Sideways on a Scooter (31 page)

She insisted she would take the money as an advance against her salary, but we both knew that she’d never be able to repay me and that the guilt-ridden memsahib would give her whatever she asked for in any case.

I ran into Joginder in Nizamuddin market a few days later, and he stopped me to talk. That was unusual: Joginder was usually in too much of a hurry for idle conversation, and especially with me, because I required slow and careful Hindi. It took particular effort today because Joginder had inserted a wad of
paan
into his mouth only moments before I saw him, to judge from the size of the packet and the sharpness of the odor. He raised his volume even higher to compensate.

He’d started a collection for Radha’s wedding fund, he said; had she approached me already about helping her out? I nodded, a little annoyed, because I assumed he was going to try to get me to lend her more money. In fact, Joginder wanted to gossip. He confided that he didn’t approve of Radha’s extravagant wedding plans. It wasn’t the dowry that he took issue with—she had no choice about that—but he did think she was planning an irresponsibly spendthrift wedding. I realized that he was collecting money for her only because he considered it his brotherly duty. I’d never heard Joginder say anything negative about his cousin-sister before and wondered what had happened that he was voicing it to me now.

“Radha is the kind that needs to show off. She will be inviting so many guests and giving expensive saris-saris to each one. She’ll insist on special food instead of the simple rice
dal
that villagers are used to.” He repositioned the
paan
to the other side of his mouth. A dribble of red goo escaped down his chin, and he wiped it away unself-consciously. “She wants to prove to everyone from the village that she is having a good life, because they all know her husband is dead and her in-laws have abandoned her.”

Joginder didn’t share Radha’s superiority complex—although, he reminded me, he was himself high caste, “the Ram caste, just one rung below Brahmin.” A few years ago, he said, he’d found Radha a well-paying job as a cook for a family of wealthy meat-eating Hindus, and she’d turned up her nose at the job. It still made Joginder angry that she’d said she wouldn’t defile herself by cooking meat.

“She thinks like an old-timer. If she insists on working only in
pure-pure veg houses, she will always be poor. But when I tell her this is why she’s living in the
bustee
, she doesn’t care.”

I could imagine Radha’s response: Joginder wasn’t himself a Brahmin, she’d say, so he couldn’t understand.

We were still standing on the street. Passing rickshaws whipped up dust storms around us, and I could feel sweat streaking under the waistband of my
salwar kameez
. A group of young guys leaned against the fruit stand, passing a small, rusty knife between them to peel open guava fruits. Each time they split open the pale green skins to reveal the soft white innards, the tangy smell stung my nostrils. As they sucked the white meat out of the skins, they eyed me almost unblinkingly with the idle, vacant curiosity of the overworked and exhausted. I wondered fleetingly whether I had any wifely cachet left with the Nizamuddin crowd. Joginder hadn’t asked about sahib in a while. But his thoughts were on higher matters now. He was in a mood to muse on the globalizing India.

“You know what,
deedee
? Radha hasn’t realized that things have changed. Caste isn’t so strict anymore, not even in the villages.”

Joginder said that as a child in Bihar, when a cow or buffalo died in the fields, the villagers would call for one of the local untouchables to cart away the carcass. “Now they say the world has changed and they shouldn’t have to do the dirty work their fathers did,” he told me.

In Delhi, caste rules had broken down even further: Radha didn’t like to acknowledge it, but her own children had of course played with kids of unknown caste origin. In the city, they all knew people who had taken up different occupations than their parents and grandparents. There was simply no way to monitor it anymore. Still, I told him that as far as I could tell, caste remained important to many people in Delhi, not just Radha.

“Well … that’s because there are some ways it hasn’t changed at all,
deedee
. When it comes to marriage, caste matters more than anything else. I’m glad that India is modernizing. I like having a cell phone and seeing American TV. But there are some Indian traditions that are important, and they shouldn’t ever change.”

“Marriage is about honor,
deedee,
” he continued. “If my daughter
joined a family from a lower caste, no one from my village would come to the wedding. They wouldn’t even accept a drink of water from my house afterwards, because they would consider us contaminated. And that’s how it should be.”

Radha knew her daughter would have to drop out of high school to marry the mobile-in-charge, but that was an easy calculation to make. She’d sent her daughters to school to make sure they didn’t have to mop other people’s floors; this was just a different route to the same outcome. A good marriage was a more efficient way to guarantee that Pushpa would be “well placed” in life, because it eliminated the uncertainty right away.

But Pushpa was ashamed and confused when her mother told her she wouldn’t be able to take her tenth-grade exams. Radha had always insisted that she go to school every day, and now she was commanding her to quit showing up for class because she had too much to do in the weeks before the wedding. When Pushpa suggested that she’d like to finish school after marriage, Radha was quick to disabuse her of that notion: “I can’t imagine any family that would allow it.”

Joginder knew Radha was probably right about that, which was why he thought she should have waited another year before approaching the
pujari
. He spoke about the importance of “the education of the girl child” with the evangelistic fervor of a man who has come to an unexpectedly progressive decision on his own.

“I make no difference between a boy and a girl,” he’d say. “If my daughter wants to get a job, she should. I will find a family that agrees.”

Joginder’s older daughter, Rekha, was Pushpa’s age. He didn’t plan to marry her off for several years, though; in fact, he told me proudly that he might allow her to take a one-year computer course after high school. He planned to raise the topic of Pushpa’s education at the engagement meeting, in the hope of influencing the boy’s family. Since he was Radha’s closest male relative in Delhi, he was expected to be at the meeting to help negotiate the dowry.

Radha couldn’t bring herself to disagree with a male relative to his
face, so instead, she paid a visit to Joginder’s wife. She told me later that she’d found Maniya in her usual spot—on her charpoy in the afternoon shade, shelling peas with practiced speed. Maniya was half watching her ten-year-old son’s heated game of cricket in the alley with the other ragtag neighborhood kids. They used a stick for a bat and a rock for a ball, which had made for some serious black eyes in the past. Radha sat down heavily beside Maniya on the cot. Although she was tired from her morning’s work, she didn’t pause to complain about her swollen knees as she usually did. Joginder’s disapproval had been weighing on her for days; she got right to the point.

“I’ve always believed it is best to get girls married when they are young. That’s the way our people have always done things.”

Maniya had heard Joginder rant about Radha’s decision, so she knew where this was heading. While she wasn’t sure she agreed with her husband’s opinion that girls were the same as boys and couldn’t help but think that she herself hadn’t needed an education to be a good wife and mother, it was her duty to agree with her husband. She had to prepare her words carefully, though, because Radha was her closest confidante, and she didn’t want to isolate her.

“My husband never even saw a photo of me before we were married. But things are changing now. The villages are almost as modern as the city.”

Radha wasn’t to be thrown off course.

“Maybe so, but do girls wait until they are eighteen to marry there?”

“Probably not. But here in the city, girls even go to college before marriage. Rekha told me, and you see it in films, too.”

Radha was unsmiling: “If it keeps on like this, girls will be the age of a grandmother by the time they become a mother. It makes no sense!”

“Think of it this way—if you had gone to school, you could have gotten a better job when your husband died.”

“That’s different. That’s my fate,” Radha said, in the pitiful tone of voice she reserved for speaking about her widowhood. Maniya refused to take the bait.

“You are still marrying your daughter into a good family despite
that. We only hope for the same for ours. Every parent knows it is marriage, not a computer course, that determines a girl’s happiness.”

Rekha, the daughter in question, was crouched over a bucket at the other end of the alley, rinsing out an enormous batik-print bedsheet under the outside tap. Her mother had always decreed her “too tall” for her age—whatever her age—because she’d never been able to wear family hand-me-downs. Now that she was a teenager, Rekha’s relatives would shake their heads sorrowfully when they saw her: It’s much harder to marry off a tall girl, they’d say.

In spite of this physical disability, Rekha’s parents believed she had good dharma. She’d proved it the previous year, when she was having trouble preparing for her exams. Without electricity in the porch-shack, she’d been unable to study once the sun went down. When Rekha told her teacher, he took up her cause. He called Mago-sahib, the man who for twenty-one years had been Joginder’s overseer, and asked whether he couldn’t find a little more space for the family, at least in the weeks before Rekha’s exams. The call apparently shamed the landlord: He told Joginder that he’d allow him to stretch his living space into an interior room of the house.

For the first time in their lives, Joginder and Maniya had legal electric power running through their home and were able to sleep in a separate area from their children. Maniya hung her saris on a hook on one wall, brightening the corner with streaks of yellows and reds. On another wall, she nailed up a calendar, a free offering from the Nizamuddin tailor shop, which had a different Hindu god on each page. When Rekha did well on her exams that term, Joginder took it as evidence that girls should be encouraged at school.

He recited this tale of good fortune at Pushpa’s engagement meeting, but the father of the groom only nodded distractedly.

“Yes, we too believe that school is important. But my wife will need the girl to help in the house. That’s the first duty of a daughter-in-law.”

The groom’s father moved on to more pressing matters, asking his son, Shivshankar, to tell them about his job. The boy explained that
mobile-in-charge
meant that he managed cell-phone towers for Airtel,
India’s biggest wireless provider. After the wedding, the family explained, Pushpa would move in with her in-laws in Delhi and Shivshankar would make the twenty-hour train ride back to Patna, the capital of Bihar, where he lived for most of the year in a company guesthouse. The groom’s parents turned to Radha and began quizzing her about her daughter’s nature and the dishes Radha had taught her to cook. They had a long list of their own Bihari favorites that they wanted to be sure Pushpa could handle.

When Pushpa told me about the meeting, she said she didn’t once lift her eyes from the lap of her red celebratory sari. She was listening intently, though. She knew she’d soon be responsible for using the right amount of mustard seeds for her in-laws’ meals. Only a few weeks from now, she would be forever linked to the stranger who sat only a few feet from her. Pushpa resisted the urge to peek at him, so for all she knew, he could have looked like a crooked character. Or, she said, he might have even looked like Shah Rukh Khan.

Listening to his high-pitched voice, though, she somehow knew he didn’t. It quavered with nervousness, and she imagined his face was tight and pinched. Pushpa gave her
pallu
a tug to be sure no hair was showing and reminded herself that it was time to grow up. From now on, no one must know how she felt. Beneath her scarf, her carefully oiled hair gleamed, even though no one could see its sheen.

R
amadan was not a good month for the Fitness Circle. Since Muslims are not supposed to eat between sunrise and sundown during the holy month of fasting, they try to exert as little energy as possible. Banks and some government offices set up napping benches for Muslim employees during lunch hour; some shops just stayed closed. For those gym ladies who were getting up before four o’clock to prepare the family’s morning meal, the rest of the day was pretty much a wash. Membership shrank by half, and Leslie could barely stay afloat.

Azmat still showed up to do
jaroo-pocha
, but her own exercise regime, such as it was, fizzled out entirely during the holy month. She’d catnap on the mats for a while, then amble over to the treadmill to talk to me.