Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  What astonished me was that India’s poor had reconciled themselves to it. In my first couple of years in India, I routinely wondered why there hadn’t ever been a true caste- or class-based revolution. Eventually I decided that it could be explained by the Hindu belief in dharma and reincarnation. Many of India’s poor are simply getting through this life in the hope and expectation that in the next one, it will be them in the back of the Mercedes and the rich man will be crouched under a plastic tarp in torn clothes. It makes it easier to accept things as they are, and it certainly creates a powerful incentive to live a moral life. Dharma didn’t make the daily inequalities okay for me, though.

  I reserved a special dread for the traffic triangle near Nizamuddin, a gathering point for Delhi’s maimed and impoverished, which I called Hell Corner. Once, when an aggressive, brawny adolescent beggar girl tugged at my purse through the rickshaw, I actually slapped her across the face. I don’t remember whether I hit her hard, but what I do recall is her laughter, loud and bitter. In bed that night, I remember thinking, I have reached an all-time low: I actually struck a beggar child. I felt sadder about myself and the world than I had in a long time. After that, when I was driving through the intersection with K.K., I’d urge him to floor it through a yellow light to avoid getting stuck. I couldn’t force myself to do as other passengers did and ignore the beggars with a straight-ahead stare.

  One evening, Parvati and I got caught there at a red, and she rolled down her window to hand out a few coins. Like most middle-class Indians, she made regular donations to beggars; it’s an essential social duty in both Hinduism and Islam. A woman with a badly burned face approached the car. I hated how the toddler in her arms had learned to mimic her imploring gestures. Parvati told me that most of Delhi’s beggars belong to street rings and hand over their earnings to gang leaders at the end of each day. The leaders force the women to carry babies and sometimes deliberately disfigure the children, she said; they keep the kids hungry so they are more likely to cry. Looking out at the assembled miserable on the corner that day, Parvati seemed as perturbed as I was.

  “Just look at this! Handing out rupees to whoever comes up to the car isn’t a good solution. We should come up with a better system, a way to decide who to give to.”

  For starters, Parvati declared, no more donations to women holding babies—unless the women also bore obvious signs of domestic abuse. We should stop giving to the plucky street kids, because they were almost always attached to a gang, she said. We agreed that lepers and the limbless should always get our coins. Even though many of them also work for the mafia, they have little choice other than to beg, we reasoned.

  It was a completely arbitrary notion of right and wrong, of course, but I was glad to impose some kind of order. The new rules made me feel good about contributing to the skateboard beggar, my longtime favorite on Hell Corner. He’d lost both his legs to some terrible accident, and his beard had a lot of gray in it. He scooted himself between the wheels of the stopped cars on a self-styled skateboard with fierce, determined energy. Because he couldn’t reach the car window, I’d drop the coins onto the street, and he’d scramble to pick them up before the light changed. Even if the cars were moving toward him to get across the light, he always touched the coins to his head in a gesture of thanks.

  Geeta guided her little car through the pandemonium of Hell Corner and turned into the well-groomed driveway of the Oberoi hotel. We waited in the lobby, perched stiffly on uncomfortable pastel-print chairs. I averted my eyes from passing guests, hoping I wouldn’t run into one of my sources, clad as I was in my village-girl costume. I wondered whether Ashok’s family was part of the social elite, or whether they’d chosen the place as a conceit. With dowry at the center of marriage negotiations, money is an unavoidable aspect of Indian matchmaking. Presenting an image of wealth is one way to push the girl’s family for higher dowry gifts. Geeta’s liberal Punjabi parents were extremely unusual in insisting that they wouldn’t pay dowry at all; that was how it had been for generations on Geeta’s mother’s side. Still, if Ashok’s people had aimed to impress Geeta with their choice of venue, they’d succeeded. She twiddled a strand of her hair into a strange curl that I didn’t have time to fix before they were standing in front of us.

  The boy was short and pleasant looking in an unremarkable way. It was his glitzy sister who caught my attention. One glance at her expensive silk tunic and Italian shoes and I knew Geeta had miscalculated—these people were more upscale than we had anticipated. Next to her, I looked as though I’d been milking cows all afternoon. She introduced herself as Maneka, proffering a carefully manicured hand; I wanted to hide my own ten-rupee nail job behind my back. With a flick of her tinted hair, she glided down the hall to the swanky coffee shop, and we followed.

  Inside, I told them I would get the drinks—I figured it was appropriate, since I was sort of playing the role of Geeta’s father. Standing at the stainless steel counter, I thought how different this atmosphere was from the Barista coffee shop where Geeta had met Aditya, the hand-holder. Barista’s best-selling items are American-style brownies and sugary smoothies; customers at the Oberoi expect espresso drinks and fresh almond croissants.

  I glanced back at the table. It looked as though the meeting was off to a bad start. Geeta was twisting her hair again, and Ashok was straight backed and tense in the wrought iron chair opposite her. It was a weird, contemporary version of the feudal village scene, in which pre-pubescent boy and girl are seated on opposite cushions, hands and eyes lowered, as their fathers negotiate their futures over their heads. I clonked my knee against the marble table as I sat down, spilling our drinks, and promised myself I would keep my mouth shut.

  Maneka seemed perfectly comfortable, however. With a crisp copy of Geeta’s bio-data laid out in front of her on top of a manila folder, she conducted the meeting as if Geeta were one of thousands of long-shot candidates for a coveted job.

  “Where did you go to school?” “What rank did you graduate?” “How long have you been working in Delhi?”

  Gone was the Punjabi princess I knew; Geeta responded obediently without raising her eyes from her interlocked fingers. Her voice was so low I had to strain to hear her. When Maneka asked about her cooking skills, she looked up at her from beneath her eyelids like a coy fifties Bollywood starlet.

  “Well, I love making the Punjabi favorites. My father always praises my paranthas. In fact, he says they are better even than my mother’s. I am not sure whether I should believe him, though.” She giggled a little, showing off that infectious Geeta charm for the first time since we’d sat down.

  I knew she hadn’t made a parantha in years; her ability to praise herself under duress and to stay on message was impressive. Even today, many matrimonial ads call for a “homely” woman, a term that means “domestic” in Indian English. Geeta’s task was to prove she was a nurturing caretaker, neither careerist nor over-Westernized, but she also had to be careful not to come off as unsophisticated to her savvy interviewer.

  When Maneka finished her inquisition, she turned to Ashok as though he were her errant celebrity and she his public relations guru.

  “Any follow-up questions?”

  Ashok forced himself to raise his eyes to Geeta across the table, and I got a good look at him. He was probably a nice, easygoing guy in real life, I thought. Scrutinized by three pairs of eyes, he seemed to struggle to come up with a reply.

  “Well … I guess I would like to ask you some things about your personality. Like … what is your favorite color?”

  He was not being ironic. Here was a grown man asking his potential wife a question that hadn’t been asked of me since grade school, and Geeta leaped in with a coquettish answer, as though she’d been waiting for the question all evening.

  “Well, I’m wearing orange. So probably you can guess it is a favorite color of mine. What about you?”

  Ashok, a technology analyst with an MBA degree, had a little speech about his favorite
color, too.

  “Many boys like blue or green, but I think I like brown, because it is the color of most people’s eyes.” Was this a subtle stab at flirtation? His next question confirmed it. “You have lived in Delhi all these years, so I was wondering what you do for fun. I don’t even know what people do when they go out at night here anymore.”

  A shadow passed across Geeta’s evenly composed face. I could imagine she was thinking that there was no correct answer to this question. She didn’t want to seem like a village naïf, but admitting she had a social life could open up all kinds of problematic questions: Did she go out with boys as well? Had she ever had a “friend”?

  “Not much. I can’t go out very much because I have to watch Nanima. She’s my main social activity, I guess! And I sleep a lot on weekends. Ask Miranda, she knows how much I love to sleep.”

  I nodded knowledgeably in agreement, my one and only contribution to the conversation so far. But Ashok pressed on, making me wonder what his real motivation was: “You don’t go to clubs or anything? I’m only asking because that’s what we do in California—you know, groups of guys and girls together.”

  My palms were sweating. I avoided Geeta’s eyes, but nothing could have distracted her. The girl has fortitude, I thought to myself.

  “Sometimes I go to a movie with a girl from work. Not often, though. I have a simple life.”

  Maneka had shifted her gaze from Geeta to her brother. Her lip was twitching with barely disguised hostility. She picked up her cup and took a final sip of her latte before filling the silence that followed Geeta’s answer. Her eyes remained on her brother, though, as she addressed Geeta.

  “In the United States, people do things differently. And I’m sure you know that even here in India people have all kinds of relationships. But Ashok’s tired of all that clubbing-clubbing. That’s why we are looking for an arranged match.”

  A hint of triumph flashed across Geeta’s face.

  “Actually, I too believe in the arranged way. I think it works better than a love match. I guess you can say I am quite traditional.”

  But the meeting was over for Maneka. She tapped the paper into the folder.

  “Of course, my brother has many good proposals. As you know from his bio-data, he is making a high salary in California. He has an MBA from a top university, and our family is well connected.” She stood up. “So you can imagine that we have plenty of families expressing interest. We’ll contact your father if we want to pursue.”

  Ashok gave Geeta an apologetic glance—or perhaps it was smug?—and he and his sister swept toward the hotel’s front entrance. Geeta and I took the side door out to the lot where the “self-driven cars” are parked. She navigated us into a line of sleek chauffeur-driven vehicles waiting to exit the hotel driveway. I ran through the meeting in my mind, trying to decide whether it would upset Geeta to talk about it. When I couldn’t hold out any longer, I spat out: “What was up with her? Was that normal?”

  Geeta looked a little surprised at the strength of my reaction.

  “She was just being protective of her younger brother, Miranda. Plus, she probably felt like she had to act the way her father would have, you know? It’s weird for everyone, doing these meetings in a pretend traditional way. No one knows how to act.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected her to ask you so many questions about your cooking. She seems way too modern to be asking all that stuff.”

  “Yeah, I was a little surprised about that, too,” Geeta replied mildly. “Obviously they want a conventional type. But if you thought that meeting was bad—you have no idea. It’s so much worse when the parents are there. Maneka didn’t even ask about my past. And plus, the boy was nice. You should see some of the moorks I have met.”

  “So you liked Ashok?” There was surprise in my voice. He’d seemed kind of confused and cowardly.

  “He was cute and seemed to have a nice nature. But I’m pretty sure they want a girl from a rich family.”

  “They seethed money. We should have made them buy the coffee!”

  Geeta shot me a smile as we swerved out into the city traffic. The Hindi pop on the radio was a dull throb between us.

  “You know what? Maybe Ashok has a girlfriend back in California. I bet that’s it—his family won’t let him marry her.” It sounded like a plot from a melodramatic TV family drama, but Geeta’s conviction grew as she spoke. “That would explain everything. I bet his family is pushing him to do an arranged match, and that’s why she didn’t ask about my past—she didn’t want to risk having to answer the same kinds of questions about him.”

  A familiar song came on the radio. It took me a moment to identify which movie it was from—was it DDLJ? Or KKKG, that movie we’d recently seen with Amitabh Bachchan? Then I realized: It was from KHNH (Tomorrow May Never Come). In the video for the first love song, the lovers frolic through Times Square as they realize what they are feeling. As corny as the scene is, it always made me think of Benjamin driving me through Manhattan on his motorcycle one Sunday morning, when the streets were empty and it felt as though the whole city belonged to us. It was strange to remember that hopeful, fresh-faced time, from here inside the calloused body of Super Reporter Girl.

  I’d recently returned to Delhi from covering the Indian Ocean tsunami and its aftermath. When the quake hit, the day after Christmas, I’d abandoned my family vacation, deaf to my mother’s pleas, and taken the first flight out to Sri Lanka, where the death toll was rapidly rising. Sri Lanka is a tiny teardrop-shaped island nation off the southern coast of India, and the tsunami had turned it inside out. Along the southern coast, train tracks were twisted up into tree branches like a roller coaster gone wrong. A woman’s nightgown fluttered like a pink flag above a fisherman’s leveled shack. The bloated, stinking carcasses of buffalo floated in ocean lagoons. In the relief camps, everyone was drunk on moonshine.

  “Why should I talk to you? My whole family is dead. What can you give me?” the fishermen would ask.

  I’d give them the stock journalist answer—that hearing their story could help influence the U.S. government to send more aid. There was truth to this reasoning, but it still felt like a cheap lie. After weeks of reporting on the disaster, I’d started to lose faith in the very mission of journalism. In a hotel bar in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, my journalist friends talked about where the “sexiest” part of the story was. What they meant was where the most bodies were. I felt as though we were all competing with one another to squeeze painful tales out of as many victims as we could find and get the grisliest stories first.

  In one relief camp, my driver—who doubled as my translator, to save money—helped me interview a man who’d lost everyone except for one lanky preteen daughter, who crept over to me as I talked to him and put her head in my lap. I stayed stroking her hair long after I finished talking to her father, even though my driver had been agitating that we had to find somewhere to stay for the night before it got dark. When she sat up, my jeans were damp from her tears. I gave her money, even though I knew I shouldn’t since I planned to use her father’s interview on the radio. In spite of the intimacy of that moment, I can’t even picture her face anymore. It has run together with all the other lyrical, brokenhearted Sri Lankan faces.

  My friends emailed from New York, saying they’d been hearing me on the radio and were envious of my exciting life. It was hard not to roll my eyes at my laptop screen. I’d spend hours crouched under the mattress with my microphone on damp and moldy sheets, in a sweaty attempt to re-create the sound of a radio studio as I voiced my stories. I’d been wearing a single pair of jeans and sweatshirt for weeks, and I’d lost so much weight they hung off me. I felt as though I was filled up with the ghosts of all the unknown drowned. I spent most evenings in half-abandoned guesthouses, the coffee and bags of flour floating in a filthy pool of sea backwash in the kitchen, starving dogs panting in the lobbies. I made all kinds of friends, knowing I’d probably never see them again.

&nbs
p; By the time I got back to Delhi, all I wanted to do was lie in the dark with my cats. My mother sent worried emails suggesting that I could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I told my editors that I was going to stick close to home for a while. Saying so felt like a failure; having laid claim to a huge swath of Asia as “my patch” of reporting ground, I felt as if I was neglecting the purpose of my existence if I wasn’t roaming around searching for stories. I’d left everything else behind—my reporting had become my whole identity.

  That was especially apparent as I faced the final disintegration of my relationship with Benjamin. Even though I’d known that the only possible action was to choose between him and India, I’d delayed doing so, afraid that opting for the latter was tantamount to resigning myself to becoming Miserable Jen. I didn’t want to leave a job I loved for a man I wasn’t sure I could trust, but I didn’t even know how to voice that to him. Instead, I’d argue that I wasn’t yet ready to move back to New York, where any job I could imagine would feel like a dull grind. Besides, Delhi felt like home by now. Not to Benjamin, though—it was too hot, life was too hard, and he couldn’t get enough work to justify it.

  In the meantime, I’d been defiantly dedicating myself to everything but Benjamin: resolutely creating a community for myself in India, obsessing over my reporting, and turning to love affairs whenever I was bored or sad. I told myself he wasn’t right for me—but now and then, the thought struck me that he might not be entirely to blame. It was possible that I was too itinerant, independent, and cold to hold down a relationship with anyone at all.

  One morning after I got back from Sri Lanka, I donned my running shoes and a pair of sweatpants over my shorts, so as not to expose my legs on the walk over to the Fitness Circle. I hadn’t seen the gym ladies in months; I thought their easy banter would be a welcome break. Once I got there, though, I realized that I couldn’t deal with their questions and wished I’d brought my iPod. Leslie came up behind me as I was stretching. I flinched when she touched my shoulder, and she peered at me kindly.