Sideways on a Scooter (45 page)

As we talked over the course of the evening, I realized that the flip side of being pampered in her new home was being watched over and guarded like a fragile and expensive piece of china. Ramesh’s father, Keshava, was at pains to defend his daughter-in-law from the dangers of the outside world. He didn’t like Geeta to go out shopping on her own, saying that she could be eve-teased even if she was accompanied by a family driver.

“He knows that you lived in Delhi for eight years, right?” I asked.

“Of course. I am always telling him I took care of myself for all those years. But he says my safety is his responsibility now.”

Geeta—a lifelong daddy’s girl—was eager to represent her father-in-law’s smothering as evidence of how much this new father figure adored her.

“It’s nice in a lot of ways—I mean, I always know that someone else is taking care of things, so I can relax. We have a special relationship. He told me to call him Appa right away, the same thing his own children call him. When I begged him to let me come to Delhi, he eventually agreed to let me come here on my own, even though he couldn’t spare Ramesh from the office. I can tell he trusts me more than my sisters-in-law.”

Geeta spent all day every day with the Murthy women, but she didn’t exactly paint a picture of female bonding. It was a household of bored women competing for the attention of the patriarch. In the morning, Ramesh, his brother, and his father would leave for the offices of Murthy Electronics Manufacturing, and the women would commence their daily ritual of cooking, cleaning, and praying until the men returned. Geeta, forbidden to do domestic work, was consigned to even fewer activities than the other women: sleeping, eating, and praying.

“Isn’t that your dream life?” I grinned.

Geeta shook her head. She couldn’t enjoy this life of enforced repose, surrounded as she was by semihostile women who spoke scarcely a word of her language. She said she’d been struggling to learn Kannada.

“Ramesh usually translates for me, but after he goes to work, it’s like silence falls. I can’t understand most of their comments and jokes. We do
puja
together—Ramesh’s mother always says it doesn’t matter what language you pray in. Sometimes I feel like shouting, ‘You can be bored in any language, too!’ I never prayed this much before. These women go straight into the
puja
room for three hours in the morning. They stop only to prepare the meals and go back to it again after they eat. It’s as if this is their only entertainment, as if they don’t have a TV, as if this is the old India.”

A few months before, Geeta had told Ramesh she couldn’t stand it anymore and begged him to let her start looking for a job. The decision about whether she could go back to work wasn’t Ramesh’s to make, though; it was his father’s. Keshava’s response was that he didn’t understand why the girl would want to endure the discomforts of working outside the home if she didn’t need to. Perhaps, he hinted, Geeta wasn’t aware how humiliating it would be for a well-regarded business family to have the new
bahu
“take a job outside” the family.

“Naturally, people will think that we don’t have the money to provide. If the girl wants something to do, I’ll find something for her—inside.”

A few days later, Keshava came to Geeta with an offer. She wouldn’t have to venture out into Bangalore traffic and slog away at a nine-to-five job; she could stave off boredom right in his home office by helping him out with the accounts for Murthy Electronics Manufacturing.

By the time she told me about it, Geeta had resigned herself to the role—this was the best she was going to do.

“It isn’t exactly what I’d imagined, but at least this way I can bond with Appa. The thing is—working with Appa isn’t good for my relationship with the other women in the house. They’re all jealous of me getting close to him. They should be! At least he understands me and knows that I want to do more with myself than just sit around praying all day.”

It took us a long time to get out of the apartment. It was just like in the old days—me stomping my feet impatiently at the door while Geeta checked herself over again, to be sure her clothes weren’t too tight. She’d settled on a fitted tunic over jeans: a modern look, but modest enough for a married girl out without her husband. Geeta liked to boast that Ramesh gave her a lot of leeway; not many husbands would allow their new bride to take off to another city alone.

By my standards, Ramesh seemed overbearing, though. When Geeta’s cell phone rang, it was him again, for the third time in an hour. He kept remembering details to ask about—what she was wearing, how we were getting to the hotel. In fact, Ramesh had made our plans for the night. We were meeting one of his childhood friends, Jayant, so he could give Geeta something “very important” that he’d picked up on a business trip to New York. I was to escort her because it wasn’t appropriate for her to be seen with a man she wasn’t married to, even if he was her husband’s best friend.

K.K. dropped us off at one of Delhi’s gaudiest five-star hotels, the American-owned Le Méridien, a place that takes Indian opulence to a
new level. Signs at the front desk advertise poolside aroma-oil massages, and the hallways lead to a high-end shopping arcade. I found myself remembering Geeta’s coffee date at the Oberoi hotel a couple of years before and how intimidated she had been by the place. Now she strode into Le Méridien’s plush upstairs bar looking perfectly at ease with the trappings of the Indian elite. Clearly, she’d become accustomed to a fancier lifestyle in Bangalore.

Jayant stood up to greet us.

“I was right, Geeta! I told Ramesh that if he was nice to his pretty bride, she would plump up like a good Punjabi housewife. I can see he’s been nice to you.”

I bristled on her behalf, but Geeta just laughed. Comments about weight are standard fare in a country where everything is everyone’s business. In fact, Jayant was probably giving her a compliment, because gaining a few pounds is believed to be evidence of a happy marriage. It was a thread of conversation that Geeta wanted to pursue.

“I have become such a good Indian wife, Jayant. I haven’t had even a sip of alcohol since I moved down to Bangalore. I pray all day long. I am all the time eating their food, trying to learn their crazy customs.”

Jayant was from the North, so Geeta could say such things. He smiled and ordered drinks—beers for himself and me, a soda for Geeta—and when he sat down again made a drumroll on the table.

“Do you know what I have for you?”

“I have a feeling.… Did Ramesh make you shop for me in New York?”

“How did you guess.”

He was being sardonic. Since Ramesh had exchanged his New Jersey life for what seemed to him an utterly average Indian existence—living at home with an Indian wife—“dressing American” had taken on a new urgency for him. He now refused to wear anything other than Tommy Hilfiger jeans; Geeta said he visited the Tommy outlet at a Bangalore mall every couple of weeks. Ramesh was not impressed with his wife’s fashion sense, though. Although she’d worn miniskirts and jeans in Delhi, he thought she suffered from “the Punjabi clothing
curse,” meaning prioritizing flashiness, sequins, and bright colors in her Indian clothes of choice.

Ramesh had wasted many hours trying to explain the American concept of high-end but simple “lifestyle clothing” to his wife, and trying to impress on her that while ostentatious hotels were appropriate meeting spots, showy attire was not an appropriate fashion statement for the modern bride of an NRI boy. Geeta still didn’t see the point in paying a premium for simply designed, high-quality clothes; when she’d bought “Westerns,” they’d always been inexpensive, Indian-made knockoffs. But that wasn’t going to stop her husband from buying his favorite brands of clothes for her.

Jayant passed a bunch of shopping bags across the table, stuffed with Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and Forever 21 dresses. They’d been purchased under precise instructions from Ramesh, after hours of scanning online catalogues.

“Oh my God, there’s so much. How much did this all cost?”

Jayant said nothing.

“No, don’t tell me. We better call Ramesh. He’ll be dying to hear my reaction. He’s going to love it—I’ll look like I’m on
Friends
or something! How can I wear this stuff at my in-laws’ house?”

Geeta had two requests before she left Delhi. She wanted Radha to make her some
khichdi
, Geeta’s ultimate comfort food—a mild dish of rice and lentils that they never cooked in the Murthy household. And she wanted to take a walk in Lodhi Garden before dinner, for old time’s sake. When we got there, after the late-afternoon monsoon downpour, the park was saturated with color. Geeta didn’t seem invigorated by the luminescent green of the lawns the way I was, though. Her pace dragged, and I slowed my step to match hers. That night she was taking the train up to Patiala to see her family for the first time since her marriage. After a week, she had to return to her new life. She couldn’t bring herself to say it, but I could tell she dreaded going back to Bangalore.

When Geeta had imagined her life after marriage, it had only been
that everything would be easy. And that much was true: Certainly, she was no longer responsible for her own health or safety; her husband and father-in-law not only planned her travel but also bought her clothes. But marriage had brought other, unforeseen, difficulties. Playing the part of the cheery, dutiful
bahu
in her new household took constant effort; she despaired that she’d ever belong among them; and when she wasn’t frustrated, she was bored. I can understand the temptation to idealize her life in Delhi, to remember it as a free and exciting time.

“Ramesh was always playing this game,” Geeta said out of the blue. “Trying to kiss me on the cheek or grab my hand when no one was looking.”

“That’s cute!” I said.

“It’s silly. He would do it in the car, or when we’re at home watching TV, and I was always paranoid that the driver or his aunties would see. But he would say he can’t stop himself. He’s like that: always saying he loves me—even when I don’t say it back—and telling people it’s a love marriage.”

Geeta looked at me. “One time his grandmother Ajji saw him kiss me. It was so embarrassing. I mean, it wasn’t a Mallika Sherawat lip kiss or anything—but still.”

An image of Geeta rose up in my mind: clad in the bright red miniskirt that marks Mallika as a loose woman, being caught French-kissing her husband in his conservative South Indian home. I tried to imagine an equivalent humiliation in my world: Perhaps being caught naked by my boyfriend’s father or something.

“Ajji spends the whole day doing puja,” she continued. “She is such a proper Brahmin lady. I thought I would die when she saw Ramesh kiss me. But you know what she said? ‘Let him kiss you! How else are you going to bear us any issue?’ ”

The addition of the aggressively pro-baby grandmother in the scene made it even funnier—despite the fact that this was evidence that the family pressure to have children had now begun for Geeta. If this is a classic experience of newlyweds the world over, the social expectation to quickly create a family is especially extreme in India. I thought of my married friends back home, who said their parents crept around the
topic, dropping hints about baby names and good school districts and the like. That seemed the height of subtlety compared to this. Geeta said that Ajji and the other women now brought up the subject all the time.

“Ajji tells me, ‘All you have to do is make the babies, and we’ll take care of everything after that.’ I tell them that I know how it works—I grew up in a joint family, too, and my grandmother basically raised me. Ajji loves saying that I won’t ever have to change a single diaper, because there’s so many women in this house. It makes me think—if I did have a baby, would I even ever see it at all?”

“It sounds like they’ve got it all planned out.”

“Yeah. I think they expected me to get pregnant immediately, because I’m older than most girls are when they marry. We’ve only been married six months—I still have my wedding
chura
on, for goodness sake! But these woman act as though it’s been forever. And the thing is, I can’t help but worry about it a little. I am going to be thirty-two, remember, and everyone knows it’s harder for older girls.”

It was the first time I’d heard Geeta express anything like regret about having married later than most Indians. When I thought about my experience with Dr. Kapur, though, it made sense. To Geeta, having children had never seemed a matter of choice; she’d always considered it a necessary aspect of womanhood. The thought that she might have actually cut the possibility of children out of her life by marrying late was heartbreaking.

“Perhaps I wasted too much time fussing about finding the right boy. You remember how freaked out I was that I would pick the wrong match.”

“Well, it seems as though Ramesh was worth waiting for. Even if you do have problems with his family, it’s worked out pretty well.”

“True,” she conceded. “In fact, even my mother recently said something like that. It was so cool. We were talking about my female cousins, and she said maybe they don’t need to get married right after college—that it might not be so bad if they wait a little while and have a job first, like I did.”

I grinned. “See, you’re at the forefront of an Indian marriage revolution, Geeta. You’re leading the charge into the globalized future!”

She gave me a bitter smile that looked as though it belonged more to Parvati than to her.

“Well, I doubt my mother will feel the same way if I don’t have kids soon. I guarantee it will be the first thing she asks me about when I arrive in Patiala tonight. When she hears that I’m not pregnant yet, she’ll probably panic and assume that it’s because I’m too old. The idea that I haven’t even started trying yet wouldn’t make any sense to her, and I don’t know how to explain it.”

Geeta paused and then looked up at me with a grin. “She’ll probably change her mind and call up my aunt, and tell her to get my cousins married off right away!”

Something about the vulnerability and sweetness in her face as she said that reminded me of how we’d comforted each other during our loneliest days, when we’d first met, years ago in Delhi. Evening was falling quickly now, purpling the bushes with a light that was almost too violent to be real. I smiled and murmured that I was sure she wouldn’t have any problems whenever she decided she wanted to try to get pregnant.