Sideways on a Scooter Page 9

  It’s a question that could be asked today. India’s new economy makes merit-based social mobility possible as never before, but caste discrimination is old and deep. It is built into every institution and impulse in India, as was racism in the pre–Civil War American South. If it is difficult for an outsider to have an honest conversation about race in the Dixie states, the same is true about caste in India. It’s not that these conversations don’t take place, but even in private they are veiled in platitudes and spoken in hushed tones.

  When I brought up caste, progressive-minded intellectuals, economists, and politicians would fiercely resist the comparison to slavery and racism. In the mainstream narrative of India’s economic and social uplift, there is no room for India’s deep-rooted system of discrimination based on birthright.

  “Caste was a problem in the old India, but now things have changed,” they’d say, or “It’s been solved in the cities. It is only an issue in villages now.” I’d usually keep quiet, for the sake of holding on to a source or avoiding an argument about a topic I was scarcely an expert in, but I didn’t believe them. Globalization and urbanization just paper over caste—they haven’t eradicated it. In my own apartment in the capital city of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, my two servants lived out the most basic inequities of the caste system every day.

  As I packed up my radio equipment, Vijay apologized for barely allowing me to get a question in.

  “I get too too passionate about this subject. We should have a calmer discussion sometime. Why don’t you come and meet some friends at the Delhi Press Club this weekend. I think you’ll like my friend Parvati.”

  I didn’t need convincing. I was so starved for social activity that I didn’t care whether he ranted all night about caste, cricket, or Bollywood dance moves. Nighttime activities had proved surprisingly difficult in Delhi. Everyone from Joginder to my taxi driver, K.K., recited the same foreboding counsel: “Single ladies should not be venturing outside after dark.” The newspapers regularly chronicled incidents of “eve-teasing,” the Indian euphemism that has its root in the biblical story of Eve and that makes sexual harassment sound much less serious than it is. In fact, government statistics show that violence against women has actually risen since 2003. Probably due to more women entering the workplace and other public spaces, rape cases rose by more than 30 percent; kidnapping or abduction cases increased by over 50 percent. Geeta had her own stories of being “harassed by village boys,” as she put it, on public buses and even in temples.

  When Benjamin was in Delhi, he provided a certain amount of protection from Delhi’s butt pinchers. Nevertheless, the city offered few nightlife options even for a couple, other than expensive cocktails at five-star hotels or late-night house parties and family gatherings that we weren’t invited to. Bars are still a new enough phenomenon to be a focal point in India’s culture wars. In 2009, a group of women was physically attacked in a college-town bar by members of a conservative Hindu group who accused the women of acting “un-Indian.” Government officials condemned the attack, and then, a few days later, India’s health minister held a press conference to urge national prohibition, declaring, “The pub culture must end. It is not our culture.”

  Over the years I lived in Delhi, the city’s public life improved dramatically as it opened up to more global influences. But even if young people are hanging out more in malls and bars than ever before, family remains the core of social life in India. Gatherings tend to take place inside the home, and alcohol is not usually the focus since it is forbidden by both of India’s major religions, Hinduism and Islam. In Manu’s Hindu codebook from the second century, drunkenness is listed among the four worst sins—along with stealing gold, “defiling the bed” of a religious teacher, and killing a Brahmin—and women are forbidden to drink.

  After independence, several Indian states banned the sale and consumption of liquor. It’s still illegal in Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state, out of deference to his principled teetotaling. The ban has spawned a dangerous industry of bootlegging booze; a bad batch of illegal liquor killed more than 130 people in Gujarat, in one of several such incidents in a single month in 2009. Home-brewed arrack—distilled from palm, rice, or sugarcane—is cheap and easy to get. I’d see the slum dwellers lining up outside the liquor stall a few streets away from my apartment to buy plastic pouches of booze called thaili, which look like snack-size potato chip bags. When the shop opened, at noon, the place quickly became a frantic throng of shrill voices and skinny arms waving ten-rupee notes, the equivalent of twenty cents, at the hooch distributor. They’d put the pouches down the legs of their skinny pants and then knock them back inside their rickshaws while waiting for customers.

  Delhi’s middle classes buy their spirits at different stalls, known as English Wine Shops, although wine is rarely on offer. Imported wine is heavily taxed in India, and the domestic industry has been slow to take off, partly because Indians typically drink before, not during, dinner. More to the point, a bottle of whiskey costs a third as much as a bottle of wine, even an Indian-made bottle, and it has three times the alcohol content. English wine is actually a catchall term for Indian-made Foreign Liquor, clumsy Indian bureaucratese that is commonly shorthanded to “IMFL” by English-speaking Indians. It is branded under familiar names, such as Smirnoff and Gordon’s, but it pretty much all tastes the same because most of it is distilled from molasses rather than the grain or juniper berries that are used in the West to make vodka and gin.

  Delhi’s discerning drinkers can either pay ten times the standard U.S. price for imported booze, or they can procure an exclusive membership at a place such as The Delhi Golf Club, whose wood-paneled bar features a view of the Mogul-monument-studded golf course. Here, uniformed waiters serve Bombay Sapphire gin, a brand manufactured outside India. Its name refers to the popularity of gin among the British Raj in India; they drank it with tonic water, which contains quinine, to protect against malaria. Club memberships are as highly coveted in today’s India as they were among British officials, passed down from generation to generation of industrialists and military officials. One of my neighbors liked to joke that her parents would use her Delhi Golf Club membership as part of her dowry, the money or goods that women in India are expected to bring to the groom’s family in marriage.

  The Delhi Press Club, Vijay’s favored drinking joint, attracts a rather less exclusive crowd: Indian journalists, almost all of them male and as hard-drinking, chain-smoking, and cuss-mouthed as American newspapermen of the 1950s. They throng the bar in crumpled button-downs, tossing back whiskeys and handfuls of spicy fried Bombay mix, and trying to best one another with tales of political scandal. The place is windowless, run-down, and raucous, with TV sets blaring Hindi news channels. When I walked in, a half-beat of silence fell across the smoky room as a number of the men paused to take note of the unlikely sight of a feringhee girl in their midst. It was worth just that—a glance—before they returned to their stories.

  I wandered outside to the patio and found Vijay in the falling dusk. He was with the only other woman in the bar, whom I took to be Parvati. She was wearing a white salwar kameez, a wool shawl pulled around her shoulders against the late October chill. Her makeup was the traditional kind that Geeta disdained for Western-style colored eye shadow and lip gloss. For centuries, Indian women have lined their eyes with dramatic black kohl and painted a black or red bindi dot on their foreheads—women from upper-caste maharanis to 1930s Bollywood heroines. Parvati was dressed like a pious virgin, and yet, lined up on the table in front of her were a pack of Gold Flake cigarettes, a bottle of soda water, and a shot of amber-colored whiskey.

  Vijay introduced her with a grand sweep of his hand. She was one of Delhi’s best political reporters and one of the few women who’d been asked to join the press club, he boasted, then added, “She also really cares about issues, which is unusual among most of the journalist choots you see in here.” Vijay’s words slurred together boozily, and
his English was peppered with Hindi profanities that he must have restrained himself from using during our interview; I soon learned that Hindi curses are an essential accessory among the Delhi Press Club set.

  Parvati rolled her kohl-lined eyes at his effusive praise.

  “Arre, boss, maybe so. But you know I was too lazy to fill out the form.” Turning to me, she added, “We’ve been coming here for years, but I still use Vijay’s membership. So much for the great honor of being asked to join.”

  She caught sight of the waiter scuttling among the rowdy tables in a gray Mao suit—the working man’s uniform, a holdover from decades of socialism in India.

  “Dev!” I was startled by the sudden power in her voice. Dev appeared swiftly beside our table, and I faltered, unsure what to order. Parvati waited half a beat before she commanded: “Start with some vegetarian snacks. How about aloo chaat, the potato stuff. And to drink?”

  “What are you drinking?” I asked her.

  “A peg of Seagram’s Blenders Pride with soda.” She used the Anglo-Indian term for a shot. “It’s the best Indian-made whiskey. Or rather, it’s the only drinkable one.”

  “That’s not real Indian whiskey!” Vijay exclaimed, shoving his glass across the table. “This is. Royal Challenge.”

  I looked doubtfully at the two glasses lined up in front of me. Parvati stepped in to explain: Her brand, Seagram’s, was one of the few Indian whiskies that was distilled with grain rather than molasses.

  “In foreign markets, my brand, Royal Challenge, isn’t even considered whiskey,” Vijay continued. “Can you believe it? They can’t sell whiskey made from molasses in Europe unless they call it something else.”

  Taking a sip, I wasn’t surprised: The sweet, pungent stuff tasted nothing like what I knew as either scotch or bourbon. I smiled politely and decided not to get involved in the competition, since Vijay seemed as strong willed and passionate about whiskey as he was about caste. I ordered a beer.

  As the waiter plunked our glasses down on the plastic table, Parvati leaned toward me like a practiced storyteller. She seemed eager to explain herself. Perhaps she could tell that I was trying to sort out her place in conservative Indian society; or maybe, because she considered herself something of an outsider, she felt a kinship with me.

  “There are lots of people who immediately assume I’m a certain kind of woman when they see me smoking and drinking. But I don’t give a crap about this pure virginal Mother India bollocks. I’m not even very Westernized or anything, but I don’t see why I should have to act a certain way—”

  “She doesn’t give a damn what these judgmental Delhi wallahs think of her!” Vijay interrupted.

  “It’s true that I’ve learned not to care,” Parvati said with a smile. “People are always surprised when they find out that I am not raised in some upscale Delhi household, because those women are much more likely to break away from society’s expectations. In fact, I am a village girl. Really. I come from a tiny place in the Himalayan foothills.” She scanned my face to make sure I was listening. Her eyes were more complicated than the brown I’d first taken them to be. Flecked with yellow-green and hazel, they glowed like a cat’s when the light hit them.

  “We didn’t have any money—my father worked for the government—but mine was one of the few upper-caste families in the village. My father wore his sacred Brahmin thread under his clothes every day of his life, like every good Brahmin is supposed to. Everyone in the village knew it was there. His last name, my name, is clearly a Brahmin name, Pande.”

  According to Parvati, her teachers tolerated her bad behavior as a child because of her family’s high standing in the village, punishing other kids more harshly. She grew up believing she could get away with almost anything and still achieve whatever she wanted.

  “I wasn’t a good student, but I had my family name, which made it easier to get into universities. My father taught me English and helped me apply to college. I wouldn’t be here otherwise; I wouldn’t even be able to talk to you like this, in your language.”

  “Also, her father thought that his daughter should have ambitions beyond marriage,” Vijay added. “But how did he get that way, to have those beliefs about women?” He looked at me as though he was really quizzing me. When I shook my head, he flicked his hand impatiently and answered himself. “Because her father was also educated, that’s how. In these small villages, it’s still true that only the high castes are well educated.”

  For centuries, Vijay said, high-caste Hindus have dominated Indian institutions. At the time of India’s independence, Dalits accounted for as much as 25 percent of the population in some provinces and were represented by a sole untouchable minister in parliament. Brahmins, who made up only 2 percent of the population, held fully two-thirds of the seats. The vast majority of India’s prime ministers have been Brahmins, leading British prime minister Winston Churchill to scorn Indian politics for being dominated by “one major community.”

  In recent decades, affirmative action policies and better education opportunities have broken the upper-caste stranglehold on Indian politics and helped create a small but substantial Dalit middle class. In 1997, a Dalit was named president of India, a position with great symbolic significance if little actual power. One of India’s most powerful national parties, the BSP, rose to prominence on a platform of dignity and self-respect for Dalits. The leader of the party, Mayawati, is instantly recognizable across India by her single name. She styles herself as a defender of the oppressed—at her early rallies, she famously urged fellow Dalits to beat higher-caste people with their shoes. She has repeatedly been elected chief minister of the largest state in India, Uttar Pradesh.

  Parvati pulled her shawl around her shoulders.

  “This cold weather reminds me of the hills where I grew up.” She gave Vijay a moony look.

  He ducked his head shyly.

  “Parvati’s name means ‘she of the mountains.’ Isn’t that nice? We both love it in the hills. If only it wasn’t so bloody restrictive to live there …” His voice trailed off.

  Not for the first time that night, I wondered about their relationship. They had the natural ease of a couple who had heard each other’s stories many times. But I hadn’t seen his hand on hers all evening, and despite their tipsiness, their chairs remained scooted a prim distance apart. It seemed unlikely they could be married, either to each other or to anyone else. But Parvati was a couple of years older than me, and Vijay was approaching forty, so if he was her boyfriend, they were even more unusual.

  I didn’t have to wait long before Parvati solved the mystery for me.

  “Stay at my place tonight. I’ll drop Vijay home, and we’ll be able to chat in the morning.”

  Apparently, she not only lived separately from her boyfriend but also drove him around; when we got outside, she slid into the driver’s seat of the small white car parked outside the club. I folded my feet up in the tight backseat, trying to process all the ways that my new friend broke Indian norms. Parvati seemed unusually self-assured about her decision to defy Indian stigmas against women drinking and smoking. I thought of how Geeta occasionally donned a miniskirt and flirted with boys, and those rebellions seemed trifling in comparison. Sometimes, she’d allow one of her male friends to buy her an Old Monk rum and Coke, the sweet and not very alcoholic drink of choice of many Delhi college girls. She always claimed to get tipsy on the first sip, as though to emphasize her daintiness. Parvati, on the other hand, had imbibed multiple pegs of whiskey and at least a pack of cigarettes over the course of the evening. At least in my own boozy state, this seemed an apt symbol of her break from tradition; it was as though Parvati occupied her own moral universe, outside mainstream values and norms.

  I was so absorbed by these thoughts that I didn’t consider that a night ride with the whiskey drinker might not be prudent. During the day, Delhi traffic operates according to its own organic logic. Streams of cycle-pulled rickshaws, street-vendor carts, and imported BMW
s meet and glide seamlessly between lanes; they rarely honk when they cut one another off, nor do they move fast enough to inflict major damage when there is a collision. At night, the unwritten rules of this traffic ballet expire. Vehicles pick up speed in the empty streets and new obstacles assert themselves. Parvati seemed not to notice the roaming packs of dogs, the steaming piles of the homeless stretched out to sleep on the medians. She cruised through the red lights, chattering away with one eye on me in the rearview mirror.

  I gasped: Out of the gray nighttime fog rose the lumbering rump of an elephant, indistinguishable from the night air. High above it was the red bobbing turban of its rider. Parvati swerved, waking Vijay from his passenger-seat nap. In the beam of her headlights, I saw a hand-painted sign strung on the elephant’s tail, the size and shape of a license plate: I LOVE MY INDIA, it announced.

  Parvati guffawed with relief and adrenaline.

  “I don’t even have a license!”

  “Are you serious?” I gulped, and fished around the backseat for a seat belt, surrendering to my stereotypical feringhee fear of Indian driving. Parvati cackled at my alarm.

  “There’s no belt in the backseat of Indian cars. Welcome to India, my friend. No one wears a seat belt, and hardly anyone has a license.”

  I noticed that like many Delhi taxi drivers, she’d pulled her seat belt loosely around her chest but hadn’t clipped it in. She said she did so to avoid the fines the cops had started enforcing on drivers who didn’t wear them.

  “They don’t stop you if you look like you’re wearing it. Anyway, if they do, it’s no big deal. You just hand over a hundred rupees baksheesh.”

  I decided not to tell her that my concern was whether we’d get back alive, not whether she had to pay a fine.