Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  Urban educated Indians have started keeping purebred dogs as pets, as a sort of symbol of upward mobility, but cats have not benefited from the trend. The only ones I saw in Delhi were brute-faced, prowling the alleys, the recipients of regular kicks from neighborhood guards.

  Eager to root myself in my new life, I looked for an animal shelter from which to adopt some of Delhi’s beleaguered felines. The closest I could find was a gaushawla, a sanctuary for abandoned, sick, and dying cows rescued from Delhi’s streets. Cow slaughter is banned in most parts of India, and the untimely death of one is liable to spark a furious riot. When a cow blocks the road, drivers descend from their vehicles to move the beast aside with great care. Yet Indian cows do not all receive treatment befitting the sacred. During their milking years, city cows are cared for so they can supply small dairies; once their milk dries up, though, their owners often abandon them to wander the streets and forage in garbage. The vet at the gaushawla told me that these old cows sometimes ingest so many plastic bags in the garbage that their stomachs explode.

  She gave me a strange look when I said I wanted to adopt a cat, but she obliged by dispatching a boy up to the roof, where she said she’d seen some. He returned grasping an orange tabby with feral eyes, an infestation of lice and worms, and ears black with dirt. I took her home and gave her three baths. By the time Radha came in, the kitten was curled sweetly on a cushion on the floor. Nevertheless, Radha recoiled with such exaggerated horror that I had to struggle not to laugh. She’d never seen a domesticated cat before; to her, it was as though I’d brought a wild possum into the home she was responsible for cleaning—except worse, because to righteous Brahmins like Radha, animals are considered spiritually impure.

  When I brought home a second one, from a litter my vet had discovered on the street, Radha took it as a personal insult. I struggled to calm her: I’d grown up with cats in my home in the United States, I said, and they were meticulously clean. My feringhee naïveté forced Radha to revert to her most dramatic invocation of God: “Ay, bhagwan, deedee. You don’t know. I know. No Indian would bring this dirty creature into their home.”

  I’d filled a box with grimy sand, bilked from a nearby construction site, since the only cat litter I could find in Delhi was imported and heavily taxed under some obscure government pet tariff regime. I put the litter box out on the patio, but that did not stanch her fury. Her eyes darkened at my betrayal, and my nervous Hindi became muddled. Afraid she might quit, I assured her she wouldn’t have to touch the litter box; I would clean it myself.

  Taking care of my own garbage presented a new set of problems. A few days after I’d started carrying the used cat litter to the neighborhood garbage dump, I heard Joginder tromping up the stairs again.

  “Why you are doing this, madam?” His customary bellow was softened by disappointment. Apparently, people in the neighborhood were making jokes about the crazy foreign girl who carried her cat crap to the garbage dump. “Garbage collecting is not good work, deedee. Only certain people touch it.”

  I sighed, wondering whether the complex Indian protocol for caste and pollution would ever make sense to me. Indians rarely discuss such matters forthrightly, but my building caretaker decided it was time to set me straight. He folded his arms, leaned back against the door, and dedicated several minutes of his morning to explaining the complex system for dealing with garbage in Indian cities. The city doesn’t pick up trash cans from the curb, he said, so the job is outsourced to India’s lower castes.

  “Garbage is a job for the sweeper caste, madam. But no problem! I have arranged.”

  And just like that, I became an active sponsor of the caste system. Uncomfortably, I recognized that by agreeing to pay my untouchable employee just over a dollar a month to do the dirtiest work in the house, I was tacitly agreeing that I and my Brahmin maid were too good for such chores. But if I wanted to fit in to India, I’d have to go along with India’s ways.

  When the garbage collector rang the doorbell, I greeted her hesitantly, wary of being too personable and sticking my elbow in the eye of yet another Indian tradition. I’d witnessed Radha shooing away low-caste women in the alley with the same disdain with which she treated my cats. But the untouchable smiled widely as she held out her plastic bag, the identifying tool of her trade, and introduced herself. Maneesh was scrawny from centuries of malnutrition, the kind of thin I had never seen before coming to India. Her salwar kameez was grubby and wrinkled, a sure sign of someone on the bottom rung, since India’s ubiquitous press wallahs charge only a rupee—about two U.S. cents—to iron a piece of clothing with their antiquated coal-fired appliances. She’d taken some care in her appearance, though, wearing rings on her toes and colorful metal bracelets right up to her elbows—symbols of a married woman. They clattered up and down her arms as she went from room to room collecting the trash. Without a twinge of shame or indignation, she stooped to sift through the litter, picking out the cat poop with her hands inside a plastic bag.

  Later, Joginder told me that Maneesh’s husband was a drunk who beat her; she supported him and their two sons by collecting garbage, cleaning bathrooms, and mopping the floors at half a dozen houses. As an uneducated untouchable, her job options were limited. Few families would hire her to work in the kitchen. My servants represented the extreme ends of the caste system, and that was always apparent—even when they sat gossiping together, squatting on their haunches in the kitchen. Once, I overheard Radha asking Maneesh in a low voice whether she came from the Valmiki subcaste, one of the groups of untouchables that traditionally dispose of human excrement. Maneesh assented amiably that indeed she did; her family had collected garbage for generations.

  I came to look forward to Maneesh’s midmorning ring of the bell. I’d linger to chat in the doorway after she arrived. Even before my Hindi improved, these conversations weren’t a struggle, because she almost always said the same thing: “How are the cats, deedee? Is the black one still acting crazy?” Sometimes Maneesh even stroked the cats, giggling nervously at their purring sound; but Radha never came around to them. To her, they were always shay-tann, the Hindi word for “terror,” which was all the more amusing to me because it sounds like the English word Satan. When the black one—whom I’d named Kali, after the Hindu goddess of destruction—slinked near the folds of Radha’s sari, she’d give it a vicious swipe with her broom.

  I’d been trying to work out how to tell my maids about Benjamin. He’d emailed that he was coming to stay with me for three months, and I knew I needed to ensure that my domestic workers not judge me a boyfriended woman. So I resurrected that useful Hindi phrase “Mehre patee aungi,” my husband is coming.

  “Wow, deedee!” said Maneesh, breaking into a grin, which exposed a mouthful of wonky teeth. “We didn’t know you were married! Did you know, Radha-deedee?”

  “No, deedee didn’t tell me, either!” I tried to organize my features innocently as I turned to Radha. She was shrewd, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d sniffed out my lie, but she looked pleased, not suspicious. I think it’s because I was easier to place now. I was part of the club of married ladies, a recognizable element, no longer a girl alone.

  Within days, my maids had passed word along to the neighborhood: The feringhee lady has a patee. When I walked through Nizamuddin market a few days later, I was surprised to receive a nod hello from the pock-faced electrician in his shop; although I walked past him every day, he’d never directly acknowledged me before. Later that week, when the tailor and his twin brother greeted me with a respectful Namaste, I felt inexplicably proud.

  As my neighborhood began to accept me, I promised myself I’d figure out how to belong here. The morning smells from my patio—chapatis cooking inside kitchens, incense burning in the local storefront shrine, the sour rush of sewage—were not so overwhelming if I made an effort to differentiate each one from the others. It was easy to ignore the staring, if I resolved not to care.

  There was magic in Delhi’s
many newnesses: the paper boys, squatting on the empty streets at dawn in a long row to sort the sections of the newspapers. The way K.K., my favorite driver at the local taxi stand, would twinkle his eyes at me in the rearview mirror when he informed me that the roads were blocked, again, because “a V-V-V-V-I-P is zipping through”—Indian English lingo to describe a government minister so important that he warranted three extra “very”s in front of his “very important person” title. We’d chuckle in the stalled traffic—he in the driver’s seat, me in the back—as we waited for the minister’s clunky white Ambassador car to pass, its red light on top blinking importantly. I loved the care that my local press wallah took with my clothes, stiffening out every last crease with her flatiron filled with hot coals. They still smelled slightly acrid when her teenage daughter delivered them to me in a tidy, compressed cube. If, in order to belong here, I needed to play the part of a good wife, then that was what I would do. I wrote Benjamin to tell him that a little family awaited him in India: two scrappy street cats, two maids, and one fake wife who had laid a very real claim on her adopted city.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pious Virgins and Brave-hearted Heroes

  The set of car keys dangling in her hand caught my attention. Women are rarely seen behind the wheel in Delhi; usually, they get dropped off at the office by a male relative or are chauffeured around town by a family driver. My new neighbor, Geeta Shourie, was a modern girl—and although the phrase is often used as a pejorative, to me it was a sign of hope. My neighbor’s brown hair was stylishly highlighted and cut in long layers. I noticed right away that her salwar kameez was not the standard shapeless kind that I’d come to associate with housewives, but the close-fitting, thigh-length tunic and tight-fitting leggings preferred by college and professional women.

  She shot me a sympathetic smile as she stepped into the alley, overhearing my meek attempt to bargain with Ram, the vegetable wallah who sold his wares from a wooden cart he wheeled around the neighborhood, crying out “Sub-ziiii!” to announce himself. I was pretty sure that Ram had been ripping me off for the vegetables I bought from him—the sweet bloodred carrots and the studded, lumpy squash that I thought of as the “skin-disease vegetable” because I’d once seen a woman on the New York subway with similar eruptions on her face, neck, and hands.

  The housewives from the neighborhood who clustered around the cart never accepted Ram’s first price. Sometimes, they’d even toss his vegetables back at him in dramatic displays of disgust. When I tried to do the same and reject his prices, Ram would make a big show about his meager earnings and drop the price a mere rupee or two. Since even his inflated prices were a fraction of what I would have paid for vegetables in New York, I’d always concede. I was reluctant to prolong these interactions, mostly because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the seeping boil growing out of Ram’s forehead. Had it leaked onto the vegetables; did I need to disinfect them? Did he notice me staring at the thing? I didn’t understand how the other women could ignore his festering third eye. They bargained as if they were staking their lives on getting him down, and they always walked away with more vegetables for their money than I did.

  “How much is he asking for those tomatoes?” Geeta asked, with an Indian ease about intruding on the problems of strangers. She flashed me a shy smile, which dimpled her cheeks, making her look even younger than she already did. With her petite frame, she could have passed for a college student, though I guessed she was in her late twenties.

  “Sorry for the interrupting, I just thought you might like some help.”

  Right away, I could see that Geeta was blessed with the kind of smile that made other people want to smile back. When I told her how much Ram was charging me, though, the sweetness drained out of her face.

  “He thinks he can overcharge because you’re a foreigner. This gives our country a bad image. I’ll fix him.”

  Although her English was fluent, it was slightly stilted, with awkward Indian English phrases; I imagined she mostly spoke Hindi at work and among her friends. She turned to Ram, her features hardening, and for a second, I felt sorry for him. Even though he’d been overcharging me for months, it probably cumulatively amounted to less than fifteen dollars. Like everyone else from the slums, my vegetable guy was just a chancer, as they’d say in England—running whatever little scam he could, on the chance of improving his lot against bad odds. In Delhi, you charge what you can get; there are few chain stores with fixed prices to provide a solid point of comparison. In the ad hoc world of informal shopping, the worth of goods and services is slippery, decided more by the urge to best the other guy than anything else.

  Like any good bargainer, Geeta knew how to feign anger without getting agitated; that would have revealed her hand. Ram played his part, too—displaying righteous indignation, holding out for as long as he could. They both knew they’d eventually compromise and one of them would walk away feeling that he’d tipped the scales a few rupees in the right direction. This time, it was Geeta. After several minutes, she wheeled around triumphantly.

  “You only owe him thirty-two rupees. He was trying to charge you double that.”

  She hurried down to her little Indian-made car parked at the end of the alley, saying she had to get to work. Ram handed me my cut-rate vegetables, his forehead boil throbbing angrily.

  A few days later, I stopped by to thank Geeta. Although we hadn’t met properly, I knew who she was from Joginder, my primary source of neighborhood information. He’d told me Geeta had just moved to the floor below me with Nanima, an old woman known universally in the neighborhood not by her name but by the respectful term for grandmother. The door to her apartment was slightly ajar, and I caught a strong whiff of urine as I pushed it open. Even in the dim evening light, I could tell it was grungier than my barsati.

  “Hello? Is Geeta here?”

  “Oh God!” came a melodramatic howl from the sofa. “Geeta hasn’t come yet! Neither has my servant girl. Everyone is gone. Even my children have abandoned me. And I am starving!”

  Her theatrics made me smile, because the woman spoke with the quaint accent of someone who had attended a colonial British school, an accent which would have been familiar to my great-aunt Edith. And she scarcely looked like she was dying of malnourishment.

  “Can I get you something, Nanima? Some toast?”

  “Yes please, betee,” she said enthusiastically, calling me the affectionate term for child.

  I went upstairs to my place to scrounge something together. I didn’t do much cooking in my outhouse kitchen, since it was invaded by bugs and lacked electrical appliances of any kind. I’d come up with a toaster replacement, though, using my little space heater, which approximated toast more successfully than the Indian frying pan method. When I reappeared with a plate of Anglo-Indian toast—thinly sliced white bread spread with butter and a red fruitless paste that passed for jam at the local store—the old lady beamed at me.

  “How I love toast. Lovely, buttery British toast—”

  She froze, hearing Geeta’s heels on the floor.

  “Nanima, did you make our neighbor bring you food? You know you’re not supposed to have toast.” Geeta’s hands were on her hips moments after she clip-clopped to a halt inside the apartment.

  Nanima looked briefly ashamed, but when she realized Geeta wasn’t going to take the toast away, she dug into it. Nanima was diabetic, Geeta said resignedly, and always breaking her diet.

  “Must be quite a job to take care of her,” I sympathized.

  Geeta frowned and lowered her voice, though Nanima was focusing on her toast, not on us.

  “It isn’t actually supposed to be my job. There’s a full-time maid who is off today. But it’s still always exhausting. Her kids basically just left her here. They send money and that’s it. She relies on me for everything.”

  I’d assumed Nanima was Geeta’s relative, but the old woman was actually the grandmother of a family friend. Geeta had moved in with her because her mother wou
ldn’t let her get an apartment by herself. A girl living alone, as I well knew, carried almost as much stigma as a girl with a boyfriend. Still, Geeta had taken a drastic measure by moving in with Nanima. It obviously curtailed whatever social life she might have had in Delhi: The old woman was so emotionally unstable that if Geeta went out for more than a couple of hours in the evening, she was likely to cry and pee all over the sofa. I wondered whether Geeta’s mother had calculated this when she had her move in with Nanima.

  Geeta moved to Delhi three years before I did. Before then, though, she’d scarcely left her hometown of Patiala, a small city in the North Indian state of Punjab. Her father, a doctor in a government hospital, was a progressive man. He’d urged her to go to college and even agreed to let her move to Delhi and take a job at a public relations firm after graduating. Many families would refuse to allow their twenty-something daughter to head off to another city to “live alone,” she said.

  “My father spoiled me. He always calls me a Punjabi princess, and it’s true. I am their only child, which is rare in India … I guess I got used to having my own way.”

  She grinned unself-consciously. Still, she added, her parents had allowed her only a couple of years in Delhi. In fact, their deadline for her to return to Patiala to get married had long passed. Her smile turned sour at the edges. There was more to Geeta than the bubbly, easygoing exterior. She seemed to miss her family—not just the comfort and ease of living at home, but also the knowledge that she was living in the correct, traditional way. I was struck, though, by how much she wanted to emphasize her identity as an independent city girl, at least to me.

  I could sympathize. In Delhi I was, for the first time in my life, completely free: I had no boss, no friends, no family, and scarce contact with my boyfriend. I was no longer limited to a schedule of any kind. I’d set off on reporting trips, having spoken briefly to an editor about an idea, and no one would notice whether I was gone for two days or ten. I would hire a translator and travel through villages, just looking for story ideas, stop and report on one of them for a few days, and continue on by local bus, staying in inexpensive guesthouses in temple towns.