Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  Whatever Ramesh said, Geeta knew that a jeans-clad daughter-in-law was unlikely to be acceptable to his conservative South Indian family. New brides are always expected to dress decorously. Ramesh had acknowledged that his mother and aunts dressed in formal South Indian saris and gold jewelry every day. In Geeta’s family, her mother and aunties wore salwar kameez, more casual garments that allowed for greater mobility than saris. And they clearly spent less time on prayer and cooking than the women in the Murthy family: Many of them held jobs as nurses or teachers, while none of Ramesh’s relatives had ever worked outside the home. Geeta would need suitcases’ worth of tidy matching outfits and wifely saris to fit in.

  It would be a shift, because Geeta was proud of her identity as a professional woman. She was only mildly ambitious: She’d worked for the same company for eight years in Delhi and hadn’t considered moving to a bigger firm because she didn’t want a taxing work schedule. What Geeta loved about her working life wasn’t so much the work itself as much as the lifestyle: wearing stylish suits and driving herself to work in the mornings. Blasting Red FM on the stereo and honking her horn at bad drivers on the Delhi roads were a part of it, and so was the occasional night out with girls from the office.

  Because she’d always associated working with singledom, I doubt Geeta considered staying in Delhi after she got married. Both she and Ramesh seemed to take it for granted that they’d move in with his family in Bangalore. I’d assumed that she would find another job after marriage, though. Ramesh was probably as close to Shah Rukh Khan’s character in DDLJ as a thirty-something girl could hope to get, and he’d said he liked modern, professional girls. But Geeta had no plans to look for a job in Bangalore. It turned out that while she wanted a sensitive-minded NRI boy, she was also looking forward to an easy, family-oriented postnuptial lifestyle.

  “I’m going to have plenty to keep me busy after marriage,” she said to explain her decision to me. “I’ll have to focus on adjusting to Ramesh’s family. Just think—I’ve only once visited Bangalore. I don’t know anything about life there. I’m going to have to learn to speak Kannada. And even if Ramesh says he wants me to hold on to some of my Punjabi traditions, I’m sure his family will want me to do things their way.”

  Hearing Geeta get specific about her new life made me realize how very different it would be after she married. It was hard to imagine making so many sacrifices for a relationship. My mother forfeited a graduate school scholarship and an art history career to be with my father, and left her family in England to marry my dad. She’d always told me not to compromise my own life too much. I’d grown up believing I’d regret it if I altered my life goals for a man.

  I’d also convinced myself that choosing between a relationship and a career was an outdated baby-boomer quandary. In New York, few of my girlfriends would have considered changing their careers—let alone abandoning them—for the sake of a relationship. It might have something to do with the kind of people who move to New York, but there had also been a profound generational shift. Most of my friends believed, as I did, that the gains of seventies-era feminism should have protected us from this conflict.

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. Although my sense of myself was rooted in my independence and my journalism career, I didn’t want my life to be restricted to that realm. Deep down, I worried that I’d lost my one and only shot at coupledom by choosing the Super Reporter Girl life over Benjamin. I couldn’t voice the thought to anyone, though—it seemed too awful to say.

  Luckily for her, Geeta didn’t share this aspect of my identity crisis. She didn’t seem to find it discordant to plan to be a professional woman while single and a housewife once married, and part of me envied her that. I’ll never forget something that a film critic in Mumbai once told me during an interview about Bollywood heroines. Although actresses are now able to portray modern girls, she said, such characters tend to be split between their pre- and posthusband selves.

  “Women in movies seem to forget that they have professions once they fall in love,” she said. “A girl gets engaged, and she’s suddenly singing songs and shopping. After marriage, the center of her existence becomes the man and his family. That ideal is very Indian.”

  She could have been referring to Geeta’s life. Maybe Geeta had based her identity on what she saw in the movies, or maybe Bollywood has so deeply penetrated Indian culture that it has redefined social stereotypes. Either way, it seemed that Bollywood had indeed prepared her to be a perfect Indian bride.

  Geeta’s single decade had been a terrible strain on her relationship with her mother. It wasn’t for weeks after Nitin returned from Bangalore that he could convince his wife that a South Indian boy was better than no boy at all for their daughter. Eventually, Pooja called Geeta. She didn’t mention the match; she just told her daughter she’d paid a visit to the safe deposit box at the bank that morning to look at the family wedding jewels.

  “There is so much gold waiting for you, betee. I can’t wait to see you dressed like a proper Indian bride.”

  A few weeks later, Pooja made her first of many trips to Delhi to begin the hunt for the lehnga choli in the city’s upscale wedding boutiques. Geeta said it was strange to relax into spending time with her after years of being on guard against scathing remarks. Her mother was startlingly even-keeled, and after a couple days together, Geeta felt comfortable enough to confide her apprehension about fitting in with Ramesh’s family. Her mother let pass the opportunity to make a snide comment about how Geeta had chosen to marry a stranger.

  “It is never easy to join a new family, betee,” she said instead. “Even if it is a well-aligned match, the girl has to change to fit in with her husband and new parents. It was hard for me, too.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Geeta that her mother might have had trouble getting used to her father’s family. Of course, it wasn’t the kind of thing a mother would confide. But now Pooja seemed to feel an urge to link herself to her daughter’s experience and prepare her for married life.

  “I came from the same community as your father, but I still had to figure out how much sugar he liked in his chai, and whether to chop one or two onions for the korma. My mother-in-law was very particular, and it is the girl’s duty to learn these details. If you don’t, the family may feel they made a bad choice. Then anything could happen.”

  When Geeta told me about this foreboding conversation, I couldn’t help but think of a scene from DDLJ. The heroine, Simran, is sitting with her mother at an open bedroom window, through which we can see the Punjabi mustard fields and the sun setting behind. Simran has confessed that she is in love with Raj, the Westernized Indian in a motorcycle jacket. Her mother has a stark message to deliver.

  “I, your mother, come to take you from your own happiness.”

  She is weeping as she tells Simran that she has to forget about Raj and marry the man her family has chosen for her.

  “You know, my father used to say there’s no difference between man and woman,” she continues. “When I grew up, I realized what a lie that is. At every step, as sister, daughter, mother, I went on sacrificing my own happiness. When you were born, I made a promise never to let that happen.… But I was wrong, Simran. I had forgotten that a woman doesn’t have the right to make promises. She is born to be sacrificed for men.”

  Geeta stirred the ice in her drink with her straw. Something was bothering her, though we’d been sitting in the Barista for almost an hour before she’d tell me what it was. Eventually she cleared her throat. A few nights ago, she said, Ramesh had whispered into the phone that he wanted to talk about something intimate: her past. The words had sent a familiar chill down her spine. Until then, Ramesh had insisted that a girl’s “innocence” didn’t matter to him; when they’d first met, he’d told Geeta that he thought it seemed “backwards” to make virginity into such an important attribute in a marriageable girl. Now, though, he just had to know. He promised it wouldn’t have any impact on the wedding, but Geeta, horr
ified at the prospect of having to tell him about Mohan, allowed her silence to eat up the conversation.

  In a bid to make her more comfortable, Ramesh offered to tell her about his own relationship history. Geeta remained frozen, even after he informed her that he’d had an Indian-American girlfriend in New Jersey. The admission was rare—boys are rarely quizzed about their pasts during arranged marriage meetings—and none of Geeta’s friends had ever asked a boy about prior girlfriends. Still, his candor didn’t set her at ease, and hearing her cry down the phone made him more nervous than he needed to be. Eventually, Geeta whimpered out the story of Mohan. Although she quickly told him they’d never been “involved,” Ramesh was not satisfied.

  “He asked me for all kinds of details—did we kiss and all other questions. He really wanted to go into it. I said, ‘I am a very honest person, and I’m not going to lie, the way some girls would.’ So I told him that, yes, we kissed.”

  In spite of all my Indian training, my eyes widened at how much fear she felt about revealing a smooch with an ex-boyfriend. My reaction, predictably, made her defensive.

  “These things are serious in India, Miranda. I thought he might call off the marriage.”

  I apologized and wiped the surprise off my face. Geeta wound her plastic straw into a tight whorl. After a while, she looked at me again.

  “Miranda … do you think Ramesh has had … experiences in America?”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant, but the way she emphasized the word experiences made it sound vulgar. She lowered her voice.

  “He’s had a girlfriend … so what do you think he would expect on the wedding night? Will he want me to act experienced? Am I supposed to do some Mallika Sherawat moves?”

  Geeta had a hint of a smile as she referred to the Bollywood starlet, but I still found it startling, the disparity between her urban, educated lifestyle and her complete illiteracy when it came to the realm of sex. Like most Indian mothers, Geeta’s had carefully neglected to explain to her daughter how the body works or what to expect on her wedding night. The fragments that Ramesh had told her about his past—his American-born girlfriend, his lingerie preferences—only served to highlight her deficiencies in both instruction and experience.

  I made an effort at a kind smile, but it probably came out looking more like a grimace. I’d enjoyed playing a teasing role as Geeta’s sexual mentor and confidante, but now that she was on the verge of marriage, the stakes were much higher. My flippant comments over Old Monks that night in my apartment made me feel a little queasy. What had made me think that I could advise Geeta on an Indian wife’s sexual duties? I remembered reading in some Indian women’s magazine that if a girl was “too active” in bed, her husband might think she wasn’t “innocent.” For all I knew, Ramesh subscribed to some version of these pervasive ideas, in spite of his proudly touted Americanism. If I tried to predict his desires or expectations, I’d surely get it wrong.

  Geeta had no idea what a bad sexual role model I was. She knew that Benjamin and I had shared a bed, and that, she’d decided, was acceptable only because I’d told her that we planned to get married one day. I still hadn’t even admitted to her that we’d broken up, and I didn’t want to imagine what she’d think of me if she knew about all my affairs. Recognizing the distance between my sexual morals and hers, I felt suddenly ashamed.

  I couldn’t tell her how to behave in bed, so I filled the space between us with optimistic platitudes. You’ll figure it out, I told her. Sex will hurt the first time, but eventually it will feel good, so you should try to relax. I let most of her unasked questions drift, unanswered, back into the atmosphere. The silence we were left with, underneath the Bollywood pop pumping through the café, was pure and godly and Indian.

  On her wedding night, Geeta would be almost as unsullied by the knowledge of sex as her mother and her grandmother had been. I thought of the scene that had played out for centuries in India: the groom peeling off the sequined lehnga choli, the bride lying still beneath him like a terrified bird. Now, though, after her groom finishes, the new Indian bride pulls on a lacy thong to cover herself. The bride who bleeds through her imported European underwear: that is today’s perfect fantasy of the modern arranged marriage.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Bride Who Showed Her Teeth

  “After marriage, the trouble starts,” Radha intoned. She was mincing carrots on the counter with alarming speed.

  In the seven months since Pushpa’s wedding, Radha’s proud references to her daughter’s husband, the mobile-in-charge, had disappeared. Taking its place were complaints about “saas-bahu tension,” the Hinglish phrase used to describe problems between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. I’d become somewhat immune to Radha’s filminess, but this was a phrase I’d heard again and again about new marriages in India.

  The difficult in-law relationship is a global phenomenon, of course: It is rarely easy for a stranger to adopt an intimate role in any new family. The relationship is especially fraught in India, where wives almost always move in with their husband’s family, creating more opportunities for miscommunication and disagreement. Urban middle-class couples do choose to live separately, but they remain a statistical fraction of the country’s millions of families. Even if Geeta would have liked to join their ranks rather than move in with Ramesh’s conservative family, she wouldn’t have said so out loud, not even to me.

  Warnings about saas-bahu tension are everywhere, which made it hard to believe that any Indian girl could look forward to married life. The theme forms the entire plot of a top-rated prime-time Hindi soap opera, the not-so-subtly-named Because a Mother-in-Law was Once a Daughter-in-Law (its Hindi acronym, KSBKBT, proves that the Hindi title is almost as long). The show churned out a new episode every weekday for eight years; Radha and her daughters had watched almost every one of them, through the sea of static on their thirdhand TV. After Pushpa moved into her in-laws’ home, though, Radha joked darkly that her daughter no longer needed to watch KSBKBT because she was living it. The show teaches its audience that new brides are responsible for the bulk of the housework in their in-laws’ homes, and indeed, Pushpa’s saas had been looking forward to her son’s marriage for precisely this reason. A bahu would give her the first break from the household chores since her own daughter had married and moved out.

  Pushpa’s saas was suspicious of the girl’s aspirations to finish high school, which seemed to her nothing more than an impudent attempt to shirk her housewifely duties, and decided she needed to crack down on her. She told Pushpa she could no longer indulge in weekly visits back to her own family home. This made Radha grumble all the more—“My daughter is only seventeen!”—but she’d surrendered control of her when she’d married her off and had to be content with twice-weekly calls from my landline.

  Radha pushed open the door to my room after she finished mopping the floors.

  “Deedee?”

  I could tell what she wanted just from the servility in her voice. I came out to the living room, and she fished around inside her choli for the scrap of paper—well worn and slightly damp with sweat. It was always the same slip of paper. On it, Babloo had written Pushpa’s home number in his careful handwriting.

  After I dialed, Radha took the receiver awkwardly, as though it were a living thing. When a busy signal sounded through the plastic earpiece, she held it up to eye level and peered at it, as though the instrument itself might reveal why she couldn’t hear her daughter’s voice on the other end. I took it back and dialed again. This time, her face lit up and she pronounced gleefully: “It’s ringing, deedee!”

  When someone picked up, Radha composed herself. Speaking into the telephone was a serious endeavor and required a formal manner. The plastic receiver represented the power of the outside world, a world that her lack of education largely excluded her from. Even if Radha was doing nothing more than ordering milk from the local shop, doing so over the phone imbued the transaction with gravitas. Now Radha asked to speak
with her daughter in a low and deferential voice, so I took it that Pushpa’s saas had picked up. When her voice lifted above its respectful murmur, I could retreat, because Pushpa had come to the phone.

  Afterward, Radha came into my office, squatted behind my chair, and waited for me to notice her. I was working with my headphones on, and she didn’t announce her presence, so I have no idea how long she was there. This often happened, and I’d always get a start to turn around to find her crouched just inches from my chair.

  “Sorry, deedee, I just wanted to tell you about my conversation with Pushpa.”

  There were reddish rings under her eyes that made me think she’d been crying. I didn’t want to believe it—surely the restrained and hard-headed Radha would consider it undignified to squat behind me and weep—so I decided to pretend it wasn’t so.

  She didn’t get up, though, and by squatting on her heels directly behind my chair, she’d blocked me in. I leaned back so I’d feel less claustrophobic and waited for her to let out what she needed to say. Then her words gushed out.

  “Pushpa’s saas is very short-tempered, deedee. The boy is good, but I don’t think the family is. That woman is always complaining, saying Pushpa didn’t bring enough dowry. It’s not fair! The family themselves asked for cash instead of electronics and furniture. I am going to be in debt for years, deedee, and still she is saying I didn’t give enough. Ay bhagwan.”

  Apparently, Pushpa’s saas carped about the insufficient dowry when she was displeased with her for some other reason—when Pushpa had oversalted the curry, for instance—but couched inside the complaint about the wedding payment, Radha heard something much worse. She heard another mother accusing her daughter of being unable to meet the demands of wifehood. There was really no greater slight in Radha’s world. Her children, better educated and worldlier than she, were her greatest source of satisfaction.