Sideways on a Scooter (10 page)

“I’ve watched
Friends
, Miranda: I know you do things differently in America.”

I didn’t know what to think about having my life compared to an
oversimplified sitcom, but outdated American shows were an important point of reference for Geeta. Sometimes she presented them as evidence of her globalized savvy, and sometimes to prove to me that her life was more complicated than mine. Whether or not this was the case, this much was true: Everything she did was carefully scrutinized and outlined with the thick black marker of social custom.

The more I got to know Geeta, the more I saw that her life was poised between two very different possible outcomes. She hadn’t yet chosen her modern Delhi identity over marriage, but neither was she making a move toward the conventional option. In the Bollywood movie of her life, Geeta wanted to be Ash, forever a virginal bride; but I think she was afraid she’d be seen as Mallika. There was a sadness to her face sometimes that made me wonder whether there was more to the story than she was telling me.

Her parents had sent her on dozens of arranged marriage meetings, or parentally approved blind dates, even before she’d graduated from college, and she’d gone along, because it was easier than refusing. She’d always managed to find something wrong with the boy, though. On the verge of the high-water mark of a girl’s marriageable years, Geeta now seemed frozen. It was as though she was waiting for an indication about which version of herself she should be.

Fate was very real for Geeta—she saw its hand in almost everything. What seemed to me a series of normal coincidences Geeta read as destiny; anecdotes about an unseasonable rainfall or running into an old colleague were transformed, in her telling, into small miracles. Like many Hindus, she believed the events of her life were guided by dharma, the eternal order of the cosmos, meaning everything could be explained by events of the past. These beliefs only seemed to heighten the fear that she was too modern to be marriageable.

The same conflict is at the heart of the Bollywood classic
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
(The Brave-hearted Will Take the Bride), a mouthful of a title that everyone avoids by using the Hindi acronym,
DDLJ
. When the film came out in 1995, Geeta saw it several times in the theater with her college friends, and she still watched it every time it came on TV—which was often, because it is one of the highest-grossing and
longest-running Bollywood movies of all time. There are still daily screenings in one Mumbai movie theater; the schedule wasn’t even disrupted by the 2008 terror attacks.

The brave-hearted hero of the title is played by Shah Rukh Khan, in what is undoubtedly his most famous role. His character, Raj, is a rich second-generation Indian immigrant in London; to prove the extent of his Westernization, he is depicted strutting around in a motorcycle jacket and playing soccer and the piano, rather than having Indian hobbies such as playing cricket and the sitar. In an early scene of the film, Raj bullies a London shopkeeper, a fellow Indian immigrant, to give him a six-pack of beer. This all proves that he is, in Bollywood-speak, a “crooked character” who has moved too far away from Indian traditions. But, in typical Bollywood style, he’s given a chance to reform, and it comes in the form of a beautiful pious virgin. Among the first things we learn about our heroine, Simran, is that she prays at the family’s Hindu shrine before dawn. Her father considers her the very essence of Indianness. When he tells her he’s accepted an arranged marriage proposal for her and she runs out of the room in horror, he misinterprets her reaction: “Ah, she is shy. That’s our etiquette, our culture. In the heart of London, I’ve kept India alive!”

Even before the intermission, Raj begins to resurrect himself from Western depravity, having realized that he is destined to be with Simran and must better himself to deserve her. According to traditional Hindu beliefs, if the priest, the community, and the astrologers approve of a match, it proves it is fated and should last for the next seven lifetimes. So, in the hope of proving to her family that he should be with her, Raj follows Simran to India. I assumed the film was approaching its climax when the two reunite in a field of swaying yellow mustard seed in Punjab. They clutch passionately at each other—though they don’t, of course, touch lips, because the hero is played by the chaste SRK. Simran begs Raj to elope with her, but he refuses.

“I haven’t come here to steal you. I’ll take you only when your father gives me your hand. About our lives, they can decide much better than we can. We have no right to make them sad for the sake of our own happiness.”

It is not for another hour into the film that Simran’s family finally comes to terms with fate. Our hero is standing in the door of a moving train, literally streaked with blood and tears, by the time Simran’s father tells her to go to him; only then does she leap from the platform onto the accelerating train. This movie is Bollywood at its most melodramatic and sentimental; still, its message about society hit me hard. I’d always wanted to believe that love would be unassailable if it was true and right. I cried my way through
DDLJ
’s whole drawn-out final scene the first time I watched it.

I thought that if I followed my urge to set off on my own, I’d eventually find my place in the world—the city, job, friends, and man that I loved. But
DDLJ
made me wonder what I was trying to prove and why I needed to leave everyone who mattered to me to do it. Perhaps I was just doing as my family always had and trying to escape the conventional, driven not by my adventurous soul but by my fear of normalcy. If there was a Bollywood movie version of my life, I’d certainly be the seductress-vamp, unwilling to sacrifice my own goals for either love or family.

I was pretty sure that, as lost as she sometimes seemed, Geeta would find her way back to the girl she’d always expected to be. Someday soon, she’d project pure Indian virginal side of herself to her Patiala audience again—because if she didn’t, the consequences would be dire: A modern girl is one thing, but an aging spinster without a family is a pitiable specter in Delhi. I’d never thought about my actions as having such stark consequences—in my world, being a single woman wasn’t ideal, but it didn’t automatically brand you as a spinster, either. I knew my mother would be sad if I ended up alone, but it wouldn’t make her write me out of the script altogether.

Still, as I watched
DDLJ
, the thought filtered into my mind that the decisions I’d made to leave New York and my boyfriend might have an impact on the kind of life I would end up leading. If this sounds as if it should have been obvious, let’s just say that it wasn’t. I’d been raised to think of my life as a series of disparate events, not as a straight line working toward a happy ending. It was impossible for Geeta to ignore the consequences of her choices, though they echoed around her all
the time, in her mother’s warnings, her friends’ decisions, and the films that she watched several times a week. Bollywood tells us that love is spontaneous and all consuming, but that it is worth nothing without community. When heroes fall in love, they stretch their arms open wide as though to say “Now I feel a part of this beautiful world.” In the next scene, they lower their heads and touch the feet of their elders. Only then do they earn the right to marry the person they love.

M
y stomach was churning as I pushed my way to the front of the barrier at Delhi airport’s international terminal. The place was packed with uniformed hotel boys displaying handwritten signs as they waited for the early-morning flights to land. They joked around between tranches of arriving passengers, but when a flight cleared customs, they would focus intently on the rumpled crowd, elbowing one another aside to achieve prominence for their sheets of paper. They paid the most attention to the foreign passengers, whose slightly panicky eyes skipped among the unfamiliar brown faces, searching for their names.

I felt briefly and irrationally envious of these unknown foreigners, many of them businessmen making initial trips to India, optimistic about the potential it offered their companies. They were tired and overwhelmed, but soon they’d find their sign. The hotel porters would ask them the standard questions as they delivered them to their chauffeured cars—“Which country? How many days in India?” In the morning, they’d dine in the carefully sanitized five-star-hotel buffet. Their transaction with India would be clean and simple—or so at least it
seemed, compared to the arrival of my not-husband, maybe-boyfriend in this country that had already drawn me in more deeply than I had anticipated.

I would have been ashamed to admit at the time that Benjamin was one of the reasons I left New York. Not because I was trying to get away from him, but because I hoped that by setting off to India, I would prove that I was just as carefree as he. He’d spent his postcollege years hopping illegal rides on freight trains, staging theatrical protests to save community gardens in New York, and living in an artists’ commune in Brooklyn, a lifestyle he supported by working at magazines and writing travel articles. In the six months we’d been together, I’d discovered to my dismay that just because I shared his ideals and his wanderlust didn’t make him believe I wouldn’t suffocate him.

In the weeks before I left, the decision seemed to have the desired impact. Benjamin started hesitating about whether he shouldn’t come with me, after all. He initiated discussions about our relationship. We set limits on our “arrangement,” promising we’d only have affairs when we were in different countries. When we were together, we told each other, we’d wipe all of that away. He promised to get writing assignments in India, so he could spend a couple of longish stints with me each year. After we’d both had our adventures, I’d move back to the States, and we’d fill a rambling house in Vermont with kids and animals.

The vagueness of this plan suited us both. We thought we wanted to be together—although neither of us was sure we wanted to get married—and this seemed like a good way to bookmark the idea. Plenty of women I knew were starting to settle down at my age of twenty-six or twenty-seven, but I had no such urge. I’d always been ambivalent about marriage and kids; I’d certainly never drawn up a plan to make them happen by a certain stage of my life. I just wanted to have my experience of India, without having to worry that I’d severed myself from New York altogether.

When Benjamin emerged in the airport terminal, he was taller than I’d remembered, even hunched under the weight of his pack. My first thought was that Radha was going to be very impressed by my American
husband. For a moment I saw him through her eyes: fair skinned and well built, with dark hair and light eyes, like one of the actors she’d seen on
Baywatch
reruns. Watching him walk up the arrivals hall, I felt suddenly distant from him and my life in New York. My year in India had already changed me in ways I hadn’t figured out yet, and I was, for a moment, not at all sure that I wanted my old life to catch up with me so soon. There was nothing for it, though; he was here.

When he leaned to kiss me, he became familiar and wonderful again—the self-confident grin, as wide as the curve of a banana, the slightly unwashed smell of his clothes. As we drove to Nizamuddin, the taxi breezing through the red traffic lights in the empty streets, his face shone with a small-town boy’s wonderment at Delhi in the gray smoggy dawn. Benjamin was the best of companions in India. He didn’t mind the hassle, dirt, and discomfort. He didn’t care that the guys in the market stared at him in his baggy shorts, which made him look goofy and half naked—men in Delhi almost always cover their legs. To him, India was just another in a lifetime of adventures. That freed him from the pressure of trying to fit in, and seemed a welcome break from my own obsessive concern about what my neighbors thought of me.

Soon after he arrived, Benjamin bought a clunky Indian-made bicycle, thinking it would be an efficient way to avoid bargaining with Delhi’s notoriously unscrupulous auto-rickshaw drivers. I warned him that he’d be the only cyclist in the city who earned more than a dollar a day. India has a caste system for the roads, as for everything else, and bicycles rank lower than bullock carts and camels.

Benjamin came home sweaty and grimy after an especially trying afternoon ride. An aggressive “jingle truck,” so called because the hand-painted vehicles are hung with jingling ornaments, had edged him off the road. He’d walked the bike home along the freeway.

“If I’m going to spend any time in this insane town, I’m going to have to pull myself up a few notches on India’s transportation hierarchy,” he asserted. After all, he reminded me, with a touch of the bravado that I found so charming in him, he drove a Honda Nighthawk 750 in New York. A few days later, I heard a honking in the alley and
stepped out on the patio to see an ebullient, bareheaded Benjamin revving a silver motorcycle: a Royal Enfield Bullet Machismo, aptly named for restoring his manhood.