Sideways on a Scooter (35 page)

“That’s sad,” I said.

“Yeah, it is—
she’s
sad, in general, actually. And I know I shouldn’t
say this, but I think something about the situation has affected the way she looks and acts. All the stress and strain of being alone and lying about her marriage—it makes sense that it would have an impact.”

“Explains what?”

“Well, those good looks Vijay was always telling me about. She used to be this gorgeous girl with smoldering dark eyes, but not anymore. I don’t see it.”

I snorted in spite of myself. It was a bitchy thing to say about a woman in trouble, but it broke the tension. I didn’t know how to respond to Parvati’s uneasiness about the strange situation with Vijay’s unusual houseguests. Neither she nor I knew how to act when she felt vulnerable. I changed the topic the only way I could think of—by asking questions.

“Did you know she was coming?”

“Not until two days back. I guess she’d been telling Vijay she wanted to come for some time, and he finally agreed, so she got on a train on the spur of the moment. She’s impulsive like Vijay that way.”

“It seems strange she would make so much effort to stay in touch with him if she didn’t have feelings for him.”

Parvati cracked her window and flicked her cigarette butt out. A blast of hot, dry air shot into the air-conditioned car, and the effects of that single beam of heat stayed for a few moments after she rolled it back up again.

“Probably she does. But I’ve made damn sure she knows she can’t have him. Maybe she’s trying to be friends with me instead of trying to compete with me. I guess that’s good, right?”

Parvati saw a figure approaching the car and waved through the windshield.

“This is her. I told her to find me in the parking lot.”

We watched Divya as she approached, reluctant to leave the cool air until absolutely necessary. Through the windshield, I could see that she had wide-set eyes and broad features, the kind of face that might have once been striking. Now, though, her eyes were sunken and her features sagged with extra weight, making her appear older than she
was. That impression was exaggerated by a tragic slash of red lipstick across her face.

The bright makeup seemed shocking, because I’d become accustomed to the homogeneous, conservative style of dress among women in India. It’s rare to see dramatic or showy shades of lipstick on anyone other than low-caste villagers or prostitutes. It was unnerving to see a thirty-something middle-class woman with red lips; and all the more so because Divya had an infant slung across her chest. Even under the best of circumstances, a woman in her late thirties carrying a child draws surprised and judgmental glances in India, because that is considered old to have a baby.

The woman walking toward us was not what I had pictured when Parvati first told me about Vijay’s stormy college love affair. There was something tragic about her moving slowly in the heat, weighed down by the swaddled infant. I wondered whether Parvati was right about her being “a bit off,” because it was hard to believe that she wasn’t self-conscious about her makeup. Parvati was apparently thinking the same thing.

“I don’t know why she does her face up like that,” she said through her teeth, so that Divya couldn’t read her lips through the windshield. She was almost at the car now, but Parvati continued. “I feel sorry for her, having to carry that baby everywhere. I know that most women want children—and I am just different that way, because I don’t—but I
really
can’t imagine having one on my own like that. With no help, and everyone looking at you and imagining the worst
 … Ay baba
. Come on, let’s take the poor woman shopping. It’s the least I can do for my husband’s wife, right?”

She gave me a sardonic grin, and we climbed out of the car into the scorching sun of the parking lot.

Geeta’s father was so eager to talk that he called her before he even boarded his flight home from Bangalore.

“I won’t be able to eat for a week,
betee,
” he said, and she knew the visit had gone well: There’s no better way to demonstrate warmth in
India than to lavish food on your guests. Before he told her about her potential in-laws, Nitin Shourie paused to describe, in mouthwatering detail, Ramesh’s mother’s
obbattu
, a thin, fried chapati filled with cane sugar and coconut.

“You won’t find a better family than his,
betee
. This is our chance. I’m going to tell your mother that we should bring this boy in and treat him like a Punjabi.”

Geeta was a little surprised by her father’s enthusiasm. When she’d broken the news about Ramesh, her mother had been so upset that she’d refused to speak to Geeta for several days. It had fallen to her father to summarize their objections.

“All these years your mother has waited for a son-in-law, and now you’re going to marry a stranger and move to the other end of the country, where all their habits are strange to us. How will you be happy down there,
betee
?”

Their disapproval had made Geeta edgy and flustered for weeks; she kept leaving her keys in the car and forgetting to renew her prepaid credits on her cell phone, so she’d be unable to make calls for days at a time. When it rang, she’d plow frantically through her bag to find it. She lay awake at night, even on weekends—her most prized sleeping time—second-guessing herself and mourning the angst she was causing her parents. Only when her father finally came around and told his wife that they owed it to their daughter to meet the boy’s family was she able to relax.

From what Geeta could conjecture, the visit had been uncomfortable at first. For starters, the families spoke different regional languages: Geeta’s, Punjabi, and Ramesh’s, Kannada, the language of their home state, Karnataka. It wasn’t an issue for Geeta and Ramesh, because, like most middle-class Indians of their generation, they could rely on English to bridge the regional gap. Not so for their parents. When the two mothers met at the engagement, they wouldn’t be able to utter a word to each other beyond
Namaste
. The fathers could speak just enough English to show off a little, though not enough to form full sentences; they relied on Hindi to communicate with each other, even though Ramesh’s father had barely spoken it since high school.

Keshava Murthy was a man of large gestures. His was a prominent business family, and his youngest son’s engagement seemed the kind of occasion that warranted great rhetorical flourish. I’m sure it must have pained him to be unable to communicate smoothly with the girl’s father. He tried to make up for it in other ways. He donned expensive, designer-made kurta suits and embellished his poor Hindi with expansive arm gestures in an effort to signal his acceptance of the cultural differences that lay, unmentioned, between the two families.

Each man had something to prove. Geeta’s father was determined to demonstrate to the wealthier, more successful man that he was an upstanding Brahmin whose daughter would make a kind and caring addition to the Murthy family. Keshava, for his part, needed to show that he could create a superior life for Nitin’s only child in his multi-room mansion. He was confident about the advantages he could offer.

He considered it a great accomplishment—his own—that his extended flock still lived together under one roof. If Geeta married into the family, she’d move in with Ramesh’s parents, grandparents, brother, brother’s wife, and their two kids—not to mention a couple of widowed aunties who always seemed to be around. This was evidence, Keshava thought, of how safe the other man’s daughter would be.

It was Nitin’s first visit to Bangalore. Before the benefits of the economic boom of the 1990s trickled down to the middle classes, Indians rarely took vacations at all. If they did, they traveled by train, because it wasn’t until the early 2000s that air travel became remotely affordable. That’s when the Indian government liberalized industry regulations to allow low-cost private airlines to enter the market and make air travel available to more than business travelers and the rich. Since the train journey to Bangalore took forty-two hours from Patiala, it was an unlikely destination for a Punjabi family.

In any case, the city had only recently become a place worth visiting. For most of Nitin’s life, Bangalore had been best known as “the pensioners’ paradise.” It was only in the nineties that Bangalore created incentives to draw in technology companies. They worked: Soon, practically every U.S. software company had research and outsourcing
operations there. Bangalore became the world’s back office and outsourcing capital. For years, it was the fastest-growing city in India.

Keshava assumed his relatively provincial guest would be impressed by the steel and glass of the new India. He expounded grandly on Bangalore’s opportunities and the tens of thousands of college graduates who flock to its green corporate campuses. Nitin tried to act impressed, but what made the biggest impression on him was the pollution. He was shocked by the hours they spent in traffic, competing for road space with busloads of technology workers and aspirational multitudes on scooters. “I think I’d rather live in a pensioners’ paradise than booming Bangalore,” he joked later.

Keshava Murthy was unaware of these sentiments and dedicated the rest of Nitin’s visit to showcasing his proudest achievements, with a tour of the factories of Murthy Electronics Manufacturing, the refrigerator-parts unit that had been in the Murthy family for three generations, and, of course, of his luxurious home.

Because Nitin had spent his career as a state-employed doctor, the family had lived in a government-allotted apartment that spoke of India’s socialist past—gray concrete floors, gray concrete façade, every unit grayly identical. In Nitin’s social circle, there was a certain prestige to dedicating your working life to what Indians refer to as a
service job
. Because Indian government employees are well respected and underpaid, they pride themselves on living the self-sufficient, frugal lifestyle that Mahatma Gandhi advocated. In fact, Gandhi’s vision was not that different from the ancient Brahminical ideal of centuries ago, when the priestly caste eschewed worldly needs to educate others about the principles of Hinduism. Geeta still sometimes described her father as being “correct for our caste,” a phrase that probably came directly from him.

But in an era of fast-rising prosperity, Nitin’s moralistic lifestyle was out of fashion. Of the two fathers, only Keshava had learned to adapt to the India of global corporate values and seven-figure salaries. His friends headed thriving car dealerships and textiles companies. I imagine Nitin shuddered a little when the other man clapped him on
the back and declared, “This is the era of big money in India, dear Nitin-
ji
! For the first time, we Indians are able to earn serious money—why shouldn’t we?” Keshava seemed not to share Nitin’s Brahminical qualms about money—he was proud of his prospering family business.

Geeta told me how Ramesh justified his father’s capitalist instincts to her. His father had never been motivated by raw financial ambition, he said, but rather by a desire to grow his great-grandfather’s business. To Keshava, upholding the family name seemed the noblest of goals, which was why he’d never been able to understand his son’s decision to stay in America for as long as he did. Ramesh’s college and career achievements were blunted in his father’s mind because he had attained them in New Jersey, apart from the family.

He’d been trying to cajole Ramesh into the family business for years now. Keshava’s wife, Savitramma, had hoped to pull her son back in by marrying him off to a girl from a local Brahmin family, but, much to her surprise, the boy had refused to consider any of their matches. He’d made them wait for years and now he’d picked a complete stranger—a working girl who lived alone in Delhi—and he was set on her. Soon after he returned from Delhi, Ramesh had sat his parents down and made a pact with them: If they let him marry the girl he chose, he’d come back and work for Murthy Electronics Manufacturing. If they gave him trouble, though, Ramesh said, he might just return to New Jersey. It was close enough to a threat to anger Keshava, but his wife reminded him that it could be worse. Their son might have shown up with an American girlfriend in tow; they’d all heard such stories. At least this girl was Indian and would understand the importance of the family.

By the time the two fathers met in Bangalore, both were resigned to the alliance, which was why they were making such an effort to ignore their cultural differences. Nitin did his best to suppress his aversion to the Murthys’ extravagant lifestyle, reminding himself that Geeta would enjoy having expensive saris and her own car and driver. Keshava kindly overlooked the other man’s shabby bureaucrat’s clothes and his old-timer views on caste and money. For the most part, it worked. Nevertheless, the Murthys’ money—and the Shouries’ lack of it—necessarily complicated the nuptial negotiations. Nitin knew that
if he expressed moral distaste for the dowry system, Keshava was likely to assume he was trying to get out of the marriage because he couldn’t match their expectations.

Nitin waited until the end of his second day in Bangalore to suggest to Keshava that they take a stroll on their own while the women prepared dinner. Outside in the balmy evening, it took only a moment for Nitin’s fears to be confirmed: The other man clearly did not share his distaste for dowry. Nitin had to backpedal to save his daughter’s best—and perhaps only—shot at a good marriage.

“Of course, government salaries are modest. But like any father, I have saved for my daughter’s wedding. I hope you won’t think that our dowry principle is a matter of money. I would of course want to send my daughter in comfort to your house. Gifts for the couple and the family—that goes without saying—we would never want her to be a burden to you.”

“No need, no need,” Keshava said, though of course there was.

Nitin, I’m sure, was trying to rescue something of his pride.

“The part we would like to avoid is the dowry
negotiation
. My wife and I think it seems … indecorous. Educated people should avoid this bargaining. Such behavior is more for the lower castes.”