Sideways on a Scooter (36 page)

“Of course,
ji
, of course.”

Nitin later told Geeta that Keshava had answered him as if he were comforting a child, patting his arm as they walked back to the house.

“We are in complete understanding,
ji
. We will not make demands. You simply give what is comfortable. It’s not the money that matters; it’s the family. Family first.”

I was sure something was wrong when Maneesh stopped showing up for work. She’d never missed a garbage-collection day before—not without telling me first that there was a Hindu festival or family event she had to attend. When she finally rang the bell to my apartment after a few days’ absence, my first thought was that her husband had seriously hurt her. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her
salwar
didn’t match her
kameez
, as though she’d dressed without thinking. Seeing the concern
on my face, her legs buckled beneath her. She fell to her haunches on the living room carpet and wailed, “
Ai-o deedee!
I have a fever!”

Radha rushed out from the kitchen, and the two of us stood there together, stunned by this tragic display from our cheery garbage collector. I wondered whether she was actually ill or whether it was that she lacked the vocabulary to express sadness or fear. I’d noticed that Maneesh sometimes described her emotions in physical terms.

“My husband is very ill.
Ai-o
, he is in the hospital!”

Radha and I exchanged a glance. Few Indians of their poverty level would pay for treatment if they had any choice about it; the drunken Om Prakash would surely never spend good booze money on a hospital visit unless it was serious. Maneesh wiped the tears off her face ferociously, like a child, and drew a shaky breath.

“He’s been sick for a couple of months,
deedee
, and last week, his legs swelled up and he couldn’t eat. So his brother took him to the hospital in a rickshaw. They had to wait outside for a whole day before the doctor saw him.”

Radha
tsk
ed sympathetically. She knew what it was like to watch your husband die in Delhi’s public hospitals.

I sat down next to Maneesh and put my hand on her arm. In a culture where women rarely touch anyone other than their children in public, the gesture seemed extremely intimate after I made it. I think Maneesh was in too much of a state to notice.

“Where is he now?” Radha prompted.

“I don’t know for sure. My brother-in-law and sons are with him.” Maneesh raised her head to look at us. “What will I do if he dies?”

“Widowhood is a terrible fate,” Radha said, and followed it with a bleak invocation of God:
“Arre bab.”

I shot her a reproachful look. “If they took him to the hospital, I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

Radha couldn’t understand why I would say something she saw as clearly untruthful; platitudes were not a part of her vocabulary. She leaned toward me and said, in a loud whisper, “Maneesh’s husband does nothing but drink and shit. He doesn’t even eat anymore. People have been expecting him to die for years.”

Maneesh had of course heard her, and nodded miserably in agreement.

“It’s true,
deedee
. I’m going to be a widow. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in mourning.”

“When you say goodbye to your husband, you surrender everything worth living for,” Radha told her, just for good measure.

I gave Maneesh bus fare. Radha poured leftover rice and lentils into a plastic bag for her, and she accepted it gratefully. I watched from the balcony as she limped down the block toward the main road, her shoulder bones poking out of the back of her
salwar kameez
. Her husband was dying, but the intensity of Maneesh’s sadness still surprised me. It sounds cynical, but in the slums, death always hovers close. Nearly four million babies die within a month of their birth every year in India. Maneesh had told me that “two or three” of her siblings had died when she was young; she wasn’t sure exactly how many.

It also seemed that Maneesh might actually be better off without Om Prakash. She’d told me that he often drank away all the money for vegetables and she and her sons would eat their evening chapatis with nothing more nutritious than chilis. Still, in a society in which marriage is a requirement, her husband provided the outline of her life. No one in Maneesh’s community would believe for a moment that her life would be easier if she lived alone, even though everyone agreed he was a crooked character. As Radha put it, a life without a husband is scarcely a life at all.

The classical Hindu texts decree that upper-caste widows are supposed to teeter between life and death once their husbands have left the land of the living. Centuries ago, Hindu widows frequently took their own lives by committing sati, throwing themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres during cremation ceremonies. Sati was the greatest sacrifice a wife could make for her husband; the women who did so were honored like saints. At Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan state, the maharaja’s widows left impressions of their handprints in the fort’s inner walls before they killed themselves on his pyre when he died. That was 1843: The British had made sati illegal fourteen years earlier.

The practice is no longer commonplace. When, in the 1980s, an
eighteen-year-old widow was burned alive in her red wedding sari on her husband’s pyre, the country was horrified. There were infuriated panel discussions about “backward India” on English-language TV shows, and the uproar eventually caused the Indian parliament to toughen the laws against the practice. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the strength of tradition in India that the police couldn’t prosecute anyone. The community closed ranks around the family, calling the woman a martyr and refusing to reveal the circumstances around her death. During the years I lived in India, I read about several possible sati cases, but the authorities couldn’t ever confirm whether the women had chosen to throw themselves on their husband’s pyres or had been pushed.

“Woman is as foul as falsehood itself,” wrote Manu in the first Hindu law book. Although he ranked women almost as low as untouchables, even he did not command widows to immolate themselves at their husbands’ funerals. He merely decreed that traditional Brahmin widows should immolate
pleasure
from their lives after their husbands’ deaths. They were banned from remarrying and instructed to shave their heads; wear nothing other than white, the color of mourning; and survive on one meal a day. Even today, some families force the widow to live out the rest of her life in deprivation and prayer in an ashram. It’s a convenient way for them to free themselves of the burden of caring for their daughter-in-law.

Radha’s in-laws had banished their dead son’s wife to the city instead of an ashram. And once in Delhi, Radha had imposed upon herself the strict rules of Brahminical widowhood with the zeal of a true martyr. She never wore colorful clothes, a
bindi
dot on her forehead, or bangles on her arms. Radha fasted during every Hindu festival without fail, and even on normal days she ate only one meal. Her food was without spices or chili and her morning
chai
was without sugar.

Because Maneesh was an untouchable, outside the Hindu system, the strict laws governing widowhood shouldn’t have applied to her. But the lower castes have increasingly adopted high-caste practices in recent years, because mimicking upper-caste rituals often feels like advancement. Adopting the stark life of a Brahmin widow could hardly have seemed empowering for Maneesh, though.

The next time I saw her, she came to tell me that the doctor had sent Om Prakash home to die on his charpoy, because his liver and kidneys had failed. The women of the house had gathered around Maneesh after his death to ready her for the thirteen-day mourning period. They rubbed the red
sindoor
out of the part in her hair; the powder had first been applied by her husband during the wedding ceremony and had signified that she was married. They pulled the
mangalsutra
, the gold necklace that is another traditional symbol of marriage, off her neck. They held her arms down and smashed the bangles off them, leaving violent red marks on her wrists. Maneesh said she was sobbing as they removed her toe rings, because she knew they would be pushed onto the dead toes of her husband.

In the other room, Om Prakash’s brothers bathed his emaciated body and decorated it with garlands of orange and yellow marigolds. Maneesh’s elder son had his head shaved to symbolize his grief before collecting Om Prakash’s ashes from the cremation ground. He couldn’t afford to travel to Varanasi, which Hindus consider the most auspicious place to scatter the ashes of the dead; instead the men of the family took a taxi to Haridwar, a secondary holy city along the Ganges, carrying the ashes with them in a tin carafe.

Along the banks of the fast-flowing river, hundreds of candles inside leaf baskets floated downstream, like so many prayers to the gods. The men chanted a prayer and tossed Om Prakash’s ashes into the water. Back in Delhi, the female relatives dressed Maneesh in a white sari and submerged her into the Yamuna River. The largest tributary of the Ganges, it was supposed to purge her of the sins of the living world.

When Maneesh returned to work a widow, her face was gaunter than before. She had an abstracted, reflective attitude about her.

“I feel like I am dreaming all this. When I did the rituals, it felt as though I had died, too. Everything seemed familiar. I guess that’s because I was doing what widows always do.”

To Maneesh, widowhood wasn’t a way to prove her saintly virtue to the world, as it was for Radha; it was just further evidence of her bad fortune. She wasn’t ready to accept that her days of womanhood were
over. I couldn’t tell whether she was mourning her husband or her new status as a widow, but perhaps they were one and the same.

“I always loved wearing bangles and anklets,
deedee
. I always had toe rings and colorful outfits, even if they were inexpensive ones. But now see.” She gestured sadly at her plain white
salwar kameez
and unadorned arms. “My sister-in-law warned me that if I wear anything more than this, everyone will say, ‘Why is that widow going around like a bride?’ There are new rules for me now. When I attend my relatives’ weddings, I cannot sing with the other women. I have to sit at the back, because it’s a bad omen for a girl to see a widow at her wedding.”

Maneesh’s sister-in-law had also warned her not to chat to any men in the
bustee
, because that would spark rumors that she was on the hunt for a second husband. The community didn’t expect Maneesh to feel much sorrow at Om Prakash’s death, but even if they assumed she’d want to remarry, that didn’t make it socially acceptable. Until the nineteenth century, remarriage was actually illegal for Hindu widows, and the cultural prohibition remains.

I could tell that the topic was making Maneesh uncomfortable. She wanted me to know that she’d only consider it if her brother-in-law kicked her out and she needed somewhere to go. She had a good relationship with her husband’s family, but nevertheless, her brother-in-law would have to be very kind
not
to eject her from Om Prakash’s home after his death.

Maneesh seemed determined to find something sacred in the memory of Om Prakash.

“He was useless,
deedee
, but he was the man I was married to. We were together since I was very young. When I sit alone after I finish my work, I will always think of him.”

She told me that she’d mark his death anniversary every year by making a meal for the birds. She’d cook a rice pudding called
kheer
and serve it, along with fried
poori
bread, on small plates made of leaves. She’d put the food out on the terrace as an offering to the gods in the name of the man she’d married. The next morning, in the smoggy dawn of the slum, Maneesh would climb onto the terrace and clear away the remains left by the crows.

G
eeta decided to shop her way into believing in her marriage. She showed up at my apartment one Saturday morning after a visit to Madame X, clutching a long list of things to buy. She’d been working on it all morning with Sameena, she said, while getting her nails done. “I don’t know how I will do it all before the wedding!” she said dramatically, handing me the list.

Her face showed none of the worry of recent months, though; in fact, I think Geeta relished the shopping challenge before her. If it had been my list, I would have been truly stressed out. She had to find two weeks’ worth of fancy outfits for the wedding period; ten days of honeymoon wear; and an entire trousseau for her new life at her in-laws’ house. Her mother would help her find the equivalent of her wedding dress, the
lehnga choli
that she’d wear during the final ceremony, but she was on her own for the rest. Geeta circled the words “honeymoon outfits” on her list and tapped them with her pen.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than looking for bikinis or underclothes with my mother.”

From my brief experience of Pooja Shourie, I had to concur. It was hard to picture Geeta’s mother, a reserved and frugal woman, in the lingerie section of a Delhi boutique. I thought of the first such outing I took with my own mother, age thirteen, having convinced her to buy me a training bra because all the other girls had them. In the fitting room, enduring the humiliation of my mother’s eyes on my bare chest as I tried on bras I did not need, I’d wished I’d asked a girlfriend to come to the mall with me instead. I could imagine that the experience would be similarly uncomfortable for Geeta, age thirty-one, particularly because India has no tradition of mother-daughter outings to Victoria’s Secret. Underwear is considered private and embarrassing, and sexy lingerie is a relatively new phenomenon.