Sideways on a Scooter (42 page)

“Miranda, what if I am in love with my boss?”

I drew back in surprise.

“Who—Amit? The married guy?”

Geeta nodded sadly, as though acknowledging an irrefutable truth. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t believe it for a minute. Why would she wait until her betrothal was only hours away to raise the possibility that she had feelings for a different man, someone she’d known for years? At the very most, Geeta’s relationship with Amit amounted to a few eyelash flutters and flirty comments. She’d just scared herself into voicing the unthinkable, and to the extent that she’d transferred her worries onto Amit, it was probably because he was one of the few men she’d spent any time with at all. I tried to speak sternly.

“You thought he was cute, Geeta; that’s not the same.”

“No, but … it would have been so much easier, because Amit is Punjabi. Automatically we have so many things in common. With Ramesh, I’m going to have to work so hard to adjust. And already there is this imbalance, because he loves me, and I am not sure.”

As much as I wanted to dismiss her claim and put an end to the conversation, part of me could sympathize. It was more than just a longing for familiarity and tradition in her marriage; there was something else at the root of Geeta’s worries, and I thought I could understand it. I knew by now that she and I shared an overly romanticized view of love and marriage: Hence our mutual connection to Bollywood. She also suffered from the same “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” syndrome as I did. I’d spent more than a decade dismissing men genuinely equipped for a relationship, falling instead into doomed love affairs with emotional cripples, workaholics, and nomads; during the same decade, Geeta had found fault with pretty much every single one of her parents’ Punjabi matches. It was easier for both of us to surrender to the movie version of romance and love than it was to the real thing.

There was no time to ruminate on it now, though—we were pulling into the parking lot, where Geeta’s cousins waited in a bright, buzzing clutch. They knotted around the vehicle, and we could hear them shrieking even before they wrested open the car doors.

“Oh my God! We thought you would never get here!”

“Geeta, you look like a perfect doll!”

“Of course the makeup isn’t too much, why would you think that?”

The wedding grounds stretched behind them, lit up like a football field on game night. The air was sharp with excitement and generator diesel fumes. Geeta’s cousins hurried her toward a reception building, and I scurried along behind, trying not to trip on the folds of my sari. The girls deposited us in a bridal waiting room, with the instruction that Geeta was to stay put until the groom arrived at the gate. They dashed out again, leaving us in the small windowless chamber, whose walls were lined with mirrors. Geeta sat in front of one of them and appraised her bridal avatar.

“What if Amit showed up here and told me he loved me?”

I looked at her, surprised.

“Come on, Geeta, you’re really being silly. This isn’t Bollywood. You’re not being married off against your will to some crooked character; you’re marrying an awesome guy you’ve chosen yourself! It’s just wedding-day jitters. Everyone says it happens.”

Geeta was still staring at herself in the mirror, as though she couldn’t believe what she saw.

“I really didn’t want my makeup to be this heavy. I don’t know what Ramesh is going to do when he sees me looking like this. He might not even recognize me. Oh my God, what if he doesn’t recognize me!”

I snorted, hoping she was joking.

“Well, even if he doesn’t, it will be pretty obvious who you are, considering you’re the only woman here in bridal gear,” I said.

Geeta shifted uncomfortably; if there had been a trace of humor behind her makeup mask, it was gone. I thought of the American friends who’d admitted to having second thoughts before their weddings. One acquaintance back in New York said she had sat shivering in the bathroom for an hour before her mother could convince her to put on her wedding dress; another told me he’d thrown up before entering the wedding hall. But before I could decide whether to repeat these stories to Geeta, the door flew open, and a crowd of plump and bejeweled aunties rushed at the bride. They pulled at her pink head scarf, going
hoo-hoo
to praise her doll-like image. Geeta, who usually loved nothing more than being fawned over, remained stony faced under her mask of makeup.

“Ah, the poor girl is nervous,” the aunties told one another.

Some cousins tumbled in, breathless with the news that the groom’s
baraat
was arriving. All the ladies were to go off and greet them at the gate. Chandni grabbed my hand.

“This is our most important duty of the evening. It’s the ladies’ job to get as much money as possible out of the groom before we let them in—it’s a time-honored Punjabi custom.”

It didn’t sound like a very pleasant tradition. I protested that I’d promised the bride’s mother that I would stay by her side until she
climbed onto the wedding podium, but they insisted that this trumped my other duties and dragged me off. When I looked back, Geeta was still staring at her pink reflection.

Chandni and I joined the other women under a long bamboo trellis. A red carpet, scattered with rose petals to welcome the groom, led from the gate to the wedding grounds. The gathered women, however, were anything but welcoming. They were in a huddle, strategizing how to best weasel cash out of him. At Punjabi weddings, extortion is the bride’s right. Wedding guests are expected to demand cash from the groom at several points during the night, starting with his arrival. During the wedding
puja
, the bridal party steals the groom’s shoes and forces his groomsmen to pay up to get them back. Sometimes they even block the entrance to the honeymoon suite and make the poor man shell out again before he can lead his prize inside. It’s all supposed to be in good fun, but I found myself worrying about Ramesh, already insecure about fitting in to Punjabi Wedding World.

I wormed my way to the front of the crowd at the gate. Ramesh, in silly headgear and veil, waited on the mare. The two fathers, both in pink turbans, were holding a formal greeting ceremony. They garlanded each other, embraced, and shook hands, pausing midshake to pose like politicians for the photographer. The women were deep in negotiation with Ramesh’s brother-in-law, Satish. I heard him boast in fluent Hindi that he’d learned how to bargain Punjabi style when he was in college in the North.

“Well, you’ll need all your skills to get past us!” shrieked Geeta’s friend Nimrat.

She was nineteen, already longing for a wedding of her own, and one of several self-appointed protectors of Punjabi culture at Geeta’s ceremony. She swished her shiny hair across Satish’s face as she wheeled around to face the approving crowd of women, chanting, “If you want in, you’ll have to shell out! Otherwise, you can take the boy back to Bangalore!”

Nimrat made her demand: two hundred thousand rupees, several thousand dollars. Satish blanched. Although I later heard him bluster
that he had never considered handing over that much cash, he didn’t get very far with bargaining down the ladies. I remembered Geeta’s words the first day we met, at Ram’s vegetable stall: “There is no one more formidable than an Indian woman at cutting a deal.” The groom’s party was starting to get antsy behind Satish, as the buzz from the whiskey wore off. They’d been there more than an hour. I heard grumbles that they should storm the gate. Eventually, one of Geeta’s uncles strode up—an old man who commanded respect in the family. He wagged his finger at Nimrat.

“You should be ashamed! Don’t you know that these people are not from our culture? They are our guests, let them in!”

He tugged open the gate, and Ramesh’s guests began filing in—timidly at first, and then with more confidence. It took only a beat for the women on Geeta’s side to transform themselves from hostile gatekeepers to courteous ushers, folding their hands into respectful
Namastes
. Nimrat couldn’t bear it, though. When Satish entered, his arms above his head in a triumphant bhangra dance, she huffed: “These stuffy South Indians have no idea how to do a wedding. We’ll get what we are owed.”

I made a mental note to keep my distance from the shoe-stealing scene.

I kept picturing Geeta’s panicked face and headed back toward the waiting room. I’d missed her, though: She was already up on the stage. My heart pounded. I knew I wouldn’t see her again except from a distance. She’d leave in the morning for Bangalore.

The wedding lawn was a tightly packed sea of silk saris and kurtas, the guests lining up to congratulate the couple. I slid through the crowd to catch a glimpse, but there was nothing of Geeta that I could recognize up there. She looked like a pink and gold cardboard cutout, a child princess beside her prince on an oversize wedding throne.

In the early hours of the morning, when we were all cross-eyed with exhaustion, the
pujari
tied the end of Geeta’s sari to Ramesh’s kurta, and they walked around the sacred fire together seven times. Ramesh stroked a line of red
sindoor
into Geeta’s hairline to symbolize that she
was his wife. Just before sunrise, she climbed into a palanquin, a covered litter suspended on two poles that I recognized from old photographs of my great-aunt Edith in Kashmir.

Four men hefted the chair onto their shoulders like a coffin, to lead Geeta to the waiting car, and a tragic procession trailed behind. I’d been told many times during my stay in Patiala that it was a Punjabi ritual to make a
filmy
scene when a bride leaves, and indeed, almost everyone there was sobbing. In India, a wedding is considered an ending. In fact, in some parts, the groom’s family gives the bride a new first as well as last name. Unlike some brides, Geeta would be able to go back to her natal home to visit—though not very often. From now on, she’d spend holidays with her husband’s family.

When she stepped out to say goodbye, I saw that Geeta was crying, too, in great, dramatic heaves. She gripped on to her father. When her groom tried to pry her out of her father’s arms, I had to turn my head away, like my mother does during the saddest parts of movies. Eventually, Ramesh shepherded his bride into the car—an imported brand, white, decorated with red roses, and suddenly quite inappropriate for the joyless scene. Geeta was bent over in the seat. Ramesh gestured to the driver, and as they turned out of the parking lot, I caught a glimpse of the groom’s face through the back window. His eyes were wide with worry, as though he’d just realized that the two of them were now completely alone.

T
he gynecologist’s sari flirted open across her stomach, and her
choli
blouse was cut low across her chest. A good sign, I thought, as I sat down in Dr. Kapur’s office. The exam table was immaculate and included a roll of table covers, which meant the paper was changed after each patient—a hygienic precaution I’d learned not to take for granted in Indian clinics. I felt a flash of hope that I’d finally found a modern-minded ladies’ doctor.

No such luck.

“Are you married?” she asked.

I knew the question wasn’t on the form. What Dr. Kapur wanted to know was whether I was sexually active and had multiple partners. In official India, marriage is shorthand for sex—even at the gynecologist’s office, the one place that I’d have imagined the word would be acceptable outside the Fitness Circle. This was exactly why I’d been putting off my checkup: I didn’t want to have to deal with a doctor nosing her way into the moral dimension of my sexual health.

I considered the question. Was I married? Well, it depended on
whom you asked. My maids thought so, as did the gym ladies and the rest of Nizamuddin. Even though it annoyed me to have to lie about it, I’d continued to perpetuate the myth, because surely telling them that I was divorced would be worse than the original infraction I’d tried to cover up, that of having a boyfriend. Though I’d intended to tell Geeta that I wasn’t going to marry Benjamin, it hadn’t seemed right to confide in her about my breakup during her dizzy months of courtship and marriage. In Patiala, when she’d joked that I should be taking notes for my own wedding, I hadn’t corrected her.

I suddenly felt cowardly about my timidity. There was no reason I should care if the gynecologist raised a disapproving eyebrow at my sex life. I was obviously neither a pious virgin nor a pure Indian wife, nor did I especially want to be either of those things. If I felt judged by her, I wasn’t sure I could blame it all on India. It probably spoke more to the nagging worry that I was making selfish choices rather than investing in lasting relationships. The doctor might well have asked, “Why are you ashamed of the life you’ve chosen?” or “Which are you going to choose to be—an independent girl or a married lady?”

I gathered myself. I wanted to talk about birth control, so for the purposes of Dr. Kapur’s questionnaire, I decided, I would be married. That wasn’t sufficient, though. Her next question caught me off guard, as well.