Sideways on a Scooter

by Miranda Kennedy

  “Oh my God! We thought you would never get here!”

  “Geeta, you look like a perfect doll!”

  “Of course the makeup isn’t too much, why would you think that?”

  The wedding grounds stretched behind them, lit up like a football field on game night. The air was sharp with excitement and generator diesel fumes. Geeta’s cousins hurried her toward a reception building, and I scurried along behind, trying not to trip on the folds of my sari. The girls deposited us in a bridal waiting room, with the instruction that Geeta was to stay put until the groom arrived at the gate. They dashed out again, leaving us in the small windowless chamber, whose walls were lined with mirrors. Geeta sat in front of one of them and appraised her bridal avatar.

  “What if Amit showed up here and told me he loved me?”

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “Come on, Geeta, you’re really being silly. This isn’t Bollywood. You’re not being married off against your will to some crooked character; you’re marrying an awesome guy you’ve chosen yourself! It’s just wedding-day jitters. Everyone says it happens.”

  Geeta was still staring at herself in the mirror, as though she couldn’t believe what she saw.

  “I really didn’t want my makeup to be this heavy. I don’t know what Ramesh is going to do when he sees me looking like this. He might not even recognize me. Oh my God, what if he doesn’t recognize me!”

  I snorted, hoping she was joking.

  “Well, even if he doesn’t, it will be pretty obvious who you are, considering you’re the only woman here in bridal gear,” I said.

  Geeta shifted uncomfortably; if there had been a trace of humor behind her makeup mask, it was gone. I thought of the American friends who’d admitted to having second thoughts before their weddings. One acquaintance back in New York said she had sat shivering in the bathroom for an hour before her mother could convince her to put on her wedding dress; another told me he’d thrown up before entering the wedding hall. But before I could decide whether to repeat these stories to Geeta, the door flew open, and a crowd of plump and bejeweled aunties rushed at the bride. They pulled at her pink head scarf, going hoo-hoo to praise her doll-like image. Geeta, who usually loved nothing more than being fawned over, remained stony faced under her mask of makeup.

  “Ah, the poor girl is nervous,” the aunties told one another.

  Some cousins tumbled in, breathless with the news that the groom’s baraat was arriving. All the ladies were to go off and greet them at the gate. Chandni grabbed my hand.

  “This is our most important duty of the evening. It’s the ladies’ job to get as much money as possible out of the groom before we let them in—it’s a time-honored Punjabi custom.”

  It didn’t sound like a very pleasant tradition. I protested that I’d promised the bride’s mother that I would stay by her side until she climbed onto the wedding podium, but they insisted that this trumped my other duties and dragged me off. When I looked back, Geeta was still staring at her pink reflection.

  Chandni and I joined the other women under a long bamboo trellis. A red carpet, scattered with rose petals to welcome the groom, led from the gate to the wedding grounds. The gathered women, however, were anything but welcoming. They were in a huddle, strategizing how to best weasel cash out of him. At Punjabi weddings, extortion is the bride’s right. Wedding guests are expected to demand cash from the groom at several points during the night, starting with his arrival. During the wedding puja, the bridal party steals the groom’s shoes and forces his groomsmen to pay up to get them back. Sometimes they even block the entrance to the honeymoon suite and make the poor man shell out again before he can lead his prize inside. It’s all supposed to be in good fun, but I found myself worrying about Ramesh, already insecure about fitting in to Punjabi Wedding World.

  I wormed my way to the front of the crowd at the gate. Ramesh, in silly headgear and veil, waited on the mare. The two fathers, both in pink turbans, were holding a formal greeting ceremony. They garlanded each other, embraced, and shook hands, pausing midshake to pose like politicians for the photographer. The women were deep in negotiation with Ramesh’s brother-in-law, Satish. I heard him boast in fluent Hindi that he’d learned how to bargain Punjabi style when he was in college in the North.

  “Well, you’ll need all your skills to get past us!” shrieked Geeta’s friend Nimrat.

  She was nineteen, already longing for a wedding of her own, and one of several self-appointed protectors of Punjabi culture at Geeta’s ceremony. She swished her shiny hair across Satish’s face as she wheeled around to face the approving crowd of women, chanting, “If you want in, you’ll have to shell out! Otherwise, you can take the boy back to Bangalore!”

  Nimrat made her demand: two hundred thousand rupees, several thousand dollars. Satish blanched. Although I later heard him bluster that he had never considered handing over that much cash, he didn’t get very far with bargaining down the ladies. I remembered Geeta’s words the first day we met, at Ram’s vegetable stall: “There is no one more formidable than an Indian woman at cutting a deal.” The groom’s party was starting to get antsy behind Satish, as the buzz from the whiskey wore off. They’d been there more than an hour. I heard grumbles that they should storm the gate. Eventually, one of Geeta’s uncles strode up—an old man who commanded respect in the family. He wagged his finger at Nimrat.

  “You should be ashamed! Don’t you know that these people are not from our culture? They are our guests, let them in!”

  He tugged open the gate, and Ramesh’s guests began filing in—timidly at first, and then with more confidence. It took only a beat for the women on Geeta’s side to transform themselves from hostile gatekeepers to courteous ushers, folding their hands into respectful Namastes. Nimrat couldn’t bear it, though. When Satish entered, his arms above his head in a triumphant bhangra dance, she huffed: “These stuffy South Indians have no idea how to do a wedding. We’ll get what we are owed.”

  I made a mental note to keep my distance from the shoe-stealing scene.

  I kept picturing Geeta’s panicked face and headed back toward the waiting room. I’d missed her, though: She was already up on the stage. My heart pounded. I knew I wouldn’t see her again except from a distance. She’d leave in the morning for Bangalore.

  The wedding lawn was a tightly packed sea of silk saris and kurtas, the guests lining up to congratulate the couple. I slid through the crowd to catch a glimpse, but there was nothing of Geeta that I could recognize up there. She looked like a pink and gold cardboard cutout, a child princess beside her prince on an oversize wedding throne.

  In the early hours of the morning, when we were all cross-eyed with exhaustion, the pujari tied the end of Geeta’s sari to Ramesh’s kurta, and they walked around the sacred fire together seven times. Ramesh stroked a line of red sindoor into Geeta’s hairline to symbolize that she was his wife. Just before sunrise, she climbed into a palanquin, a covered litter suspended on two poles that I recognized from old photographs of my great-aunt Edith in Kashmir.

  Four men hefted the chair onto their shoulders like a coffin, to lead Geeta to the waiting car, and a tragic procession trailed behind. I’d been told many times during my stay in Patiala that it was a Punjabi ritual to make a filmy scene when a bride leaves, and indeed, almost everyone there was sobbing. In India, a wedding is considered an ending. In fact, in some parts, the groom’s family gives the bride a new first as well as last name. Unlike some brides, Geeta would be able to go back to her natal home to visit—though not very often. From now on, she’d spend holidays with her husband’s family.

  When she stepped out to say goodbye, I saw that Geeta was crying, too, in great, dramatic heaves. She gripped on to her father. When her groom tried to pry her out of her father’s arms, I had to turn my head away, like my mother does during the saddest parts of movies. Eventually, Ramesh shepherded his bride into the car—an imported brand, white, decorated with red roses, and suddenly quite inap
propriate for the joyless scene. Geeta was bent over in the seat. Ramesh gestured to the driver, and as they turned out of the parking lot, I caught a glimpse of the groom’s face through the back window. His eyes were wide with worry, as though he’d just realized that the two of them were now completely alone.

  CHAPTER 15

  Any Issue?

  The gynecologist’s sari flirted open across her stomach, and her choli blouse was cut low across her chest. A good sign, I thought, as I sat down in Dr. Kapur’s office. The exam table was immaculate and included a roll of table covers, which meant the paper was changed after each patient—a hygienic precaution I’d learned not to take for granted in Indian clinics. I felt a flash of hope that I’d finally found a modern-minded ladies’ doctor.

  No such luck.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  I knew the question wasn’t on the form. What Dr. Kapur wanted to know was whether I was sexually active and had multiple partners. In official India, marriage is shorthand for sex—even at the gynecologist’s office, the one place that I’d have imagined the word would be acceptable outside the Fitness Circle. This was exactly why I’d been putting off my checkup: I didn’t want to have to deal with a doctor nosing her way into the moral dimension of my sexual health.

  I considered the question. Was I married? Well, it depended on whom you asked. My maids thought so, as did the gym ladies and the rest of Nizamuddin. Even though it annoyed me to have to lie about it, I’d continued to perpetuate the myth, because surely telling them that I was divorced would be worse than the original infraction I’d tried to cover up, that of having a boyfriend. Though I’d intended to tell Geeta that I wasn’t going to marry Benjamin, it hadn’t seemed right to confide in her about my breakup during her dizzy months of courtship and marriage. In Patiala, when she’d joked that I should be taking notes for my own wedding, I hadn’t corrected her.

  I suddenly felt cowardly about my timidity. There was no reason I should care if the gynecologist raised a disapproving eyebrow at my sex life. I was obviously neither a pious virgin nor a pure Indian wife, nor did I especially want to be either of those things. If I felt judged by her, I wasn’t sure I could blame it all on India. It probably spoke more to the nagging worry that I was making selfish choices rather than investing in lasting relationships. The doctor might well have asked, “Why are you ashamed of the life you’ve chosen?” or “Which are you going to choose to be—an independent girl or a married lady?”

  I gathered myself. I wanted to talk about birth control, so for the purposes of Dr. Kapur’s questionnaire, I decided, I would be married. That wasn’t sufficient, though. Her next question caught me off guard, as well.

  “Any issue?”

  I raised one eyebrow and asked, in a voice that I hoped was dripping with scorn, “What kind of issues are you referring to?”

  The doctor looked up, surprised.

  “I mean, have you borne any issue yet … any offspring?”

  The phrase was just an antiquated Britishism and a natural follow-up to an assertion of marriage. Feeling a little silly, I told her that since my husband and I lived in different countries, we weren’t ready to leap into child rearing just yet, and waited for her to move on. But Dr. Kapur drew herself up in her seat and eyed me suspiciously. I was starting to feel the way I imagine Geeta did during her arranged marriage date inquisition with Maneka.

  “I see here that you are more than thirty years old—don’t you want to have babies? Soon it will be too late.”

  I stumbled that I thought I still had plenty of time, but before I even got the words out, she jumped in with a monologue in favor of procreation.

  “You know, dear, no woman is complete without babies. You’ll learn. Look at me—I’m a modern working woman. My husband doesn’t make me stay at home and cook all day. But I couldn’t be happy without my children. Here, I’ll show you their pictures. You’ll see how adorable they are.”

  She pulled out her cell phone and started scrolling through pictures of her kids. I was now longing to get back to the new-patient form. Apparently, since I hadn’t leaped to reassure Dr. Kapur that I did indeed want children, I needed to be converted to the cause. This took me by surprise: It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might perceive me as a baby-hating crone. Sure, my Delhi friends joked that I was a crazy spinster obsessed with my alley cats, and I sometimes worried that I’d celebrate my fortieth birthday in the same way that I had my thirtieth—with a drunken rooftop party where a friend suggested we stumble back to a more private part of the roof deck to have pro forma sex—but growing up didn’t rate top among my concerns.

  It was the blessing and curse of being raised by independent intellectuals; I’d always believed I could make the future happen at my own pace. I had plenty of time to figure myself out, I thought, after I’d had my adventures. I assumed it was the same for my friends back in the States. Now, though, I found myself wondering whether I wasn’t too far removed from the normal patterns of people’s lives to understand my friends’ updated plans and dreams. After all, my idea of a committed relationship was a nonmonogamous three-year saga: If my girlfriends were considering adult things such as babies and houses, they weren’t likely to confide it to me.

  In my fantasy version of this scene, I would have pleasantly asserted myself and informed Dr. Kapur that I was glad to see that she’d achieved perfect balance in her life, but babies weren’t my current aim. I wish I’d reminded her that I’d come to her office to discuss the pros and cons of the Pill and the IUD, and that her baby pictures served no purpose in such a conversation. Instead, I heard myself cooing over her children and thinking bitterly, “Have I proved my maternal instinct yet?” It was all I could do to get her to finish my exam.

  I usually saved up stories such as this one to tell Parvati over whiskeys or at the dinner table on trips back to see my family. Anecdotes about crossed cultural wires traveled well, I found. They always got a laugh, and they had the added bonus of making me feel good about the person I’d become while living overseas. I could present my bumbles through India’s social conservatism as evidence of the effort I was making to fit into a culture very different from my own. These stories served another purpose, too, of which I was only dimly aware: They helped me separate the person I wanted to be from the person I often found myself being in Delhi. I did my best to tread lightly in India and to be careful in my friendships, but in my stories, I was always a better version of myself. I was never my bitchy Delhi incarnation, Demanda.

  Leaving the doctor’s office, though, I decided that this one wouldn’t make it into my repertoire. If I told Parvati, she’d just laugh at me for caring what some conservative choot thought. I didn’t want to tell my mother, because she might agree with Dr. Kapur. In the wake of my breakup with Benjamin, I’d noticed that she’d started rather unsubtly reminding me that it was possible to keep your independence inside a relationship. My mother apparently didn’t need to know Miserable Jen to worry that I’d turn into a lonely, hardened woman.

  I had my own doubts too. But I ignored them. Still in Super Reporter Girl mode, I felt anything but prepared for a committed partnership these days. When my girlfriends asked how I was, I’d grin mischievously and say I’d been spending a lot of time in Kabul. Among my expat friends, that was shorthand for having romantic adventures with swashbucklers and wanderers—the only type to be found in Afghanistan. We used to say we loved going to Kabul for the parties, and we weren’t joking.

  In the years after the invasion, the country filled up with young adventurous internationals—security guys, journalists, and the UN types we cynically called “democracy junkies.” They worked in high-security compounds under great strain, and they let loose like nowhere else in Asia. Although alcohol is illegal under the Afghan constitution, everyone ignored that regulation in the chaos of the early years of the war. With foreigners flocking into the country to fight and rebuild, Afghanistan was willing to overlook all kinds of infracti
ons. For years, you could buy cans of Heineken from Kabul street vendors with long beards and Muslim prayer caps.

  I was generally pretty cautious in Afghanistan; although I embedded with the military several times, I never followed them into combat. It isn’t possible to avoid risk in Kabul, though, and one of the small dangers I was reluctant to eliminate from my life was spending evenings at L’Atmosphère. Owned by Frenchmen and notorious for its late-night boozy pool parties, the restaurant was a perfect target for insurgents. As I waited in the alley on the wrong side of L’Atmosphère’s protective blast walls, I couldn’t help but think that my headscarf wouldn’t help me if the wrong person was to drive past. The sluggish armed guard at the compound entrance moved excrutiatingly slowly as he patted us down for weapons and checked our passports to make sure there were no Afghans among us—they weren’t allowed inside places that served alcohol.

  Inside was a magical green garden that seemed designed to make you forget the stress of a conflict zone. It was dotted with lounge chairs and hammocks, and there was soccer on the TV and European lounge music in the air. During the winter months, guests clustered around the fire pit with glasses of red wine, and on summer nights, there were couples flirting in the pool. The menu featured foie gras and fish with lobster sauce—items that had their provenance hundreds of miles from the Hindu Kush and required a remarkably complex supply chain to make it there. We had UN and NATO planes to thank for the Frenchmen’s extensive wine list, which was better than anything I’d seen in restaurants in Delhi or Mumbai.

  Because Afghans were not permitted to indulge in the pleasures of L’Atmosphère, most of them imagined it a den of iniquity; foreigners had already acquired a reputation for depravity among Afghans. My translator, Najib, whispered that his neighbor had seen white women sunbathing naked out in the open. He’d heard that Americans—in Afghanistan, all foreigners are called Americans—held regular sex orgies in their guesthouses. It was hard to know where wild imaginings left off and truth began, because in Kabul, there was something of the lawless liberality of the Roaring Twenties in interwar Europe.