Sideways on a Scooter (30 page)

There was an added incentive: The untouchable family would have little power in the dowry negotiations. Usha’s brother quickly worked out a deal. When Usha moved into her new home, she brought with her what she considered a “modest dowry”: a bed, sofa set, fridge, TV, sewing machine, and kitchen utensils. That’s not to mention the mandatory clothes and electronic items that her family presented to the groom’s side at the ceremony. All told, Usha’s brothers borrowed close to five thousand dollars for the wedding—hardly a modest sum for an impoverished family.

Radha started fretting about Pushpa’s dowry as soon as her older daughter hit puberty. When I met her, Pushpa was a shy sixteen-year-old, meticulous about her studies and about her long black hair. Each morning, she’d use a drop or two of palm oil to brush it straight and shiny. At first, Radha had boasted about how Pushpa loved school and what good grades she got, but now she was occupied by new concerns.

“It’s time for the girl to get ready for marriage,
deedee
. I can tell she’s going to give me trouble about having to leave school before she graduates, but she’s already had many years of school. It’s time for her to move on.”

Radha had made it known to her daughter from an early age that she could give her only two guarantees about her future husband: He would share her religion and caste, and he’d help usher her into her years of womanhood in comfort. Pushpa was more nervous than excited about her looming marriage. Like everyone, she’d heard stories about abusive mothers-in-law, and admitted to me that the prospect of going off
to a new home frightened her a little. She’d never have dared tell her mother that, though. Nor would she have admitted to her mother that she sometimes watched Shah Rukh Khan films with her girlfriends and imagined finding her own love match. The world of love-cum-arranged was unthinkable for Pushpa. As far as Radha was concerned, her daughter’s husband would be chosen by the
pujari
, and even being selective about a boy’s “nature” was an indulgence they were unable to afford. It would be enough of a challenge to find a boy for Pushpa who met the basic criteria without demanding an extraordinary dowry.

Radha’s worry wasn’t whether the girl was ready; it was how to fund the wedding. It had never crossed her mind to plan an event within her means. If she was to secure for her daughter an alliance that would get her out of the slums, she expected that she would have to meet the groom’s family’s higher standards for the nuptials. Weddings are, in general, the biggest lifetime expense for Indians of all income groups. Middle-class Hindu weddings mean a guest list tipping into the thousands and two full weeks of religious rituals, parties, and dinners—in other words, lifelong debt. In today’s India of conspicuous spending and Bollywood glitz, the richest grooms arrive at their weddings in helicopters; their banquets feature extravagant flourishes such as spurting chocolate fountains. Indians spend an average of thirty-two thousand dollars on a wedding. That’s seven thousand dollars more than the average American spends, even though Indians earn only 10 percent of the American per capita income.

One morning, Radha marched past me into the kitchen, her jaw set. She had the morning’s vegetables in one arm and a plastic bag with a change of clothes in the other. I opened my mouth to say hello, but she spoke before I could get the word out.

“I can’t chat today,
deedee
. I have to hurry.”

She rushed through the
jaroo-pocha
—sweeping and mopping—and worried aloud as she chopped the vegetables. I was half listening as I made my way through the stack of the day’s papers, tearing out articles that might be useful story ideas.

“Pushpa is slim, pretty, and well behaved. My relatives say that in the village, she would already be married.
Ay bhagwan
. Families in the
city are asking for such high dowry these days. And now the girl is saying she doesn’t want to marry before she finishes school. Does she think we can just choose when it happens?”

After she finished the floors, Radha disappeared into the bathroom, where I heard her washing herself under the tap—the shower-head intimidated her as much as the TV remote. She emerged in a clean sari, a fine dusting of baby powder creeping up her neck and already congealing into white lines in the damp folds of her neck. She tugged her
pallu
, the loose end of her sari, over her head so that it covered her hair, and announced that she was going to visit the priest at the neighborhood Hindu temple.

Even though the temple was just a few paces from my apartment, for years I didn’t know it was there. It didn’t look like much: a tumbledown structure perched in the center of an overgrown courtyard with a few Hindu swastikas painted on the outside wall. Inside, marble idols of the gods—almost life-size and dressed in handmade outfits of saffron and gold—lined a marble-floored room. The resident priest, Dharamdev Shastri, was a bombastic, balding Brahmin. His large forehead was painted with white and orange lines displaying his caste and religious rank; he wore a long, loose shirt and
doti
cloth the color of cream. When Dharamdev walked, which was rare, it was with a shuffle. He spent most of his day cross-legged behind a low desk, watching the tiny green parakeets flit through the courtyard.

Like almost everyone in Radha’s limited world, Dharamdev was a migrant from the Madhubani region in Bihar. In fact, he was related to Radha through her late husband, though that was not apparent from the reverence with which she treated him. Dharamdev was highly educated by the standards of Radha’s community: He held a college degree from a Hindu Sanskrit college. The Bihari immigrant community had been coming to him for religious advice since he first took up in the temple. As far as Radha was concerned, there was no one with greater moral authority than he, which was why she’d come to him for help in finding a match for her daughter.

When she got back from the temple, she squatted in front of me, her face flushed, to tell me about the visit in feverish detail. Radha had
never considered placing a classified ad for Pushpa—she wanted to marry her the village way. Back home in Madhubani, weddings are brokered either by relatives or by the local
pujaris
, who operate efficient matchmaking businesses out of their temples. The priests keep a running list of the marriage-age girls and boys in the region and align couples from nearby villages—so as to minimize cultural differences and to prevent marriages within the same line of descent. Dharamdev welcomed the opportunity to continue the tradition in the Delhi temple, because he earned ten dollars a pop for matchmaking duties and
puja
ceremonies. This was his only source of income other than donations to the temple, and a good incentive to be efficient in aligning boys and girls.

Radha abased herself in front of the priest, and only when he repeated impatiently that she should sit up did she settle herself cross-legged in front of him. He pulled out a large, yellowed ledger book, the kind used by Indian government bureaucrats. Seeing the pages filled with handwritten notes, Radha said, made her heart flutter with the seriousness of the hallowed task she’d embarked on. She sat breathlessly before him for what seemed an eternity as he flipped through the pages. After a while, he fingered a page in the ledger, drained the tin cup of water on his desk, and placed a pair of large-framed reading glasses on his nose.

The boy he had in mind was, naturally, a Brahmin from Madhubani. He’d recently graduated from high school and was making decent money in an office job, Dharamdev said, reading from his notes. The boy’s family and nature were good.

The catch was that he’d already found another girl for him. The problem was not with the boy but with the girl, Dharamdev added quickly. His idea was that Radha’s daughter might be able to take this girl’s place—if Radha was willing to accept the astrologer’s date, that was. Radha assured him that she was happy to marry her daughter off on whichever date he named, and then asked, in her most obsequious voice, whether he could tell her more about the issue. Dharamdev seemed reluctant to go into detail, but after a moment, he sighed, removed his glasses, and leaned back against the wall.

The boy’s family, he said, had visited an astrologer to find out the auspicious time for his marriage, and they’d been told he must marry within the next two months, ideally on April 20, to be exact.

“Of course, the astrologer’s date is unchangeable. I went to great trouble to find a family who would agree to it, and then they changed their mind. They complained that it was too soon for the girl. I tried to tell them this was God’s date, but no use.”

Dharamdev said he’d advised the boy’s parents to abandon the match. Radha was nodding sympathetically. She could see that her respected
pujari
felt he’d failed and that the boy’s family probably blamed him for arranging an unsuccessful match. Radha leaped to assure him that she agreed that the girl’s family was clearly in the wrong. “How could they think their own schedule was more important?” She bowed her head. If given the chance, she said, she’d gratefully accept the fate he had in store for her daughter.

A week later, Dharamdev sent a message to Radha’s
bustee:
Pushpa’s alliance was fixed. The boy’s family had agreed to the match. Radha didn’t even know the boy’s name yet, but I had never seen her as happy as she was the following morning.

“Oh,
deedee
, this is a gift from God. They are a very good family. The father is working in a nice shop. The boy earns a huge salary at his very fancy job. He is a ‘mobile-in-charge.’ ”

The English phrase clattered against her mouth. I doubt she knew what
mobile-in-charge
meant; I certainly didn’t. But she knew that the boy earned more than one hundred dollars a month and that any job with an English title implied social capital. Radha, who had never owned a landline or a mobile phone, was going to marry her daughter to a boy in a position of authority in something to do with phone technology. It was evidence that she’d succeeded as a mother: She’d managed to secure a better life for her daughter.

Radha’s gleefulness was disconcerting. But she soon reverted to her more customary state of pessimism: “I only pray that nothing goes wrong before that.” In two weeks, she said, the families would meet
for the first time at the engagement ceremony, where they would negotiate the important details of the alliance, including the dowry. In a nod to the relative liberalism of city life, the
pujari
had deemed it acceptable for Pushpa and the boy to “see each other” at the engagement. In today’s Bihar, Radha informed me, bride and groom are rarely permitted to meet before they have completed the wedding rituals. At this citified engagement ceremony, Pushpa and her husband-to-be could sit together in the same room, although they wouldn’t exactly “meet”: They were not to look directly at or speak to each other.

What was worrying Radha now—because there always had to be something—was that the groom’s family would decide that her daughter’s status was too far below theirs. Making her way across the living room floor with a rag, Radha enumerated all the reasons why the boy’s family might nix the match.

“First of all,
deedee
, I am a widow. And we cannot invite them to our house for the meeting, because our house and area are not good. And then—I wash floors and clothes for a living. If they see the calluses on my hands, they will think I have the hands of a sweeper!”

Inevitably, when Radha complained about her job, I felt like a colonialist memsahib responsible for her degradation and humiliation. The specter of my missionarying relative Edith would rise up before me, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, her Bible in hand. I lamely offered that she could try moisturizing her hands to smooth out the calluses before the meeting.

Radha sniffed at me. “
Arre
, it would take months to get soft hands like yours. Anyway, the
pujari
will be there, and I can’t lie about what I do in front of a religious man.”

She dunked the floor cloth into the bucket and wrung the water out hard. I returned to my newspaper until she spoke again.

“Well, if I say I’m a cook, I won’t be lying—right? Maybe I don’t need to tell them that I mop floors. I will tell them my boss is a foreigner. That will make it seem better.”

This congratulation for my American birth emboldened me to pipe up again.

“I think any family would be impressed by a mother who’s worked
so her children can go to school. You should be proud of what you’ve done.”

Radha looked embarrassed by the compliment. She also knew better than to believe that their admiration for her values would outweigh their disdain for her untouchable’s occupation. “Maybe,
deedee
. But no Brahmin family would want the daughter of a sweeper in their family—not even a Brahmin sweeper.”

She turned up her mouth sardonically at her little caste joke; there is not supposed to be any such thing as a Brahmin sweeper. Then she heaved the bucket of dirty water into the bathroom to dump it down the drain.

When Radha came to me with a submissive and downtrodden expression on her face, I knew something was up. The expression didn’t suit her.

“
Deedee
, you know my daughter’s wedding is going to be very expensive.…”

I looked up and asked how much she wanted. My tone was sharper than I’d meant it to be; perhaps I’d learned something about servant management from Geeta and Priya after all. She cut the coy act and reached inside her
choli
, the intimate safekeeping place for the most important pieces of her life. She unwrinkled a scrap of paper, on which was written, in Babloo’s careful handwriting, “10,000 rupees”—almost two hundred fifty dollars. When Radha saw the surprise on my face, she tried to explain.

“In my day,
deedee
, in the village, dowry demands were much lower. But now people see money everywhere. The boy’s family is sure to ask for at least double what I make in a year. Also, I have to pay for the wedding, with no one to help aside from Joginder. I don’t want to deny my daughter the match that the
pujari
says will bring her a good life!”