Sideways on a Scooter (44 page)

Usha tried to become immune to her
saas
’s pleas. Still, when her second turned out to be a boy, she took an auto-rickshaw from the hospital straight to the temple to thank the gods. I was at the Fitness Circle the morning she called. The gym floor exploded with shrieks of excitement, drowning out Red FM. Even though the gym ladies would insist earnestly that the sexes were equal—they’d all seen the Indian government billboards to that effect—it seemed embedded in the culture to feel greater joy at the birth of a boy. For Azmat, the best part about the news was that Usha invited a few of us over for tea to celebrate. Since she spent her days cleaning the floors and waiting for her brother to find her a husband, any excuse to socialize outside of the Fitness Circle was a treat for Azmat.

“Usha hasn’t ever been able to invite us over before,
deedee
, because her
saas
is bad natured,” she informed me. “She doesn’t want Usha to work outside the home, and she thinks we working ladies are a bad influence.” Azmat chuckled at the ridiculousness of the notion. “Now her
saas
is handing sweets out to the whole neighborhood and inviting us to visit. She must be out of her head with happiness.”

On the afternoon of our tea date, Azmat showed up in an elaborate
salwar kameez
outfit decorated with yellow sequins, which seemed a hot and uncomfortable choice for the cycle-rickshaw ride over to Usha’s. Leslie and I were dressed up, too, though, as per Azmat’s instructions. We’d brought a ceramic dish set and a chocolate layer cake for Usha’s
saas
. Leslie rested the cake box on her knees. This Western extravagance thrilled Azmat: She kept pulling up the lid to marvel at the cake’s glistening surface.

Usha met us in the lane outside the cement apartment block where she lived with her husband’s extended family. A toothless old uncle was cross-legged in the shade on a charpoy. He eyed us suspiciously: two foreigners and a Muslim girl dressed to the nines. Usha didn’t
introduce us. She led us up a crooked set of stone stairs, smoothed by decades of wear into a treacherous surface. I felt my sandals slipping and clutched at the wall in the dim light. Others had done so, too: The green paint was smeary with the grease of many hands. Usha said the power had been out for several days. Still, the interior walls, painted pink and mustard yellow, seemed to glow with color. I could make out a portrait of the Dalit hero B. R. Ambedkar on one wall, garlanded with fresh marigolds. Almost every Dalit home in India boasts his image: round face, round glasses, and an inscrutable expression.

Usha’s mother-in-law was in a corner on the floor upstairs, cooing at the newborn boy in her lap. In one fluid, wordless motion, she nodded a greeting, gestured for us to sit on the daybed, and ordered Usha to make
chai
at the two-burner stove in another corner of the room. A grudging look of pleasure flickered across her broad, ungenerous face as she received the chocolate cake. She held up the grandson to show him off. He was wrinkled, with sallow skin and eyes lined with kohl. When Usha’s toddler daughter wandered over, a shy finger in her mouth, the old woman ordered her to hand out slightly sweet English-style tea biscuits to the guests.

After she’d made
chai
, Usha joined Leslie, Azmat, and me on the bed. She had to step around the plates of her teatime offerings, because the room was too crowded for either table or chairs. I asked where her husband was, and she said he’d started working on Saturdays since their son was born. Even if sons end up being a financial net gain in the long run, Usha explained that they require an early output of cash, in that everyone expects the new parents to share the joy around.

Usha lowered her voice, but her mother-in-law wasn’t paying us any attention—she was still goo-gooing into the newborn’s face. Usha said that her
saas
had insisted they host a dozen celebratory tea parties like this one; an even greater expense was the upcoming Hindu baby-naming ceremony. Expectations were higher for such an event if it was for a boy. Usha’s
saas
had informed her that the family was expected to hand out saris and gold rings to all the female relatives.

“We’ll have to take out a loan. It’s not that different from having to
borrow money to get my daughter married when she grows up. It costs almost as much.”

Usha must have been missing the gym-mat chats. Normally hesitant and self-effacing, she was now eager—impatient almost—to discuss her troubles. We shook our heads sympathetically, and Azmat murmured that she’d heard other parents make a similar complaint, but we were all taken aback by Usha’s next admission.

“My husband recently suggested that I get the
operation
”—she used the English word—“because we can’t afford to have another child.”

Leslie spoke first.

“What operation? Do you mean getting your tubes tied?”

“I don’t know exactly what it is,
deedee
. The thing that stops you from having babies. My husband says there’s a wife version and a husband version. He doesn’t want to have it.”

India’s population more than doubled in the first seventy years of the twentieth century, leading Western journalists and scientists to prophesy widespread famine. The government responded with coercive and forced sterilizations: In the 1970s, officials would round up men with three or more children and herd them off in police vans to “vasectomy camps.” Between 1975 and 1976, the government conducted more than eight million sterilizations, more than anywhere else in the world at that time, which means there is still widespread unease about the procedure. A mandatory population control program like China’s would never work in today’s India; people would simply refuse to abide by it. As India’s population swelled to the 1.2 billion of today, many state governments began offering compensation for voluntary sterilizations, though. One especially creative state government plan offers a gun license to men who get the snip.

The compensation from the Delhi state government wasn’t quite that exciting. It was the equivalent of twenty dollars, half a month’s earnings for Usha’s husband. Still, he was “worried that he might not be able to do sex afterwards,” Usha said. Azmat let out a bawdy cackle at the English word
sex
, but Usha pretended not to hear; her eyes were fixed on Leslie, the neighborhood health expert.

“My husband found out that ladies get higher compensation than
men for the operation. But will it hurt? Do you think I’ll be sick afterward?”

We all turned to Leslie.

“I’m not sure about all the details, Usha, but I think if a woman gets the operation, it’s riskier. You have to go under general anesthesia—you know, go unconscious. That’s probably why the government pays women a little more.”

Usha bit her lip. She hadn’t realized she would have to go unconscious, she said. Her husband had already made the appointment.

Geeta was allergic to South India. Six months after she’d moved into her in-laws’ house, she was bloated and spotted with pimples, and she’d gained fifteen pounds. I hadn’t seen her since the wedding. This was her first trip back to Delhi, and she was staying with me and Priya in the Nizamuddin apartment. After Geeta got married, Nanima had left the neighborhood; one of her children had finally taken charge of her.

Geeta sat down on the sofa and looked around as though she’d been gone for years.

“Wow. I’ve really been missing Delhi—everything about it. I wouldn’t have expected that! I’m especially homesick for North Indian food—even Radha’s Bihari food that I used to complain so much about—even that is an improvement over South Indian food. Her chili and oil is nothing like as bad as what Ramesh’s family uses. South Indian food is so spicy and fattening—I swear, my stomach is constantly upset.”

Geeta blamed her ill health and weight gain entirely on the Murthy family cooking, though after spending a little time with her, I thought it was probably due to something more than that, since she also seemed profoundly depressed.

One of my cats wandered in and stared at her. Geeta had never expressed much interest in the scrawny alley cats I’d made my pets—like Radha, she didn’t know why anyone would choose to keep dirty felines inside the home, let alone shell out money for their food. But now she held out her hand. The creature turned her back and strutted off, as
though to punish my friend for her history of Brahminical anticat sentiments. Geeta looked hurt.

I was struggling to adjust to the new Geeta, too: a puffy, mellower version of my punchy Punjabi friend, now dressed in a prim
salwar kameez
with her hair neatly pulled back. The miniskirts were obviously gone for good. I wondered whether she’d gotten any use out of her Curves attire, but I didn’t dare ask. Her honeymoon was a touchy subject: Ramesh’s father had asked them to cancel the trip to Thailand because Ramesh would have been away from the office for too long, so they’d traveled to the more predictable destination of Goa instead. After all her excitement, she’d had a quotidian domestic honeymoon.

Sitting down beside her on the sofa, I wondered whether we would have stayed good friends if we hadn’t also been neighbors. Of course, Nizamuddin was the reason we met; and then for a while after that, we’d become so close that it had stopped mattering. Now that we were separated by geography and lifestyle, though, our personality differences seemed to outweigh our bond.

I noticed that Geeta’s arms were still decorated to the elbows with wedding bracelets and tried to come up with an appropriate remark.

“You’re still wearing your
chura
. I hope they’ve been treating you as a new bride should be treated!”

She looked back at me dully.

“Yeah, they won’t let me do anything. I am like the princess of their household—totally pampered and silent and a stranger.”

Being well cared for in her new home should have been the ultimate triumph, but Geeta offered none of the victorious dimpling that should have accompanied such an announcement.

“I have a bad feeling there. It’s like they want to keep me an outsider in their household. Like they treat me well to keep me out or something. Bangalore
is
very different to what I know. I feel like a
feringhee
in my own country.”

As I’d learned from
KSBKBT
, the TV show about
saas-bahu
tension, mothers-in-law can torture new brides in many ways, most of which, according to the show, involve the kitchen. New
bahu
s are sometimes
forced to slave away at housework—as in Pushpa’s case—and sometimes they are locked out of the kitchen, and therefore the family. In Geeta’s new world, it was the latter. Making food was an honor reserved for the better-established women of the Murthy household. Ramesh’s mother, grandmother, and aunties competed for space in the kitchen, only occasionally granting his older brother’s wife access though she’d been in the family for several years now. The women produced a rotating buffet of traditional fare, all of it rendered eye-wateringly hot with mustard seeds and green chilies. Even at breakfast, there was no reprieve: In Ramesh’s house, the South Indian rice cakes called
idly
were served with a fiery morning stew.

A few months after she’d moved in, Geeta asked her mother-in-law for permission to make a Punjabi meal. It is a wife’s greatest honor to serve her own food to her husband, she pleaded. It was hard for me to imagine Geeta begging to be allowed to cook, but domestic tasks had taken on a new profundity in her few months of marriage. When she told me that Ramesh’s family had complimented her mild potato curry and roti, she looked exultantly proud of herself. Her
saas
had made it clear it wasn’t going to be a regular thing, though.

“There was tension every time I went into that kitchen. Some kind of possessiveness, like I was infringing on their territory. I guess that’s why they call it kitchen politics.” She sighed.
“Ai-yore-ramachandra.”

I smiled to hear her using the elaborate South Indian exclamation.

“Did you pick that up in Bangalore?”

“Ramesh’s family all use this expression—just like
‘Ay baba
’ in the North. See? I’m trying my best to adjust. I’m even using their silly phrases. If I’d heard myself a few years ago, my God, I would have laughed at myself.”

Geeta wasn’t finished telling me about the food wars, though. After Ramesh specifically asked his mother to make milder versions of the curries for her, the women briefly obliged, she said.

“That’s all stopped now. I heard them grumbling about it in the kitchen, but I barely had time to feel guilty before my food tasted the same as theirs again. I know my mother-in-law thinks I’m just having new-wife growing pains, and I should just get used to what they eat.”
Geeta tugged her
kameez
over her thighs. “Here’s even more proof that I’ve tried to adapt—I’m looking like a fat housewife after only six months of marriage!”

Geeta had organized the trip up to Delhi specifically so she could see a gastroenterologist. A North Indian doctor was more likely to sympathize with her Bangalorean cuisine issues, she thought, and she’d planned it all out carefully, including the doctor’s note she’d bring back.

“I’m hoping he’ll give me a prescription for something. Then I can show my mother-in-law that their food isn’t good for my system. I want those women to start taking me seriously.”

She slouched into the sofa, a weary look on her face. Still perplexing, that Geeta. From the outside, she appeared to be living the Bollywood dream, with a husband who adored her and a family invested in her comfort and safety. I was sure she’d brag about it all when she went back to see her family in Patiala. Yet Geeta was obsessively fixated on her meals, which seemed a minor issue. She also hadn’t uttered a word about her former boss—whom she’d panicked that she was in love with on her wedding night—or about her earlier fears about not loving Ramesh. Come to think of it, she’d barely mentioned her husband since she’d come in. I had a feeling she remained as conflicted about the reality of her arranged marriage as she’d been about it in theory.