Sideways on a Scooter (34 page)

Geeta took a thoughtful sip of her drink.

“I don’t know, Miranda. Amit is cute, and because he is Punjabi, automatically we understand each other’s jokes and references. We have a rapport, I guess. But Indian girls don’t think about flirting around like that. At least, we’re not supposed to.”

“Especially not with your boss, I guess,” I added.

“Even if he wasn’t my boss it would be that way! Any kind of flirting seems bad to me. Only now, with TV and everything else, love and sex have become part of how we think in India now. That’s totally new, though, and most girls still don’t know how to deal with it. Very honestly, Miranda, we’re still pretty naïve about all of that kind of stuff.”

In spite of her stated naïveté, I decided to plow ahead with my lesson in the womanly arts. I winked at her.

“Well, no matter what happened before, once you get married, you’ll realize that you can have a lot of fun. I bet you’ll wonder why you waited so long to jump into the sack.”

Geeta let loose a giggle.

“I think you’ve had enough rum, Miranda!”

But I was just getting started. I hadn’t ever met a thirty-something virgin before—not that I was aware of, anyway—and it seemed like a problem I should help her correct.

“When I was seventeen, I used to joke with my high school best
friend that we were the Last American Virgins, because it felt like we were.”

Geeta gulped, imagining me a sex-obsessed American teen. I was enjoying the shock on her face.

“Actually, we were pretty average. I looked it up. Most Americans lose their virginity when they’re seventeen. You’ve waited more than fourteen years longer than that, so my theory is that you’re going to have a lot to make up for when you get married.”

Geeta held up her hand, laughing.

“Enough, Miranda. Don’t tell me anything more about it. Now I know why Indians don’t talk about sex to their daughters. We would want to have it all the time!”

Instead, Geeta steered the conversation back to the issue she was obsessed with: the love versus arranged marriage conundrum. She’d obviously turned the corner on her feelings for Ramesh. If, before, she’d been suspicious of any boy who wouldn’t insist outright that he wanted a traditional arrangement, she was now trying to justify Ramesh’s views against the institution. She spoke in the assertive voice that meant she was trying to convince herself of something.

“Ramesh says he’s been living in the U.S. too long to have a pure arranged type. He wants to have a connection with the girl he marries. In fact, he wouldn’t even consider ours to be an arranged marriage, if it happens. It feels more like love to him, because we have connected.”

I tried not to look skeptical. Ramesh seemed like a
filmy
type, someone who liked the idea of love enough to convince himself he felt it—even if he’d only met the girl twice. Of course, I was a pretty
filmy
type myself, so I should know. Geeta, unconcerned about whether I was paying attention, was still talking.

“His family has been begging him to look for a girl for years, and his father kept sending him bio-data for all these girls, but he wasn’t ever interested. He said they all looked the same. When he went on Shaadi and saw my picture, it was love at first sight.… Just the same that happened with me! I have met so many boys, thirty or more, and he was the first I liked.”

I was surprised by Geeta’s ability to completely rewrite her own romantic
history. In the days following their second meeting, she began acting as though all her doubts about her future had disappeared. She found a way to mirror the narrative that Ramesh had come up with—a story line in which they had discovered each other after many lost years—as though to convince herself that their match was fated. In this version of their love story, she was alternately a girl giving in to a determined suitor and a princess accepting her destiny. I could see the appeal of the fairy tale. Geeta had resolved not to do as so many of her friends and family members had and make the familiar Indian calculation about a match: that the boy would do.

P
arvati was hungry. We’d both been working late, and I’d invited her over on her way home, but she called from outside my apartment to tell me there was a change of plan.

“I need some real food, Miranda. Not
pasta.
”

She pronounced the word with the disgusted emphasis that most Indians reserve for words such as
boyfriend
. I restored my unsatisfying Western cooking to the fridge and slid in next to her in the passenger seat of her car.

Parvati drove us to her favorite
parantha
stall. In the parking lot of the
Times of India
building, two grease-spattered, spindly armed teenagers labored over an enormous, blackened stove to satiate the late-night crowd with thick fried breads. We pulled up wobbly plastic stools and balanced leaf plates on our knees. I was full before I could even finish the Frisbee-sized thing. When I wiped my lips, a long line of
parantha
grease smeared across the back of my hand like the trail left by a slug across a leaf. Parvati tossed her plate into a nearby trash
can, where it was ravaged by a stout rat. I shuddered and folded my legs under me on the stool.

Parvati’s mind was elsewhere. The bare bulb hanging from the
parantha
stall cast a slash of light across her face.

“Remember how I said Divya had started contacting Vijay again?”

I nodded, feeling my pulse increase as she fixed her gaze on me. I could never tell what it was going to be with Parvati. She fostered unpredictability and drama in her life, and right now she looked as though she could say anything.

“Suddenly she was calling him all the time. Vijay didn’t tell me what was going on until a few days back. Divya had a baby.” Her eyes, meeting mine, were dull. “He told me it’s not his. He says it’s the baby of some boyfriend of hers, but now the boyfriend has left and she’s just alone with this baby.”

“Wow.” It took me a moment to register the implication of what she’d just said, and then a moment longer to eliminate the skepticism that immediately followed. After all, a lot of men have told a lot of girlfriends that some other woman’s baby isn’t theirs. Parvati either fully believed that the child wasn’t Vijay’s or was determined that I should believe that she believed it: Either way, it was clearly not up for discussion. I struggled to come up with the appropriate response and finally managed, “Does she have people to help her? Is her family in Jaipur?”

“Yes, they’re there, but that’s also complicated. They assume it’s Vijay’s—everyone thinks they are married and that he’s not around much because he works in Delhi. I don’t think anyone knows about this other man. She’s been begging Vijay to come and help her, and he finally agreed to attend some family event with her. It’s crazy.” Parvati almost chuckled—though not quite. I felt a wave of resentment toward Vijay.

“Has he told her about you?”

“Yeah. She knows I’m his girlfriend—in fact, she wants to meet me. Vijay says she knows they are finished, she just can’t admit it to her family. I don’t worry about his feelings; I can tell that he doesn’t love her.
Vijay doesn’t respect many people other than me, honestly. We fight, but he knows his life would be much more chaotic if I wasn’t in it.”

I nodded in agreement, remembering how well she’d cared for Vijay when he’d had chest pain and heart palpitations the prior year. He’d started feeling unwell after working out at the boxing gym, and then felt progressively worse. Parvati had spent hours on the phone that night, trying to get him an appointment at AIIMS, Delhi’s highly esteemed research hospital. Then she took a week off work to take him to various appointments. When they were told that Vijay had dangerously high blood pressure, she’d dedicated herself to helping him cut down on his smoking and drinking. They’d been spending less time at the Press Club in an effort to avoid the whiskey-sodden political arguments and dozens of cigarettes that inevitably accompanied a night there. She’d convinced him to take a break from boxing, too, because the doctor said it was too much of a strain.

The pair of them had adopted an uncharacteristically Zen-like new regimen. Parvati had convinced Vijay to take evening walks around the neighborhood with her, and to read at home with a glass of
nimbo panne
instead of whiskey. I was sure that I could already see a difference in Vijay’s manner—on more than one occasion, I’d seen him ignore potential provocations from friends who stopped by and started talking politics.

Thinking about this made it more difficult for me to come to terms with the new information.

“Wait—he’s actually in Jaipur with his wife and her baby now? Why?”

Parvati glanced over at the next table of
parantha
eaters, a loud group of newspapermen telling dirty jokes. They were paying us no more attention than they were the rummaging rats, which had now multiplied from one to several.

“He feels guilty. He says there’s no one else to help her. She lost a lot of friends when they split up.”

I was still suspicious.

“So … he’s sleeping on the sofa or something while he’s there?”

“You know how weird Vijay is about this kind of stuff. Dealing with women, even in normal situations, makes him intensely uncomfortable.
You know as well as I do, Miranda—the man is not suited for anything other than an idealistic life of the mind. I imagine he’s staying as far away from her as he can. I almost feel sorry for him.”

“He has too much passion for this world,” I said, reciting Parvati’s own line back to her; she often used it in the wake of one of his storming-off scenes.

She gave me a feeble smile.

“Yeah, my boyfriend has way too much of
everything
for this world. He’s too kind, really—he feels responsible for messing things up for Divya.”

I said I was sure that if I were in this situation, I’d be feeling much less solicitous toward both of them. Parvati pushed her hair back with her hand.

“I was angry, too, Miranda, believe me. As you well know, I’m not some Mother India martyr type. But there’s no point in being angry. I’ve chosen to be with Vijay. He’s made unconventional decisions, and you pay a high price for that in India. But Divya is paying an even higher price than him.”

Parvati stared into the tottering pile of greasy leaf plates in the trash can beside us. Her forehead was creased with tension.

“You know how much I complain about the neighbors and my family prying into my life. But now I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for Divya. I mean, my God, lying to everyone all the time about everything: It must be exhausting. Seriously, I can’t imagine a worse fate.”

A few weeks later, Parvati called with an “urgent request”: that I meet her at the outdoor clothing market near her apartment that afternoon. It didn’t make sense: Parvati hated shopping—especially there, because the cheap cotton
salwar kameez
suits leaked color and wore thin after a couple of washes. She was determined to bend me to her will, though, begging, “Come on, you can’t have that much work to do. It’s a Saturday.”

I gave in when I realized that she must have a good reason, even though she refused to explain on the phone. Parvati didn’t often make requests of me. After fighting with Vijay, she’d wait a couple of days
before she called. When she did, she rarely wanted advice or sympathy; she preferred to play it down. I don’t think she was proud of her relationship upheavals, and talking about them made her feel too vulnerable.

Parvati met my taxi on the outskirts of the market. She was restless as I paid the driver, tapping her
chappal-
clad foot on the concrete, pulling a cigarette out of her ten-pack of Gold Flakes, and lighting it with quick, nervous fingers. Her hair was uncombed, little strands fluttering out of the braid that she usually pulled together tidily before going out in public. When I was done, she gestured me urgently to follow her into her parked car.

“What’s going on, Parvati?”

“I know I’m acting crazy. But just listen. Divya’s coming here.” She lowered her voice as though someone might hear her through the sealed windows. “She’s got her baby here, too, and I said I would help her buy some things for it. Vijay isn’t coming. It was just going to be the two of us. But I got all freaked out about it earlier and thought that I needed to have someone here with me.”

Divya had been in town only a day, she said. She was staying in Vijay’s guest room over the weekend, baby and all. She’d apparently come specifically to meet Parvati. It seemed strange—especially for socially conservative India. I was having trouble picturing Vijay cloistered in his apartment with girlfriend, wife, and child. Parvati said they’d dealt with the awkwardness by getting rollicking drunk. They’d ended up singing 1950s Bollywood tunes—which was a good conclusion to any night, according to Vijay and Parvati.

“Considering what a bad situation it is, and all the potential for discomfort, it’s actually been okay. I had some good chats with her last night. She’s an interesting girl, and I feel like I could actually be her friend if it wasn’t for all this. I think this hardship has been a strain on her. She seems unhappy and somehow a bit … off. It’s like she laughs a little too much, you know? Nervously.”