Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  Still, as I watched DDLJ, the thought filtered into my mind that the decisions I’d made to leave New York and my boyfriend might have an impact on the kind of life I would end up leading. If this sounds as if it should have been obvious, let’s just say that it wasn’t. I’d been raised to think of my life as a series of disparate events, not as a straight line working toward a happy ending. It was impossible for Geeta to ignore the consequences of her choices, though they echoed around her all the time, in her mother’s warnings, her friends’ decisions, and the films that she watched several times a week. Bollywood tells us that love is spontaneous and all consuming, but that it is worth nothing without community. When heroes fall in love, they stretch their arms open wide as though to say “Now I feel a part of this beautiful world.” In the next scene, they lower their heads and touch the feet of their elders. Only then do they earn the right to marry the person they love.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Whiskey-drinking Woman

  My stomach was churning as I pushed my way to the front of the barrier at Delhi airport’s international terminal. The place was packed with uniformed hotel boys displaying handwritten signs as they waited for the early-morning flights to land. They joked around between tranches of arriving passengers, but when a flight cleared customs, they would focus intently on the rumpled crowd, elbowing one another aside to achieve prominence for their sheets of paper. They paid the most attention to the foreign passengers, whose slightly panicky eyes skipped among the unfamiliar brown faces, searching for their names.

  I felt briefly and irrationally envious of these unknown foreigners, many of them businessmen making initial trips to India, optimistic about the potential it offered their companies. They were tired and overwhelmed, but soon they’d find their sign. The hotel porters would ask them the standard questions as they delivered them to their chauffeured cars—“Which country? How many days in India?” In the morning, they’d dine in the carefully sanitized five-star-hotel buffet. Their transaction with India would be clean and simple—or so at least it seemed, compared to the arrival of my not-husband, maybe-boyfriend in this country that had already drawn me in more deeply than I had anticipated.

  I would have been ashamed to admit at the time that Benjamin was one of the reasons I left New York. Not because I was trying to get away from him, but because I hoped that by setting off to India, I would prove that I was just as carefree as he. He’d spent his postcollege years hopping illegal rides on freight trains, staging theatrical protests to save community gardens in New York, and living in an artists’ commune in Brooklyn, a lifestyle he supported by working at magazines and writing travel articles. In the six months we’d been together, I’d discovered to my dismay that just because I shared his ideals and his wanderlust didn’t make him believe I wouldn’t suffocate him.

  In the weeks before I left, the decision seemed to have the desired impact. Benjamin started hesitating about whether he shouldn’t come with me, after all. He initiated discussions about our relationship. We set limits on our “arrangement,” promising we’d only have affairs when we were in different countries. When we were together, we told each other, we’d wipe all of that away. He promised to get writing assignments in India, so he could spend a couple of longish stints with me each year. After we’d both had our adventures, I’d move back to the States, and we’d fill a rambling house in Vermont with kids and animals.

  The vagueness of this plan suited us both. We thought we wanted to be together—although neither of us was sure we wanted to get married—and this seemed like a good way to bookmark the idea. Plenty of women I knew were starting to settle down at my age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, but I had no such urge. I’d always been ambivalent about marriage and kids; I’d certainly never drawn up a plan to make them happen by a certain stage of my life. I just wanted to have my experience of India, without having to worry that I’d severed myself from New York altogether.

  When Benjamin emerged in the airport terminal, he was taller than I’d remembered, even hunched under the weight of his pack. My first thought was that Radha was going to be very impressed by my American husband. For a moment I saw him through her eyes: fair skinned and well built, with dark hair and light eyes, like one of the actors she’d seen on Baywatch reruns. Watching him walk up the arrivals hall, I felt suddenly distant from him and my life in New York. My year in India had already changed me in ways I hadn’t figured out yet, and I was, for a moment, not at all sure that I wanted my old life to catch up with me so soon. There was nothing for it, though; he was here.

  When he leaned to kiss me, he became familiar and wonderful again—the self-confident grin, as wide as the curve of a banana, the slightly unwashed smell of his clothes. As we drove to Nizamuddin, the taxi breezing through the red traffic lights in the empty streets, his face shone with a small-town boy’s wonderment at Delhi in the gray smoggy dawn. Benjamin was the best of companions in India. He didn’t mind the hassle, dirt, and discomfort. He didn’t care that the guys in the market stared at him in his baggy shorts, which made him look goofy and half naked—men in Delhi almost always cover their legs. To him, India was just another in a lifetime of adventures. That freed him from the pressure of trying to fit in, and seemed a welcome break from my own obsessive concern about what my neighbors thought of me.

  Soon after he arrived, Benjamin bought a clunky Indian-made bicycle, thinking it would be an efficient way to avoid bargaining with Delhi’s notoriously unscrupulous auto-rickshaw drivers. I warned him that he’d be the only cyclist in the city who earned more than a dollar a day. India has a caste system for the roads, as for everything else, and bicycles rank lower than bullock carts and camels.

  Benjamin came home sweaty and grimy after an especially trying afternoon ride. An aggressive “jingle truck,” so called because the hand-painted vehicles are hung with jingling ornaments, had edged him off the road. He’d walked the bike home along the freeway.

  “If I’m going to spend any time in this insane town, I’m going to have to pull myself up a few notches on India’s transportation hierarchy,” he asserted. After all, he reminded me, with a touch of the bravado that I found so charming in him, he drove a Honda Nighthawk 750 in New York. A few days later, I heard a honking in the alley and stepped out on the patio to see an ebullient, bareheaded Benjamin revving a silver motorcycle: a Royal Enfield Bullet Machismo, aptly named for restoring his manhood.

  In the morning he ran down to Joginder’s house, full of the enthusiasm of the virtuous. He knocked on the aluminum siding door and presented the bicycle. Joginder was not impressed by the offering.

  “I am superintendent. I am not for bicycle, sahib. Even sahib should not have been cycling-trykling.” The most Joginder would deign to do was donate the bike elsewhere. He gave it to the Bihari boys who worked at the local grocery, and for years afterward, I’d see them swinging up onto its thick frame, a canvas bag of supplies slung across a shoulder.

  It didn’t take long for word to get around Nizamuddin about the generous foreigner who’d made an unexpected donation. Now when Benjamin walked down to the market, the neighborhood boys would gather around him. There was something in his confident amble and the awe he inspired in the Bihari immigrants that called to mind a movie star. He’d sometimes buy the Nizamuddin guys a round of Thums Up—a harsh Indian-made cola that is considered a manly drink in villages and comes in returnable glass bottles. They’d drink it in companionable silence, standing in the street outside the shop, because the shopkeeper insisted that customers return the bottles right away. One of them would light a bidi, and they would pass it between them like a joint.

  In the weeks before he left Delhi, Benjamin talked about how much he would miss the camaraderie he’d established with the neighborhood guys. In spite of their limited interactions, he’d developed a wordless attachment with them, the kind that blooms quickly in South Asia. He was especially enamored with the youngest of the shop delivery boys, Arjun, who was newly arrived fr
om the village and didn’t yet have the dead-eyed cynicism of many of Delhi’s older slum dwellers. When he appeared with the day’s milk and bread, Benjamin tipped him excessively. The affection was mutual, so much so that I dreaded ordering things from the shop after Benjamin left. Arjun would peer hopefully over my shoulder from the doorway, as though hoping my husband would pop out from behind me in the apartment. When he realized it was just me, he’d pocket the few rupees of my comparatively meager tip and turn back down the stairs, his face bereft.

  Everyone says that India desensitizes you to human misery. During my first year in Delhi, I eagerly awaited that change, but it was a long time coming. Just driving through the streets, I routinely felt a low-level sadness that exploded into horror, or even nausea, at the sights around me—limbless beggars, children eating garbage, the desperate abusing the desperate.

  During Benjamin’s stay, we went to Mumbai and visited the Haji Ali shrine. Attracted by its whitewashed minarets perched on a tiny islet off the coast, we followed a procession of pilgrims across a long causeway, lined on both sides with supplicants asking for alms. It was a veritable nineteenth-century freak show of misery that reminded me of the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds museum. Among the gallery of beggars sat a bloated balloon of a woman, her body expanded wide with elephantiasis, and a man with a hole in his chest, through which, I swear, you could see his left lung. Stacked in front of each of them were piles of coins—when I looked more closely, I realized they weren’t rupees but paisa coins made of tin. Each coin was worth one-hundredth of a rupee; the donations they’d received probably totaled no more than several American cents. At the end of the causeway, four legless and armless torsos were writhing on the ground. The heads attached to the torsos were chanting fervent prayers to Allah. My own legs were shaking by the time we got up to the mosque, and for years afterward, I wondered how a man can lose all four of his limbs and still survive. The Indian government cites endemic infection, arterial disease, severe burns, traumatic injury, deformity, and paralysis as some of the reasons that ten million people in India have lost limbs.

  Geeta instructed me rather harshly that I would have to “get over” my “Western oversensitivity” if I was to live in India. I tried to follow her advice and get better at inuring myself. I learned to skip over the almost daily newspaper articles about traffic accidents and natural disasters—“82 Dead in Bus Mishap”; “Hundreds Washed Away on Flood Plain.” Even with death tolls that would have been front-page news in the United States, these stories were relegated to the inside pages of the Indian papers; there were simply too many of them.

  I always read the reports about caste-related violence, though, drawn to the topic with horrified fascination. Not long after I moved to India, the papers got hold of a story about several untouchable villagers in the North Indian state of Haryana. They were leather tanners, a job reserved for the lowest of the low because it involves working with dead cows. The police stopped the men when they were on their way to the market to sell a cow hide, accusing them of killing the cow to tan it, which is illegal in most Indian states. The villagers insisted that the cow had died naturally, but the police brought them in, and rumor spread fast. A mob gathered outside the police department, rushed into the building, and dragged the five men out. They were beaten to death in front of the police department.

  The English-language press ran articles with headlines such as “Five Men = One Cow.” Television talk shows pondered whether caste inequality had improved at all in India’s sixty-plus years of independence. One fierce and poetic newspaper op-ed began: “Thanks to my upper caste credentials, I don’t have to skin a dead cow for a living. Nor are my ‘community members’ not allowed to enter temples or stopped from drinking water from village wells, or forced to use a ‘marked’ cup in the local tea-shop, or made to eat human excreta as divine punishment.”

  I went to see the journalist who’d written it. Vijay Mukherjee had the brooding look of an aging Marxist—furrowed brow, receding hairline, string bag of books over a shoulder. It’s not an uncommon style in today’s India, where communism remains a potent force in politics and attracts millions of followers. Still, Vijay seemed out of place in the sleek office building in central Delhi where he worked as a senior writer for one of India’s top-selling English-language papers. That impression was only exaggerated when he sat down in front of my microphone and his account of the caste system morphed into a furious hour-and-a-half-long monologue. He worked himself into a sweat in spite of the air-conditioning, pounding on the table and rendering my radio recording unusable.

  The word caste, he told me, is actually a conflation of two Indian concepts: jati, which describes the community, clan, or tribe that you marry into, and varna, the place this group occupies on the hierarchy mandated by Hindu scripture. There are four main varnas, topped by the Brahmins—traditionally the teachers and priests—who are followed by the kings and warriors, the merchants and farmers, and the service people. Inside each of these four categories are thousands of jatis, or subcastes. And below the lowest category are the untouchables, literally outcastes from the system.

  Indian scholars think caste stratification evolved gradually, as the idea of religious purity became central to Hinduism. Unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism has no one single canon laying out the principles of the religion. There are books of mythology with morals and stories; for the rules, Hindus turn to the Manusmrti (The Laws of Manu) from the first century B.C. It records in meticulous, cruel detail the Hindu caste code that came into practice during the Vedic period, from 1500 to 200 B.C. Manu, the book’s author, was naturally a Brahmin himself, since they were the only educated caste. He is careful to preserve the preeminence of his own tribe in his taxonomy of the social order. The jobs of the untouchables, he says, should include disposing of corpses and carrying out executions; they should wear the clothes of executed convicts and live outside the boundaries of villages.

  Manu is still considered the best authority on the social and religious duties of dharma and caste. And although it is not known how closely or widely the rules were followed in his era, it is indisputable that he formalized caste divisions. Today’s Hindu marriage code is still based on his principles. Then, when the British took over India, they only entrenched the caste system further. The British slotted the educated Brahmins into the colonial institution to serve as imperial bureaucrats and religious advisors to judges.

  When Mahatma Gandhi launched a long-overdue movement to reform the caste system, in the 1920s, he linked the issue to the bid for India’s independence, accusing the British of exploiting caste as part of its policy of divide and rule. Gandhi forced the issue into the open for the first time. He declared that untouchables should be called Harijans, which means “children of God.” The media photographed him eating from banana-leaf plates among untouchables in their slums, a shocking image because he hailed from an upper-caste family. Interdining between the castes was extremely rare.

  The untouchable leader B. R. Ambedkar thought these gestures patronizing, though. He was an unusual man: Born into a family whose hereditary work was cleaning toilets and guarding the bodies of the dead, he became the first untouchable to be educated overseas. On his return to India, Ambedkar rose into national politics, advocating radical social revolution and hoping India’s new democracy would itself overthrow the caste system. Ambedkar shared Gandhi’s goals of self-rule and self-reliance for India, but he didn’t believe it would happen within the Hindu framework. Gandhi, as a privileged caste Hindu, had no right to speak for untouchables, he said—or to name them. He rejected the name Harijan, preferring to describe himself as a Dalit, which means “downtrodden” or “broken to pieces.” His is the term that stuck.

  Ambedkar, a lawyer, was the lead author of India’s 1950 constitution, which made it illegal to discriminate against untouchables. More than fifty years later, when I’d moved to India, I still saw caste everywhere. Intercaste marriage was officially legal,
for instance, but it was regularly prevented or punished by families wielding their own system of justice. In ancient times, high-caste Hindus believed there were terrible mental and physical consequences to being touched by the people who cleaned toilets and skinned cows. One scholar of Hinduism compares this fear of pollution to Americans’ terror about people with HIV at the height of the AIDS panic. Hindus who defile their high-caste status—by killing an animal of any kind or sharing a drinking vessel with a low-caste person—were supposed to purify themselves with what Manu called “expiatory penances” such as begging for food and bathing three times a day.

  At school, Ambedkar was forced to drink from a separate untouchables cup, into which water was poured from a height to protect the server from being contaminated by the vessel. Dalits still drink from a separate well in some villages. In ancient times, they were obliged to announce their arrival by clapping together the soles of their shoes to avoid contaminating the higher castes. In some parts of today’s India, Dalits are forced to hold their chappals in their hands when they walk past high-caste houses, so as not to pollute the path. Although interdining is now common in cafés and restaurants in Delhi and Mumbai, the highest and lowest castes almost never share meals in rural areas, let alone align their lives in any more intimate ways, such as marrying into each other’s families.

  Ambedkar was the first to warn that good laws alone wouldn’t end caste discrimination. India would “enter a life of contradictions” when the constitution came into effect, he said, because “in politics we will have equality.… How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?”