Sideways on a Scooter (29 page)

My thirtieth birthday loomed over the months that followed Benjamin’s final departure, only heightening my self-pitying state. I didn’t want to believe that turning thirty drew a red line across my life, as it had across Geeta’s, but it did seem to announce that it might be about time to grow up. It was hard not to think of adulthood as a lockdown, in spite of my efforts not to see the world as a binary place in which you had to choose between being either young and hopeful or grown-up and sensible. And the evidence was mounting that my current lifestyle—tromping around Asia, covering conflicts and having affairs—was not sustainable. I found myself doing battle with India’s marriage obsession: I could feel it seeping into my skin, this urgent need to settle down and find a match.

Much to my dismay, my friends in New York were growing up, too. Each time I went back, I’d half expect everything to be the same as I’d left it, and would inevitably be piqued to discover that my friends now had priorities other than downing weeknight margaritas at our favorite Mexican bar in Brooklyn and making dinner of the free chips. Their jobs and boyfriends were more serious now. I’d missed the weddings of four close friends; soon they’d start having children, and our friendships would dwindle down to nominal acquaintanceships. I knew there was a chance this would happen with age anyway, but surely the distance didn’t help. When I tried to tell my friends about my life, it came out sounding more chaotic than I’d expected it would. I didn’t
know where I wanted to live, or how. They thought I was brave, but I could see something else behind their eyes, too, something very different from admiration.

Boarding the plane back to Delhi, I usually felt more relief than anything else. I thought about how I’d felt sorry for my great-aunt Edith as a child, when my mother told me that she’d been allowed to visit home only once every five years, and that the journey back home to England from India had taken her six weeks by ship. Marriage and children were impossible, and I don’t think Edith kept up with many people in England over the four decades she lived in India, other than her siblings and fellow missionaries.

I’d always considered this a wrongheaded sacrifice, made in pursuit of a half-baked ideal. Only now, as I breathed a sigh of relief at my aloneness, did the thought strike me that Edith might not have wanted those things at all. After all, hers wasn’t an especially religious family, and she’d joined the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society against her father’s will. She’d chosen a life apart from everything familiar. Perhaps the trappings of a late-twentieth-century British life felt like a prison to her, and the experience of leaving everything behind had freed her missionary soul.

Listening to the song from
KHNH
in the car with Geeta, I was overwhelmed with emotion—which was not entirely inexplicable. I’d figured out that Bollywood romances fit well with my predilection for the dreamy and the passionate. Their sentiment is much like that of the Merchant Ivory film
A Room with a View
, for instance, which I’d cried my way through more than a dozen times. Watching Bollywood helped me escape the disparaging patter in my head and reminded me of the transcendent sensation of falling in love—with Benjamin, with India.

Toward the end of
KHNH
, we learn that Shah Rukh Khan’s character has sacrificed his chance to marry the girl he loves. Although they are destined to be together, he takes fate into his own hands, because he knows he is going to die and he wants to protect her from widowhood. I could see why Geeta was tempted by the idealized vision of love and
the notion that there was one soul out there fated for her. I couldn’t think about Benjamin without blaming myself for not making it work, but Geeta had an easy out—she could shift the responsibility onto a higher force. If she didn’t get the hero in this lifetime, she could tell herself that she’d find him in the next one.

Benjamin used to recite Robert Frost to me when I was sad:

Maybe Frost was wrong. At the end of
KHNH
, Shah Rukh Khan’s character is on his deathbed, having surrendered his heroine to another man. He tells her new husband that he is laying a claim on her, overriding the Hindu belief that a marriage ties a couple together for seven lifetimes.

“Naina is yours in this life,” he tells him. “But in every life after this—every other birth—she will be mine.”

In the heady fantasy world of Bollywood, nothing is more romantic than rediscovering your true love on the other side of death. But maybe there was more to this reincarnation stuff than silly fantasy, I thought. Like Edith, I’d chosen India—but perhaps our path really does choose us, as many Hindus believe. Perhaps I should stop trying to mold my future into the shape I thought it was supposed to be and accept the life I had. I turned up the volume, and Geeta and I belted out the song the rest of the way back to Nizamuddin.

T
he topic of marriage inspired uncharacteristic cynicism from Usha, the otherwise cheery yoga teacher at the Fitness Circle.

“There’s no marriage in India without dowry,” she told me. “The boy always asks for dowry—usually he demands it. And if the girl’s family can’t pay, there’s no wedding.”

When I told her that Geeta’s father had said he would refuse to pay dowry on principle, Usha snorted dismissively: “Good luck to her finding a husband who’ll go along with that!”

There had been no such high-minded ideals in Usha’s own, low-caste Hindu family. Their dowry problem had been more typical: They simply couldn’t afford to get Usha married. Her father had worked on and off as a tailor and furniture repairman; like more than 90 percent of the Indian workforce, he’d had neither an employment contract nor regular hours, no unemployment insurance, and no promise of a pension. Her mother’s life sounded almost Dickensian. She gave birth to twelve children at home on her charpoy. “No birth control in those days,” Usha said, grimacing. Only half of Usha’s siblings had survived
past infanthood—which, some sociologists say, partly accounts for why Indian women used to have so many children. Like most women of her time, Usha’s mother had never visited a “ladies’ doctor,” as gynecologists are often called in India, and never had a checkup during any of her pregnancies. She eventually died in childbirth, as do almost a hundred thousand women every year in India.

After her death, Usha and her older sisters had to drop out of school to take over the cooking and cleaning; Usha never completed the fifth grade. Her brothers left school soon after, to start earning for the family when their father fell ill. He died, and her brothers had to dispatch Usha’s four older sisters before they could start looking for a match for her. By the time they got to her, she was twenty-two, already considered “a little old” in her community, and they’d spent all the dowry savings on the older sisters. They were forced to lower their sights for Usha, which meant her first prospects were a stream of undesirables.

One suitor, a village boy, arrived with eight family members in tow. Usha said she was immediately turned off by the women’s polyester-blend saris and the cheap metal bangles clanking up and down their arms. Still, she acted as a marriage-age girl should, lowering her gaze modestly as she carried out homemade snacks on a plastic tray for the guests. She presented several plates of fried vegetable
pakoras
, sickly-sweet
mithai
, and
chai
in her brother’s best teacups, made of porcelain. The boy’s escorts hungrily polished off the plates of food before turning to the work at hand: inspecting the girl. They complimented Usha’s narrow waist and small hands, then
tsk-tsked
aloud about her uneven complexion as though she couldn’t hear their commentary.

“Why does the girl have these blotches on her face?” one demanded of Usha’s oldest brother. He had no answer, so she continued. “It’s unfortunate. The skin is fair, but these sunspots are not good. A girl’s skin should be smooth.”

The women informed Usha’s brother that they “always check the girl’s feet,” and requested that she remove her sandals. Usha, who was otherwise following the manual for the demure marriage-age girl to the letter, couldn’t help but raise a skeptical eyebrow. Discussing her skin tone was par for the course at such a meeting, but she’d never
heard of a foot test. It was hard not to chuckle at the women’s self-important provincialism as they described their obscure village tradition. If the girl’s big toe and second toe were equal in length, they informed her, it meant she would get along well with the boy. If her second toe was longer, she would try to dominate him, and his family would be able to ask for more dowry.

Usha reluctantly slipped off her sandal and pulled up the leg of her
salwar
. The women crowded around her, pushing over one another to get a peek of her feet. Then came the cry: “The girl is good!” Usha’s first two toes were the same length. The family promised to return the following evening with an official proposal.

Usha says she gave her brother a pleading look after they left.

“Don’t worry, I would never give you away to such superstitious village louts,” he promised her. “They would be lucky to get you for
free
.”

The free part was a joke, of course. The idea of a wedding without dowry was even more laughable than checking a woman’s feet to determine whether she’d make a good wife. Dowry is as essential today as it was centuries ago in many Western cultures. Because marriage in India is still considered a negotiation between families, it includes a complex symbolic exchange of goods and prestige.

Thousands of years ago, dowry was supposed to act as a sort of buffer for Indian women, who are more vulnerable after marriage because they become a part of the groom’s family. Dowry was a way for the natal family to pass on some inheritance to their daughter and ensure that the girl wouldn’t be completely dependent on her husband. In practice, though, most of the gift went to the groom’s family, rather than to the bride herself. Dowry served other purposes, too. It was a way to sweeten the deal for the boy’s family, since the girl was expected to marry up and often hailed from a slightly lower-status family. It was also a way to compensate for the economic burden of bringing a new bride into the groom’s household.

Dowry has been illegal for forty years, but, like child marriage and caste discrimination, the law has done little to eradicate it from Indian culture. In fact, dowry expectations have broadened and increased in recent years. The practice first originated among upper-caste Hindus,
but in recent decades it has become obligatory across all castes. Ironically, this has happened even as women have achieved more choice and economic freedom. In today’s globalizing India, parents routinely begin saving for dowry as soon as a daughter is born. Most Indian-owned banks have special “daughter funds” or wedding loan programs. The best sales—especially on big-ticket items such as electronics—are found during the wedding season. Stores do not necessarily advertise the lower rates as “deals for your dowry shopping,” but they don’t have to. The Indian government recently declared that it would toughen the Dowry Prohibition Act by requiring couples to submit a formal list of gifts exchanged during their wedding ceremony. If that happens, though, families will surely find a way to get around this bureaucratic requirement, as with every other; the government is filled with corruptible officials who’d accept a small cut in exchange for failing to note down the full amount offered to a groom’s family.

Dowry has much more serious consequences than petty corruption. The worst of them is the epidemic of harassment and bride burnings, or dowry deaths, in which a wife is abused or killed by her husband or his family. A 2009 study in the British medical journal
The Lancet
found that young Indian women are more than three times as likely as young men to be killed by fire—deaths often related to domestic abuse. One married woman dies by fire almost every hour, according to the Indian government. Brides in hospital burn wards often tell police that they were set on fire by husbands or mothers-in-law after months or years of dissatisfaction over dowries. The families claim that the bride’s sari caught fire or that a tank of cooking gas exploded as she was cooking. Reports of “stove-bursts” or “kitchen accidents” in the newspapers, I learned, are allusions to murder.

In the months after the foot test suitor came calling, Usha had three other possibilities. The first asked for a car, the second a motorcycle, and the third a great deal of cash. Usha’s oldest brother was getting worried—not least because his younger sister was living in his cramped home until he found her a match. When an aunt suggested a Dalit boy, he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, even though there was a yawning social chasm between his family and this boy’s. Usha’s family
ranked low on the caste rung, but untouchables do not even register in the system. Because caste is inherited from the father, few non-Dalit families would consider marrying their daughter into one—after all, what kind of parents would knowingly consign their grandchildren to a life of untouchability? But the aunt explained that this boy didn’t hail from “a family that cleaned”: the boy’s father worked in a cycle repair shop, a respectable enough vocation, and that made it seem a little less dishonorable to consider him.