Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  I tried not to look skeptical. Ramesh seemed like a filmy type, someone who liked the idea of love enough to convince himself he felt it—even if he’d only met the girl twice. Of course, I was a pretty filmy type myself, so I should know. Geeta, unconcerned about whether I was paying attention, was still talking.

  “His family has been begging him to look for a girl for years, and his father kept sending him bio-data for all these girls, but he wasn’t ever interested. He said they all looked the same. When he went on Shaadi and saw my picture, it was love at first sight.… Just the same that happened with me! I have met so many boys, thirty or more, and he was the first I liked.”

  I was surprised by Geeta’s ability to completely rewrite her own romantic history. In the days following their second meeting, she began acting as though all her doubts about her future had disappeared. She found a way to mirror the narrative that Ramesh had come up with—a story line in which they had discovered each other after many lost years—as though to convince herself that their match was fated. In this version of their love story, she was alternately a girl giving in to a determined suitor and a princess accepting her destiny. I could see the appeal of the fairy tale. Geeta had resolved not to do as so many of her friends and family members had and make the familiar Indian calculation about a match: that the boy would do.

  CHAPTER 12

  Too Much Passion for This World

  Parvati was hungry. We’d both been working late, and I’d invited her over on her way home, but she called from outside my apartment to tell me there was a change of plan.

  “I need some real food, Miranda. Not pasta.”

  She pronounced the word with the disgusted emphasis that most Indians reserve for words such as boyfriend. I restored my unsatisfying Western cooking to the fridge and slid in next to her in the passenger seat of her car.

  Parvati drove us to her favorite parantha stall. In the parking lot of the Times of India building, two grease-spattered, spindly armed teenagers labored over an enormous, blackened stove to satiate the late-night crowd with thick fried breads. We pulled up wobbly plastic stools and balanced leaf plates on our knees. I was full before I could even finish the Frisbee-sized thing. When I wiped my lips, a long line of parantha grease smeared across the back of my hand like the trail left by a slug across a leaf. Parvati tossed her plate into a nearby trash can, where it was ravaged by a stout rat. I shuddered and folded my legs under me on the stool.

  Parvati’s mind was elsewhere. The bare bulb hanging from the parantha stall cast a slash of light across her face.

  “Remember how I said Divya had started contacting Vijay again?”

  I nodded, feeling my pulse increase as she fixed her gaze on me. I could never tell what it was going to be with Parvati. She fostered unpredictability and drama in her life, and right now she looked as though she could say anything.

  “Suddenly she was calling him all the time. Vijay didn’t tell me what was going on until a few days back. Divya had a baby.” Her eyes, meeting mine, were dull. “He told me it’s not his. He says it’s the baby of some boyfriend of hers, but now the boyfriend has left and she’s just alone with this baby.”

  “Wow.” It took me a moment to register the implication of what she’d just said, and then a moment longer to eliminate the skepticism that immediately followed. After all, a lot of men have told a lot of girlfriends that some other woman’s baby isn’t theirs. Parvati either fully believed that the child wasn’t Vijay’s or was determined that I should believe that she believed it: Either way, it was clearly not up for discussion. I struggled to come up with the appropriate response and finally managed, “Does she have people to help her? Is her family in Jaipur?”

  “Yes, they’re there, but that’s also complicated. They assume it’s Vijay’s—everyone thinks they are married and that he’s not around much because he works in Delhi. I don’t think anyone knows about this other man. She’s been begging Vijay to come and help her, and he finally agreed to attend some family event with her. It’s crazy.” Parvati almost chuckled—though not quite. I felt a wave of resentment toward Vijay.

  “Has he told her about you?”

  “Yeah. She knows I’m his girlfriend—in fact, she wants to meet me. Vijay says she knows they are finished, she just can’t admit it to her family. I don’t worry about his feelings; I can tell that he doesn’t love her. Vijay doesn’t respect many people other than me, honestly. We fight, but he knows his life would be much more chaotic if I wasn’t in it.”

  I nodded in agreement, remembering how well she’d cared for Vijay when he’d had chest pain and heart palpitations the prior year. He’d started feeling unwell after working out at the boxing gym, and then felt progressively worse. Parvati had spent hours on the phone that night, trying to get him an appointment at AIIMS, Delhi’s highly esteemed research hospital. Then she took a week off work to take him to various appointments. When they were told that Vijay had dangerously high blood pressure, she’d dedicated herself to helping him cut down on his smoking and drinking. They’d been spending less time at the Press Club in an effort to avoid the whiskey-sodden political arguments and dozens of cigarettes that inevitably accompanied a night there. She’d convinced him to take a break from boxing, too, because the doctor said it was too much of a strain.

  The pair of them had adopted an uncharacteristically Zen-like new regimen. Parvati had convinced Vijay to take evening walks around the neighborhood with her, and to read at home with a glass of nimbo panne instead of whiskey. I was sure that I could already see a difference in Vijay’s manner—on more than one occasion, I’d seen him ignore potential provocations from friends who stopped by and started talking politics.

  Thinking about this made it more difficult for me to come to terms with the new information.

  “Wait—he’s actually in Jaipur with his wife and her baby now? Why?”

  Parvati glanced over at the next table of parantha eaters, a loud group of newspapermen telling dirty jokes. They were paying us no more attention than they were the rummaging rats, which had now multiplied from one to several.

  “He feels guilty. He says there’s no one else to help her. She lost a lot of friends when they split up.”

  I was still suspicious.

  “So … he’s sleeping on the sofa or something while he’s there?”

  “You know how weird Vijay is about this kind of stuff. Dealing with women, even in normal situations, makes him intensely uncomfortable. You know as well as I do, Miranda—the man is not suited for anything other than an idealistic life of the mind. I imagine he’s staying as far away from her as he can. I almost feel sorry for him.”

  “He has too much passion for this world,” I said, reciting Parvati’s own line back to her; she often used it in the wake of one of his storming-off scenes.

  She gave me a feeble smile.

  “Yeah, my boyfriend has way too much of everything for this world. He’s too kind, really—he feels responsible for messing things up for Divya.”

  I said I was sure that if I were in this situation, I’d be feeling much less solicitous toward both of them. Parvati pushed her hair back with her hand.

  “I was angry, too, Miranda, believe me. As you well know, I’m not some Mother India martyr type. But there’s no point in being angry. I’ve chosen to be with Vijay. He’s made unconventional decisions, and you pay a high price for that in India. But Divya is paying an even higher price than him.”

  Parvati stared into the tottering pile of greasy leaf plates in the trash can beside us. Her forehead was creased with tension.

  “You know how much I complain about the neighbors and my family prying into my life. But now I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for Divya. I mean, my God, lying to everyone all the time about everything: It must be exhausting. Seriously, I can’t imagine a worse fate.”

  A few weeks later, Parvati called with an “urgent request”: that I meet her at the outdoor clothing market near her apartm
ent that afternoon. It didn’t make sense: Parvati hated shopping—especially there, because the cheap cotton salwar kameez suits leaked color and wore thin after a couple of washes. She was determined to bend me to her will, though, begging, “Come on, you can’t have that much work to do. It’s a Saturday.”

  I gave in when I realized that she must have a good reason, even though she refused to explain on the phone. Parvati didn’t often make requests of me. After fighting with Vijay, she’d wait a couple of days before she called. When she did, she rarely wanted advice or sympathy; she preferred to play it down. I don’t think she was proud of her relationship upheavals, and talking about them made her feel too vulnerable.

  Parvati met my taxi on the outskirts of the market. She was restless as I paid the driver, tapping her chappal-clad foot on the concrete, pulling a cigarette out of her ten-pack of Gold Flakes, and lighting it with quick, nervous fingers. Her hair was uncombed, little strands fluttering out of the braid that she usually pulled together tidily before going out in public. When I was done, she gestured me urgently to follow her into her parked car.

  “What’s going on, Parvati?”

  “I know I’m acting crazy. But just listen. Divya’s coming here.” She lowered her voice as though someone might hear her through the sealed windows. “She’s got her baby here, too, and I said I would help her buy some things for it. Vijay isn’t coming. It was just going to be the two of us. But I got all freaked out about it earlier and thought that I needed to have someone here with me.”

  Divya had been in town only a day, she said. She was staying in Vijay’s guest room over the weekend, baby and all. She’d apparently come specifically to meet Parvati. It seemed strange—especially for socially conservative India. I was having trouble picturing Vijay cloistered in his apartment with girlfriend, wife, and child. Parvati said they’d dealt with the awkwardness by getting rollicking drunk. They’d ended up singing 1950s Bollywood tunes—which was a good conclusion to any night, according to Vijay and Parvati.

  “Considering what a bad situation it is, and all the potential for discomfort, it’s actually been okay. I had some good chats with her last night. She’s an interesting girl, and I feel like I could actually be her friend if it wasn’t for all this. I think this hardship has been a strain on her. She seems unhappy and somehow a bit … off. It’s like she laughs a little too much, you know? Nervously.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is—she’s sad, in general, actually. And I know I shouldn’t say this, but I think something about the situation has affected the way she looks and acts. All the stress and strain of being alone and lying about her marriage—it makes sense that it would have an impact.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Well, those good looks Vijay was always telling me about. She used to be this gorgeous girl with smoldering dark eyes, but not anymore. I don’t see it.”

  I snorted in spite of myself. It was a bitchy thing to say about a woman in trouble, but it broke the tension. I didn’t know how to respond to Parvati’s uneasiness about the strange situation with Vijay’s unusual houseguests. Neither she nor I knew how to act when she felt vulnerable. I changed the topic the only way I could think of—by asking questions.

  “Did you know she was coming?”

  “Not until two days back. I guess she’d been telling Vijay she wanted to come for some time, and he finally agreed, so she got on a train on the spur of the moment. She’s impulsive like Vijay that way.”

  “It seems strange she would make so much effort to stay in touch with him if she didn’t have feelings for him.”

  Parvati cracked her window and flicked her cigarette butt out. A blast of hot, dry air shot into the air-conditioned car, and the effects of that single beam of heat stayed for a few moments after she rolled it back up again.

  “Probably she does. But I’ve made damn sure she knows she can’t have him. Maybe she’s trying to be friends with me instead of trying to compete with me. I guess that’s good, right?”

  Parvati saw a figure approaching the car and waved through the windshield.

  “This is her. I told her to find me in the parking lot.”

  We watched Divya as she approached, reluctant to leave the cool air until absolutely necessary. Through the windshield, I could see that she had wide-set eyes and broad features, the kind of face that might have once been striking. Now, though, her eyes were sunken and her features sagged with extra weight, making her appear older than she was. That impression was exaggerated by a tragic slash of red lipstick across her face.

  The bright makeup seemed shocking, because I’d become accustomed to the homogeneous, conservative style of dress among women in India. It’s rare to see dramatic or showy shades of lipstick on anyone other than low-caste villagers or prostitutes. It was unnerving to see a thirty-something middle-class woman with red lips; and all the more so because Divya had an infant slung across her chest. Even under the best of circumstances, a woman in her late thirties carrying a child draws surprised and judgmental glances in India, because that is considered old to have a baby.

  The woman walking toward us was not what I had pictured when Parvati first told me about Vijay’s stormy college love affair. There was something tragic about her moving slowly in the heat, weighed down by the swaddled infant. I wondered whether Parvati was right about her being “a bit off,” because it was hard to believe that she wasn’t self-conscious about her makeup. Parvati was apparently thinking the same thing.

  “I don’t know why she does her face up like that,” she said through her teeth, so that Divya couldn’t read her lips through the windshield. She was almost at the car now, but Parvati continued. “I feel sorry for her, having to carry that baby everywhere. I know that most women want children—and I am just different that way, because I don’t—but I really can’t imagine having one on my own like that. With no help, and everyone looking at you and imagining the worst … Ay baba. Come on, let’s take the poor woman shopping. It’s the least I can do for my husband’s wife, right?”

  She gave me a sardonic grin, and we climbed out of the car into the scorching sun of the parking lot.

  Geeta’s father was so eager to talk that he called her before he even boarded his flight home from Bangalore.

  “I won’t be able to eat for a week, betee,” he said, and she knew the visit had gone well: There’s no better way to demonstrate warmth in India than to lavish food on your guests. Before he told her about her potential in-laws, Nitin Shourie paused to describe, in mouthwatering detail, Ramesh’s mother’s obbattu, a thin, fried chapati filled with cane sugar and coconut.

  “You won’t find a better family than his, betee. This is our chance. I’m going to tell your mother that we should bring this boy in and treat him like a Punjabi.”

  Geeta was a little surprised by her father’s enthusiasm. When she’d broken the news about Ramesh, her mother had been so upset that she’d refused to speak to Geeta for several days. It had fallen to her father to summarize their objections.

  “All these years your mother has waited for a son-in-law, and now you’re going to marry a stranger and move to the other end of the country, where all their habits are strange to us. How will you be happy down there, betee?”

  Their disapproval had made Geeta edgy and flustered for weeks; she kept leaving her keys in the car and forgetting to renew her prepaid credits on her cell phone, so she’d be unable to make calls for days at a time. When it rang, she’d plow frantically through her bag to find it. She lay awake at night, even on weekends—her most prized sleeping time—second-guessing herself and mourning the angst she was causing her parents. Only when her father finally came around and told his wife that they owed it to their daughter to meet the boy’s family was she able to relax.

  From what Geeta could conjecture, the visit had been uncomfortable at first. For starters, the families spoke different regional languages: Geeta’s, Punjabi, and Ramesh’s, Kannada, the l
anguage of their home state, Karnataka. It wasn’t an issue for Geeta and Ramesh, because, like most middle-class Indians of their generation, they could rely on English to bridge the regional gap. Not so for their parents. When the two mothers met at the engagement, they wouldn’t be able to utter a word to each other beyond Namaste. The fathers could speak just enough English to show off a little, though not enough to form full sentences; they relied on Hindi to communicate with each other, even though Ramesh’s father had barely spoken it since high school.

  Keshava Murthy was a man of large gestures. His was a prominent business family, and his youngest son’s engagement seemed the kind of occasion that warranted great rhetorical flourish. I’m sure it must have pained him to be unable to communicate smoothly with the girl’s father. He tried to make up for it in other ways. He donned expensive, designer-made kurta suits and embellished his poor Hindi with expansive arm gestures in an effort to signal his acceptance of the cultural differences that lay, unmentioned, between the two families.

  Each man had something to prove. Geeta’s father was determined to demonstrate to the wealthier, more successful man that he was an upstanding Brahmin whose daughter would make a kind and caring addition to the Murthy family. Keshava, for his part, needed to show that he could create a superior life for Nitin’s only child in his multi-room mansion. He was confident about the advantages he could offer.

  He considered it a great accomplishment—his own—that his extended flock still lived together under one roof. If Geeta married into the family, she’d move in with Ramesh’s parents, grandparents, brother, brother’s wife, and their two kids—not to mention a couple of widowed aunties who always seemed to be around. This was evidence, Keshava thought, of how safe the other man’s daughter would be.