Sideways on a Scooter (46 page)

“I hope you’re right. Appa is always saying that family is everything in India. He says it all the time, and that’s where the pressure comes in. Having children is the one thing every Indian is supposed to do well. This is the land of the exploding population, after all. It’s like—if you don’t have issue, who are you, anyway?”

Geeta picked up her pace. The parakeets were already announcing that evening had fallen, and she had a train to catch.

T
he driver leaned on his horn, shattering the Sunday morning calm of the neighborhood. I groaned when I saw that Rangeet was behind the wheel of the taxi outside my apartment. K.K. had been on leave in his village for weeks now, so I was stuck with his replacement, whose pores leaked the potent, bitter fumes of cheap arrack at all hours of the day. He drove a white Ambassador, the vehicle that status-conscious K.K. had taught me to disdain. It rattled as though it had been made along with the first batch back in 1948.

As I pulled open the iron gate, I saw that Rangeet, who a moment before had seemed in a great rush to get me downstairs, was now paying obeisance at his tiny windshield shrine. I stood in the street, one hand on an impatiently cocked hip. I already felt silly for ordering a taxi to take me to Lodhi Garden so that I could go for a run there, but I’d found that if I didn’t, I spent all my energy dodging beggars and cars just trying to get to the park so I could get my exercise in. Now, an added annoyance: waiting for Rangeet to finish his alcoholic morning invocation before we could make a move. My driver gestured for me to
be patient and formed his features into a devout expression as he leaned inside the car, circling a stick of incense around the plastic Hindu gods glued to his dashboard. After a few minutes of chanting, he stubbed it out and stuck the stick back in his pocket.

I climbed in, where the smoke mingled nauseatingly with the booze seeping out of him. I should have just called for another taxi, but my standards for safe driving had fallen substantially in the years since my first night out with Parvati at the Press Club. As Rangeet weaved into the middle of the street, his eyes unfocused and glazed in the rearview mirror, I hoped that the gods had been listening during his moment of piety. At least, I told myself, there weren’t many cars on the long stretch of Lodhi Road because it was early on a Sunday morning, but we still needed all the protection we could get.

When Rangeet sailed dreamily through a red light, I shouted in alarm. It was one thing to ignore traffic signals at night. But the daytime streets presented many more dangers. He gave me a rueful stare in the mirror, as though to chide me for shattering his reverent, boozy haze. Then I heard a painful crunch under the tires and a screech of brakes as my face slammed into the leather seat in front of me.

We both looked around, trying to figure out what we had hit. After a long moment, the sticklike body of a teenager unfolded itself from underneath the side of the car, dragging the crumpled ruins of a bicycle up with him. There was a lot of blood on him, and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I allowed myself a second of relief that the boy could stand, though. I saw it flash across Rangeet’s face, too, and transform into anger. He unrolled his window and hollered: “You
behen chode
. What idiot rides a bike like that? You should watch where you’re going!”

In a perverted reversal of roles, the perpetrator had made himself into the aggrieved, and the victim of the accident looked desperate to flee the scene. The boy was tugging at the frame of his bike, trying to untangle it from the wheels of the Ambassador. His eyes briefly caught mine through the car window, and I saw that they were dilated black with fear. Something about the boyishness around his mouth reminded me of Babloo, Radha’s son, and I felt sadness rise up in me.
This slum-dwelling boy with surely broken limbs and a now-ruined family bicycle was terrified of the man who had hit him, because, as a taxi driver, Rangeet was automatically of higher status than a boy on a bicycle could possibly be.

I heard a burst of shouting behind us and turned to see that several cars had come to a stop in the middle of the intersection. Their drivers were leaping out. For a moment, I thought that they were going to go after the bicyclist, too, but mob justice was on the right side of the law this time. They were coming for Rangeet—and also for me.

Rangeet was rolling up his window more quickly than I’d ever seen him move before, but not fast enough—one of the band of men jammed his fist in the window crack and held it open.

“He’s just a boy—how dare you abuse him?” they hollered.

“You’re the
behen chode
! You drove right through a red light, you shithead.”

When I caught sight of a large Sikh with a baseball bat approaching the taxi, I made my decision before I even knew I had. I opened the car door, leaped out, and dashed down Lodhi Road in the direction of the park, praying that I wouldn’t be followed by a stampede of enraged drivers. At least I was dressed for a run.

In India, I had recurrent nightmares about crowds. I’ve never been an especially paranoid person, but for some reason, I worried about improbable events in Delhi, even after the city became as familiar as anywhere else I’d ever lived. What freaked me out—much more than monkey attacks, market bombings, or insurgent attacks—was getting lost or smashed in a crowd. Throngs, even joyful ones, take on a fervent life of their own in South Asia. I tried not to read the gruesome details of tramplings and smotherings in the paper, but I often couldn’t help myself, and then I’d inevitably imagine what it felt like to suffocate in a train car full of pilgrims or to be caught in a crazed swarm of men celebrating a political victory on the streets. That it was unlikely to happen didn’t stop me from worrying about it.

Jogging back home along Lodhi Road after a couple of circuits of the park, I saw there was a stream of cars on the road and no sign of the accident. Later, I called the taxi stand, and K.K.’s brother told me that
Rangeet had been beaten up pretty badly. I apologized for having left him alone to be pummeled by the crowd. What bothered me more was that I’d never know what happened to the cyclist. Did the other drivers protect him, did he get away, was he seriously injured? If he’d been badly hurt, his odds weren’t good, because a Delhi boy on a bicycle was unlikely to be able to afford a hospital visit.

I wished I’d been brave enough to do what I imagined Parvati would have done. I doubt that she would have called the police, because they might well have sided with the more powerful and moneyed of the two; those in positions of power tend to subscribe to the same social hierarchies that made Rangeet feel entitled to yell at the teenager. I could imagine Parvati cussing Rangeet out and urging the crowd to pummel him. Then I bet she would have hailed a rickshaw, taken the bicyclist to a private hospital, and paid his fees.

I was too ashamed to tell Parvati about it until much later. To my relief, when I did, she reassured me that I’d probably done the only thing I could.

“Who knows what would have happened when they saw that you’re a foreigner?” she said. “That could have made them angrier. They might have gone after you before you could convince them you were on their side.”

I’ll never know whether my presence—an obvious
feringhee
in the back of the Ambassador—contributed to the drivers’ fury after the accident. I didn’t look back to see if any of them tried to follow me as I sprinted down the street. Parvati’s words made the possibility seem more real, though. The incident made me second-guess my own engagement with India. For the first time, I began to seriously wonder whether my whole enterprise here was flawed. If being a
feringhee
had crippled me in a situation like this, when I should have been able to do some good, then something was backward about my life. Surely you don’t belong in a place where the best response you can come up with is to literally flee.

I’d wanted to connect with India, and largely, I’d done so; but on days like this one, my involvement with the place felt superficial. My friends had drawn me close into their lives and I believed I understood
something of India. Yet no matter how well I paid my servants or how many Hindu mythological tales I memorized or how many Indian boyfriends I had, I would always be an outsider. Exchanging niceties with Joginder and the rest of Nizamuddin could scarcely be considered a deep engagement with my community.

And while I’d become pretty desensitized to the misery on Delhi’s streets, I couldn’t rid myself of the desire to do something about it; hiring untouchables to clean my garbage and giving donations at Hell Corner simply didn’t cut it. In fact, tossing rupee coins to the skateboard beggar made me feel like what my aunt Susie would call “Lady Muck,” and I didn’t exactly like the vision of myself as a do-gooder Victorian duchess handing out alms to the pitiable masses. Working in a soup kitchen back in the States might have given me a little of the same feeling, but at least it wouldn’t have been compounded by the sensation that I was also a colonialist intruder. Nothing I did in India seemed honest or lasting.

One consequence of moving around a lot as a child was that I had developed high expectations for being able to fit in almost anywhere. If I made an effort with people, I believed, I should be able to establish bonds and feel comfortable wherever I ended up. Of course, multicultural Western cities are a very different matter, and it was naïve to think this would be true in India.

Delhi is undeniably marching toward globalization, but it shares little with London, New York, or even Beijing, and I doubt it ever will. Given its thousands of different languages and cultures, India has a startlingly strong, unified sense of itself. No matter how many call centers there are in Bangalore, Indian teenagers will continue to eat rice and roti after snacking at McDonald’s. Whenever I got worked up about things such as the country’s obsession with
Sex and the City
, Geeta would remind me, “India will always be India, Miranda. You don’t need to worry about us.”

The intrusions of the outside world have also not been uniformly well received in India. It wasn’t so long ago that it was a socialist country in which signs of ostentatious wealth were unacceptable. Now, for every teenager glued to HBO shows, there are dozens more who have
yet to benefit from the transforming economy. There is palpable rage simmering beneath the shiny surface, which seems especially notable in a place as fatalistic as India. Perhaps the unease about India’s urban economic inequality explains some of the anger of the baseball-bat-wielding Sikh on Lodhi Road.

In the months after the taxi accident, the thought of my missionarying aunt’s colonial legacy in India would rise up in my mind, the way bile rises in the throat. That morning, I’d acted like a memsahib, guided by my own fear. Edith would have always been treated with sycophancy, and would have always held herself apart in her determination not to be subsumed into the madding crowds of India.

More than sixty years after India’s independence, my
gora
skin still inspired complex emotions. While it sometimes drew hostility, my pale complexion was mostly a source of great privilege. Hotel porters and restaurant waiters would straighten up respectfully when they saw me—even though I was usually dressed like a sloppy journalist—and give me the same obsequious treatment they gave to kurta-clad Indian politicians and Delhi ladies in gold-threaded silk saris. Even at the Fitness Circle, Usha would shoo the other ladies off my favorite treadmill when I arrived, no matter how many times I told her not to. Usha and I were friends, but India’s underprivileged classes cannot consider a
feringhee
a true peer.

From what I can tell, my great-aunt Edith believed in her British superiority just as profoundly as her servants must have. During her nearly four decades in India, she clung to her Britishness, so determined not to “go native” that she avoided Indian curries and rice, instead teaching the missionary cooks to make shepherd’s pie and steamed pudding. In the missionary hospital, Edith made it known that she liked dinner to be served with proper table settings, including starched white damask napkins.

To Edith, the world was starkly divided. There was Englishness, which was just and pleasant, and there was the rest of the world, rather dark and unhappy. There was Christianity, which represented good, and then there was everything else, in which there lurked great, unspecified danger. After Edith moved back to England, my aunt Susie
remembers telling her that she’d started going to yoga classes in London. Edith exclaimed in horror, “But yoga is for pagans!”

For all the intensity of her personal belief, Edith and the other lady evangelists didn’t have much success in spreading the Gospel in India. Converting to Christianity was rare and dangerous in India in those days, especially where Edith was based—close to Varanasi, one of Hinduism’s holiest cities, on the Ganges. Hindu and Muslim villagers who abandoned their religion had to leave their families and move onto the missionary compound for protection.