Sideways on a Scooter (43 page)

“Any issue?”

I raised one eyebrow and asked, in a voice that I hoped was dripping with scorn, “What kind of issues are you referring to?”

The doctor looked up, surprised.

“I mean, have you borne any issue yet … any offspring?”

The phrase was just an antiquated Britishism and a natural follow-up to an assertion of marriage. Feeling a little silly, I told her that since my husband and I lived in different countries, we weren’t ready to leap into child rearing just yet, and waited for her to move on. But Dr. Kapur drew herself up in her seat and eyed me suspiciously. I was starting to feel the way I imagine Geeta did during her arranged marriage date inquisition with Maneka.

“I see here that you are more than thirty years old—don’t you want to have babies? Soon it will be too late.”

I stumbled that I thought I still had plenty of time, but before I even got the words out, she jumped in with a monologue in favor of procreation.

“You know, dear, no woman is complete without babies. You’ll learn. Look at me—I’m a modern working woman. My husband doesn’t make me stay at home and cook all day. But I couldn’t be happy without my children. Here, I’ll show you their pictures. You’ll see how adorable they are.”

She pulled out her cell phone and started scrolling through pictures of her kids. I was now longing to get back to the new-patient form. Apparently, since I hadn’t leaped to reassure Dr. Kapur that I did indeed want children, I needed to be converted to the cause. This took me by surprise: It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might perceive me as a baby-hating crone. Sure, my Delhi friends joked that I was a crazy spinster obsessed with my alley cats, and I sometimes worried that I’d celebrate my fortieth birthday in the same way that I had my thirtieth—with a drunken rooftop party where a friend suggested we stumble back to a more private part of the roof deck to have pro forma sex—but growing up didn’t rate top among my concerns.

It was the blessing and curse of being raised by independent intellectuals; I’d always believed I could make the future happen at my own pace. I had plenty of time to figure myself out, I thought, after I’d had my adventures. I assumed it was the same for my friends back in the States. Now, though, I found myself wondering whether I wasn’t too far removed from the normal patterns of people’s lives to understand my friends’ updated plans and dreams. After all, my idea of a committed relationship was a nonmonogamous three-year saga: If my girlfriends were considering adult things such as babies and houses, they weren’t likely to confide it to me.

In my fantasy version of this scene, I would have pleasantly asserted myself and informed Dr. Kapur that I was glad to see that she’d achieved perfect balance in her life, but babies weren’t my current aim. I wish
I’d reminded her that I’d come to her office to discuss the pros and cons of the Pill and the IUD, and that her baby pictures served no purpose in such a conversation. Instead, I heard myself cooing over her children and thinking bitterly, “Have I proved my maternal instinct yet?” It was all I could do to get her to finish my exam.

I usually saved up stories such as this one to tell Parvati over whiskeys or at the dinner table on trips back to see my family. Anecdotes about crossed cultural wires traveled well, I found. They always got a laugh, and they had the added bonus of making me feel good about the person I’d become while living overseas. I could present my bumbles through India’s social conservatism as evidence of the effort I was making to fit into a culture very different from my own. These stories served another purpose, too, of which I was only dimly aware: They helped me separate the person I wanted to be from the person I often found myself being in Delhi. I did my best to tread lightly in India and to be careful in my friendships, but in my stories, I was always a better version of myself. I was never my bitchy Delhi incarnation, Demanda.

Leaving the doctor’s office, though, I decided that this one wouldn’t make it into my repertoire. If I told Parvati, she’d just laugh at me for caring what some conservative
choot
thought. I didn’t want to tell my mother, because she might agree with Dr. Kapur. In the wake of my breakup with Benjamin, I’d noticed that she’d started rather unsubtly reminding me that it
was
possible to keep your independence inside a relationship. My mother apparently didn’t need to know Miserable Jen to worry that I’d turn into a lonely, hardened woman.

I had my own doubts too. But I ignored them. Still in Super Reporter Girl mode, I felt anything but prepared for a committed partnership these days. When my girlfriends asked how I was, I’d grin mischievously and say I’d been spending a lot of time in Kabul. Among my expat friends, that was shorthand for having romantic adventures with swashbucklers and wanderers—the only type to be found in Afghanistan. We used to say we loved going to Kabul for the parties, and we weren’t joking.

In the years after the invasion, the country filled up with young adventurous internationals—security guys, journalists, and the UN types
we cynically called “democracy junkies.” They worked in high-security compounds under great strain, and they let loose like nowhere else in Asia. Although alcohol is illegal under the Afghan constitution, everyone ignored that regulation in the chaos of the early years of the war. With foreigners flocking into the country to fight and rebuild, Afghanistan was willing to overlook all kinds of infractions. For years, you could buy cans of Heineken from Kabul street vendors with long beards and Muslim prayer caps.

I was generally pretty cautious in Afghanistan; although I embedded with the military several times, I never followed them into combat. It isn’t possible to avoid risk in Kabul, though, and one of the small dangers I was reluctant to eliminate from my life was spending evenings at L’Atmosphère. Owned by Frenchmen and notorious for its late-night boozy pool parties, the restaurant was a perfect target for insurgents. As I waited in the alley on the wrong side of L’Atmosphère’s protective blast walls, I couldn’t help but think that my headscarf wouldn’t help me if the wrong person was to drive past. The sluggish armed guard at the compound entrance moved excrutiatingly slowly as he patted us down for weapons and checked our passports to make sure there were no Afghans among us—they weren’t allowed inside places that served alcohol.

Inside was a magical green garden that seemed designed to make you forget the stress of a conflict zone. It was dotted with lounge chairs and hammocks, and there was soccer on the TV and European lounge music in the air. During the winter months, guests clustered around the fire pit with glasses of red wine, and on summer nights, there were couples flirting in the pool. The menu featured foie gras and fish with lobster sauce—items that had their provenance hundreds of miles from the Hindu Kush and required a remarkably complex supply chain to make it there. We had UN and NATO planes to thank for the Frenchmen’s extensive wine list, which was better than anything I’d seen in restaurants in Delhi or Mumbai.

Because Afghans were not permitted to indulge in the pleasures of L’Atmosphère, most of them imagined it a den of iniquity; foreigners had already acquired a reputation for depravity among Afghans. My
translator, Najib, whispered that his neighbor had seen white women sunbathing naked out in the open. He’d heard that Americans—in Afghanistan, all foreigners are called Americans—held regular sex orgies in their guesthouses. It was hard to know where wild imaginings left off and truth began, because in Kabul, there was something of the lawless liberality of the Roaring Twenties in interwar Europe.

The city was infamous for its “Chinese restaurants,” in which food was not the item for sale; these brothels were regularly frequented, we heard, by American security contractors. I don’t know if the rumors of orgies were true, but every foreigner in Kabul did seem to be sleeping with every other one; there were stories of unhinged parties, stormy affairs, broken marriages, and high-drama scenes at the airport.

After a couple of months of reporting from Kabul, I found myself even more susceptible to high-drama romances. Recently I’d been indulging in an affair that was all boil and no simmer, to adapt the Indian phrase to my circumstance. Jehan was an Indian-origin guy with a smart-alecky charm that made my knees buckle. When I met him, he’d been working on Afghan economic development projects in Kabul for a couple of years. He seemed sane and less intense than other men I met there, though I guess that was a fairly low standard.

We were both determined to believe that this was more than just another war-zone fling. After a few weeks together at his Kabul guesthouse, we were both telling our parents about each other. I loved the image of myself I saw reflected in his eyes. He thought my sardonic comments were hilarious and my ambitions profound; he described me as adorable and delicate and sweet—not adjectives I’d often had applied to me.

The stream of compliments didn’t last. After I went back to Delhi, Jehan visited a couple of times; during each visit, he slipped a little farther off the pedestal. Everything I knew of him had been exaggerated into wonderment by the intense circumstances of our meeting. Now he seemed controlling and closed-minded, and I heard harshness in his voice when he spoke to me—or was I just creating faults where there were none because he was leaving?

Worse than realizing I might be wrong about him, though, was
watching myself come crashing down in his estimation. At the end of his second visit, he said something sharp over dinner, and I could tell when he looked at me that his tenderness had drained away. It seemed terribly clear that we’d been fooling ourselves. To my amazement, I was suddenly crying, and we had to abandon our plates of pasta. I remember thinking that our waiter there had a much more sympathetic face than my boyfriend.

Climbing back into the car with K.K. after my appointment with Dr. Kapur, I slammed the door against my knee, giving myself a mighty bruise. K.K. glanced at me, alarmed by the violence in my voice as I let out an ugly Hindi curse. Sometimes when he looked at me in his rearview mirror, I felt as though he could see into my soul, straight down to the most despairing parts of me.

“Okay, Miss Mirindaah?”

I couldn’t bring myself to turn up the ends of my mouth into a smile even for my beloved driver.

“No, K.K. Let’s just go home.”

Married life in India is not complete without the pressure to procreate. Pushpa’s
saas
despaired that the girl had crossed the one-year marriage mark without conceiving. Even though her husband lived in another state eleven months of the year, even though she was only eighteen and had many fertile years ahead of her, Pushpa got no reprieve from the duty to quickly bear offspring.

At the Fitness Center, Usha told me that her own mother-in-law had begun dropping hints a mere three days after her wedding.

“At first, she’d just say things like ‘I hope my grandson will have your fair coloring.’ It sounded like a compliment, but it still made me worry.” She laughed nervously, as she always did when she was saying something that could be interpreted as unkind. “That was nothing. When I still wasn’t pregnant three months later, my
saas
started to get nasty. She’d moan to my husband, ‘What terrible fate to marry you to a girl who refuses to bear me a grandson!’ Of course I could hear her, and she knew it. We live in a tiny space.”

It was not an accident that Usha’s
saas
was specific about the gender of the grandchild she expected. In the words of the Bollywood film
Jodhaa Akbar
, “a marriage is complete only when there’s an heir.” Until recently, Indian law restricted women’s ability to inherit property, and even now, families almost always pass it on to their sons. In a country where the vast majority of senior citizens will never receive a pension, sons represent social security, because it’s considered their duty to care for their parents in old age. And, of course, families with sons receive instead of pay out dowry.

India’s son preference is actually better described as a daughter dispreference. The latest Indian census data found only 927 girls for every thousand boys nationwide. India is in the center of an epidemic of female feticide, and, strangely, modern technology is to blame. When ultrasounds became available in the 1980s, “doctors” opened private clinics all over rural India that advertised sex-determination tests—a miracle solution to the perennial desire for sons. Low-income villagers were encouraged to take fate into their own hands and abort the fetus if it was female.

The UN says two thousand girls are aborted every day now in India. In some parts of the country, there’s such a shortage of marriage-age girls that families are forced to share the same wife among several men or import brides from other states. I reported from one village in eastern India where every other household had a
paro
, or outside bride. Sex-selective abortion is now a crime in India. But although doctors can be imprisoned for revealing the gender of a fetus, they’ll offer hints after an ultrasound instead. They will say, “Your child will be beautiful like Lakshmi,” if it’s a girl, or they’ll make a
V
sign for victory if it’s a boy.

Once Usha got pregnant, she again annoyed her
saas
by refusing to take a sex-determination test. She’d read enough articles in
Grihshobha
magazine to know that it wasn’t practical to keep popping babies out in the hopes of having a boy, as her own mother had. But she said she couldn’t have aborted a girl child. Luckily, her “very-very nice” husband agreed that they should keep the child no matter the gender. Usha admitted that she nevertheless felt a pang when the nurse told her she’d given birth to a girl—in spite of herself.

“Not because I think boys are better,
deedee
. I just knew my
saas
would give me more trouble. And it was true: Even before I left the hospital, she reminded me about my duty to bear her a grandson. ‘How can I die in peace unless I know that my son has a son to take care of him in old age?’ That’s the kind of thing she says.”