Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  I’d come to India with the idea that here I could remake myself into the person that I imagined my family wanted me to be—a brave adventuress and chronicler of cultures. I anticipated that I would embrace the expatriate life in the romantic way that Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa, described it: “Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions. Here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!”

  Of course, I rarely felt that liberated. Often I felt suspended in midair like the mosquitoes that hovered over my bed. Now that I was no longer surrounded by the outward things with which I had previously defined myself—friends, work, activities—it was as though my life had come to a pause. I’d think about how overwhelmingly busy I’d felt in New York just a few months before, rushing from work to yoga class, perpetually late to dinners with friends, falling asleep on the subway on the way home. Now I struggled to fill the hours. Reporting and writing didn’t take up enough of them, and interviewing strangers could scarcely satisfy my need for human interaction. In India, I was a bizarre white ghost whom no one knew.

  When I started feeling sorry for myself, I’d remind myself that restlessness was my inheritance. That made me feel better about it—as though it was fated or something. My mother’s sister, Susie, had also refused to take the expected straightforward path. She defied her father’s wishes and trained as an opera singer when she was young, and spent much of her twenties and thirties touring Europe. In my childhood imagination, she was a glowing mezzo-soprano sweeping onstage in a diaphanous gown, her hair swept into a dramatic updo. Susie had only sometimes mentioned the hardships of her time as a performer. I knew that after she’d done it for years—traveling for months at a stretch, steeling herself for another concert, winding herself up about being successful enough onstage—the stresses of the performing lifestyle became too much for her. She’d believed since she was ten years old that she was born to be an opera singer, but by the time she turned forty, my aunt had started to realize that this might be more of a self-imposed image of her identity than anything else.

  I’ve always loved recounting this next part of Susie’s life, the part where she set off to work out who she was. She established a second career as a psychotherapist in London, but a bout with cancer changed that. When she recovered, Susie traveled to Hawaii to work with alternative healers—which turned into a multiyear odyssey. After selling her London apartment, giving away her beloved dog, and surrendering her therapy practice, my proper British aunt started acting completely out of character. She rode Harleys and shot guns in Yuma with a biker boyfriend and his gang, practiced somatic meditation, and learned to decorate cakes in a bakery out west. She changed her name from the frumpy Susan to Susannah, which seemed much better suited to the soulful and sophisticated aunt I knew. At the age of fifty, she married a poet in Santa Fe.

  I was chaotic and impulsive, but I hadn’t expected my life to be as iconoclastic and freewheeling as hers. Still, I’m sure that something about Susie’s determination to find her own way in life gave me the nerve to move to Delhi. Once there, I’d found myself wanting to know more about what she’d felt in Europe during her opera-singing years, away from everything she knew. I remembered her describing a sense of dislocation that she thought made her more susceptible to romantic propositions from pianists and conductors she met on the road. Susie didn’t follow through on most of these offers—nevertheless, my semi-invented picture of her glamorous European years stirred me to seek my own experience of that traveler’s stereotype, the spontaneous overseas love affair.

  Benjamin and I had been together for only six months when I’d decided to move to India for an indeterminate length of time; I bought a yearlong ticket and warned I would stay longer if things worked out. I would have liked him to come with me, to package him up into a tidy, portable boyfriend format, but he wasn’t willing to surrender to my bossy urges when we lived in the same city, let alone tag along on my adventure with me. I knew, of course, that he wouldn’t come, that he shouldn’t come, that taking off to India was actually my way of asserting my independence.

  In the days before I left, I remember us agreeing that we wanted to stay together, and him quite calmly suggesting that if we did so, it would be better not to be monogamous. It seemed unadventurous and cowardly not to agree. Experimenting with the idea of free love also felt like a kind of postfeminist rebellion. By separating myself from society’s expectations, I imagined, I would free myself and my relationship, and Benjamin and I would be able to be our honest selves. Having affairs also seemed like a natural step in the life of a woman of international intrigue. Still, this “arrangement” felt awkward to both of us. We only discussed it once more before I left, and when we did, it was as though the idea had quotes around it—we didn’t really believe it was going to happen. Surely, I was aware that an open relationship was bound to be hurtful, but I preferred to focus on the fantasy, that we’d be able to have our separate adventures and still trust each other enough to come back together again.

  In India, I was determined to abide by our relationship code, which decreed that we be independent, undemanding, and not jealous. I refused to undermine the image Benjamin had of me as brave and strong, certain that he wouldn’t love me otherwise. I emailed him with funny stories and exotic anecdotes about my new life and never called him when I was lonely or afraid. Instead, I’d spend dull nights in the heat, holding staring contests with the translucent-eyed geckos in the corners of the ceiling and willing myself not to think about him. That was always a bad idea, because my longing for him would inevitably turn to jealous imaginings about what he might be doing. Eventually, I resolved to put an end to the pining and distract myself by leaping into affairs with other men. I was just holding up my side of the agreement, I told myself when I felt sad about my disloyalty. But part of me welcomed the chance to have affairs while holding on to my boyfriend. Benjamin was little more than the idea of a boyfriend, but he provided an important link for me to my life back in New York.

  There was another reason that it made sense to have affairs in India. It was the most passionate, emotive place I’d ever been, though I still cannot clearly articulate why. There’s something about the swoony film music blasting out of the little chai stands; the vivid saffron and crimson of women’s clothes; the sun saturating everything. There’s the crackling excitement of the festival season in October and November, which slides into the season of weddings, when there is gold everywhere: jewelry on the brides, streaked into the women’s saris. There’s something about the sentimental way Indians talk about their mothers and grandmothers and husbands, so their voices grow scratchy and their eyes well up with tears. And something about how present and human the Hindu gods are in daily life in India, their names coupled off into mythical pairs and recited like mantras—Sita, Rama, Radha, Krishna. Their sensual, sometimes even lusty images, full breasted and well toned, leap out from billboards, mantels, car dashboards, and shop windows. Alone in front of their bedroom shrines, or in groups inside temples, women chant prayers to the gods, and they sound more like love songs than the words of the devout:

  The god of love never hesitates!

  He is free and determined like a bird

  Winging toward the clouds it loves.

  Yet I remember the mad tricks he played,

  My heart restlessly burning with desire

  Was yet filled with fear!

  Still, it was rather ironic that I decided to pursue my saucy side in Delhi, where boyfriends are only to be had on the sly and even married couples do not hold hands on the street. Love affairs are complicated by the fact that most young people live at home with their families until marriage. “Doing a live-in,” the Indian phrase for cohabitating before marriage, is only acceptable in the most progressive families. Such is the poverty and close proximity of family life in India that intimacy is often impossible even for married couples. As a result, public spaces are precious rea
l estate for lovers. Strips of beach, coffee shops, shopping malls—all highly desirable locales. One Indian official was right when he denounced malls as “havens of hand-holding”; they are full of snuggling teens and married couples. In Mumbai, one highway overpass has become infamous as a make-out spot; there are invariably two dozen scooters and motorcycles parked along the side of the road at dusk, the couples tangled over each other on the seats. The residents in the apartment buildings overlooking the highway can do little more than complain to city authorities about their “indecent view.”

  In Delhi, the favored spot for lovers is Lodhi Garden, a public park filled with verdant flower beds and sixteenth-century monuments. One evening a few months after I arrived, I noticed that the blooming shrubs on the lawn were a little too dazzlingly colorful. Peering closer in the fading evening light, I saw that the bushes were actually spread with women’s saris. From under the fabric came the murmurs of Indian lovers on the evening grass. I couldn’t suppress my curiosity. I loitered nearby until I spotted a couple emerging from one of the bushes. The guy stood up first, glancing self-consciously around him as he tucked his shirt back into his jeans, which were tight and stonewashed, in a style I called “slum-cut” because they are so pervasive among the poor. A minute later, the woman darted out behind him—tousled, though completely clothed. It was a “boyfriend bush”! She smoothed back her hair and folded up the sari with crisp, humiliated efficiency, staring at the ground. There was no playfulness between them. No smile lingered on her lips. I felt inexplicably sad as I walked away from the scene of their secret lovemaking.

  My own Delhi affairs were infused with a similar sense of wrongdoing and embarrassment. Even when I got involved with fellow feringhees, we sneaked around behind the backs of the coterie of servants that surround you in India; having successfully propagated the myth of my so-called husband to my new community, I didn’t want to destroy it. Rafi, a young Indian journalist I met through a mutual friend, was the first of my Indian relationships. We had coffee and dinners together for a couple of months, which, I realized, qualified me as his girlfriend. Dating in India is sort of like in middle school. We’d have inexpensive dinners of South Indian dosas, and he’d drive me home, weaving through the Delhi traffic on his scooter. He showed me how to perch behind him so that I wasn’t straddling the seat, which is considered unseemly for proper Indian ladies. After a couple of months living there, sitting astride a scooter behind a man started to feel obscene to me, too. I tried to get comfortable sitting sideways, my legs dangling into the street, even though it gave me the sensation that I was about to tip forward into traffic.

  In fact, no matter how I sat on his scooter, Rafi thought of me as anything but a proper lady. I don’t think he considered telling his friends about me, let alone his family—especially not after our relationship moved out of the virtuous Indian realm and into Rafi’s rented room. He lived separately from his family, in a crowded block of tenements near the campus of Delhi University, one of the city’s largest, in a dank cement box of a room with a single window. I learned to hold my breath while using the squatting toilet. There was no stove on which to brew tea, so we’d go out to a shopping complex near the university and bring it back in plastic cups. At night, we’d lie on his mattress on the floor and curl sadly into each other under his bright block-printed bed sheet. Being with him made me realize how lonely I was for home. And although the rules of my relationship allowed me to do as I wished, and I’d told myself this was the adventurous life I wanted, Rafi made me miss Benjamin all the more. In the mornings, I felt as though I was crawling out of a boyfriend bush. I’d want to fold up the sheet quickly and leave the room.

  Rafi said he was getting nervous that his neighbors would see me coming and going from the apartment. He suggested I cover my head with a scarf to disguise that I was a feringhee, so that he could say I was his sister. If someone reported that he, an unmarried boy, was spending nights alone with a girl, he could actually be evicted. I didn’t know how to respond when he told me that. After a while, we decided we’d be better off being friends. I think I missed the idea of him more than the person he was; but it was hard to know, because all my interactions in Delhi during those first few months seemed somehow unreal. I’d never struggled like this to form bonds with people.

  In the meantime, I had Geeta. Although we had little in common other than our proximity and our loneliness, I’d remind myself of the Indian families I saw who seemed content simply sitting together, even if they didn’t talk at all. With my own friends and family, I’d always felt I had to be dynamic and funny, and to prove myself by announcing fantastic plans for the future. Geeta and Nanima freed me from that pressure: We rarely did more than sit around watching TV. Since my hippie parents had essentially banned TV during my childhood, this was a great luxury in itself.

  I’d join Geeta downstairs in her apartment when she got home from work, relieved to escape my dusty barsati, which by the end of the day often felt like an isolated prison cell. When I wasn’t traveling, I worked alone up there. One night Geeta whipped up a batch of frothy Punjabi milkshakes called lassis, and we settled in on Nanima’s sofa to channel surf. Geeta flicked past a CNN report, a grave-faced mullah on a Pakistani prayer channel, and a hyperbolic anchor on an Indian news show.

  “Look at all this. It’s amazing how much India has changed in my own lifetime.” Geeta seemed to consider it her duty to impress on me the breadth of her country’s advancement in the last two decades, as if she was doing her bit to ensure that the transformed India would no longer be ignored by the developed world. India had only one TV channel when she was growing up, she said. The state-owned Doordashan network had held a complete monopoly on the airwaves since the first television broadcast in India in 1959.

  “It was just endless footage of government ribbon-cutting ceremonies. You wouldn’t believe how dull.” As a child she’d lived for Wednesday evenings, when Doordashan would broadcast a half-hour show of film songs.

  It wasn’t until 1995 that the Supreme Court declared the government monopoly on broadcasting unconstitutional and private broadcasters flooded in. By the time I moved to India, you could watch hundreds of shows—news, reality TV, and prime-time soap operas—in dozens of Indian languages, all for a cable fee of four dollars a month. But even in its improved state, television takes a secondary place in Indian pop culture to film. Some twelve million people a day go to the movies, whether to a multiplex in a big city or to a village temple where new releases are projected on a sheet on the side of the building.

  In India, the movies mean Bollywood, the film industry whose name conflates Hollywood with Bombay, where the first Hindi-language film was made. Even after Bombay was renamed Mumbai in an effort to free the city of its colonial legacy, Bollywood stayed Bollywood. It churns out at least two hundred films a year, each costing less than a million dollars—a sixth of the average price tag of a Hollywood film. Prolific, popular, song-filled, and sentimental, Bollywood films almost always swoon over the three-hour mark. As a result, they all have intermissions, during which theater concession stands rake it in selling spicy veggie burgers, samosas, and “American snacks” such as caramel popcorn.

  Movie soundtracks are Bollywood’s best promotional tool. In the weeks before a big studio release, music videos of the songs take over the TV channels. The songs are recorded by an army of unseen “playback singers” but are associated in perpetuity with the actors who have lip-synched them. I’d hear Geeta humming a new film tune, and later that day, Joginder’s cell phone would announce itself with the same song. India’s star culture is even more obsessive than our own. Hollywood has the celebrity website TMZ, but in India, Bollywood gossip isn’t relegated to the niche media: it is often a top story on the nightly news. Many movie stars have actual, real-life shrines erected to them, and when they are not literally being worshipped, their faces are everywhere, from well-produced TV ads for toothpaste to hand-painted movie billboards on rural unpaved ro
ads.

  Bollywood’s biggest romantic hero, Shah Rukh Khan, is best known as “King Khan,” though Geeta preferred to refer to him by the less obsequious nickname “SRK.” He’s produced a stunning five dozen films over his career of almost twenty years. When he was named one of Newsweek’s fifty most powerful people in the world, the Indian media treated it like a national accomplishment; when he was invited to present a Golden Globe Award, Indian announcers said it spoke to the country’s growing might; when he was detained at Newark airport in 2009, presumably because of his Muslim last name, the TV channels called it a “national humiliation.”

  The Bollywood phenomenon puzzled me at first: Hindi films have very little of the stuff Westerners expect from movies—realism, cynicism, sex. They are medieval morality plays made entertaining through melodrama, song, and spectacle. The villains are always villainous, and goodness almost always triumphs. “Pageants for peasants” is how the early Indian filmmaker S. S. Vasan described his movies. But watching Bollywood helped me come to terms with Indian culture. It also helped me understand Geeta, which made things easier for both of us: Instead of having to explain her parents’ expectations, she could use film plots as shorthand. Bollywood has three archetypes for its heroines, she informed me: the beautiful pious virgin, the pure Indian wife, and the seductress-vamp. Until very recently, an actress who was typecast as the latter would have been shut out from mainstream success.

  Geeta acknowledged that SRK’s films were overblown and fantastical, but that didn’t make her any less of a Bollywood-ringtone-downloading fan. If I scoffed that Bollywood’s lavish houses and pristine streets looked nothing like the India around us, she’d get defensive.