Sideways on a Scooter (27 page)

Parvati had occasionally mentioned boys she’d dated before she met Vijay; but his discomfort with the topic was on another order of magnitude. We’d been friends for years, and he still scarcely acknowledged his multiyear commitment with Parvati to me. Sidelong references to my relationship with Benjamin made him uneasy, too. Sometimes, if Parvati was feeling mischievous, she’d tweak him by making a bawdy joke. He’d promptly remove himself to the kitchen to pour another drink, and she’d whisper loudly, “Isn’t it cute? My boyfriend is as modest as a blushing Bollywood bride!”

Parvati was looking at me steadily now, and her next comment brought me back to the present.

“His college days were passionate times. In fact, Vijay got married in college.”

The last of the evening light picked up the green flecks in her eyes, giving them an urgent glitter. Everything I’d thought about her, and their relationship, and even India, shifted a little in that moment. Parvati lit a second cigarette off her first.

“Her name’s Divya. She was his college girlfriend—very beautiful, he is always saying, and very intense. I guess she wanted to get married, and he went along with it. It was a love marriage. I don’t know that many details, though. He doesn’t like to talk about it, which is hardly surprising.”

“What happened?”

“Well … they’re still married.” The words hung in the air for a moment before Parvati picked up the thread again. “I mean, they have been separated for a long time. But she didn’t want to do a divorce; it was too shameful. So he agreed. He won’t ever officially divorce her now.”

After the split, Divya left Delhi and moved back to her hometown, Jaipur, several hours’ drive away. A decade later, she had yet to acknowledge to her family that her defiant love marriage had collapsed. Her family continued to go along with the ruse, perhaps preferring it over the humiliating truth. Vijay had explained this choice to Parvati by
reminding her how difficult it was for women who break the mold. First Divya had married against her family’s wishes, and now the marriage had fallen apart; if they found that out, it would surely only vindicate their conservative beliefs.

When Parvati told me that Divya had started contacting Vijay again, I couldn’t help but think that Divya was probably holding out hope that he would one day return to her. Parvati seemed to read my thoughts.

“I don’t think he loves her anymore. I really don’t,” she said. “I think he takes her calls because he feels so guilty about how it ended.”

“So … what happened?”

My astonishment had rendered me incapable of articulating a different question. Flustered, Parvati smoothed the free strands of her hair with her hands.

“You know Vijay. Not many people can put up with him, and I think she was a pretty moody girl, too. But how can I know? He hasn’t come to terms with it himself.”

I remembered that Vijay hadn’t spoken to his parents for years, and that he’d told me that his relationships with his siblings were rocky. Maybe this explained it. My mind was careening all over the place. The right thing for him to do, I thought, was to initiate an official divorce; even if it would take years, it was the only way to be respectful to Parvati. Of course, that was an American idea, born from a culture that actually lauds couples for ending unhappy marriages. Not so in India. Even in Vijay’s liberal circle of journalists and activists, a divorce could render him a social outlier. No wonder his relationship with Parvati was secretive and turbulent, I thought.

I considered how I would feel if I were relegated to the status of mistress in the eyes of society. I was pretty sure I’d be paranoid about what people thought of me, even in my significantly more tolerant world. I didn’t have Parvati’s mettle to battle worries like that. It also occurred to me that Parvati might have adopted a stance against marriage and kids because she was, in any case, unable to have those things with Vijay—though I would never have suggested such a thing to her. In fact, now that I knew the backstory, I wished I hadn’t quizzed her so aggressively about Vijay early on in our friendship. She’d finally told me
the whole truth, and I had no idea what to say. Parvati had run out of words, too. She stubbed out the last cigarette of her pack and drove me home.

During my first years in Delhi, I rarely caught more than a glimpse of the air-conditioned, generator-supported world of the elite. Because I’d shown up in India without a foreign correspondent’s salary or contacts, I didn’t meet the kind of people most of my colleagues socialized with—industrialists, government officials, film stars. Over time, I found myself scheduling interviews at five-star hotels and dining out at the aptly named Diva restaurant. I had to force myself to put it out of my mind that I was blowing the equivalent of Radha’s monthly earnings on a plate of pasta and a glass of wine. In fact, I learned to celebrate how far my paltry public radio salary would stretch in India. It seemed amusing that my servants considered me the epitome of wealth, but in a way, I was. Having secured a steady job and salary, I could even have moved into one of Delhi’s luxurious gated enclaves, but I found them to be disturbing reminders of class and clout in the status-obsessed political capital.

When I began shambling after the five-star denizens I was forced to learn a whole new set of Delhi rules—starting with the vehicle I was seen in. If I took a rattling taxi to an interview with a government official or an important businessman, I’d have to hope that he wouldn’t catch sight of me climbing out of it in front of the building—because if he did, I knew it would be a struggle to be taken seriously. As for rickshaws, they aren’t even permitted inside the gate of most Indian hotels and government buildings. I’d often been dumped at the bottom of a hotel driveway and forced to approach the entrance on foot—undoubtedly the least classy way to arrive at an appointment in a city where no one other than beggars and dogs walks between destinations. The hotel porter would gingerly hold open the door for this sweaty, uncouth
feringhee
, his mustache twitching disdainfully.

One of the best things about hiring K.K. was being able to turn over to him the stress of dealing with my vehicle status. I’d call the taxi stand
in the morning and describe my day’s appointments, and he’d choose a car accordingly. Having driven Delhi’s elite for fifteen years, K.K. was better qualified than just about anyone to be a vehicle snob. As co-owner of Nizamuddin Taxi Stand, K.K. liked to remind me, he had access to “all many kinds of top-class cars.” On important days, he’d show up in a Honda City, because foreign-made vehicles confer the greatest status on their passengers. No matter what appointment I had, though, K.K. outright refused to drive an Ambassador, the classic Indian car, first made in England but manufactured in India since 1948. Like the flowing white kurta uniform, the Ambassador remains an essential accessory of Indian government ministers. But to K.K., as to many of the aspirational classes, the car was nothing more than an unwelcome reminder of India’s shoddy socialist days, when the best way to acquire wealth was to bribe a corrupt government bureaucrat.

K.K.’s personal vehicle of choice was the Tata Indigo, an Indian-made sedan marketed as “the working man’s luxury car.” He deemed this vehicle acceptable for most of my evening social events—partly because it was equipped with a DVD player. He kept a stockpile of Bollywood movies for the nights he waited for me while I mingled at some work-related cocktail hour. With hundreds of embassy officials and Indian businessmen filling the lawns of multimillion-dollar colonial homes, such parties ran late into the night.

It took me a while to get used to the dozens of uniformed servants flitting across the lawns, proffering predinner kebabs. I’d never experienced anything like it in my rumpled academic family. It was always a relief to clamber back into the car and ask K.K. to drive me over to Parvati’s tiny apartment, where the blinking tube light needed to be replaced. I’d have a similar sensation when I showed up at the dinky Fitness Circle after an indulgent Sunday brunch at an ostentatiously decorated restaurant with other Western reporters, as if I was living two lives and neither of them was exactly real.

When I complained to a wealthy Indian friend about it, he was unsympathetic.

“That’s India. This country is totally irreconcilable. There’s only one thing to do: Reconcile yourself to it.”

What astonished me was that India’s
poor
had reconciled themselves to it. In my first couple of years in India, I routinely wondered why there hadn’t ever been a true caste- or class-based revolution. Eventually I decided that it could be explained by the Hindu belief in dharma and reincarnation. Many of India’s poor are simply getting through this life in the hope and expectation that in the next one, it will be them in the back of the Mercedes and the rich man will be crouched under a plastic tarp in torn clothes. It makes it easier to accept things as they are, and it certainly creates a powerful incentive to live a moral life. Dharma didn’t make the daily inequalities okay for me, though.

I reserved a special dread for the traffic triangle near Nizamuddin, a gathering point for Delhi’s maimed and impoverished, which I called Hell Corner. Once, when an aggressive, brawny adolescent beggar girl tugged at my purse through the rickshaw, I actually slapped her across the face. I don’t remember whether I hit her hard, but what I do recall is her laughter, loud and bitter. In bed that night, I remember thinking, I have reached an all-time low: I actually struck a beggar child. I felt sadder about myself and the world than I had in a long time. After that, when I was driving through the intersection with K.K., I’d urge him to floor it through a yellow light to avoid getting stuck. I couldn’t force myself to do as other passengers did and ignore the beggars with a straight-ahead stare.

One evening, Parvati and I got caught there at a red, and she rolled down her window to hand out a few coins. Like most middle-class Indians, she made regular donations to beggars; it’s an essential social duty in both Hinduism and Islam. A woman with a badly burned face approached the car. I hated how the toddler in her arms had learned to mimic her imploring gestures. Parvati told me that most of Delhi’s beggars belong to street rings and hand over their earnings to gang leaders at the end of each day. The leaders force the women to carry babies and sometimes deliberately disfigure the children, she said; they keep the kids hungry so they are more likely to cry. Looking out at the assembled miserable on the corner that day, Parvati seemed as perturbed as I was.

“Just look at this! Handing out rupees to whoever comes up to the
car isn’t a good solution. We should come up with a better system, a way to decide who to give to.”

For starters, Parvati declared, no more donations to women holding babies—unless the women also bore obvious signs of domestic abuse. We should stop giving to the plucky street kids, because they were almost always attached to a gang, she said. We agreed that lepers and the limbless should always get our coins. Even though many of them also work for the mafia, they have little choice other than to beg, we reasoned.

It was a completely arbitrary notion of right and wrong, of course, but I was glad to impose some kind of order. The new rules made me feel good about contributing to the skateboard beggar, my longtime favorite on Hell Corner. He’d lost both his legs to some terrible accident, and his beard had a lot of gray in it. He scooted himself between the wheels of the stopped cars on a self-styled skateboard with fierce, determined energy. Because he couldn’t reach the car window, I’d drop the coins onto the street, and he’d scramble to pick them up before the light changed. Even if the cars were moving toward him to get across the light, he always touched the coins to his head in a gesture of thanks.

Geeta guided her little car through the pandemonium of Hell Corner and turned into the well-groomed driveway of the Oberoi hotel. We waited in the lobby, perched stiffly on uncomfortable pastel-print chairs. I averted my eyes from passing guests, hoping I wouldn’t run into one of my sources, clad as I was in my village-girl costume. I wondered whether Ashok’s family was part of the social elite, or whether they’d chosen the place as a conceit. With dowry at the center of marriage negotiations, money is an unavoidable aspect of Indian matchmaking. Presenting an image of wealth is one way to push the girl’s family for higher dowry gifts. Geeta’s liberal Punjabi parents were extremely unusual in insisting that they wouldn’t pay dowry at all; that was how it had been for generations on Geeta’s mother’s side. Still, if Ashok’s people had aimed to impress Geeta with their choice of venue, they’d succeeded. She twiddled a strand of her hair into a strange curl that I didn’t have time to fix before they were standing in front of us.

The boy was short and pleasant looking in an unremarkable way. It was his glitzy sister who caught my attention. One glance at her expensive silk tunic and Italian shoes and I knew Geeta had miscalculated—these people were more upscale than we had anticipated. Next to her, I looked as though I’d been milking cows all afternoon. She introduced herself as Maneka, proffering a carefully manicured hand; I wanted to hide my own ten-rupee nail job behind my back. With a flick of her tinted hair, she glided down the hall to the swanky coffee shop, and we followed.

Inside, I told them I would get the drinks—I figured it was appropriate, since I was sort of playing the role of Geeta’s father. Standing at the stainless steel counter, I thought how different this atmosphere was from the Barista coffee shop where Geeta had met Aditya, the hand-holder. Barista’s best-selling items are American-style brownies and sugary smoothies; customers at the Oberoi expect espresso drinks and fresh almond croissants.

I glanced back at the table. It looked as though the meeting was off to a bad start. Geeta was twisting her hair again, and Ashok was straight backed and tense in the wrought iron chair opposite her. It was a weird, contemporary version of the feudal village scene, in which pre-pubescent boy and girl are seated on opposite cushions, hands and eyes lowered, as their fathers negotiate their futures over their heads. I clonked my knee against the marble table as I sat down, spilling our drinks, and promised myself I would keep my mouth shut.