Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  “You have to simplify things to get people into theaters, Miranda. That’s how it works here. Why would some poor rickshaw driver want to go and see his slum on the big screen? People go to the movies to escape reality.”

  The 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire garnered eight Oscars in the United States, but its gritty portrayal of poverty led to angry protests in India. In fact, the industry’s most famous actor, Amitabh Bachchan—universally known in India as “the Big B”—disparaged the film for projecting India as a “third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation.” This caused “pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots,” he said.

  This evening, after channel surfing a while, Nanima begged us to watch part of an old film with her. Even today, almost all Bollywood films are musicals; but in the 1940s and ’50s, the songs were the focus, and sometimes as many as forty of them interrupted the plot. When Geeta reluctantly agreed, Nanima clapped her hands with a joy matched only by her response to my space-heater toast. She scooted forward to the edge of the sofa as the first love scene got going. This one had a long buildup in a wheat field, the stalks quivering in the wind. The carefully groomed, fair-skinned hero gazed soulfully at his plump heroine, her eyes darkly lined with kohl, which has been used in India for centuries. The music crescendoed. They leaned closer in the soft-focus light, and the music peaked again. Nanima was holding her breath. Just when it seemed certain that the lovers would kiss, the camera darted away to focus on a wildly shaking tree branch, a classic Bollywood substitute for an on-screen kiss; a bee pollinating a flower is another one. When the camera cut back to the lovers, their lips were parted, their hair was tousled, and they were about to sing.

  Geeta and I cracked up laughing: “We missed all the action, Nanima.”

  “No, no. We had the passion, only, and none of the bad parts,” she said primly.

  Until the late 1990s, the sexiest Bollywood scenes featured the heroine “caught” under a spontaneous spray of water in a clinging wet sari. Even today, on-screen nudity is banned by the Indian Censor Board. Although kissing on-screen is not officially illegal, many stars and directors self-censor displays of passion to avoid angering India’s vocal and powerful Hindu conservatives. As a result, Shah Rukh Khan has never once delivered a movie lip kiss—much to the chagrin of fans such as Geeta and me. He’s just as careful about maintaining a culturally acceptable, wholesome persona offscreen. Like 1950s Hollywood studio stars, SRK is a symbol of manhood—although unproven rumors about his sexuality persist.

  It follows that Bollywood starlets are expected to be emblems of chastity, though this struck me as especially incongruous in today’s sexualized Bollywood. I thought it strange to see heroines dance suggestively in hot pants and bustiers even as they acted the parts of virginal characters. On TV shows such as the popular Saturday night program Koffee with Karan, starlets regularly disavow affiliations with various actors. The host of the program, Karan Johar, is further proof of Bollywood’s double standard about sex: He’s stylish, good looking, and significantly unmarried, and theories abound about his romantic life.

  “What toss!” the otherwise uncynical Geeta would jeer when she heard top Bollywood actresses disavow that they’d ever had romantic relationships. In spite of the industry’s famously chaste image, gossip shows and magazines spin vicious stories. One of Bollywood’s top actresses, Aishwarya Rai—or Ash, as everyone in India calls her—was long pursued by the media. She waited until she was thirty-three to marry, and even that didn’t quiet the rumors about her character. Although that’s late for a normal Indian girl, it’s acceptable in Bollywood, since wedlock traditionally signals the end of an actress’s career. Industry wisdom has it that audiences do not find it believable to watch a married woman play a virgin, and, of course, audiences want to continue to watch their top stars for as long as they can. The restriction applies to male actors, too: When SRK first started getting cast in Mumbai, producers suggested he keep his marriage a secret so as not to spoil his budding career as a romantic hero. After Ash was arranged into a marriage with the son of Amitabh Bachchan, she did continue acting—unlike previous generations of Bollywood starlets—but found herself offered more matronly roles. She even went so far as to start wearing flesh suits under her saris when she performed. Hiding the real skin of her arms and stomach was a sign of respect to her husband and her in-laws.

  In spite of all this, Indian audiences were changing. With only-slightly-edited reruns of Sex and the City now on Indian cable, some Bollywood producers worried about keeping up. They started producing a wave of sexy films. The first and riskiest of these was Khwahish (Desire), in which the lead actress, Mallika Sherawat, delivered seventeen carefully counted kisses, spawning a new mini-industry in editorials and op-eds opining the loss of morality in the new India. But although it was predicted that the movie would be career suicide for an aspiring starlet, the opposite happened: It shot Mallika to stardom. The theaters were packed with gleeful boys having the most sexual experience of their lives; nary a man in India under the age of sixty missed the film.

  Mallika took her image as a bombshell seductress-vamp and inhabited it with full force, dressing seductively for every public appearance. She took to the stage in a red miniskirt for the hundredth performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in Mumbai. During interviews, rather than fluttering her eyelids modestly at the camera, as do Ash and the other pious virgin types, she makes suggestive comments about her “male friends.” Mallika will never be cast as the innocent girl in a moralistic coming-of-age blockbuster—Bollywood audiences definitely wouldn’t find that believable—but she doesn’t need such roles. She’s proved that it’s possible, even in Bollywood, to be a vamp and be successful.

  Although Geeta complained about Bollywood’s limited female characters, Mallika’s multiple on-screen kisses and steamy videos were a bit much for her. She preferred a more moral school of movies, a subgenre of Bollywood blockbusters aimed at upwardly mobile Indian audiences and the Indian diaspora. The female characters in these films are often college students or professional women; SRK usually plays the hero, successfully negotiating the complications of contemporary sexuality. His characters often move overseas, where they struggle to maintain Indian traditions or battle with love that precedes marriage. I think Geeta found these films comforting. In the end, the hero always recovers his fundamentally Indian sensibility; the heroine always proves her noble character. When we watched SRK’s blockbusters together, I could see her scanning them for clues about how to resolve her own struggles over identity, love, and marriage. Geeta wanted to live a modern life, at least in theory, but she worried that her identity as independent Delhi girl could overshadow her other identity as pious virgin.

  I learned a lot about Geeta those nights in Nanima’s apartment. She’d sometimes bring me into her bedroom, where she’d rifle through boxes of her photographs. I could tell that she was proud of her highly educated Brahmin family. Her home state, Punjab, has relatively liberal attitudes toward women, she told me, and her grandmother sent all five of her daughters to school in an era when that was anything but common in India. Geeta’s mother had worked as a schoolteacher when Geeta was young, though the vast majority of Indian women—even today—quit work after marriage.

  Marriage is a topic on which Geeta’s family had more traditional views—but that’s only to be expected in India, where some 90 percent of Indian partnerships are arranged, either by the family or by matchmakers. Most marriages are still a merger between two families of similar caste backgrounds and religious beliefs. Euphemism abounds inside the institution of Indian marriage: Parents talk about finding “a mutually agreeable match,” meaning one that meets a set of religious and astrological specifications. Geeta told me that her family had been looking to arrange her into marriage for years already with a “boy from a good family,” meaning a Punjabi Brahmin from a family of equal status to theirs.

  In the vocabulary of arranged marriage, potential mates are
referred to as larke and larkiya, boys and girls, because for centuries marriages were formalized at puberty. Mahatma Gandhi was betrothed at the age of seven and married at thirteen. As far back as 1929, the Indian government raised the legal age of marriage to twenty-one for boys and eighteen for girls, but no one paid much attention. According to the United Nations, in 2007, 47 percent of Indian women had been married before they were eighteen years old. In rural areas, it is 56 percent. Modern-minded, middle-class Indians in cities are marrying later than ever before, though. Geeta said that in her community it was acceptable for a girl to hold off until her mid-twenties. She was veering uncomfortably close to the age of thirty, though, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the delay.

  When Geeta showed up at my door one evening clad in a denim miniskirt and heels, I found it hard to hide my surprise. The skirt wasn’t actually that short, in retrospect, but at the time, I was under the full sway of Delhi’s prudish fashion sense. Wearing a Western skirt at all, but especially a knee-length one, was a freighted decision. Geeta noticed my eye on her hemline.

  “I’m going out dancing with my friend from college tonight. We always wear skirts.” Her confidence faltered. “Do you think it’s too short?”

  I raised an eyebrow, unsure how to answer. Just the other day, she’d told me that although she liked wearing the comfortable salwar kameez, she was treated more respectfully at work when she donned a sari, the more traditional garb of older women. Geeta would sometimes “wear Westerns,” as she referred to jeans and blouses, but only in restricted places, such as malls and upscale movie theaters. In these kinds of settings, it’s common to see girls in revealing tank tops and short skirts—that is, the kind of girls who can limit their dealings with the rest of India. If they are chauffeured from coffee shops to nightclubs in five-star hotels, they limit the risk of getting eyeballed or grabbed. That wasn’t Geeta’s world, but she aspired to be a part of it.

  “I have worn this skirt out dancing many times already. It’s becoming quite normal for girls to wear dresses in Delhi. There’s just a few people who are stuck with those old views.”

  She flipped her hair with forced nonchalance. I tried to wipe away my skeptical look so as not to make Geeta any more defensive—either about her reputation or about her country as a backward place.

  Geeta’s defiance was only skin deep, though. In fact, she admitted, she’d stopped by to ask me to walk her out to her car. No one would bother her at the club, she said, but she wanted moral support on this end—just in case some of the people with old views happened to be hanging around the neighborhood tonight. An elderly man on the street had once yelled at her for wearing a miniskirt, she said, chiding her that she should be ashamed of herself for dressing in such a way. I thought about Joginder in the alley, and the rest of our neighbors, and found it hard to imagine that any of them wouldn’t judge her for her outfit. I hoped selfishly that none of the Nizamuddin market guys would see me escorting Geeta around the corner; I had my own image to maintain, after all.

  I found it hard to navigate between Geeta’s two identities—the naïve, closed-minded girl and the savvy, globalized woman. She grumbled about playing nursemaid to Nanima, but I think it also made her feel virtuous to martyr herself for this old lady who had been abandoned by everyone else. Her mother believed that the living arrangement would be appealing to potential in-laws. “Isn’t it ridiculous, the things mothers think of?” Geeta laughed. Still, I sensed that part of her agreed that it was a good idea to present herself as a conventional wife-to-be.

  I found it hard to know what to say to the conservative girl from Patiala, though I could talk to her fairly openly when she was in her miniskirt mode. Still, I had no intention of informing her about my Delhi affairs—she would have been horrified to think of me kissing Indian men. When I told her that I’d be doing a live-in with Benjamin for a few months, though, she was refreshingly unsurprised.

  “I’ve watched Friends, Miranda: I know you do things differently in America.”

  I didn’t know what to think about having my life compared to an oversimplified sitcom, but outdated American shows were an important point of reference for Geeta. Sometimes she presented them as evidence of her globalized savvy, and sometimes to prove to me that her life was more complicated than mine. Whether or not this was the case, this much was true: Everything she did was carefully scrutinized and outlined with the thick black marker of social custom.

  The more I got to know Geeta, the more I saw that her life was poised between two very different possible outcomes. She hadn’t yet chosen her modern Delhi identity over marriage, but neither was she making a move toward the conventional option. In the Bollywood movie of her life, Geeta wanted to be Ash, forever a virginal bride; but I think she was afraid she’d be seen as Mallika. There was a sadness to her face sometimes that made me wonder whether there was more to the story than she was telling me.

  Her parents had sent her on dozens of arranged marriage meetings, or parentally approved blind dates, even before she’d graduated from college, and she’d gone along, because it was easier than refusing. She’d always managed to find something wrong with the boy, though. On the verge of the high-water mark of a girl’s marriageable years, Geeta now seemed frozen. It was as though she was waiting for an indication about which version of herself she should be.

  Fate was very real for Geeta—she saw its hand in almost everything. What seemed to me a series of normal coincidences Geeta read as destiny; anecdotes about an unseasonable rainfall or running into an old colleague were transformed, in her telling, into small miracles. Like many Hindus, she believed the events of her life were guided by dharma, the eternal order of the cosmos, meaning everything could be explained by events of the past. These beliefs only seemed to heighten the fear that she was too modern to be marriageable.

  The same conflict is at the heart of the Bollywood classic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-hearted Will Take the Bride), a mouthful of a title that everyone avoids by using the Hindi acronym, DDLJ. When the film came out in 1995, Geeta saw it several times in the theater with her college friends, and she still watched it every time it came on TV—which was often, because it is one of the highest-grossing and longest-running Bollywood movies of all time. There are still daily screenings in one Mumbai movie theater; the schedule wasn’t even disrupted by the 2008 terror attacks.

  The brave-hearted hero of the title is played by Shah Rukh Khan, in what is undoubtedly his most famous role. His character, Raj, is a rich second-generation Indian immigrant in London; to prove the extent of his Westernization, he is depicted strutting around in a motorcycle jacket and playing soccer and the piano, rather than having Indian hobbies such as playing cricket and the sitar. In an early scene of the film, Raj bullies a London shopkeeper, a fellow Indian immigrant, to give him a six-pack of beer. This all proves that he is, in Bollywood-speak, a “crooked character” who has moved too far away from Indian traditions. But, in typical Bollywood style, he’s given a chance to reform, and it comes in the form of a beautiful pious virgin. Among the first things we learn about our heroine, Simran, is that she prays at the family’s Hindu shrine before dawn. Her father considers her the very essence of Indianness. When he tells her he’s accepted an arranged marriage proposal for her and she runs out of the room in horror, he misinterprets her reaction: “Ah, she is shy. That’s our etiquette, our culture. In the heart of London, I’ve kept India alive!”

  Even before the intermission, Raj begins to resurrect himself from Western depravity, having realized that he is destined to be with Simran and must better himself to deserve her. According to traditional Hindu beliefs, if the priest, the community, and the astrologers approve of a match, it proves it is fated and should last for the next seven lifetimes. So, in the hope of proving to her family that he should be with her, Raj follows Simran to India. I assumed the film was approaching its climax when the two reunite in a field of swaying yellow mustard seed in Punjab. They clutch p
assionately at each other—though they don’t, of course, touch lips, because the hero is played by the chaste SRK. Simran begs Raj to elope with her, but he refuses.

  “I haven’t come here to steal you. I’ll take you only when your father gives me your hand. About our lives, they can decide much better than we can. We have no right to make them sad for the sake of our own happiness.”

  It is not for another hour into the film that Simran’s family finally comes to terms with fate. Our hero is standing in the door of a moving train, literally streaked with blood and tears, by the time Simran’s father tells her to go to him; only then does she leap from the platform onto the accelerating train. This movie is Bollywood at its most melodramatic and sentimental; still, its message about society hit me hard. I’d always wanted to believe that love would be unassailable if it was true and right. I cried my way through DDLJ’s whole drawn-out final scene the first time I watched it.

  I thought that if I followed my urge to set off on my own, I’d eventually find my place in the world—the city, job, friends, and man that I loved. But DDLJ made me wonder what I was trying to prove and why I needed to leave everyone who mattered to me to do it. Perhaps I was just doing as my family always had and trying to escape the conventional, driven not by my adventurous soul but by my fear of normalcy. If there was a Bollywood movie version of my life, I’d certainly be the seductress-vamp, unwilling to sacrifice my own goals for either love or family.

  I was pretty sure that, as lost as she sometimes seemed, Geeta would find her way back to the girl she’d always expected to be. Someday soon, she’d project pure Indian virginal side of herself to her Patiala audience again—because if she didn’t, the consequences would be dire: A modern girl is one thing, but an aging spinster without a family is a pitiable specter in Delhi. I’d never thought about my actions as having such stark consequences—in my world, being a single woman wasn’t ideal, but it didn’t automatically brand you as a spinster, either. I knew my mother would be sad if I ended up alone, but it wouldn’t make her write me out of the script altogether.