evangelists” of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society, or BCMS, were urged not to leave. In spite of the “churchmen” in its name, BCMS boasted that “the toughest fields were served by women” in its missionary work.

  Something like a million people died during the partition of India in 1947, killed in religious violence or by malnutrition or contagious disease as Muslims traveled west to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs east to India. More than ten million refugees poured across the border in what is still the greatest mass migration in history, and during that time, many foreign missionaries risked their lives to run clinics at the dangerous border crossings between the newly divided countries. I don’t know whether Edith was there, because she didn’t like to discuss difficult matters with the family, which, according to the dictates of her proper British upbringing, included political turmoil and religions other than her own.

  It seems improbable that the lady evangelists would have had any success in evangelizing the religion of the kicked-out colonizers, but Edith and the others “carried on” in India, as one former lady evangelist told me. They “wrestled with the strange Hindi characters, learnt to eat fiery Indian curries, and, ignoring aching joints, to sit upon the ground,” according to a BCMS pamphlet. In the photographs of Edith’s missionary days, the Indian women look shrunken beside her. She was over six feet tall, a disadvantage in her line of work: She refused to wear saris on her evangelizing missions for fear that villagers would think she was a man dressed as a woman, though I’m not sure why she thought wearing a shapeless ankle-length cotton frock protected her from making this impression.

  In spite of Edith’s fastidious English dresses, expressions of femininity were never appropriate among missionary ladies, who lived a life of self-denial and rigor completely unlike that of officers of the British Raj and their wives. Edith’s hair was parted down the middle in a cruelly straight line and scraped back into a practical bun. Years later, my mother’s sister, Susie, told me that their aunt’s hair was actually her secret vanity. She would save the strands from her comb and wrap them into the bun at the nape of her neck, like some surreptitious storehouse of her femininity. Edith had few other indulgences: She spent her adult life in a rural mission with neither electricity nor running water. She would travel to villages on the dusty northern plains to distribute medicine, teach girls to read, and, of course, do God’s work of preaching the Bible to the pagans.

  They say every family has one black sheep, but almost all my mother’s relatives were strong willed, rebellious, and independent. My mother and Susie did not share Edith’s faith or her paternalistic missionary attitude, but her dedication and endurance had a huge influence on them both. Edith was in her late sixties by the time she retired. Until then, she continued making her annual summer expeditions north to Kashmir with missionary friends to rest, away from the heat of the plains. One year, they sent the porter ahead with their bedrolls and tins of homemade English biscuits and rushed through the train station to make their connection. After they’d leaped aboard, Edith’s face went gray. She refused to interrupt the vacation by going to the hospital. When she returned to the mission, six weeks later, she discovered she’d had a heart attack.

  As a sheltered child in rural England, my mother pored over the letters Edith sent each month on stationery printed with Indian birds. She dreamed of seeing the bulbul and the hoopoe, with its fan-shaped crest, and of experiencing the simple Indian village life Edith described. The opportunity came soon after she married my father, an American graduate student she’d met at Oxford University. He was working at a small college in a Michigan town they both hated. In the hope of escaping, my father decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship. He didn’t get India; instead, the committee offered him a lectureship at the University of Karachi, in Pakistan, a rather less appealing choice since it was reeling from a brutal civil war. Still, it got them out of Michigan.

  As my mother anticipated, it was spending a couple of months in India, afterward, that had the greatest impact on her. After my sisters were born, she converted the whole family to Hindu-inspired vegetarianism, and stuck with it throughout our childhood. When my sisters and I complained that we didn’t have name-brand clothes, she’d lecture us about the frugal lifestyle of India’s independence hero Mahatma Gandhi. My mother always seemed to have Indian friends, and decorated every house we lived in with objects she and my father had collected in the East: leather safari chairs, antique tribal rugs, and a heavy brass statue of the god Shiva dancing in a circle of flame, which my father would complain he’d lugged all across India.

  When I announced I was moving there myself, my parents didn’t seem surprised.

  “If I’d lived a different life and stayed single longer, I would have liked to do something like you did,” my mother once said wistfully. “Just head off on my own.”

  She offered advice about how to clothe myself appropriately in India and how to avoid getting amebic dysentery, which she and my father had repeatedly suffered from in Karachi. She tried to prepare me for the harshness of life in India, telling me that what had shocked her most was the desperation, the bodies wasting away on
the streets. I didn’t pay much attention to all this, though. Even though my interest in the place was born of the family history, I was determined to make it mine. It was ironic that the most exotic destination was, for me, also the most conventional. I wanted to at least make my own mistakes.

  I’d educated myself pretty thoroughly about India, I thought, having read obsessively about it for years. I knew that the country was yielding more nuanced stories in the U.S. and British press than it had for decades. It used to be that an assignment in India meant penning lyrical essays about starving men in lungis, exotic snake charmers, and the country’s multiple truths and mysteries, but when India opened its economy to the world, it inspired a new level of engagement.

  Now the press seemed to have arrived at a glowing consensus—that the country’s transformation was social as well as economic. I read that millions of Indians were buying their first cell phones and upgrading from scooters to cars. According to the American papers, India’s lowest castes were hoisting themselves out of their villages and hereditary occupations, couples were choosing their own life partners rather than being pushed into preordained parental arrangements, and women were buying microwaveable curries so they could develop careers as news anchors and lawyers.

  Even these optimistic portraits couldn’t neglect to mention India’s poverty and grime, though. The average annual income was less than a thousand dollars a year. In China, the country whose economic rise was most often compared to India’s, the annual income was almost three times that. The nation now produced more than enough food to feed its people and was growing a vibrant service-based economy; and yet its endemic inefficiency meant that millions of farmers and laborers struggled for one meal a day. Although my mother’s warnings about lepers and teeming slums were based on an India of thirty years ago, little seemed to have changed.

  I thought I was prepared for whatever would greet me off the plane, but India knocked the swagger out of my gait. The dissonant smells seeped into the aircraft before I even stepped onto Indian soil—a mix of burning plastic and metal that reminded me of the afternoon of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In Delhi, the smell of burning was mingled with other assaulting odors—the earthy fragrance of cow-dung patties leaching their odor into the streets, the tang of tamarind and lime from a roadside food stall outside the airport.