Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  One morning, Radha marched past me into the kitchen, her jaw set. She had the morning’s vegetables in one arm and a plastic bag with a change of clothes in the other. I opened my mouth to say hello, but she spoke before I could get the word out.

  “I can’t chat today, deedee. I have to hurry.”

  She rushed through the jaroo-pocha—sweeping and mopping—and worried aloud as she chopped the vegetables. I was half listening as I made my way through the stack of the day’s papers, tearing out articles that might be useful story ideas.

  “Pushpa is slim, pretty, and well behaved. My relatives say that in the village, she would already be married. Ay bhagwan. Families in the city are asking for such high dowry these days. And now the girl is saying she doesn’t want to marry before she finishes school. Does she think we can just choose when it happens?”

  After she finished the floors, Radha disappeared into the bathroom, where I heard her washing herself under the tap—the shower-head intimidated her as much as the TV remote. She emerged in a clean sari, a fine dusting of baby powder creeping up her neck and already congealing into white lines in the damp folds of her neck. She tugged her pallu, the loose end of her sari, over her head so that it covered her hair, and announced that she was going to visit the priest at the neighborhood Hindu temple.

  Even though the temple was just a few paces from my apartment, for years I didn’t know it was there. It didn’t look like much: a tumbledown structure perched in the center of an overgrown courtyard with a few Hindu swastikas painted on the outside wall. Inside, marble idols of the gods—almost life-size and dressed in handmade outfits of saffron and gold—lined a marble-floored room. The resident priest, Dharamdev Shastri, was a bombastic, balding Brahmin. His large forehead was painted with white and orange lines displaying his caste and religious rank; he wore a long, loose shirt and doti cloth the color of cream. When Dharamdev walked, which was rare, it was with a shuffle. He spent most of his day cross-legged behind a low desk, watching the tiny green parakeets flit through the courtyard.

  Like almost everyone in Radha’s limited world, Dharamdev was a migrant from the Madhubani region in Bihar. In fact, he was related to Radha through her late husband, though that was not apparent from the reverence with which she treated him. Dharamdev was highly educated by the standards of Radha’s community: He held a college degree from a Hindu Sanskrit college. The Bihari immigrant community had been coming to him for religious advice since he first took up in the temple. As far as Radha was concerned, there was no one with greater moral authority than he, which was why she’d come to him for help in finding a match for her daughter.

  When she got back from the temple, she squatted in front of me, her face flushed, to tell me about the visit in feverish detail. Radha had never considered placing a classified ad for Pushpa—she wanted to marry her the village way. Back home in Madhubani, weddings are brokered either by relatives or by the local pujaris, who operate efficient matchmaking businesses out of their temples. The priests keep a running list of the marriage-age girls and boys in the region and align couples from nearby villages—so as to minimize cultural differences and to prevent marriages within the same line of descent. Dharamdev welcomed the opportunity to continue the tradition in the Delhi temple, because he earned ten dollars a pop for matchmaking duties and puja ceremonies. This was his only source of income other than donations to the temple, and a good incentive to be efficient in aligning boys and girls.

  Radha abased herself in front of the priest, and only when he repeated impatiently that she should sit up did she settle herself cross-legged in front of him. He pulled out a large, yellowed ledger book, the kind used by Indian government bureaucrats. Seeing the pages filled with handwritten notes, Radha said, made her heart flutter with the seriousness of the hallowed task she’d embarked on. She sat breathlessly before him for what seemed an eternity as he flipped through the pages. After a while, he fingered a page in the ledger, drained the tin cup of water on his desk, and placed a pair of large-framed reading glasses on his nose.

  The boy he had in mind was, naturally, a Brahmin from Madhubani. He’d recently graduated from high school and was making decent money in an office job, Dharamdev said, reading from his notes. The boy’s family and nature were good.

  The catch was that he’d already found another girl for him. The problem was not with the boy but with the girl, Dharamdev added quickly. His idea was that Radha’s daughter might be able to take this girl’s place—if Radha was willing to accept the astrologer’s date, that was. Radha assured him that she was happy to marry her daughter off on whichever date he named, and then asked, in her most obsequious voice, whether he could tell her more about the issue. Dharamdev seemed reluctant to go into detail, but after a moment, he sighed, removed his glasses, and leaned back against the wall.

  The boy’s family, he said, had visited an astrologer to find out the auspicious time for his marriage, and they’d been told he must marry within the next two months, ideally on April 20, to be exact.

  “Of course, the astrologer’s date is unchangeable. I went to great trouble to find a family who would agree to it, and then they changed their mind. They complained that it was too soon for the girl. I tried to tell them this was God’s date, but no use.”

  Dharamdev said he’d advised the boy’s parents to abandon the match. Radha was nodding sympathetically. She could see that her respected pujari felt he’d failed and that the boy’s family probably blamed him for arranging an unsuccessful match. Radha leaped to assure him that she agreed that the girl’s family was clearly in the wrong. “How could they think their own schedule was more important?” She bowed her head. If given the chance, she said, she’d gratefully accept the fate he had in store for her daughter.

  A week later, Dharamdev sent a message to Radha’s bustee: Pushpa’s alliance was fixed. The boy’s family had agreed to the match. Radha didn’t even know the boy’s name yet, but I had never seen her as happy as she was the following morning.

  “Oh, deedee, this is a gift from God. They are a very good family. The father is working in a nice shop. The boy earns a huge salary at his very fancy job. He is a ‘mobile-in-charge.’ ”

  The English phrase clattered against her mouth. I doubt she knew what mobile-in-charge meant; I certainly didn’t. But she knew that the boy earned more than one hundred dollars a month and that any job with an English title implied social capital. Radha, who had never owned a landline or a mobile phone, was going to marry her daughter to a boy in a position of authority in something to do with phone technology. It was evidence that she’d succeeded as a mother: She’d managed to secure a better life for her daughter.

  Radha’s gleefulness was disconcerting. But she soon reverted to her more customary state of pessimism: “I only pray that nothing goes wrong before that.” In two weeks, she said, the families would meet for the first time at the engagement ceremony, where they would negotiate the important details of the alliance, including the dowry. In a nod to the relative liberalism of city life, the pujari had deemed it acceptable for Pushpa and the boy to “see each other” at the engagement. In today’s Bihar, Radha informed me, bride and groom are rarely permitted to meet before they have completed the wedding rituals. At this citified engagement ceremony, Pushpa and her husband-to-be could sit together in the same room, although they wouldn’t exactly “meet”: They were not to look directly at or speak to each other.

  What was worrying Radha now—because there always had to be something—was that the groom’s family would decide that her daughter’s status was too far below theirs. Making her way across the living room floor with a rag, Radha enumerated all the reasons why the boy’s family might nix the match.

  “First of all, deedee, I am a widow. And we cannot invite them to our house for the meeting, because our house and area are not good. And then—I wash floors and clothes for a living. If they see the calluses on my hands, they will think I have the hands of a sweeper!”

/>   Inevitably, when Radha complained about her job, I felt like a colonialist memsahib responsible for her degradation and humiliation. The specter of my missionarying relative Edith would rise up before me, her hair pulled back into a severe bun, her Bible in hand. I lamely offered that she could try moisturizing her hands to smooth out the calluses before the meeting.

  Radha sniffed at me. “Arre, it would take months to get soft hands like yours. Anyway, the pujari will be there, and I can’t lie about what I do in front of a religious man.”

  She dunked the floor cloth into the bucket and wrung the water out hard. I returned to my newspaper until she spoke again.

  “Well, if I say I’m a cook, I won’t be lying—right? Maybe I don’t need to tell them that I mop floors. I will tell them my boss is a foreigner. That will make it seem better.”

  This congratulation for my American birth emboldened me to pipe up again.

  “I think any family would be impressed by a mother who’s worked so her children can go to school. You should be proud of what you’ve done.”

  Radha looked embarrassed by the compliment. She also knew better than to believe that their admiration for her values would outweigh their disdain for her untouchable’s occupation. “Maybe, deedee. But no Brahmin family would want the daughter of a sweeper in their family—not even a Brahmin sweeper.”

  She turned up her mouth sardonically at her little caste joke; there is not supposed to be any such thing as a Brahmin sweeper. Then she heaved the bucket of dirty water into the bathroom to dump it down the drain.

  When Radha came to me with a submissive and downtrodden expression on her face, I knew something was up. The expression didn’t suit her.

  “Deedee, you know my daughter’s wedding is going to be very expensive.…”

  I looked up and asked how much she wanted. My tone was sharper than I’d meant it to be; perhaps I’d learned something about servant management from Geeta and Priya after all. She cut the coy act and reached inside her choli, the intimate safekeeping place for the most important pieces of her life. She unwrinkled a scrap of paper, on which was written, in Babloo’s careful handwriting, “10,000 rupees”—almost two hundred fifty dollars. When Radha saw the surprise on my face, she tried to explain.

  “In my day, deedee, in the village, dowry demands were much lower. But now people see money everywhere. The boy’s family is sure to ask for at least double what I make in a year. Also, I have to pay for the wedding, with no one to help aside from Joginder. I don’t want to deny my daughter the match that the pujari says will bring her a good life!”

  She insisted she would take the money as an advance against her salary, but we both knew that she’d never be able to repay me and that the guilt-ridden memsahib would give her whatever she asked for in any case.

  I ran into Joginder in Nizamuddin market a few days later, and he stopped me to talk. That was unusual: Joginder was usually in too much of a hurry for idle conversation, and especially with me, because I required slow and careful Hindi. It took particular effort today because Joginder had inserted a wad of paan into his mouth only moments before I saw him, to judge from the size of the packet and the sharpness of the odor. He raised his volume even higher to compensate.

  He’d started a collection for Radha’s wedding fund, he said; had she approached me already about helping her out? I nodded, a little annoyed, because I assumed he was going to try to get me to lend her more money. In fact, Joginder wanted to gossip. He confided that he didn’t approve of Radha’s extravagant wedding plans. It wasn’t the dowry that he took issue with—she had no choice about that—but he did think she was planning an irresponsibly spendthrift wedding. I realized that he was collecting money for her only because he considered it his brotherly duty. I’d never heard Joginder say anything negative about his cousin-sister before and wondered what had happened that he was voicing it to me now.

  “Radha is the kind that needs to show off. She will be inviting so many guests and giving expensive saris-saris to each one. She’ll insist on special food instead of the simple rice dal that villagers are used to.” He repositioned the paan to the other side of his mouth. A dribble of red goo escaped down his chin, and he wiped it away unself-consciously. “She wants to prove to everyone from the village that she is having a good life, because they all know her husband is dead and her in-laws have abandoned her.”

  Joginder didn’t share Radha’s superiority complex—although, he reminded me, he was himself high caste, “the Ram caste, just one rung below Brahmin.” A few years ago, he said, he’d found Radha a well-paying job as a cook for a family of wealthy meat-eating Hindus, and she’d turned up her nose at the job. It still made Joginder angry that she’d said she wouldn’t defile herself by cooking meat.

  “She thinks like an old-timer. If she insists on working only in pure-pure veg houses, she will always be poor. But when I tell her this is why she’s living in the bustee, she doesn’t care.”

  I could imagine Radha’s response: Joginder wasn’t himself a Brahmin, she’d say, so he couldn’t understand.

  We were still standing on the street. Passing rickshaws whipped up dust storms around us, and I could feel sweat streaking under the waistband of my salwar kameez. A group of young guys leaned against the fruit stand, passing a small, rusty knife between them to peel open guava fruits. Each time they split open the pale green skins to reveal the soft white innards, the tangy smell stung my nostrils. As they sucked the white meat out of the skins, they eyed me almost unblinkingly with the idle, vacant curiosity of the overworked and exhausted. I wondered fleetingly whether I had any wifely cachet left with the Nizamuddin crowd. Joginder hadn’t asked about sahib in a while. But his thoughts were on higher matters now. He was in a mood to muse on the globalizing India.

  “You know what, deedee? Radha hasn’t realized that things have changed. Caste isn’t so strict anymore, not even in the villages.”

  Joginder said that as a child in Bihar, when a cow or buffalo died in the fields, the villagers would call for one of the local untouchables to cart away the carcass. “Now they say the world has changed and they shouldn’t have to do the dirty work their fathers did,” he told me.

  In Delhi, caste rules had broken down even further: Radha didn’t like to acknowledge it, but her own children had of course played with kids of unknown caste origin. In the city, they all knew people who had taken up different occupations than their parents and grandparents. There was simply no way to monitor it anymore. Still, I told him that as far as I could tell, caste remained important to many people in Delhi, not just Radha.

  “Well … that’s because there are some ways it hasn’t changed at all, deedee. When it comes to marriage, caste matters more than anything else. I’m glad that India is modernizing. I like having a cell phone and seeing American TV. But there are some Indian traditions that are important, and they shouldn’t ever change.”

  “Marriage is about honor, deedee,” he continued. “If my daughter joined a family from a lower caste, no one from my village would come to the wedding. They wouldn’t even accept a drink of water from my house afterwards, because they would consider us contaminated. And that’s how it should be.”

  Radha knew her daughter would have to drop out of high school to marry the mobile-in-charge, but that was an easy calculation to make. She’d sent her daughters to school to make sure they didn’t have to mop other people’s floors; this was just a different route to the same outcome. A good marriage was a more efficient way to guarantee that Pushpa would be “well placed” in life, because it eliminated the uncertainty right away.

  But Pushpa was ashamed and confused when her mother told her she wouldn’t be able to take her tenth-grade exams. Radha had always insisted that she go to school every day, and now she was commanding her to quit showing up for class because she had too much to do in the weeks before the wedding. When Pushpa suggested that she’d like to finish school after marriage, Radha was quick to disabuse her of t
hat notion: “I can’t imagine any family that would allow it.”

  Joginder knew Radha was probably right about that, which was why he thought she should have waited another year before approaching the pujari. He spoke about the importance of “the education of the girl child” with the evangelistic fervor of a man who has come to an unexpectedly progressive decision on his own.

  “I make no difference between a boy and a girl,” he’d say. “If my daughter wants to get a job, she should. I will find a family that agrees.”

  Joginder’s older daughter, Rekha, was Pushpa’s age. He didn’t plan to marry her off for several years, though; in fact, he told me proudly that he might allow her to take a one-year computer course after high school. He planned to raise the topic of Pushpa’s education at the engagement meeting, in the hope of influencing the boy’s family. Since he was Radha’s closest male relative in Delhi, he was expected to be at the meeting to help negotiate the dowry.

  Radha couldn’t bring herself to disagree with a male relative to his face, so instead, she paid a visit to Joginder’s wife. She told me later that she’d found Maniya in her usual spot—on her charpoy in the afternoon shade, shelling peas with practiced speed. Maniya was half watching her ten-year-old son’s heated game of cricket in the alley with the other ragtag neighborhood kids. They used a stick for a bat and a rock for a ball, which had made for some serious black eyes in the past. Radha sat down heavily beside Maniya on the cot. Although she was tired from her morning’s work, she didn’t pause to complain about her swollen knees as she usually did. Joginder’s disapproval had been weighing on her for days; she got right to the point.

  “I’ve always believed it is best to get girls married when they are young. That’s the way our people have always done things.”