Sideways on a Scooter (47 page)

For the most part, Edith satisfied herself with a quieter kind of evangelism. She worked in the hospital and taught girls to read; she helped finance the education and marriages of some of the children from the missionary orphanage. She hoped her work would speak for itself and translate into awe for Christianity. It only sometimes did. Still, I like to think that her work was appreciated for what it was. Today, many Indians will say that they respect the help that foreign missionaries gave to lepers and untouchables. In the pre-Gandhi era, such people were reviled by most of India.

I wonder how Indians responded to Edith. I know she considered some of the children from the missionary orphanage her godchildren and continued sending them money even after she went back to England. I always assumed that Edith loved India at least as much as I did, but it may not have been so. When I asked my uncle Stephen about Edith’s feelings for India, his response surprised me; he probably knew her better than anyone else in the family.

“As far as Edith was concerned, there was no difference between India and Africa,” he said. “She didn’t care where she was—she wasn’t serving India, she was serving her Lord.”

Stephen wanted to disabuse me of the notion that Edith was some kind of social humanist heroine, and he was probably right that I had romanticized her to suit the narrative of my own life. But at the very least, her life had been a useful lesson for me in India. If I stuck around for decades, as Edith had, I might always linger on the edges of the place—either wistfully trying to belong, or, like her, rejecting the idea of belonging.

I could already feel myself bumping up against the limits of my friendships with Geeta and Parvati. Of course, all our friendships shift as we change and grow up, but cultural differences exaggerate it. If Parvati had to be an unabashed bitch to shield herself from the judgments of Delhi strangers, it also meant she was sometimes inaccessible to her friends. Her cackle had a harsh ring to it. I’d become less patient with trying to fit into Parvati’s idea of the right way to act and be, and I found myself wanting to confide in her less.

After Geeta moved into her in-laws’ house, she was scarcely available, either, and her life was changing so rapidly that it was hard for me to keep up. When we talked on the phone, it felt as though we were struggling to suspend our judgments about each other. I couldn’t help but wonder about the sacrifices she was making for her marriage and whether we’d soon have nothing left in common. For her part, Geeta couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just grow up, go home, and get married.

Breaking the news to Radha was the hardest thing about deciding to leave. I knew she’d see it as a betrayal, even if it had always been inevitable. With Radha, everything was personal; she didn’t have space for any other imagining of the world. I’d wanted to find her a new job first before I told her she’d be out of one, but I hadn’t had any luck. By the time I worked up my nerve to tell her I was moving back to America, I’d already started packing my things.

How to dispatch your discarded servants is a perennial expat conundrum. Ideally, they can be passed on to the next generation of
feringhees
. One journalist I know paid his maid’s salary out of his pocket for a couple of months after he left Delhi, until his replacement arrived from England. Unfortunately, I couldn’t convince the couple moving into my apartment that an illiterate maid with attitude was a desirable asset, and I wasn’t willing to become Radha’s benefactor in perpetuity. That would have really been an echo of Edith.

As with so many memsahibs before me, my professional relationship with my maid was complicated by the emotional one. I knew I
would miss Radha’s sharply expressed opinions, her wry humor, and her melodramatic life stories, and I also felt guilty about abandoning her to an uncertain, unpensioned future. In
Out of Africa
, Karen Blixen—writing as Isak Dinesen—developed a strong bond with the laborers on the coffee plantation she owned in colonial British East Africa, now Kenya. Especially close to her heart was an ill-educated tribal boy named Kamante, who worked as her cook. Dinesen couldn’t find him another job before she left, and for years afterward he sent her brokenhearted letters, begging his “Honored Memsahib” to return: “Your old servant they poor people now.” He said he missed her company, but what he needed, of course, was her employment. That said, the two things were inextricably intertwined.

A few days after I told Radha I was leaving, she made it clear that if it came down to a choice between the two, she was going to miss the money more than me. In the weeks before I left, she’d point out things in the apartment that she’d like me to leave for her, as though she were the blunt grandchild and I the dying grandparent. She unsubtly hinted that she intended to use my “goodbye gift” toward her younger daughter’s dowry. I hadn’t mentioned anything about a parting bonus, but it apparently went without saying.

Part of me was relieved when Radha restored things to a transactional level. The friendship, if that is what we had, sometimes felt too tangled for me to know how to deal with it. For months I’d been feeling vaguely uneasy around her, ever since she’d caught me having breakfast with a strange
feringhee
man. I wasn’t sure Radha had picked up on the fact that there was something romantic going on with this new guy, Ted; there was even a small chance she didn’t realize that he wasn’t Benjamin, because all
feringhees
looked alike to her.

Still, I put too much stock in her moral judgments to want to take the risk. When I’d first met Ted, I’d kept him away from my apartment, trying to explain that the shadow of my imaginary husband loomed large in Nizamuddin. It sounded pretty silly to hear myself admitting aloud that I was willing to alter my life to suit my maid’s righteous ideas about the world. Ted didn’t live in Delhi; he was unaccustomed to the complications of Indian servant relationships. When I met him at an
economic conference, he was in town for several weeks for work. I asked if I could interview him, and he agreed, saying he’d also like to take me to dinner.

I carefully prepared a mental list of conversation topics beforehand, which was my standard protocol for such occasions, so as to avoid uncomfortable silences. We didn’t get to any of my queries about trade barriers to Indian exports, though. In fact, we barely talked about work. It was well after midnight when I looked at my watch for the first time. It quickly turned into another of my ill-considered affairs: an immediate draw, an impulsive decision, no thought for the long term. On a whim, Ted extended his stay in India, so we could go to Varanasi together.

In spite of all that, it didn’t feel like a reckless adventure this time. Ted was different in this way from the swashbucklers who’d defined my romantic life thus far: He didn’t get distant eyed or guarded when I asked him about his future plans. He came from a tightly knit community in the American South, and he seemed to expect loyalty and kindness from the people he knew. He had a stunning confidence in the world’s ability to become the kind of place he wanted it to be.

We made an exception and stayed at my place one night before he went back to the States. I wanted to show off my apartment; so accustomed was I to my Indian friends oohing and aahing over my luxury pad that I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t really deluxe by American standards. Even after I’d invested in a set of bamboo furniture, it looked underfurnished when I saw it through Ted’s eyes. Although Radha kept the apartment spotlessly clean, it looked grungy compared to the sanitized, air-conditioned glow that so many American living spaces have.

In the morning, Ted acknowledged that he hadn’t slept much. Like an exhausted Delhi beggar conked out on a traffic median, I’d become accustomed to the prickly mattress fibers that poked through the sheets, and to relying on the thin rays of warmth from the space heater to offset the December damp. I no longer heard the
chowkidar
’s whistle, which had mystified him and kept him up all night.

I got us up early, for fear of hearing Radha’s key in the lock. We were
sitting down to coffee and an omelet when she walked in. I greeted her in what I hoped was a jaunty voice: “Oh, hi! My friend just came over for breakfast.” Radha pulled her
dupatta
over her head, as she did in front of anyone of the opposite sex, and nodded a shy
Namaste
. I doubt it occurred to her that he’d been there all night.

She was distracted by something else: the smell of eggs in the kitchen. She gave the omelet pan an exaggerated sniff for my benefit and looked at me reproachfully, as though I’d left her the detritus of a roasted pig. Relieved that this was her only gripe, I told her I’d wash the pan. She gave me a look to say, “That’s right you will!” and moved on to the sweeping.

I could tell that Ted was uncomfortable, sitting like a colonial governor at the breakfast table while Radha made her way around us with her broom. We paged our way through the stack of newspapers. After a while, I heard a strangled laugh and followed his gaze to the tangle of dust and cat hair she’d swept up in a corner. Floating on top of the pile was a blue condom wrapper.

Clearly, I would not ever achieve Radha’s moral approbation without changing my life in ways I wasn’t willing to. In spite of my guilt-driven attempts to fit in with her idea of how I should act, I knew I’d never fully succeed. Nevertheless, watching her walk with a straight back through her small world had taught me something about pride and principled behavior. I felt as though Radha had helped me realize something important about myself. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was; maybe it doesn’t have a name.

After I made it clear I planned to give Radha a few months’ salary as her final bonus, she started to consider me with affection again. In the weeks before I left Delhi, we’d stand around the kitchen with Maneesh, reminding one another of funny things that had happened in the apartment. The time Radha discovered that one of the cats had clawed the seat off the toilet, which she took as absolute confirmation that the feline was a filthy untouchable; the day that Maneesh saw a gecko
scamper into my hair as I leaned against the wall, and I’d scrabbled frantically in my scalp, sending the thing flying across the room. These silly stories had the same familiarity and tenderness of family tales.

Neither of them asked me what my life would be like in America. Maybe neither had any context for it; or maybe the future, like the past, was an irrelevant blur to Radha and Maneesh. I didn’t want to imagine their lives after I left, either. I couldn’t stand to think that things might be harder without my meager patronage, any more than I wanted to think of Delhi continuing without me.

I kept turning to
Out of Africa
. At the end of Dinesen’s days in British East Africa—the adopted country that she left against her will, to go back to Denmark—she felt as though the place was actually retracting from her, as if to show her its full beauty: “Till then I had been a part of it, and the drought to me had been like a fever, and the flowering of the plain like a new frock.”

Dinesen knew she’d never come back to Africa, and she wanted to imprint herself on it, to claim it as her own.

“If I know a song of Africa, of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was?”

If India had been a man, we would have had a very unhealthy relationship indeed. The place overwhelmed and infuriated me; sometimes, after a hot day of frustrations, I felt as though it was taking blood from me to feed itself. In the mornings, though, waking up with India beside me, I was a girl newly in love. I’d lie very still, blinking into the bright white light. I could hear Radha moving around in the apartment, and I’d pray that she wouldn’t intrude. I liked to let the outside cacophony wash over me, as though it was part of my dream. If I lay perfectly still, I imagined, it would stay with me for the whole day.

The temple drumming and rickshaw traffic that had once echoed
strangely in my ears now sounded like home. Ram, the vegetable seller, with his dusty tomatoes and tiny hard lemons, calling out a deep-throated
“Sub-ziiii!”
as he tried to drown out the guava and mango boys with their competing carts. The screeching breaks of the trains in Nizamuddin Station and the pigeons flapping and cooing against my windows—they all seemed part of me. In Delhi, I’d grown into myself. However halfhearted my belonging could be, this city had taken me in, a stranger, just as it does so many millions of impoverished Indian migrants, and made me part of its rhythm. Now I felt as though my own daily clatter—the smell and breath of me, my hopes and thoughts—had been subsumed into the city’s crazy hum. That was the closest I would come to conquering India, and it was enough.

K.K. picked me up in the middle of the night. A tousle-haired boy with a cleft palate followed him in a van. I’d sold my bamboo furniture back to my landlord and given many of my belongings away, but I still had a dozen Indian army–issue canvas bags filled with books and
salwar kameez
suits to take back to America. My feral alley cats were in an airline-approved steel cage. To judge from their yowling, they were not happy about being relocated to the land of plenty, but I wasn’t about to do a Holly Golightly in the film
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and throw them out of the taxi. I was determined to commit myself to something.

As we loaded up the vans, the neighborhood
chowkidar
s paused on their rounds to watch us with the dull interest of the perennially exhausted and bored. Any kind of activity attracts a crowd, I thought—even at three in the morning. It was strange to meet the watchmen in person for the first time now, after years of hearing them banging and whistling through Nizamuddin’s night streets. All three were tall and lean with serious expressions, their gray uniform caps cocked sideways on their heads. I tried to memorize their faces and then thought: It doesn’t matter. It’s time to go.