Sideways on a Scooter (13 page)

I gasped: Out of the gray nighttime fog rose the lumbering rump of an elephant, indistinguishable from the night air. High above it was the red bobbing turban of its rider. Parvati swerved, waking Vijay from his passenger-seat nap. In the beam of her headlights, I saw a hand-painted sign strung on the elephant’s tail, the size and shape of a license plate:
I LOVE MY INDIA
, it announced.

Parvati guffawed with relief and adrenaline.

“I don’t even have a license!”

“Are you serious?” I gulped, and fished around the backseat for a seat belt, surrendering to my stereotypical
feringhee
fear of Indian driving. Parvati cackled at my alarm.

“There’s no belt in the backseat of Indian cars. Welcome to India, my friend. No one wears a seat belt, and hardly anyone has a license.”

I noticed that like many Delhi taxi drivers, she’d pulled her seat belt loosely around her chest but hadn’t clipped it in. She said she did so to avoid the fines the cops had started enforcing on drivers who didn’t wear them.

“They don’t stop you if you look like you’re wearing it. Anyway, if they do, it’s no big deal. You just hand over a hundred rupees baksheesh.”

I decided not to tell her that my concern was whether we’d get back alive, not whether she had to pay a fine.

We were headed for Trans-Yamuna Delhi, the distant suburbs east of the river. On the other side of the bridge, the cityscape stretched
into pocket-sized fields of crops that were cultivated between small factories and low-income housing blocks. Vijay stumbled out of the car at his apartment complex, and Parvati drove us around the block to her place. As she led me up the open staircase of her whitewashed concrete building, I realized that they live in the only acceptable way an unmarried couple can in Delhi: separate apartments in adjacent buildings. Parvati said they hung out together most evenings, sometimes spending the night together, “if the circumstances are right.” That sounded foreboding, but I couldn’t be sure; I’d become accustomed to hearing a different meaning from the spoken one.

“I like having my own space so my mother can come stay with me. It’s tiny, but unlike Vijay’s place, it is very, very clean.” That was definitely the adjective that came to mind as I looked around her box of an apartment. Lit by fluorescent tubes, the three rooms had the sanitized glare of a hospital. “My mom comes to stay with me for six months of the year, and she is obsessed with purity. Some kind of Brahminical austerity.”

She handed me a white Victorian-style nightgown, so crisply ironed that it felt starched, and we passed out on the large daybed that took up the bedroom’s entire floor space.

When Parvati tugged open the curtains the next morning, the sun was already searingly bright, even at seven
A.M
. and close to winter. She brought
chai
in china teacups, steaming with cardamom and ginger, and a thick roll of several newspapers to flip through. Hardly anyone savors India’s tabloid-style papers slowly; most of the stories are no more than a couple of paragraphs long and have little context or history. Parvati was an especially speedy news skimmer. She peeled past the entertainment and sports headlines that so often litter the front pages and found a story she was looking for inside, an update about a politician caught on video accepting wads of rupee notes. She guffawed as she read out details of his political humiliation.

A wrinkled brown skin formed on top of my
chai
as it cooled. I pushed it to one side. Its steam, rising in a slot of sun, made me feel comforted and much less alone than I’d felt in many months. I’d first spoken to Parvati only twelve hours before, but I already hoped I’d be
able to talk to her as I would to my girlfriends back in New York. I had an instinct that she shared something of my own values.

I wondered for a moment whether it was wise to bring up her relationship with Vijay so early on in our friendship. I’ve never been especially subtle or oblique, which I liked to excuse by saying that those traits do not suit the job of a journalist. From what I’d seen, Parvati was even blunter than I was. Because she’d talked frankly about one of the greatest Indian taboos—caste—I hoped she would be as easy about discussing another—sex and love.

She looked up sharply at the question, though.

“That is a difficult question, Miranda.” She returned to her paper. I raised my eyebrows in mild surprise. It was several minutes before she spoke again. “You know, I haven’t ever been to the U.S.—or anywhere outside India, actually. But from what I can tell, you have many acceptable kinds of relationships there. In case you haven’t realized, there is really only one way in India. And I’ve decided to opt out.” There was a finality in her voice that referred not just to the decision but to our conversation.

Later that morning, as she was dropping me off at home, Parvati pulled over at a roadside tobacco stand. She rolled down the window and shouted to get the attention of the kid working at the stall: “
Han-ji!
Hello!” He was maybe fourteen, his bony brown shoulders jutting high out of his white tank top. He stared at Parvati dolefully. She lifted her hand out of the window at him in a questioning gesture, but he didn’t move. She cursed under her breath.

“
Gaand ke dhakan
. This happens half the time I try to buy smokes in this town. These village boys land up in Delhi and act like it’s bloody illegal for women to smoke.”

She pulled herself out of the car. She was wearing another conservative
salwar kameez
set, complete with a matching scarf looped across her chest. The boy gummed a wad of
paan
, sizing her up as she approached, as though trying to place her in the hierarchy of the world as he knew it.

“Ten Gold Flake cigarettes,” Parvati demanded in Hindi. Like everyone else, she pronounced her favored brand of cigarettes “Gold
Flack.” He didn’t move. She raised her voice to full volume, drowning out the horns and cow moos of the market: “Ten Gold Flack!”

I watched nervously from the car window, half expecting her to grab a pack from the shelf and throw it at him. After a long moment, the teenager leaned over, disgorged his mouthful of
paan
into the street, and set a pack on the counter. Parvati let it lie there for a moment. Then she snapped it up.

“Thank you, ji,” she said, her voice full of irony as she used the term of respect. She pulled a cigarette out and lit it with the lighter that was tied to the boy’s counter with a piece of string. The lighter tube flashed red and blue, and I could see the colors reflected in his blank eyes. Parvati slammed her money on the counter and marched back to the car, her lit cigarette dangling from her mouth.

T
he crows were cawing anxiously in the top branches of the
gulmohar
, a tree with fire-red blossoms that Indians call “the flame of the forest.” The tree arched gracefully over the apartment building I’d just moved into, though it looked anything but graceful now, as the winds stripped it of its fleshy blooms. They landed on the concrete with pregnant thuds. An August monsoon storm was coming. The skies darkened, the birds disappeared, and the air became heavy and silent, like the interior of a mangrove swamp. Then the rain came, lashing and slanting viciously at the windows. The drains quickly clogged, filling the gutters with rainwater and stinging my nostrils with the putrid sewage smell.

I saw Joginder dash toward the market, his head covered with a plastic bag. A delivery boy teetered through the stalled traffic on a bicycle, precariously balancing large metal canisters of gasoline on each side. A taxi swayed through the flood, the driver poking his head out the window to navigate, his hair slick with rain. He couldn’t see through the wall of water on the windshield; his wipers must have been
broken. By evening, the last of summer’s
gulmohar
blossoms were bloody smears on the pavement.

I’d moved around the corner from my old
barsati
in Nizamuddin, and although my new apartment was fully indoors, we still couldn’t stave off the ooze and creep of the humid season. The spices disintegrated into a soggy mash in their leaky jars. The chapati bloomed with fungus just hours after Radha made it. Brilliant green mold rose up in a shimmering line along the windowsills. Millipedes scuttled along the walls, and hordes of mosquitoes hovered around the sink. The transparent geckos gorged themselves all day on the insects in my kitchen.

My second Delhi apartment was four times as expensive as the
barsati
, which horrified Geeta. Until she saw the place, that is. It was “family sized,” she gasped—three bedrooms, three bathrooms, each with Western-style toilets and actual showers—with an air-conditioning unit in almost every room. It was definitely not the kind of apartment typically occupied by a single girl. I’d justified it to the landlord by saying that my husband would be spending half the year there, but I didn’t really expect Benjamin to be around that much, which meant I’d have a lot of space to myself.

The thing that I loved best about the apartment was the inverter that came with it. I don’t know how I made it for two years in India without this particular luxury: a device that stores up battery power and switches itself on when the electricity goes out. Because Delhi’s electricity supply is so unreliable, an inverter is as essential as a ceiling fan or a window screen, even though only those in the upper middle class can afford one. For all the discomforts that Delhi’s masses endure, the chronic power cuts seemed the least bearable to me. The inverter is rarely robust enough to power an air conditioner, but it can sustain a couple of fans—and during the almost-daily power cuts of a Delhi summer, a fan’s breeze was air from the flapping wings of a blessed angel.

In my
barsati
, the chronic blackouts meant I’d spend my nights awake, sweaty and helpless to do anything other than pray that the Delhi electricity board would get its act together. After an hour of such frustration, I’d flee downstairs to Nanima’s slightly cooler apartment, where she and Geeta were inevitably up, too; without any air circulating, sleep
was not an option. Geeta and I would push open the windows in the hope of a breeze and watch the neighbors filtering onto their patios. Often, they’d join Joginder and his family on charpoys in the alley, where the pitch darkness was unrelieved by even the narrow beam of a streetlight.

In my new apartment, I realized, I might sleep straight through the power cuts. I tried not to rub it in to Geeta as I showed her around, because I could tell she was already jealous of the new place. I think she would have loved to move into the spare bedroom, but she couldn’t leave Nanima. Nevertheless, Geeta made it clear that she intended to spend a lot of time there. She decided that this was a good time for me to learn how to manage my household better than I had in my
barsati
, which she considered chaotic and understaffed. Geeta appointed herself a sort of household advisor for my new Nizamuddin life. It wasn’t a position I’d realized I needed to fill, but Geeta was determined that I’d be a proper Indian homemaker yet.

The first step was finding me an Indian woman to show me how it was done. That was easy enough: Geeta quickly got a friend from work, Priya, to move into my extra bedroom. Like Geeta, she was a modern girl from a middle-class family who had been “living alone” in Delhi for a couple years. Her parents were only two hours’ drive from the city, and she spent most weekends with them. During the week, Geeta tasked her with showing me how to run an Indian household. This arrangement had multiple benefits, as Geeta saw it. I wouldn’t be as lonely in my huge family-sized apartment, and I’d have someone to contribute toward my rent, which, at four hundred dollars a month, she considered irresponsibly profligate.

Radha and I walked over together the day I moved in. The skinny neighborhood boys skittered past us with boxes of my clothes on their heads, perspiring through their polyester shirts to earn their three-dollar moving fee. Radha lumbered beside me, scowling occasionally in the direction of the steel cage in which I carried my howling cats. She was grumpy: She’d lost an argument that morning in which she’d ordered me to leave my cats behind, on the premise that I should not allow them to dirty a second apartment.

When we stepped inside, her disgusted incomprehension fell away. She stood in awed silence, as though taking in a Gothic cathedral. Then she walked through the empty rooms, exclaiming softly to herself. The place seemed bigger than I remembered, now that I considered that my maid would have to sweep and mop the long stretches of white tile. After she’d peered inside every closet door, Radha sank down on her haunches to digest.

“It’s going to be lots more work,
deedee
”—I was about to apologize when she looked up at me, and I saw that her eyes were shining with pride—“but it is so beautiful. I’ve never seen a more beautiful house,
deedee.
”

Radha took my apartment upgrade as evidence that I was moving up in the world, and according to the traditional master-servant equation, this meant she was advancing, too. Maybe she’d brag to her friends about the mansion her
rich feringhee
employer had moved into, I thought; perhaps it would ease some of the humiliation of cleaning someone else’s floors.