Sideways on a Scooter (32 page)

“Why are you working to stay slim and trim if you already have a husband?”
Slim and trim
was one of Azmat’s most frequently used English phrases. I’d inject as little enthusiasm as I could into my smile, hoping to discourage further conversation so I could keep up my pace. She rarely got the hint and would continue gamely on.

“I don’t know why you bother. Your husband isn’t even in Delhi now—you might as well relax.” A little while later: “You’re really sweating a lot,
deedee.
” This remark allowed her to transition to a favored theory: “Foreign ladies sweat more than Indians. Everyone notices it.”

I’d restrain myself from pointing out that if she and the other gym ladies engaged in taxing physical activity, they, too, might perspire.

Eventually, bored by my lackluster responses, Azmat would wander away, eyeing the empty doorway ruefully. When a black burka would block the light at the door and one of the ladies would clomp down the stairs to join her, she’d brighten immediately. They’d sink onto the mats and make what Azmat called “time pass chat” to kill the dull, hungry hours. A common topic was whether they would lose weight this month. Azmat had been disappointed that in past years, she’d actually gained a couple of pounds during Ramadan, because she’d eat so much in the evening to compensate for the day of hunger.

At sunset, the mosque in the Nizamuddin
bustee
sounded a siren throughout the neighborhood, as loud and jarring as an air-raid warning: the signal that it was time for Muslims to say
namaaz
prayers and break the fast. One evening, I followed the wail into the
bustee
, where Azmat shared an apartment with six of her nine siblings. She’d advised me that I’d be unlikely to find the place on my own—if locating an address in Delhi’s middle-class neighborhoods is a challenge, it is virtually impossible amid the tiny lanes of the
bustee
.

Azmat met me on the
bustee
outskirts. She was clad in a black, sequined
salwar kameez
edged with bright orange stitching; a matching
dupatta
covered her hair. The material was gauzy, but opaque and unrevealing. Still, she looked positively flashy compared to the burka-clad women around us. Azmat had often informed me that her brother, Mehboob, was unusually liberal in not making her and her sisters cover their faces in public. He’d warned her that she’d lose this freedom after marriage.

“He says he probably won’t be able to find a boy for me who won’t make me wear burka. I’ll be tripping all over the place! You can’t see anything in those things,
deedee
. I’ll probably have to give up my job at
the Fitness Circle after marriage, too. So I’m just enjoying my freedoms now.”

As she led me through the maze of narrow lanes, I had the sensation of falling down a rabbit hole into a world distinctly different from my own India of chauffeur-driven cars and movie tickets. We were only a few steps away from my orderly neighborhood, but the passageways of packed mud had narrowed, and I fell behind Azmat because we couldn’t fit two abreast. The brick and cement houses were piled haphazardly on top of one another on either side, like teetering castles of cards—cluttered with plastic water tanks, satellite dishes, and laundry lines.

A couple of scraggly goats were tethered to a pole in an alleyway, snapping greedily at a pile of scraps. They looked as if they needed more than another two weeks of fattening; that was all they had left before they’d be slaughtered for the Eid feast at the end of Ramadan. When the siren finally stopped, the sound echoed for a moment in the air, and then the
bustee
was charged with a new energy. Vendors shuttered their stalls of essential oils, strings of beads, and religious books, and joined the men streaming toward the mosque. Others, too hungry to sit through formal prayers, were cramming into kebab shops.

Azmat’s apartment smelled like stewing meat and onions. We all sat cross-legged on the plastic sheets that she and her sisters had laid out on the floor, with the food in the middle, like an indoor picnic. Azmat’s brother said a quick prayer, and they passed out dates to break the fast. They presented Rhemet’s special chicken
biryani
rice dish with great fanfare; this was the dish that Azmat believed would guarantee her older sister a swift match. There was also a dish of ground lamb and wheat called
haleem
, plates of cut fruit sprinkled with salt and pepper masala, and rose-flavored vermicelli in syrupy milk. The family ate efficiently, breaking their concentration only to heap more food onto my plate.

In the digestive silence that followed, one of Azmat’s brothers returned to the topic of Rhemet’s
biryani
. “The whole neighborhood knows when Rhemet is cooking. The aroma is so fragrant that it makes people long to taste it.”

“Any boy who does will surely want to marry her!” chimed another brother.

Rhemet looked down with forced modesty, and everyone chuckled, as at a joke that has been told many times before. I noticed that none of the three sisters, not even outgoing Azmat, spoke much around their brothers. They addressed them not by their first names but more respectfully, by the Hindi words for “older brother” or “younger brother.”

When the brothers headed out to visit a relative, Azmat’s familiar, chatty self reemerged. She moved to the daybed and patted the space beside her for me to sit down.

“You know we still haven’t found a match for Rhemet or me yet, Mirindaah. That com-
pooh
-ter way didn’t work.”

I nodded, and she pointed toward a huge blowup of a couple in wedding regalia. It was the only decoration in the room.

“That’s our brother in Mumbai. He was the first in the family to marry—and he chose a girl he went to school with. Not arranged.” She looked at me significantly as she said these last words in English, anticipating that I’d be impressed. That did not mean, however, that she’d want the same for herself, she was quick to inform me: “It’s not good for a girl. The family should pick her match—that’s the right way in my community.”

Azmat wanted a straightforward alliance, but spending time at the Fitness Circle had made her consider making some changes. Now that she’d befriended women who worked outside the home even after marriage, she’d decided that she’d like to find a husband who would allow her to do the same—or, at the very least, who would permit her to take a tailoring course so she could work from home. Mehboob told her that was probably too much to ask; he was not optimistic that they’d find a boy who’d be willing to invest in a sewing machine.

When I asked her to tell me what else she’d like in her husband, she smiled coyly. Apparently, Azmat often whiled away the unsociable hours at the Fitness Circle imagining her dream spouse. Her ideas sounded far from dreamy to me, though.

“The most important thing is that the boy come from a good family, where everyone lives together under one roof and shares their income.
He also shouldn’t have any bad habits: no smoking, no drinking, and no
paan
. I don’t want him to take a second wife, no matter what the Koran says.”

Rhemet joined us in the living room. I was pretty sure she’d been listening in from the kitchen as she washed the dishes. Although she was the shier of the two and usually allowed Azmat to speak for the both of them, she sounded like a reproachful older sister now.

“You know you aren’t likely to find all those things in one boy.”

Rhemet realized that if Azmat held out for the perfect husband, her own marriage could be further delayed, since Mehboob had decided to combine the two events. As a result, her own wish list was even more modest than her sister’s.

“I’m looking forward to socializing a little after marriage. It isn’t appropriate for single girls to mingle outside the family. And I guess I’d like to improve my appearance, too. Maybe my husband would take me to get the mole on my face removed.” She laughed as though she was embarrassed about this self-indulgent aspiration and added, “It doesn’t matter, though. We’ll both be content with any boy our brother chooses for us. Now that our parents are gone, he knows best.”

Azmat wasn’t so easily quieted.

“Well, our brother thinks it is okay to have more modern ideas, Rhemet. He says it is acceptable to talk to the boy or even meet him for a date before the engagement.”

She used the English word
date
proudly, a cherished signifier of upward mobility.

“He does say that,” Rhemet concurred. “But I don’t think I could—I’d be too nervous.”

Azmat reminded her that Mehboob’s own wife, Hena, had been reluctant, too.

“Now Hena says she’s glad she met him before they got married, because she knew what to expect in the marriage. Most girls are terrified on their wedding, because they don’t know whether the boy is nice or not. But she didn’t have to be worried, she said.”

Hena was the first girl in her family to go on a premarriage date. Even though the event was chaperoned by Hena’s sister and her husband,
who sat at a separate table within eyesight, it was a radical move for a conservative Muslim girl. Mehboob chose the venue—Yo! China, a Chinese fast-food chain restaurant whose ridiculous name apparently appeals to middle-class teens. Although the place was far from romantic, the loud piped music and non-Indian cuisine made an important statement about Mehboob’s aspirations. The appeal of the globalized lifestyle worked their charms on the girl.

“Hena told me that our brother asked about all kinds of unheard-of things. He even asked whether she liked the idea of marrying him. Can you imagine? She didn’t know what to say! He told her he didn’t want to marry her unless she wanted to. Eventually, she became bold enough to tell him yes.”

Recalling the story of her brother’s match, Rhemet seemed to recover from her irritability. She pulled a pink-covered album from the sole bookshelf in the room.

“Our brother’s wedding photos. We never get tired of looking at them.”

Rhemet flipped the album open to an image of Mehboob, exuberant in a cream-colored
sherwani
, the formal brocade coat typically worn by Indian grooms. I couldn’t see Hena’s face in any of the images because her gaze was always lowered, but Azmat informed me that she’d worn blue contact lenses that day, to make her look “even more beautiful.”

Rhemet flipped through quickly. The best part was toward the back: the honeymoon pictures. The section opened with a shot of an ornate canopied bridal bed that the family had decorated with mounds of rose petals. This intimate picture led into dozens of even more private photos of the newlyweds. Apparently, the honeymoon, just as much as the wedding, is family property in India.

Both Hena and Mehboob were clad in revealing Bollywood clothes in the shots of their week together in Goa, a strip of India famous for its beaches. Gone was the loose
salwar kameez
Hena usually wore; she’d transformed herself into a saucy Mallika-style starlet for her honeymoon. To judge from Azmat and Rhemet’s reaction to the album, it is just par for the course to do so. In one picture, she modeled painted-on-tight
jeans and a 1980s-style cropped jean jacket that exposed her midriff. Mehboob strutted beside her in a bomber jacket and knockoff designer jeans. They looked like stills from a romantic Bollywood film: The couple posing stiffly in front of their palm-tree-lined hotel; standing, not touching, in their flashy outfits beside a waterfall; and strolling barefoot in the surf. I mentioned how different Hena looked, and Azmat laughed.

“That’s why they took so many snaps. She’ll never wear any of those clothes again. It was purely for the honeymoon.”

I paused at one of the last photos of Hena on the beach. She was pointing at the words “Mehboob loves Hena” scratched into the sand.

“It was an arranged match, right? They had just had one date?”

“Yes, but they’d already been alone in Goa for a few days. Of course they felt love by now!”

Azmat’s chuckle was startlingly bawdy.

Geeta’s father didn’t hear from Ashok’s family, and she took out her frustration on Shaadi, refusing to sign on to her account for more than two weeks. When she finally went back online, an instant message box popped up.

“Hi Geeta—It was very nice to meet you in Delhi. I am sorry my family wasn’t in touch.” It was Ashok. She was trying to decide whether to respond when another line pinged through. “Actually my situation is a little complicated. I have a girlfriend who I am trying to get married with. Our families are giving us trouble.” Silence for a moment. Then he wrote, “Anyway, bye!”

Geeta closed the message box, feeling more vindicated than angry. It was just as she’d thought. Energized by the knowledge that Ashok might have worked out had his situation not been “complicated,” she resolved to take fate into her own hands. She’d have to do as Radha’s and Usha’s parents had: compromise on the match. In the online matrimonial world, this meant expanding the criteria on her Shaadi profile to include non-Punjabi boys. She wasn’t willing to go so far as to include those from another caste or religion, but even so, she decided
not to tell her parents what she was doing. As eager as they were to get her married, they would hate to imagine her raising children who didn’t speak their mother tongue.

Geeta received several new emoticons expressing interest right away, including one from a guy with the no-nonsense profile name “groom4marriage.” His Shaadi profile identified him as “32 yrs, Hindu, Brahmin, software consultant, USA.” When Geeta told me about him, she couldn’t remember where he lived; whether it was New Jersey or California didn’t mean anything to her. What mattered were the specificities of his Indian origin; still, she didn’t find that out until after several instant-messaging sessions. Shaadi protocol demands that the boy and girl play it cool for the first week of online correspondence. Only after that do they start to ask the leading questions of the marriage oriented.

When “groom4marriage” revealed his real name—Ramesh Murthy—Geeta definitely didn’t play it cool. She called me right away to tell me that his name made clear what his profile did not: that he was from South India.