It was Nitin’s first visit to Bangalore. Before the benefits of the economic boom of the 1990s trickled down to the middle classes, Indians rarely took vacations at all. If they did, they traveled by train, because it wasn’t until the early 2000s that air travel became remotely affordable. That’s when the Indian government liberalized industry regulations to allow low-cost private airlines to enter the market and make air travel available to more than business travelers and the rich. Since the train journey to Bangalore took forty-two hours from Patiala, it was an unlikely destination for a Punjabi family.
In any case, the city had only recently become a place worth visiting. For most of Nitin’s life, Bangalore had been best known as “the pensioners’ paradise.” It was only in the nineties that Bangalore created incentives to draw in technology companies. They worked: Soon, practically every U.S. software company had research and outsourcing operations there. Bangalore became the world’s back office and outsourcing capital. For years, it was the fastest-growing city in India.
Keshava assumed his relatively provincial guest would be impressed by the steel and glass of the new India. He expounded grandly on Bangalore’s opportunities and the tens of thousands of college graduates who flock to its green corporate campuses. Nitin tried to act impressed, but what made the biggest impression on him was the pollution. He was shocked by the hours they spent in traffic, competing for road space with busloads of technology workers and aspirational multitudes on scooters. “I think I’d rather live in a pensioners’ paradise than booming Bangalore,” he joked later.
Keshava Murthy was unaware of these sentiments and dedicated the rest of Nitin’s visit to showcasing his proudest achievements, with a tour of the factories of Murthy Electronics Manufacturing, the refrigerator-parts unit that had been in the Murthy family for three generations, and, of course, of his luxurious home.
Because Nitin had spent his career as a state-employed doctor, the family had lived in a government-allotted apartment that spoke of India’s socialist past—gray concrete floors, gray concrete façade, every unit grayly identical. In Nitin’s social circle, there was a certain prestige to dedicating your working life to what Indians refer to as a service job. Because Indian government employees are well respected and underpaid, they pride themselves on living the self-sufficient, frugal lifestyle that Mahatma Gandhi advocated. In fact, Gandhi’s vision was not that different from the ancient Brahminical ideal of centuries ago, when the priestly caste eschewed worldly needs to educate others about the principles of Hinduism. Geeta still sometimes described her father as being “correct for our caste,” a phrase that probably came directly from him.
But in an era of fast-rising prosperity, Nitin’s moralistic lifestyle was out of fashion. Of the two fathers, only Keshava had learned to adapt to the India of global corporate values and seven-figure salaries. His friends headed thriving car dealerships and textiles companies. I imagine Nitin shuddered a little when the other man clapped him on the back and declared, “This is the era of big money in India, dear Nitin-ji! For the first time, we Indians are able to earn serious money—why shouldn’t we?” Keshava seemed not to share Nitin’s Brahminical qualms about money—he was proud of his prospering family business.
Geeta told me how Ramesh justified his father’s capitalist instincts to her. His father had never been motivated by raw financial ambition, he said, but rather by a desire to grow his great-grandfather’s business. To Keshava, upholding the family name seemed the noblest of goals, which was why he’d never been able to understand his son’s decision to stay in America for as long as he did. Ramesh’s college and career achievements were blunted in his father’s mind because he had attained them in New Jersey, apart from the family.
He’d been trying to cajole Ramesh into the family business for years now. Keshava’s wife, Savitramma, had hoped to pull her son back in by marrying him off to a girl from a local Brahmin family, but, much to her surprise, the boy had refused to consider any of their matches. He’d made them wait for years and now he’d picked a complete stranger—a working girl who lived alone in Delhi—and he was set on her. Soon after he returned from Delhi, Ramesh had sat his parents down and made a pact with them: If they let him marry the girl he chose, he’d come back and work for Murthy Electronics Manufacturing. If they gave him trouble, though, Ramesh said, he might just return to New Jersey. It was close enough to a threat to anger Keshava, but his wife reminded him that it could be worse. Their son might have shown up with an American girlfriend in tow; they’d all heard such stories. At least this girl was Indian and would understand the importance of the family.
By the time the two fathers met in Bangalore, both were resigned to the alliance, which was why they were making such an effort to ignore their cultural differences. Nitin did his best to suppress his aversion to the Murthys’ extravagant lifestyle, reminding himself that Geeta would enjoy having expensive saris and her own car and driver. Keshava kindly overlooked the other man’s shabby bureaucrat’s clothes and his old-timer views on caste and money. For the most part, it worked. Nevertheless, the Murthys’ money—and the Shouries’ lack of it—necessarily complicated the nuptial negotiations. Nitin knew that if he expressed moral distaste for the dowry system, Keshava was likely to assume he was trying to get out of the marriage because he couldn’t match their expectations.
Nitin waited until the end of his second day in Bangalore to suggest to Keshava that they take a stroll on their own while the women prepared dinner. Outside in the balmy evening, it took only a moment for Nitin’s fears to be confirmed: The other man clearly did not share his distaste for dowry. Nitin had to backpedal to save his daughter’s best—and perhaps only—shot at a good marriage.
“Of course, government salaries are modest. But like any father, I have saved for my daughter’s wedding. I hope you won’t think that our dowry principle is a matter of money. I would of course want to send my daughter in comfort to your house. Gifts for the couple and the family—that goes without saying—we would never want her to be a burden to you.”
“No need, no need,” Keshava said, though of course there was.
Nitin, I’m sure, was trying to rescue something of his pride.
“The part we would like to avoid is the dowry negotiation. My wife and I think it seems … indecorous. Educated people should avoid this bargaining. Such behavior is more for the lower castes.”
“Of course, ji, of course.”
Nitin later told Geeta that Keshava had answered him as if he were comforting a child, patting his arm as they walked back to the house.
“We are in complete understanding, ji. We will not make demands. You simply give what is comfortable. It’s not the money that matters; it’s the family. Family first.”
I was sure something was wrong when Maneesh stopped showing up for work. She’d never missed a garbage-collection day before—not without telling me first that there was a Hindu festival or family event she had to attend. When she finally rang the bell to my apartment after a few days’ absence, my first thought was that her husband had seriously hurt her. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her salwar didn’t match her kameez, as though she’d dressed without thinking. Seeing the concern on my face, her legs buckled beneath her. She fell to her haunches on the living room carpet and wailed, “Ai-o deedee! I have a fever!”
Radha rushed out from the kitchen, and the two of us stood there together, stunned by this tragic display from our cheery garbage collector. I wondered whether she was actually ill or whether it was that she lacked the vocabulary to express sadness or fear. I’d noticed that Maneesh sometimes described her emotions in physical terms.
“My husband is very ill. Ai-o, he is in the hospital!”
Radha and I exchanged a glance. Few Indians of their poverty level would pay for treatment if they had any choice about it; the drunken Om Prakash would surely never spend good booze money on a hospital visit unless it was serious. Maneesh wiped the tears off her face f
erociously, like a child, and drew a shaky breath.
“He’s been sick for a couple of months, deedee, and last week, his legs swelled up and he couldn’t eat. So his brother took him to the hospital in a rickshaw. They had to wait outside for a whole day before the doctor saw him.”
Radha tsked sympathetically. She knew what it was like to watch your husband die in Delhi’s public hospitals.
I sat down next to Maneesh and put my hand on her arm. In a culture where women rarely touch anyone other than their children in public, the gesture seemed extremely intimate after I made it. I think Maneesh was in too much of a state to notice.
“Where is he now?” Radha prompted.
“I don’t know for sure. My brother-in-law and sons are with him.” Maneesh raised her head to look at us. “What will I do if he dies?”
“Widowhood is a terrible fate,” Radha said, and followed it with a bleak invocation of God: “Arre bab.”
I shot her a reproachful look. “If they took him to the hospital, I’m sure he’ll be okay.”
Radha couldn’t understand why I would say something she saw as clearly untruthful; platitudes were not a part of her vocabulary. She leaned toward me and said, in a loud whisper, “Maneesh’s husband does nothing but drink and shit. He doesn’t even eat anymore. People have been expecting him to die for years.”
Maneesh had of course heard her, and nodded miserably in agreement.
“It’s true, deedee. I’m going to be a widow. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in mourning.”
“When you say goodbye to your husband, you surrender everything worth living for,” Radha told her, just for good measure.
I gave Maneesh bus fare. Radha poured leftover rice and lentils into a plastic bag for her, and she accepted it gratefully. I watched from the balcony as she limped down the block toward the main road, her shoulder bones poking out of the back of her salwar kameez. Her husband was dying, but the intensity of Maneesh’s sadness still surprised me. It sounds cynical, but in the slums, death always hovers close. Nearly four million babies die within a month of their birth every year in India. Maneesh had told me that “two or three” of her siblings had died when she was young; she wasn’t sure exactly how many.
It also seemed that Maneesh might actually be better off without Om Prakash. She’d told me that he often drank away all the money for vegetables and she and her sons would eat their evening chapatis with nothing more nutritious than chilis. Still, in a society in which marriage is a requirement, her husband provided the outline of her life. No one in Maneesh’s community would believe for a moment that her life would be easier if she lived alone, even though everyone agreed he was a crooked character. As Radha put it, a life without a husband is scarcely a life at all.
The classical Hindu texts decree that upper-caste widows are supposed to teeter between life and death once their husbands have left the land of the living. Centuries ago, Hindu widows frequently took their own lives by committing sati, throwing themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres during cremation ceremonies. Sati was the greatest sacrifice a wife could make for her husband; the women who did so were honored like saints. At Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan state, the maharaja’s widows left impressions of their handprints in the fort’s inner walls before they killed themselves on his pyre when he died. That was 1843: The British had made sati illegal fourteen years earlier.
The practice is no longer commonplace. When, in the 1980s, an eighteen-year-old widow was burned alive in her red wedding sari on her husband’s pyre, the country was horrified. There were infuriated panel discussions about “backward India” on English-language TV shows, and the uproar eventually caused the Indian parliament to toughen the laws against the practice. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the strength of tradition in India that the police couldn’t prosecute anyone. The community closed ranks around the family, calling the woman a martyr and refusing to reveal the circumstances around her death. During the years I lived in India, I read about several possible sati cases, but the authorities couldn’t ever confirm whether the women had chosen to throw themselves on their husband’s pyres or had been pushed.
“Woman is as foul as falsehood itself,” wrote Manu in the first Hindu law book. Although he ranked women almost as low as untouchables, even he did not command widows to immolate themselves at their husbands’ funerals. He merely decreed that traditional Brahmin widows should immolate pleasure from their lives after their husbands’ deaths. They were banned from remarrying and instructed to shave their heads; wear nothing other than white, the color of mourning; and survive on one meal a day. Even today, some families force the widow to live out the rest of her life in deprivation and prayer in an ashram. It’s a convenient way for them to free themselves of the burden of caring for their daughter-in-law.
Radha’s in-laws had banished their dead son’s wife to the city instead of an ashram. And once in Delhi, Radha had imposed upon herself the strict rules of Brahminical widowhood with the zeal of a true martyr. She never wore colorful clothes, a bindi dot on her forehead, or bangles on her arms. Radha fasted during every Hindu festival without fail, and even on normal days she ate only one meal. Her food was without spices or chili and her morning chai was without sugar.
Because Maneesh was an untouchable, outside the Hindu system, the strict laws governing widowhood shouldn’t have applied to her. But the lower castes have increasingly adopted high-caste practices in recent years, because mimicking upper-caste rituals often feels like advancement. Adopting the stark life of a Brahmin widow could hardly have seemed empowering for Maneesh, though.
The next time I saw her, she came to tell me that the doctor had sent Om Prakash home to die on his charpoy, because his liver and kidneys had failed. The women of the house had gathered around Maneesh after his death to ready her for the thirteen-day mourning period. They rubbed the red sindoor out of the part in her hair; the powder had first been applied by her husband during the wedding ceremony and had signified that she was married. They pulled the mangalsutra, the gold necklace that is another traditional symbol of marriage, off her neck. They held her arms down and smashed the bangles off them, leaving violent red marks on her wrists. Maneesh said she was sobbing as they removed her toe rings, because she knew they would be pushed onto the dead toes of her husband.
In the other room, Om Prakash’s brothers bathed his emaciated body and decorated it with garlands of orange and yellow marigolds. Maneesh’s elder son had his head shaved to symbolize his grief before collecting Om Prakash’s ashes from the cremation ground. He couldn’t afford to travel to Varanasi, which Hindus consider the most auspicious place to scatter the ashes of the dead; instead the men of the family took a taxi to Haridwar, a secondary holy city along the Ganges, carrying the ashes with them in a tin carafe.
Along the banks of the fast-flowing river, hundreds of candles inside leaf baskets floated downstream, like so many prayers to the gods. The men chanted a prayer and tossed Om Prakash’s ashes into the water. Back in Delhi, the female relatives dressed Maneesh in a white sari and submerged her into the Yamuna River. The largest tributary of the Ganges, it was supposed to purge her of the sins of the living world.
When Maneesh returned to work a widow, her face was gaunter than before. She had an abstracted, reflective attitude about her.
“I feel like I am dreaming all this. When I did the rituals, it felt as though I had died, too. Everything seemed familiar. I guess that’s because I was doing what widows always do.”
To Maneesh, widowhood wasn’t a way to prove her saintly virtue to the world, as it was for Radha; it was just further evidence of her bad fortune. She wasn’t ready to accept that her days of womanhood were over. I couldn’t tell whether she was mourning her husband or her new status as a widow, but perhaps they were one and the same.
“I always loved wearing bangles and anklets, deedee. I always had toe rings and colorful outfits, even if they were inexpensive ones. But now see.” She gestur
ed sadly at her plain white salwar kameez and unadorned arms. “My sister-in-law warned me that if I wear anything more than this, everyone will say, ‘Why is that widow going around like a bride?’ There are new rules for me now. When I attend my relatives’ weddings, I cannot sing with the other women. I have to sit at the back, because it’s a bad omen for a girl to see a widow at her wedding.”
Maneesh’s sister-in-law had also warned her not to chat to any men in the bustee, because that would spark rumors that she was on the hunt for a second husband. The community didn’t expect Maneesh to feel much sorrow at Om Prakash’s death, but even if they assumed she’d want to remarry, that didn’t make it socially acceptable. Until the nineteenth century, remarriage was actually illegal for Hindu widows, and the cultural prohibition remains.
I could tell that the topic was making Maneesh uncomfortable. She wanted me to know that she’d only consider it if her brother-in-law kicked her out and she needed somewhere to go. She had a good relationship with her husband’s family, but nevertheless, her brother-in-law would have to be very kind not to eject her from Om Prakash’s home after his death.
Maneesh seemed determined to find something sacred in the memory of Om Prakash.
“He was useless, deedee, but he was the man I was married to. We were together since I was very young. When I sit alone after I finish my work, I will always think of him.”
She told me that she’d mark his death anniversary every year by making a meal for the birds. She’d cook a rice pudding called kheer and serve it, along with fried poori bread, on small plates made of leaves. She’d put the food out on the terrace as an offering to the gods in the name of the man she’d married. The next morning, in the smoggy dawn of the slum, Maneesh would climb onto the terrace and clear away the remains left by the crows.
CHAPTER 13
Curves
Geeta decided to shop her way into believing in her marriage. She showed up at my apartment one Saturday morning after a visit to Madame X, clutching a long list of things to buy. She’d been working on it all morning with Sameena, she said, while getting her nails done. “I don’t know how I will do it all before the wedding!” she said dramatically, handing me the list.
Sideways on a Scooter Page 27